While the first sobs were still raking her, he set down his cup and saucer, knelt beside her, reaching up, until she buried her face in the crook of his neck, cheek fast against the rough collar of his coat.
“Had he, you know, molested her? Interfered with her, like?” It was later, dark pressed up against the windows; Resnick had made the tea this time and the pot sat before the bars of the electric fire, knitted tea cozy not quite in place.
“We don’t know. Not for certain. The length of time she’d been left. But, yes, you have to think it’s possible.” A shiver coursed through him, nothing to do with the cold. “I’m sorry.”
Edith shook her head. “I can’t understand it, can you? How anyone in his right mind …?”
“No,” Resnick said.
“Then, of course, that’s it. They’re not in their right mind, are they?”
He said nothing.
“Sick, sick. They need whipping, locking up.”
He began to reach a hand towards her.
“No, no. It’s all right. I shall be all right.”
Inside the room it seemed airless. The fire was burning Resnick’s right leg, making no impression on the left. Despite himself, he was thinking of the long drive home, the murder incident room the next morning.
“The funeral,” Edith said suddenly. “Whatever’s going to happen about the funeral?”
“Perhaps Gloria’s mother …” Resnick began and then stopped.
“It’s my fault, you know.”
“No.”
“It is. It is my fault.”
“No one can be expected to watch over a child all the time. Where you left her …”
But that wasn’t what Edith Summers meant. She meant her daughter, Susan, born late, virtually ignored by her father for the first nine months of her life, chased and harried by him for the eighteen after that until he left, setting up house in Ilkeston with a woman he’d met on the checkout in Safeway, old enough to indulge him and count the consequences. He scarcely ever came round after that, not all the while Susan was growing towards her teens. Not that Edith encouraged him, better at gritting her teeth and bearing it than she ever was at reconciliation.
When Susan reached ten, rising eleven, all that seemed to change. Her dad’s relationship had broken up and he was back in the city, sharing a house with a couple of taxi drivers who lived at Top Valley and driving a cab himself. “Edith,” he would say, smiling his way round the door on his increasingly frequent visits, “Edie, lighten up. She’s my daughter, too. Aren’t you, princess?” Offering Susan the comics, the chocolate, the Top-Twenty singles to play on the Taiwanese music center he’d bought her as a Christmas present. “Eh, his dad’s girl.”
Three years it lasted, lightning visits whenever one of his fares left him over in the right direction, time to call in and sweep his daughter off her feet all over again. Then the Saturday he kissed Susan on the top of the head and said to her mother, “Right, c’mon. Get your coat, we’re off round the pub. Nothing for you to worry about, princess. Back in a couple of shakes.”
Over a pint of mixed and Edith’s gin and Dubonnet, he told her about America, the woman he had met when she was over here on holiday-“Just picked her up in the cab, short fare from the Lace Hall to Tales of Robin Hood, who’d have thought it?” She was the one who’d invited him over, reckoned she could put in a word, get him fixed up with a job, someone who would vouch for him, see that he settled.
“And Susan?” Edith had managed.
“She’ll be able to come over, won’t she? Holidays. You see; I’ll send the fare.”
What he sent were postcards, once a Mickey Mouse that lost a leg in flight. Susan sulked and cried and claimed she didn’t care: right up to the time she first stayed out all night and when she arrived back home next morning, dropped off by a 25-year-old in a purple and gold Cortina, said to her mother’s face, “It’s my life and I’ll do what I want with it and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” Not so many days short of her fifteenth birthday.
Edith looked at the tea pot by the fire through blurred eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s anything in there worth drinking?”
Resnick tried for a smile. “I’ll make some more.”
“No,” getting to her feet, “let me. It’s my house. Bungalow, anyhow. You’re the visitor, remember?”
He followed her into the tiny kitchen; whenever she needed to reach for the packet of Tips, the carton of UHT milk, Resnick had to suck in his stomach, hold his breath.
“Sixteen she was when she fell for Gloria,” Edith said, waiting for the tea to draw. “I was only surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. If ever I asked her, you know, said anything about taking precautions, all that happened was she told me to watch my mouth, mind my own business. I suppose I should have stood my ground, made a scene, dragged her off screaming and kicking to the doctor, family planning, if that’s what it needed.” She sighed and gave the pot a final stir before beginning to pour. “But I didn’t, I let it alone. Look,” handing him the cup and saucer, “you’re sure that’s not too strong?”
Resnick nodded, fine, and they moved back into the other room.
“Turned out,” Edith said, sitting down, “she’d got in with this particular gang of lads, old enough to have known better: they’d been passing her round like some blanket you use to take the chill out of the grass when you lie down. Any one of them it could have been and, of course, none of them stood up for it. Susan was too concerned with being sick, being angry to think about pointing fingers, blood tests, any of that.”
Edith leaned forward from her chair, shaking an inch of ash from her cigarette on to the beige tiles surrounding the fire.
“She could’ve had an abortion, but I think she was too frightened. All she could talk about was adopt, adopt, adopt. I suppose somewhere inside I hoped that once she’d had the baby, held it, she’d think different. No. The only feelings Susan ever seemed to have were for Susan. Anything that was going to cost her more than opening her mouth, opening her legs, she didn’t want to know.”
Edith rattled down her cup and looked Resnick in the face. “Whatever made me think, after the mess I made of bringing up one daughter on my own, I could do better with another?”
Resnick took away the cup and saucer, stubbed out the cigarette and held her hands. “Listen,” he said, “what happened, it wasn’t your fault.”
She was a long time replying. She said: “No? Then who was it ran off and left her there? Off round the corner for a packet of fags? Who?”
Only when his arms were numb, the heat from the fire on his leg so strong that he could smell the material of his trousers beginning to singe, did Resnick seek to loosen her grip, let her go.
Outside the rain had stopped and the wind that cut across the street was keen as a knife. Hesitating for a moment before getting into his car, Resnick could just hear the swish and fall of sea, dull roll of the undertow. And because there was nothing else to do, he turned his key in the lock, the ignition, released the handbrake, adjusted the choke, indicated that he was pulling away.
Ten
“D’you see this?”
“What’d you say?”
“I said, did you see …”
“Lorraine, it’s no use, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” Lorraine remembered not to sigh or shake her head, pushed the paper a little to one side and sipped at her red mug of Nescafé, Gold Blend decaffeinated. On the ceramic hob, potatoes and carrots were simmering nicely; five minutes’ time, she’d empty some frozen peas from the large family pack into a small pan of boiling water, add a teaspoon of sugar and a shake of salt, the way her mother always did. She would check the oven at the same time; if the fish was ready inside its foil packet, move it down on to the lower shelf and adjust the temperature ready for the Sara Lee Danish Apple Bar, Michael’s favorite, served with double cream and custard both.