No mention was made of the jewellery when Elizabeth went next door at six o'clock to remind her neighbour to water her house plants and take in any parcels that might arrive at number 25 in her absence. As she always did when Elizabeth called, at any rate after four, Susan said she was just about to have a small sherry and would Elizabeth join her. Elizabeth was fond of sherry, a civilised drink that seemed to be fast disappearing from all but the drinks cabinets of those over seventy, and she sat down.
When told that Elizabeth was going to Salzburg and Budapest, Susan asked if she would be meeting her 'friend' en route. Elizabeth said she would, but at Waterloo for the Eurostar, not at an airport. Like everyone else, Susan assumed that Elizabeth's friend was a woman and she never enlightened them nor did she say that holidaying with a woman would hardly be her idea of fun. She merely nodded and smiled when Susan referred to the friend as 'she'.
'It's very kind of you to do this. I doubt if there will be any parcels. The most important thing is to water the maidenhair fern every day. But I know you won't forget,' which was a nicer way of putting it than, 'Please don't forget.'
'Have a lovely time,' said Susan after a second small sherry had been drunk by each of them.
Elizabeth was due to leave the house very early for a flight which went from Gatwick at eight and she slept badly, as she always did the night before starting her holiday. The alarm was set (unnecessarily) for five and at ten to she dreamed that the child came into the house as he did last time. No, not quite as he did last time. She was standing at the window in the half-dark and she saw his thin little body squeeze itself out of the mouth of the drainpipe and pull itself up on to all fours. A child of seven or eight. He scuttled across the area of flat roof and skylight, and slipped in through the casement she had left open in her bedroom. Except that she had no casements and no flat roof. This realisation woke her. She switched off the alarm and went into the bathroom to have her shower.
The blonde in a rather too short beige jersey dress introduced herself as Joel's mother – 'Call me Wendy'. The dress was very plain but decorated with a good deal of gold jewellery, diamonds on her fingers and on her ear lobes. She was very polite to Ella and very pleasant. It was hard to tell whose side she was on in the family quarrel. She spoke of it as if a father refusing to see his son for years on end but paying for him to live in comfort was quite normal behaviour. Joel, she said, must pull himself together. There was no reason why he should remain in his flat. If he wanted company and attention he could go into a hotel for a while. His father would be content with that. As for her, she couldn't possibly move in with her son. 'No, doctor, it's out of the question. I can't leave my husband because my son needs a servant.'
Wendy Stemmer had come to the medical centre. Ella had expected her to refuse her request to come and had been surprised at her acquiescence, reluctant though it was. She looked wonderingly at her surroundings as if she were in some far country she was surprised to be visiting, then said, 'I lived in Notting Hill as a girl but not around here of course.'
Ella could think of no answer to that. 'I could find a carer for Joel,' she said.
'Yes, that seems a good idea. I don't know how much these people charge but you could have the bills sent to my husband.'
'Is there a possibility of him coming to see me?'
'Oh, goodness, no. He's at the office.'
Ella had long ago learnt that women of Wendy Stemmer's kind, when speaking of a husband's absence at work, always say he is at the office. As if, she thought, there were only one office in the world or only one of importance.
'I see. Leave it with me. I'll see what I can do and get back to you.'
Later, she phoned an agency. It called itself Caregivers Inc. in the American way, could offer Ella Noreen or Linda, both thoroughly reliable kindly women. Whichever one came would stay in the flat from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. The cost staggered Ella but she wasn't paying. Joel's father was and he never seemed to mind what things cost so long as he was paying for his son's absence from his life. She phoned Mrs Stemmer and then Joel, and told him, half expecting him to say he didn't want anyone staying overnight so that she would have to cancel the whole thing and think again, but he agreed to the presence of Noreen or Linda, his tone limp and indifferent.
'I won't have to make up beds or anything like that, will I, Ella?'
'She'll do that.'
'I wish it was you coming,' he said.
It was her afternoon off, no calls to make, no evening surgery. She went to Knightsbridge, clothes shopping for Como, telling herself that she was walking there because at last after all the rain it was a fine sunny day, not to help her lose weight. Too many of her patients moaned continually about the pounds they had put on and their increasing waist measurement. If she really meant to reduce her ten stone to nine she should have done something about it months ago, not when her wedding dress was half made. The sun made her feel cheerful. Eugene liked her the way she was and that was what mattered. She bought a long dress in darkblue lace to wear in the warm Italian evenings.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Church of the Children of Zebulun was in a poky little mews off the Portobello Road and nearly as far north along that long serpentine street as you could get without coming up against the Great Western main line. There was a shop selling Central African artefacts in the mews and another offering natural remedies in purple glass jars and bottles. The church had once been a garage with a flat over the top of it. Its founder, now dead, had converted it into a single high-ceilinged room, attached a plasterwork gable to its front and painted the whole edifice a shade of burnt orange. A sign executed in black lettering said 'O, Come, all ye Faithful'.
A regular attender on Sunday mornings, Uncle Gib dressed himself in his best, a black pinstriped suit that had been new when he got married some forty-six years earlier, one of the shirts picked up in a Portobello Road sale and a blue tie, also new for that distant wedding. The suit had once in its long lifetime been cleaned. That was in the days when Auntie Ivy was alive and able to take it to the dry-cleaners. Since then it had been kept in Uncle Gib's wardrobe, its pockets stuffed with mothballs. It reeked of camphor. He had been thin when he married and he was thin now. The mystery (to him) was that the trousers seemed longer than they had been, for Uncle Gib, if no heavier, had suffered one of the drawbacks of old age and shrunk an inch or two.
He enjoyed the services of the Children of Zebulun, usually had something to say when the spirit moved him and sang the hymns lustily while Maybelle Perkins's sister played the piano. Afterwards there was tea and orange squash and Garibaldi biscuits, though Uncle Gib never ate any. He consumed no food outside his own home. But no food or drink was served this Sunday and the service was ended after only fifteen minutes. The Shepherd – the Children had no appointed priest or preacher – had no sooner moved to the lectern and uttered the opening words 'Chosen People!' when he swayed, stumbled and collapsed. His head had scarcely touched the floor before a woman in the front row was on her mobile, calling emergency services. Of that other kind of service there would be no more that day.
Maybelle Perkins assured Uncle Gib she would 'keep him posted' as to the prognosis for the sick man, though he was more concerned at missing the hymn singing than for the Elder's fate. He set off for home, feeling disgruntled, his mood intensifying at every outrage he encountered along the way: shops open on the Portobello Road on a Sunday, pubs open on a Sunday, and those foolish enough to go into them driven out to smoke their cigarettes on the pavement. Uncle Gib lit one of his own but he didn't linger. Turning into Golborne Road, he remembered it as it had once been. Not with nostalgia, still less with longing, but with a kind of practical assessing faculty directed at estimating how much the street had 'come up'. This was something he did most days and with mounting satisfaction. Doing it now went a long way towards dispelling his bad mood.