He was a comical figure, but Roz did not feel like laughing. For all his idiotic mannerisms he had a certain dignity.
She telephoned St. Angela’s Convent from a payphone but it was after five o’clock and whoever answered said Sister Bridget had gone home for the evening. She called Directory Enquiries for the DSS number in Dawlington, but, when she tried it, the office had closed for the night and there was no answer. Back in her car she pencilled in a rough timetable for the following morning, then sat for some time with her notebook propped against the steering-wheel, running over in her mind what Crew had told her. But she couldn’t concentrate. Her attention kept wandering to the more attractive lure of Hal Hawksley in the Poacher’s kitchen.
He had an unnerving trick of catching her eye when she wasn’t expecting it, and the shock to her system every time was cataclysmic. She thought ‘going weak at the knees’ was something invented by romantic authoresses. But the way things were, if she went back to the Poacher, she’d need a Zimmer frame just to make it through the door! Was she mad? The man was some sort of gangster. Whoever heard of a restaurant without customers? People had to eat, even in recessions. With a rueful shake of her head, she fired the engine and set off back to London. What the hell, anyway! Sod’s law predicated that because thoughts of him filled her mind with erotic fantasies his thoughts of her (if he thought about her at all) would be anything but libidinous.
London, when she reached it, was fittingly dogged and oppressive with Thursday night rush-hour traffic.
An older motherly inmate, elected by the others, paused nervously by the open door. The Sculptress terrified her but, as the girls kept saying, she was the only one Olive would talk to.
You remind her of her mother, they all said. The idea alarmed her, but she was curious. She watched the huge brooding figure, clumsily rolling a cigarette paper around a meagre sprinkling of tobacco, for several moments before she spoke.
“Hey, Sculptress! Who’s the redhead you’re seeing?”
Except for a brief ifick of her eyes, Olive ignored her.
“Here, have one of mine.” She fished a pack of Silk Cut from her pocket and proffered it. The response was immediate. Like a dog responding to the ringing tap of its dinner plate, Olive shuffled across the floor and took one, secreting it in the folds of her dress somewhere.
“So who’s the redhead?” persisted the other.
“An author. She’s writing a book about me.”
“Christ!” said the older woman in disgust.
“What she want to write about you for? I’m the one got bloody stitched up.”
Olive stared at her.
“Maybe I did, too.”
“Oh, sure,” the other sniggered, tapping her thigh.
“Now pull the other one. It’s got frigging bells on.”
A wheeze of amusement gusted from Olive’s lips.
“Well, you know what they say: you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time…” She paused invitingly.
“But not all of the people all of the time,” the woman finished obligingly. She wagged her finger.
“You haven’t got a prayer.”
Olive’s unblinking eyes held hers.
“So who needs prayers?”
She tapped the side of her head.
“Find yourself a gullible journalist, then use a bit more of this. Even you might get somewhere. She’s an opinion-former. You fool her and she fools everyone else.”
“That stinks!” declared the woman incautiously.
“It’s only the bloody psychos they’re ever interested in. The rest of us poor sods can go hang ourselves for all they care.”
Something rather unpleasant shifted at the back of Olive’s tiny eyes.
“Are you calling me a psycho?”
The woman smiled weakly and retreated a step.
“Hey, Sculptress, it was a slip of the tongue.” She held up her hands.
“OK? No harm done.” She was sweating as she walked away.
Behind her, using her bulk to obscure what she was doing from prying eyes, Olive took the day figure she was working on from her bottom drawer and set her ponderous fingers to moulding the child on its mother’s lap. Whether it was intentional or whether she hadn’t the skill to do it differently, the mother’s crude hands, barely disinterred from the day, seemed to be smothering the life from the baby’s plump, round body.
Olive crooned quietly to herself as she worked. Behind the mother and child, a series of figures, like grey gingerbread men, lined the back of the table. Two or three had lost their heads.
He sat slumped on the steps outside the front door of her block of flats, smelling of beer, his head buried in his hands. Roz stared at him for several seconds, her face blank of expression.
“What are you doing here?”
He had been crying, she saw.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“You never talk to me.”
She didn’t bother to answer. Her ex-husband was very drunk.
There was nothing they could say that hadn’t been said a hundred times before. She was so tired of his messages on her answer phone tired of the letters, tired of the hatred that knotted inside her when she heard his voice or saw his handwriting.
He plucked at her skirt as she tried to pass, clinging to it like a child.
“Please, Roz. I’m too pissed to go home.”
She took him upstairs out of an absurd sense of past duty.
“But you can’t stay,” she told him, pushing him on to the sofa.
“I’ll ring Jessica and get her to come and collect you.”
“Sam’s sick,” he muttered.
“She won’t leave him.”
Roz shrugged unsympathetically.
“Then I’ll call a cab.”
“No.” He reached down and jerked the jack plug from its socket.
“I’m staying.
There was a raw edge to his voice which was a warning, if she had chosen to heed it, that he was in no mood to be trifled with. But they had been married too long and had had too many bruising rows for her to allow him to dictate terms. She had only contempt for him now.
“Please yourself,” she said.
“I’ll go to a hotel.”
He stumbled to the door and stood with his back to it.
“It wasn’t my fault, Roz. It was an accident. For God’s sake, will you stop punishing me?”
EIGHT
Roz closed her eyes and saw again the tattered, pale face her five-year-old daughter, as ugly in death as she ad been beautiful in life, her skin ripped and torn by the exploding glass of the windscreen. Could she have accepted it more easily, she wondered as she had wondered so many times before, if Rupert had died too? Could she have forgiven him, dead, as she could not forgive him, alive?
“I never see you,” she said with a tight smile, ‘so how can I be punishing you? You’re drunk and you’re being ridiculous. Neither of which conditions is any way out of the ordinary.” He had an unhealthy and un cared-for look which fuelled her scorn and made her impatient.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she snapped, ‘just get out, will you? I don’t feel anything for you any more and, to be honest, I don’t think I ever did.” But that wasn’t true, not really.
“You can’t hate what you never loved,” Olive had said.
Tears slithered down his drink-sodden face.
“I weep for her every day, you know.”
“Do you, Rupert? I don’t. I haven’t the energy.”
“Then you didn’t love her as much as I loved her,” he sobbed, his body heaving to control itself.
Roz’s lips curled contemptuously.
“Really? Then why your indecent haste to provide her replacement? I worked it out, you know. You must have impregnated your precious Jessica within a week of walking away unscathed from the accident.” She larded the word with sarcasm.
“Is Sam a good replacement, Rupert? Does he wind your hair round his finger the way Alice used to do? Does he laugh like her? Does he wait by the door for you and hug your knees and say: “Mummy, Mummy, Daddy’s home”?” Her anger made her voice brittle.