‘We’ll just get into bed for five minutes -’
‘I don’t want to get into bed today. Not the way those sheets are.’
‘OK. We’ll go and have a Babycham.’
‘I’d love a Babycham.’
When the house was empty except for themselves it was best. It often was empty in the early afternoon, after the woman who came to clean had gone, when Gerard’s mother was out, doing the voluntary work she had recently taken up. They wandered from room to room then, poking into everything. Among other items of interest they found letters, some written by Gerard’s mother to Rebecca’s father, some by him to her. They were in a dressing-table drawer, in a slim cardboard box, with a rubber band around them. Twice the love affair had broken up. Twice there were farewells, twice the admission that one could not live without the other. They could not help themselves. They had to meet again.
‘My, my,’ Rebecca enthused. ‘Hot stuff, this.’
After their weekend visits to the two who had been wronged Gerard and Rebecca exchanged reports on Sunday evenings. Gerard’s father cooked and used the washing-machine, vacuum-cleaned the house, ironed his own shirts, made his bed and weeded the flowerbeds. Rebecca’s mother was in a bedsitting-room, a sorry sight. She ate nuts and chocolate while watching the television, saying it wasn’t worth cooking for one, not that she minded in the least. She was keeping her end up, Rebecca’s mother insisted. ‘You can see,’ she confided, ‘why I didn’t think I should look after you, dear? It wasn’t because I didn’t want you. You’re all that’s left to me. You’re what I live for, darling.’
Rebecca saw perfectly. The bedsitting-room was uncomfortable.
In one corner the bedclothes of a divan, pulled roughly up in daytime, were lumpy beneath a stained pink bedspread. Possessions Rebecca remembered, though had not known were particularly her mother’s – ornaments and a tea set, two pictures of medieval people on horses, a table-lamp, chairs and floor rugs and, inappropriately, a gong – cluttered the limited space. Her mother’s lipstick was carelessly applied. The same clothes she’d worn in the past, smart then, seemed like cast-offs now. She refused to take a penny of alimony, insisting that part of keeping her end up was to stand on her own two feet. She’d found a job in a theatre café and talked a lot about the actors and actresses who bought cups of coffee or tea from her. All this theatrical talk was boring, Rebecca reported on Sunday evenings: her mother had never been boring before.
Gerard’s father, hurrying through his household chores so that he could devote himself to entertaining Gerard, was not the same either. He was more serious. He didn’t spread himself about in the sitting-room the way he used to, his legs stretched awkwardly out so that people fell over them. Another boy had once shown Gerard how to untie his father’s shoe-laces and tie them together while his attention was diverted. His father had never minded being laughed at; Gerard wasn’t so sure about that now.
‘She said she had three miscarriages,’ Rebecca reported. ‘I never knew that.’
Gerard wasn’t certain what a miscarriage was, and Rebecca, who had been uncertain also, explained that the baby came out too soon, a lot of mush apparently.
‘I wonder if I’m adopted,’ Gerard mused.
The next weekend he asked his father, and was assured he wasn’t. His father said his mother hadn’t wanted more than a single child, but from his tone Gerard decided that she hadn’t wanted any children at all. ‘I’m a mistake,’ he said when he and Rebecca were again alone.
Rebecca agreed that this was probably so. She supposed she should be glad she wasn’t just a lot of mush. ‘You be the detective,’ she said.
Gerard rapped with his knuckles on the parquet floor and Rebecca opened and closed the door.
‘What do you want?’
‘Hotel detective, lady.’
‘So what?’
‘I’ll tell you so what. So what is I have grounds for believing you and your companion are not Mr and Mrs Smith, as per the entry in the register.’
‘Of course we’re Mr and Mrs Smith.’
‘I would appreciate a word with Mr Smith, ma’am.’
‘Mr Smith’s in the lavatory.’
‘Do you categorically state that you are named Mrs Smith, ma’am? Do you categorically state that you and the party in the lavatory are man and wife?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Do you categorically state you are not in the prostitution business?’
‘The very idea!’
‘Then what we have here is a case of mistaken identity. Accept my apologies, ma’am. We get all sorts in the Grand Splendide these days.’
‘No offence taken, officer. The public has a right to be protected.’
‘Time was when only royalty stayed at the Grand Splendide. I knew the King of Greece, you know.’
‘Fancy that.’
‘Generous to a fault he was. Oh, thank you very much, lady.’
‘Fancy a cocktail, officer? Babycham on the rocks OK?’
‘Certainly is. Oh, and, ma’am?’
‘How can I help you, officer?’
‘Feel free to ply your trade, ma’am.’
‘A little brother,’ Gerard’s mother informed them. ‘Or perhaps a sister.’
Gerard didn’t ask if this was another mistake because he could tell from the delight in his mother’s eyes that it wasn’t. There might even be further babies, Rebecca speculated when they were alone. She didn’t care for the idea of other children in the house. ‘They’ll be the real thing,’ she said.
Something else happened: Gerard returned after a weekend to say there had been a black-haired Frenchwoman in his father’s house. She strolled about the kitchen in stockinged feet, and did the cooking. One result of this person’s advent was to cause Gerard to feel less sympathetically disposed towards his father. He felt his father would be all right now, as his mother and Rebecca’s father were all right.
‘That’ll be nice for you,’ Rebecca’s mother remarked sourly when Rebecca passed on the information about the expected baby. ‘Nice for you and Gerard.’
When Rebecca told her about the Frenchwoman she said that that was nice too. These were the only comments she made, Rebecca told Gerard afterwards. Keeping her end up, her mother engaged in a tedious rigmarole about some famous actor or other, whom Rebecca had never heard of. She also kept saying the rigmarole was funny, a view Rebecca didn’t share.
‘Let’s do the time she caught them,’ Rebecca suggested when she’d gone through the rigmarole for Gerard.
‘OK.’
Gerard lay down on the parquet and Rebecca went out of the room. Gerard worked his lips in an imaginary embrace. His tongue lolled out.
‘This is disgusting!’ Rebecca cried, bursting into the room again.
Gerard sat up. He asked her what she was doing here.
‘A cleaner let me in. She said I’d find you on the office floor.’
‘You’d better go,’ Gerard muttered quietly to his pretend companion, pushing himself to his feet.
‘I’ve known for ages.’ Real tears spread on Rebecca’s rounded cheeks. Quite a gush she managed. She’d always been good at real tears.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry, my God!’
‘I know.’
‘She forgot her panties. She left her panties by the wastepaper basket when she scurried out.’
‘Look -’
‘She’s on the street without her panties. Some man on the tube -’
‘Look, don’t be bitter.’
‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I be whatever I want to be? Isn’t anything my due? You were down there on the floor with a second-class tart and you expect me to be like the Virgin Mary.’
‘I do not expect you to be like anyone.’
‘You want me to share you with her, is that it? What a jolliness!’
‘Look -’
‘Oh, don’t keep saying look.’
Rebecca’s real tears came in a torrent now, dribbling on to a grey cardigan, reddening her eyes.