‘Your rag time,’ she said. Then I wept and that was all the answer she needed. ‘And for that you’re sent out?’
I cried harder to see myself as Dell saw me, punished and rejected for what any woman might come to.
She shook her head and said, ‘That isn’t right.’ She put her arms round me then and rocked me this way and that saying ‘shush’ and ‘poor rabbit’.
It was cold so she got under the blanket with me and it was nice holding her close and being held.
After a while I asked her what would happen here to someone in my case.
She shrugged. ‘Anything. Or nothing. There are some men who’ll care for a child but more who talk big while you’re giving them what they want, then first sign of trouble they’re gone.’ A shudder passed through her. I looked in her face and her eyes were wet.
‘Oh Dell,’ I said, ‘sweet Dell, you’ve had a baby.’
‘If you call it that. A tiddler the size of a carrot.’
‘And it died?’
‘A trader came wanting breakfast and I’d puked up in the meat pot and I had nothing to feed him. Trevor made out it was dogs broke into the kitchen, but the trader guessed it was me. He slapped me up, kneed me in the belly.’
‘And did Trevor know? I mean, about the baby?’
‘Not until after, when he had to mop me up.’
I thought how much easier than hers my life had been, everything neat and ordered.
I asked her if she ever thought about how she might have lived if Cat and Trevor hadn’t raised her.
She said, ‘All I know is what Trevor told me. I was brought here as a baby by Brendan and a planter girl, a sad-eyed wisp called Janet, who maybe was my mother but didn’t say.’
‘Not your mother, Dell. My mother.’
‘Janet was your mother? Then I’m sorry she wasn’t mine too, so we could have been sisters.’
I knew then I must tell her what I could about her parents. That the man she called Brendan was truly her father – she wept at that and said she’d always felt it – and that her mother was the best and most beautiful woman.’
‘Still alive, then,’ she said. ‘So why did she ditch me?’
‘Oh, she would have kept you and loved you, I’m sure of it, if they’d let her.’
After a while Dell slept and so did I. When I woke she was gone. The morning light was thin through the trees and I heard them outside, Dell and Trevor, talking and chopping logs for the cooking.
I hear them now, and last night’s sleepers stumbling down the stairs, laughing or cursing and calling for food. And I feel so sorry for myself. Once I had a cottage and my own little room in it that I kept neat and clean. And I had a mother who loved me in her way. I had Sarah to read me texts from the Book of Air. I had Roland, who knew almost everything about me. In time we would have married. I would have led him to his bed at the Hall and it would have been our bed. But he chose Megan because I let this book fill me with wrong thoughts, and I let Brendan trick me into thinking I loved him, and because I lost my way. I miss my father. I think of his treasures hidden in the cottage – the knife with the sliding blades, the wren he carved for me, the silver chain – and think I shall never see them again.
Jason
I didn’t see Penny for three or four years – not until I was about to start work on the old maternity hospital in Bermondsey. I loved that project – beautiful Victorian brickwork and one spectacular wall of smoked glass spanning the gap between the north and south wings. High-ceilinged, big-windowed spaces, accessed directly from a glazed atrium, the old dark corridors carved up into en suite bathrooms. It was going to be perfect. Never happened, of course. What happened was the virus. And people lost interest in luxury apartments, along with the whole money system, the whole property thing. But we weren’t there yet. We had no idea what was about to hit. We were all still scrabbling to get ahead. I thought the worst thing we had to deal with was Brexit, starting with a lot of jumpy foreign investors scared that London was dropping off the map. And I figured I could ride that wave.
The atrium was going to be built on what had been the hospital garden, a patch of ground bounded on three sides by the walls of the building and open to the west to catch the afternoon sun. We were ready to start on the foundations when the protestors moved in. They called themselves the Urban Diggers. Their literature said that they were planting for a sustainable future. They reckoned my proposed extension would bury one of the last green spaces in the borough and they were asserting their right as citizens of the planet to grow vegetables. Bivouacs sprouted overnight. The Diggers walked between them with watering cans.
I ventured on to my own property, introduced myself, and asked to speak to their leader. They said they didn’t have a leader but would delegate some people to meet me. I invited their delegation to my office. They countered with the One World Cafe on the corner – breakfast at seven. I suppose they thought I’d be a walkover at that hour of the morning, seeing I was a member of the idle rich.
I was tempted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but I wanted to work something out so I could get on with the job.
I made sure to get there early. I watched them through the window dodging the morning traffic, three of them and a kid. When they pushed open the door, I realised their secret weapon wasn’t vegan omelette and camomile tea at the crack of dawn, but Penny. There she was in a headscarf, cotton dress and rubber boots, reinvented as an Urban Digger, chin forward, ready for a fight. The kid was Random’s, I could see that. A white-haired woman held him by the hand and waited while he raised his foot over the threshold. Trailing after them was a beautiful Asian girl.
I introduced myself.
Penny said, ‘They know who you are, Jason.’
‘So they know you’re my sister? I hope they don’t hold it against you?’
‘We don’t believe in genetics, Jason. We’re environmentalists.’
It was the kind of thing Penny said and you weren’t sure if it was a joke or not. She was bright but had these gaps, like someone who hasn’t been speaking the language very long.
Only the older woman, Ursula, gave a smile, but she was looking down at Simon and might have been smiling at him or might just have been smiling out of general contentment. The Asian girl, who was called Aisha, looked at me solemnly and rubbed Penny’s back.
I made my arguments. I was preserving a piece of historic London. It was a cutting edge development in terms of energy use. It fulfilled all the requirements for social inclusion. I wasn’t Satan. I wasn’t even one of Satan’s lesser minions. So the economy was in the crapper – people still needed somewhere to live. I’d make a donation in their name to an environmental cause, the World Wildlife Fund or some tree-planting outfit. I’d find them another plot in the borough, a piece of land the same size, give them free use of it for a year to grow their vegetables.
But they weren’t there to negotiate. They’d come to convert me. Couldn’t I see there were too many buildings already and not enough land? That we were choking the planet with our emissions, stoking the flames of our own destruction? Aisha and Penny did most of the talking, Aisha reacting to Penny’s agitation by stroking her arm or touching her hair. The meeting went nowhere. About the planet at least they were right.
As we were leaving, Simon held something up to me. It was a plastic dog. It looked grubby, and I thought maybe one of the Diggers had found it buried in the hospital garden.
I squatted to his level, ‘What’s this?’
He held it up to one eye. ‘This is Dumpy. Dumpy is mine dog. He’s a brave dog.’
‘He looks fierce.’
‘He has ventures. If you’re mean to me Dumpy will biten you. And if you’re mean to Dumpy and make him cry I will biten you until you say sorry.’