The Lively Dead Page 6

  “Yes, I went to explain about her mother’s death.”

  “In prison!”

  “That’s right I liked her. I think she’s been very unfairly treated.”

  “Brought it on herself, Ma Newbury said. Ruined by drink, she said.”

  “That reminds me—did you have any idea that Mrs Newbury was drinking so much herself?”

  “Cunning old bitch—you could of knocked me down with a feather. But what about Procne?”

  “Oh … I told her I’d find out whether her mother had left her anything, or made a will. I thought perhaps you …”

  “She was making a will. I mean, she was on about me not being able to sign it, cos I was under eighteen. I never seen it. Nothing to leave, had she? Drunk it all,”

  “I don’t know. I just said I’d find out. When was this?”

  “Ooh … bit before Christmas. She was on about how ungrateful Procne was, and what a nice lady Princess Anne was. I don’t know as she actually got it written out proper, but if she did I bet she got it signed all right. She might of burnt it after, perhaps, so as she could get a thrill out of being that noble and forgiving …”

  It was a measure of the vigour of Mrs Newbury’s personality, her heroic scale, that even the totally self-absorbed Mrs Pumice was able to sketch a vivid outline of how she might have behaved.

  “I don’t suppose there’s much point in searching her room,” said Lydia. “The police must have done that”

  “Him!” said Mrs Pumice. “Down here for cuppas half the time, on about what a hard life it was. But Procne … She OK? How’s she doing her hair now? What’s it like in there?”

  “Inside? It’s exactly my idea of hell. It’s a system designed to grind you down.”

  Lydia was about to expand on the society-induced apathy and loneliness of prison life when she saw that it wouldn’t seem much different from the life Mrs Pumice herself lived. So she notched up a resolution to find excuses for visiting her tenant more often and switched to a description of Procne’s coiffure.

  “She really is beautiful,” she added. “The photographs don’t give you any idea.”

  “Oh, I seen her.”

  “I thought she’d never come here.”

  “No, Ma Newbury got it into her head to go to Court one day and drug me along. I seen her then.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, she loved a bit of a secret, didn’t she? Fact, she made me promise not to tell. But then, being her, she got talking with some bloke and next thing I knew we was in the papers. Look, I nicked the picture out of her collection—something to show Don when he comes back, see?”

  She lumbered out of her chair and fetched from a collection of papers jammed behind a biscuit tin a clipping from the Sun, already yellow and brittle. Mrs Pumice, in the left foreground, might have been any bun-faced gawper. Mrs Newbury, in the centre, was herself even to the exact angle of her snapping-turtle head as it poked from her awful fur tippet. Over to the right, a bit further off, stood a very large, solemn Indian. It took Lydia a while even to notice him, and a while more to realise that he was Mr Jack Ambrose.

  She was startled until she saw that the coincidence wasn’t all that strange. A man whose job is to help the inadequate must quite often find himself hanging around the courts. Still, the sight of him there, and the tenuous connection to Procne, depressed her. But what mattered was the good likeness of Mrs Newbury.

  “May I borrow this for a couple of days?” she said. “I’ll let you have it back.”

  “OK,” said Mrs Pumice, wholly uninquisitive. “My, Trev fancies you, don’t he? You wouldn’t like to keep him?”

  Her jokey tone only half hid the wistfulness behind the question. Lydia was not conscious of any movement in herself, but the baby seemed to sense her inner rejection, waking into a whine. Carefully she petted him back to oblivion.

  “I fancy him too,” she said. “I’d love to look after him sometimes if you want to get out.”

  “Would you really? That’d be great!”

  Those were exactly the words Procne had used, in the heart of her prison. Lydia was shocked at the difference in her own reactions—her eagerness to go back to Holloway, her grudging acceptance of a duty to take Trevor over and let Mrs Pumice escape for a few hours.

  “Yes, I’d love to,” she said. “Any time.”

  Chapter 10

  “I’m a bit drunk,” said Richard, drowsily. “One bottle of plonk, only. What was that in aid of?”

  “I can explain everything,” wheedled Lydia.

  “The trouble is we’ve got out of the habit. Do you remember that restaurant in Salzburg where we knocked back four bottles after Rosenkavelier? I can’t remember much about the opera, but the hangover remains vivid. You didn’t suffer at all.”

  “You drank twice as much as I did. One of the things I really like about the way we live now is not having to go to any more operas.”

  “I’ve got twice your mass, so I ought to be able to absorb twice as much alcohol. What was it in aid of to-night? Celebration of moving in here?”

  “Not really—at least I hadn’t thought of that. It’s funny about fresh plaster. It’s got a sort of white smell, even in the dark.”

  “Hyperaesthesia, they call it. Where do you strike next?”

  “Mrs Newbury’s. I’m pretty sure Mrs Pumice will move up, and that means Paul can’t have it.”

  “I thought you like him.”

  “I do. When he’s serious, and when he’s doing things. But … anyway, whether I like him doesn’t matter.”

  “Umm. What was the wine in aid of, then?”

  “Nothing. I just felt I had to buy it because the bloke in the off licence was so helpful. It’s that one at the bottom of Addison Avenue.”

  “Aren’t there some nearer than that? At least four, I make it. Helpful about what, anyway?”

  “Oh, recognising Mrs Newbury. Mrs Pumice lent me a photo of her. The bloke said she went there every week to pick up an order. You remember her old red shopping bag with the black rim? It turns out she had two of those, and she’d take one of them back every Tuesday morning, full of empties, and he’d have the other one ready and hand it over—six bottles of vodka and one of brandy. She gave him the money and took the change and went. She never said a word. He told me he’d inherited the system from the bloke who was there before him, and he didn’t even know her name. If there was someone in the shop she’d walk past and come back when it was empty. He didn’t even know she was dead. He’d still got the last order waiting—he showed me. And he never asked why I wanted to know, or anything, so I felt I had to buy something. I liked it, actually.”

  “So did I. When I’m a judge we’ll have a couple every night, unless we’re going to the opera. What does vodka cost?”

  “Three oh nine. I looked.”

  “Plus the brandy. Over twenty quid a week. Where the hell was she getting it from?”

  “Well, Procne was sending her ten quid a week. Richard?”

  He tensed at his name, but only a little. Perhaps the wine helped. For a moment Lydia wondered whether that had been her subconscious motive in buying it.

  “Ung?” he said, wary.

  “What’s going to happen to Procne?”

  “The News of the World will pay her two thousand quid for her life story in six instalments. There might be another thousand from a book. After that, if she’s got any sense she’ll emigrate.”

  “Don’t be a bloody man of the world. What will happen to her?”

  “Sorry … I hadn’t got it that you minded … wheeee! You want her to come here?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Provided she doesn’t bring her work home … damn! Sorry. That’s the wine. What do I think? My first thought is you’re nuts—only I know you’re not. So … ummmmm …�
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  “You see, darling, I’ve read again and again that when you come out of jail or a mental home or something like that …”

  “The army …”

  “Shut up or I’ll bite you. The point is you’ve got to have something to do, somewhere to live, and a community to live in which accepts and supports you. Otherwise you simply go back and do whatever you did again. I think I’m probably the only person she knows who doesn’t belong to her old world. I mean, if she wants to go back there, that’s her decision. But we could at least offer her a choice. I think we ought to. Darling?”

  “Ung … if you put it like that…I don’t know…all the empties were vodka? No brandy?”

  Richard’s technique for not thinking about what bothered him was to think about something else. He did it quite deliberately. Sometimes Lydia had woken in the small hours to hear him murmuring lists of names—every man who had served in some company with him, all the cricket teams at his prep school.

  “She’d probably dumped those,” she said.

  “You went to her room quite a bit, didn’t you?”

  “Why?”

  “Vodka doesn’t smell. Brandy does. Besides, six bottles a week of hard liquor—even Jack Arbuthnott didn’t quite reach that level. Where the hell was she getting twenty-five quid a week? Six quid from the Government, say six from her pension, ten from Procne … you know, that ten from Procne sounds a little bit like blackmail. Perhaps there was someone else.”

  “Only too likely,” sighed Lydia. “She had a Mafia outlook on life. Or she might have been nicking the Government’s stamp money. She was awful. I miss her.”

  “Umm … suppose you decided to let Procne come, you could say to this Vaklins chap that he could have the room till then. Honestly, Liz, you could do with the cash.”

  “I know. But I really do want to take the chance to move the tenants into more sensible rooms. Besides …”

  “Does he bother you? Am I going to have to unpack my hunting whip? I wonder where the hell it is.”

  “Yes, he bothers me, but not like that. I mean, at first I thought it was like that, you know the ‘I’m a man and you’re a woman so it’s my nature to admire and court you and your nature to pretend not to like it but eventually succumb with gladness’ bit. But I think that’s only a manner, a sort of foreign politeness. There’s something else—I don’t quite know what.”

  Richard chuckled in the dark and squeezed her hand.

  “Just a bit too eager to please,” he said. “Perhaps if you gave him the room he might slack off a bit.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or you could find him an outside interest.”

  “I’m sure he’s got plenty. He really is very handsome in a slightly gnomish way. I get an occasional urge to scribble a moustache on his face.”

  “Umm. What’s Lalage up to?”

  “Last I heard she’s walked out of her job. I don’t keep up with her love life.”

  “It’s worth a try. Let’s have a beano. I’m beginning to feel a bit hermit-like.”

  “I’ll ask her when I see her.”

  “Great. That’s fixed.”

  After that the conversation became spasmodic. Between whiles Lydia cast up mental minutes of the meeting. It had been agreed that if when the upheavals were over a room became available Paul should be offered it until Procne needed it, but that Procne could come if she wanted to. But as Richard had given more than Lydia to reach this compromise, she’d compensate by setting up a proper dinner party for him, with the family silver gleaming in the candle-light and all the other bloody trimmings.

  Chapter 11

  It was just bad luck that the day Lydia wanted to start on Mrs Newbury’s room was Dickie’s half term. She was planning bus-routes for a round trip taking in The Army Museum, the Imperial War Museum, Apsley House and the Armoury at the Tower when Mrs Pumice knocked at the door and came in without waiting for an answer. She was wearing flared orange trousers, a purple jersey and a cap to match the trousers. Her baby whined on her arm.

  “Oh, I’m ever so sorry,” she said. “I got to go out. It’s ever so urgent. I was hoping you could look after Trev for a couple of hours. He’s got a bit of a grizzle, like, but you’re ever so good with him.”

  It was the first time she had asked. It was impossible to refuse. So Lydia smiled and took the child; with minimal thanks Mrs Pumice was gone, eager and excited, as if she were dashing to meet a lover who was waiting for her somewhere in the snapping February wind.

  “It isn’t fair,” said Dickie. “It’s my half term.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. I’ll just see if I can get him to sleep, then we can go and throw furniture about in Mrs Newbury’s room. We might even find treasure.”

  Trevor refused to sleep. His whine wasn’t anything burpable, and didn’t seem to be a teething noise, it was just an expression of generalised vague discontent, much like his mother’s normal view of the world. Dickie tried to interest him in being a besieged army in a fortress of furniture, but that didn’t work either. In the end Lydia humped him, still whining, up to Mrs Pumice’s room, where she changed him and dumped him in a carrycot. This she carried up the next flight and deposited on the landing outside the Government’s front door, as though he were a bastard they’d jointly fathered. Dickie fought a heroic retreat up the stairs behind her, dying gloriously three times on the way.

  “OK,” said Lydia, “we’ll start by looking for treasure.”

  Dickie enjoyed that. He rootled unsystematically among the drawers, hurling around Mrs Newbury’s incredible musty old garments, until he came across a huge whale-boned corset which he decided could be worn upside down as a breastplate. Strapped into this he held the bed against an attacking army while Lydia put the clothes back and searched anywhere he hadn’t rifled. There was no sign of money or will. Outside the door Trevor’s whine at last stilled into sleep.

  “Now, darling,” said Lydia, “the next thing is to get all the furniture over there. Then we can roll the carpet up. Do you want a ride?”

  The bed became a tank. A brief engagement with a panzer division was fought. Lydia was practised in using her slight weight efficiently, but she’d forgotten how Mrs Newbury had managed to accumulate all the heaviest furniture in the house. In particular there was a vast satinwood wardrobe against the inner wall, which could wait for the moment but would have to come to pieces before she could shift it. While Dickie bounced untiring on the bed she hoicked the tacks out of the carpet and began to roll it up, away from the window. As she worked she became vaguely conscious of a smell—not gas, not Mrs Newbury (who had generated her own strong odour of tea and shampoo and chocolate biscuits), not that reek of age and poverty which had filled the house when she’d first bought it, none of the rots she knew. She had a moment of sick despair about the rots, until she realised that what she was remembering was not the odour of any fungus but of the solvent that carried the fungicides.

  When she’d rolled the carpet a few feet she slipped tuppence under the far end, then rose and walked round the room, sniffing. The strange smell seemed strongest in the corner by the wardrobe.

  “Are you smelling for treasure?” said Dickie.

  “I don’t know. Come here and see what you think.”

  At once he was on hands and knees beside her, sniffing like a snuff-addict, rump taut.

  “Dead man’s chest,” he said in a puzzled voice.

  (One of Richard’s family traditions was that children with colds must have their chests rubbed with Vick. During the process the adult who was rubbing had to sing the pirates’ catch from Treasure Island. This mightn’t help the child to get better, but it was the Right Thing to Do.)

  “Yes, it does smell a bit like that,” said Lydia. “It seems stronger higher up. Oh, look!”

  The stain in the corner of the ceiling was not very noticeable
, but Lydia was reasonably sure it was new. She pulled the table over, stood on it and reached up. The patch was sticky to the touch, and whatever it was had dribbled a little way down the corner where the walls met; the smell on her fingertips was resinous but not really chemical. Could even a weeping fungus weep such tears? As far as she could remember the room directly above was the one in which the Government filed their documents, chiefly evidence for claims for compensation against Soviet Russia when freedom and democracy once again dawned in Livonia.

  She would have liked to go and investigate, but could hardly walk in on the Government with Trevor whining on her shoulder and Dickie winkling out machine-gun nests behind her.

  “Come and help me with the carpet, darling,” she said. “It’s getting a bit heavy for me alone. You push at that end.”

  Dickie got down and heaved against the roll with such verve that it trundled forward all askew and he tumbled after it, missing the planted tuppence. Still he was thrilled when Lydia pointed it out and went back to the bed to bounce, holding it high over his head and whooping at each bounce. Outside on the landing the baby joined in.

  The door opened.

  “Sorry,” said Paul Vaklins. “I’ve woken someone’s child. Can I help?”

  “I can manage, except for that wardrobe,” said Lydia. “It comes to bits. I’d like to get it over there. Oh, damn that bloody kid!”

  “Me?” asked Dickie, very interested.

  “Of course not, darling. Sorry, Paul. Look, that sort of cornice thing lifts off …”

  The wardrobe was like a vast Chinese puzzle, separate shapes self-locked to each other. The cornice was light enough, but the first section of actual hanging-space seemed to weigh several hundredweight.

  “Whew!” said Lydia, as they settled it down by the window. “Thanks. I couldn’t have done that alone.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You sometimes give the impression that you can do anything. Hello!”

  Paul had strolled back to where the other half of the wardrobe stood, tall but proportionless, displaying a cobwebby interface. The end section of the pedestal had fallen out sideways. Paul bent and picked up a large brown envelope, to which a smaller white envelope had been taped.