Peter Diamond-formerly of Harrods security staff-had become one of the job-seekers.
He got bis turn with the Standard and ran his thumb down the columns. If he could imagine himself filling any of the posts on offer, he would hurry to the nearest phone. Most of the ads were couched in a friendly style-Call Mandy or Ring Trish-and you were encouraged to picture a sweet-natured personnel officer on the end of the line eager to talk you into a thirty-grand job with bonus and pension. Today, as usual, no Mandy or Trish in London seemed to have an opening for a forty-eight-year-old ex-detective who couldn't be relied upon to patrol a floor of Harrods,
He gave up. The Standard reported another rise in unemployment with the headline DESPAIR OF LONDON'S JOBLESS. The despair wasn't much in evidence in High Street Kensington, apart from the droop of Diamond's shoulders. Young women with laminated carrier bags stuffed with goodies from the department stores stood by the curb waving for taxis. Middle- aged men in designer tracksuits jogged in the direction of Holland Park. The lunch crowd were still installed in Al Gallo D'Oro, the Italian restaurant across the street
For the past seven months, Diamond and his wife Stephanie had subsisted in a basement in Addison Road, a one-way street where the traffic noise is almost unendurable without double-glazing and earplugs. The house was a stuccoed three-story building with rotting window frames that never stopped shaking. Across the road was St. Barnabas, a great smog-stained block with a turret at each corner, not by any stretch of imagination an attractive church, but one that might have been improved by exterior cleaning. Someone had tried to distract attention from the grime by painting the doors in bold Oxford blue, only it wasn't visible from the Diamonds' foxhole. Apart from the towers of St Barnabas, all that they could see as they peered up were the topmost levels of multistory flats. It was a far cry from the view across Georgian Bath that they'd enjoyed until a year ago.
Not wishing to be idle, Diamond had refreshed the walls and ceilings of the flat with a coat of emulsion called primrose on the color chart. Turned out every drawer and cupboard, oiled every hinge, brushed the chimney, checked the electric plugs, changed the washers on the taps and fitted draft-excluders to all the doors. The drawback to this admirable zeal was that he was no handyman, so oil and paint got on the soles of his shoes and was transported everywhere; the taps dripped worse than ever; the doors stuck halfway; soot fell into the living room whenever the wind blew; and the cat had moved into the airing-cupboard for sanctuary.
Stephanie Diamond would have joined the cat if she could. She worked two mornings in the Save the Children shop and had lately upped this to four, just to be out of the house. To discourage the DIY, she'd started bringing home jigsaws people had donated, getting Peter to occupy himself assembling them to see if pieces were missing before they were sold in the shop. It was not the good idea it had first seemed. She woke up one night at four A.M. with something digging into her back.
"What on earth…?" She switched on the bedside lamp.
Diamond turned over to see. "Well, what do you know! It's that corner piece I was missing."
"For crying out loud, Peter."
"Fancy a cuppa?"
She remembered the taste of the
She remembered the taste of the tea since he'd descaled the kettle. "No, go back to sleep."
"God knows how it turned up here, of all places."
"Oh, forget it"
After an interval he said, "Are you awake, Steph?"
She sighed. "I am now."
"I was thinking about the kid."
"Which kid?"
"The Japanese girl I got sacked over. Why would anyone abandon a kid like that? She was nicely dressed. Clean. In no way neglected."
"Perhaps she ran away from home."
"And turned up on th & seventh floor of Harrods? I can't believe that"
"Fretting over it won't help," said Stephanie. "She's not your responsibility."
"True."
He was silent for a while.
She was almost asleep when he said, "There must be a way of keeping all the pieces in one place."
"Mm?"
"The jigsaws. I was thinking if I were to help in the shop-"
She sat upright. "Don't you dare!"
"I was going to say I could do the
"I was going to say I could do the jigsaws there, and if pieces went missing at least we'd know they were on the premises."
"If you so much as set foot in that shop, you'll leave it on a stretcher when I've finished with you, Peter Diamond." A bold claim-considering she was about 98 pounds and he 252, but she knew what havoc he would wreak-innocently, let it be said-in all that clutter. She'd known when she married him that he was accident-prone. He was badly coordinated. Some fat people are graceful movers. Her husband was not. He knocked things over. In the street he failed to notice curbstones. Hazards like dog-mess seemed almost to seek him out.
"This getting old-I don't care for it," he said at breakfast next morning.
"Fishing?" Stephanie said.
He gave a shrug.
"All right, I'll say it. You're not that old."
"Too old for work, apparently."
"Snap out of it, Pete."
"You want to see them lining up for unemployment benefit. Younger men than me. Much younger, some of them. Kids, straight out of school."
She heaped streaky bacon on his plate. "Things could be worse."
"You mean one of those unemployed kids could be ours."
She looked away, and he cursed himself for being so boorish. In her first marriage, to a shop manager, Steph had miscarried three times. She'd lost another baby when she married Diamond. That time she'd suffered complications that were finally resolved by a hysterectomy. Surgery had been the cure-all in the early seventies. She'd lost her womb, but not the maternal urge. Before he met her she'd taken on the role of leader to a pack of Brownies. Did it for years, and did much more than Baden-Powell had ever intended. Always willing to be a second mum to small girls whose parents neglected them. They were all young adults now and she still wrote to some of them.
He put his hand over hers and said, "Sorry about last night, love."
Her face creased into a bewildered look. "Last night?"
"In bed."
She stared at him with wide eyes.
"The jigsaw piece."
"Oh!" She laughed. "I'd forgotten that. I thought you were on about something entirely different. It didn't make sense at all."
The day was fine after more than a week of overcast skies and rain, so instead of joining the queue in the library again, he called in at the news agent's, treated himself to his own copy of the Evening Standard and took it into Holland Park to read. Finding that nothing in the jobs columns grabbed him, he put the paper aside and basked in the sun for a while on one of the wooden benches facing the pond beside the Orangery, watching people walk their dogs and push their prams along the length of the arched cloister. Everyone but he had some accessory, some visible reason for being in the park. A model airplane, a tennis racket, a camera, a spiked stick for picking up waste paper.
He got up decisively. Hell, he had no cause to be idle. He'd remembered an urgent job of work. Overnight a couple of air bubbles had appeared on the freshly emulsioned kitchen ceiling. Stephanie hadn't said anything, but he was sure she'd noticed them. He'd see if he could rub them out with sandpaper.