The light changed, and when she stepped forward her boot missed the curb, giving Logan an opportunity to take her arm. “Nearly a nasty accident,” he said.
“Sorry, I’m not concentrating.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Stand over here, out of the flow.” He guided her into a doorway. “Been in the pub?”
“I wish it were only that.” She showed him the face of a troubled child. “I can’t remember who I am.”
“Have you got identification in your handbag?”
“Yes, but that isn’t the point. I can look and discover who I am and where I live. I want to know without doing that.” She drew herself up. “Have we met? You could be an acquaintance and I wouldn’t know.”
“Afraid not. My name is Tony Logan. My partner and I are working on that house across the road. Converting it into flats. We saw you walk by and took an interest.”
She closed her eyes and slumped against the wall. “Forgive me,” she said. “These blackouts leave me weak.”
“You need a sit-down and a cup of tea.” Logan took her arm again. “Come along, we have a kettle on the site.”
They sat on salvaged chairs in a small garden behind the house, under the shade of a pear tree that would survive the modeling. Colman acted as “mother,” pouring boiling water onto teabags in massive crockery mugs. Logan passed the ginger cake.
“I’ve remembered my name,” she said. “I’m Nora Packer.”
“I wonder,” Colman said, “if Nora Packer would like to attend our meeting.”
“Might be the best thing for her,” Logan said. “Drinks and conversation with convivial strangers. Nobody knows who anybody is at the Broken Bell. Amnesia anonymous.”
“I am Mrs. Nora Packer.”
“I have a wife and four children,” Colman excused himself.
Logan said, “I have an American girl friend who treats me like a husband. We’re all safe as houses.”
The shattered house beside them chose that moment to shed a couple of slates from its roof. As the dust settled, everybody laughed. “I like a building with a sense of humor,” Nora said. “What’s this Broken Bell?”
The public house derived its name from an emasculated brass bell hanging behind the bar. Its clapper had been removed by the previous landlord, who decided to defy the drinking laws by refusing to signal the legal closing hour of eleven o’clock at night. He got away with it for a while, then he paid a few fines and finally was stripped of his license. The new owner obeyed the rules, but the broken bell was retained as a conversation piece. Eventually it took over from the predictable Rose and Crown as a more original name for the pub.
Colman brought drinks to the arrangement of tables pushed together where Logan was sitting close to Nora in a crowd that included Max, the unemployed actor, Neville, the alcoholic ex-journalist who was surviving currently on one of the houseboats beside Battersea Bridge, Tilly from the greengrocer’s shop next door to the pub, and Gabe, the punk beautician from the King’s Road, with her fluorescent hair and her face made up in white and red like a pantomime mask. Others came and went like the gulls that flickered beyond the wall of windows facing the river, and conversation surged in tides of argument and laughter.
“You were crazy to give up the Doctor Dillon series, Max,” Neville scolded. “You worked every week — you were seen on every television screen in Britain.”
“Hindsight,” the mournful actor replied. His famous eyes rolled in a face drawn down with boredom and alcohol. “I wanted to escape being typecast. Now, God help me, I’m seldom cast at all.”
Gabe was framing Nora Packer’s face with nervous hands, her eyes squinting through smoke from a cigarette clenched between her teeth. “Your hair is mad for me to shape it forward.”
“Never mind,” Neville droned on, “we’re all sinking here. If only a publisher would accept my book, I could get back to work. I can’t go and see my friends at the paper. They ask me how the novel is going. Good lord, four years—” He produced the shy smile of a schoolboy.
The landlord approached, his arms lined with plates. “Egg and chips,” he recited, “steak and chips, shepherd’s pie and chips, bacon sandwich and chips—” The meals were claimed and the perpetual rotation to and from the bar for drinks went on.
“I’m not sure what he’ll say,” Nora said to Logan and Colman, the three of them withdrawn into a private conversation. “My husband is an unpredictable man.”
“A powerful man,” Logan warned. “When you said Packer, I thought right away of the Reginald Packer who writes the column for Reflections Magazine and does those talks on Metro Radio.”
“Tony’s girl friend,” Colman said, “the American woman he mentioned, works for Reflections. Her name is Valerie Land. She keeps wanting him to move with her to New York.”
“Go,” Nora said fervently. “Escape. I almost made it once, all the way to Montreal, before they caught me and brought me back.”
“There speaks an unhappy person.”
“So unhappy my mind shuts off every now and then. One of these days, I may not come back.” She gave the dusty builders a wistful look as they leaned close, attending on her words.
“What happened, Nora?” Logan asked. When she hesitated, he said, “This is the place for the truth. And the time.”
“I got pregnant,” she said. “Not by my husband. Reg was not pleased, but he seemed to have a civilized solution to the problem. He has connections in Montreal from years ago. I was sent there to have the baby because he refused to claim it as his own and I said no to an abortion. The idea was that I would settle down and start raising my child there. He would work out his contracts here and join me in Montreal in a year or so to begin a second career.”
“Obviously, none of that happened.”
“Some of it did. I had the baby, but she was taken from me immediately and given away for adoption — I never even held my daughter. The shock wasn’t like anything I’ve experienced. I still have these blackouts. I flew back to London to try and persuade Reg to honor his promise. When I saw he never would, I returned to Montreal — the escape I mentioned — and tried to get Doctor Monteith to put me in touch with my daughter, to get her back. Reg must have given him a lot of money — he refused even to see me. My husband sent a detective. I think the amnesia may have taken over — anyway, when I woke up I was back in London.” She picked up her glass and set it down without drinking. “And here I am.”
Colman’s wife appeared, along with his oldest son — a carbon copy of his father. Rangy build, sky-blue eyes. She was impressively fat and as beautiful as a black-forest gateau. “Caught you with another woman,” she said.
After introductions, Colman said, “Nora is married to a very unkind man. We’ve been hearing.”
“She needs a friend,” Logan told her.
“She’s found two of them,” Colman said.
Half an hour later, he and his wife and son were off to do things with the barbecue behind his house in Hammersmith. “You have my permission to sort the bastard out,” he instructed Logan. “But save a piece for me.”
“Nobody can do anything against Reginald Packer,” Nora said.
“Don’t be too sure,” Colman told her. “You’re in with a whole different class of guy.”
When his partner was gone, Logan said, “What about the father, the man who got you pregnant? Wasn’t he able to help?”
“I never even told him. He doesn’t know I had the baby.”
“Does that make sense?”
“I thought it did at the time. Maybe it doesn’t. It was a very sudden affair and it was over almost before it started. I met Martin at a class I used to attend for keeping fit. He was our celebrity guest one night.”