Tony, when she had told him about this, had asked, “So if she bought the right kind of house, how come she put the wrong sort of stuff in it with you looking over her shoulder?”
“Because I wasn’t looking over her shoulder, not even when she asked me to,” said Kay. “It’s not my place.”
“Come on. The kid worships you and you’re the nearest thing to a mother she ever had.”
“But I’m not her mother and I never want to give her occasion to remind me. In fact, looking back, I suspect she chose the house because she knew in advance I’d like the look of it, which I did. Inside’s different. They’re the ones who’ve got to live in it.”
“You’re all heart, baby,” said Tony, smiling. He was a man of many contradictions and this capacity to be cynical and affectionate at the same time was one of them.
Now she seated herself gingerly at one end of a long sofa. This was great furniture for lounging in. Helen in her pre-pregnancy days would usually curl up in one of the huge chairs with her legs tucked up beneath her and Kay had had to admit that the setting suited her marvellously well. Herself, even in Helen’s company, she liked to stay in control, and felt taken over by the soft cushions and yielding upholstery. Tony had called it a great shagging sofa, and thereafter whenever she sat on it she got a mental flash of Jason and Helen intimately intertwined in its depths.
Now Helen was long past the curling up stage and presumably the intimate intertwining stage too. She’d brought one of the broad high elbow chairs from the dining room to sit upon, though even this was becoming a tight fit.
“Hope you don’t mind-got pizzas coming-cooking’s getting hard without doing myself or the Aga serious damage-sorry.”
There’d been a time when Kay had tried to amend Helen’s rather breathlessly unpunctuated way of speaking but she’d given up when she saw she was merely creating tension. The same with the girl’s taste in interior decoration. This was how she was, and you didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth especially when God was the giver.
“Pizza’s fine,” she said with a smile. “Though I hope Jase is making sure you get a slightly more varied diet.”
“Don’t worry-I’m sticking to the menu I got from the clinic-more or less-tonight’s a treat-triple anchovies-damn! Just when I’d got comfortable.”
The phone in the entrance hall was ringing.
“I’ll get it,” said Kay.
She rose elegantly, not an easy feat from the absorbent upholstery, and went into the hall.
“Hello,” she said.
“Kay, is that you? It’s Jason. Look, Pal hasn’t turned up for squash and I wondered if maybe he’d tried to ring me at home. Could you ask Helen?”
“Sure.”
She called, “It’s Jase. Pal’s stood him up. He wants to know if he’s left a message here.”
“No, nothing-tell Jase to get himself something at the Club like he usually does-don’t want him spoiling our evening just because Pal’s spoilt his.”
“Jase, did you get that?”
“Yes. Who needs phones when you’ve got a wife who could yodel for Switzerland? OK, tell her I’ll get myself a pasty, then go up on the balcony and see if I can find a couple of sweaty girls to watch. How are you keeping, Kay?”
“Mustn’t complain.”
“Why not? Everyone else does. Probably catch you before you leave. ’Bye.”
Kay put down the receiver and stood looking at her reflection in the gilt mirror on the wall behind the phone table. Her face wore the contemplative almost frowning expression which Tony had once caught in a snap which he labelled La Signora Borgia checks her guest list. She relaxed her features into their normal edge-of-a-smile configuration and went back into the lounge.
4
“There we go,” said PC Jack “Joker” Jennison, placing the two newspaper-wrapped bundles on the dashboard. “One haddock, one cod.”
“Which is which?”
“Mail’s haddock, Guardian’s cod.”
“That figures. What do I owe you?”
“Don’t be daft. Chinese chippie two doors up from the National Party offices, they’d pay good money to have us park outside till closing time.”
“Then they’ll be getting a refund,” said PC Alan Maycock. “We’re out of here.”
He gunned the engine and set the car accelerating forward.
“What’s your hurry?” asked Jennison.
“Just got a tip from CAD that Bonkers is on the prowl. Don’t think he’d be too chuffed to find us troughing outside a chippie, so let’s find somewhere nice and quiet.”
Bonkers was Sergeant Bonnick, a new broom at Mid-Yorkshire HQ who was hell bent on clearing out its dustiest corners. Also he was big on physical fitness and had already been mildly sarcastic about the embonpoint of the two constables, saying that watching them getting into their car was like seeing a pair of 42s trying to squeeze into a 36 cup.
“Not too far, eh? I hate cold chips,” said Jennison, pressing the warm packets to his cheeks.
“Don’t fret. Nearly there.”
They’d turned off the main road with its parade of shops and were speeding into the area of the city known as Greenhill.
Once a hamlet without the city wall, Greenhill had been absorbed into the urban mass during the great industrial expansion of the nineteenth century. The old squires who bred their beasts, raised their crops, and hunted their prey across this land were replaced by the new squires of coal and steel and commerce who wanted houses to live in that had land enough to give the impression of countryside but without any of the attendant inconveniences of remoteness, agricultural smells or peasant society. So the hamlet of Greenhill became the suburb of Greenhill, in which farms and cotts and muddy lanes were replaced by urban mansions and tarmacked roads.
From the naughty nineties to the fighting forties, many of the great and the good of Mid-Yorkshire paraded their pomp in Greenhill. But after the war, the rot set in. Old ways and old fortunes faded, and though for a while the makers of new fortunes still turned their thoughts to what had once been the arriviste’s dream, a Greenhill mansion, there rapidly developed an awareness of their inconvenience and a sense that they were at best demode, at worst crassly kitsch, and by the seventies Greenhill was in steep decline. Many of the mansions were converted into flats, or small commercial hotels, or corporate offices, or simply knocked down to make room for speculative development.
Some areas hung on longer than others, or at least by sheer weight of presence managed to preserve the illusion that little had changed from the glory days. Chief among these was The Avenue, which, if it ever had a praenomen, had long ago shed it as superfluous to general recognition. Here on nights like the present one, with mist seeping in from the already shrouded countryside to blur the big houses behind their screening arbours into vague shapes, still and awe-inspiring as sleeping pachyderms, it was possible to drive slowly down the broad street between the ranks of leafy plane trees and imagine that the great days of Empire were with us yet.
In fact, driving slowly down the Avenue was still a popular pursuit among a certain section of Mid-Yorkshire society, but they weren’t thinking of Empire, except perhaps metaphorically. The shade against the elements provided by the trees, the privacy afforded by many of the dark and winding driveways, plus the thinness on the ground of complaining residents, made this a favourite parade ground for prostitutes and kerb crawlers. In the misty aureoles of the elegantly curved Greenhill lampposts, the Avenue might look deserted. But set your car crawling sedately along the kerbside and, like dryads materializing from their trees at the summons of the great god Pan, the ladies of the night would appear.