“Ye-es.” He wasn’t altogether happy to see the conversation turning to his age. “Long time ago.”
Twenty minutes till blackout. A noisy group at the bar were bidding each other good night, setting off to the station, to wives and children and safety. Paul slid his hand along the bench towards her and let it lie there, palm upwards. Silence. He felt a pressure in his throat, he couldn’t breathe. After a while she glanced sideways, smiled again and covered his hand with her own.
TWENTY
Bloody desperate, this. Picking up her bag, Bertha braced herself to face the stairs. Never liked coming home. Every morning, she plunged onto the streets craving light and space. Every afternoon, she crept back, cowed by the vast expanse of sky. Mind, she wasn’t as bad as she used to be. When she first come out, she used to hide in shop doorways, because the bustle was more than she could stand. You didn’t get much bustle in prison, only the one hour a day in the exercise yard, trudging round and round in a bloody circle. You weren’t supposed to talk to the other women, not that she’d have lowered herself, the riff-raff you got in there.
Needed to do something, cheer herself up. Sing. “Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…” Singing always cheered you up. “But when ye come back, and all the flowers are dying, if I am dead, as dead I well may be…” Well, not always. What lifted her spirits was the spirits she had in her bag, but it was a bit early to be starting on that. Gin and cod’s head — dear God, what a combination. Hated bloody cod’s head, but it was cheap, and if it was a choice between food and gin — and these days it quite often was — gin every time. She was turning into a right old gin-lizzie — her mam would’ve been horrified. Though, truth be told, she’d liked a tipple herself. She’d been thinking a lot about her mam recently. Well, childhood, really. School. Didn’t do to think too much about that. Or anything else back then, really. Only she loved her mam.
Landing. Pause for breath — up we go again. Bloody stairs — they’d be the death of her. Still, the seances were picking up, partly because she was pushing the limits. All the time now. But forty people, ten bob a ticket, not bad, not that she’d see anything like her fair share of it. Howard would have told them. To be fair, whatever his faults, he was the one pushing her along. He’d seen the opportunities — she hadn’t. And the first few seances, my God…Every bloody spirit who showed up—manifested, Howard said — he was always correcting her — was fighting mad. Furious. “No use blaming the spirits, love,” Howard said. “It’s you, you’re attracting it.” “Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?” “Well, it’s not exactly your fault, but you’re going to have to calm it down a bit, love. Nobody’s going to pay good money to get whacked over the head with a chair.”
Last lap now. She was looking down at her feet — plod, plod, plod — so she didn’t see him at first. But she heard breathing, so she stopped and peered into the darkness. Couldn’t see a bloody thing, somebody had nicked the lightbulbs on the stairs, but then a long shadow peeled itself off the wall.
“Oh,” she said. “You.”
“Now, now, no need to be like that.”
He was smiling, big yellow teeth bared in a grin. She wanted to tell him to bugger off, but she didn’t dare. Feet squarely planted, he stood waiting for her to unlock the door. Bloody key wouldn’t work, her hands were shaking, and all the time he stood there, watching. Weasel-faced little shit. Said his name was Payne. Didn’t believe it. Said he was a policeman — didn’t believe that either. She could smell police a mile off, but — and this was the alarming bit — if he wasn’t police, what was he?
As soon as she got the door open, he followed her into the room, took his hat off, looked all round, taking his time, finally pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”
“Well, Mrs. Mason. What a pleasure to see you again.”
She wasn’t going to dignify that with a reply, so she went over to the window and pulled the blackout curtain across. Attic windows were always fiddly, but at least it give her a minute to think. She switched on the light, checked to see the chamber pot was well tucked under the bed, and turned to face him. “What do you want?”
“You did a seance last night.”
“Gave.”
“What?”
“You don’t do seances, you give them.”
“Bit rich, isn’t it, seeing you charge the poor buggers ten bob?”
“Oh, you were there, were you?”
“No, heard about it, though.”
“Oh, from Miss Pole, I suppose? I noticed she was there again.”
“Nothing to do with me. I believe she calls herself a ‘psychic investigator.’ ”
“She can call herself whatever the hell she likes, she’s still a twat.”
“Ah, Mrs. Mason, I have missed you.”
He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, twirling his hat, a battered trilby, round and round in nicotine-stained fingers. She could see dark stains on the sweatband. His trousers, stretched tight across his bony knees, were shiny, almost threadbare. He had such a seedy, lonely, hangdog look about him — put you in mind of rooms in lodging houses with cracked washbasins and fanny hairs on the bottom sheet. And yet he was a clever man — perhaps “clever” wasn’t the right word—fly, that was it. It occurred to her, suddenly, that he might be the Devil. In a long and varied career she’d met quite a lot of people who’d seen the Devil and what always impressed her about them was that they described him in exactly the same way — not so much the Prince of Darkness, more a commercial traveler down on his luck. She was reminded of the men you used to see after the last war, selling silk stockings door to door, twitching that much they could hardly count out the change.
She sat down on the bed, folded her arms across her breasts. “It’s not against the law.”
“Taking money under false pretenses is. And you’re not seriously claiming you talk to the dead, are you?”
She sat, mute.
“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. No, Mrs. Mason, what you do is fraud. Fraud.”
That word, it put her right back in the dock with that wretched little creep of a man telling everybody they’d got a doctor to examine her. “Every orifice,” he’d said. “Every orifice. And the rolls of fat on her belly.” He’d looked across at the jury and smirked. “You could hide a rat in there.”
She looked at Payne, who was also smirking. “I need the money.”
“You’ve got a job. Oh, no, sorry, you haven’t, have you? You got the sack. Well, get another one then.”
“Where? There aren’t any.”
“There’s always cleaning.”
“Too many houses boarded up, and besides it pays peanuts. Nobody could live on that.”
“Not with the gin and fags you get through.”
Bastard knew everything. “What am I supposed to have done this time?”
“Well, it’s more of an accumulation, really, isn’t it? The boy sailor from the Royal Oak? And then there was that soldier on the beach at Dunkirk. No air cover. Remember that. And then last night the boy from the school.”
“What about him?”
“You said there were seven hundred dead.”
“He said, and he didn’t say seven hundred, he just said ‘hundreds.’ ”
“The official figure’s seventy-three.”
“And do you know anybody who believes it? I don’t.”
“Look, it’s one thing to say it in private, it’s quite another to say it in public.”