‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘Oh, a few things to sort out, you know. Gotta find Gav. Gotta get a kip. I’ll see you soon, yeah?’
She nodded mutely, while Donovan sobbed quietly behind her.
She watched Dom unpeel Donovan from his leg at the front door and squeeze it closed behind him, almost trapping his son’s fingers as he did so.
Betty turned back to the kitchen. The room was in chaos: cracked eggshells littered the work surface, the oily frying pan was still on the hob, there were crumbs of burned toast everywhere, and Acacia, still without a nappy, had at some point,
without
anyone even noticing, done a poo on the floor.
Donovan ran back into the kitchen, his face puce with fury, tears coursing down his cheeks and screamed at Betty, ‘Why didn’t you let Daddy take me to the park? I
hate
you!’ before stamping up the stairs and slamming his bedroom door behind him.
Betty brought the baby close to her face and kissed her scalp tenderly. ‘Naughty Daddy,’ she whispered softly in her ear. ‘What a naughty, naughty Daddy.’
And then she put the baby down, pushed up her sleeves, and set about hosing down the kitchen.
47
1920
FOR HER WEDDING
Arlette wore black. Minu was her maid of honour and Gideon’s brother Toby was the best man. They married at Chelsea Town Hall during a torrential downpour that marked the end of the mellow early days of autumn, and arrived for a sombre lunch at a Chelsea café like a band of drowned rats. Arlette and Gideon were toasted with tumblers of warm whisky and they ate gristly lamp chops with cold mashed potatoes, which Arlette promptly threw up in the gutter when they left the restaurant an hour later.
Gideon offered to carry Arlette over the threshold of his cottage but she told him not to be a fool and stamped into the house crossly, drank another tumbler of Scotch and went straight to bed.
When she awoke the following morning, she experienced, as she had every morning since the awful night of her twenty-second birthday, a brief moment of forgetfulness, of feeling how she used to feel, of being the Arlette who had a stellar career in ladies’ fashion, who lived in cosy Bloomsbury lodgings with her best friend, who loved a man called Godfrey Pickle and would one day have his babies.
And then, as her eyes slowly opened, so too would her memory. And then her stomach would convulse and a sob would rise up through her, and she’d have to clutch herself to stop herself screaming out loud at the horror of it all.
Her doctor had offered her the services of a ‘good woman’ in Russell Square, but Arlette had shaken her head forcefully.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no. I could not do that. It is a baby. It needs me.’
He had nodded once and said, ‘And I feel sure you will provide well for it. You seem to be a fine and very mature young woman.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed primly. ‘I am.’
She could hear Gideon, now, rattling around in the kitchen. She stared at the wall, blindly, brushing away a single tear from her nose. A moment later there was a soft knock at the door.
‘Come,’ she said.
Gideon stood in the doorway, dressed and clean, holding a tray.
‘I have brought you ginger tea,’ he said. ‘I have been told it is very soothing for morning sickness. And some unbuttered toast. Will you be going to work today?’
Arlette nodded and sat up in her bed. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I shall work until I feel I am no longer able to do so.’
‘Good,’ he said, laying the tray on her bed-stand. ‘And how did you sleep?’
‘I slept well, thank you,’ she replied.
‘That’s good,’ he said, standing slightly awkwardly above her bed with his hands in his jacket pockets.
They were silent for a moment, until Gideon cleared his throat and said, ‘Well, I shall leave you to get ready. I have lit a fire downstairs so there is plenty of hot water. If you need me for anything, I shall be upstairs in my studio.’
‘Thank you, I’m sure I shall be fine.’
Gideon smiled tightly and turned to leave. But halfway to the
door
he stopped and turned back. ‘Your name,’ he began nervously, ‘will you be Mrs Worsley?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I will be Mrs De La Mare. I should not wish to replace my father’s surname with any man’s name, least of all yours.’
Gideon looked injured, but then rallied and said, ‘But the baby …?’
‘The baby shall have your name.’
He smiled then and left the room, closing the door quietly behind himself.
48
1995
JOHN BRIGHTLY WAS
not on his stand when Betty got back to Berwick Street at twelve thirty. A man was holding an Ultravox picture disc in his hand and looking anxiously up and down the street. He looked at Betty as she stopped to take out her front door key and said, ‘Excuse me, do you work here?’
She smiled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘sorry.’
‘Oh.’ The man looked disappointed. ‘Right. It’s just, I’ve been stood here for about ten minutes now, wanting to buy this single, but there’s no one here.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s strange. I know the guy who runs this stand and he never leaves it unattended.’
‘Right,’ said the man, distractedly. ‘It says five pounds on the label. Can I just give you the money? And you can give it to him when he comes back?’
Betty stifled a smile. The man seemed oddly anxious to buy an Ultravox picture disc. She couldn’t imagine what he wanted to do with it. ‘Er, yeah, sure,’ she said.
‘Great.’ He passed her a crumpled note and in return she slid the single into a paper bag and handed it to him. He tucked it lovingly into a flight bag slung over his shoulder and scuttled away.
Betty watched John’s pitch from her front window for a while after she got upstairs. She made herself some lunch and ate it by the kitchen window, peering down every minute or two. Then she sat and wrote a note that said: ‘John, I sold a single to some guy for a fiver. Ring the bell when you get back and I’ll give you the cash.’
She ran downstairs and tucked the note under the leg of a display stand on the table and then went back upstairs to smoke a cigarette, leaving both doors open so she could hear the doorbell.
She glanced across at Dom’s house. There were no signs of life. Dom had either crashed out in his clothes or he was out somewhere getting up to no good. She thought of the two of them, sitting framed together in that window three nights ago, she thought of him telling her that he wished he’d met her first. She thought of how she’d felt, filled with longing, and then the shock of his soft lips against hers. And then she thought of the scene in Amy’s kitchen just now, and shuddered.
There was still no sign of John when she looked out of her window again a few minutes later, so once more she headed downstairs and spoke to the man who ran the pitch next door, selling toiletries.
‘Excuse me,’ she began.
The man looked at her with annoyance, before his face softened into a lecherous smile. ‘What can I do for you, beautiful?’
Betty pointed a thumb at John’s stand. ‘Any idea where John is?’
‘Bloke in the hats?’
‘Yes, you know, he’s here every day.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know who you mean. Far as I know he just popped over the road, you know, call of nature.’
He gestured at the scruffy pub opposite, the heavy metal pub that Betty had never ventured into and always walked past very quickly with her head down.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘OK.’ She decided to give him five more minutes, then she would try to find him. She sat on his stool and counted down the minutes and then, when he had still failed to reappear, she took a deep breath and headed across the road to the pub.
The pub was quiet on this sunny Friday lunchtime and she headed straight for the bar, ignoring the curious gazes of the handful of solitary men in denim waistcoats, the line of tattooed arms propping up the bar. She smiled at the unhappy-looking barmaid and said, ‘A guy from the market came in here about half an hour ago. Hasn’t been seen since. Would you mind just checking the men’s toilets for me?’
The barmaid raised a pencilled-in eyebrow and said, ‘Go and look yourself. I can’t leave the bar.’
‘Fine,’ said Betty, ‘good.’
She followed the signs to a scruffy door at the back and breathed in. She knocked once, quietly, and then twice, louder, and she pushed open the door and found John collapsed on the floor, half in and half out of the solitary cubicle, his arms spread out in front of him as though he’d been trying to catch himself. There was a trickle of dark brown blood running from his hairline to the floor.
Betty shouted out and dropped to her knees. There was a slight sheen of sweat on John’s forehead. He felt very hot, almost feverish and his breath sounded laboured.
‘John! Oh my God, John! Help!’ she called out towards the door. ‘Someone help! Call an ambulance!’ But it was pointless, the jukebox was booming out heavy metal. Then she remembered her mobile phone in her bag. She pulled it out and dialled in 999, her other hand touching John’s throat, feeling for breath. She answered the operator’s questions: yes, he was breathing; no, he wasn’t blue; yes, there was a head wound; no, it didn’t seem to be deep. In under a minute she heard the faint sound of sirens outside on the street.
‘It’s OK, John,’ she whispered, stroking his hair, that thick dense hair she’d dreamed about touching so often in the past. ‘It’s OK. The ambulance is here. We’re going to the hospital now. They’ll make you better, don’t you worry. Don’t you worry, John Brightly.’
The door flew open and a female paramedic appeared. ‘Betty?’ she said.
‘Yes, yes.’
She got to her knees next to John. ‘And this is John?’
‘Yes,’ said Betty, ‘John Brightly.’
‘And you’re his friend?’ She put a hand to his throat for a pulse.
Betty nodded.
‘I’m Jackie,’ she said, feeling his forehead. ‘He’s very hot.’ She put a thermometer into his ear and stared at it. ‘Fever,’ she said. ‘Has he been unwell?’
Betty shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t the last time I spoke to him.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Wednesday,’ she said. ‘Although I saw him this morning and he looked OK. But I didn’t really talk to him.’
‘Hmm.’ Jackie put the thermometer back in her pack and called through the door to another paramedic waiting outside. ‘We’re going to need a stretcher, patient concussed. And also high temperature, 42.2 Celsius, he’ll need something to bring it down.’
The male paramedic disappeared.
Betty said, ‘What do you think happened?’
Jackie sat back on her heels and said, ‘I think he fainted. Cracked his head on the sink there.’
‘Do you think he’ll be OK?’
‘Hard to say. I don’t know how long he’s been like this.’
‘About half an hour,’ said Betty, anxiously. ‘Maybe longer.’
Jackie winced. ‘That’s a long time to be out. But he hasn’t lost
much
blood.’ She sucked in her breath. ‘We’ll run some tests. We’ll see.’
A stretcher arrived and Betty waited outside the toilets while the two paramedics strapped John onto it.
‘Can I come?’ she asked, following beside them, John’s hot floppy hand held in hers.
‘Of course you can.’
‘Where are you taking him?’
‘UCH.’
In the back of the ambulance they took John’s temperature again and covered him over with a metallic blanket. It seemed remarkable to Betty that someone so extraordinarily warm could feel so lifeless. She kept his hand in hers and talked to him. ‘Sold a single for you,’ she said, ‘an Ultravox picture disc. I mean, seriously, who wants an Ultravox picture disc in 1995? I thought maybe he was going to make a wall clock out of it. Or maybe
mould
it into a fruit bowl, or something. Anyway, he was really happy. And I’ve got your fiver. Which I will give you when you
wake up
. Which you must do
very soon
, please.’ She smiled at him and squeezed his hand. ‘And I’ve told the toiletries guy to keep an eye on your pitch, so don’t worry about that. And I have your hat safe in my bag.’ She pulled open her bag to show him his hat. ‘So now all you have to do is open your eyes and say something. OK?’
The ambulance squealed around a corner and Betty held onto her seat. A moment later they were pulling up at the back end of the UCH and John was being put onto a trolley.
The trolley was pushed down corridor after corridor, through sets of flapping plastic doors until he was taken away from sight into a cubicle behind curtains and Betty suddenly found herself alone, on a plastic chair, staring at a poster about tetanus injections.
Betty sat on that chair for nearly fifty minutes before finally a doctor appeared.
‘I’m his friend,’ she said, jumping to her feet, ‘the man, in there. Is he OK?’
The doctor smiled and said, ‘He will be.’
‘Can I see him?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not yet. He’s conscious now, but he’s got a very bad infection. We think it might be legionnaire’s disease. We’re waiting for the bloods to come back. If it is we’ll need to keep him in overnight, get some heavyweight antibiotics into him. And also keep an eye on him after the concussion.’
‘But does he seem all right? Can he remember what happened?’
‘Yes, he appears to be fully
compos mentis
. But we’ll keep an eye on him anyway, just to be sure.’
‘And the legionnaire’s disease – I mean, how would he have got that?’
‘Similar to flu,’ said the doctor, ‘similar to pneumonia.’
‘Could he have got it from living in a damp flat?’
The doctor shrugged and put his hands into his trouser pockets. ‘Definitely,’ he said, ‘yeah. In extreme circumstances, when the damp’s really bad, the spores from the mildew can cause all sorts of health problems.’
Betty nodded. ‘Does he know I’m here?’
‘Er, yeah, I think so. I think he knows there’s someone here. Once he’s settled on a ward, you can go and see him. We’re just waiting for a bed. Shouldn’t be too long.’ He smiled and then turned as if to leave before turning back and saying, ‘My name’s Richard, by the way, and you are …?’
‘I’m Betty,’ she said.