Tarnished (20 page)

Underneath that picture, Peg found two identical prints of an older black-and-white professional portrait with the Bermondsey photographer’s name and address embossed in gold on the back of each deckled cardboard frame. In the formally posed studio portrait, a woman – shortish, plumpish and in a fifties patterned sundress, sat between a young girl in a nautical-themed, full-skirted dress and a younger boy with short back and sides who scowled up at the camera. On the woman’s lap was a fat baby in a pale dress.

Although she had a pretty clear idea who the people in the portrait were, Peg slipped the top photograph out of its frame and looked on the back, where, as she had hoped, Doll had noted in the neat, slanting and looped handwriting of her former, pre-senile self:

2 April 1953, Jeanie, Doll, Keith and Franklin Raymond.

Peg turned the photo face up and peered at the uncle she never knew. His eyes stared shiny and blank back at her, like pennies.

Would his family have ended up like this had he not died?

She looked at Raymond in the picture and tried to read something into the way he stood next to the brother who – if Jean were to be believed – he would kill twelve months or so after this photo was taken. But there was nothing to see. It all looked perfectly innocent, just a picture of three kids and their mum.

She propped one photograph on top of the bookcase and the other on top of the fiancé picture, to take through to Jean. Then she carried on rummaging.

At first glance, she thought the next picture she pulled out was a smaller version of the school portrait of herself that Doll kept framed on the bookshelf. On closer inspection she realised that, blue blazer and striped tie aside, the girl looked nothing like her – her curly hair was in fact red, and she had freckled pale skin, sharp, Anglo-Saxon features and a mouth full of cemented-in braces.

Why would there be a photograph of some schoolgirl stranger in this box?

At least, Peg thought she was a stranger. But something about that face, that hair, unsettled her, made something shift in her stomach.

Perhaps it was just the uniform and all the misery it signified. Possibly the school had accidentally sent this portrait home instead of her own, and Doll hadn’t got round to returning it?

She slipped the photograph inside her notebook, to think about later.

Perhaps it would come to her who it was.

Near the bottom of the box, she came across an old Kodak wallet with
For Raymond xxx
written on it in a hand she didn’t recognise. In it was a series of colour photographs of a small, pretty, blonde woman, dressed in the way only small, pretty, blonde women seem to manage. In one she was in a bar, blowing a kiss at the photographer. In another she stood in front of the Flamingos doorway – although with its neon and fresh paint it looked a world away from the shabby place Peg had visited. In another, Raymond – much younger than the man she had met in Spain, but still recognisable – stood next to the blonde as she perched on the bonnet of a shiny white Jag.

The tiny woman made him look enormous, far bigger than the Raymond Peg had stooped to greet, and there was something proprietorial about the way he stood beside her, his big arm on her dainty young shoulders.

What were
these
photos doing here? Did her father have yet another family that she didn’t know about? Was this a half-sister that Doll and Jean had seen fit to keep from her, ‘for fear of hurting’? Peg bent closer to look. Even though her knowledge of what constituted a paternal pose was limited, Raymond was striking something quite different in this picture.

This was a classic rich-man and younger-woman pairing: sexual and possessive.

There was nothing to date any of the images, but from the woman’s hair and clothes they didn’t look like they were from as far back as the seventies, and one of the few facts she knew about her parents was that they were married in 1979.

So, as well as being a child murderer and wife-killer, was Raymond an adulterer too?

And why did this not surprise her?

She put a couple of the pictures of the blonde with the other photographs she had pulled out.

She wanted some answers.

As she stood up slowly, shaking her leg, which was tingling with pins and needles from having sat still for so long, the tinny sound of Jean’s buzzer made her jump nearly clean out of her dusty skin.

‘Meggy? Meggy? Are you there?’ Jean wailed. ‘I need you! It’s urgent. OH!’

Nineteen

Peg leaped for the back door, grabbed Jean’s key and dashed round to the extension. When she reached the bedroom she found Jean trying to heave herself up out of bed.

‘Oh, there you are,’ Jean said, falling back against the pillows, her voice weak from effort, sweat beading on her upper lip. ‘Thank goodness. I didn’t know if you was still there . . .’

‘What’s the matter?’ Peg said.

‘Oh, Meggy. I’ve run out of ciggies and the girl didn’t leave me no more.’

‘I thought you were in real trouble, Aunty Jean. I thought something awful had happened.’

‘Sorry, I’m sure.’

Peg went through to Jean’s kitchenette and looked in the cigarette drawer, where Julie stockpiled the Marlboros. By Peg’s reckoning, Jean got through three packs a day at least, which might have made some sort of contribution to the hole in Doll’s bank account. She slipped out a new pack and removed the cellophane – an act that still brought her pleasure, despite her irritation at her aunt.

‘Could you pour me a little Guinness, please darling, too? And perhaps fetch us some crisps?’ Jean called from the bedroom.

Peg poured the Guinness, put a tray together and took it back through to the bedroom.

‘The girl says you’re piling up bin bags out there,’ Jean said, after she had settled herself down with crisps, stout and a cigarette.

‘It’s just pure rubbish, Aunty Jean. No one could want any of it. Some of it’s just got to go; you couldn’t move in there. And it’s filthy.’

‘It can’t be that bad, surely?’

‘You wouldn’t believe how bad it’s got, Aunty Jean.’

Jean wouldn’t know, of course. Since she had got too big to wrench herself into the trolley, Jean hadn’t been anywhere but her bed.

‘Poor Mummy.’ Jean picked at the duvet, using exactly the same gesture as Doll had in the hospital, although where her mother’s shrunken fingers were sharp and worried, Jean’s were lost and grabbing, like a baby pounding at the breast.

‘I’m only clearing out the rubbish and cleaning things up. You really couldn’t walk about in there without tripping over something. If we want her back—’

‘Which we do.’

‘Which we most certainly do—’

‘She’d rather die than go in a home.’

‘I know that, Aunty Jean, and I’m doing everything I can to keep her here.’

‘Oh, I know you are, Meggy. You’re a good girl. I know that. It’s just she likes her stuff around her, and it would kill her to lose it all.’

‘I know.’

‘And she’s a very private lady. She’d hate you nosing through all her stuff.’ Jean looked up at Peg with one eyebrow arched. ‘All her Commonplaces and stuff.’

‘You said. Look, I’m not nosing. I’m just glancing to see what’s what. And of course, I’d never look at her Commonplaces.’

‘They’re like her diaries.’

‘I know that. Look, so far it’s just old papers and photographs anyway. No incriminating evidence yet.’

Jean looked up sharply. ‘What do you mean, incriminating?’

‘It was just a joke.’

Jean picked up a hand mirror from her table and looked at herself, patting her hair down.

‘I found some photos, actually,’ Peg said. ‘You might find them interesting. I think there’s one of Keith.’

Jean continued to peer at her reflection, smoothing the line of her lipstick with her finger.

‘And there’s a couple of you looking pretty glam.’

‘Oh,’ Jean said, now checking her nostrils.

‘Tell you what. I’ll bring some through. See if you can tell me any more about them.’

‘I’m a bit tired, though,’ Jean said, laying her mirror down on the bed.

‘It won’t take long, Aunty Jean. I’ve got to go and visit Nan in a bit.’

‘If you like, then, dear.’

When Peg let herself back into Jean’s extension with the photographs, she was struck by a smell so strong that it overpowered even the stale cigarette stink. A keening, moaning sound came from Jean’s bedroom.

‘Aunty Jean, are you all right?’

‘Ooh. Oh dear,’ Jean said, squirming in her bed. ‘I think I’ve had a bit of an accident. I’ve made a mess, Meggy.’

Reaching the bedroom, Peg looked at her immobile aunt beached on the bed and sighed. She had helped Doll often enough, in the days before Julie, so she knew what had to be done. From Jean’s supplies cupboard she pulled out wipes, a clean pad, a waste bag and a disposable mat to save soiling the bed.

The council had installed a system involving straps, a hoist and the inflatable mattress, which meant that it was possible even for little Julie to change Jean single-handed. When the woman from the medical aids company came round to draw up the specifications, she had actually thought that Peg was joking when she told her that the even tinier Doll had managed to care for Jean with no lifting equipment whatsoever.

With a little direction from Jean about which hooks went into which eyelets, which Velcro strap did up where, Peg managed to roll her over onto one side, so that she could get at her back.

‘Don’t take too long,’ Jean said, panting through the flesh of her face. ‘It’s hard for me to breathe like this.’

Peg laid the mat underneath her and removed her pad.

‘Have you got a bit of an upset tummy then?’ she said, breathing through her mouth as she started to clean her up.

‘I had a curry last night,’ Jean said. ‘The new girl didn’t give me enough, so I had to have a curry.’

‘How did you manage that?’

‘Mummy had a word with the Taj Mahal. In case of an emergency. They’ve got a key and they can deliver straight to my bed.’ Even from her squashed position, Jean said this as if it were the most marvellous thing in the world.

Doll had stressed how important it was to ‘get everything down there completely clean’, otherwise Jean would end up with impetigo, a urinary infection, or worse. So Peg took great care, making sure every deep crease and dimpled fold was spotless.

‘Don’t forget the talc,’ Jean said. She was in a great deal of discomfort, gasping for breath through gritted teeth.

Obediently, Peg sprinkled medicated talcum powder over the area she had cleaned. Since she had last cared for her, Jean must have put on a good few stone – she was bigger than ever, which was odd, because Julie was supposed to keep her on a healthy diet. Peg wondered how liberally Jean interpreted ‘an emergency’; perhaps feeling a bit peckish was reason enough for her to call in a curry.

When the waste was sealed in the special scented disposal bags, Peg allowed herself to breathe through her nose. She strapped on Jean’s new pad, tugged a fresh pair of netting retaining pants over the top and rearranged Jean’s smock to cover her modesty.

‘Let me down now,’ Jean said. ‘Let me down, Peg!’

Peg parted the straps and deflated the mattress, and Jean gradually subsided onto her back.

‘Thank you, Meggy.’ Jean smiled up at her as sweetly as if she had just received a bunch of flowers.

After spraying the room with Oust, Peg carried the bagged-up waste to the wheelie bin in the back garden, silently praying that some cruel twist of genetics wouldn’t see her end up like her aunt.

She would truly rather be dead.

She wondered if that was how her mother had felt about her own illness. Whether she
had
in fact begged with Raymond to help her out.

In Jean’s kitchenette, Peg washed her hands thoroughly and gave them a quick blast of the sanitiser from one of the bottles Doll kept posted in every room – beacons of hygiene standing as constant reminders of how well-run her dusty and neglected home had once been.

‘Cleaner,’ she used to tell Peg proudly, ‘than an hospital.’

Back in the bedroom, she found Jean smoking a cigarette, eating a biscuit and fiddling with the remote.
Cash in the Attic
was on at full volume.

‘It’s my programme,’ Jean protested as Peg went to turn down the volume. ‘Hadn’t you better go and see Mummy now?’

‘I’ve got a bit of time,’ Peg said. ‘The train’s not for an hour or so. I thought we could look at these.’ She reached for the photographs on the dressing table, where she had left them while she changed Jean.

‘But it’s my programme,’ Jean said.

‘I’ll record it for you,’ Peg said. She took hold of the remote and pressed the red button. Then she switched off the TV.

Jean sighed heavily and let her head flop back onto the pillows.

‘Please, Aunty Jean. It won’t take long. Look.’ Peg thrust the top photograph into Jean’s hand.

‘Pass me my glasses,’ Jean said.

She peered at the picture, as if having difficulty focusing on it.

‘Here.’ Peg switched on the bedside light and angled it so there was no chance of her aunt saying she couldn’t see.

Jean held it up, her lips working as if around some imaginary food.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘That’s Keith.’ She rubbed her fat fingers over the photograph, as if trying to wipe a smear from it. ‘Me and Raymond and Keith. Before, obviously.’

Peg handed her the next picture.

‘And that’s me and Tony. At our engagement.’

‘Tony?’

‘Oh, it was a long time before you was born.’ Jean sighed and peered again at the photograph. ‘It was before I got my weight, too, look.’

‘You both look very dashing,’ Peg said. ‘He looks very handsome under that green biro.’

‘He was,’ Jean said, grimly. ‘A handsome devil.’

‘You didn’t marry him though, did you?’

‘He turned out a bad ’un.’ Jean clamped her lips together. ‘Vanished completely. Just as well, really. It turned out on top of buggering off, he was a crook and he played around with the dolly birds.’

‘Crook?’

‘Your father employed him. And that Tony thanked him by embezzling.’