After Hours (38 page)

Walter drew money from his pocket. ‘Paid in advance,' he insisted. He noticed how she held her breath, uncertain whether to accept. He placed the coins on the table. ‘How about a quick cuppa?'

She smiled and nodded, and set about filling the kettle with water. ‘How's things?' Walter often stopped by for a chat like this. It broke the monotony of her days and brought no pressure. He seemed to visit out of sheer kindness. She compared him with Richie, and found no likeness. Walter was patient and steady. His wavy brown hair gave his face an open, friendly look. Though he was tall and upright, his presence felt shy. Ready to smile, slow to take offence, she would even call him handsome. After all, she'd once been attracted to him, before their affair had fallen into its uneventful, companionable pattern.

Sadie listened as Walter ran through the street gossip. Taxi business was down, as it always was in the summer. Rob and he were still a million miles away from getting their hands on new cars. The old Bullnoses creaked on. The boycott at the Duke was holding up. Rumour had it that Bertie Hill was already feeling the pressure
from the brewery. ‘I hear he's been forced to serve after hours every now and then, just to boost the takings.'

Sadie laughed. ‘Who says so?' She couldn't imagine Hill being so careless of his licence.

‘Tommy.'

‘Well, then!' She dismissed the rumour. ‘Tommy's a dreamer. He says he's moving into Coopers' old shop when he's ready. Swears blind he'll be a millionaire before he's thirty!'

Walter laughed and rose to go. ‘I'd best be off.' He took his hat from the table.

‘I'll get these accounts typed up and back to Rob or you by the weekend,' she promised.

‘No rush.' He nodded and left, passing Bertie Hill on the stairs.

Sadie's door was still open and Hill strolled in without being observed. He stood watching as she worked with her back turned, lifting the sleeping Meggie from the chair and laying her gently in her crib.

When she turned, she started. She felt his eyes devour her, glanced down to straighten her blouse, walked to the far side of the room.

‘It's that day already.' Hill strolled to the window and smirked, ‘Rent day.' He folded his arms and continued to stare.

Sadie nodded. She had to cross near to him to fetch her purse from the mantelpiece. He stepped after her, trapping her in a small space by the empty hearth. She took out the money and handed it to him. His thick fingers turned the coins in his palm. Twelve shillings and sixpence,' she assured him. ‘It's what we agreed.'

‘You ain't heard the bad news, then?'

His casual manner nettled her further. ‘No. What?'

‘I put the rent up to thirteen shillings last week. To cover maintenance costs. The roof, it needs mending.'

‘You ain't said nothing to me.'

‘I am now.' He kept her locked in the corner, studying her figure, noticing the smoothness of her skin.

‘But that ain't right.' She fumed against him. Twelve and six was what they'd agreed.

He shrugged. ‘Please yourself. There's plenty of others would
pay thirteen bob for a nice place like this.' He glanced round at her improvements; clean paintwork, bright tablecloth, a picture or two on the wall.

‘It's a crying shame! And you ain't done nothing about the rats, like I asked. It's bad for the baby. Ain't you never heard of the Housing Act? This place ain't fit for nothing!'

Again he shrugged, but didn't move.

She stared back at him, furious.

‘'Course, we might be able to agree special terms,' he suggested. It seemed to him a reasonable offer he was about to make. ‘If you was nice to me, I might see my way to a tidy little rent reduction.' He didn't expect her to turn it down. In his experience, women in Sadie's situation would snap his hand off.

Sadie looked at him with loathing. ‘Stay away from me, you hear!' As he advanced, she began to push him off. The offer was meant to operate then and there.

Hill grabbed her by the elbow. ‘Ten shillings. How does that sound? Don't that seem fair enough?' He reached to kiss her. She struggled as she felt his lips smear down her cheek on to her neck. She tried to turn away at the last second, and began to yell out. Her fists pummelled ineffectually against him.

He lashed out with his free hand and sent her staggering against the wall. Then he pinned her against it, tearing at the buttons on her white blouse, excited by her resistance. He felt her tug the back of his hair. Her body was soft and slender.

Sadie felt a wave of sick panic. She struggled to break free, but knew at once that he was too brutal and strong. She wouldn't give in, though. She cried out against him.

Walter had seen the landlord going up to Sadie's room and made nothing of it. After all, she'd told him it was rent day. But back in the taxicab, he frowned. Hill had seemed to give him a sneering look of the man-of-the-world type, as if he knew why Walter was a regular visitor to Sadie's room. Walter had shrugged off the implication. Now what he found in the car gave him cause to go back up and check in any case. He took up a loose page which had fallen from the bundle of accounts and grasped it in his hand.
Sadie would need it so she could type it up with the rest. He ran back up the stairs, two at a time.

Sadie had almost blacked out from hatred and disgust. Hill had ripped the clothes from her breast and his great hands were mauling her. He held her up to stop her from sinking down, pressing her up against the wall. His mouth worked against her neck. She still fought him off, but was growing feebler.

Walter ran in through the open door. He hurled himself at the landlord, tore him away from Sadie. Then he punched at his body and head, sending him reeling backwards with a bloody nose. Sadie wept and sank to the ground, trying to cover herself.

Crazy with anger, Walter laid into the burly ex-policeman. Hill knew how to handle himself, but Walter was fitter, cleverer. His punch, developed at Milo's gym during his teenaged years, was stronger. There was only so much battering that Hill could take before he slumped to the ground. In the end, Sadie had to drag her defender away, to prevent real damage.

By the time Walter had lugged Hill from the room and watched him stagger away, Sadie too was almost senseless. Walter rushed across the landing to Mary O'Hagan, sent her in to help Sadie, then rushed for Annie. When he brought her back, they found Sadie in tears in Mary's rooms. She was begging for Richie.

Walter stopped short at the door.

Annie shot him a look. ‘I'll see to things here. You go get yourself cleaned up.' There was blood trickling from the corner of Walter's mouth. His shirt collar was torn.

In a daze he went down to the taxi and drove himself to the depot. Rob took one look and demanded the full story. Walter spat it out, seeing Rob's own anger boil up. ‘A girl ain't safe with Hill around. I hope you gave him a good thrashing, Walt. He bleeding deserved it!'

Walter dabbed at his sore mouth. The cut was swollen and tender. ‘If she had someone to look after her, none of this would've gone on. God knows what he'd have done if I hadn't showed up again.'

Rob frowned through his cigarette smoke. ‘Ain't you the one to do it, then?'

‘What?'

‘Look after Sadie, long-term. You know.' Walter shook his head.

‘Why not?'

‘It ain't me she wants, Rob. It's Richie Palmer.'

Rob swore and protested, he called Sadie a fool, said Walter was worth ten of Richie. Walter wondered what Sadie would do next. ‘She can't stay there no more. Hill will see to that. We gotta do something, Rob. Why can't we find Richie for her?'

‘You're stark staring mad.' Rob took a step back and shook his head.

‘It's what she wants.'

‘Then she
is
a fool.' Rob thought through the new situation. Sadie's position as a single woman with a kid was open to all kinds of abuse. Men like Bertie Hill would crawl out of the woodwork wherever she turned. Driving a taxi round these courts and back streets late at night, Rob knew this all too well. He listened to Walter's account of Sadie sobbing out for Richie to come back. His conscience dug deep. ‘We could put out the word.' Still he hesitated before he told Walter the full truth.

‘To find Richie?'

Rob nodded. ‘It ain't gonna be that hard.'

‘You know something?'

‘I heard he was in Hoxton,' he admitted. ‘I don't know where exactly. And I don't know why I'm telling you this, Walt. We must be bleeding mad.'

Walter pressed him to go on. ‘If Sadie wants to see him, you gotta let her.'

Rob gave in. ‘Tell her she should try the Queen's Head. Like I say, I must be round the bleeding twist. And you need your head looking at,' he told Walter. ‘You wouldn't find me giving up on a girl like that!'

Walter knew the Shoreditch and Hoxton area well enough to find his way easily to the Queen's Head on the comer of Regent Street and Turner Court. It was an old-style pub where street gangs graduated after a teenage apprenticeship of fights with belts and bottles, where the twentieth century had as yet scarcely impinged, and where assorted carmen, porters, navvies and railway workers gathered until well past midnight.

He had driven through the mean streets, the miles of brick and squalor, the long vistas of bricks and misery, to reach the pub where Richie Palmer was to be contacted. It was a stifling night, yet to his surprise, he round a group of children with enough energy to dance to the music of a barrel organ on the street comer. Two women sat on the pub steps, singing along.

One of them grinned up at him as he stepped by. Her companion jostled her, and their laughter showed their rotten teeth, their crooked smiles. Walter ignored them. He went in and ordered a pint of bitter, served by a small grey Irishman with a long, lined face, whose hangdog expression belied the phrase about the luck of the Irish. ‘I'm trying to find Richie Palmer,' he told the man.

‘You ain't the only one.' The beer sloshed on to the bar as he slammed the glass down.

Walter paid up. ‘He ain't here, then?'

‘I never said that. This is his second home, this is.'

Walter frowned and glanced around the dingy room. The bar was partitioned by wood and glass panels, giving drinkers the privacy to play cards or dominoes. Many of the partitions contained two or three men huddled over their beer, which he now discovered
was flat and lukewarm due to the heat. ‘He
is
here, then?' Walter felt his temper shorten as he peered round.

‘
Was
. Bought a drink ten minutes since. When I say “bought”, I don't mean to say he had the wherewithal. What I mean is, he sweet-talked one of the girls into buying his beer. Richie Palmer ain't had the price of a drink way back as far as I can remember.'

The Irishman's sad face and tragic tones had a depressing effect. Realizing that he would never get a straight answer, Walter wandered away from the bar in search of the runaway.

He came across him deep in dalliance with a tousle-haired, pale girl with a shrieking laugh and a pretty, grey-eyed face. They sat in a dark comer, arms slung around each other's shoulders, though Walter got the instant impression that Richie was paying for his drink with a spot of compulsory flirting. When he saw his old employer, he leaped to his feet and pushed the girl away.

‘Richie.' Walter gave a peremptory nod. ‘I heard I'd find you here.'

‘And what if you did?' He was defensive, resenting Walter's neatly cut tweed jacket and clean collar and tie.

‘I came to ask if you'd come over to see Sadie and the kid.' Looking at Richie's patched shirt, open at the neck, his old waistcoat hanging loose, even Waiter began to doubt that Sadie knew her own mind. He was unshaven and dirty, and bore all the signs of long-term poverty and unemployment. But if Sadie couldn't get him out of her head, if she was miserable and lonely without him, who was he, Walter Davidson, to stand in her way?

Richie went on viewing him suspiciously. ‘What's in it for you? Who sent you? Did she?'

He shook his head. ‘But she is asking for you.' He described her new situation and Hill's recent attack. ‘She goes on about not wanting to make a fuss, but Annie came in and said it weren't right to leave Sadie in the tenement no more, not after what Hill done to her. She still wants her to go to the police, but Sadie won't.' It was three or four days after the event, and Sadie and Meggie were staying with Annie and Duke. After long family discussion, without Sadie's knowledge, so as not to raise her hopes, it had
been decided that Richie should be contacted. ‘Rob says you left word at Hope Street about where you was.'

Richie stood silent, avoiding Walter's direct gaze. For almost three months, since he'd left Sadie in the lurch, he'd drifted from one day to the next. He slept on garret floors, on the Embankment, in the parks. He'd left on the spur of the moment, after a build-up of shame about his diminishing prospects that he swiftly turned into resentment against the whole Parsons tribe. He'd even begun to watch Sadie, heavily pregnant, washing dishes or smoothing out the bedclothes, despising her small efforts towards respectability. She'd picked up her finicky ways from her family. Her eyes were the Parsons eyes: deep brown, big and dark.

He'd tried to foresee the future, after the baby was born. There'd have been no money. The sisters would have descended on Hope Street with a vengeance, sweeping him off his own hearth with advice, bits and bobs for the baby, tonics for Sadie. Sadie would have grown homesick, her feeling for him would have waned. She would put all her passion into the baby. Then she would have hankered for them to go back to Duke Street. If he'd given in and they'd gone back, every day he would have seen Rob Parsons in his taxicab, driving by in the car he, Richie, had looked after, and patched, and knew inside-out.