Angel Cake (25 page)

Alicia jumped. ‘Whatever put that idea into your head???’

Alison giggled. ‘You did, of course. How else would I have thought of it?’

Alicia fidgeted with vexation on the bench. She looked into the distance, where the girl with the enormous pram was coming out of ‘Dunkin’ Donuts’ and giving her child something sizeable and apparently pink out of a paper bag. ‘Well, he was nothing of the sort,’ she snapped.

A trifle huffily, Alison said, ‘Oh, all right.’ She clearly wasn’t satisfied though, because a short time afterwards she declared petulantly, ‘It’s all very well your keeping on painting this picture of perfection. I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. Things aren’t like that any more, you know.’

Alicia said, ‘Ah, but they could be.’

‘Oh no, they couldn’t. No one behaves that way nowadays.’

‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alicia. ‘It’s only because you girls put up with it that the men get away with it. If you put your foot down, you’d soon see the wind change.’

‘But, Mrs Queripel,’ Alison protested angrily, ‘I do wish you’d believe me. There just aren’t any such men any more.’

Alicia looked into the distance through knowingly half-closed eyes. ‘How can you be so sure?’ she asked.

The child in the pram and its mother munched on their bright pink cakes. The mother made her weary way back across the green towards Alicia and Alison. The brilliant cakes seemed the only bright spots of colour in their depressed world.

Alicia shuddered. It was only mid-May and it wasn’t yet warm enough to sit out, really. They left their bench because Alicia was worried her legs might seize up, and they turned for home. Alicia hung heavily on Alison’s arm and stabbed her stick vindictively into the mucky grass.

‘I don’t know if I shall make it,’ she gasped.

‘Come on, you’ve got to get into practice for our excursion,’ said Alison. ‘I don’t want to have to carry you all the way to Eastbourne.’

Alicia seemed to sleep so little these days, as if she was scared of what she might come upon in her dreams. She put off lying down on the settee as late as possible, staying in her armchair at the window until her eyes closed. In fact, one night she thought she had fallen asleep there; what she saw outside was so extraordinary. It took her a minute to realize that she wasn’t dreaming and to react accordingly.

Mr Patel and his frail old mother were walking towards her house. They were stately and solemn in the moonlight and, even in her dream, Alicia noted what very good posture they had. They might have been on stage, the pair of them; they were walking with such dignified bearing. And, as if they were on stage and this were a thriller, a terrifying figure leapt out at them from nowhere and stood in front of them, brandishing a knife. He was an all-too-familiar figure in Alicia’s nightmares; a big brutal boy with a shaven head and a studded jacket. She watched spellbound. He made threatening theatrical gestures with his knife at both of them, first at Mr Patel who stood frozen, and then to her horror at the shrivelled old lady in white. The knife-blade wiggled silver under the street-light. Mr Patel was just reaching into his trouser pocket, slow motion, to take out his wallet when Alicia came to. This was no nightmare. With a strength and presence of mind she would have thought were beyond her a few months back, she flung open her front-room window and screeched. ‘Get away, you bastard!’ she screeched. ‘Leave them be. Clear off this instant, do you hear me?’ And, as if it were a dream after all, the shaven youth spun round and gaped, staring wildly to see where the ghastly voice had come from, and when he saw Alicia’s contorted made-up face, he took to his heels and fled, kicking up the metal-tipped soles of his boots, into the night. Mr Patel and his mother stood outside Alicia’s house, still shivering. Too shocked to speak, Mr Patel stretched out his arms towards her in silent gratitude. Still under the spell of the moment, and only aware that this was how things would end in a dream or in a play, Alicia invited them in and sat them down in her front room and made them tea.

When the phone rang at seven o’clock yesterday morning, Rob tumbled out of bed, swearing, to answer it. Resentfully, I pulled the covers closer round my head. At that time of the morning, we both assumed it could only be one of his friends, Andy or possibly Jean and Eddy in some sort of emergency. But Rob came back almost immediately, looking put out. He always likes to rise to an emergency.

‘It’s for you. I believe I’ve had the honour at last –’

‘Mrs Queripel?’ I exclaimed. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

Rob yawned. ‘I’ve no idea. She said she had to speak to you “right away”. She didn’t have any time to spare on swapping social niceties with me.’

I heard him murmur as he rolled back under the duvet, ‘I hope she’s not going to make a habit of ringing at this hour.’

‘Alison?’ Mrs Q said to me. ‘There’s been an attack!’

Rob did offer to come along with me when I came back into the bedroom and started getting dressed straight away instead of climbing back into bed with him, even though it was still a full hour before I would normally have got up. I explained to him that Mrs Q had witnessed a mugging – only she didn’t call it that – outside her house the night before. In the circumstances, I thought it was best if I went on my own. ‘A new face might upset her,’ I said.

‘I suppose we should just be thankful,’ Rob sighed, ‘that she didn’t phone us with the glad tidings at three a.m.’

I wondered what he would have said if I had told him he shouldn’t come along because Mrs Q couldn’t abide him.

‘But she’s never set eyes on me,’ he might have protested, and watched me reproachfully over the edge of the duvet as I buttoned my jacket. Or he might have reacted angrily: ‘I do wish you two witches would stop ganging up on me.’

He said, ‘You’ll be incredibly late for the office.’

‘Please ring and explain,’ I said crisply, as I collected my bag and my keys. ‘Mr Charles will understand.’

I expected to find Mrs Q in a great state. I had rehearsed comforting speeches all the way. But rather than being shaken by the sight of the mugging, she seemed funnily enough, if anything elated. It must have required unusual energy to take the extraordinary step of ringing me. Even though I had come prepared to offer comfort, an audience was all she
wanted. The mugging had pepped her up. She acted it out for me in her front room with superb cries and gestures, playing all the parts. She was full of get-up and go.

At half-past nine, as I sat holding her hand after her performance and thinking I really must go to work soon, the door-bell rang and we both jumped. I said bravely, ‘I’ll go.’ An Indian man stood on the doorstep, holding a huge brown cardboard box. It was the man from the corner shop, the mugging victim himself. He looked surprised to see me there. I said I’d heard all about his frightful experience. ‘Are you all right?’ I exclaimed.

He dismissed the mugging with a little nod from side to side. ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ he said. He pointed at the big box with his chin. ‘May I bring this in, please?’

I showed him into the front room where Mrs Q, still flushed from her performance, received him. Delicately, he put his box down at her feet. ‘Just a little nothing,’ he said. He wouldn’t stay, he wouldn’t even sit down. He said he had left his wife alone in charge of the shop. But he had wanted to offer Mrs Q this small token of their thanks. She positively glowed and, when he had gone, she fell on the box and started unpacking her goodies. He had ransacked his shelves. There were tins of salmon and corned beef, chicken in jelly and gammon ham, there were packets of jelly, blancmange and Instant Whip, and at least half the box was devoted to cakes and biscuits of every kind.

Mrs Q sat back. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘it’s not true at all what they say about Indian people being penny-pinching.’

I stayed on with her a little longer, since I was now so late for work anyway. Mrs Q prepared a festive breakfast from the box. She was so transformed that I took advantage of her high spirits to raise the subject of our excursion.

‘When is it to be then?’ I asked.

She scarcely paused, cutting up her gammon ham into polite pieces and forking it at a great rate into her mouth. ‘You name the day, dear,’ she cackled. ‘I’m yours for the asking.’

I said, what about the first weekend in July, provided the weather was fine?

Mrs Q helped herself to a second slice of ham. ‘Lovely, dear,’ she agreed. ‘We’ll make it a day to remember, you’ll see.’

‘You’ve got so much get-up and go these days,’ I teased her. ‘That’s still over a month away. Will you be able to wait that long?’

As I had expected, Mr Charles was most understanding about my arriving at work in mid-morning. He didn’t enquire, but I volunteered the explanation. He was frightfully concerned.

‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed. ‘Have you told the police?’

I explained that Mr Patel had been adamant that he didn’t want the police to become involved. He was worried, I explained, about reprisals.

Mr Charles shook his head dismally. ‘What
is
this country coming to?’ he commented.

He came to the door of my room at half-past twelve and asked me out to lunch. We went to The Sovereign Grill in South Kensington again. He had the lamb and I had the steak-and-kidney. He didn’t press me for details, but I ended up telling him the whole story of my friendship with Mrs Queripel. It was extending in such unpredictable directions, I finished, that I was worried where it might end up.

Mr Charles dabbed his lips with his starched serviette. ‘It is a tricky one,’ he agreed thoughtfully. ‘Like you, I feel one does have a duty to try and preserve these dear old dinosaurs.’

I had to ring Rob when we got back from lunch in mid-afternoon, and tell him I would be pretty late home that night since, after all the interruptions, I had so much to catch up on.

It was getting warmer and warmer all the time. Yet she remembered Junes which had been bitter. Sometimes, of an evening, she even sat for a bit with her window ajar. It meant that, as well as watching the street, she could listen to it and smell it too. It smelt of other people’s dinners.

She relished this season which she had so surprisingly lived to see, and instead of cursing the chimes of the first ice-cream
van she grinned as though they were a signal: ‘Well done, dearie, you’ve made it!’

She thought a great deal about what she would wear for the outing. With her new-found energy, she had even been upstairs twice to look through her summer wardrobe, which she hadn’t bothered to bring down with her, to see what would be suitable. You opened the wardrobe and there were all your memories, sweet and sour, hanging in a row: the green mock satin dress coat, worn at the Winter Garden, at the Ideal Home exhibition and at the races. The sun had shone and she had backed a winner. The blue and white polka-dot; two weddings and Harry’s farewell send-off. The sun had not shone and the singing had rasped in her ears. She rejected the polka-dot and the stripey two-piece and settled provisionally on the dignified blue day dress, with a cardigan at the ready.

She tried to imagine what the excursion would be like, most of the time, in fact. But she just couldn’t imagine Eastbourne without Leonard or any of the rest of them and, whichever bit of it came to mind, she always saw it with Leonard striking a pose in front of it. Like the silly time she had got it into her head that he was sitting waiting for her up in their bedroom, she began to imagine that when she and Alison stepped off the train, somehow Leonard would miraculously be there. She felt she was getting ready for a reunion.

She didn’t think about it all the time of course. She told herself that she simply mustn’t. She tried to concentrate on less gripping day-to-day matters. She struggled regularly up to Mr Patel’s. He always greeted her with rapturous enthusiasm. Then there was Pearl and, every so often, there was Miss Midgley. But it was no good; at the slightest provocation her thoughts would skitter back to the outing. Pearl said, ‘I’ve been feeling all washed up just lately.’ Miss Midgley said, ‘I know you turn your nose up at the meals on wheels, Mrs Queripel, but it’s a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.’ And Alicia’s mind was straight away on the sea-front.

It goes without saying that she dreamt about it nightly: fretful, broken dreams from which she woke frequently, not
certain straight away where she was and not in the least rested. She would wake in these early summer mornings and hear the birds, Lord knows where, holding forth in their dawn chorus. Aware of some unidentified pain deep in her sleepy workings which had prodded like a splinter at her dreams, she would worry that she was not going to make it after all. She twisted Alison’s well-meant words to torment herself: ‘That’s still over a month away. Will you be able to wait that long? Will you be able to wait?’

Rob called me into his study. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘For me, this sums up what’s wrong with England today,’ and he started to play me his new interview tapes of unemployed young people in the North-West telling the visiting writer about their empty days. He pulled me on to his lap and sat with his arms close around me as though there were a cold wind blowing out of the tape recorder. The voices were chilling, numbly devoid of any rises or falls of emotion, a statement of flat despair. But I was annoyed when the first tape came to an end and, after a severe silence Rob said, ‘Christ yes, some people have
real
problems.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked sharply. ‘And, ow, let me get down! I’ve got pins and needles.’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ said Rob, turning the cassette. ‘All those invented problems some people dream up in their cushy comfortable lives. Ferreting out some far-fetched neurosis just to add a bit of spice to the daily round. These kids have a
real
problem. This is what we should all be worrying about.’

‘I’m not quite sure I do know what you mean,’ I said furiously, which was of course a lie.

‘You bloody do,’ Rob answered, and I saw the whole scene had been stage-managed. ‘And I wish you’d do me the favour of letting me know what’s going on. You could barely raise a smile when I came back from Scotland, you looked positively relieved to see the back of me when I went to Teeside and now, the day after tomorrow I’m off again and, before I go, I think it’s time you told me what’s up.’

I said, ‘Nothing.’

Rob, who had begun the scene with his back to me, fiddling over the tape recorder, turned round and I saw he was quite white. ‘I’ve never lied to you,’ he said.

‘I’m not lying to you,’ I cried shrilly. ‘There’s nothing “going on”. I don’t know what you imagine –’

‘You must think I’m a moron,’ Rob said slowly. ‘Or ridiculously possessive or something. I thought I’d always made that clear.’

‘Made what clear?’ I demanded. ‘What?’

Rob said tightly, ‘All I ask is a degree of openness. I genuinely don’t mind about … the rest. But if you are seeing someone, I would have thought the least you could do was let me know about it.’

‘Seeing someone?’ I repeated stupidly.

‘Oh, cut it out!’ Rob said disagreeably. ‘You know perfectly well I’m not going to play the possessive husband with you. I hope I’ve always made it clear that in that domain you’re … we’re both free agents. All I ask is a bit of basic honesty.’ He gave a hard laugh. ‘I can’t pretend I’m pleased. But if it’s in the context of mutual honesty and respect, because you feel you want to experiment with some aspect of yourself which I can’t cater for, I can handle it. You know bloody well this is nothing of the sort.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, giggling nervously. ‘You think I’m seeing someone else? You think I’m being unfaithful to you?’

Rob made an impatient brushing gesture with his hand. ‘The melodramatic turn of phrase is yours, not mine,’ he answered coldly. ‘But in a word, yes. I do think you are possibly seeing someone else. In fact, if you want my frank and honest opinion, I’m absolutely convinced of it.’

He stood with his back to his bookshelves, his arms folded, and he confronted me with a righteous stare.

I hesitated for a moment. I know that what I wanted to say risked infuriating him. But I replied, ‘Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose you’re right; I am seeing someone else. I am seeing Mrs Queripel.’

‘Fuck Mrs Queripel!’ Rob exploded. ‘Will you for once keep that wretched old bag out of this? That’s something else that’s really getting on my nerves. Why d’you have to keep
dragging her into everything all the bloody time? She’s got nothing to do with this, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Ah,’ I said sagely, ‘that’s where you’re wrong. She’s got everything to do with this. In fact –’

‘If you’re deliberately trying to provoke me,’ Rob interrupted furiously, ‘then I see no point in continuing this discussion. I had hoped you might have a more mature attitude.’ He paused. ‘Just let me tell you one thing: I warn you, I’m not going to be able to take very much more of this.’

He turned away to tidy his tapes, so I had to try and explain what I meant to his shoulders. When I stopped talking, there was a terribly long silence. Rob turned to me. He said, ‘This is ridiculous. Are you seriously trying to persuade me that you’re questioning our relationship, everything we’ve built up together, just because of some romantic tale a half-witted old lady has told you? That’s the most half-baked load of nonsense I ever heard!’

‘I know it sounds a bit strange,’ I said desperately, ‘but I promise you it’s the truth.’ I put my hand mock-theatrically to my heart. ‘It’s the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!’

Rob turned abruptly back to his tapes. ‘I don’t see why I should be made fun of like this,’ he mumbled. He added curtly, ‘As I see it, you could do one of three things: you could have the grace to come clean and tell me what’s really going on, you could stop seeing that pernicious old cow or you could get therapy. I’d recommend all three.’

That was on Friday evening. We maintained a cold unhappy truce all of Saturday and, on Sunday afternoon, Rob left reluctantly for Liverpool because he wanted to be at a particular dole office to meet people signing on on Monday morning. A few minutes after he had left, the front door was suddenly opened and he came back inside. He gave me a considerable shock because I hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs and normally I can hear his crêpe-soled feet thudding louder and louder all the way up the six flights. He had come up specially quietly. He bounded into the hall, as though he thought he might catch me on the phone to that supposed ‘someone else’ or possibly spiriting him out of a
cupboard. And of course I looked guilt-stricken, standing there with my bicycle lock and chain in my hands, because as soon as he had gone out the first time, I had started to get ready to ride down to Shepherd’s Bush.

‘It’s my belief that nothing came out right again after we moved back to London. Which is funny really, considering we were both quite glad to get away from the sea. But, strange to relate, we couldn’t seem to settle, you know. In ten years, we must have moved half a dozen times. Let me see, there was Aden Road and Adelaide Road, Mrs Pritchard’s and Pretoria Street. There was Albion Crescent – no, Albion Crescent and then Pretoria Street. That was a mistake. Then we had that flat in Gascoigne Gardens. We didn’t move here until the July of 1969. Quite honestly, I don’t know why we moved around so much. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t had our fill of the open road in our day. Always on the move all those years, and then, when we finally had our chance to stay put, we just couldn’t seem to. It wasn’t itchy feet, Lord knows. I don’t rightly know what it was; cussedness, perhaps. Leonard always liked everything to be just so, you know. Anywhere with noise or inconveniences or a dodgy neighbourhood, he wouldn’t stick for long. Even if I couldn’t see anything wrong with a place, a few weeks would go by, a few months, and I’d notice Leonard was harping on something again and I’d think, “Oh Lord, here we go!” Not that I blame him, mind. I’m sure he was right to want only the best. He never let his standards slip. I daren’t think what he would say if he saw how I was living today – in just one room, with everything higgledy-piggledy –’

‘But you’ve done the room up so nicely now,’ Alison interrupted her. ‘Every time I come, you’ve done something more.’

Alicia smiled bravely. ‘It’s good of you to say so, dear. But you don’t need to put on any pretence with me. I know the place is a perfect pigsty. Frankly, I’m surprised you’ve stuck it. You must have got used to my pigsty. What you must have thought of me in the beginning! An absolute fright, I dare say. It’s not true, you know, that just because
a person is living in bad conditions, he doesn’t notice them. He notices dreadfully. I think Leonard felt that he had to make twice the fuss because all those furnished places were such a come-down. The truth is that we didn’t get what we’d hoped for Regency Villa. Apparently the building needed a lot done to it, which we had never had the extra to see to. And, other than that, we had no nest-egg. Of course, prices in London were a good bit higher than on the coast too. But we couldn’t sit around for ever waiting for a better buyer or hoping we’d find something nice a bit cheaper in London. The doctor had more or less said we shouldn’t dilly-dally on the way. We decided, in any case, that it would be easier to look for somewhere in London once we were on the spot. So we accepted an offer that was way too low, really, from a widowed lady called Jacobs who was planning to turn the place into an old people’s home, and off we went. We took a furnished place in Paddington to begin with; that was Aden Road. We weren’t very particular since it was only temporary. But we must have been there six months when we realized that, for the money we had, and with prices going up all the time, we weren’t going to be able to afford anywhere very nice at all. Somehow, we had both set our hearts on a house; we just couldn’t see ourselves in a flat. So we decided that I’d get a job and maybe Leonard would do some little retirement job too and we would stay put in rented accommodation until we’d saved up a bit more. Well, I suppose it was easier for me, being out at work all day and dead-tired when I got home; I didn’t notice the place so much. But Leonard was miserable. He said the downstairs neighbours disturbed him and the smell of fish frying at all hours of the day and night from the take-away over the road put him off his food. At night he couldn’t sleep for the trains, though they never bothered me. So we decided to look for somewhere else, seeing as it was going to be a bit more permanent than we had thought originally. We moved to a lovely flat a little way away from Kilburn; that was Adelaide Road. But what we didn’t know was that the lady in the flat above us was a musical lady, and mad with it. You may well smile, but we endured torments from that woman; scales suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the night. You’d
look at your watch and it would be two o’clock in the morning. Leonard used to bang on the ceiling to begin with, with a broom, but that’d set her marching. We’d have her overhead, singing and marching and banging back half the night. It was terrible. It was midsummer when we moved there and she’d have her windows wide open all day long, with opera blaring forth from her gramophone. Always opera, never just soothing instruments; passion and shrieking and wailing. You could hear her from the end of the road. Someone put in a complaint about her to the authorities, I believe, but you know how long they take to deal with these things. We just couldn’t wait that long. They said she’d been unlucky in love. Well, let me tell you, I know people who’ve been unlucky in love who didn’t turn that peculiar! We stuck it for three months before we moved to Mrs Pritchard’s in Queen’s Park. Mrs Pritchard’s wasn’t a flat, exactly, it was the upstairs of her house and she lived in the downstairs. We had the hall and the stairs in common. Well, maybe it was cussedness, but that time it was me who took against it. It was a pleasant enough house, I’m not denying that, with its own little garden, just the sort of place we had our eye on for ourselves. But I didn’t like the lack of privacy; Mrs Pritchard knew all about our comings and goings and you never quite knew how much she could hear. There was nothing dividing us, you understand. I’d come home from work sometimes and I’d find she had invited Leonard down for tea, cool as a cucumber, and they’d be sitting there together in her front room, passing the time of day. She always went to a lot of trouble, made him cakes, and it would be set out all nicely on her table with the cake on a paper doily, and cake forks and pretty napkins. You may well laugh, but I didn’t like it one little bit. I started imagining things. Not that I had any grounds for suspicion, not on Leonard’s account. Never, in forty years of marriage! But I didn’t trust that woman. She had nothing else to do all day but pretty herself and then there was Leonard, so conveniently placed, to display her handiwork to. I don’t mind saying that even pushing seventy, Leonard Queripel was still a fine figure of a man. It was worrying me sick. I would tell them at work that I had a bad headache and I’d come hurrying home early,
thinking I was going to catch them at it. Of course, I never did. Leonard would have said it was my own fault I got those sorts of ideas. But it’s a short step from saying you’ve a headache to actually having one. I knew that if I kept coming home early, it would lose me my job. In the end, I couldn’t stand it. I told Leonard that I wanted a place with our own front door, I wasn’t going to be anybody’s lodger any more. He didn’t want to budge at first; of course, he was well content there. But in the end, I had my way. I treated him to a dose of my nerves, didn’t I? It was all very well him telling me nobody ever died of nerves. I threatened to. So we upped and moved to Albion Crescent in Willesden. It’s funny, we were moving further and further west all the time. I’d been an East Ender originally, of course, but I had no desire to go back there. We were a year in Willesden. It was a nice flat, bar the decoration. It must have been a colour-blind person who did it! But, by then, we had a new problem, our savings seemed to be going on rent nearly as fast as I was topping them up. Leonard pointed it out to me. He’d been sitting at home doing his sums. Well, that flat in Albion Crescent was the most expensive we’d had yet and Leonard said he thought we ought to move somewhere cheaper. I don’t mind telling you, I think there was a bit of tit-for-tat in it. You know, I’d got him out of Adelaide Road, where he was living the life of Riley, and he didn’t see why I should have the enjoyment of Albion Crescent, which was a lovely neighbourhood. I may be being quite unfair, of course. It’s true, you do get more particular as you get on and Leonard was nearing seventy. He found the stairs a trial; we were up on the second floor. And we were a long way from any shops or entertainments. But it was the money question which decided me. We moved to a horrid little flat not a long way away from here, in Pretoria Street, between the Westway and the Uxbridge Road, on the ground floor for Leonard’s sake. That was our big mistake. I’ve never been that keen on ground floors anyway, with all the people who can look in. We hadn’t been there a month when we were burgled. Leonard had just popped out to the shops and it’s my suspicion he didn’t shut up properly after him. Whatever it was, they turned the place upside down,
although all they took was the television and twenty-five pounds. Still, it was enough to put you off a place. And when, six months later, it happened again, that was the last straw as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t sleep in my bed at night. We’d been in London over five years by then, shunted from pillar to post and still with no home of our own. I told Leonard I’d had my fill of it. I saw no sense in me working myself to the bone in that department store for the sake of a home we would never get the chance to appreciate. I never spoke a truer word. We had it all out and we came to an agreement; we’d give it two more years at most – we knew in any case that we couldn’t afford the sort of property in the sort of area we’d dreamt of originally – we’d move out of Pretoria Street for my sake, and we’d find ourselves a home of our own at long last.