Keeping Bad Company (3 page)

‘Wait, Albie!’ I called.

But he’d gone, through the main arch and out into the road.

‘For goodness’ sake, Fran!’ (I could see Ganesh hadn’t come back from High Wycombe in the merriest of moods.) ‘What do you want to sit talking to him for?’

‘He’s a witness!’ I exclaimed, jumping up.

‘To what? How to live on an exclusive diet of whisky?’ Ganesh asked, making an impatient move towards the exit.

‘To a kidnapping!’ I shouted and it was then, as the words left my mouth, that I fully realised what I’d said.

Ganesh was staring at me. With more than a touch of despair I repeated, ‘He witnessed a kidnapping, Gan, and I’m the only person he’s told or is ever likely to tell about it.’

Ganesh dropped his holdall to the ground and made a violent gesture of dismissal. ‘Why must you always do this, Fran?’

‘Do what?’ I babbled, taken aback by the vehemence in his voice. Ganesh gets sarcastic and he gets censorious but he doesn’t generally lose his cool.

‘Mix in such bad company!’ he retorted. ‘You know it always brings you trouble!’

Chapter Two

Before I go any further, I ought to explain that, despite what you may be thinking, life wasn’t going too badly for me at that time. At least I had a decent place to live and that was definitely an improvement on my previous situation.

Immediately before moving into my present flat I’d been living in short-term council accommodation in a tower block. The lets were short term because the whole building was scheduled to come down. Half of it already stood empty, boarded up and vandalised. Drug addicts broke in and indulged their various habits and insalubrious ways. Kids sniffed glue and various down-and-outs dossed. The council cleared them out at intervals and boarded the flats up again. Back came the junkies the next night and so it went on, with the occasional suicide plunging past the window on his way from the roof, muggers lurking in the entry hall, and Leslie, the neighbourhood pyromaniac, sneaking round trying to start his fires.

People like me were moved in there because the council had nowhere else to put us, or that it wanted to put us. We had low or nonexistent priority on the housing list and we were desperate enough to be prepared to put up with the squalor and the danger. It wasn’t the first such place I’d lived in. I’d been vandalised out of an earlier one. That second one was even grottier than the first one, something I wouldn’t have considered possible. But it’s a fact that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. Beggars can’t be choosers, they say, and I bet ‘they’ are comfortably housed.

There’s only so long anyone can stand living like that and I’d got to the point where I was considering asking Leslie if I could borrow his matches. Things Had To Change. But if I walked out, the council would have said I’d made myself homeless intentionally, and they were under no further obligation towards me.

I’d have been prepared to settle for almost anything else. I had been enquiring without much hope about a place in another squat when Alastair Monkton got in touch.

The last time I’d seen Alastair he’d promised to see what he could do to help. I’d taken it as his polite way of saying farewell, like people you hear bawling ‘we must have lunch’ at someone they clearly mean to avoid like the plague.

But Alastair had come up trumps, being a gent of the old school, man of his word, etc., etc. Besides which, since I’d almost got killed trying to help
him
out, he owed me a favour. He told me about his friend in Camden. She was a retired lady librarian by the name of Daphne Knowles, whose house had a basement flat that she was willing to let to the right person.

I foresaw a problem in that. As you’ll have gathered, few people would consider me ‘the right person’ for anything, much less to have lodging under the same roof. Any lady librarian of advanced years, and certainly any known to Alastair, would, I imagined, be rather fussy about the company she kept and fussier still who lived in her basement flat. I knew Alastair had put in a good word for me, but I wasn’t counting on it being enough.

Still, worrying what she might think of me was jumping the gun. Without money one can do nothing and I had to establish my financial position before I approached the librarian. Without much optimism. I set out for the council’s benefits office. If I could at least persuade the woman I’d be able to pay the rent, it’d be something. Though what poor old Alastair and the lady librarian might consider a reasonable rent, would probably fall way outside my budget. I was undergoing one of my frequent jobless spells.

It was a quiet morning when I got to the benefits office, just a student with his head in a book, an out-of-work dancer, and a man with a cardboard box on his knees. The box was bound with string and had airholes punched in it. From time to time, a scrabbling sound came from inside it.

The student’s number was called first, so off he went and I sat talking to the dancer who’d been out of work because of medical problems. She had consequently got behind with the rent and received notice to quit. She told me all about her stress fractures and asked me whether I thought she ought to accept a job she’d been offered abroad.

‘Some of these overseas dancing jobs are a bit dodgy,’ she explained. ‘When you get there, the sort of dancing they want isn’t the sort of thing I trained for.’

I commiserated, knowing how hard it is to get a living from the performing arts, but suggested she check out the job offer carefully.

The student had gone off in a huff. It was the dancer’s turn at the counter and that left me with the man with the cardboard box. By now, he was talking to it in a furtive whisper. I had to ask what was in it. I’m human.

He was happy enough to untie the string and open it up. It turned out to contain a large white Angora rabbit with pink eyes. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the box had been completely empty or held an old boot, because you meet a lot of people like that out on the streets.

‘I’ve got to leave the place we’ve living at,’ he explained. ‘It’s got a rule, no animals. Plain stupid, I call it. I mean, it’s not like a rabbit is a dog, is it? Winston’s got his own little hutch and everything. I keep him clean. He don’t smell. Cats is worse than rabbits. Cats go roaming around. Winston don’t do that. But the landlord’s downright unreasonable. He reckons if he lets me keep Winston there, next thing he’ll have to allow pet snakes and things what more rightly oughta be in the zoo. So we’ve got to go. I mean, I couldn’t part with Winston. He’s all I’ve got.’

Winston twitched his nose and crouched quivering in his box. He looked like a nice enough rabbit, as they go, but it was a depressing thought that anyone could be left with no living friend but a rabbit. Whenever I get too smug about my own lack of strings attached, I try to remember people I’ve met like this.

The man leaned towards me, his face creased in worry. ‘I never leave him behind when I go out. I always bring him with me in his box like this. He don’t mind. He’s used to it. There’s people living where I am now that I wouldn’t trust if I left Winston all alone. When I came back, I’d find the kids had got him out of his hutch, taken him round the back somewhere, and chucked him to a couple of dogs for a bit of fun. I’ve seen a couple of dogs with a good grip, one either end, tug a small creature like Winston here, clear in two. ’Course, that’d be if someone else hadn’t turned him into rissoles first.’

I said sincerely that I hoped he found them both somewhere else safer to live.

After this, it was my turn at the counter.

I explained I’d been told of a vacant flat. Before committing myself. I needed to know what kind of help I might hope for with the rent, being out of work.

After I’d answered all the questions – and there were a lot of them – about my personal circumstances and where the flat was and what it was like (which I didn’t yet know), there was good news and bad news.

The good news was that I would probably qualify for maximum benefit. The bad news, before I got too euphoric, was that in my case this would be based on what the council considered a reasonable rent for the sort of accommodation suitable for me in the area where I intended to live. Here we hit a snag. The accommodation the Rent Officer seemed likely to consider suitable for me was probably something a little bigger than Winston’s hutch. Since Daphne’s flat was likely to be quite a bit roomier, and was located in an area where vacant bedsits were as rare as hen’s teeth, and landlords could name their price, whatever I got by way of benefit wouldn’t nearly pay the rent. I’d have to find the difference myself.

‘Or find a cheaper place,’ suggested the woman behind the counter, smiling kindly at me.

It was much as I’d expected and I couldn’t grumble. But it did seem that even going to view the flat would be a wasted journey. I went all the same, because I felt I owed it to Alastair.

I must say the first view of the area served to confirm my fears that I’d be considered the wrong person. It was depressingly genteel. Coming from where I was living, it was like being beamed down to another planet. The house itself was tall and narrow in a long curving terrace of such houses, all white-washed, with freshly painted doors and sparkling windows. One flight of steep steps ran from pavement to front door and another down into the basement. The road seemed unnaturally quiet. One or two householders had put shrubs in ornamental containers outside their doors.

That sort of thing wasn’t recommended on the balconies of my tower block. The tub and plant would disappear inside five minutes, very likely pitched over in a light-hearted attempt to brain someone on the ground below. What I saw in Daphne’s street was life, all right, but not as I knew it.

One oddity struck me. At intervals along the pavement, before each house, was a round brass disc like a small manhole cover. Before Daphne’s house the brass disc had been replaced by a circle of opaque toughened glass similar to the glass skylight in subterranean public toilets. Strange.

Before I announced myself, I crept down into the basement and took a look around. The entrance area was cramped because part of it was taken up with a newly constructed wall which ran between the house and the pavement above. I couldn’t see the purpose of this and it had me puzzled. There was a window by the front door and taking a look through it I saw a large room brighter than many basements because additional light was admitted through a window at the far end, which appeared to be an outlet on the garden. It was furnished with quite decent furniture. Through a half-open door, I glimpsed a kitchenette. Even this first sight revealed the place to be clean, newly decorated and highly desirable. I was amazed it was still empty.

I was already certain I wasn’t the sort of person who got to live in flats like this, even with the council’s help. Daphne Knowles would probably press an alarm button or something the moment she set eyes on me. I might find a job, at some future date, that would pay a decent wage and enable me completely to transform myself and my life-style, but as of that moment I had neither job nor money and this place was right out of my league.

I’d come this far and Alastair would be asking Miss Knowles whether I’d been in touch, so I climbed back up both flights of steps, and rang her doorbell.

After a moment I heard a regular padding footfall. The door opened and there stood a tall, very thin woman with wiry grey hair. She was wearing jogging pants and a sweat-shirt. On her feet were brightly patterned Fair Isle socks with soft leather soles attached. I was prepared for her to say, ‘Go away, I don’t give at the door!’ But she didn’t.

‘Hullo,’ she said cheerfully.

‘I’m Fran Varady,’ I introduced myself. ‘Alastair sent me.’

‘Of course you are,’ she replied. ‘Do come in.’

She shut the front door behind us and set off ahead of me down the hall at a brisk pace. I scurried along behind her, trying to get a look at the place as I went.

What I saw only convinced me more that I had no chance. The house oozed respectability. The furniture was old but polished and probably valuable. We were talking antiques here. Narrow stairs with carved wooden balusters ran up to unseen regions. The stair wall was lined with early French fashion prints. There was a lingering smell of coffee brewed fresh at breakfast time, lavender wax and fresh flowers.

We arrived in a large, airy sitting room overlooking a scrap of garden. The sun beamed in and lit up the spines of rows and rows of books. This was a librarian’s home, all right. There was a table by the window and on it, a cumbersome old-fashioned manual typewriter. A sheet of paper was sticking out of the top and a pile of other paper was stacked beside it. It seemed I’d interrupted her at work. That would probably also count against me.

Daphne Knowles seated herself in a cane-framed rocking chair upholstered with bright green and pink flowered cretonne, and indicated I should take a seat on the sofa. I sank down into feather cushions and sprawled there, trapped, and feeling at a considerable disadvantage. Daphne, beaming at me, began to tip back and forth in her cane rocker, which groaned a teeth-grinding protest.