Rebuilding Coventry (11 page)

‘Any
afters?’

‘A rice
pudding,’ I said and got up and took it out of the oven. It was perfect: brown
crispy skin concealed a creamy bed of plump rice. Professor Willoughby D’Eresby
said quickly: ‘Bags I the skin.’

Letitia
shouted: ‘No, bags
I
the skin.’

The
rice pudding dish, though hot, was pulled to and fro across the table.

Keir
came into the kitchen.
‘Où sont les cigarettes?’
he said.

‘Speak
English in front of the housekeeper, dear,’ said Letitia. ‘She is uneducated.’

Keir
glanced at me without interest. He was a very tall, bare-foot man in his early
twenties. His matted dark hair fell onto his shoulders and framed a face like a
thin grey pillow. A pair of dark blue workman’s overalls hung from his
emaciated body. His toenails needed cutting. He didn’t look capable of lifting
an axe, let alone going berserk with one. Letitia handed him her cigarettes and
he took them and went out of the kitchen without speaking another word.

‘He’s
stopped eating properly,’ said the professor, breaking the silence.

‘Since
when?’ I asked.

‘Since
he was seventeen and we packed him off to Oxford,’ said Letitia.

‘He was
quite astonishingly clever, y’see,’ cut in her husband, ‘but he didn’t want to
go. We had to
prise
him out of the car and into Balliol. He made an
awful scene on the stairs outside his room, said some quite
unforgettable
things
to his mother, accused her of abandoning him.’

‘We’d
never spent a night apart,’ explained Letitia.

‘Within
a fortnight the poor boy had regressed to a state of chaotic nonentity and he
has never properly recovered.’

‘But he
must
eat
something,’
I insisted. ‘I mean, if he didn’t he’d die,
wouldn’t he?’

Willoughby
D’Eresby drew heavily on his cigarette and, marking his points by tapping on
the table with his dessert spoon, said: ‘But he doesn’t eat with us. He never leaves
this house. No food is ever missing. And nobody ever calls to see him. So you
see, my dear, it’s a mystery to us why he is still alive but he is.’

‘Has he
seen a doctor?’ I asked.

‘Oh no,
he’d hate that,’ said Letitia. ‘He has entirely negative feelings towards the
medical profession.’

‘He
looks very poorly,’ I ventured. ‘Very thin and undernourished.’

‘Well
he’s bound to, isn’t he?’ said Professor Willoughby D’Eresby with an air of
finality, ‘if he doesn’t eat.’

‘Eastenders,’
said Letitia. And they got up from the table and,
knocking chairs over in their haste, they rushed from the kitchen and into the
sitting-room. I stacked the dishwasher, and from the hallway then dialled the
familiar telephone number connecting me to Sidney’s villa: 010 351 89 … He
was in.

‘Sidney?
It’s me!’ I was shouting with relief.

‘Coventry?
I’ve just had the police onto me. They reckon you’ve killed one of your
neighbours.’

‘Yes, I
have, Sidney. What did the police say?’

‘They
wanted to know if you’d phoned me. I told them I’d had the phone off all day.
We’ve only just got out of bed,’ he added. ‘Coventry, you’ve made a balls-up of
the twelfth commandment, haven’t you?’

‘What’s
that?’ I said.

‘Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ he laughed down the phone.

‘Sidney,
I’m in London, but don’t tell anyone; do you promise?’

‘Even
Derek?’

‘Especially
Derek.’

‘Don’t
come out to Portugal, will you, Coy? I’ve got a week left and I want to enjoy
it without complications. I’ll help you when I get back, but I just want this
week, OK?’

‘How
could I, Sid? I’ve got no money, no passport or …

‘Good.
Ring me when I get back … at the shop.’ He inhaled on his cigarette, then
said, ‘Did this neighbour you killed deserve to die?’ He asked this as casually
as someone might say, ‘Sugar?’

‘No,’ I
said. ‘He deserved to have a nasty bang on the head but he didn’t deserve to
die. I shouldn’t have killed him.’ A manic woman cut in and said something in
what I presumed to be Portuguese. Then the phone went dead.

A voice
behind me said, ‘Who have you killed?’

It was
Keir; he was chewing on a rolled-up copy of
Private Eye.
He swallowed a
cartoon while he waited for me to reply. Eventually I said: ‘You’re very ill,
you know.’

‘But
not mad,’ he replied. ‘Not like them in there.’

He
turned and went slowly back upstairs to his room. I put the phone down and went
upstairs and knocked on Keir’s door. He opened it at once: ‘I knew it would be
you.’

‘Can I
come in?’

‘No.
Nobody ever comes in.’

Grey
feathers floated about on the bare boards under his feet.

‘Has
your pillow burst?’ I asked him, indicating the feathery floor.

‘No,
stupid, these are pigeon feathers,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t identify
them immediately. Doesn’t everybody keep pigeons in the north?’

‘No. So
I can’t come in?’

‘No.’

‘And
you won’t come out?’

‘No. No
need. Not now I’ve got my fags.’

He
closed his door. A feather escaped from his room and descended the stairs. On
my way down I picked it up. There was a smear of blood on the quill shaft.

I put
my head round the sitting-room door. My employers were sitting on a sofa shaped
like an oyster shell. They were engrossed in a TV conversation going on between
black and white cockneys. I shouted, ‘I’m going to have a bath.’ Willoughby D’Eresby
gave a Hitler salute of acknowledgement and I backed out. There was no lock on
the bathroom door but I barricaded myself in with an Ali Baba basket and a pile
of books.

Earlier
in the day I had cleaned the bath and wash-basin and had emptied three bottles
of bleach down the foetid lavatory. But there was nothing I could do about the
ragged coconut matting prickling under my feet or the topographical shapes of
mildew that crept around the walls. The water trickled lethargically out of the
hot tap, accompanied by banging in the pipes. I’ve never been in a more
inconvenient household. Hardly anything worked; or if it did, it only worked
the
second
time and was accompanied by noise or smoke or slight electric
shocks. In that house even pressing a light switch took courage.

I
looked around for soap. I found five slivers stuck together at the bottom of a
jam jar. After ten minutes there were still only a few inches of water in the
bath; but I couldn’t wait. I took my filthy clothes off and got in.

My
bathroom at home is cosy and has a matching avocado suite, set off well with
brown and beige contrasting towels. Recently Derek made a clever shelf that
fits above the wash-basin. He used his jigsaw to cut out convenient shapes for
the family’s toothbrushes … Each slot is labelled with the owner’s name: MUMMY,
DADDY, JOHN, MARY. I mentioned to Derek that my name is not ‘Mummy’ but he
hates ‘Coventry’ and refuses to use it. He’s called me ‘Mummy’ since John was
born seventeen years ago. Derek once said, ‘I’m a laughing stock at work
because of your name.’

But I
know that my name is not the reason for any hilarity that greets him on the
shop floor: Derek is. His most famous boring monologue is ‘How to boil the
perfect egg’. What should, by nature, have taken at most four minutes in the
telling, in Derek’s mouth became an epic and is now legend and myth. Everyone
who was within earshot in the factory remembers the day Derek delivered his
boiled egg lecture. Just as they remember where they were when J.R. was shot.
That afternoon at clocking-out time one of his workmates was heard to say, ‘If
that bleedin’ Derek opens his trap tomorrow, I’ll crack
his
egg-head
open
and
I’ll pour salt in the cavity an’ all!’

To be
fair to Derek he has got an unpopular job. He is a chaser in a shoe factory,
Hopcroft Shoes Ltd. It is his function to track down orders in the various
manufacturing departments and then nag the various foremen and forewomen to
hurry the order through. He takes his responsibilities very seriously and will
be awake at night worrying that twenty dozen cossack boots are still kicking
their heels in the finishing room waiting for their buckles, when they should
have been on sale in the Co-op shoe department two days before.

We
always used to go to Hoperoft’s Annual Dinner and Dance, but we were never
invited to join the big, noisy tables where people were obviously enjoying
themselves. Instead we sat at a table for four with a senile retired worker and
his wife. Last year Derek talked solidly throughout the whole of the turkey
dinner. His subject was tortoise gestation. The old couple listened
uncomprehendingly, as I did myself.

His
nickname at work is ‘Boring Derek’. I know this because as the dinner
progressed to dance and Derek’s workmates became intoxicated with alcohol and
atmosphere, they shouted: ‘Get out the way: here comes Boring Derek.’ A path as
wide as a sheep drover’s road opened before us. At such times I felt sorry for
Derek and wanted to protect him. I half fell in love with him again and kissed
his neck when we were dancing. When the balloons were released from their net
at the end of the evening, I dived into the mob and grabbed the biggest I could
find and presented it to Derek. Like a mother placating an unpopular child.

We
always made love after the Annual Dinner and Dance. Derek talked all the way
through, asking me questions about the various men who attended the function.
His fantasy was that the managing director, Mr Sibson (a man of twenty-three
stone), and I were copulating on the dance floor, surrounded by his workmates
doing the hokey-cokey.

I
married Derek because I was in love with him. I was eighteen.

17
Norman Hartnell with Plimsolls

Letitia Willoughby D’Eresby
pushed the bathroom door open and fell over the barrier of books. A mildewed
face flannel crunched under her hand as she scrambled to her feet. I was
sitting in the bath dyeing my hair dark auburn with a do-it-yourself kit I’d
bought in a hardware shop during the day. Gobbets of dye were dropping from my
head, onto my body and into the bathwater, staining it blood-red. Letitia
opened her mouth and screamed, ‘For Christ’s sake, Gerard, come in here at
once! The hired help’s topped herself’ She then leapt at the artery under my
throat and pressed hard with her big, broad thumbs.

It was
some time before I was able to explain to the Willoughby D’Eresbys that it was
a change of appearance I was hoping to achieve, rather than translation into
another world. In the confusion I left the dye on too long and my hair is now
the colour of a particularly tangy satsuma. The W.D.s approve of this dramatic
change in my appearance. Letitia said, ‘You must wear green,’ and she has given
me a pair of jade earrings she bought in Indonesia. They are four inches long.
She offered to pierce my ears with a darning needle and a cork but I declined
this kindness.

I have
thrown my chimney-sweeping clothes away and am now wearing a Norman Hartnell
mohair suit which Letitia last wore in 1959, when she was a size ten. It is
luxuriously soft, with a navy sheen though, of course, it doesn’t look at its
best with plimsolls.

That
night I lay awake for hours thinking about my children. When I eventually
slept, I dreamt of being in prison. I was sharing a cell with Ruth Ellis. We
were very jolly and plucked each other’s eyebrows. Then, just before daybreak,
we were taken from our cell and hanged by our necks until we were dead. In my
dream, death was Grey Paths Council Estate, stretching into infinity. Ruth and
I set out to find the shopping centre. But …

I woke
up at 6 a.m. and smelt burning meat. I dressed quickly in my Hartnell suit and
plimsolls and went to investigate. Outside on the top landing the smell was
stronger and was mixed with an acrid stench that stung the back of my throat.
Looking down the stairs I saw wisps of smoke curling from under Keir’s door.

‘KEIR!
KEIR! WAKE UP! THERE’S A FIRE IN YOUR ROOM!’

I
banged on the door until my knuckles hurt. Letitia and Gerard came out of their
room, lighting cigarettes. I shouted: ‘Smoke!’ and indicated the base of the
door. The professor said: ‘Perhaps the poor boy is hitting the ciggies more
heavily than usual.’ Letitia said:

‘That’s
not fag smoke, dolt. Break the sodding door down!’

Eventually
it was Letitia herself who shouldered the door aside, her husband having
misjudged the angle and bounced off the architrave. Keir was sitting
cross-legged on the floor, roasting a pigeon in the fireplace. A tiny coal fire
glowed in the grate. Keir withdrew the toasting fork and poked at the pigeon’s
neck, testing it for edibility. He looked up at us dully. ‘I hope you’re not
expecting to join me,’ he said. ‘There is no way this will stretch to four.’