The Saint Zita Society (26 page)

June and the Princess got no dinner that evening. June was obliged to open a can of spaghetti bolognese and forage for ice cream in the freezer. She was late for the meeting of the Saint Zita Society but that hardly mattered as the only other member to turn up was Dex who sat as usual by himself, drinking Guinness and listening to the various voices, pleasant and unpleasant that his pressing of digits on his mobile conjured up.

Alone at number 3, Jimmy had a fridgeful of food and no one to eat it. He had sent three texts to Thea, left her four voicemail messages and three emails. None had been answered. She had left him, he was sure of it, had been half expecting it ever since she had made it clear Damian and Roland’s civil partnership was more important to her than their own wedding date. Yet when his mobile finally rang all this misery and all these doubts were overthrown and he knew it was her, calling to tell him that she loved him and had been absolutely unable to get to a phone all day.

It wasn’t Thea. It was her sister Chloe.

‘Are you sitting down? This is going to be a shock.’ Her voice had a catch in it, like a sob. ‘You want to prepare yourself.’

‘What is it?’ Yet somehow he knew.

‘That girl that was stabbed in Oxford Street. That was Thea. The police got hold of me to identify her. My number was on her mobile and yours was too. I was her next of kin.’

‘Y
ou,’ said Preston Still, opening the door to Montserrat.

‘Who did you think it was?’

He was looking at her as a man might look at a ghost before he realised it couldn’t be true, that whatever this was it must be a manifestation from his imaginings. She was suddenly terribly frightened. She thought of the car and herself spreadeagled across its grid, of the shove into the middle of her back that nearly resulted in her falling on to the Tube line. Now the idea of entering his flat brought on a shivering he stared at.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

If she accused him outright she was too scared of what he might do but something kept her there, unable to retreat or take a step forward. When she spoke she stammered. ‘It’s Thea who’s dead.’ She was afraid to say it was Thea he had killed.

He didn’t seem to know who she meant. ‘Who’s Thea?’

‘My friend.’ It seemed to her now that her voice was someone else’s or coming from a long way off. ‘Girl with red hair, only it’s not any more. It’s dark, like mine.’ The moment she uttered those words, even before they were fully out, she knew. She went on making the parallels. ‘And she’s got a black jacket like mine and she’s my height and she was going
where I meant to go.’ It was too much for her and she broke off into a hysterical laughing and crying, clutching on to Preston because there was nothing else to hold on to, screaming and crying into his face.

As a door on the other side of the hallway opened, he pulled her inside, hissing at her to stop, to stop, keep her voice down, be quiet. She fell on to the floor. She would have kicked out at him if he hadn’t quickly stepped away. He picked up his mobile phone from the table and she recognised the digits he gave as his reference number at the cab company he used. ‘As soon as possible,’ he said. Then he said, as she struggled to her feet, edging away from him, ‘When that woman was stabbed this morning I was at my office in Old Broad Street at a board meeting with half a dozen other people. When you tell the police I think you should tell them that too.’

She said nothing. He took her down in the lift and the cab was waiting outside. The driver must have thought it odd that she didn’t speak and Preston Still didn’t speak but opened the door for her, closed it and walked away up the steps without looking back. It was cold inside the taxi and Montserrat asked if she could have some heat, please. The driver appeared to be one of those who scarcely speak. The heat came on and he maintained his silence, finally saying as they drew up in Hexam Place, ‘Going away for Christmas?’

Montserrat shook her head, and realising he couldn’t see her, said, ‘No.’

She got out, making no reply to his parting words, whatever they were, she hadn’t heard them. Before she even got into the house, while she was still going down the area steps, she called Ciaran. Something strange had happened to her. She had lost her friend, her friend had been killed by mistake for her, she had been enormously frightened, but now when she heard Ciaran’s voice and spoke to him, she was filled with
an emotion quite new to her. She didn’t want him just for sex or for a man to be with.

‘Oh, Ciaran,’ she said, ‘please come to me. Please come now. I do love you so.’

C
hristmas Eve and Thea was dead and Jimmy couldn’t quite believe it. He hadn’t seen a paper. All he knew was what Chloe had told him and Chloe wasn’t a reliable person. Once before she had told him Thea had been to the cinema with her when she had really been serving drinks at the party Damian and Roland had had to celebrate their being together for ten years. That was an outright lie and so might this be because Chloe wanted Thea to break their engagement. Jimmy wasn’t sure whether he believed this or that Thea’s death was the reality. She couldn’t have made that up about the police, could she? Or a stabbing in Oxford Street. She could, though. It wasn’t so very way out. He ought to go up to Mr Choudhuri’s shop and buy a paper, but instead of going, he began walking up and down and round the house, looking out of the front windows.

The night before, after he put the phone down, he had gone into Dr Jefferson’s bathroom and found a foil pack of what he thought were sleeping tablets. The name was new to him, he had never heard it before, but he took two of the pills so that he would sleep and not be able to think about what Chloe had told him. It was the first thing that came into his mind when he woke up. That is, when he struggled through apparent layers of fog and fluff and something thick like soup and lay there telling himself nonsense like Thea being dead. It took about an hour of dozing and coming round for him to recall the phone conversation and what exactly she had said. Now he stood at the window, looking down at Henry who had just
walked along and got into the Beemer and then at June, her plastered arm in a sling, walking that little dog. Both of them wore quilted jackets, June’s red, the dog’s dark blue.

The candles on the windowsill had burned down and gone out. He must have gone to bed and into that drugged sleep without putting them out. The house might have caught fire. Dr Jefferson had a good stock of candles and it was only a matter of setting them into the holders and putting a match to them, but Jimmy hadn’t the heart. Thinking about cooking Christmas dinner tomorrow was equally dispiriting – no worse, impossible. He looked at the duck. He had collected the orange sauce in a china bowl, the potatoes waiting to be peeled. He put the duck into a carrier bag and carried it out into the front garden. Beacon was bringing the Audi round to park it outside number 7. Jimmy walked down the street in his short-sleeved shirt, not noticing the cold. He tapped on the Beemer’s offside front window.

Beacon got out, said, ‘That was a terrible thing about Thea. I’m very sorry.’

So it was true. In a way he had always known it. ‘Would you like to have this duck? I’ve no use for it now.’

‘That’s very good of you. We’ve got a goose but Dorothee will be pleased to have this bird as well.’ Beacon cleared his throat, assumed what Montserrat called his vicar’s face. ‘She is with God now. Where she’s gone there’s no more pain. Sorrow and sighing shall flee away. You have to remember that.’

‘Yes, thanks,’ said Jimmy. ‘I will. Enjoy the duck.’

C
ontemplating the plaster that sheathed her right arm, June said, ‘I’ve been thinking that if I’d done it back in September this thing would be off by now and I’d be able to cook our Christmas dinner.’

The Princess was trying to unzip Gussie’s quilted coat and had already received a small nip. ‘You couldn’t have done it in September because there wasn’t any ice to slip on.’ She made growling noises at Gussie, very like his own. ‘You’re a naughty dog to bite poor Mamma.’

‘We shall just have to have one of those ready meals from Waitrose or somewhere, madam.’ June was about to go out again, easing what the Princess called her ‘stone arm’ into her red quilted coat sleeve, when Rocksana arrived with a young Chinese man, his face, as the Princess put it, with more metal studs in it than the back of her leather sofa. His name was Joe Chou, he was a guitarist and Rocksana’s new boyfriend.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Rocksana said, accepting a gin and tonic for herself and one for Joe Chou. ‘I mean, you don’t think me insensitive, Rad being your sort of nephew, but you can’t argue with love, can you?’

‘We weren’t close,’ said June, taking off her coat

‘And now someone’s murdered your friend Thea. It’s got to be the same person, hasn’t it? Only it makes you wonder how many more people down here are going to snuff it. Now tell me what you’re doing for Christmas?’

‘Bugger all,’ said the Princess.

‘That’s what I wanted to hear because you’re going to have it with us. Me and Joe have got a carful of nosh outside and we’re going to come and cook it for you, turkey and all the trimmings. Pop outside and bring it in, Joe, there’s a lamb.’ Rocksana lit a cigarette and held out her gin glass for more. ‘The fact is I’ve had to give up my place in Montagu Square that was Rad’s, I can’t afford it. And Joe’s only got one room so you’re doing us a favour letting us have Christmas here. I forgot to mention Joe’s a chef when he’s not being a guitarist, so you’ll get a brilliant meal.’

He came back and was rewarded with more gin. June eyed the overflowing carrier bags and the boxes from a well-known patisserie. ‘More to come,’ said Joe, tossing down his drink at two gulps. ‘I’ve already got a parking ticket.’

‘Never mind, angel. When you’ve brought all the flowers in we’ll be on our way.’

Banksias and gazanias and multicoloured other varieties. Khalid Iqbal would have known their names and so, probably, would Dex Flitch. June wondered if they had enough vases to accommodate them, so put the food away first.

The duck having been taken home to Dorothee, at three in the afternoon Beacon picked up Mr Still from the office he would not be returning to until 28 December and drove him, not to Medway Manor Court, but to Hexam Place. His wife, Rabia told him, had just left in a hire car for the Cotswolds and her parents. Before that she had sat down in the nursery with Rabia and poured out her heart to this unwilling but acquiescent audience. The girls were watching a DVD and Thomas was asleep.

‘My marriage is over,’ Lucy said. ‘Preston has put this house on the market only no one’s supposed to know yet. It will absolutely destroy me to have to leave it. I can’t live alone with those kids. We shall talk about it over Christmas, of course, but it looks likely that I shall take them to live in my parents’ house. It’s huge and there’s a big flat in it – well, a whole wing really. That’s where we’ll live.’

Rabia said nothing. She tried to smile encouragingly but couldn’t. Her lips were as stiff as if she had had an anaesthetic at the dentist’s.

‘My old nanny’s there. She’s nearly eighty but she adores children and she’ll be a real help to me. I know I couldn’t take you away from London, so that solves that little problem
really. Preston will be talking to you about it. You don’t have a contract, do you?’

Rabia didn’t know. She couldn’t remember signing anything and contracts were papers that had to be signed. She was glad that while Lucy was speaking, when she was saying all these things, Thomas was out of sight and asleep.

Lucy’s car had come before much more was said. Rabia carried her cases downstairs for her and Lucy said she was a treasure, not a word Rabia much liked applied to herself.

‘I’m going to hate having to let you go.’

By the time Mr Still arrived the children were all ready and their cases were packed. Mr Still said nothing about contracts or her having to leave, barely spoke to Matilda and Hero and not at all to Thomas. For once he didn’t ask if the spot on Hero’s cheek was chickenpox or why Thomas was so pale. When they were all gone Rabia was alone in the house. Or she thought she was until, while she was standing on the gallery, leaning over the rail, she heard a burst of laughter from Montserrat’s flat. She was still standing there, thinking how she must go back, tidy the nursery and change the sheets on all the beds, when Montserrat appeared on the stairs below, more closely entwined with a young man than perhaps Rabia had ever seen her before. They looked up, laughing, and called ‘Happy Christmas’ to her.

Rabia thought it would somehow be wrong for her to say the same thing back, so she said, ‘Thank you.’

That evening she went to the mosque with her father but sat of course with the women, wearing her long black skirt and a new black coat, her head covered by a hijab with a gold design on it. Her thoughts had been straying in a way they should not have done, to Thomas at his auntie’s in Chelsea, a big house no doubt with everything in it that money could buy. Would she be kind to him and loving?
Would she give him the food he liked and praise him when he ate it? Rabia knew she must not keep thinking of him, she must put him out of her mind, prepare herself to forget him, look to the future and new relationships, new commitments.

It was very cold, frost already clouding windscreens, lying on hedges and brickwork. She and Abram Siddiqui walked along in silence for a while until she broke that silence by telling him there was no point in her returning to the empty house in Hexam Place that night and could she stay with him.

‘Of course, my daughter,’ he said. ‘You know I would like you to stay with me always.’

But she waited until they were there, walking along this street in Acton where many of the houses belonged to people like themselves of Pakistani heritage, but a few had Christmas trees in their windows and holly wreaths on their door knockers, before broaching the subject she intended to speak to him about.

‘There is something important I want to say to you, Father.’

He let them in, took her coat from her. ‘Will you make tea for us, Rabia?’