The Saint Zita Society (5 page)

‘You want to come to a lunchtime meeting of the Saint Zita Society?’ said Montserrat. ‘It’s an extraordinary general meeting and it’s to be in the Dugong’s garden so you can bring Thomas and when Henry starts asking an inflated price like he’s bound to, you can take my side and support me.’

‘Lucy would be angry.’

‘Lucy won’t know.’

Rabia smiled and began dragging the heavy pushchair up the steps of number 7. Henry ran up to give her a hand, calling back to Montserrat that he couldn’t take less than seventy-five pounds.

‘You’re joking. It’s about a hundred years old.’

‘
If
you don’t mind, I paid two hundred for it in 2005.’

‘Fifty,’ said Monserrat.

‘Seventy.’

‘Fifty-five.’

‘Now look who’s joking.’

June appeared at the front door of number 6 and, in spite of the rheumatism, tripped down the steps like someone half her age. ‘You two are making as much noise as a gang of yobs in Brixton. This is supposed to be one of the most select neighbourhoods not just in the UK but in the Western world. HSH has got a headache.’

‘I can give you a couple of paracetamol for her but it’ll cost you,’ said Henry, laughing.

June ignored him. ‘We shall have to raise this question of street noise at the meeting. I’ll put it on the agenda.’

Henry put the roof box inside the basement door of number 11 and then they all trooped off to the Dugong. Thea, Jimmy and Beacon, both once more on the wagon because Mr Still would want fetching from the City at four and Dr Jefferson from Great Ormond Street at five, were already there, drinks for all already bought. In October it wasn’t warm enough to sit outside, so they crowded round the biggest table in the saloon bar and June read the minutes of the last meeting, adding that this was an extraordinary general meeting called because of the full agenda.

They had barely begun on the business when Thea broke in to say she had seen Rad Sothern in Hexam Place earlier in the week. Very late at night, as it happened. ‘I wondered who he’d been calling on.’ Thea managed to pack a great deal of suggestive innuendo into this speculation. Sometimes she was bitchy to counteract her goody-two-shoes behaviour.

‘The Princess and me, as a matter of fact,’ said June.

‘You?’ It seemed almost too much for Thea to believe. ‘How on earth did you meet him?’

‘Meeting him wasn’t necessary.’ June could be icy when she chose. ‘He’s my great-nephew.’

‘That’s funny,’ said Montserrat. ‘If anyone had asked me I’d have said he’d be a relation of the Princess.’

June raised her eyebrows. ‘HSH hasn’t got any relations, she’s all alone in the world but for me. And no one did ask you that I heard.’

‘There’s no need to be nasty.’

‘Sometimes there’s every need. And may I remind you all that this is supposed to be an extraordinary general meeting of the Saint Zita Society and the main item on the agenda is increasing street noise made by members.’

‘And I’ve got some Any Other Business,’ said Henry.

Dex turned up at the meeting, or, rather, he walked into the Dugong while the meeting was going on and sat down at the big table where the others were already sitting. He bought himself a Guinness and, having nothing to say as usual, listened to the discussion while observing everyone. One of the women had red hair. She was one of those people whose eyes he could see, and see too that they were a bright blue. Otherwise her face was the usual blank, not very different from the rest of the faces. Another one was talking on a mobile. Maybe they had gods living in theirs too or just fruits, orange and blackberry and apple, Dex had heard. The others were talking about shouts in the street and shrieks of laughter and loud talking late at night. Dex always took advantage of any free food that might be about and now he dipped his fingers into the bowl of various-coloured crisps and fetched out a handful. He had noticed the woman called June looking at him and now she said, ‘Your hand is very dirty. Now you’ve touched those crisps no one else will want to eat them.’

Dex didn’t mind if no one else ate them, there would be all the more for him. He made an effort to answer. ‘I like them,’ he said. ‘I’ll eat them.’

‘Well, really,’ said June. She raised the matter of a theatre visit but no one seemed interested.

Henry’s other business concerned residents of neighbouring streets parking their cars in Hexam Place so that sometimes there was no room for Lord Studley’s car. ‘His Lordship has to walk round the corner to find me.’

‘Won’t hurt him,’ said June, in radical mode.

Jimmy, whose kind employer would have walked half a mile to get into his car without complaining, said he couldn’t see any way this occupying of the Hexam Place parking spaces could be stopped. It was perfectly legal. Dex drained his Guinness glass and moved away to a small table to be by himself. He pressed some keys at random as he always did but starting with the London code of 020. Some notes of music came out and a woman’s voice saying the number had not been recognised. Dex knew this meant his god was busy and couldn’t speak to him now. That was all right, it often happened. He would try again later. He picked up the crisps bowl in his dirty left hand and poured its contents into his even dirtier right hand with a sigh of satisfaction.

Thea, red-headed, blue-eyed, wearing a red-and-blue-patterned dress instead of trousers, wasn’t quite warm enough but she thought she looked more attractive that any other woman in the pub. Bored stiff during the meeting after her squabble with June, she had made shy attempts to catch men’s eyes but the only response had been from Jimmy. She couldn’t really think of Jimmy as in the same category as previous boyfriends and then she decided this was outrageous snobbery and caught his eye again, smiling
this time. But Jimmy, without smiling back, went off to pick up Dr Jefferson and Thea went home alone, where Damian met her in the hall to tell her they had run out of dishwasher tablets.

T
hea filled the role of the gay men’s woman friend and yet she always felt that Damian and Roland didn’t like her much. She was useful to them and that was all. They liked men, gay and straight, and men’s company was sufficient for them. Considering how often she shopped for them, even cooked for them when they had guests for dinner, she thought they might have reduced her rent but she couldn’t bring herself to ask.

She had a part-time job, teaching IT and basic word processing in an office skills school over the top of a drycleaner’s in the Fulham Road and she also taught an evening class called Internet Literacy. Considering the number of people over sixty who couldn’t use a computer and barely knew what ‘going online’ meant, for whom the class was designed, it was surprising how ill-attended it was. No doubt it would soon close down because of cuts and her income correspondingly cut. It made her cross that neither Damian nor Roland had ever asked her what she did for a living. Perhaps they thought she was like their mothers, had private means and did nothing. Perhaps they thought that when she went out it was to play bridge or have lunch with other ladies, also like their mothers. They were not interested in her and were only nice to her when they wanted to ask a favour or
had a reason to be particularly cheerful. Neither of them took any notice of Miss Grieves – if she had a given name no one knew it – the ninety-year-old who lived below them. It was Thea who shopped for her, fetched her a Sunday paper and helped her up the area steps when she was specially troubled by her rheumatoid arthritis. Damian called her the last maiden aunt left in London but if she had any nieces no one ever saw them. She looked old enough to be June’s mother and June really was a maiden aunt.

The house belonged to Roland Albert who came from a wealthy family. To buy it in the early nineties he had sold an object called the Kamensky Medal to a Russian collector of Russian insignia. The medal, quite small and in Thea’s opinion very ugly, had been given to an ancestor of Roland’s by the then Tsar, had been handed down among his descendants and finally fetched the amazing sum of £104,000. This he had used as the deposit on a mortgage to buy number 8 Hexam Place. Even so, he could afford it only because the basement flat had a sitting tenant in the shape of Miss Grieves who had been there for a longer period than Roland’s lifetime. Over the years Roland and Damian had offered her, through their solicitor, various increasingly large sums to get out and so leave them with another floor to their home or else a lucrative property for rent. Miss Grieves, who had a racy manner, said in the words of Eliza Doolittle, ‘Not bloody likely.’

In addition to being so kind and helpful, Thea tried to ingratiate herself with her neighbours. This she did with Damian and Roland in an attempt to make number 8 the most attractive house in the street by persuading Damian, the kinder and more easy-going of the pair, to buy window boxes for the second-floor windows, urns for the balcony that extended across the front of the first floor, and filling them with bulbs in spring and annuals in summer.

Not that she did the planting herself. Now two weeks into October, she was awaiting the arrival of the Belgrave Nursery’s van, driven by their outdoor-plant adviser. Thea expected a small rather weedy man called Keith but when the dark green van turned up, a picture of a mimosa in full bloom on its side, the outdoor-plant adviser was a tall well-built man with a black beard, the badge on his dark green uniform jacket informing her that he was Khalid.

The urns were to have red and purple hyacinths and white multi-flower narcissi, he told her, the window boxes dwarf tulips. A new variety that the Belgrave Nursery were very proud to stock was a peach-coloured double called Shalimar. He would put some of those in, mingled with a fringed tulip in a dark red colour and a yellow-leaved miniature ivy. What was the squirrel situation in Hexam Place?

‘Pardon?’ said Thea.

‘Do you have squirrels? Only let a squirrel smell a tulip bulb a mile off and he will be here, rooting in your pots for his breakfast.’ His mild facetiousness made Khalid laugh at his own joke, though it had no effect on Thea. ‘Oh, no doubt about it.’

‘Then don’t put them in,’ said Thea, sour-faced.

‘Rather we plant them and supply you with our anti-squirrel pot guards, the latest thing, only come on the market in the past month.’

When it came to haggling, Thea found herself no match for Khalid. She was unaware that though a British citizen since the age of twelve, he came from a long line of Islamabad market stallholders, and after only ten minutes she had agreed to the anti-squirrel pot guards and Khalid was planting tulips in the window boxes. An hour later he had moved the van, made another parking permission phone call to Westminster City Council and was ringing the front doorbell of number 7.
No servants’ entrances for him. Montserrat let him in and took him straight up to the drawing room with his bag of tools and bag of bulbs, having first glanced at his shoes as if she expected to see them encased in mud-encrusted boots.

Khalid, who wore elegant highly polished footwear, said in a sarcastic tone, ‘Perhaps you would like me to remove my shoes as is the rule at UK airports.’

‘Oh, no, your shoes are spotless.’

Lucy had gone out to lunch at Le Rossignol. Preston Still was of course in the City. The girls were both at school and Thomas was upstairs with Rabia, having his nappy changed and being dressed in a new navy-blue jumpsuit and new camel-coloured cashmere coat with brass buttons. One thing Lucy enjoyed doing for her children, Rabia had noticed, was choosing their clothes, the more expensive the better. But she appreciated her employer’s taste. Nothing was too good for Thomas who looked so gorgeous that she couldn’t help hugging him. The hugging over, Thomas was gently lifted into his sumptuous baby carriage and Rabia, in her hijab, was pushing him along the gallery when Montserrat came up the stairs and with her a man she recognised as a member of her father’s plant team. She recognised too the name on his dark green jacket and knew why he was there and the principal purpose of his visit. This tall, black-bearded and admittedly handsome man was her father’s choice for her as a second husband.

‘Good morning,’ said Rabia.

‘Good morning, Miss Siddiqui.’

‘Thank you but it’s Mrs Ali.’

A gratified smile appeared on Khalid’s face. ‘Let me assist you to carry the perambulator to the ground floor.’

‘Perambulator’ was a word Rabia had never come across before and it silenced her. An obviously strong man, Khalid
picked up the pushchair with Thomas in it and carried both single-handed down the stairs. Rabia followed, said a rather subdued ‘Thank you’, and hurriedly began pushing Thomas towards the front door.

‘How will you manage steps outside?’ Khalid called after her.

‘I will manage as I always do,’ said Rabia and closed the front door with a soft but firm click.

‘A lovely-looking woman,’ said Khalid.

Montserrat, who disliked hearing any woman praised but herself, said it was a matter of taste and would Khalid like to start on the planting of the nursery window boxes. An argument over which was the nursery, this room or his place of work, ensued. Having refused his offer of squirrel pot guards with a toughness Thea had been unable to achieve, Montserrat decided to leave him to it. She went downstairs to the basement flat where she called her mother on her new iPhone, bought with gratuities from Lucy and Rad Sothern, to tell her she’d like to come to Barcelona for a couple of days before driving up to the Jura. Montserrat’s mother was Spanish, her father an Englishman living in Doncaster. Señora Vega Garcia sounded less than pleased to hear from her daughter, but when Montserrat made no request for a loan or even indicated that she might be short of money, she softened and they had the pleasantest conversation they had had for months.

The ‘couple of days’ would be at the beginning of December or a little later, depending on the weather and the state of the snow. In Colmar she would meet a French friend from schooldays whose brother she had always rather fancied. She wondered what Lucy and Rad Sothern would do when their conductor had taken off the month to which she was entitled. Go without, she supposed.