The Saint Zita Society (8 page)

There were of course exceptions to this rule and on Saturday morning Preston Still, having twice grabbed at the faulty banister, felt it wobble in his hands and nearly let him fall down the basement stairs, carefully examined the structure of banisters and rail with a view to doing a temporary repair. Sixth of November! Couldn’t something better than that have been arranged?

Montserrat said it couldn’t and stood by, watching him.

He had always supposed, he said, that the banister, wooden, probably walnut, pale grey-brown and polished, was a solid piece, the length of a tree’s height, but of course it wasn’t, it was cunningly put together by some kind of interlocking system, maybe consisting of four pieces in all. You could only see the joins if you looked closely. This construction, he said to Montserrat, made mending a loose rail much easier. As if to prove it he took hold of the banister itself and began tugging it.

By this time Lucy had appeared. Instead of the yellow suit, she was dressed in white shorts, a white T-shirt and white
trainers, the smooth brown skin of her long legs making a nice contrast. With her, looking disgruntled, were her daughters, similarly attired.

‘We’re all going for a run round the park, aren’t we, girls?’ The girls made no reply but Hero pulled a face. ‘So we thought we’d come and see what Daddy was doing on our way.’

‘Now you’ve seen,’ said Preston sourly, ‘you can get going.’

‘No, but, darling, what
are
you doing?’

‘Trying to mend the banister,’ said Rabia who had appeared behind her with Thomas in his pushchair. ‘Better to wait for my cousin Mohammed who is coming very kindly on a Saturday and therefore giving up his day of rest.’

Preston ignored her. He was vigorously shaking the banister. There was a noise halfway between a groan and a crunch and the whole section of polished wood came away in his hands. He nearly fell over backwards, uttering an expletive which made Matilda say in the tone listeners thought would one day land her a job as headmistress of a girls’ public school, ‘Daddy, you’re not supposed to say words like that in front of
us
. You should remember Thomas is only sixteen months old.’

‘I’m sorry, kids,’ said Preston, still clutching the section of banister. ‘I really am. I shouldn’t have said that.’ His eyes turned to his son and rested there, growing anxious. ‘Is that a rash I can see on his neck, Rabia?’

‘I am sure it is not, Mr Still.’

‘What’s that redness, then?’

‘It is because his scarf is red. Now see when I move it.’

Thomas began to chortle because he thought he was being tickled. His neck appeared white as milk away from the scarf.

‘Oh, well, you know best. If there’s any doubt about it you’ll run him along to Dr Jefferson, won’t you?’

All but Montserrat melted away, Lucy driving her daughters before her like an aggressive shepherd with his flock. Rabia
had to carry the pushchair down the steps on her own. It was rather cold and rain was forecast. But indoors the habitual heat prevailed and Preston, sitting on the stairs where he had wrenched the loose rail out of the section of banister, said irritably, ‘All it needs is some glue. Have we got any glue?’

‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so.’

‘Well, have a look, will you? And, Montserrat, would you make me a cup of coffee?’

‘It’ll have to be instant.’

She made the coffee. Zinnia never came on Saturdays. Perhaps Preston would have forgotten about the glue by this time. There was none in the any of the cupboards under the kitchen’s two sinks. He had moved, was now sitting in a (reproduction) eighteenth-century French chair halfway along the gallery, the banister and its one intact rail on his lap, the other in his right hand. Montserrat, walking slowly to avoid spilling the coffee, wondered why Lucy had married him, he was so hairy. At ten in the morning – she had heard him shaving at eight – he already had a five o’clock shadow seven hours too early. His body and his legs must be a sight to behold. Like a gorilla! And he had a small but increasing belly. No wonder Lucy preferred Rad Sothern even if he was about six inches shorter.

‘Now you’ve done that,’ he said, letting her put the coffee cup on the floor, ‘perhaps you’ll go out and buy some glue.’

Montserrat knew that ‘perhaps’ meant nothing. ‘Go where?’

‘You must know where there are some shops. I don’t. I have a job which takes up all my time, in case you’ve forgotten. Ask people. Look in the phone book.’

She had been there before. She’d just go and she’d ask. Preston emptied his pockets of notes and coins and handed it to her. The rain had started and she took one of the large umbrellas from the stand in the hall. The whole exercise
would have been insupportable had she not been able to picture Lucy and the girls umbrella-less and getting very wet. Rabia wouldn’t care while Thomas had a hood on his pushchair to keep him dry. Montserrat counted the money Preston had given her for the glue, nearly thirty pounds. He must be mad. She found an ironmonger’s on the Pimlico Road, bought two kinds of glue that the man behind the counter recommended just to be on the safe side. She didn’t want to be sent out again.

It appeared that Preston had given up. Her trip had been in vain and what to do with two useless tubes of adhesive?

‘Oh, put it somewhere. Maybe that Mohammed will have a use for it.’

Montserrat knew he wouldn’t. She waited till Preston had disappeared along the gallery and up the big curving staircase and then she examined the shakily replaced section of banister and the two rails. Before he started both rails had been undamaged. Now the top end of one of them was jagged enough to reveal the raw wood. Montserrat shook her head and laughed silently. He had left his coffee cup on the carpet by that chair he had sat in. She went back and fetched it, not too resentful. After all, he hadn’t asked for his change back and she was the better off by twenty-five pounds. By this time she was feeling so cheerful that she forgot her usual carefulness and started to run down the basement stairs, grabbing the banister as she went. He had left it so shaky, much worse than before he messed about with it, that she fell over and only just managed to save herself by clutching at the edge of the stair carpet.

B
eginning work on the agenda for the next Saint Zita meeting the same day as she returned from Florence, June included in the matters to be discussed the really
revolting question of the little plastic bags of dog excrement and the problem of noise in Hexam Place after 11 p.m. Various notes from members had come while she was away. She had no objection to an item requesting a debate on the smoking habits of members and where they should be able to indulge it. June already agreed that if an employer might smoke indoors why should an employee not do likewise? A request from Thea for permission to be granted to sit on the front steps of
one’s own home
(this heavily underlined) especially when
one was not a servant
, June decided to exclude. Let her raise it under Any Other Business. The date of the meeting was to be lunchtime on 29 October. June quickly made the first item Rules to be Formulated.

The Princess was watching
Avalon Clinic
, this evening’s episode heavily featuring Rad as Mr Fortescue. June joined her on the sofa, bringing with her two stiff gin and tonics and a bowl of pistachios. Until now, apart from various minor flirtations, Mr Fortescue had mostly been presented in his role as hardworking gynaecologist but now he appeared as embarking on a love affair with the glamorous sister from Estonia. Both were married to other people which complicated matters delightfully.

‘Thea told me you can get a boxed set of the first series,’ whispered June when Mr Fortescue was off the screen for fifteen seconds. ‘Shall I?’

‘Yes. Tomorrow. Don’t talk, please. How many times do I have to tell you? He’s just coming back.’

Gussie, fetched from the boarding kennels in a taxi, snuggled up on the Princess’s lap, from where June had to dislodge him for his evening walk round the block. Descending the steps, whom should she see on the other side of the street but Mr Fortescue himself sneaking out of the basement door at number 7. June waved to her great-nephew, seeing no
reason why she should conspire with them in their intrigue. Rad just raised one hand in a feeble wave. From the basement window of number 8 Miss Grieves also watched Rad leave. Two hours before she had watched him arrive.

Studying wheelchair advertisements in the newspaper, the Princess turned briefly from the page. ‘Don’t forget to get that canned set tomorrow, will you? You won’t remember if you don’t write it down.’

‘Boxed,’ said June absently.

F
or Rabia a weekend at the Stills’ country house was always something to look forward to. Until they took her to Gallowmill Hall she had never seen anything of the English countryside, let alone stayed there,
slept
there. She had discovered in herself a rapturous love of the fields and woods, the little stream which ran through the grounds and where there were ducks and moorhens, sometimes a swan and once an otter. Butterflies, red and black and white, abounded. Thomas could lie on a blanket on the lawn while the sun shone above and fluffy clouds drifted across a pearly-blue sky.

It was some weeks since her first visit but now they were going again and, Lucy told Rabia, such a stay would be impossible without her. Who else could manage the children? So indispensable was she that in the car going down – a rented minibus so that all could be accommodated – Lucy apologised to her nanny for the house being so near to London and in
Essex
.

‘It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only Hertfordshire, but Essex makes people laugh as soon as you utter the name, doesn’t it, Press?’

‘Not the people I utter it to,’ said Preston.

Rabia didn’t know what they were talking about so she just smiled. Thomas had fallen asleep next to her. If she could only
be with him until he grew up or they sent him away to one of those wicked boarding schools, if only she could be with Thomas she would want nothing else, no second husband, no home of her own. If only. The girls were bickering. They had been made to wear trainers for the country instead of their new shoes and had shuffled their feet out of them as soon as the minibus was off.

‘Your shoes stink,’ said Matilda.

Hero pinched her on the arm. ‘It’s yours that stink. My sweat doesn’t smell, I’m not old enough. You are.’

‘If you pinch me again I’ll kick you.’

‘Now that is enough.’ Rabia admonished them because their mother never bothered. ‘We want none of that while we go away to enjoy ourselves.’

They obeyed her, they usually did. It took half an hour to get out of London and on to the M25, then along a turning through Epping Forest where there was little traffic and the air smelt fresh. The day was bright and cold, the woods golden, leaves falling or blowing off in the gusts of wind. Gallowmill Hall was approached by a long drive between yellow trees, half of whose leaves lay underfoot. In the meadow on the left-hand side a stag and three or four hinds, property of the deer farmer who rented a few of Preston’s acres, grazed on the lush green grass. A hawk hovered overhead.

Thomas woke up, whimpering, and put his arms round Rabia’s neck as Preston drew up on the sweep in front of the house. If Lucy described it to her friends as ‘nothing much to look at, one of those two-a-penny late-eighteenth-century places’, to Rabia it was a gorgeous palace. That one family could live in such a place, and not even live but just come there sometimes to stay a couple of nights, was to her unbelievable, a dream. But it was real. The previous time they had been there, when the children were in bed, she had
crept downstairs and come outside to touch the grey-gold stonework, half expecting it to dissolve in her hand. It was real. The rooms with their high ceilings and pale green or ivory walls were real, and the sweeping staircase, twice as wide as the one in Hexam Place, its banisters filagree silver, that too was real. The paintings were real and of real people in silk and satin, grandfathers and grandmothers of Mr Still and
their
grandfathers and grandmothers. And to think that when her father took her back to Pakistan when she was sixteen to meet her future husband, relatives had asked her if it was true that everyone in United Kingdom was equal.

They had brought all the food for the weekend with them, bags and crates and cool boxes of it, all delivered by M&S and Ocado the day before. Rabia helped Mr Still carry it in. She got the girls to help too because Lucy couldn’t, she said she was tired, being driven out here always exhausted her. Rabia had plenty to do, lunch to be got for one thing, then Thomas put down for his afternoon nap, but she went out later for a walk in the grounds. The girls refused to come with her; their quarrel in the past now, they preferred to play computer games in the bedroom they shared. They might as well have been in London. Rabia saw rabbits and a squirrel, something in the distance that might have been a badger but she couldn’t be sure, she had never seen one before. The gardener she had encountered on her previous visit. He had stared then at her long black gown and her hijab but this time he was used to her appearance and seemed to understand that she spoke English and wasn’t crazy or fierce, and greeted her with an ‘Afternoon, missus’.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Rabia. ‘Are you digging that up to plant flowers?’

‘That’s right. Preparing the flower bed. We’ll have some
bulbs in there for the spring and then some annuals for the summer.’

‘That will be very beautiful.’ Rabia told him about her father who was the manager of a nursery that sold flowers and plants and trees and the man seemed very interested.

Her walk had taken her to look at the stream and the little wood and a little maze she didn’t go in because you could get lost. The worry that had been with her for months now, whether she should speak out in the matter of Lucy’s immoral, and to Rabia criminal, behaviour, she could put to the back of her mind while she was out in the fresh air and under the trees. She went back to the house, feeling cheerful and ready to think about what to give them all for their dinners.