Thirteen Steps Down (5 page)

his profession and his ambitions, about the place in which they lived, the

Korean War, the Iron Curtain, and the changing times. Gwendolen talked

about these things too, as she had never talked to anyone before, and

sometimes about hoping to see more of life, making friends, traveling,

seeing the world. And always they talked about her mother dying, how it

wouldn't be long, and what would happen afterward.

Doctors' handwriting is notoriously unreadable. Gwendolen scrutinized

the prescriptions he wrote for Mrs. Chawcer, trying to decipher his first

name. At first she thought it was Jonathan, then Barnabas. The nearest

she got was Swithun. Cunningly, she turned the conversation on to

names and how important or unimportant they were to their possessors.

She liked hers, so long as no one called her Gwen. No one? Who were

these people who might inadvertently create for her a diminutive? Her

parents were the only ones who didn't call her Miss Chawcer. She said

none of this to Dr. Reeves but listenedavidly for his contribution.

Out it came. "Stephen's the sort of name that's always allright to have.

Fashionable at the moment. For the first time, actually. So, one day,

maybe, folks will guess I'm thirty years younger than I am."

He always called people "folks." And he said "guess" the American way,

meaning "think." Gwendolen loved these idiosyncrasies. She was

delighted to find out his name. Sometimes, in the solitude of her

bedroom, she mouthed to herself interesting combinations: Gwendolen

Reeves, Mrs. Stephen Reeves,G. M. Reeves. If she were American she

could call herself Gwendolen Chawcer Reeves; if from parts of Europe,

Mrs. Doctor Stephen Reeves. To use the servants' word, he was courting

her. She was sure of that. What would be the next step? An invitation

out somewhere, her mother would probably say. "Wil lyou come with me

to the theater, Miss Chawcer? Do you ever go to the pictures, Miss

Chawcer? May I call you Gwendolen?

Her mother no longer said anything. She was comatose with morphine.

Stephen Reeves came regularly and every time he had tea with

Gwendolen. One afternoon, across the cakestand, he called her

Gwendolen and asked her to call him Stephen. The professor usually

came home to keep an eye on his daughter as they were finishing their

portions of Victoria sponge, and Gwendolen noticed that Dr. Reeves

reverted to Miss Chawcer when her father was present.

She sighed a little. That was half a century ago and now it wasn't Dr.

Reeves but Olive and her niece who were expected for tea. Gwendolen

hadn't invited them for this day, shewouldn't have dreamt of it. They had

asked themselves. If she hadn't been tired at the time and even more

tired of Olive's company she would have said no. Wishing she had, she

went up to the bedroom that had once been her mother's, where in fact

her mother had died, but not the one where she had tried out those

name combinations, and put on a blue velvet dress with a lace insert at

the neckline, once but no longer called a modesty vest. She added pearls

and a brooch in the shape of a phoenix rising from the ashes and put her

mother's engagement ring on her right hand. She wore it every day and

at night put it in the jewel box of silver and chased mirror glass, which

had also been her mother's.

The niece didn't come. Olive brought her dog instead, a small white

poodle with ballet dancer's feet. Gwendolen was annoyed but not much

surprised. She had done this before.The dog had a toy with it like a child,

only this plaything was avery life like white plastic bone. Olive ate two

slices of the swiss roll and a great many biscuits and talked about her

niece's daughter while Gwendolen thought what a good thing it was the

niece hadn't come or there would have been two of them talking about

this paragon, her achievements, her wealth, her lovely home, and her

devotion to her parents. As it was, her day was spoiled. She should have

been alone, to think about Stephen, to remember--and perhaps to plan?

Olive was wearing a trouser suit in bright emerald green and a lot of

mock-gold jewelry. Kitsch, Gwendolen called it to herself. Olive was too

fat and too old to wear trousers or anything in that color. She was proud

of her long fingernails and had lacquered them the same scarlet as her

lipstick. Gwendolen stared at lips and nails with the critical and mocking

eye of a young girl. She often wondered why she had friends when she

rather disliked them and didn't want their company.

"When my great-niece was fourteen she was already five feet ten inches

tall," said Olive. "My husband was alive then. 'If you grow any more,' he

said to her, 'you'll never find a boyfriend.The boys won't go out with a girl

taller than them.' And what do you think happened? When she was

seventeen and over six feet she met this stockbroker. He'd wanted to be

an actor but they wouldn't have him because he was six feet six, far too

tall for the theater, so he went into stockbroking and made a packet. The

two of them were quite an item. He wanted to marry her but she had her

career to think of."

"How interesting," said Gwendolen, thinking of Dr. Reeves who had

once said she was a nice girl and he was awfully fond of her.

"Girls don't have to get married these days like we did." She seemed to

have forgotten Gwendolen's single status and went on blithely, "They

don't feel they're left on the shelf. There's no status to marriage anymore.

I know it's a bold thing to say but if I was young again, I wouldn't get

married. Would you?"

"I never did," said Gwendolen austerely.

"No, that's true," Olive said as if Gwendolen might have been in some

doubt about it. "Maybe you did the right thing all along."

But I would have married Stephen Reeves if he'd asked me, Gwendolen

thought after Olive had gone and she was clearing up the tea things. We

would have been happy, I would have made him happy, and I'd have got

away from Papa. But he had never asked her. Once he had said he was

fond of her, Papa seemed to have made a point of being there, though he

could not have overheard. When her mother was dead Stephen signed

the death certificate and said that if they wanted Mrs. Chawcer cremated

they would need a second doctor's signature, so he'd ask his partner to

come round.

He didn't say he'd enjoyed all those teas they'd had together or that he'd

miss them or her. Therefore she knew he'd comeback. Probably there

was some rule in medical etiquette that forbade a general practitioner

asking the relatives of a patient to go out with him. He was planning on

coming back, waiting till after the funeral. Or perhaps he meant to come

to the funeral. Gwendolen went through several series of agony because

she had omitted to ask him to the funeral. That too might be in the

medical etiquette rule book. She couldn't ask her father. They were both

supposed to be grieving too much to ask each other anything like that.

Dr. Reeves didn't come to the funeral. It was at St. Mark's, and apart

from Gwendolen and her father, only three other people were there: an

old cousin of Mrs. Chawcer's, their current maid, who came because she

was religious, and the old man next door in St. Blaise Avenue. Since he

hadn't been at thefuneral, Gwendolen was sure Stephen Reeves would

just turn up at the house one day. He was leaving it for a little while

outof respect for the dead and the mourners. During that week she spent

more time, trouble, and money on her appearance than she had ever

done before or since. She had her hair cut and set, she bought two new

dresses, one gray and one dark blue, she experimented with makeup.

Everyone else piled it on, especially about the lips and eyelids. For the

first time in her life she wore lipstick, bright red, until her father asked

her if she'd been kissing a fire engine.

Dr. Reeves never came back.

Chapter 4

For the third time in a week, Mix sat in his car on Campden Hill Square

with the windows shut and the engine running to keep the airconditioning on. It was a hot day and getting hotter every minute. He felt

like a stalker and didn't much like it, partly because it reminded him of

Javy. When he was twelve Javy had caught him looking through a pair of

binoculars that belonged to his elder brother and beaten him for being a

peeping Tom. Useless to say he hadn't been looking at the woman next

door but at someone's new motorbike parked by the curb.

Forget it, he said to himself, put it out of your mind. He always said

that when he started thinking of his mother and Javy and life at home

but he never really forgot it. Reading Christie's Victims would have passed

the time while he waited, but he might get immersed in it and miss her.

It must be half an hour he'd been there, waiting for her to come out,

keeping his eyeon her front door or shifting it to the golden Jaguar

parked on her drive. Of course he'd seen her on previous visits butit had

always been with some man escorting her or she'dbeen dressed in one of

those semitransparent shifts she liked so much, under a fur wrap or

sequin-embroidered denim jacket,or else in skin-tight jeans and stilt

heels that permitted only small mincing steps. On those occasions she

got into the chauffeur-driven limo.

It wouldn't be long before a traffic warden appeared and moved him on.

Having a client in Campden Hill Square would have been a help but he

didn't. Judging by the bronzed, taut muscled young men who called at

several of these houses, the residents mostly had personal trainers. He

was wondering if there was any point in staying, he had several calls to

make before lunchtime, when a woman out walking a dog banged on the

car window. She had a cigarette in her hand and the dog, not much

bigger than a Beanie Baby, was wearing a redcollar with a diamante tag

hanging from it. They were all richround here.

"You know," she said in a voice like Colette Gilbert-Bamber's, "it's very

wrong of you to sit there with your engine on like that. You're polluting

the environment."

"How about you with your smoke?" The combination of waiting about

and her voice made him angry. "Why don't you get lost and take that toy

on a lead with you?"

She said something about how dared he and marched off , dropping

ash. He was on the point of giving up when Nerissa came out of her front

door and got into her own car. She wore a rose-pink sleeveles stop and

white jeans, her hair tied on the top of her head with a pink silk ribbon.

Mix thought she looked lovelier than ever, even in the big black shades

that half covered her face. Casual suited her. But what kind of fashion

didn't?

To follow her was essential, even if it made him late for the appointment

he had at twelve in Addison Road. He'd give the woman there a call and

say he'd been held up. Nerissa drove into Notting Hill Gate and turned

up toward the Portobello Road but avoided it and went on to Westbourne

Grove. For once, there was very little traffic, nothing to separate his car

from her car or hold them up. Roadworks at the top slowed them both

and he saw her put her head out of the window in an attempt to see what

was going on. But finally they were through the barriers and past the

cones. More suddenly than he expected--she didn't signal--she swung

the car into a meteredspace in a side street, dropped in her coins and

ran up to a door with the number 13 Charing Terrace on it and

"Shoshana's Spa and Health Club" in big chrome letters. By then, staring

after her, he was holding up a stream of traffic. A chorus of hooting and

yells of rage from other drivers at last forced him to move.

He was ten minutes late for the woman in Addison Road. All the way to

the back of this big house and down the basement stairs, she lectured

him on punctuality as if she were his employer, not his client. Mix nearly

told her that, in his opinion, the damage to the climbing machine was

caused by disuse, not wear and tear, and he wasn't surprised when he

looked at the shape and size of her. But he didn't. She had an elliptical

cross-trainer on order from Fiterama Accessories, and if he was rude

she'd withdraw her custom.

Nothing like that mattered now he'd found the gym Nerissa went to. Pity

about the number though. Along with his other occult beliefs and fears,

Mix was superstitious, especially about walking under ladders and the

number thirteen. He always avoided having anything to do with it when

he could. When this phobia or whatever it was had started he didn't

know, though it was true that Javy, whom his mother had married on

the thirteenth of the month, had his birthday on the thirteenth of April.

The day he had beaten Mix so badly it had nearly killed him had very

likely been the thirteenth, but Mix had been too young then to remember

or even to have known.

The Cockatoodle Club in Soho was overheated, smelled of various kinds

of smoke and Thai green curry and was none too clean. So, at any rate,

said the girl who Ed's girlfriend Steph had brought along for Mix. Ed was