At breakfast, Nancy said that Prosser had been sniffing around again.
Riley looked up, put his tea down and went bonkers. He grabbed a plate and sent it to the wall, like a frisbee. The pieces went everywhere. Arnold tore from his wheel and Nancy ducked as if it were an air raid (as a teenager she’d hidden in the Underground while London got trashed by the Nazis).
‘I’m sick of him,’ shouted Riley His mouth curled like a boxer’s, and he huffed and puffed, pacing the ring in his head. ‘He’s always watching me, chewing that cigar.’
Riley looked for something else to throw, but Nancy had cleared the table.
‘I’ll speak to Wyecliffe,’ vowed Riley.
‘When?’ said Nancy dropping a cup. ‘What for?’
‘I’ll go tonight,’ he seethed. ‘And he’ll bang a writ on Prosser’s nose.
That sounds very legal, thought Nancy not quite knowing what it meant.
Buoyed up and punchy Riley set off for work, his boots crunching on the crockery.
When Nancy duly opened her shop that morning she went straight to the filing cabinet. She untied Mr Johnson’s plastic bag and pulled out the first volume that came to hand. She sat by the fire, aiming to read, to drive out the memory of that lawyer in his stuffy twilit room. But he was too strong. Nancy let the book drop on her lap. She could almost feel his breath and smell the nuts.
A few weeks after the ‘preliminary conference’ at the bungalow, Mr Wyecliffe sent Nancy a letter ‘requiring your kind attendance’.
She thought solicitors weren’t meant to have beards and yet his was like an old toilet brush. She hadn’t liked him. Not because he’d been hungry when he should have lost his appetite, and not even because of the grilling he’d dished out (he’d leaned across his desk, tugging at his hairy chin, not taking no for an answer, digging around in her private life: it was like he was after something, but wouldn’t say what). No, she didn’t like him because she’d said too much. Part of her had gone missing. The room had been dark, the windows jammed, and he’d just bitten his way through her life, as if it were another sandwich. And another thing: his eyes were too close together.
Mr Wyecliffe had said, for openers, ‘What you now tell me is completely confidential.’
‘Then how does it go in my statement?’
That knocked him one. He wasn’t used to women with minds of their own. But he explained himself. He was the professional. He needed to know everything. ‘Just imagine I’m doing a jigsaw out of sight. You’ll wonder why I pick up this bit or the other. Don’t think about the broader picture: leave that to me.’ Nancy supposed that that was why lawyers earned so much money -they could see things the rest of us couldn’t. And then Mr Wyecliffe got started in the middle of nowhere, and wouldn’t let go. ‘I suppose your husband goes out with the lads every now and then?’
‘Never. He stays at home. ‘All the time?’
‘Well, apart from work and that -’
‘Every evening?’
‘Yes, unless he’s doing overtime.’
‘Do you ever get unexpected phone calls from a strange man?’
‘Of course not.’ She folded her arms tight across her chest. ‘Why would I?’
‘Wanting to speak to your husband?’
‘No.’
‘Does Mr Riley make calls to anyone you don’t know?’
‘We’re husband and wife.’ Nancy had been getting more unsettled than cross, because the questions were like digs in the side, but she was proud to throw that one back. They were man and wife. Till death us do part. For better or for worse.
‘Is that no?’
‘Yes.’
Mr Wyecliffe nodded like her Uncle Bertie would after he’d checked the odds at Ladbrokes. ‘Just as I expected.’ He chewed a pencil, smiling at Nancy his eyes too deep in his head. Not a word had been written down.
‘So your husband does lots of overtime?’ ‘He works for his living, yes.’
‘Indeed. This overtime. Is it always on the same days?’
‘Not now, what with the downturn on the docks.’
‘Of course. But it’s frequent?’
‘We find out as and when. Mr Lawton’s been very lucky so yes, there’s always a lot to be done. The boss has to keep ahead of the game. And my husband’s always there, ready to help. He’s one of his best workers. Never missed a shift.’
‘I don’t doubt it. Any cash in hand?’
Nancy felt the coming of a blush. ‘No.’
Mr Wyecliffe swivelled the pencil, biting into the wood. He said, ‘Do you collect the rents with him?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Ever met the tenants?’
‘No.’
Once again, the solicitor looked like Uncle Bertie with the Racing Post. ‘Very sensible,’ he said. ‘Let ‘em rest in peace.
‘Exactly.’
Nancy wanted a breather, but Mr Wyecliffe seemed to have her trapped. He said, ‘How often does your husband visit the property?’
‘Well, I don’t know, once or twice a week, if anything needs doing. He does all the maintenance himself. Keeps the costs down.’
‘Very sensible. Just let me try some names.
Nancy thought she’d suffocate if he went on like this.
‘David?’
‘No.’
‘George?’
‘No.’
‘Bradshaw?’
‘No.’
Mr Wyecliffe looked at the pencil as though he was a film star with a cigar, and Nancy saw that the lead had snapped. He started chewing the dry end. ‘Is Mr Riley in debt to anyone?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Then why the overtime?’
‘We’d like a house to match yours.’
A noble objective that would, however, bring considerable disappointment.’
Suddenly the little man got up and opened the door. He returned and put a plump little hand on her shoulder, ‘Sorry, but the ventilation system is somewhat primitive.’ He looked at her in a funny way as if he were hungry again. ‘One more name, of a sort.’ Nancy closed her eyes. Quietly he asked, ‘Have you ever heard of the Pieman?’
Nancy gripped the sides of her head as though it might fall in two. ‘Never.’
‘Is Mr Riley frightened?’
Frightened? What a thing to have asked. Her man was scared of no one. A flash of heat spread across her chest, face and scalp – that was the menopause, telling her she’d never have a baby that it was too late. So the doctor had said. Strange even to her own hearing, she replied, ‘Yes.’
‘What of?’
Nancy didn’t want to say It sounded daft. If she’d been asked was her man angry, she’d have said, ‘Oh yes,’ and that would have been that. But this question had stirred a new kind of thinking deep inside, somewhere other than her head – it wasn’t really thinking; she didn’t know what it was, but it happened in her lungs, and lower down, in the stomach. ‘Well,’ she said, feeling weak, sheets of fresh sweat unfolding, ‘he was scared by the hunter in Bambi even though you never see him.’
Mr Wyecliffe nodded like the doctor, showing no surprise.
Nancy continued, blinded by salt and mortification, ‘And he doesn’t like the new queen in Snow White.’
Mr Wyecliffe kept nodding, his eyes closed. Then he asked, ‘What does he think of the little princess?’
And that was where Nancy went too far – without understanding why except in her guts. She replied, ‘He hates her.’ She’d never liked the h-word. It was hard and sharp and somehow dark.
The sweating had stopped and a chill had struck her. Nancy sat with her arms folded tight, feeling like she was in the altogether on the ice-rink at Hammersmith. These humiliating flushes could go on for years, apparently So the doctor said. Nancy reached for a hankie.
‘I don’t think we’ll be calling you as a witness.’ Mr Wyecliffe put his pencil down. And Nancy knew – because she wasn’t daft – that he’d never intended to call her in the first place.
The cars struck the bump and swept past Nancy’s door. Blinking uncertainly like she’d just landed, Nancy handled the book on her lap. It fell open naturally in the middle. A spill of coffee or tea had made the ink run and the paper was ribbed and sticky.
… and her hair was pulled back ever so tight. Like all female staff at the Bonnington, she had to wear a black dress with a white frilly pinafore. It made her look like a servant in The Forsyte Saga. I watched her walk down the corridor pushing a trolley of sheets. That was the first time I saw Emily. And I said to myself, ‘I shall marry this woman before the year is out.’ I eventually found the manager’s office. Sister Dorothy said he would be rude and she was right, but she’d also said keep your eye on his smile, which I did. He said, ‘Young man, all you have to do is carry bags, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, and don’t loiter for a tip. This is London not New York.’ I was what an American businessman once called ‘the bell hop’ – presumably because I came running when I heard a ding from the reception desk.
Unfortunately Emily had no interest in me.
Nancy was forcefully present to herself now Eagerly she turned the page but it was stuck to the next few with something like jam. and there he was lifted high in the air by a nurse. I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry,’ because I thought I’d gone into the wrong theatre. But then I saw Emily on the bed. And then I realised that the baby in the air, on his way to the scales, was my son. I’d missed his birth by seconds. I don’t remember a sound, not a cry.
Nancy slowly closed the book here, at the point that most interested her. This had to be the son who would one day be lost, the boy who’d run along the pier at Southport. Out of respect to Mr Johnson, she would read no further, because in all their many conversations, he’d never told her what had happened.
I’m a dreadful woman, thought Nancy Mr Johnson had his own tragedy and yet she escaped from hers into his, as if his story wasn’t real.