Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (10 page)

Zillah fetched a cloth and began mopping up the mess while Mrs. Peacock sat tight, her eyes traveling from Zillah to the Browns and Liberty bags and back again. “Is there any tea left in the pot, Mrs. Peacock?”

“It’ll be cold by now.”

Chapter 8

THIS WOULD BE the first wedding Minty had ever been to. She was never beset by the ordinary woman’s anxieties, so she worried not at all about what to wear and whether she ought to buy a hat. If Jock hadn’t stolen her savings, she’d have bought Josephine and Ken a present, but now she had only her wages with nothing left over for luxuries, which included gifts. Would he have paid her back if he’d lived? Was he returning, his ghost appearing the way it did, not to take her away with him but because he wanted to pay his debt?

She hadn’t seen him again since that night in the cinema, but she’d brooded about the things Sonovia and Laf had said. The cat walking on her grave. She couldn’t help thinking about it, her burial ground maybe up in that huge, awful cemetery in the far north of London where Auntie’d once taken her to her sister Edna’s funeral. It wouldn’t be like Auntie’s resting place, nice and cozy under the big dark trees and near to her home, only just the other side of the high wall, but one of a bleak row of white tombstones, each indistinguishable from the rest, her name that had been engraved upon it obliterated by the wind and rain. But would her name be engraved on it? Who would do that for her? There was no one now Auntie was gone and Jock was gone.

She dreamed of the grave. She was lying in it under the earth but not in a box. They couldn’t afford the cost of a coffin. She lay under the cold, wet earth, the worst place she’d ever been in, and she was coated all over with dirt, on her skin, in her hair, in her fingernails. Mr. Kroot’s old cat came and scratched the earth, scraping with its paws the way they do. She saw it above her, looking down through the hole it had dug, its gray muzzle all bared teeth and angry flashing eyes and shaking whiskers. Then it scraped back all the earth into her mouth and nose, and she awoke fighting for breath. After that dream she had to get up and have a bath, though it was the middle of the night.

What Laf had said about her muttering and her eyes being shut and Josephine that talking to yourself was the first sign of insanity, she hadn’t liked either. She hadn’t been muttering, she never did, and she’d had her eyes shut because she was scared. They’d been laughing at her all the time they were in that pub. Next time she wanted to see a film, she’d decided, she’d go on her own. Why not? She used to go on her own and she could again. She’d buy herself a packet of Polo mints. Or a banana because
he
didn’t like them—but no, not that, she’d have to dispose of the outside of it somewhere.

In the bus on the way back, a man came and sat next to her. She wouldn’t look round because she was sure it was Jock’s ghost and she could hear a voice whispering, “Polo, Polo.” But when she edged her head very cautiously and slowly toward the right, an inch at a time, she saw it was someone quite different, an old man with white hair. Jock must have sneaked off when she wasn’t looking and made this old man sit there.

People didn’t often go to the three-thirty showing. The multiplex cinema was always nearly empty then. Immacue closed at one on a Saturday, so in the afternoon Minty went to see
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
She bought one ticket and was told which theater to go in. There were only two other people there and she had the whole row to herself. Jock didn’t appear. She hadn’t seen him for a week, for you couldn’t count that meeting on the bus. It was nice being alone; you didn’t have to keep saying thank-you when someone passed you the popcorn or a chocolate, or have the person behind you telling you to shut up.

The evenings were getting light now. She could buy flowers for Auntie from the man at the cemetery gate and walk down to the grave in sunshine. There was no one about. It had rained so much lately that the vase was brimming over, though the flowers in it were dead. Minty threw them away under a holly bush and put her daffodils into the water. Then she took two tissues from her bag, laid them on the slab, and knelt down on them, holding the silver cross between her forefinger and middle finger. Her eyes tight shut, she prayed to Auntie to make Jock go away forever.

Sonovia was at her front gate saying good-bye to Daniel, who’d come in for a cup of tea. Minty hadn’t seen him for months, not since she got the letter saying Jock had been killed.

“How are you today, Minty?” he said in his busy doctor’s voice, all breezy and bedside manner. “Feeling a bit better?”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Been somewhere exciting?” Sonovia asked it in the sort of tone that implies a person only does dull things, a tone with laughter somewhere underneath it. Minty didn’t answer. She was aware of the bum bag with the knife in it sliding round under her clothes. “You want a lend of my blue dress and jacket for Josephine’s wedding?”

How could she say no? She couldn’t think of a way, but stood there nodding, feeling awkward. Daniel went off to his car that he could park anywhere because it had a doctor sticker in its window. Minty wanted to go home, have a good wash, check Jock wasn’t in the house, and shut all the doors. Instead she had to go into Sonovia’s, have a look in her clothes cupboard, and choose the blue dress and jacket, whether that was what she wanted or not, because it was the only thing to fit her.

“I haven’t been able to get into it since I put on weight,” Sonovia said.

Minty tried it on. There wasn’t a choice. She hated Sonovia seeing her bare skin, so pallid and soap-smelling, and staring at the bum bag, hanging round her thin waist. The dress was a bit big but it would do. She shuddered so much as she pulled it over her head—how did she know how many times it had been worn and whether it had ever been cleaned?—that Sonovia asked that regular question of hers: was she cold?

“You look ever so nice. You really suit it. You ought to wear blue more often.”

Minty studied herself in the mirror, trying to forget about the dress being dirty. It was a full-length mirror that Sonovia called a pier glass. Behind her, opening the door and walking into the room, Jock’s ghost was reflected. He laid his hand on the back of her neck and, bending his head, pressed his face against her hair. She lashed out at the thing behind her. “Go away!”

“What, me?” asked Sonovia.

Minty didn’t answer. She shook her head.

Sonovia said, “Where were you this afternoon, Minty?”

“I went to see a film.”

“What, all on your lonesome?”

“Why not? I like being alone sometimes.” Minty pulled off the dress. Jock had disappeared. She handed it to Sonovia like a woman buying a garment in a shop.

Sonovia said, in a voice Minty didn’t care for, dry and tolerant, like someone talking to a naughty child, “I’ll put it in a bag for you.”

Downstairs again, Minty refused the proffered cup of tea and the alternative, a gin and tonic. “I’ve got to get home.”

Mr. Kroot was in his front garden and his sister was with him. She had a suitcase as if she’d just arrived. She wasn’t called Kroot but something else, she’d married someone about a hundred years ago. Minty didn’t look at them. She let herself into her house. The dress and jacket smelled of something. Stale scent mainly. There was a spot of grease on the jacket hem, a splash of fat maybe. She shuddered, glad Sonovia wasn’t there to ask if she was cold. All the pleasure she’d taken in the film had gone, driven away by what had happened since. She felt vulnerable, endangered. Going upstairs, she touched wood all the way, the banister bars that were cream-colored, the rail that was brown, the skirting board at the top that was pale pink. Auntie had liked variety in house decoration, and Minty was thankful for it. What would have become of her if all the woodwork had been white like in Sonovia’s place?

She ran a bath and got into the water holding the knife, she didn’t know why. Except that lying in the water with the knife in her hands, she felt safer than she did anywhere else. Jock’s ghost had never come into the bathroom, and it didn’t come in now. She washed her hair and lay in the water until it began to grow cool. She wrapped a towel round her body and another round her head while she dried the knife. Now there were three towels instead of two for the wash but she accepted that, all in the good cause of being spotless. Clean cotton trousers went on and a clean T-shirt. Before handling the contents of Sonovia’s bag, she put on a pair of Auntie’s black cotton gloves but she still held dress and jacket at arm’s length. She’d take them to Immacue on Monday and dry-clean them herself, put them through the luxury valet service. Leaving the dress in the spare room, well away from anywhere she might be, she took off the gloves and washed her hands.

It was the purest chance that Sonovia went into Immacue. Usually she took any clothes she and Laf needed cleaning to the place in Western Avenue, but he hadn’t been very pleased with the job they’d done on his dinner jacket, and for her part she’d not been amused by the crack the manager had made about the policeman’s ball.

Now he wanted his gray flannels and houndstooth check sports jacket cleaned. “Take them round to Minty’s place, why don’t you? Give it a go.”

At Immacue, clothes ready for collection were hung on a coat rack. The rack stood on the left-hand side of the shop and extended from behind the counter to the rear wall. When Sonovia entered there was no one about, so she waited a while, letting her gaze rove from the various aids to cleanliness on sale on the counter to the stacked shirts on the shelves on the right to the coat rack on the left. She was about to give a discreet cough when she spotted the garment hanging at the very front of the rack. It was on a hanger with a Styrofoam collar and sheathed in transparent plastic, but still she had no difficulty rccognizing her own blue dress and jacket. Angrily, Sonovia slammed her hand on the bell on the counter.

Josephine came out. “Sorry to keep you,” she said. “How may I help you?”

“By fetching Miss Knox, that’s how. I’ve got a bone to pick with her.”

Josephine shrugged. She went to the door at the back and called, “Minty!”

Sonovia was growing crosser by the second. When Minty came out she was standing there fuming, with her arms folded. “I’d just like to know who you think you are, Miss Araminta Knox, to be so fastidious. Borrowing a person’s clothes and then deciding they’re not clean enough for you. I suppose you had one of your famous baths after you’d tried them on. I’m surprised you’d keep them in the house, or did you put them out in the garden over Sunday?”