A Clear Conscience Read online

  ‘I know what I was going to ask you, guv,’ Ryan said, bored to death with scandal. ‘You know yesterday? Going to see that Mr Eliot? Can you tell me something? Do all those barristers have rooms like that? I mean, a mess. I can’t see how he’d ever find anything in there, let alone read it, but he had read ours, hadn’t he?’ Ryan had been dying to discuss this phenomenon since Bailey had abruptly abandoned him in the Temple; Bailey had forestalled him all morning.

  ‘They don’t have much space,’ Bailey said. ‘Eliot takes papers home, most of the time. I must remind him to give them back. What does it matter if they work out of chaos? As long as they get it done.’ Ryan sighed with a theatricality Bailey found irritating, like many features of the boy, which made him ponder from time to time the random nature of affection between human beings. It remained so senselessly selective, not based upon virtues or admiration; it came out of the blue and landed him with loyalties often undeserved. He would have run through fire to rescue Ryan from danger without having any real idea why, especially at this moment. He put down the newspaper.

  ‘And speaking of conferences with barristers, Mike, your manners were bloody awful yesterday. You were either sighing like a tragedy queen or grinning like a monkey, and the expressions in between ranged from pout to boredom.’

  ‘I only grinned when he said there was nothing wrong with the case, didn’t I? When he said he thought we’d done what we could. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘No wronger than him saying he couldn’t take a case because it might risk his wife’s cleaning lady. I never heard such crap.’

  The doors of the courtroom opened. Three barristers in wigs emerged, followed in drabs by others without fancy dress. The barristers seemed to sense the brooding presence of two police officers and moved away.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Ryan asked, enlivened by the prospect of movement, however minimal. Bailey caught the expression of ardent satisfaction on the face of the defending barrister, nodding with his opposite number, both in earnest conversation.

  ‘It probably means the judge has got the hump and our brief is copping a plea to actual bodily harm.’

  ‘But that bloke had a broken skull,’ Ryan protested.

  Bailey shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ said Ryan, without lowering his voice, ‘the whole fucking system stinks. Wigs or no Wigs.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Bailey hissed. ‘I was only kidding.’

  Then one of the lawyers came towards him with an ingratiating smile, and he knew the joke was on them. He stared up at the vaulted ceiling of the magnificent palais de justice and tried to imagine it was a cathedral.

  Helen and Cath stood under the white ceilings of Helen’s flat. Decorator gone, job half done, Helen was turning round and round, as if she was staring at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  ‘I think you’ve done enough, Cath. You’ll be knackered.’

  ‘No I won’t.’

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Helen murmured out loud.

  ‘It’s white paint,’ Cath murmured prosaically.

  Cath remained unscathed by paint. She seemed weary, preoccupied, but she worked with quiet precision. Helen had emulsion in her hair: her hands were stiff with it and a blister raised itself on her right forefinger.

  ‘I’ve left him, you know,’ Cath remarked idly.

  ‘Oh. Would you like some tea?’ What else was there to say? ‘I expect he wants you to go back, does he?’ she added.

  ‘I expect so,’ Cath shrugged. ‘That woman you sent round was very helpful. Mary. She gave me a lift.’

  It was on the tip of Helen’s tongue to say she had sent no-one. Then she thought of interventionist Bailey, the man who never let anyone know what he was doing, and held her tongue. Cath had her own version of events: let her keep it.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked gently. They were back to back in the kitchen, Cath cleaning a brush. The repeated shrug was felt rather than seen.

  ‘I dunno. It doesn’t much matter. Did you take down that address I gave you? The carpet place?’

  Helen was beginning to realise the existence of a code. Cath could no more come out with a straight series of statements than she could fly over the moon. As soon as she had said anything personal, she needed to change the subject. The listener could not prompt or initiate, only hope for the thread to be renewed.

  ‘Do you really think I need new carpet, Cath?’

  ‘Yeah, if you can afford it, why not?’ Cath gave a surprising, if grim, chuckle. ‘Make the place really nice. Catch a man, that way. They like to be comfortable.’

  ‘You sound like Mrs Eliot. She says the same thing.’

  ‘I bet she does.’

  They spent a lot of time, in between silences, talking about Mrs Eliot. Cath was never warmer or more animated than when talking about Emily, Helen realised. Mrs Eliot this, Mrs Eliot that, as if the woman were somewhere between goddess and patron saint. And a better role model than me, Helen thought. She often forgot, in her own milieu, how a career woman was not everyone’s idea of a heroine. In Cath’s eyes she was a slightly deficient spinster.

  ‘Do you think I need her advice, Cath?’

  ‘No more than I need yours. Are you going to get that carpet? Only if you want me to show you where it is, you’ll have to come on the bus.’

  ‘I’ve got paint in my hair,’ Helen protested.

  ‘Suits you,’ said Cath.

  She wondered if it did, this casual scruffiness which made her at one with everyone else on the bus, churning through unfashionable London. Down St Paul’s Road, into Balls Pond, Dalston Junction, where the crowds hanging round the stops, newly risen from bed in the mid-afternoon, waited less for transport than simply for the sake of waiting. Into the nettlebed of Hackney, Helen silent, Cath, animated for Cath, treating her companion to a muttered commentary, given from behind the back of her hand as if it was confidential.

  ‘They don’t go out to work around here, not much, anyway. Don’t know how they live, really. No self-respect. Look over there. That’s the leisure centre and all they do is vandalise it, terrible. That’s where my brother was killed in a fight. Don’t worry, not far to go now. That’s where I’m living now,’ gesturing to a high-rise block on the left. ‘Right on the top. They don’t go to work from there, either. I bet you’ll get a good bargain in this warehouse. I did, but Joe was sick on it. If they see anyone coming in with money, they’ll fall over backwards.’

  The code continued to invade this anecdotal account of Cath’s life and times. First there would be a clue, a statement, a throwaway line, hidden in the midst of several sentences of banality, gems to be picked out of the dross. About how much she loved the Eliots, especially that Jane, how Joe did not know where she was in the afternoons and then, look at that dog, woman, shop, driver, tut tut. Some people got no respect, have they? This apropos of nothing, until finally, ‘I hate this bus, you know, I do really. If Joe wants me back, he’ll have to do something about this bus. And this is where you get off.’

  There was nothing anyone could do about the bus. It moved of its own volition, snarling and wheezing, with a conductor suffering from a summer cold and seasonal indifference. It stopped and started, swallowed and disgorged. The engine throbbed; passengers shuddered in unison. A shambling drunk lurched on the bench seat downstairs, yelling at the window until the conductor yanked him up by the scruff of the neck without a word and he fell silent. Two overstuffed women, large enough to fill a seat each, sat in front of them, squeezed so tight that their laughter passed through acres of skin, loud and infectious. Amid a feeling of uncomfortable voyeurism, unused to travelling without a phallanx of commuters, Helen could see why Cath both hated and loved it. There was just too much life on an urban bus. Far too much. And that was all she understood.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bailey looked at his watch; the unfamiliar action surprised him. Perhaps it was the fast-running clock which had confused hi
m, wearing itself out for days with its frenetic telling of next year’s time. He had cured the problem and the clock ticked in accordance with his watch, the hands crawling round the empty spaces of time at ordinary speed, and he now felt oddly disappointed. Real time, time without a purpose, hung heavy. It composed itself into units, each requiring a separate input of duty, pleasure, labour and necessity. He was clean, he was fed, he had done his work for the day, and unless he went to see Helen, the mending of another clock would be the last positive pleasure of the evening.

  He sat on the enormous sofa, covered with tapestry cloth, the only spark of colour in the room, and surveyed his spacious domain with satisfaction. On balance, though, he preferred this room in winter, when artificial lights softened the harsher utilitarian edges and made everything glow. Looking forward to winter, and looking at his watch to dispel the restlessness induced by endless daylight, was surely a sign of depression. And he was not depressed, except by his own failures. He was simply at sea, armed with the engine of his own self sufficiency. Bailey, mid bottle of wine, decided it was too late to go to Helen now, he wouldn’t be safe to drive.

  He had himself and a book, a bottle and some music. No laughter, no discussion, none of life’s non-essentials. He was sorry for people who could not cope on their own. He usually enjoyed it far too much.

  Joe Boyce could not cope. He shivered and sneezed, could not catch his breath as he sat on the bus, felt as if his heart was jumping rather than beating. There were no fingernails left to chew. At other times he was hit by a peculiar lethargy and sat behind the bar with his mouth open, resembling, so Mickey Gat said in tones of ill-concealed disgust, some poor old geezer in the middle of a stroke. Mickey Gat, finding him thus on a Monday morning, was short on sympathy, the way she always was for anyone in her employment who could not work. Joe had no illusions about the profit motive and the rules of his employment, but Mickey’s attitude hurt. It was one Joe had seen, heard, felt through his skin a thousand times before, condescension from the large person to the small, the officer to the non-commissioned, the boss to the wage slave, his father to himself. The hearty slap on the back, the smile, the jeering, all of it geared to stop him from doing what he wanted to do, which was weep.

  ‘Women,’ said Mickey Gat. ‘Ungrateful, aren’t we? S’pose she’s a bit upset, is she? Did you give her that perfume or what?’ Then roared with laughter. More boxes appeared in the back room of the Spoon and Fiddle. Another huge hand landed between Joe’s shoulder blades, like a soft mallet being tapped against his spine, either as warning or solidarity, Joe did not know and could not have articulated a guess. Mickey did the dreadful business of tapping her nose. ‘Mind you behave,’ she said, roguishly, ‘while your old woman’s away.’ Dear Mickey; so much one of the boys, she had become an honorary man.

  When Mickey’s grey Jaguar had slid away, like a sleek lion after a carnivorous lunch, Joe mustered his courage, and it was then, cutting the lemon clumsily so the juice ran round his bitten finger stumps, that he screamed. Anger had exhausted itself over the first few days. He had shouted and paced round the empty flat; he had examined the boxes in the attics, gloated over them, taken comfort from their bulk, made himself drunker than a skunk, yelled out of the top window, ‘Good riddance!’ while all the time the fear gripped his ribs. Joe Boyce cannot keep a wife. Joe Boyce cannot get it up. Joe Boyce retains nothing he holds dear, not a friend or even an enemy.

  Now he sat with his head lolling, desperately sober after Mickey Gat’s bonhomie, unable to go for the bus which would take him home. Trade was slack: summer holidays. Today it felt like a personal insult, as if the drinking public at large knew what a failure he was and shunned him like a leper. Joe did not quite know if he should feel grateful for this, since, all of a sudden, Cath’s defection seemed to mean that he had something to prove. Hard men, friends of Damien Flood, do not sit around weeping for wives. He was half asleep on his feet, too immobile by far to manage a yawn, wired up, and ready to spring, a jerky mess who was dangerous to know, when in came the man he called Colonel Fogey. Half cut at five in the evening. The fact that the old colonel, if indeed he had ever borne such a rank, was never in any condition other than half cut or quarter sober, did not improve his chances because all Joe could remember was Cath ticking him off for poisoning the old boy with cocktails.

  ‘Attenshun!’ the colonel announced as he swayed through the door. Sunlight meant nothing to a man steeped in India. Or so he said. Joe looked at him with the sourness of entrenched dislike, as he sashayed towards the darkest corner, humming. ‘Shun!’ he repeated, sitting with a suddenness which clearly alarmed him. The colonel had a figure like a frog, a trembling jowl; his shirt-tails hung out slightly before and aft, his pathetic linen jacket, worn ragged over the decades, seemed to bear signs of rust, while his trousers, pleated into permanent creases, bore ominous stains around the crotch.

  ‘Beer, boy,’ said the colonel, tapping the table and looking round the empty room for an audience, raising his patrician voice. ‘Beer, old chap. Now!’

  It was some dim remembered vision of the pristine cleanliness of Cath, the way she wiped vomit off the walls and ironed his shirts, which made Joe see nothing but red. Filthy old scroat, banging the table and issuing orders. No money to spend and nothing to offer but drunken platitudes in an upper-class accent, no memories but good ones, no voice but the kind which issued orders. Joe went towards the old man, bearing a half of strong lager. Carlsberg, the alcoholics’ answer to the problem of sitting still. He poured it over the colonel. Then he crashed the glass on the edge of the table, leaving a jagged stump protruding from his fist. There was so much flesh about the colonel’s face worth the mashing. Joe’s hand trembled; he longed to plunge the glass into the smoothest part of the high dome of skin stretched over the forehead, could feel in advance the satisfying crunch of shards against such a bare expanse of bone. The colonel’s terror, enough to cause hesitation, made his flaccid belly shake. The trembling moved from his wobbly thighs to his chest and then to his hands; Joe paused, closed his eyes, unable to stop. Then a hand fell on his shoulder. Another relieved him of the glass.

  ‘Haw haw haw,’ said a voice behind his back. ‘Very funny, very funny indeed. Nearly had us all convinced, eh, old man?’

  Joe stood, helpless. A male figure emerged from nowhere, clouted the colonel round the shoulders, and bent down towards him.

  ‘A joke, sir, innit? Good, innit? Why don’t you sit out in the sun, sir? Drinks on the house.’

  Colonel Fogey was helped from his chair, led outside, his leader grabbing a towel off the bar as they went, talking all the time, like a burbling drain, not glancing back. Joe stood in a trance, looking at his own shaking fist, still seeing the lethal stump of glass. He had just about recognised Ryan, the cheerful man who had taken his statement all those weeks ago, fucking copper, nice enough, not that nice. His brain, shocked by the wash of violence, began to reel when he realised what he might have done. He registered the sudden sunlight streaming through the door, the presence of the other man, the sound of the colonel outside, giggling like the child Joe had met this morning, and a voice with a clean mint smell, familiar, without being bossy.

  ‘How do I get the man a drink, guv? And another towel, if you would.’ There was a pause in which he found himself responding, thrusting five towels towards Ryan’s clean breath, holding a glass beneath the optic which poured whisky in singles, doubles and trebles. Whisky was the colonel’s favourite whenever his pension allowed. Joe gave him a treble.

  ‘That’s enough, ta. Great.’

  Joe watched this small-statured Boy Scout, of equal height but probably lighter than himself, whisk the glass away to the great outdoors. There was a distant murmur of traffic, nothing which threatened half as much as the imagined whisper of Mickey Gat’s Jag over the cobbles. The world was taking some time to come back into focus. He had the same desire to cry that he had felt in the early morning, when he expected to hear the discreet
rustle of Cath leaving the bed. Outside, the colonel had found a companion. There was an earnest sort of chat going on, punctuated by the old man’s dreadful guffaws. He seemed to have fully recovered. His presence outside, drying out in the sun, stinking like a brewery, would keep custom at bay for an hour.

  Ryan slid onto the stool opposite the bar with long-practised ease. Bailey had said the bill was on the house, also the taxi home. Ryan did not know the purpose of this luxury, but he might as well enjoy it. Joe swivelled his head round and reluctantly looked him in the eyes. He met nothing but a cheeky grin, sympathetic.

  ‘Pint of bitter, please,’ said Ryan, putting a note on the counter. It was clear he was not even going to press his advantage by demanding free drinks. The desire to weep was almost overpowering Joe. Not sobbing as such, simply a surfeit of tears, stored overlong and oozing out of the corner of his eyes as he pulled the pint and sat down again.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he mumbled. He did not know if Ryan would assume he was sorry about the tears or sorry about the fact that he had almost taken the old boy’s eye out.

  ‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Ryan gravely, neatly covering both possibilities. They sat in silence for a moment. Ryan looked around the neat little snug of a bar, nodding approvingly. Joe Boyce liked that too. He was proud of the Spoon and Fiddle, never liked the implication made, however obscure, that the place was a shade effete, not a proper pub with music and all the trimmings, but a sort of club-like bar for the civilised of Kensington.