Shadow Play Read online

  Helen West, trying to think of other things than the constant queasiness, dredged her memory for nicer times. Thinking of cases at 3 a.m. was reminiscent of counting sheep and often worked, but at the moment it hardly sufficed to blot out the other thoughts which had surfaced from nowhere with alarming speed. Such as where, among the clutter of her colourful possessions, she would house a baby, let alone a child? These reflections, passing through with dramatic speed, induced sensations of panic which nothing could cure, so she rose, showered and encased her hot body in cool clothes. Normality, the continuance of life as it was before, danced before her eyes like a tantalising vision.

  Helen caught sight of her face in the newsagent’s window as she waited for a bus, and that was normal, with the eyes and nose still in the same place. But she found herself standing back from the crowd, avoiding contact as if there really was something, for once, worth preserving from crush or contagion. She did not like herself much. Then she thought of Bailey as a father.

  Squashing into the seat next to her was a young woman, pale and enormous, balancing her workday bag on the rock of her pregnant abdomen against which her coat strained. Helen made more room and stared ahead. Like a person counting sheep.

  The graveyard was never closed. There was no need, despite the disturbing tendency in recent years to steal the stone angels. The late-Victorian church stood like a monument to disbelief, the small congregation rattling inside, but the graveyard took the corpses of faithful and faithless alike into soft earth which turned easily on the spade in summer. In the absence of a creed, interment in consecrated ground often appealed more than the queue at the distant crematorium. Logo could see benefits in both and did not much mind. He could clear the leaves as easily anywhere, but he found the graveyard rewarding and he liked the fact he knew so many of the recent names. There were dead flowers, souvenirs of the children from the junior school beyond the gates: and among the earliest, forgotten tombs, were Coca-Cola cans and empty cider bottles. He liked that. It added a little something to the place and confirmed his own usefulness.

  Fifty-five years old, still young in comparison to these dead with their lead-etched names on stone. Logo felt healthy. He had loved this site as long as he had known it. By eleven that morning, there was a misty sun, glowing rather than shining behind the blanket of grey sky, giving a diffuse light which created no shadows but warmed the ground. Logo always marvelled at the gravediggers, stopped to watch them now. They dug in sequence along preordained lines with little space allowed in between each grave. Raw January, post Christmas, was the busiest time of year and their method was always the same. No measurements, rulers or spirit-levels, they dug out their troughs with automatic precision and no more modern conveniences than huge, sharp shovels, but they grumbled about the frost. The earth here had been turned, freed of rubble and thus softened, but the task was still hard.

  The regular shovellers were unused to an audience: people tended to stay away, but there was the occasional macabre eccentric, Logo the least favourite. His interest bordered on the unhealthy, his jokes were vile and his habit of beginning the funeral service even while they dug was unnerving.

  ‘Asses to ashes, dust to dust. If the Lord won’t save you the devil must,’ he quipped, squatting on his haunches beside them.

  ‘Oh shut it, will you, Logo,’ said the younger man.

  ‘All right,’ said Logo. ‘I’ll sing if you insist.’ His voice passed over their heads, defeating the sound of distant traffic.

  ‘Spare oh God, thy suppliant groaning!

  Through the sinful woman shriven

  Through the dying thief forgiven,

  Thou to me a hope has given …’

  The older man turned round, raised a hand. Logo stopped his singing.

  ‘If you don’t shut it, Logo, I shan’t be able to give you a cigarette.’ He was more diplomatic than his companion.

  ‘Who’s dead this time?’ Logo asked cheerfully, accepting the bribe.

  ‘I don’t know. Why should I?’ said the gravedigger. ‘I just get the message, dig one. A new one, I mean. Which means, don’t dig up an old one to put someone in on top. Might be anyone. But I tell you, there’re bound to be two or three more in the next fortnight.’

  They never seemed to know for whom they dug, or care for whom the bell had tolled. They were as immutable as the graveyard itself where the gravestones were practically identical from one decade to the next, no innovations, no plastic, only stones the same shape as always with the same words and sentiments. The richer or the guiltier of the mourners had marble, but it all went grey in time.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Logo asked with his bird-like curiosity.

  ‘Say what?’ The gravedigger had forgotten his prognostications about local death. ‘Oh, I just know. It’s Christmas kills them. Their families, probably. Bugger off, will you!’

  Logo obeyed, not in deference to commands, but because he so wished. His boots scuffed the edge of the soft earth the diggers had displaced and he left his footprints with satisfaction. Look where I’ve been, he told himself. Look where I’ve been.

  He set off on the day’s perambulations with his trolley, the cumbersome old brute, obscurely satisfied, pausing by another grave several rows back and saluting a headstone which commemorated the death of an Angela Jones four years ago. He had known Angela, nice woman from Legard Street, died of cancer you know, a shame, and her only ninety-four, the bane of her relatives who had moved to another city to get away. Logo chuckled, oh, he felt youthful today. From beyond the road at the left gate, he heard children going to school, the end of the Christmas holidays signalled by their shrieks and yells. Logo sat on the grave nearest the gate. He felt for the Bible in his pocket, but did not take it out, determined to stay still until they had all gone indoors. He quoted, out of context, the way he always did, those chunks of the Bible which stuck in his head without rhyme or reason. Logo took no lessons from the Bible, only told himself he did, but isolated verses were merged and burned into his mind.

  ‘“I will send wild beasts among you,”’ he droned quietly, ‘“which will rob you of your children, and your highways shall be desolate. And the flesh of your daughters shall you eat. And the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase you, and you shall flee as fleeing from a sword, and you shall fall where none pursueth.”’

  As the sun rose further, an effortful sun only waiting to retire without grace by midday, and the clock in the magistrates’ court showed ten-thirty, John Riley, Junior Crown Prosecutor and new to the game, rose to his feet, his small height almost obscured by the pile of paper in front of him. He had command of the daily list of the drunks and disorderlies, those soliciting on Seven Sisters, those burgling the night before, and all those remands postponed from previous dates for the preparation of papers and defences before a full hearing in either the magistrates’ or the Crown Court. John waded through, bobbing up and down as the occasion demanded, gathering confidence as he went. The magistrate was fierce: speed by advocates was the only attribute rewarded by a grim nod and the sort of smile imposed on a corpse by a mortician. Finally, they had dispensed with all the two-minute appearances. ‘Drunk, Your Honour, shouting and screaming, fourth offence in six months.’ ‘Anything to say?’ ‘Nothing, Your Honour.’ ‘Ten pounds or a day, take him down. Next? Get on with it, Mr Riley, get on with it.’ The Clerk of the Court, second only to God, shuffled to signify a pause.

  ‘Mr Balchin next,’ she said sweetly. John felt for the next volume. Balchin, the name rang no bells even on the inner ear. His hands dug through the remaining four files, no Balchin. ‘Where’s Balchin?’ yelled the magistrate to whom delay was a mortal sin. Balchin stood in the dock, a smart businessman in a shirt which gleamed through a sober suit below a face of fleshy success. ‘Trial adjourned until today from December, plea not guilty to driving with excess alcohol?’ said the clerk, questioningly. Balchin nodded, anxious, but presentable. All eyes fell on the prosecutor, waiting for him to begin as he
rose to his feet with all the steadiness of the drunks earlier in the list.

  ‘I don’t seem to have any papers,’ he said lamely. ‘May I seek an adjournment? We don’t have the witnesses—’

  ‘I object to that,’ said the defendant mildly.

  ‘So do I,’ said the magistrate. ‘Mr Balchin’s third appearance in this court and the Crown Prosecution Service still not ready? How often do you want him to come back, Mr Riley, hmmmm? Case dismissed. Next.’

  John sat, flaming red, scrambling for the next file and the chance to redeem himself. It was twelve o’clock and the day was suddenly long. Mr Balchin, businessman, left the court house and raised his eyes to the sun in quiet thanksgiving. Then he walked round the corner to his parked BMW, patted the shining roof in reverence and climbed in, to return to his business which so depended on his ability to drive. God had been good today. It was worth the thirty pieces of silver which had changed hands.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Pregnant and happy? Fine …’

  The advertisement Helen and a million others saw daily on the Underground, showed a late-teenage girl with a curtain of perfect hair falling across a pensive face of model proportions. Her elegant neck was dressed with a single line of pearls. A well-manicured finger rested on her white teeth in a gesture of coy indecision, as if trying to decide which chocolate to pick next, like a princess merely troubled by too much choice and a heavy night sleeping on a pea. ‘Pregnant and happy?’ said the advert. ‘If not …’ Beneath this there was the telephone number and address of a clinic. The urine sample burning a hole in Helen’s handbag had been decanted into a miniature whisky bottle for lack of any other receptacle. She did not know which embarrassed her most.

  Standing in line on the escalator first thing on a crowded morning, she passed the serene face on the poster and felt a strong desire to rip it, but she was borne onwards and upwards to the air of Oxford Circus. She did not trust the pharmacist’s pregnancy kit and did not like doctors. This was also the first time in her life she could recall responding so directly to an advertisement and that was irritating, too. Although the nausea had faded after thirty-six hours, it had been replaced by a kind of grim elation.

  The cold was muffled by the crowd who swayed away from the fetid warmth of the Underground, filtering through cars and the buses which disgorged even more people into the shops. On a day like this, Helen hated to leave the claustrophobic but volcanic warmth of the Tube.

  The women she noticed most were those with the smoothest faces, en route to the make-up counters to sell promises through the medium of their flawlessly counterfeit cheeks. Her own face was comparatively bleak, but she was jauntily dressed in a scarlet jacket, tight black trousers, red shoes and a scarf of vivid stripes. Helen West, supporting her own team.

  The family non-planning clinic was above other premises in the wide backwaters where the huge department stores gave way to the environs of Harley Street, with its shops full of medical supplies, private dentists and wholesale pharmacists scattered among esoteric restaurants and the head offices of the rag trade. The plate-glass windows of one of these flanked the nondescript door at the side, which led in turn up four flights of ever narrowing stairs past small, locked offices on each floor. The air grew cooler, more rarefied and, as she turned the last bend, developed into an antiseptic smell of cleaning fluid rather than medicine. Worn carpet, an electric heater and mismatched chairs in the waiting-room said the rest. None of the other three women, perched on these uncomfortable chairs and staring at the surrounding walls, resembled the princess on the poster who had drawn them there. Least of all Rose Darvey, sitting apart, in a state of defiant misery, chewing her pigtail.

  They were the last people each could have borne to see on the opposite side of the road, let alone a place like this. The hostile nature of their surprise was felt even by the other two girls who waited, booted, spurred and disguised for some verdict on their lives. Helen had the feeling she was old enough to be everyone’s mother. Rose looked away in disgust while Helen presented her fee and the whisky bottle to a receptionist whose drabness belied a personality ecstatic with bonhomie and a whispering voice of solicitude. Rose spied the label on Helen’s bottle; stress, worry, the million reflections which were steaming through her head at a hundred miles an hour, all emerged through her mouth in a great, barking laugh which turned abruptly into a cough, then a series of violent coughs which almost brought her to her feet in her effort to breathe, before she slumped back in the chair and slid further down on the polished seat, still gasping. Helen took the empty chair next to her. There was no need for explanations: all that was obvious.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Rose. She looked as if the giggles of tension would consume her. ‘Something I ate. Swallowed the wrong way.’

  ‘Swallowed? I bet you wish you had,’ Helen murmured.

  Rose’s coughing resumed a new note of yelping. This time she put her hand over her mouth and leant forward as the coughs slowly came under control. Helen patted her back, with a balled fist to take out of this stray solicitude any hint of intimacy. She stopped as soon as Rose sat upright.

  ‘Keep that up, will you, and you won’t need anything else. You’ll give birth on the floor. Twins,’ said Helen helpfully. Suddenly the whole situation was ludicrously funny. It couldn’t have been worse if she’d sat in line with the wife of a lover.

  Rose was off again. ‘What a game,’ she gasped between breaths. ‘What a game. A whisky bottle, I ask you. I bloody ask you. Miss bloody West.’

  Helen’s expression became severe. ‘Well I didn’t drink it, he did. Present from Malaga, that little bottle. What do you think I am? Cheap?’

  They were suddenly doubled up in their scarves, snorting and laughing like schoolgirls in church.

  ‘Ms Darvey!’ The receptionist called Rose’s name, suddenly officious.

  ‘Christ,’ muttered Rose. ‘Oh God, this is it. What shall I do?’ She looked desolate, childlike as she began to stand wrapping her coat around her, wanting to delay, drawing a deep and painful breath.

  ‘Listen …’ she said, and paused.

  ‘Listen,’ said Helen, ‘when you’ve finished, will you wait for me? Please?’ Rose nodded, her eyes turning towards the glazed-glass door of the other room, to the received wisdom, the result of the test, the possible kindness and advice. It looked, she said later, like the entrance to an old-fashioned lavatory. She went like a prisoner to the gallows, turned at the door, pulled a face and waved.

  Helen wanted to weep, on both their accounts.

  Sitting inside a small cubicle with a counsellor, listening to the murmur of other voices, Helen found the need to weep became an actuality positively encouraged by the woman who told her with a no-nonsense sweetness that she was not pregnant, not this time and what was her reaction to that? Time marched on, did it not, and if she had not wanted this crisis, had she considered more effective means of birth control? She found herself accused somehow, of a lack of self-respect, an indigence about her own life, a laxity of purpose, a constant ambivalence. Or so she took it to be, having levelled these same accusations at herself over the last two days with all the sure-firing action of a rifle. Mixed in with that was relief (life could now, after all, go on as before), and a grief of such proportion it made her speechless, nodding and smiling and saying, thank you, thank you, you’ve been very kind, but let me out to smash things and scream and speak to someone else. For the five terrible minutes of the interview and the passing over of leaflets and wishes of good luck, Helen forgot Rose Darvey, but that was only temporary, because what she most wanted was to think of someone else, anyone else.

  Waiting in the foyer with ill-concealed impatience and a smile on her face which could have lit a coastline, Rose gripped Helen by the arm and propelled her to the door.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of this place. It smells.’ Rose led a race downstairs, making in her progress the maximum noise, saying nothing until they reached the pavement, where she leapt a
cross the threshold, flung her arms in the air and yelled, ‘Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah!’

  ‘Does that mean you are?’ asked Helen, her own responses dulling her perception of this display. Rose stopped and laughed out loud.

  ‘Pregnant? Course it doesn’t. It means I got it wrong and I’m not, I’m not, I’m not! God, I feel better. Christ, you’ve no idea what it’s been like, awful, thought I’d die … you’ve no idea …’ Then she stopped, looked at Helen apologetically, still unable to suppress her own smile, and her expression of dawning comprehension. ‘What am I talking about?’ she said. ‘Of course you know. I mean, you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know. Sorry. Only I never imagined …’

  ‘That someone my age had a sex life?’ Helen suddenly found herself able to laugh. Rose’s state of joyous liberation was infectious: there was something oddly comforting about her present embarrassment and an overpowering desire to talk.

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that, not really—’

  ‘Yes you did. Are you going back to work, or are we both playing hookey?’ Helen asked. ‘Only I want a pint of coffee, and then I’ll tell you the story of my life if you aren’t careful. Come on.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a coffee,’ said Rose magnanimously, hugging herself.

  ‘Too right you will. You owe me an apology, but if we can find a bottle of wine, I’d rather have one of those.’

  ‘I know where,’ said Rose, tapping the side of her nose in mock wisdom. ‘Follow Rose. God!’ she shouted again. ‘God, I feel great!’