15

‘I missed the birthday cake,’ says Hamish, coming into the tea room. ‘Why did no one tell me? Where is everyone?’

‘Gone,’ says Gemma, happily. ‘Victor went off with Janice and Wendy. Wendy has a boy-friend now. Fancy that!’

‘And that leaves Elsa with us.’ Hamish cut himself a slice of birthday cake. ‘I hope you sang Happy Birthday.’

‘Of course.’

‘What a delightful cake. You must let Gemma teach you to cook, Elsa.’

Elsa looks from Hamish to Gemma. A little seed of anger roots, sprouts, swells, driving out grief.

‘I hope he didn’t take the library ladder,’ says Hamish.

‘I’m afraid he did.’

‘A man of direct action,’ says Hamish sadly. ‘One has to admire it.’

‘You’ll instruct your solicitors?’

‘Of course.’

‘They’re better than his?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Good. I’m afraid he hasn’t behaved very well to Elsa. Her prince turned out to be a positive toad. Didn’t he, Elsa?’

Still Elsa does not reply.

‘Sit down quietly, Hamish. I’m just finishing my story. Of how I met you, my dear.’

‘I hope it’s true.’

‘It will do.’

And Gemma continues.

While Mr Fox pursued Gemma with his lacy axe, Marion went in search of help. She rang her father at his office. ‘Dad! It’s Marion. Mr Fox is murdering Gemma.’

‘Speak to your mother.’ Marion’s dad handed his wife the telephone. Mrs Ramsbottle often visited her husband’s office: together they would tour travel agents, in search of new brochures.

‘Mum, Mr Fox is going to murder Gemma.’

‘You naughty girl! You’ll be in prison for libel if you go on like this.’

But something stirred in Marion’s mum’s mind. Floating on top of the scented blue water in the toilet bowl this morning – what? Flush, and flush, but still it floated. Hideous, horrible, this vindication of their daughter.

Marion’s mum and dad came round in a taxi, and at the bottom of the Fox and First building found an agitated Mr First trying to summon the lift, with Marion beside him.

‘He’s left the lift doors open,’ said Marion. ‘He sometimes does that. As a joke.’

‘No joke,’ said Mr First. ‘He was in no joking mood. Such genius! Such tragedy! We’ll have to walk. Quick, quick!’

So while Mr Fox raised his lacy axe above poor Gemma’s head, and she lay helpless, rescue was on its way.

Up and up; round and round. Would it come in time? Or if it came, would it be effective? Could the imperfect unison of such imperfect parts – Mr First, Marion, Marion’s mum and dad – contain sufficient goodness to combat Mr Fox’s concentrated villainy?

Up and up. Round and round.

‘Just one more flight,’ begged Mr First, bringing up the rear.

‘I’m afraid she’s in great danger. I never thought, never dreamt –’ but he needs all this breath to make his thin legs work: and Marion’s mother, likewise, to make her fat ones move.

‘Like being back in the Dolomites,’ she panted. ‘Just the same feeling in the back of the legs. It will be hell tomorrow. Why are you going so fast, Mr First? He’s not really going to murder her, is he? It’s just Marion and her tales again. Such a nice man, Mr Fox. Always such a charming smile and such clean teeth. You ought to clean your teeth more, Marion, you might have more success with the boys.’

‘I clean them twice a day, mum. I can hardly take a toothbrush to the office.’

‘I’m sure Gemma does.’

‘Well, look at Gemma now!’

Look indeed.

Down came the axe on the third finger of Gemma’s left hand: she had been quite right; never again would the hand be fit for the ordinary tasks of everyday life.

It hardly hurt; it hardly bled. Mr Fox removed the rings, slipped them on his own fingers. How easily they fitted; lubricated as they were by blood.

‘You see,’ he cried. ‘A nice slim finger! If I put on a pound in weight I go for a week to the gym and lose five. That’s self-discipline, Gemma. You should have developed it. Now as to the neck, that may be more difficult!’

He bent to investigate the golden collar: but his fingers travelled down her body, exploring. Gemma fainted, and just as well. She had some memory, afterwards, of a sudden personal pain, felt as the loss of her finger still was not, but likewise hazed by shock; and of looking up and seeing Mr Fox’s eyes above her, close and far, close and far, red and narrow with the exercise of his lust, or love, or whatever it was: and in her own heart, her own body welling up, the ineradicable stubborness of love, so that she cried out aloud, from fear and joy, pain and pleasure mixed.

Now die, Gemma. That’s all. That’s enough. That’s what it was all about.

‘Up you go!’ cried Marion’s dad, pushing his wife from behind. ‘Let’s just hurry, shall we? Let’s be on the safe side! I, too, found a human finger floating in the loo this morning. You could flush the flush but it wouldn’t go down. You know what some objects are like – something to do with specific density, I believe. I didn’t like to tell you then, but I’m telling you now. Come on, old dear. Pretend you’re in an avalanche run and it’s just begun to snow –’

And the noisy, clattery, ridiculous party arrived on the landing, to find the fire door locked and entrance to the Fox and First showrooms barred.

‘We keep it locked,’ said Mr First faintly, ‘in case of burglars.’

‘I don’t want to go in,’ shrieked poor Marion. ‘I don’t want to see. Don’t you understand everybody, I’ve had enough?’

But they didn’t, couldn’t, never would understand.

‘The neck will have to go,’ said Mr Fox. ‘No other way. Sorry about that. I was carried away.’

Marion’s father opened the little leather case – bought in the Algarve – which he referred to jokingly as his ‘in case case’ and took out a bent piece of wire and a plastic plaque with which he quickly and simply picked the lock.

The wind blew in through the shattered glass and fluffed the tail of the dead seagull, and spattered water from the fountain across Gemma’s face.

Mr Fox stayed his hand; and withheld the axe while he admired the effect.

‘The fountain plays a rainbow of grief across your face, poor Gemma. If I could only make a necklace of your tears, or of my own –’

Mr Fox laid down his axe and knelt beside Gemma’s unconscious form; he tried, indeed he did, to find another way of removing the collar without cutting the neck, and it is to his credit that he did so. But finding none, he again picked up the axe –

‘None of that rough stuff,’ said Marion’s father, behind Mr Fox’s back, and Mr Fox turned, and paled, and his hand sank down, and Mr First removed the axe, while Marion and her mother hurried to Gemma’s side.

‘My dear Gemma,’ said Mr First, distraught. ‘I told you not to leave your desk. I knew that staircase was a deathtrap. Now see what you’ve done! And Leon, is there no controlling you?’

Gemma moaned, and stirred, and moaned again, feeling pain now, in her back and in her finger.

‘I can’t move,’ said Gemma, and so it seemed.

‘I must ring the police,’ said Mr First. ‘You understand that, Leon?’

‘I understand very well. The barbarian hordes have arrived. The package tourists. It is time for me to depart. You won’t have a business left, you know that. You can’t survive without me. It’s the end of Fox and First.’

‘It’s the end anyhow,’ said Mr First. ‘We couldn’t really have mass produced that ring. There isn’t a market for it. Ordinary people remain respectable as they ever did: all this is surface froth. The bottom’s dropping out of the erotic jewellery market. After the surge, the recession. Time I was getting out of Carnaby Street and into something more serious. More natural. There’s going to be a swing back to wholesomeness, mark my words.’

‘Then ring the police,’ said Mr Fox. ‘Let them come for me with dogs and sirens. I wish I could hang. A glorious barbarity! But even that is not allowed. Now begins the whole dreary business of paper mugs and instant coffee, probation officers, head-shrinkers, social workers, open prisons, and the smell of boiled cabbage for ever and ever – I knew it would come to it in the end.’

Mr First rang the police. Mr Fox peered at Gemma.

‘You are a silly girl, Gemma. There was no need to run away. I was only joking. We could have been happy together. When you’d been trained, of course.’

Mr First finished his call. He raised Gemma’s head and pressed his dry lips to her soft ones. Marion cried out in grief.

‘Don’t they make a lovely picture!’ said Marion’s mum, head on one side. ‘Gemma and her millionaire. It’s what she deserves, I’m sure.’

Gemma’s cool, sad voice stops.

‘Have you finished?’ enquires Hamish, coldly.

Elsa, looking through the french windows, can see the small figures of Johnnie and Annie clearing the debris of the front gate, as of the manner born. Annie sweeps with a wide broom, patiently. Johnnie raises the splintered blocks and beams shoulder high and tosses them to the side of the drive. The weight is as illusory as that of the chunks of foam and balsa that bounce upon the crowds in films of earthquake and tornado.

Goodbye, Victor. Shattering barriers which scarcely existed, in the final impulse of familial generosity.

‘And that’s the end?’ asks Elsa, brightly, bravely.

‘Not quite,’ says Gemma, fingering her pendant. ‘When I woke in the ambulance Hamish was sitting next to me. He asked me to marry him and I said yes. Well, for a girl without working legs and a ring finger missing, who’d just been raped, it seemed a good offer. As good as any I was likely to get.’

Hamish’s grey face is greyer yet with pain. I could make him happy, thinks Elsa, but I could never make him suffer. What good am I to him? To anyone?

Hamish reaches forward and tugs the pendant out of Gemma’s fingers.

‘Horrible cheap thing,’ he says. ‘Why do you wear it? You only do it to annoy.’

He uses so much force that the chain cuts into Gemma’s neck; she cries out in pain and anger; the chain snaps. The pendant falls.

‘See what you’ve done?’ she weeps. ‘My mother’s pendant.’

‘Don’t believe a word Gemma says, Elsa,’ says Hamish. ‘The only truth in it all is that she came down to London as a young girl and got a job modelling jewellery at Fox and First. Mr Fox was a homosexual, and later did his boy-friend to death in a rather horrible way and had to be restrained in Broadmoor, which played on my poor wife’s mind. And my unfortunate sister fell accidentally from the window: and it’s true the other typist, Marion, was somewhat disturbed and stole one of the rings. We did not press charges. And that’s all.’

‘But my finger! How do you explain my poor hand?’

‘You caught your finger in the lift door. It had to be amputated. I proposed to you in the ambulance: so much is true. You loved me then: we loved each other. The present is bad enough, without you blackening our past as well.’

‘And my legs? What about my legs?’

‘The paralysis started later, on the day we were married. You fell on the steps of the Register Office, after the ceremony. You have not walked since. There is no organic damage, the doctors say. Only an emotional disturbance for which you will accept no treatment.’

Gemma cries, head in hands, nine-fingered. How old she seems! As fantasy drains from her veins, decay creeps in.

‘One story or another, Hamish,’ she says, ‘what’s the difference? It is all the same. It’s the one-way journey we all make from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience. We must all make it: there is no escape. It’s only that love and romance and illusion and hope are etched so deeply into all our hearts that they can never quite be wiped away. They stay about to torment us, with thoughts of what might have been. For you, as well as me. We are fallen creatures: we never quite lose sight of grace, and the pain of our fall is always with us.’

‘I didn’t do the typing, Gemma,’ says Elsa, into the silence. ‘Hamish did it.’

Gemma turns her old and spiteful eyes upon her husband.

‘You have such a humble heart,’ she says. ‘How you wish to be of service! It’s what I most despise in you.’ Hamish says nothing. How haggard Gemma looks, and malevolent. A witch!

‘You deserved to lose Victor,’ says Gemma to Elsa. ‘Little liar, little slut.’

‘I know,’ says Elsa.

‘You had no right to him in the first place. You’re just a bit-part player in other people’s dramas. You’ll never amount to anything else. Do you realise that?’

‘Yes,’ says Elsa.

‘I lost Mr Fox and all my future too, whoever he was and however I did it: it’s all the same. This is a living death I have here in this chair. And don’t think that because others are worse off than me, that’s any comfort. It’s not.’

Gemma, you should have died when your mother did. Great-Aunt May, you should have let Gemma go: not nursed her through her infant illnesses; saved her against a rainy day.

What good did it do you in the end? You died lonely, and were buried alone.

That’s why you did it. Yes, you did. Had no child of your own: so stole your sister’s daughter’s child.

Back and back through the generations goes the good and evil in us. Proliferating, as the peoples of the world increase, raising the banners of their struggle high.

‘Never mind,’ says Gemma softly, to Elsa. ‘Sit here beside me in the sun and we’ll look through Harrod’s baby-linen catalogue, and choose the nursery furniture. Hamish will find it a sixteenth-century rattle. Won’t you, Hamish.’

‘If that’s what you want, Gemma.’ Hamish sits, mournful and depressed, his energy evaporated.

‘Gemma,’ says Elsa tentatively, ‘we don’t even know if it’s conceived, yet.’

‘Then you will stay at Hamish’s side, in Hamish’s bed, until it is. We will rear your child, Elsa, as the living evidence of the renewal of grace.’

‘But what about me?’

‘You? You can go back to your typing pool or wherever you’re happy, six weeks after the birth.’

Gemma stops talking. Elsa stands beside her chair, like some living puppet. Her mouth gapes wide.

But Gemma frowns, and now seems to address herself.

‘What are you saying?’ she asks, and her face is contorted, and an old lady croak comes out of her mouth to match her old lady face. ‘You’re being very naughty, Gemma.’

Great-Aunt May’s words, Great-Aunt May’s voice. Great-Aunt May perhaps. Hamish is on his feet, startled. But it is to Elsa he goes, not Gemma, as if he were afraid the spell might break and she might escape. He clutches her upper arm in his hand. Later she is to find bruises upon it. But Elsa shakes him off, disdainfully and easily, and gives him a quick look, and sees nothing more than a sad old man with strong fingers, a lecherous eye, and a failing prostate gland. She looks at Gemma and sees an old lady in a wheelchair.

‘Run, Elsa, run,’ says Gemma in her new, old, cracked voice, herself transcended. ‘The door’s open. Just run. Please run.’

Elsa, mesmerised, backs towards the french windows, fumbles with her foot by the sill, finds it, steps down. The sun strikes low over the horizon, large and red.

‘Run!’ cries Gemma once more, and her voice is her own again, light and hopeful. It is the voice her mother gave her, and which Aunt May preserved. ‘Run, Elsa! Run for all you’re worth. Don’t fall. Please don’t fall, the way I did. You can do it: go so far and then draw back. I know you can. You must! You must run for me and all of us.’

And Elsa runs, though whether for herself or Gemma she is not quite sure. She runs towards the splintered gate: stops to unlace her platform heels, and then runs on: her head spins, her side aches.

‘Stop her!’ calls Hamish from the terrace. ‘Annie and Johnnie! Stop thief!’

What is it I have stolen, wonders Elsa. His child, his heir, his vision of himself? His hope for a different future?

Annie and Johnnie stand together, arms akimbo, in the gateway. Still Elsa runs. She trips; she falls: she is at their very feet. She cries out in pain, gasps her distress. Johnnie raises the broom as if to belabour her, punish her, but Annie bends and takes Elsa’s arm, and helps her up, pushes her husband aside.

‘Run along, Missie. Quick,’ she says. ‘Out of here!’

But Elsa, standing again without breath to move, turns and stares back at Gemma and Hamish, and what she sees is etched forever in her mind.

Gemma is on her feet, out of her chair. She is reaching, craning, walking forward. She is unsteady, but she is over the step and on to the terrace and past Hamish, as if she too would, could, might perhaps somehow reach the gate and freedom. Annie and Johnnie run back towards Gemma. But she shakes her head: she needs no help from them. She turns back to Hamish instead, and takes his arm, and stands swaying beside him.

Gemma laughs. Gemma walks, on her husband’s arm. One step forward, one step back. Collapse. Then up again, off again. Gemma smiles her triumph; he smiles his. They are each other’s child: they do not need Elsa’s. Never did.

Gemma and Hamish walk side by side back into the house. Annie and Johnnie follow.

Elsa, forgotten, turns away and limps out of the gate. She has stubbed her toe and scraped her arm in falling. Her feet are bare. Thorns and brambles scratch her.

Not far from the gate is a telephone box. Elsa reverses the charges and speaks to her mother: or rather, cries disconsolately down the telephone for a while, and then utters her list of complaints. She has no money, no home, no job, no friends, no Victor. It is as her mother said it would be.

‘You were quite right,’ sobs Elsa. ‘Men are beasts.’

‘I never said men were beasts,’ protests Sheila, ‘just that you were a fool. Gone back to his wife, has he?’

‘Yes. Can I come home, Mum? I’ll share with Sally and Sophie.’

‘We’re very crowded. You’ve got used to grander things.’

‘I haven’t. Honest I haven’t.’

‘You’ll have to work. I can’t have you moaning under my feet all day, eating us out of house and home, the way you used to. They’re looking for people down at market garden. Pinching out tomatoes.’

‘My fingers will get green. The smell makes me faint.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Derek keeps asking after you, you’ll be glad or sorry to hear.’

‘Derek? Who’s Derek?’ Elsa really can’t remember.

‘You were at school with him. He’s on the milk round.’

‘Oh him. The one with acne.’

Sheila sighs.

‘How are you getting back?’

‘I’ll have to hitch.’

‘Be careful.’

Oh, home, safety, peace. Eternal irritation, and eternal consolation.

Elsa walks a good half mile down the road, unkempt, barefoot, and distrait, before a garage van going in to London picks her up. She is home by half-past eleven, in time for the epilogue on television, and cocoa with her brothers and sisters.

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