Angela thought that Veronica’s Cafe would be a safe place for her to meet Christopher at lunchtime. Gregory never went near the east end of the city. She arrived there first and was glad because it gave her time to do her hair and make-up in the squalid lavatory next to the kitchen. Christopher was there, sitting at a table furthest from the window, when she came out. The dog was already asleep at his feet. He looked up and saw her and raised his arm as though she was not five steps away, but was instead approaching him from the end of a long road. They had to touch each other. He helped her to take her coat off but, instead of hanging it up on a peg on the wall near by, he laid it across the table and they held hands beneath it for a while before Angela removed it and hung it over the back of her chair. She looked around. The café didn’t look so bad today. Nothing had changed physically: but Angela saw it now with the eyes of a duplicitous woman. The grimy surfaces and the bad food spoke to her now of human fallibility.
Christopher gazed at her lovely face, and pushed back a strand of hair that had attached itself to the corner of her mouth. It was another excuse to touch her. He wanted her again. He wanted her back in his bed. He told her this.
“I want you as well,” she said. She remembered his morning face as his semen pumped inside her. He had opened his eyes and told her to open hers, and they had held their gaze until he was empty, and she was full of him.
She was wearing a pink silk scarf at her neck. He touched it and said, “I didn’t notice that scarf this morning. It’s lovely.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I bought it on the way here. It’s a Hermes copy.”
“I’ll buy you a real Hermes scarf one day,” he said. “We’ll go to Paris, on the Eurostar.”
He asked what she wanted to eat, but she shook her head and said, “I can’t eat, Chris; I’ve had nothing since yesterday morning.”
It was true. She felt bloated with love. There was no room for food.
She watched him when he went to the counter to order his own food. Whilst he waited for the café woman with the lank hair to remove a wire basket full of pale chips from the deep-fat frier, he turned to look at Angela and smiled and mimed drinking a cup of tea. She nodded and he turned around and gave the woman his order. As he started back to the table he saw Tamara, Storme’s mother, come into the café with her arm around a man of his own age. The man was dabbing at his eyes with a tissue. He heard Tamara’s loud whisper, “Don’t, Dad,” and the man’s reply, “I can’t help it, sorry.”
Tamara steered her father to the table next to Angela and Christopher, and seated him gently. He turned his back away from them and blew his nose loudly. It wasn’t until Christopher said hello to her that Tamara recognised him as the man who’d bought Storme the red boots and the snowsuit. He was sitting with a fat woman with black shiny hair and red lipstick. Tamara said hello back to him and turned to her dad, who was folding the tissue into a neat square before putting it into one of his trouser pockets. She was glad her dad had stopped crying. It was a terrible thing to see and hear. It made her feel as if blackness was going to cover the earth.
“Shall I get you a cup of tea?”
Ken didn’t trust himself to speak. He’d need a couple of minutes. He shook his head. What he wanted, needed, was the compassionate bite of alcohol at the back of his throat. He’d have a pint of mild first, and follow it with a treble Johnnie Walker. He needed to forget what he had seen at the hospital, and the shame he had felt when his daughter had been ordered away from Storme’s bedside by Mr Parker-Wright.
“Will you come to the police station with me, Dad?”
Ken nodded. He’d have to try and walk that dividing line between drunkenness and apparent sobriety. It was going to be difficult: Tamara’s appointment with PC Billings was at four o’clock which left him three hours’ drinking time. He could throw a lot down his neck in three hours. He’d have to take it steady: pace himself. He lit two cigarettes and passed one to Tamara.
“You’d better go home and do yourself up,” he said. “You look bleddy awful.”
He was ashamed to be sitting with her, looking like she did.
“I can’t go home,” said Tamara. “And anyway I’ve got nothing else to put on.” Cath had kept her looking like a little princess. They called her their pink princess, because it was the only colour she would wear. Now she only wore black.
There were photograph albums in the unit in his living room that showed they’d brought her up properly. There was page after page of Tamara looking clean and healthy and happy, smiling delightedly into the camera. Her pink dresses always ironed, her long blonde hair plaited or bunched, or flowing over her shoulders. Her white socks turned at the ankle. He couldn’t reconcile that pretty little girl with the pasty-faced young woman who sat opposite him now. He would never understand why she’d dyed her beautiful hair black and shaved most of it off. He watched her picking at the loose threads in her black sweater, then he took his wallet out and pulled two twenty-pound notes from the compartment inside. He passed them to Tamara and said, “Here, go and buy something. I’m not going to the police station with you looking like that.”
From inside another plastic compartment of the wallet Cath’s photograph stared up at him. A first-class stamp obscured part of her face. Ken pushed the stamp aside and looked at Cath. She’d not been a pretty woman, but she’d been a lovely wife. There was no point in looking for a replacement. It was just a matter of getting through the rest of his days without her.
Christopher had seen Ken pass the money to Tamara and was pleased. He would have been a generous father himself, he thought; a soft touch.
“How’s your little girl?” he asked Tamara. He couldn’t bring himself to say Storme’s ridiculous name. She didn’t answer, but instead looked at her father as though asking for permission before replying. Christopher noticed her discomfiture and said, awkwardly, “Does she still like her red boots?”
Tamara said, “She’s in the hospital,” and indicated the building over the road where the lighted windows of the wards could be seen vividly through the dark light caused by the cambered snow clouds above. “She fell out of her cot.”
Angela saw the shock on Christopher’s face and turned around to take a proper look at this girl who was apparently a mother, but had the voice of a child. When Tamara eventually disclosed the extent of Storme’s injuries Christopher half rose to his feet. His body needed to move. Angela put a restraining hand on his arm and he sat down at once. He remembered Storme walking proudly in her new boots. Angela was bewildered by this girl’s passionless account of the accident to her baby.
“She was told not to do it. I told her, and her dad told her, but she kept doing it, climbing out. Then she must have just—fell.”
Angela said, “On to a bare floor?”
“No, there’s a carpet,” said Ken.
Blood was thicker than water. What had their family business got to do with these strangers?
“And this fall fractured her skull and ruptured her spleen?” Christopher asked.
Tamara looked away.
“She must have landed funny,” said Ken.
He clasped his hands together. He was trembling for a drink.
The café woman shouted from the serving hatch that Christopher’s ham salad and chips were ready. But it was Angela who got up to collect it. She wanted to do things for him. She made a second journey to collect their cups of tea and then a third to collect paper napkins and cutlery and salt and pepper. She arranged everything in front of him as though she were making preparations for a simple religious ceremony. She wanted him to know that she worshipped him.
She was pleased to see that the girl and her father were preparing to leave. She resented the interruption they had caused to the short time she and Christopher had together. As Tamara and Ken got up to leave, Christopher said, “I’ll be thinking about her.”
When they were outside on the icy pavement, Ken said, “Who’s he?”
Tamara said, “Just a bloke,” and she took her father’s arm. He looked unsteady on his feet.
♦
Angela watched Christopher eating. She loved the neat way he cut his food up and forked it into his mouth. She bent down and stroked the sinuous back of the dog and it woke and pushed its muzzle into her hand. “I love your dog,” she said.
“We’ll go and see the baby when I’ve finished this,” he said, looking over at the hospital.
“I can’t go,” she said. “I’ve got to go back to work. And they won’t let you see her will they? You’re not family are you?”
“I just want to see her,” he said, stubbornly. “Come with me, Angie.”
They were careful to keep a distance between them as they crossed the road together. Nobody seeing them would have known that they were lovers. When they drew near to the entrance of the hospital Angela looked at her watch and said, “I’ll be late for work if I don’t go now.” He pleaded with her to accompany him. Helplessly she agreed. He tied the dog’s lead to the icy iron railings surrounding a small frosty garden and they went inside.
At the main reception he gave the little information he knew about Storme and after a short wait they were told that Storme was on the seventh floor, in Paediatric Intensive Care. Angela was relieved. There was no possibility of visiting anyone there. If she started back now she wouldn’t be late for work. But Christopher walked towards the lifts and pressed the button for the seventh floor.
“You can’t!” she said.
“Please, Angie, come with me,” he said.
The lift was empty, and he took her in his arms as soon as the doors shut. When they opened again he said, “Just look as if you know where you’re going.”
There was nobody at the nurses’ station at the entrance to the ward. Nobody came to answer the ringing telephone.
Christopher soon found Storme. He stood looking through the glass at her, and at the nurses who were threading a plastic tube inside her nose.
Angela looked for a moment, then turned her head away and went back to the lift to wait for him. Catherine came and stood at her side. As usual, she was immaculately groomed. Her school uniform looked brand new.
“I might be a doctor, Mum,” she said. “I’ll need three good science A levels and one in English. What do you think?” Her voice was melodious, like an angel’s.
“You can do anything; you’re the cleverest girl I know,” said Angela. Then she said, “You didn’t come to see me yesterday.”
Catherine laughed, “You were busy, Mum, with Dad.”
Angela asked her, “Are you pleased about me and Dad getting together again?”
Catherine kissed the top of her mother’s head and said, “Of course, it’s great to have two parents.”
Angela said, “You’re a wonderful, perfect daughter.”
♦
Angela and Christopher stood in the lift in silence for a while. Suddenly he took her hand and said, “You’ve got to tell me about the day you killed our baby.”
Angela hit him hard across his face with the flat of her right hand. The lift stopped on the third floor and a porter pushing an old man in a wheelchair, got in. The old man looked at Christopher and Angela and passed a hand over the grey stubble on his face.
“I need a shave,” he said apologetically.
♦
Angela didn’t wait for Christopher while he untied the dog from the railings but he soon caught up with her. He said, “Call in at my house tonight Angie. Please.” Her face was closed in. She wouldn’t look at him. He dropped back ten paces, and walked all the way behind her, only leaving her when he saw that she was safely inside Heavenly Holidays.