Читать книгу Fallen Angel - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 15

‘Therefore for Spirits, I am so far from denying their existence, that I could easily believe, that not onely whole Countries, but particular persons, have their Tutelary and Guardian Angels.’

Religio Medici, I, 33

‘Mummy. Mummy, where are you?’

Over the intercom, Lucy’s voice sounded mechanical, like a juvenile robot’s. Without the intercom and with the doors closed, they would not have heard her because the basement was now so well soundproofed.

‘Mummy.’ The voice sharpened and rose to a wail. ‘Where are you?’

Angel dropped her napkin on the table and stood up, stretching her long white arm towards the keys on the worktop. At the door she glanced back at Eddie.

‘You sort things out in here. I’ll deal with her.’

Lucy was crying now. Eddie imagined her standing by the door or curled up in bed. She was wearing the pyjamas he had bought especially for her at Selfridges; they had red stars against a deep yellow background and in normal circumstances would suit her colouring Last night, however, Lucy had not been looking her best: by the low-wattage light of the bedside lamp, her face had been white, almost green, mouth a black, ragged hole, the puffy eyes squeezed into slits.

‘Daddy. Mummy.’

The intercom emitted a series of crackles: Angel was unlocking and opening the door to the basement.

‘Mummy. I want –’

‘You’ll see Mummy very soon.’ Angel’s voice was tinny and precise. There was a click as she closed the door behind her. ‘Now, what are you doing out of bed without your slippers?’

‘Where’s Mummy? Where am I? Where’s Daddy?’

‘Mummy and Daddy had to go away for a night or two. Don’t you remember? Eddie and I are looking after you.’ There was a pause, but Lucy did not respond. ‘I’m Angel.’

Lucy began to cry again. The intercom twisted and distorted her sorrow.

‘That’s enough, dear. I don’t want to have to get cross. Think how sad Mummy would be if she heard you’ve been naughty.’

The crying grew louder.

‘Lucy. You won’t like it if I have to get cross. Naughty children have to be punished.’

The wails continued. There was a sharp report like the crack of a whip. The crying stopped abruptly.

‘We don’t allow cry babies here, dear. You’re going to have to pull your socks up, aren’t you?’

Eddie could bear it no longer. He switched off the intercom and listened to the silence seeping into the kitchen like water flowing into a pool.

Here we all were on this overcrowded planet, Eddie thought, all members of the same species and yet each of us a mystery to everyone else. Especially Angel, who, like Churchill’s Russia, was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. For example, where did she come from? How old was she? Who was she? If she did not particularly like little girls, why did she spend so much time with them? Last but not least, why had Angel said that Lucy was special? What made Lucy different from the other three?

Nothing about Angel was straightforward. To all intents and purposes she might have been born adult less than six years before, on the March evening when Eddie met her. She came to the house in Rosington Road in answer to an advertisement which Eddie’s mother had put in the Evening Standard. The advertisement gave the name of the road but not the Graces’ name or the number of the house. Eddie’s mother said that you couldn’t be too careful, what with all the strange people roaming round the streets today.

From the start, Thelma refused to consider male applicants. ‘They’re dirty beasts. Women are tidier and cleaner.’ Eddie himself was excepted from this general view of the male sex, which confirmed his suspicion that his mother did not think him entirely masculine.

When Angel phoned, Eddie’s mother gave her the number of the house almost immediately. She liked Angel’s voice.

‘At least she speaks the Queen’s English. More than you can say for the rest of them. And she says she’s got a job. I don’t want one of those Social Security scroungers under my feet all day.’

There had been nine other calls before Angel’s, but none of them had led to an invitation to see the room. Thelma disliked the Irish, West Indians, Asians and anyone with what she termed a ‘lower class’ accent.

When the doorbell rang, Eddie and his mother were watching television in the front room.

‘She’s on time,’ Thelma commented, looking at her watch. ‘I’ll say that for her.’

Eddie went into the hall and peeped through the fish-eye lens at the person on the doorstep. He could see very little of her, because she had turned to stare at the traffic on the road; and in any case, she was wearing a long, pale mackintosh with a hood. As he opened the door she turned to face him.

She was beautiful. For an instant her perfection paralysed him. He had never seen anyone so beautiful in real life, only on television, in pictures and in films. She stared at him as though she were assessing his suitability rather than the other way round.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, Miss – ah – come in.’

There was an infinitesimal pause. Then, to his relief, she smiled and came out of the rain. Angel was about his own height, which was five feet six. She had a long, fine-boned face, the skin flawless as a child’s. Thelma, pop-eyed with suspicion, escorted her upstairs to see the spare room. Eddie lurked in the hall, listening.

‘How lovely,’ he heard Angel say. ‘And, if I may say so, how tastefully decorated.’ Her voice was self-assured, the crisp enunciation hinting at a corresponding clarity of thought.

By the time they came downstairs again the two women were chatting almost like friends. To Eddie’s amazement, he heard his mother offering hospitality.

‘We generally have a glass of sherry at this time, Miss Wharton. Perhaps you’d care to join us?’

‘That would be lovely.’

Thelma stared at Eddie, who after an awkward hiatus leapt to his feet and went to the kitchen to search for the bottle of sweet sherry which his father had opened the Christmas before last. When he returned with three assorted glasses on a tray, the women were discussing how soon Angel could move in.

‘Subject to a month’s deposit and suitable references, of course.’

‘Naturally.’ Angel opened her handbag. ‘I have a reference here from Mrs Hawley-Minton. She’s the lady who runs the agency I work for.’

‘A nursing agency?’

‘Nursery nursing, actually. Essentially it’s an agency for nannies with nursing training.’

‘Eddie,’ Thelma prompted. ‘The sherry.’

He handed round the glasses. Angel passed an envelope to Thelma, who extracted a sheet of headed paper and settled her reading glasses on her nose. Eddie and Angel sipped their sherry.

‘I see that Mrs Hawley-Minton knew your parents,’ Thelma said, her stately manner firmly to the fore.

‘Oh, yes. That’s why she took me on. She’s very careful about that sort of thing.’

Thelma peered interrogatively over her reading glasses.

‘An agency like hers is a great responsibility,’ Angel explained. ‘Particularly as children are concerned. She believes one can’t be too careful.’

‘Quite,’ said Thelma; and after a pause she added, ‘I do so agree.’ She folded the letter and handed it back to Angel. ‘Well, Miss Wharton, that seems quite satisfactory. When would you like to move in?’

In those days, Angel was always Miss Wharton. Thelma took refuge in obsolete formality. Eddie avoided calling Angel anything to her face, but sometimes at night he whispered her Christian name, Angela, trying it for size in his mouth, where it felt awkward and alien.

By and large, Angel kept to her room. She was allowed the use of the bathroom, of course, and she had her own latchkey. For a time she had all the virtues, even negative ones.

‘I’m so glad she doesn’t smoke,’ said Thelma, who had converted her former pleasure into a vice. ‘It would make the whole house smell, not just her room. But I suppose she wouldn’t, being a nurse.’

Before Angel moved in, Thelma had worried a great deal about the telephone. She had visions of Angel making unauthorized calls to Australia, of the phone ringing endlessly (a woman who looked like that was bound to have an active social life), of long conversations with girlfriends and, even worse, boyfriends.

Angel soon calmed Thelma’s fears. She rarely used the phone herself, and when she did she kept a meticulous record of the cost. Nor did she receive many incoming phone calls. Most of them were to do with her work – usually from Mrs Hawley-Minton’s agency. As the weeks went by, Thelma developed a telephonic acquaintance with Mrs Hawley-Minton.

‘They value Miss Wharton very highly,’ she reported to Eddie. ‘Mrs Hawley-Minton tells me that her clients are always asking to have her back. One of them was a real prince. His father was a king. Bulgaria, was it? He was deposed a long time ago, of course, but even so.’

Eddie envied Angel her job. He thought a good deal about her children and what she might do with them. Sometimes he tried to imagine that he was she, that he was in her clothes, in her skin, behind her eyes.

‘She’s working in Belgrave Square this week,’ Thelma would say, telling Eddie for want of anyone better to talk to. ‘He’s a Peruvian millionaire, and she’s something to do with the embassy.’ And Eddie would see dark-haired children with solemn faces and huge eyes in an attic nursery with barred windows; he would see himself looking after them and playing with them, just as Angel did.

Thelma was curious about Angel’s antecedents, and about her apparently non-existent social life. ‘If you ask me, she’s been unlucky in love. Don’t tell me a girl like that hasn’t had plenty of opportunities. I bet she has men chasing after her with their tongues hanging out every time she walks down the street.’

Thelma’s coarseness surprised Eddie, even shocked him. She had never shown that side of herself when Stanley had been alive. He noticed that the hypothetical fiancé appealed greatly to her.

‘I wonder if she was engaged, and then he was killed, and since then she’s never looked at another man.’ Thelma also had a strong sentimental streak, buried deep but liable to surface unexpectedly. ‘Perhaps he was in the army. Miss Wharton’s father was, you know.’ It transpired that Mrs Hawley-Minton’s late husband had been a brigadier, and he and Angel’s father had served together in India during the war. ‘I think both parents must be dead,’ Thelma confided. ‘She seems quite alone in the world.’

Thelma’s curiosity about Angel extended to her possessions. Angel kept her room clean and made her own bed. But Thelma retained a key, and every now and then, when Angel was out, she would unlock the door of the back bedroom and cautiously investigate her lodger’s private life.

‘I’m not being nosy. But she’s my responsibility in a way. And I have to make sure she’s not burning holes in the bedspread or leaving the fire on when she goes out.’

Eddie watched his mother on one of these incursions. He stood in the doorway of the back bedroom – a landlady’s dream: clean, tidy, smelling faintly of polish and Angel’s perfume. Thelma moved slowly round the room in a clockwise direction. She opened doors and pulled out drawers. On top of the wardrobe was a large modern suitcase.

‘Locked,’ Thelma commented, curious but not annoyed.

In the cupboard by the bed was a japanned box, and that was locked, too. ‘Probably keeps family papers in there, mementoes of her parents and her fiancé. Funny she doesn’t have any photographs of them. There’s plenty of room on the dressing table.’

‘You haven’t got any pictures of Dad,’ Eddie pointed out.

‘That’s quite different,’ Thelma wheezed, her attention elsewhere. ‘She’s got an awful lot of books, hasn’t she? I wonder if she’s actually read them.’ She peered at the spines. ‘You wouldn’t have thought she was religious, would you?’ His mother spoke the word ‘religious’ in a tone in which incredulity, pity and curiosity were finely balanced. ‘You’d never have guessed.’

Eddie noticed a bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. He ran his eyes along the row of spines and other titles leapt out at him: G. K. Chesterton’s biography of Thomas Aquinas; the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne; The Christian Faith; The Four Last Things; A Dictionary of Christian Theology; The Shield of Faith; Man, God and Prayer.

‘She doesn’t go to church,’ Thelma said, her voice doubtful. ‘I’m sure we would have noticed.’ She drifted over to the dressing table, picked up a small bottle of perfume and sniffed it. ‘Very nice.’ She put down the perfume. ‘Mind you, it should be. That stuff isn’t cheap. You could feed a family of four on the amount she spends on dolling herself up.’

Insignificant though it was, the remark lodged in Eddie’s memory. It was the first sign of a rift developing between Thelma and Angel. His mother was by nature a critical person, always willing to find fault and never satisfied with anyone or anything for long. She pursued perfection all her life and would not have known what to do if she had caught up with it.

As a mild grey spring slipped into a mild grey summer, the carping gathered strength. Thelma fired criticisms like arrows – at first one or two, every now and then, but steadily increasing in number.

As with Stanley, so with Angel: Thelma did not try to get rid of her lodger any more than she had tried to get rid of her husband. Angel’s unwillingness to take remarks in the spirit they’d been uttered infuriated Thelma. But there was nothing she could do about it – Angel wore her placidity like a suit of armour.

On a sunny morning in the middle of summer, Eddie took a cup of coffee into the garden. His mother was out of the house for once – every four weeks she went by taxi to the health centre where she had her blood pressure checked and collected her monthly ration of pills and sprays – and he felt unusually relaxed. He wandered towards the trees at the far end.

The peaceful mood was shattered when he heard the back door opening behind him. He turned. Angel came towards him, picking her way between a weed-infested flowerbed and the long grass of the lawn. Her hair was loose, and she wore a short green dress and sandals. The sun was to her right and a little behind her, casting a golden glow over her hair and throwing her face into shadow.

‘I’m not disturbing you?’

‘No.’ He shrank back towards the fence.

‘It’s such a lovely day. I couldn’t resist coming outside.’

He sipped his coffee, scalding his tongue.

‘Do you know, I saw a fox the other day.’ Angel pointed down the garden towards Carver’s. ‘It went down there. Probably into the wasteland at the back.’

‘There’s a lot of wildlife there.’

‘Shame it’s such a mess.’ She stopped beside him, and he caught a suggestion of her perfume. Her eyes swung towards the council flats. ‘Still, better a jungle than something like that.’

Eddie nodded.

After a pause, Angel went on, ‘Have you noticed the woman with the binoculars? She’s often on the balcony with the geraniums.’

Only one balcony had geraniums. It stood out starkly from its neighbours partly because of this, and partly because of its tidiness, the fresh paint on the railing and the absence of a satellite dish. No one was standing there now.

‘I think she watches birds,’ Eddie said. ‘Her name’s Mrs Reynolds.’

‘She was there just now. I was looking out of my bedroom window, and for a moment I thought she was watching you.’

‘Are you sure? Why?’

‘She was probably looking at the house. Or at next door. Perhaps there’s a bird on the roof.’ She smiled at him. ‘In any case, even if she was looking at you, I wouldn’t take it personally.’

‘Oh no. Of course not.’

‘Old women do strange things.’ Angel glanced back at the house, and Eddie knew that Mrs Reynolds was not the only old woman she had in mind. ‘But it’s their problem, not ours.’

Over the summer, as Thelma’s criticisms multiplied, Eddie found himself warming towards Angel. The process was gradual and subtle. She would smile at him as they passed in the hall, or ask him what he thought the weather was going to do this morning and listen to his answer as if his opinion really counted. When Thelma was being more than usually absurd, Angel would occasionally glance at Eddie; and when their eyes met there was the delicious sense of a shared secret, of shared amusement.

Eddie was flattered and alarmed by these hints. Women had never shown any interest in him before, especially not beautiful women like Angel. Not that he liked her specifically as a woman, he told himself, but as a person. And there was no doubt that her beauty affected the way he responded to her: it added significance to everything she said and did.

Then came the first Sunday in September. It was a fine late summer day, and after breakfast Eddie decided to walk up to the Heath. (Since his father’s death he had lost his fear of going out.) He happened to glance back as he was walking up Haverstock Hill and noticed, some way behind him, Angel walking slowly in the same direction. Her presence irritated him. On his walks he liked to be among strangers. He quickened his pace and cut down the next side road. He looked back more than once but there was no sign of her. He thought that she had probably continued up Rosslyn Hill to Hampstead Village.

He spent a pleasant hour on the Heath. It was a place he avoided in the evenings because parts of it were rough and dangerous and, they said, haunted by men doing horrible things to each other. But in daytime at weekends and during the holidays the Heath was full of children, some with grown-ups, some without. Eventually he found a bench on Parliament Hill and watched irritable fathers flying kites for bored children. Below him stretched the city, brick and stone, glass and tarmac, blues and greys and greens, trembling like a live thing in the haze.

To Eddie’s delight, two girls of about eight began to do gymnastics near his bench. They were of an age when they were still unselfconscious about their bodies, when competition came naturally to them. One was wearing jeans, but the other – a girl with a pale, serious face spotted with freckles – wore a sweatshirt over a skimpy dress. Eddie watched her covertly. He tried to decide whether she was consciously teasing him, as Alison used to do in that far-off summer when she swung higher and higher, revealing more and more, and pretending that she didn’t know he was watching her. He stared at her, wondering how soft the skin would be above the bony knees.

Then, with an abruptness which made him gasp, this pleasant reverie was shattered.

‘Aren’t they sweet?’ Angel sat down beside him. ‘All that energy. Where do they get it from?’

Eddie stared wildly at her. Her sudden appearance would have shocked him in normal circumstances and brought about another attack of shyness. But this was worse. Had his face revealed something of his thoughts? Angel was a nanny. She would be alert for strange men who watched children.

‘It’s a lovely day for the Heath. The best part of summer.’

‘Yes,’ he managed to say. ‘Very sunny.’

The breeze blew a strand of her hair towards him. She smoothed it back into place. For an instant her sleeve brushed his and he smelt her perfume. She was wearing a blue sweatshirt and jeans. Her left hand was now lying on her leg, long-fingered, smooth-skinned, the nails not quite oval but egg-shaped, with the narrow ends embedded in the fingers; she wore no rings.

He looked away, worried that she might think he was staring at her. To his relief the two girls were running down the hill, shrieking to someone below. He no longer had to worry about betraying his interest in them.

‘Would you like one?’ Bewildered, Eddie turned towards her, for a moment thinking she was referring to the girls. But Angel was holding out a packet of Polos to him, the foil at the end of the tube peeled back. He took one because a refusal might offend her. For a moment they sat in silence. The mint seemed unnaturally strong, and he coughed.

‘I like coming here,’ Angel said. ‘So nice to see the children playing.’

Eddie bit hard on the Polo, and it disintegrated. Two boys on the fringe of puberty raced by on their bikes. One of them dropped a crisp packet as he passed.

‘When they’re older, they’re not nearly so appealing. Don’t you agree?’ She seemed not to expect an answer. ‘But I wouldn’t like to have children around all the time. They can be very tiring. What about you?’

Hastily he swallowed the fragments of Polo, the sharp edges snagging against his throat. ‘I’m sorry?’

She smiled at him. ‘I wondered if you’d like children of your own. I know I wouldn’t.’

‘No.’ The word came out much more vehemently than Eddie had intended. He thought of the boys on the bicycles, of Mandy and Sian at Dale Grove Comprehensive, and of all the children who grew up. He was frightened that he might have revealed too much, so he took refuge in a generality. ‘I think there’re far too many people in the world as it is. Five and a half billion, isn’t it, and more being born every day.’

Angel nodded, her face serious. ‘That’s a very good point.’ Her tone implied that she’d never considered the question from that angle before. ‘Still, they are sweet when they’re young, aren’t they? That’s what I like about my job. I get most of the fun, but none of the long-term responsibility.’

‘That must be nice.’

They sat there for another five minutes, talking in spurts about the city below them and its history. Slowly Eddie relaxed. He was surprised to find that he was enjoying the conversation, or rather the novelty of having someone to talk to.

‘By the way, how did our road get its name?’ Angel asked. ‘I asked your mother but she didn’t know.’

‘It’s because back in the Middle Ages the land round there used to belong to the Bishop of Rosington.’

A cloud slid across the sun.

‘I thought it might be that. It’s getting cold.’ Angel hugged herself, dramatizing the words. ‘Shall we find a cup of coffee? There’s a café on South End Green.’

Before Eddie knew what was happening, they were walking down the hill together. He felt lighter than usual, floating like a spaceman. This can’t be happening to me. Part of him would have liked to run away, but this was swamped by other feelings: running away would be a very rude thing to do; he was flattered to be in Angel’s company, and even hoped that someone he knew would see them; and he also liked the sense, obscure but powerful, that by being together he and Angel were somehow fooling his mother. For once, Eddie was not alone; he was part of a couple, and two was company. Soon they were sitting at a table by themselves, with coffee sending up twin pillars of steam between them.

‘This is nice.’ Angel smiled at him. ‘It’s good to get out. I worry about your mother sometimes. She spends so much time in the house.’

‘Oh, she likes being at home. She’s always been like that, even when my father was alive.’

‘As long as it makes her happy.’

‘She’s getting old,’ Eddie said, meaning that he couldn’t imagine how old people could be happy.

Angel answered the thought, not the words: ‘Old age is very sad. I’d hate to be old.’ For an instant, her face changed: she pressed her lips and frowned; wrinkles gouged their way across her skin, a glimpse of what might be to come. Then she smiled, and the years retreated. ‘That’s one of the things I like about children. It’s impossible to imagine them ever being old.’

Eddie nodded. He thought of Alison again – at present she was in his mind a good deal – and wished with all his heart that she could have stayed for ever young in the summer when they’d played the Peeing Game, and that he could have been young with her. He smiled across the years at Alison.

‘What’s funny, Eddie?’ Angel asked.

‘What? Nothing.’ He bent his head to hide his embarrassment. Steam from the coffee misted his glasses.

‘You don’t mind if I call you Eddie?’

He felt himself blushing. ‘Of course not.’

‘But don’t call me Angela. Horrible name.’

He looked up. She was leaning towards him, her face blurred by the steam like the city by its smog. It seemed to him that her features were dissolving in the vapour. She said something he didn’t catch.

‘What was that?’

‘My friends always call me Angel.’

Over the next four months it seemed natural to keep Thelma in the dark about what was happening, though there was no reason to be secretive about their growing friendship. Eddie derived great pleasure from pretending at home in front of his mother that he and Angel were still on the old footing of lodger and landlady’s son. It amused Angel, too.

‘Children enjoy make-believe,’ she told him on one of their outings. ‘I think I still do.’

They met in a succession of public places – cinemas, Primrose Hill, the National Portrait Gallery, a coffee shop attached to an Oxford Street store, a pub near the Heath where children played while their parents drank.

Being with Angel allowed Eddie to watch children without worrying about what adults might be thinking. After all, he and Angel were roughly the same age: they might be taken for a married couple; in any case, a man and a woman together were much less threatening than a single man.

Once, in the garden outside the Hampstead pub, a little girl fell off a swing and scraped her knee. Angel picked her up and calmed her down. Eventually the child managed to tell them that her mother was inside the pub.

‘Then we shall go and find your mummy.’ Angel picked up the child, who was no more than three, and handed her to Eddie. ‘This nice man will give you a ride.’

The girl nestled in Eddie’s arms. He could not help wondering whether Angel had known that carrying her would give him pleasure. The three of them went into the pub.

‘Where’s Mummy?’ Angel asked the girl.

The mother found them first. She rushed in front of Angel and snatched her child from Eddie. She clung so tightly to the little girl that the latter, until then perfectly happy, began to cry.

The woman stared at Eddie, her face reddening. ‘What happened? What –?’

Angel cut in with an explanation which was an implicit accusation, delivered in her clear, confident voice. The mother reacted with an unlovely mixture of gratitude, guilt and surliness. She was a squat little woman in a long, dusty skirt; she wore no make-up and her arms were tattooed; piggy eyes glinted behind gold-rimmed glasses. She was also quite young, Eddie realized, perhaps not much older than the girls he had taught at school.

‘You can’t be too careful. Not these days,’ she said in an unconscious echo of Thelma. She backed away from them, swallowed the rest of her drink and towed the child outside.

Eddie and Angel queued at the bar.

‘If I hadn’t been with you,’ Angel said casually, ‘that wretched woman would probably have thought you were trying to steal her child.’

As autumn turned to winter, Thelma seemed to sense that the atmosphere in the house had changed, that the emotional balance had tilted away from her. She grumbled more about Angel to Eddie. She became suspicious, wanting to know exactly where he’d been. There was not an open quarrel between her and Angel, but the old cordiality was no more than a memory.

Eddie was cautious by nature. (It was this which had kept him away from the networks of people who shared his special interests; he knew they existed because he read about them in the newspapers.) He did not want a rift with his mother. Sometimes he tried to imagine what life would be like if he and Angel could afford a flat or even a small house together. But financially this was out of the question. He had nothing to live on except what the state and his mother doled out to him.

It was wiser to keep a foot in both camps, at least for the time being. This was why Eddie did not tell Angel about his mother’s snooping. He did not want to run the risk of provoking a quarrel between them.

The policy worked well until midway through January. One evening Eddie ran downstairs. He was due to meet Angel in Liberty’s in Regent Street: they planned to see a film and then have a pizza before coming home.

‘Eddie,’ Thelma called from the kitchen. ‘Come in here a moment.’

He glanced at his watch, irritated because he was already a little on the late side and he didn’t like to keep Angel waiting. He hesitated in the kitchen doorway. His mother was sitting at the table, breathing heavily. Her colour was high and there were patches of sweat under her arms.

‘I’m in a bit of a hurry.’

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Just out.’

‘You’re always going out these days.’

‘Just a film.’

Thelma’s face darkened still further. ‘You’re seeing that woman. Go on, admit it.’

Surprised by the sudden venom, Eddie took a step backwards into the hall. ‘Of course not.’ Even to himself, his voice lacked conviction.

‘I can smell her on you. That perfume she wears.’

Powerless to move, he stared at her.

‘I tell you one thing,’ Thelma went on, ‘she’s paid up till the end of the week, but after that she’s out on her ear.’

‘No!’ The word burst out of Eddie before he could stop himself. ‘You can’t do that. There’s no reason to do that.’

‘She fooled me at the start, I admit that. But I’m not alone in that. She’s fooled everyone.’ Thelma tapped a sturdy manila envelope which lay on the table before her. ‘Wait till Mrs Hawley-Minton hears about this. Unless she’s in it, too. It’s fraud, I tell you, barefaced fraud. It’s a matter for the police, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Eddie stared at her. ‘What do you mean? Are you all right?’

His mother opened the envelope and took out a British passport. She flicked over the pages until she found the photograph. She pushed the passport across the table towards Eddie, pinning it open with grubby fingers.

Reluctantly he came into the room and peered at the photograph, which showed a thin-faced, short-haired woman he had never seen before.

‘So? Who is it?’

‘Are you blind?’ his mother shouted. ‘Look at the name, you fool.’

Eddie stooped, holding the glasses on the bridge of his nose. The name swam into focus.

Angela Mary Wharton.

Eddie’s memories of the next few hours were vivid but patchy. This was, he supposed later, a symptom of shock. He remembered slamming the front door of 29 Rosington Road, a thing he’d never done before, but after that there were missing links in the chain of events.

He must have walked to Chalk Farm underground station and taken the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road. He could not remember whether he had changed on to the Central Line for Oxford Circus or simply walked the rest of the way. But he had a clear picture of himself standing just inside the main entrance of Liberty’s: the place was full of people and brightly coloured merchandise; a security guard stared curiously at him; he tried to find Angel, but she wasn’t there, and he felt despair creeping over him, a sense that everything worthwhile was over.

Suddenly she touched his shoulder. ‘Let’s go outside. I’ve got you a present.’

Taking his arm, which was something she had never done before, she urged him outside. There, standing on the pavement in Great Marlborough Street, she gave him a small Liberty’s bag.

‘Go on, open it.’ Angel was like a child, incapable of deferring pleasure. ‘I knew I had to get it for you as soon as I saw it.’

People flowed steadily past them like a stream around a rock. Inside the bag was a silk tie, blue with thin green stripes running diagonally across it. Eddie stroked the soft material, his eyes filling with tears as he tried to find the right words.

‘See,’ she said. ‘It picks out the blue in your eyes. It’s perfect.’

Everything except himself and Angel receded, as though rushing away – the black-and-white frontage of Liberty’s, the people eddying along the pavement, the snarling engines and the smell of fast food.

‘Put it on.’ Angel did not wait for him to respond but buttoned the collar of his shirt, which he was wearing without a tie. ‘That shirt will do perfectly.’ She turned up his collar, took the tie from his hand and put it round his neck. Deftly she tied the knot, making him feel like a child or even a doll. She stood back and looked assessingly at him. ‘Yes, perfect.’

‘Thank you. It’s wonderful.’

Angel looked at her watch. ‘We’re going to miss the film if we’re not careful.’

‘I’m sorry I’m late. My mother …’

‘What is it? Something’s happened.’

‘My mother’s been in your room.’

‘That’s nothing new.’

Eddie snatched at the diversion, a temporary refuge. ‘You knew?’

‘She pokes her nose in there most days. I leave things so I can tell. Now, what is it?’

He felt hot and embarrassed: he hoped she did not know that he too had sometimes been in there. ‘She found something in a tin box.’

Angel wrapped her hand around his arm and squeezed so hard that he yelped. She was pale under the make-up, and she pulled her lips back and the wrinkles appeared, just as they had done on Parliament Hill. ‘It was locked.’

‘She must have found the key. Or found one of her own that fitted. Or maybe for once it wasn’t locked. I don’t know.’ He stared miserably up at her. ‘She’s got the passport. She’s going to show it to your boss at the agency. And maybe the police.’

At this point there was another broken link in the memories. The next thing he knew they were deep in Soho, in Frith Street, and he was following Angel’s shining head down a flight of stairs to a basement restaurant whose sounds and smells rose up around him like a tide. They sat at a table in an alcove, an island of stillness. A single candle stood between them in a wax-coated bottle. Eddie could not recall what they ate, but he remembered that Angel bought first one bottle of red wine and then another.

‘Drink up,’ she told him. ‘Come along, you need it. You’ve had a shock.’

The wine tasted harsh and at first he found it hard to swallow. As glass succeeded glass, however, it became easier and easier.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ Angel asked when they had finished the starter. ‘No one else knows the truth, but I want to tell you. Can I trust you?’

‘Yes.’ Angel, you can always trust me.

She stared into the candle flame. ‘If my mother had lived, everything would have been different.’

Her mother, she told Eddie, had died when she was young, and her father had married again, to a wife who hated Angel.

‘She was jealous, of course. Before she came along, my father and I had been very close. But she soon changed that. She made him hate me. Not just him, either – she worked on everyone we knew. In the end they all turned against me.’

Desperate to get away, Angel found work as an au pair, at first in Saudi Arabia and later in South America, mainly in Argentina. Then she became a nanny. Her employers had been delighted with her: she had stayed with one family for over five years. Finally, she had been overcome by a desire to come back to England.

‘It gets to you sometimes: wanting to go back to your roots, to your past. Then I met Angie Wharton. She was English, but she had been born in Argentina. Her parents emigrated there after the war. Angie wanted to come home, too. Not that she’d ever been here before.’

‘How could this be her home?’ asked Eddie owlishly. ‘If she hadn’t been here, I mean?’

‘Home is where the heart is, Eddie. Anyway, Angie was a nursery nurse – she’d trained in the States before her parents died. We thought we’d travel home together, share a flat and so on. It’s thanks to Angie that I know Mrs Hawley-Minton. Poor darling Angie.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘It was terribly sad.’ Angel’s eyes shone, and an orange candle flame flickered in each pupil. ‘It hurts to talk about it.’ She turned away and dabbed her eyes with a napkin.

‘I’m sorry,’ Eddie said, drunk enough to feel that he was somehow responsible for her sorrow. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

‘No. One can’t hide away from things. It was one of those awful, stupid tragedies. Our first night in London. We’d only been here a few hours. Oh, it was my fault. I shall always blame myself. You see, I knew that Angie was – well, to be blunt, she was a lovely person but she had a weakness for alcohol.’ Angel topped up Eddie’s glass. ‘Not like this – a glass or two over a meal. She’d go on binges and wake up the next day not knowing what had happened, where she’d been. It was terrible.’

Eddie pushed away his plate. ‘What was?’

‘It was on our first evening here,’ Angel said, her eyes huge over the rim of the wine glass. ‘Life can be so unfair sometimes. She’d been drinking on the plane. One after the other. When we got here, we found a hotel in Earl’s Court and then we had a meal. Wine with the meal, of course. And then she wanted to carry on. “I want to celebrate,” she kept saying. “I’ve come home.” Poor Angie. I just couldn’t cope. I was fagged out. So I went back to our room and went to bed. Next thing I knew it was morning and the manager was knocking on the door.’

The waiter brought their main course and showed a disposition to linger and chat.

‘That’ll be all, thank you,’ said Angel haughtily. When she and Eddie were alone again she went on, ‘I hate men like that. So pushy. Where was I?’

‘The manager knocking on the door.’

The irritation faded from Angel’s face. ‘He had a policewoman with him. Apparently Angie had gone up to the West End. Drinking steadily, of course. Somehow she managed to fall under a bus in Shaftesbury Avenue. There was a whole crowd coming out of a theatre, and people coming out of a pub, and a lot of pushing and shoving.’ Angel sighed. ‘She was killed outright.’

‘How awful.’ Eddie hesitated and then, feeling more was required, added, ‘For you as much as her.’

‘It’s always harder for those who are left behind. No one else grieved for her. And then – well, I must admit I was tempted. I mean, who would it harm if I pretended to be Angie? Without a qualification I couldn’t hope to get a decent job. It was so unfair – I knew more about the practical side of nursery nursing than she ever did, and I could easily read up the theory. And then she had this ready-made contact in Mrs Hawley-Minton, who’d never met her. So I told the police that Angie was me, and I pretended to be her.’

‘But didn’t they know her name? From her handbag, or something?’ Sensing Angel’s irritation at the interruption, he added weakly, ‘I mean, they knew the hotel where she was staying.’

‘She didn’t have any identification on her – just cash, and a card with the name of the hotel.’ Angel smiled sadly. ‘She’d left her passport and so on with me, in case they got stolen.’

‘Oh yes. I see now. But surely the passport photo –?’

‘I had an old one in mine. And physically we weren’t dissimilar.’

‘There must have been an inquest.’

‘Of course. I didn’t tell any lies. I didn’t want to. There was no need to.’

‘Didn’t they ask your father to identify the body?’

‘He’d gone to work in America years before this happened. We’d lost touch completely. He simply couldn’t be bothered with me.’ Angel leant closer. ‘The point is, Eddie, I know Angie would have wanted me to do what I did. Just as I would have wanted her to do the same if the positions had been reversed.’

‘I think you were right.’ Eddie’s voice was thick and his tongue felt a little too large for his mouth. ‘I mean, it didn’t hurt anyone.’

Briefly she patted his hand. ‘Exactly. In a way, quite the reverse: I like to think I take my job very seriously, that I’ve made a difference for a lot of children.’

‘What was your real name, then?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I gave it to Angie, and it’s buried with her. Look forward, that’s my motto. Don’t look back. After the funeral I just waited until the dust had settled, and then I wrote to Mrs Hawley-Minton. And from there everything’s gone like a dream.’ She broke off and rested her head in her hands. ‘Until now.’ Her voice was almost inaudible. ‘It’s such a shame – just as everything was going so well.’

‘I’ll talk to my mother. I’ll make her see sense.’

‘You’re a darling. But I don’t think you’ll succeed.’

‘Why not?’ He was almost shouting now and heads turned towards him.

‘Hush, keep your voice down.’

‘She wouldn’t like us both to go away. She’d be lonely.’

‘She’s jealous of us. Don’t you see? I wish I were richer – then we could get somewhere together, just you and me. As friends, I mean, just good friends. Would you like that?’

‘Yes. Oh God, yes.’

There was a long pause, filled with the noise from the rest of the restaurant.

Angel picked up the bottle. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

Eddie said, elaborately casual, ‘What sort of children do you look after? You could always bring them to the house if you wanted. For tea, I mean. Make a sort of treat for them.’

‘They often want to see where I live. But I don’t think the idea would go down very well with your mother.’

Another silence stretched between them, heavy with silent suggestions and questions. Angel refilled their glasses.

‘Drink up.’ She held up her glass and clinked it against his. ‘This may be our last chance of a celebration, so we’d better make the most of it.’

They finished that bottle before they left. By now Eddie was very drunk. Angel had to support him up the stairs. In Frith Street the fresh air made his head spin and the light seemed very bright. He vomited partly into the gutter and partly on the bonnet of a parked car.

‘There, there,’ Angel said, patting his arm. ‘Better out than in.’ Later he heard her calling out in her patrician voice: ‘Taxi! Taxi!’

Eddie remembered little more of the evening. Angel took him home. He could not remember seeing his mother – it was very late, so perhaps she was asleep.

‘Come on,’ she said when they got home. ‘Up the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire.’

In his mind there was a picture of the palm of Angel’s right hand extended towards him with three white tablets in the middle of it.

‘Take these. Otherwise you’re going to feel terrible in the morning.’

He must have managed to swallow them. After that he fell into a dark, silent pit. The first thing that made an impression on him, hours later, was the pain in his head. This was followed, after an immeasurable period of time, by the discovery that his bladder was extremely full. Later still, he realized that if anything the headache was worse. He dozed on, reluctant to leave the peace of the pit and physically unable to cope with the complicated business of getting out of bed.

The next time he woke the light on the other side of the curtains was much brighter, and the sight of it made his headache worse. Someone was shaking him.

‘Eddie. Eddie.’

Shocked, he turned over. As far as he knew Angel had never been in his room before. What would his mother say when she found out?

Daylight poured through the open door. Angel shimmered so brightly that he could not look at her. She was wearing her long white robe and, though her face was immaculately made up, her hair was still confined to its snood. His eyelids began to droop.

‘Eddie,’ Angel called. ‘Eddie, wake up.’