Читать книгу Fallen Angel - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 17

‘Do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their first matter, and you discover the habitation of Angels …’

Religio Medici, I, 35

‘Lucy’s as good as gold with me.’ Angel rinsed the soap from the back of Lucy’s neck. ‘Aren’t you, poppet?’

Lucy did not reply. She looked very young and small in the bath, her body partly obscured by a shifting mound of foam. She was staring at a blue plastic boat containing two yellow ducks; the boat bobbed up and down in the triangular harbour created by her legs. Her wet hair, plastered to her skull, was as black as polished ebony.

‘It’s the first of December today,’ Angel went on, briskly sponging Lucy’s back. ‘Did you know, if you say “White rabbits” on the first of the month and make a silent wish, then the wish will come true? Well, that’s what some people say.’

Eddie thought that Lucy’s lips might have trembled, and that perhaps she was saying ‘White Rabbits’ to herself and making a wish. I want Mummy. She had had very little to eat for over thirty-six hours and this was beginning to show in her appearance. Children, Eddie had noticed, reacted very quickly to such changes. Now it was Sunday morning, and Lucy’s shoulders looked bonier than they had done on Friday evening, and her stomach was flat. She was still listless from the medication, and perhaps from the shock, too, otherwise Angel would not have risked taking her out of the soundproofed basement to give her a bath.

(This had been Angel’s rule since the incident with Suki, a sly girl who acted as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth until Angel went out to fetch a towel, leaving her alone with Eddie: as soon as the door closed, Suki had bitten Eddie’s hand and screamed like a train. After that, Angel gave their little visitors regular doses of Phenergan syrup, which kept them nicely drowsy. If a visitor became seriously upset, Angel quietened her with a dose of diazepam, originally prescribed for Eddie’s mother.)

‘There’s a good girl. Stand up now and Angel will dry you.’ With Angel’s help, Lucy struggled to her feet. Water and foam dripped down her body. Eddie stared at the pink, glistening skin and the cleft between her legs.

‘Uncle Eddie will pass the towel.’

He hurried to obey. There had been an unmistakable note of irritation in Angel’s voice, perhaps brought on by tiredness. He noticed dark smudges under her eyes. He knew she had gone out the previous evening and had not returned until well after midnight. Eddie had tried the door to the basement while she was out, only to find that it was locked.

Angel wrapped the large pink towel, warm from the radiator, around Lucy’s body, lifted her out of the bath and sat her on her knee. Eddie thought they made a beautiful picture, a Pre-Raphaelite Virgin and child: Angel in her long white robe, her shining hair flowing free; and Lucy small, thin and sexless, swaddled in the towel, sitting on Angel’s lap and enclosed by her arms. He turned away. His head hurt this morning, and his throat was dry.

The clothes they had bought for Lucy were waiting on the chair. Among them was a dark-green dress from Laura Ashley, with a white lace collar, a smocked front and ties at each side designed to form a bow at the back. Angel liked her girls to look properly feminine. Boys were boys, she once told Eddie, girls were girls, and it was both stupid and unnatural to pretend otherwise.

‘Perhaps Lucy would like to play a game with me when she’s dressed,’ Eddie suggested.

The girl glanced at him, and a frown wrinkled her forehead.

‘She might like to see the you-know-what.’

‘The what?’ Angel said.

Eddie shielded his mouth with his hand, leaned towards her and whispered, ‘The conjuring set.’

He had bought it yesterday morning and he was longing to see Lucy’s reaction: all children liked presents, and often they showed their gratitude in delightful ways.

Angel rubbed Lucy’s hair gently. ‘Another day, I think. Lucy’s tired. Aren’t you, my pet?’

Lucy looked up at her, blinking rapidly as her eyes slid in and out of focus. ‘I want to go home. I want Mummy. I –’

‘Mummy and Daddy had to go away. Not for long. I told you, they asked me to look after you.’

The frown deepened. For Lucy, Eddie guessed, Angel’s certainty was the only fixed point among the confusion and the anxiety.

‘Now, now, poppet. Let’s see a nice big smile. We don’t like children who live on Sulky Street, do we?’

‘Perhaps if we played a game, it would take Lucy’s mind off things.’ Eddie removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the corner of a towel. ‘It would be a distraction.’

‘No.’ Angel picked up the little vest. ‘Lucy’s not well enough for that at present. When we’ve finished in here, I’m going to make her a nice drink and sit her on my knee and read a nice book to her.’

To his horror, Eddie felt tears filling his eyes. It was so unfair. ‘But with the others, we always –’

Angel coughed, stopping him in mid-sentence. It was one of her rules that they should never let a girl know that there had been others. But when Eddie looked at her he was surprised to see that she was smiling.

‘Lucy isn’t like the others,’ she said, her eyes meeting Eddie’s. ‘We understand each other, she and I.’ Her lips brushed the top of Lucy’s head. ‘Don’t we, my poppet?’

What about me?

Eddie held his tongue. A moment later, Angel asked him to go down and warm some milk and turn up the heating. He went downstairs, the jealousy churning angrily and impotently inside him as pointlessly as an engine in neutral revving into the red. The two of them made such a beautiful picture, he accepted that, the Virgin and child, beautiful and hurtful.

He altered the thermostat for the central heating and put the milk on the stove. His headache was worsening. He stared into the pan, at the shifting disc of white, and felt his eyes slipping out of focus.

Virgin and child: two was company in the Holy Family. Poor old Joseph, permanently on the sidelines, denied even the privilege of making the customary biological contribution to family life. The mother and child made a whole, self-contained and exclusive, Mary and the infant Jesus, the Madonna and newborn king, the Handmaiden of the Lord with the Christ Child.

Where did that leave number three? Somewhere in the crowd scene at the stable. Or leading the donkey. Negotiating with the innkeeper. No doubt paying the bills. Acting as a combination of courier and transport manager and meal ticket. No one ever said what happened to old Joseph. No one cared. Why should they? He didn’t count.

What about me?

It seemed to Eddie that almost all his life he had been condemned to third place. Look at his parents, for example. They might not have liked each other, but their needs interlocked and they excluded Eddie. Even when his father allowed Eddie to join in the photographs, Stanley’s interest was always focused on the little girl, and the little girl always paid more attention to Stanley than to Eddie; they treated him as part of the furniture, no more important than the smelly old armchair.

When Stanley died, the pattern continued. His mother hadn’t wasted much time before deciding to find a lodger. But why? There had been enough money for them to continue living at Rosington Road by themselves. They could have managed on Thelma’s widow’s pension from the Paladin, her state pension, and what Eddie received from the DSS. They would have had to live frugally, but it would have been perfectly possible with just the two of them. But no. His mother had wanted someone else, not him. She found Angel and there was the irony: because Angel preferred Eddie, at least for a time.

Only Alison and Angel had ever taken him seriously. But Alison had gone away and now Angel no longer needed him because she had Lucy instead. But what made Lucy so special?

Eddie’s eyes widened. The milk was swelling. Its surface was pocked and pimpled like a lunar landscape. A white balloon pushed itself over the rim of the saucepan. The boiling milk spat and bubbled. He lunged at the handle of the saucepan and a smell of burning filled the air.

I blame you.

Mummy, Mum, Ma, Mother, Thelma. Eddie could not remember calling his mother by name, not to her face.

Angel had taken charge when Thelma died. Eddie had to admit that she had worked miracles. When he finally managed to drag himself downstairs on the morning of his mother’s death, he had sat down at the kitchen table, in the heart of Thelma’s domain, and laid his head on his arms. Still in the grip of an immense hangover, he hadn’t wanted to think because thinking hurt too much.

He had heard Angel coming downstairs and into the room; he had smelled her perfume and heard water gushing from the tap.

‘Eddie. Sit up, please.’

Wearily he obeyed.

She placed a glass of water in front of him. ‘Lots of fluids.’ She handed him a sachet of Alka-Seltzers which she had already opened to save him the trouble. ‘Don’t worry if you’re sick. It usually helps to vomit.’

He dropped the tablets one by one into the water and watched the bubbles rising. ‘What happened to her?’

‘I suspect it was a heart attack. Just as she expected.’

‘What?’

‘You knew she had a heart condition, didn’t you?’

A new pain penetrated Eddie’s headache. ‘She never told me.’

‘Probably she didn’t want to worry you. Either that or she thought you’d guessed.’

‘But how could I?’ Eddie wailed.

‘Why do you think she gave up smoking? Doctor’s orders, of course. And those tablets she took, not to mention her spray … Didn’t you ever notice how breathless she got?’

‘But she’s been like that for years. Not so bad, perhaps, but –’

‘And the colour she went sometimes? As soon as I saw that I knew there was a heart problem. Now drink up.’

He drank the mixture. At one point he thought he might have to make a run for the sink, but the moment passed.

‘It’s a pity she didn’t change her diet and take more exercise,’ Angel went on. ‘But there. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?’

‘I wish – I wish I’d known.’

‘Why? What could you have done? Given her a new set of coronary arteries?’

He tried to rid his mind of the figure on the bed in the front room upstairs. Never large, Thelma had shrunk still further in death. He glanced at Angel, who was making coffee. She was quite at home here, he thought, as if this were her own kitchen.

‘What happened last night?’

She turned, spoon in hand. ‘You don’t remember? I’m not surprised. The wine had quite an effect on you, didn’t it? I didn’t realize you had such a weak head.’

He remembered the basement restaurant in Soho. Snatches of their conversation came back to him. The silk tie, blue with green stripes. Himself vomiting over the shiny bonnet of a parked car. Orange candle flames dancing in Angel’s pupils. The three white tablets in the palm of her hand.

‘Did you see my mother last night?’

‘No.’

‘So what happened when we got back?’

‘Nothing. I imagine she must have been asleep. I took you upstairs and gave you some aspirin. You went out like a light. So I covered you up and went to bed myself.’

‘You’re sure?’

Angel stared at him. ‘I’m not in the habit of lying, Eddie.’

He dropped his eyes. ‘Sorry.’

‘All right. I understand. It’s never easy when a parent dies. One doesn’t act rationally.’

She paused to pour water into a coffee pot which Eddie had never seen before. He sniffed. Real coffee, which meant that it was Angel’s. His mother had liked only instant coffee.

A moment later, Angel said in a slow, deliberate voice: ‘We had a pleasant meal out last night. Your mother was asleep when we got home. We went to bed. When I got up this morning I was surprised that your mother wasn’t up before me. So I tapped on her door to see if she was all right. There was no answer so I went in. And there she was, poor soul. I made sure she was dead. Then I woke you and phoned the doctor.’

Eddie rubbed his beard, which felt matted. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Who knows? She might have been dead when we got home. She was certainly very cold this morning.’

‘You don’t think …?’

‘What?’

‘That what happened yesterday might have had something to do with it?’

‘Don’t be silly, Eddie.’ Angel rested her hands on the table and stared down at him, her face calm and beautiful. ‘Put that right out of your mind.’

‘If I’d stayed with her, talked with her –’

‘It wouldn’t have done any good. Probably she would have made herself even more upset.’

‘But –’

‘Her death could have happened at any time. And don’t forget, it’s psychologically typical for survivors to blame themselves for the death of a loved one.’

‘Shouldn’t we mention it to the doctor? The fact she was … upset, I mean.’

‘Why should we? What on earth would be the point? It’s a complete irrelevance.’ Angel turned away to pour the coffee. ‘In fact, it’s probably better not to mention it. It would just confuse the issue.’

The dreams came later, after Thelma’s funeral, and continued until the following summer. (Oddly enough, Eddie had the last one just before the episode with Chantal.) They bore a family resemblance to one another: different versions of different parts of the same story.

In the simplest form, Thelma was lying in the single bed, her small body almost invisible under the eiderdown and the blankets. Eddie was a disembodied presence near the ceiling just inside the doorway. He could not see his mother’s face. The skull was heavy and the two pillows were soft and accommodating. The ends of the pillows rose like thick white horns on either side of the invisible face.

Sometimes it was dark, sometimes misty; sometimes Eddie had forgotten his glasses. Was another pillow taken from Stanley’s bed and clamped on top of the others? Then what? The body twitching almost imperceptibly, hampered by the weight of the bedclothes and by its own weakness?

More questions followed, because the whole point of this series of dreams was that nothing could ever be known for certain. What chance would Thelma have had against the suffocating weight pressing down on her? Had she cried out? Almost certainly the words would have been smothered by the pillow. And if any sound seeped into the silent bedroom, who was there to hear it? Who, except Eddie?

There had not been an inquest. Thelma’s doctor had no hesitation in signing the medical certificate of cause of death. His patient was an elderly widow with a history of heart problems. He had seen her less than a week before. According to her son and her lodger she had complained of chest pains during the day before her death. That night her heart had given up the unequal struggle. When he saw the body, she was still holding her glyceryl trinitrate spray, which suggested that she might have been awake when the attack began.

‘Just popped off,’ the doctor told Eddie. ‘Could have happened any time. I doubt if she felt much and it was over very quickly. Not a bad way to go, all things considered – I wouldn’t mind it myself.’

After Thelma had gone, 29 Rosington Road became a different house. On the morning after the funeral Angel and Eddie wandered through the rooms, taking stock and marvelling at the possibilities that had suddenly opened up. For Eddie, Thelma’s departure had a magical effect: the rooms were larger; much of the furniture in the big front bedroom, robbed of the presence which had lent it significance, had become shabby and unnecessary; and his and Angel’s footsteps on the stairs were brisk and resonant.

‘I think I could do something with this,’ Angel said as she examined the basement.

‘Why?’ Eddie glanced at the ceiling, at the rest of the house. ‘We’ve got all that room upstairs.’

‘It would be somewhere for me.’ She laid her hand briefly on his arm. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, but I do like to be by myself sometimes. I’m a very solitary person.’

‘You could have the back bedroom.’

‘It’s too small.’ Angel stretched out her arms. ‘I need space. It wouldn’t be a problem, would it?’

‘Oh no. Not at all. I just – I just wasn’t quite clear what you wanted.’

There was a burst of muffled shouting. Eddie guessed that it emanated from the basement flat next door, which was occupied by a young married couple who conducted their relationship as if on the assumption that they were standing on either side of a large windy field, a situation for which each held the other to blame.

‘Wouldn’t this be too noisy for you?’ he asked.

‘Insulation: that’s the answer. It would be a good idea to dry-line the walls in any case. Look at the damp over there.’

As they were speaking, she moved slowly around the basement, poking her head into the empty coal hole and the disused scullery, peering into cardboard boxes, rubbing a clear spot in the grime in the rear window, trying the handle of the sealed door to the garden. She paused by the old armchair and wiped away some of the dust with a tissue.

‘That’s nice. Late nineteenth century? It’s been terribly mistreated, though. But look at the carving on the arms and legs. Beautiful, isn’t it? I think it’s rosewood.’

Eddie remembered the smell of the material and the feeling of a warm body pressed against his. ‘I was thinking we should throw it out.’

‘Definitely not. We’ll have it reupholstered. Something plain – claret-coloured, perhaps.’

‘Won’t all this cost too much?’

‘We’ll manage.’ Angel smiled at him. ‘I’ve got a little money put by. It will be my way of contributing. We’ll need to find a builder, of course. Do you know of anyone local?’

‘There’s Mr Reynolds.’ Eddie thought of Jenny Wren. ‘He lives in the council flats behind. The one with the geraniums.’

Angel wrinkled her nose. ‘So his wife’s the bird-watcher?’

‘He’s nicer than she is. But he may be retired by now.’

‘I’d prefer an older man. Someone who would take a pride in the job.’

Angel decided that they should leave a decent interval – in this case a fortnight – between Thelma’s death and contacting Mr Reynolds. She spent the time making detailed plans of what she wanted done. Eddie was surprised both by the depth of her knowledge and the extent of her plans.

‘We’ll put a freezer in the scullery. One of those big chest ones. It will pay for itself within a year or so. We can take advantage of all the bargains.’

She examined the little coal cellar next to the scullery with particular care, taking measurements and examining the floor, walls and ceiling. There was a hatch to the little forecourt in front of the house, but Stanley had sealed this by screwing two batons across the opening.

‘This would make a lovely shower room. If we tile the floor and walls we needn’t have a shower stall. We can have the shower fixed to the wall. I wonder if there’s room for a lavatory, too.’

‘Do we really need it?’

‘It would be so much more convenient.’

At length Eddie phoned Mr Reynolds and asked if he would be interested in renovating the basement.

‘I don’t do much now,’ Mr Reynolds said.

‘Never mind. Is there anyone you’d recommend?’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. I like to keep my hand in, particularly when it’s a question of obliging neighbours. Why don’t I come round and have a shufti?’

Ten minutes later Mr Reynolds was on the doorstep. He seemed to have changed very little in all the years Eddie had known him. He found it hard to keep his eyes off Angel, whom he had not previously met. They took him down to the basement.

‘We were thinking that we might let it as a self-contained flat,’ Angel told him.

‘Oh aye.’

‘There’s more that needs doing than meets the eye. That’s the trouble with these older houses, isn’t it?’

Mr Reynolds agreed. As time went by, Eddie realized that Mr Reynolds would have agreed to almost anything Angel said. Soon they were discussing insulation, dry-lining and replastering. Angel said that the tenants might be noisy so they decided to insulate the ceiling as well. They touched lightly on plumbing, wiring and decorating. Neither of them mentioned money. Within minutes of Mr Reynolds’s arrival they both seemed to take it for granted that he would be doing the work.

‘Don’t you worry, Miss Wharton. This will be a Rolls-Royce job by the time we’re done.’

‘Please call me Angela.’

Mr Reynolds stared at his hands and changed the subject by suggesting that they start by hiring a skip. Neither then nor later would he call Angel anything but Miss Wharton. His was a form of love which took refuge in formality.

Mr Reynolds did most of the work himself, subcontracting only the electrical and plumbing jobs. It took him over two months. During this time a friendship developed between the three of them, limited to the job which had brought them together but surprisingly intimate; narrow but deep. Mr Reynolds worked long hours and, when reminded, invoiced Eddie for small sums. Angel paid the balance with praise.

‘I’m not sure I can bear to let this room, Mr Reynolds. You’ve made it such a little palace that I think I might use it as my study.’

Mr Reynolds grunted and turned away to search for something in his tool bag.

The weeks passed, and gradually the jobs were completed. First the new floor, then the ceiling, then the walls. A hardwood door was made to measure, as was the long, double-glazed window overlooking the back garden.

‘Beginning to come together now, isn’t it?’ Mr Reynolds said, not once but many times, hungry for Angel’s praise.

If Mr Reynolds was curious about the relationship between Angel and Eddie, he never allowed his curiosity to become obtrusive. Almost certainly he guessed that Eddie and Angel were not living together as man and wife. Nor did Angel behave like a lodger: she behaved like the mistress of the house. Eddie came to suspect that Mr Reynolds did not ask questions because he did not want to hear the answers. Mr Reynolds was never disloyal to his wife, but from hints dropped here and there it became clear that he did not enjoy being at home; he liked this job which kept him out of the wet, earned him money and allowed him to see Angel almost every day.

When he had finished, the basement was dry and as airless as a sealed tomb. The acoustics were strange: sounds had a deadened quality. It seemed to Eddie that the insulation absorbed and neutralized all the emotion in people’s voices.

‘It’s perfect,’ Angel told Mr Reynolds.

‘Tell me if you need any more help.’ The tips of his ears glowed. The three of them were sitting round the kitchen table with mugs of tea while Eddie wrote another cheque. ‘By the way, what did happen to all those old dolls’ houses?’

Eddie glanced up at him. ‘My father used to raffle them at work for charity.’

‘Which reminds me,’ Angel said. ‘Some of his tools are still in the cupboard downstairs. Would you have a use for any of them, Mr Reynolds?’

The flush spread to his face. ‘Well – I’m not sure.’

‘Do have a look. I know Eddie would like them to go to a good home.’

‘I remember your dad making those dolls’ houses,’ Mr Reynolds said to Eddie. ‘Your mum and dad used to ask our Jenny round to look at them. She loved it.’ He chuckled, cracks appearing in the weathered skin around his eyes and mouth. ‘Do you remember?’

‘I remember. She used to bring her dolls to see the houses, too.’

‘So she did. I’d forgotten that. And look at her now: three children and a place of her own to look after. It’s a shame about Kevin. But there – it’s the modern way, I’m afraid.’

‘Kevin?’ Angel said.

Mr Reynolds took a deep breath. Angel smiled at him.

‘Kevin – Jen’s husband. Well, sort of husband.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s not general knowledge, but he’s a bad lot, I’m afraid. Still, he’s gone now. Least said, soonest mended.’

‘I’m so sorry. Children are such a worry, aren’t they?’

‘He ran off with another woman when she was expecting her third. What can you do? My wife doesn’t like it known, by the way. You’ll understand, I’m sure.’

‘Of course.’ Angel glanced at Eddie. ‘You and Jenny were friends when you were children, weren’t you?’

Eddie nodded. He’d given Angel an edited version of his relationship with Jenny, such as it had been.

‘Your mum and dad were very kind to her,’ Mr Reynolds went on, apparently without irony. ‘And she wasn’t the only one, they say. Maybe they’d have liked a little sister for you, eh?’

‘Very likely,’ Eddie agreed.

‘And he took some lovely photographs, too,’ said the little builder, still rambling down Memory Lane. ‘He gave us one of Jenny: curled up in a big armchair, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. We had it framed. We’ve still got it in the display cabinet.’

‘Photographs?’ Angel said, turning to Eddie. ‘I didn’t know your father took photographs.’

Eddie pushed the cheque across the table to Mr Reynolds. ‘Here you are.’

‘Do you have some of them still?’ Angel smiled impartially at the two men. ‘I love looking at photographs.’

Angel questioned Eddie minutely about his past, which he found flattering because no one else had ever done so. The questions came by fits and starts and over a long period of time. Eddie discovered that telling Angel about the difficulties and unfairness he had suffered made the burden of them easier to bear. He mentioned this phenomenon.

‘Nothing unusual about that, Eddie. That’s why so many people find psychotherapy appealing. That’s why confession has always been such a widespread practice among Catholics.’

Since his father’s death, Eddie had kept the surviving photographs in a locked suitcase under his bed. Angel cajoled him into showing them to her. They sat at the kitchen table and he lifted them out, one by one. The photographs smelled of the past, tired and musty.

‘How pretty,’ Angel commented when she saw the first nude. ‘Technically quite impressive.’

In the end she saw them all, even the ones with Eddie, even the one with Alison.

What a Little Tease!

‘That one’s Mr Reynolds’s daughter,’ Eddie said, pointing to another print, anxious to deflect Angel’s attention from Alison.

Angel glanced at Jenny Wren. ‘Not as photogenic as this one.’ She tapped the photograph of Alison with a long fingernail. ‘What was her name?’

Eddie told her. Angel patted his hand and said that children were so sweet at that age.

‘Some people don’t like that sort of game.’ Eddie paused. ‘Not with children.’

‘That’s silly. Children need love and security, that’s all. Children like playing games with grown-ups. That’s what growing up is all about.’

Eddie felt warm with relief. Then and later, he was amazed by Angel’s sympathy and understanding. He even told her about his humiliating experiences as a teacher at Dale Grove Comprehensive School. She coaxed him into describing exactly what Mandy and Sian had done. The violence of her reaction surprised him. Her lips curled back against her teeth and wrinkles bit into the skin.

‘We don’t need people like that. They’re no better than animals.’

‘But what can you do with them? You can’t just kill them, can you?’

Angel arched her immaculate eyebrows. ‘I think one should execute them if they break certain laws. There’s nothing wrong with capital punishment if the system is sensible and fair. As for the others, why don’t we put them in work camps? We could make the amount of food and other privileges they get depend on the amount of work they produce. Then at least they wouldn’t be such a total liability for society. You have to admit, it would be a much fairer way of doing things.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘There’s no suppose about it. You have to be realistic.’ Angel’s face was serene again. ‘One has to use other people – except one’s friends, of course; they’re different. Otherwise they abuse you. Obviously one tries to be constructive about how one uses them. But it’s no use being sentimental. They’ll just take advantage, like Mandy and Sian did. In the long run it’s kinder to be firm with them right from the start.’

Angel furnished her little palace as a bed-sitting room. She and Eddie brought down the bed which had belonged to Stanley and installed it on the wall opposite the long window. The reupholstered Victorian chair stood by the window. Beside it was a hexagonal table which Angel had found in an antique shop. She scattered small rugs, vivid geometrical patterns from Eastern Anatolia, over the floor. There were no pictures on the severe white walls.

Eddie went down to the basement only by invitation. By tacit consent, the new shower room was reserved for Angel’s use. If they needed something from the big freezer in the former scullery, it was always Angel who fetched it.

‘I know where things are,’ she explained. ‘I’ve got my little system. I don’t want you confusing it.’

She bought a small microwave and installed it on a shelf over the freezer.

‘Wouldn’t it be more convenient in the kitchen?’ Eddie asked.

‘It would take up too much space. Besides, we’ll use it mainly for defrosting. And having it down there will be handy if I want to heat up a snack.’

Despite the bed, Angel did not usually sleep in the basement, but in Thelma’s old room upstairs. There was not enough space for her clothes in the wardrobes which had belonged to Eddie’s parents, so she asked Mr Reynolds to fit new ones with mirrored doors along one wall of the front bedroom.

One morning in early May while Mr Reynolds was working upstairs, there was a ring on the doorbell. Eddie answered it. Mrs Reynolds was on the step, both hands gripping the strap of her handbag. For a second she stared at Eddie. She had bright brown eyes behind heavy glasses, a snub nose and small lips like the puckered skin round an anus.

‘I’d like a word with my husband, if you please.’

Eddie called Mr Reynolds and went back into the kitchen, closing the door behind him with relief. Sometimes, when he was washing up in the winter months, he looked through the kitchen window, through the screen of leafless branches, and glimpsed Mrs Reynolds with her binoculars on the balcony of the flat. Mr Reynolds had told Angel at great length about how he had bought a new and more powerful pair of binoculars as a surprise birthday present for his wife.

There was a tap on the kitchen door. Mr Reynolds edged into the room.

‘Sorry – something’s come up. I’ll have to go now. I’ll give you a ring in the morning, if that’s OK?’ He looked perfectly normal. It wasn’t what he said but how he said it. His voice trembled, and his breathing was irregular. He sounded ten years older than he really was.

Eddie stood up. ‘Is everything all right?’ He knew that Angel would want to know why Mr Reynolds had left early.

‘It’s our Jenny,’ said Mr Reynolds, retreating backwards out of the room as if withdrawing from royalty. ‘There’s been an accident.’

Poor Jenny Wren. Who better than Eddie to know that patterns repeated themselves? Sometimes he thought of his father and wondered what had happened to him when he was young; and so on with his father’s father and his father’s father’s father; and back the line went through the centuries, opening a vertiginous prospect stretching to the birth of mankind.

Even as a child, Jenny Wren had been marked out as a failure. Fat, clumsy and desperate for love, she carried her self-consciousness around with her like a heavy suitcase handcuffed to her wrist. Her children, Eddie learned later from Mr Reynolds, had been taken into care. And after the third one was born, Jenny Wren plunged into a post-natal depression from which she never really emerged.

She lived in Hackney, in a council flat on the fourth floor of a tower block. On that morning when her father was putting the finishing touches to Angel’s fitted wardrobes, she took a basket of washing on to her balcony. Instead of hanging out the clothes, however, she leant over the waist-high wall and stared down at the ground. Then – according to a witness who was watching, powerless to intervene, from a window in the neighbouring block – she lifted first one leg and then the other off the ground and rolled clumsily over the wall.

Characteristically, the suicide attempt was a failure. Though she dived head first on top of her cerebral hemispheres, the fall was partly broken by a shrub. She did a good deal of damage to herself – a badly fractured skull and other broken bones – but unfortunately she survived. A week after the fall, Mr Reynolds returned to 29 Rosington Road to finish off the wardrobes.

‘Jen’s in a coma. May never wake up. If she does, there may be brain damage.’

Angel patted his hand and said how very, very sorry they were. She and Eddie had sent flowers to the hospital.

‘How’s Mrs Reynolds coping?’

‘Not easy for her. The chaplain’s been very kind.’ The shock had made Mr Reynolds less talkative, and everything he said had a staccato delivery. ‘Not that we’re churchgoers, of course. Time and a place for everything.’

‘Are you sure you want to carry on with the wardrobes?’ Angel asked. ‘I’m sure we could find someone else to finish off. You must have so much to do. We’d quite understand.’

‘I’d rather keep busy, thanks all the same.’

Halfway through June, about six weeks after Jenny Wren’s fall, the first little girl came to stay at 29 Rosington Road.

Chantal was the daughter of an English investment analyst and his French wife. The family lived in Knightsbridge, a long stone’s throw from Harrods. Chantal was the third child and her parents did not pay her much attention, preferring to hire nannies and au pairs to provide it instead. Angel had first noticed her at a birthday party for one of Chantal’s school friends; at the time, Angel had been acting as a relief nanny for the school friend’s younger sister.

Despite frequent temptation, Angel never took one of her own charges. ‘Only stupid people run unnecessary risks,’ she told Eddie when they were preparing the basement for Chantal. ‘And they’re the ones who get caught.’

Chantal’s father was black and she had inherited his pigmentation. (Angel despised people like Thelma who were racist.) They dressed her in white dresses, which set off her rich dark skin. She had a tendency to giggle when Eddie played games with her. Occasionally Angel acted – in Eddie’s phrase – as Mistress of Ceremonies. But he did not think she enjoyed the games very much.

Human beings were such a mass of contradictions. Although Angel was wonderful at looking after children, and skilled at making them do as she wanted, she seemed not to like playing with them.

Eddie had a wonderful time for two weeks and three days. One morning he woke to find Angel beside his bed. She was carrying a cup of tea for him, a rare treat. He sat up and thanked her, his mind already running ahead to the treats planned for the day.

‘Eddie.’ Angel stood by the bed, adjusting the knot that secured her robe. ‘Chantal’s gone.’

‘Where? What happened?’

‘Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. But I took her back home last night. Back to her mummy and daddy.’

He stared at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because I knew you’d be upset. I knew you’d hate having to say goodbye to her.’ She paused. ‘And she wouldn’t want to leave you.’

Eddie felt his eyes filling with tears. ‘She could have stayed with us.’

‘No, she couldn’t. Not for ever and ever. There would have been all sorts of difficulties as she grew older.’

Eddie turned his face towards the wall and said nothing.

‘Think about it.’

Eddie sniffed. Then a new problem occurred to him. ‘What happens if she tells her parents about us, and they tell the police?’

‘What can she say? All she’s seen is our faces. She doesn’t know where the house is, or what the outside looks like. She only saw the basement. Besides, the police aren’t going to try too hard. Chantal’s back home, safe and sound. No harm done, is there?’

‘I still wish I could have said goodbye.’

‘It made sense to do it this way. We didn’t want tears before bedtime, did we?’

‘Maybe she could come and stay with us again?’

Angel sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘No. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But perhaps we can find someone else to come and stay.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know yet. But no one who lives in Knightsbridge. The police look for patterns, you see. They try to pinpoint the recurring features.’

For Katy, they travelled up to Nottingham and rented a flat there for three months. Katy was an unwanted child who escaped from her foster parents at every opportunity and wandered the streets and in and out of shops.

‘Looking for love,’ Angel commented. ‘It’s so terribly sad.’

Suki, their third little girl, had a stud in her nose and a crucifix dangling from one ear; she belonged to some travellers camping in the Forest of Dean. Angel said that the mother was a drug addict; certainly Suki smelled terribly, and when they washed her for the first time the bath water turned almost black. (This was the occasion when Suki bit Eddie’s hand and screamed like a train.)

‘Some parents shouldn’t be trusted with children,’ Angel used to say. ‘They need to be taught a lesson.’

She repeated this so often, in so many ways and with such force, that Eddie thought it might amount to part of a pattern, albeit one invisible to the police.

On Sunday the first of December, after Lucy’s bath, Angel spent the rest of the morning reading to her in the basement. At least, that was what Angel said she was doing. Eddie was both hurt and angry. Angel had never been possessive with the others: she and Eddie had shared the fun.

To make matters worse, he wasn’t sure what Angel was really doing down there. The soundproofing made eavesdropping impossible. After a while, Eddie unlocked the back door and went into the garden.

It was much colder today. The damp, raw air hurt his throat. He could not be bothered to fetch a coat. He walked warily down to the long, double-glazed window of the basement. As he had feared, the curtains were drawn. The disappointment brought tears into his eyes. His skin was burning hot. He leant his forehead against the cool glass.

The movement brought his head closer to the side of the window. There was a half-inch gap between the frame and the side of the curtains.

Scarcely daring to breathe, he knelt down on the concrete path and peered through the gap. At first he saw nothing but carpet and bare, white wall. He shifted his position. Part of the Victorian armchair slid into his range of vision. Lucy was sitting there. All he could see was her feet and ankles, Mickey Mouse slippers and pale-green tights, projecting from the seat. She was not moving. He wondered if she were sleeping. She had seemed very tired in the bath, perhaps because of the medication.

At that moment Angel came into view, still wearing her white robe. Round her neck was a long, purple scarf, like a broad, shiny ribbon with tassels on the end. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving. As Eddie watched, she raised her arms towards the ceiling. Eddie licked dry lips. What he could see through the gap, the cross section of the basement, seemed only marginally connected with reality; it belonged in a dream.

Angel moved out of sight. Eddie panicked. She might have seen him at the window. In a moment the back door would open and she would catch him peeping. I just came out for a breath of fresh air. He straightened up quickly and glanced around. There was enough wind to stir the trees at the bottom of the garden and in Carver’s beyond. The leafless branches made a black tracery, through which he glimpsed Mrs Reynolds on her balcony. Eddie shivered as he walked back to the house.

Mrs Reynolds watches me, I watch Angel: who watches Mrs Reynolds? Must be God.

Eddie giggled, imagining God following Mrs Reynolds’s movements through a pair of field glasses from some vantage point in the sky. According to Mr Reynolds, his wife had become a born-again Christian since Jenny Wren had sent herself into a coma.

‘It’s a comfort to her,’ Mr Reynolds had said. ‘Not really my cup of tea, but never mind.’

Eddie opened the back door and went inside. The warmth of the kitchen enveloped him but he could not stop shivering. He went into the hall. The basement door was still closed. He pressed his ear against one of the panels. All he heard was his own breathing, which seemed unnaturally loud.

Clinging to the banister, he climbed the stairs and rummaged in the bathroom cupboard until he found the thermometer. He perched uncomfortably on the side of the bath while he took his temperature. It’s not fair. Why won’t she let me in the basement too? He took the thermometer out of his mouth. His temperature was over 102 degrees. He felt strangely proud of this achievement: he must be really ill. He deserved special treatment.

He found some paracetamol in the cupboard, took two tablets out of the bottle and snapped them in half. He poured water into a green plastic beaker which he had had since he was a child. The flowing water so fascinated him that he let it flood over the rim of the beaker and trickle over his fingers. At last he swallowed the tablets and went into his bedroom to lie down.

Alternately hot and cold, he lay fully clothed under the duvet. He thought how nice it would be if Angel and Lucy brought him a hot-water bottle and a cooling drink. They could sit with him for a while, and perhaps Angel would read a story. Nobody cares about me. He stared at the picture of the little girl which his father had given his mother all those years ago. Very nice, Stanley. If you like that sort of thing. A little later he heard his parents talking: dead voices from the big front bedroom; perhaps they were not really dead after all – perhaps they were watching him now.

Eddie drifted in and out of sleep. Just before three in the afternoon he woke to find his mouth dry and his body wet with sweat. He dragged himself out of bed and stood swaying and shivering in the bedroom. I need some tea, a nice cup of tea.

He found his glasses and went slowly downstairs. To his surprise, he heard voices in the kitchen. He pushed open the door. Lucy was sitting at the table eating a boiled egg. Angel was now dressed in jeans and jersey; her hair was tied back in a ponytail. As Eddie staggered into the room, he heard Lucy saying, ‘Mummy always cuts my toast into soldiers, but Daddy doesn’t bother.’

She stopped talking as soon as she saw Eddie. Angel and Lucy stared at Eddie. Two’s company, three’s none.

‘What are you doing in the kitchen?’ Eddie said, his voice rising in pitch. ‘It’s against the rules.’

‘The rules aren’t written in stone. Circumstances alter cases.’ Angel stroked Lucy’s dark head. ‘And this is a very special little circumstance.’

‘But they never come in the kitchen.’

‘That’s enough, Eddie. How are you feeling?’

Thrown off balance, he stared at her.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘How did you know I’m ill?’

‘You should try looking at yourself in the mirror,’ Angel said, not unkindly.

‘I think it’s flu.’

‘I doubt it: probably just a virus. You need paracetamol and lots of fluids.’

Eddie sat down at the table. Lucy looked at him, her spoon halfway to her mouth, and to his delight she smiled.

‘Finish your egg, dear,’ Angel said. ‘It’s getting cold.’

‘I don’t want any more.’

‘Nonsense. You need some food in that little tummy. And don’t forget your Ribena.’

Lucy dropped her spoon on the table. ‘But I’ve had enough.’

‘Come along: eat up.’

‘I’m full.’

‘You’ll do as I say, Lucy. You must always finish what’s on your plate.’

‘Mummy doesn’t make me when I’m full.’ Lucy’s eyes brimmed with tears but her voice was loud so she sounded more angry than afraid. ‘I want Mummy.’

‘We’re not at home to Miss Crosspatch,’ Angel announced.

Eddie laughed. He would not usually have dared to laugh, but now the boundaries were shifting. After all, he was not entirely sure that this was really happening. It might be a dream. At any moment he might wake up and see, hanging on the wall by the door, the picture of the little girl which his father had given his mother. The girl like Lucy.

‘You’re really not yourself, Eddie.’ Angel walked into the hall. ‘I’m going to take your temperature.’ Her footsteps ran lightly up the stairs.

Lucy pushed the toast aside with a violent movement of her right arm. The far side of the plate caught the plastic cup, which slid to the edge of the table. Ribena flooded across the floor.

For an instant, Eddie and Lucy looked at each other. Then Lucy slithered off her seat and ran for the door – not the door to the hall but the door to the garden. Eddie knew he should do something, if this were not a dream, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to stand up. In any case, it wouldn’t matter: they kept the back door locked when they had a little girl staying with them.

He watched Lucy twisting the handle and pulling. He watched the door opening and felt cold air against his skin. Only then, as Lucy ran into the garden, did he realize that she really was outside. He was aware, too, that this was his fault – that he had unlocked the door when he went out to look through the basement window at Angel and Lucy. Seeing Mrs Reynolds on her balcony had made him forget to relock it when he came in. Angel would blame him, which was unfair: it was Mrs Reynolds’s fault. He stood up, propping himself on the table.

Angel took him by surprise. She ran across the kitchen from the hall, the ponytail bouncing behind her, and out of the back door. Eddie heard a crack like an exploding firework. There was another crack, then a pregnant silence, the peace before the storm. He let himself sink back on to his chair.

It was almost a relief when Lucy began to cry: jagged sobs, not far from hysteria. Angel dragged her inside, kicked the door shut and turned the key in the lock. Angel was pale and tight-lipped.

‘Very well, madam.’ Angel was holding Lucy by the ear, her nails biting in to the pink skin. ‘Do you know what happens to naughty children? They go to hell.’

Eddie cleared his throat. ‘In a way, it’s not her fault. She’s –’

‘Of course it’s her fault.’

Lucy pressed her hand against her left cheek. The sobbing mutated into a thin, high wail.

‘Perhaps she’s tired,’ Eddie muttered. ‘Perhaps she needs a rest.’

Angel pushed Lucy away. The girl fell against a chair and slid to the floor. She stayed there, half-sitting, half-sprawling, with an arm hooked round a chair leg and her head resting against the side of the seat. Ribena soaked into the skirt of her dress.

The crying stopped. Lucy’s mouth hung open, the lips moist and loose. Fear makes children ugly.

‘It’s all right, Lucy.’ Eddie sat down on the chair beside hers and patted Lucy’s dark head. She jerked it away. ‘You’re a bit overexcited. That’s all it is.’

‘That’s not all it is.’ Angel tugged open the drawer where they kept the kitchen cutlery. ‘She needs a lesson. They all need a lesson.’

Eddie rubbed his aching forehead. ‘Who need a lesson? I don’t understand.’

Angel whirled round. In her hand was a pair of long scissors with orange plastic handles. She pointed them at Eddie, and the blades flashed. ‘You’ll never understand. You’re too stupid.’

He looked at the table and noticed the swirl of the grain around a knot shaped like a snail. He wished he were dead.

‘If they do wrong,’ Angel shouted, ‘they have to pay for it. How else can they make things right?’

Eddie examined the snail. He wanted to say: But she only spilled some Ribena.

‘And if they don’t want to, then I shall make them.’ Angel’s face was ablaze. ‘We all have to suffer. So why shouldn’t they?’

But who are ‘they’? The four girls or –

‘Come here, Lucy,’ Angel said softly.

Lucy didn’t move.

Angel sprang across the kitchen, the scissors raised in her right hand.

‘No,’ Eddie said, trying to get up. ‘You mustn’t.’

With her left hand, Angel seized Lucy by the hair and dragged her to her feet. Lucy screamed. Oddly detached, Eddie noticed that there were toast crumbs and a long stain of yolk on the green Laura Ashley dress.

Angel pulled Lucy by the hair. Lucy wrapped one arm round a table leg and screamed. Angel pulled harder. The table juddered a few inches over the kitchen floor.

‘Angel, let her go. Someone might hear.’

Lucy squealed. Angel yanked the little girl away from the table. She towered over Lucy, holding the scissors high above the girl’s head.

‘No, Angel, no!’ Eddie cried. ‘Please, Angel, no.’