Читать книгу Babyface - Elizabeth Woodcraft - Страница 13

NINESaturday

Lena toyed with her scrambled egg. We were having breakfast in the café round the corner from the gym, just near Stoke Newington Green. The café was hot and full of the perfume of fried bread. A number of single men sat eating plates of sausage, egg and beans. Everybody had a large white mug of tea in front of them. It was nine o’clock. I couldn’t imagine the time Lena had had to get up in order to go to the gym first. She looked flushed and healthy. I just looked flushed. With her thick long hair pulled back and wearing a loose pink T-shirt you couldn’t tell Lena was ten years older than me. It didn’t help that I was feeling ten years older than I was. I was telling her in the vaguest terms about my few depressing days at the inquiry in Birmingham.

‘Just remember, you’re only up there for a while,’ she said. ‘It will be over in a flash. What do you think that is?’ She speared something on her fork. ‘You don’t think it’s bacon, do you?’

‘It’s probably a bit of mushroom. Does it matter? You haven’t gone vegetarian have you Lena?’

‘I’m trying a new diet,’ she said. ‘Three days vegetables to one day meat.’

‘The point being …?’

‘To see if I can, I think. I mean, we’ve got to stop eating meat. It’s not good for us or the rest of the world.’

‘But it’s so delicious.’

‘So’s foie gras but we don’t eat that, do we? Do we?’

‘Not often,’ I mumbled. ‘Well, never, actually, but I might do if, say, I was going out with a racy, possibly French, torchsong singer who was also a wizard in the kitchen.’

‘Remember what happened with your last torchsong singer,’ Lena said sagely, spearing a dripping piece of fried tomato.

‘It wasn’t her fault I got arrested for murder.’

‘No, but she would have been happy to see you take the rap.’ Lena, trying to be kind, blamed the whole thing on Margo, but it wasn’t like that. Not really.

‘We never ate anything at her place. I don’t know if she could even cook.’ I thought back to Margo’s small desolate flat, denuded of its contents by her ex-husband at the end of her marriage, all the borrowed furniture, brown and depressing.

‘Exactly, she would probably have opened a tin of the stuff, all porky pink and covered in jelly.’

‘You seem to know a lot about this,’ I said. ‘Or else you’re confusing it with Spam.’

‘Just stay away from nightclub singers,’ she warned. ‘It’s the wages of foie gras.’ She looked at me piercingly. ‘You need help. You need to spend some money.’

We strolled along Stoke Newington High Street. ‘Let’s go in here,’ I said.

‘A furniture shop?’ Lena sounded as if I’d suggested we go into an abattoir.

Overstuffed sofas were squashed one behind the other in two rows, with an aisle between them, like a chartered aircraft that was aiming for comfort as well as maximum passenger numbers.

‘I just wanted to smell the smell,’ I said. The smell of new fabrics and polished wood. ‘I was thinking I might get a new sofa.’

‘You don’t need a new sofa,’ Lena said, looking round the shop in despair. ‘Certainly not a cream and maroon one.’

‘This is the kind of place Yolande works in.’

Lena frowned, then raised an eyebrow. ‘Yolande?’

‘She’s the girlfriend of someone in Birmingham.’

‘Oh.’ She was disappointed, but her eyebrow stayed where it was. ‘Well, if you seriously want to buy something like this, buy it from her and get a discount.’

‘What about leather?’ I said.

‘Don’t you have to kill an awful lot of cows to cover a sofa? How could you sit comfortably with that on your conscience? And stop looking at me like that.’ Lena looked down at her leather coat. ‘Leather jackets are the offcuts of shoes. Or they should be. Anyway, I am aware of the contradictions that society forces us to live with. But it’s very pushy, isn’t it, leather furniture? Dominating. In a room. A huge leather sofa. Surely as feminists we didn’t give up being dominated by men to be dominated by our furniture?’

‘I was thinking of a small armchair, I thought it would feel sort of deep and intellectual.’

‘Buy a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, they’d be cheaper.’ She looked round the showroom again. ‘Can we go now? All these smoked glass coffee tables are depressing me.’

The air was clean and fresh, even for Stoke Newington, and the sun was high in the sky as I walked back to the flat. It was going to be a really hot day. The grass in front of my house looked almost verdant. I unlocked the main front door. There was no post on the mat and no neat pile outside my front door, but on a day like this I was not going to feel miserable about Margo. I wandered into the kitchen. I leaned against the sink and gazed out of the window.

In the garden the sky was blue and the lawn ached in the light, calling to me. I shared the garden with the people in the flat upstairs, which worked rather well because I like a garden and they liked gardening. Technically my half was the half nearest the house, but they did it all, mowing, pruning, planting, weeding. That is the kind of gardening I like. I pulled open the cutlery drawer and fished out the key to the French windows.

I pushed open both doors and stepped onto the patio. Two of the rose bushes were in flower and I could smell the sweet, old-fashioned perfume. Margo’s perfume had been rose, I thought woefully. But I hadn’t met her till the autumn, I told myself firmly, so there was nothing here to remind me of her. In fact she’d never been to my flat, so there was no trace of her anywhere. No trace, just feelings. I could feel a bad seventies song coming on so I went back into the kitchen. While the kettle was boiling, I walked down the three steps in my hall to a small landing where the cupboard I call a shed houses all my unused gardening equipment and my deckchairs. I hauled one back up to the garden, made some coffee and sat in the sun in the green and white deckchair, gazing at the newly watered pots of geraniums and the recently cut grass.

I was drifting in and out of a doze. The phone was ringing. I lurched into the living room, stumbling against the sofa, wondering whether I should have gone to the gym. It was Yolande.

‘What are you doing this evening?’

Lena and I had made a loose arrangement to see each other in Fox’s wine bar in Church Street if all else failed. ‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Do you want to come out for dinner? Nothing fancy, quite quiet. It might be … useful.’

‘Ah, now then …’ I began.

‘Can you pick me up at about seven?’ She said the name of a hotel in Russell Square.

‘Well …’

‘Seven it is, then. We should be at Sandra’s by about seven thirty,’ she said and there was a click as she broke the connection.

I held the receiver limply in my hand. Sandra? The Sandra who was Effo’s girlfriend? We were going to dinner with Sandra? I tried to remember what Yolande had said about Effo and Sandra. Effo got people to do his dirty work, Danny worked for Effo, Danny was a hit man, Terry Fleming was dead, well, missing believed dead. Did people like this even eat dinner? Or did they just eat other people? A small tingle ran down my spine.

I rang Lena to consider this development. Although Danny was no longer my client I retained as much client confidentiality as I could, but she had to know something so that she could take a properly informed view. At first she was most concerned that I was going out to dinner with a person who could sell sofas like the ones in the shop this morning.

‘Perhaps you should go for a walk round Heals this afternoon, as a form of inoculation.’

‘We’re not going to get that close,’ I said doubtfully, and explained about Danny.

‘So that’s two reasons not to go out for dinner with her.’

‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘She’s straight.’

‘That,’ she said darkly, ‘is what they all say.’

‘And she’s married.’

‘Three reasons then. Sofas, boyfriend and husband.’ She paused. ‘Well, if she’s really straight, why are you going?’

‘It’s just dinner. Nothing fancy. There’ll be other people there. Sandra … another girlfriend.’

‘Another girlfriend of Danny’s? Maybe that’s not so dangerous then.’

‘No, the girlfriend of another man.’ I explained the position – Lena knows she has to be discreet – about Danny and his history of serious offences, Yolande’s determination to prove him innocent, my interest in justice being done.

She sighed. ‘Was it wise to take a criminal case, after your last experience?’ she asked. Everything that had gone wrong the year before, from my arrest for murder through to my unsatisfactory relationship with Margo, could be traced back to a small drunk and disorderly case I had done at Highbury Corner magistrates’ court.

‘It’s all going to be fine.’

‘Darling, I think there’s a chance that Danny might not like you going out with his girlfriend. And might there not be the teensiest possibility that Yolande is up to something with this Sandra? They both have relationships with rather unpleasant men. Where do you come in? Look, sweetie, I’m not one to panic, as you know, but in this particular situation, isn’t there a risk that something fairly nasty might happen this evening and it might happen to you?’

‘But I’ve said I’ll go now. I’m picking her up.’

‘OK. Here’s a plan. You don’t go. You ring her back and say we have a date. Which of course we do.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I assured her, starting to worry. Lena had called me ‘darling’ and ‘sweetie’ in the same breath, it made me feel vulnerable and in serious need of hot chocolate and someone to tuck me up in bed.

On the other hand, there was Yolande, with her blonde hair and ironic eyes. She knew what she wanted. I didn’t, but she did. I like that in a woman. Clarity of purpose, determination. ‘She’s cool,’ I said. ‘I know she has her own agenda, which is helping Danny. But that means she wouldn’t take me anywhere risky. I’m useful to her.’

‘Oh Frankie,’ Lena said, mournfully. ‘Well, take your mobile, make sure the battery is charged and keep it switched on. And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, tell that ex-girlfriend of yours, the Ice Queen.’ Lena had strong negative views about Kay. ‘If she’s his solicitor, she ought to know.’

‘Of course,’ I said. But, as I replaced the receiver, I told myself that Kay didn’t need to know just yet. What was there to tell? It was just dinner.

Guilt – or was it anxiety? – forced me to pull out one of my outstanding pieces of paperwork. Mr Burke had assaulted his partner and his two children and now they were in care and he was afraid the other foster children in the placement were a bad influence. He was raising Human Rights points, that he was being denied a family life and the family life the children were getting was a bad one. The eternal dilemma. Was it better for the children to be with a parent, even a not very good one, or in a rather bad placement in care? The mother wasn’t appealing. She was twenty, the children were four and two. I wondered if she would rather someone else looked after them for a while just to get him off her back. Maybe she wanted to live a little. I drafted a short advice saying I needed more information. I felt flat and chilly. I didn’t know if it was the sadness of some people’s lives or because I was really rather concerned about the evening to come.

Suddenly it was six o’clock. It was time to think about leaving.

I put on ‘Going to a Go Go’ and jumped into the shower in time to the drum beat. I thought about what to wear. Nothing fancy, she’d said. I’d stick to black, just to be on the safe side.

Before I left the flat I set the video to record a TV show about barristers, which I needed to be able to discuss in sneering detail in chambers (‘Oh that would never happen, as if a clerk would ever say that!’ ‘You’d never do that without a solicitor!’), but then I couldn’t find a tape to use. I decided I could probably discuss it without seeing it (not that I approve of that). A thought flickered through my mind that I might not be around to discuss it anyway, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it – I was already worried that I’d put on too much Ô de Lancôme. I switched on the radio to protect my home from intruders.

They say you’re in more danger in the home than out of it, so I was being positively sensible by going out to dinner

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