The Bad Sister (24 page)

It was clear that Mrs Hyde had some messages to get – as Jean Hastie puts it. She went into a cheap butcher, and out again with a bundle wrapped in paper so thin the mince oozed at the sides; she went to a shoe-mender's bar and emerged with two small pairs of shoes, not wrapped up at all and forced to share a dingy shopper with the mince. She went – suddenly – into a betting shop and there she stayed.

Jean Hastie had, as she recalls, two choices at this point. She could go into the bookie's after the woman; or she could go home by Ladbroke Grove (for she knew well enough where she was now, the stretch of water and old
windowless buildings on the canal having temporarily dislocated her) and wait for her prey to come home. No one, Jean reckoned, would go much further on an evening like this, with mouths to feed and meat soaking through the lining of a bag. But choose she must; for she had been spying; and Mrs Hyde's wasn't the only head – in an area where to be quick is a matter of survival – to have turned with the speed of a key in a lock at the sight of Jean Hastie strolling down Harrow Road.

It soon became clear that the first option was out of the question. What was she to say to this woman, whom she had seen only once, after all, in the gardens and late at night? (It's odd here, as Jean remarks, that she was so sure the woman was Mrs Hyde: it had to do with the stooping run, the air of almost palpable disintegration and of course the infamous white mac, worn now over a nondescript skirt and sweater.) The very thought of stopping such a pathetic creature – or undeserving no-hoper, depending on how you saw these things – was repellent to the solicitor and mother of two. Besides, how could she question the woman while surrounded by punters intent on changing the course of their luck? All hell might break out. Despite her provincial manner, Jean Hastie knew enough of bad areas in inner cities to desist from plunging into the heart of a better's den.

In she went, though. She wasn't sure, as she records in her diary, what decided her, in the end: it was the possible frustration, very likely, of losing Mrs Hyde again; and of waiting, unrewarded, on a corner of Ladbroke Grove while her interviewee vanished from the face of the earth (not, as Jean told Robina Sandel when she came back scared and cold from her quest for Eliza Jekyll's beneficiary, that that, or something very like it, hadn't taken place in front of her own eyes when her quarry did finally make her way back to the dilapidated houses concealing gardens and richly stuccoed crescents behind). But at least she'd got some picture of her – and here Jean shuddered again and took the hot toddy proffered by Robina gratefully. We must regret
this, for the rest of the entries for that afternoon's encounter are short and stumbling, dwindling to silence after only a paragraph or two.

Mrs Hyde, apparently, had won some money on a horse, McCubbin, the day before. (All this as related by Robina, as told her by Jean; and I think some of Robina's fanciful humour must have crept in here and there.) The woman was even joking that she'd spent the children's family allowances on the bet; and it must have been a well-worn joke, for the only person to look up, chortle, through a fag glued to lower lip, was a fat woman with some disease resembling porphyria, her purple double chins subsiding into one another as she laughed.

‘Mrs Hyde?' Jean Hastie said.

A chatter of odds and races followed; the woman Jean had pursued with so much attention since hearing her old friend Eliza's commission, now looked away, turning up the collar of her sweater and pulling down her head under the mac so that for a moment she looked cowled, a medieval martyr, or a woman who has just been shriven and is being taken off to be burned. ‘Can I see your face?' Jean Hastie asked.

The sound of the racing swelled, and the fat woman pushed forward. A man bumped up against Jean and obscured her from seeing anything other than synthetic tweed, ash-covered and drink-soaked from repeated efforts to lift a beer can in the jostling crowd.

And I did see her face, Jean told Robina. And I can't describe it at all. It had nothing to distinguish it.

Mrs Hyde had asked Jean Hastie why the hell she wanted to see her face. ‘I thought she was going to kick me – or fly at me – then and there. But I kept my ground. The drunk was lurching his way out of the betting shop into the Harrow Road. The fat woman, like some mud wrestler – like those women in TV who are just rows of muscle under the fat – moved up to Mrs Hyde as if to protect her.'

‘We have friends in common,' Jean said. ‘Eliza Jekyll—' she added quickly, when the expressions on the faces of
Mrs Hyde and her companion showed extreme disbelief that a woman in twinset and suit of a real tweed should have friends in common with such as these – not to mention the improbable venue of a bookie in one of the roughest streets in an already rough area, to decide to make a claim of social acquaintanceship.

‘You mind your own fucking business,' said Mrs Hyde.

Jean Hastie, as she sipped her toddy – and took more without demur from Robina's big silver ladle – said Mrs Hyde had finally, after a good deal more abusive language, admitted to knowing Ms Jekyll – but not that they were friends. ‘I suppose she reali–zed this was all to do with the flat,' Jean said (for, after her unpleasant adventure, she felt the time had come to confide in her hostess). ‘She didn't want to jeopardize her chances. What she didn't know,' the Scottish solicitor added with some feeling, ‘is that it's over my dead body she gets that flat from Eliza. It's blackmail, you mark my words.'

The rest of the story concerns Jean's return to No. 19 Nightingale Crescent and the strange vision she suffered in the middle of the most congested stretch of Ladbroke Grove.

‘I swear that woman has been “appearing” to me today,' Jean said. ‘I mean, it's hardly possible that a human being can vanish from sight in front of your eyes – in swirling traffic – just dematerialize, like that!'

There was no possibility that Jean Hastie had been drinking before taking some of the punch, Robina said. She was stone-cold sober – so cold, in fact, that a hot-water bottle had been placed on her feet and a warm plaid on her knees. Robina liked her guests to feel at home.

‘Yet there she was,' Jean said. ‘And then – there she wasn't. I never saw her after leaving the betting shop. She could have flown home on a broomstick, for all I know. Then – just like that, the earth swallows her up—'

Robina had lit two fat candles this time and the rest of the comfortable, London-worn room was in shadow. A haze of light rose in the faces of the two women as they pondered,
and drank the wine and brandy and cloves, helping themselves from a silver bowl where a thin blue flame ran in circles under the eyes of the two white wax sentinels above.

‘Perhaps Mephistopheles finally came to claim her,' Robina said. And she laughed softly, as if for a time – for that evening, at least – the old tales of the Germans and the Scots might come together and be true.

Certainly, as Jean Hastie remembered, there had been a hellish aspect to the junction of Ladbroke Grove and the Crescent, as she returned from her unexpected – almost dreamlike – visit to the canal and the betting shop beyond.

Most of the street seemed to be in the process of being dug up, for one thing. Yellow diggers and dumpers moved like giant crabs in a sludge of churned earth and mud, their feelers reaching higher than the uppermost windows of the houses. Lamp-posts, facsimiles of the Victorian originals and insisted on by rich residents of the borough as replacements for the fluorescence of past decades, stood marooned on their islands of concrete as the road-widening exercise took place. The demure light they afforded – particularly as even this was shrouded by protruding rhododendron and privet from front-garden hedges – had made Jean apprehensive. She was glad, she told Mara as they sat on the morning after her adventure in Mara's upper bedroom at No. 19, to have rounded the corner from the Grove; but in the main thoroughfare, at least, the lights of the roadworks had been bright enough to see where you were going.

The odd thing, Mara said, was that Jean had clearly been very much shaken by the whole thing. ‘It's unlike her. She's become – well, a lot more conservative since we used to see a lot of one another. We don't have much in common now, I suppose you could say. And she's working on some theory of Original Sin as perceived in the first four centuries after Christ, before St Augustine came along and made his own interpretation of St Paul – saying, in effect, that free will is only an illusion, that we are all saddled with Original Sin: “sin that dwells in me, because I was the son of Adam”.'

I couldn't see what Jean's researches had to do with it, and I said so. What we are trying to do, after all, is to piece together the events both psychological and actual of the days in what the media opportunistically like to refer to as ‘Valentine's Day', or Week; and a matter of prime importance, as it now appears, is the highly improbable vanishing of Mrs Hyde under the eyes of the busy visitor from Fife.

Jean had insisted, however, on sticking to her story. The lights from the mechanical diggers were flashing; a thin drizzle was falling; here and there, like the red eye of a dinosaur, the light at the top of a crane swung into view. The roadworks had caused an appalling traffic jam, and Jean threaded her way through cars and concrete mixers to reach the pavement as it rounded and went up the Crescent towards No. 19. It was then, Jean said, that she realized that the crumbling houses of Ladbroke Grove, made even more insecure now by the sudden absence of pavement in front of them, were connected with the stucco palaces behind. For an open door in one of the most dilapidated houses, combined with a flare of brightness from the magnesium torches in the street, showed a passageway – then another door open wide – and beyond that a window, which gave out on the black, rural peace of communal gardens. At the same time, a figure of a man dashed out of the house and down the steps and Mrs Hyde, now discernible on the cordoned-off fragment of walkway made available for pedestrians in this grand scheme, came nearer, walking down from the north end of Ladbroke Grove.

There were some things, Jean insisted, which would remain in her mind a long time – and the first was by no means the descent into the ground of her original prey. No, it was the sight of the two faces at the basement window – of the house with the open door from which the man was running – the house towards which Mrs Hyde had, to all intents and purposes, been making her way – two faces, behind grimy, once-white bars, that looked up and wrung Jean Hastie's heart so that she had, in turn, to stop in her tracks and look down.

It must have been then – so Jean supposes – that Mrs Hyde ‘nipped off' somewhere else. For it is, after all, impossible to go down into the bowels of the earth in the middle of a busy street in London. Yet she could have sworn, when she looked up from her anguished contemplation of these children – so different from her own bairns: so pale and underfed and miserable, such examples of an upbringing in the cruel city – that she saw, just for one split second, the figure of Mrs Hyde, as she went down. ‘I know it can't be,' Jean said as Mara – and then Robina Sandel, called upstairs to hear the tale one more time – questioned her again. The man had run off, up the Grove towards Notting Hill. Jean was clear on that. But where – and you had to think of those poor children at the window – where was their mother now?

Jean Hastie had more than a few thoughts to contend with, as she left Ladbroke Grove and walked away from the bulldozers and pickaxes, towards the haven of Robina Sandel's house. Here the leather club fender and the air of battered permanence so soothing to inmates and visitors in an age of rapid change, demolition and reconstruction, would at least be the same as when she left earlier that day; here, too, she could hope to find Dr Frances Crane in a better frame of mind than before: prepared, possibly, to answer her urgent questions on Mrs Hyde and to allay some of her anxieties. She hurried on, uneasily aware that she, if not the ambience at No. 19, had certainly changed since her recent arrival. For how could it be, when she had passed nothing more alarming than a peeling house – the scaffolding proclaiming a return to mansion status; notices warning trespassers of dogs and prosecution; and then had walked right by a fine window, lit to show the terracotta hues of the room inside to the best advantage, with four or five people gathered in it, by a dark bookcase and guarded, as it seemed, by marble pilasters – that she felt, quite unequivocally, afraid? The lash of a shrub, wet and cold against her face, made her ashamed to admit that she would
prefer the maelstrom of Ladbroke Grove to the sudden, suffocating silence of this residential place. Somewhere in the gardens, behind the tall houses that lean just visibly against each other in their shallow foundations, an owl hooted. And Jean Hastie, telling herself she must make some sense out of this whole puzzle, walked back past the tableau in the terracotta room, and at a greater speed past the sheeted and iron-girt No. 39. Next door was a flight of stone steps, and here Jean rang on a bell where was inscribed, under a transparent shield that was also discreetly lit from behind, the name
E. JEKYLL
.

‘So you decided not to wait for Eliza's dinner party?' Mara Kaletsky said when Jean paused, as if trying to find words to convey what she had then seen. ‘You were worried for her, right? How much you need to be I don't really know. But she seems the kind of woman who can look after herself – wouldn't you say?'

Jean said she had been worried all the same. If her old friend was actually being menaced by some kind of psychotic – well, she was in need of help and there was an end to it. If she was simply going through one of her foolish phases – then Jean would refuse absolutely to draw up any legal documents for her.