Tree of Hands (21 page)

These girls were usually giggling, usually pleased with themselves. Karen had once told him that Stephanie fancied him. If it had ever been true, she had got over it now, for she pointedly turned her head the other way and so did Diana. It was a funny thing, he'd often thought most of this lot couldn't read but they had read the papers all right, they had read the bits about him helping the police with their inquiries.

Carol didn't get up till lunchtime. The phone rang a couple of times before that but they must have been wrong numbers, for each time Barry picked up the receiver, he got silence and then the dialling tone. Unless, he thought, it was someone trying to get Carol who didn't want to speak to him, who didn't even want him to know they wanted to speak to Carol – ‘they' being a man of course. He cleared up in the kitchen, washed their glasses from the night before and the cups and saucers the reporters had used when Iris had made tea for them, and carried the rubbish bag out from the waste bin to the dustbin that stood by the back door.

It was cold today but dry, colder than it had been when he went out for the papers. He noticed how green Winterside Down was, all the little rectangles of garden, all the lawns and banks and slopes, a brilliant, hard, acid, treeless green. It was a green to hurt the eyes. Mrs Spicer was putting bowls of some sort of steaming mash stuff into her rabbits' hutches. She turned round and smiled at Barry and said good morning to him and it was better today, wasn't it, at least it was dry. He felt unreasoningly grateful to her for speaking to him, for greeting him with warmth. He could have kissed her.

Carol said she couldn't stand another evening on their own, she'd go off her rocker. She had a long leisurely bath with avocado and peachnut essence in the water and a herbal pack on her face. In the black and white dress with, over it, Mrs Fylemon's cast-off, beauty-without-cruelty synthetic fox coat, she was the old Carol again, his love, his child-mother of three children. They hadn't seen Tanya
and Ryan since before Jason went. Barry didn't want to think about that, he pushed it away, he had enough without that. He and Carol were going to meet Iris and Jerry in the Bulldog, but just as they were leaving, the phone rang again. Carol answered it this time. Barry was already in the hall, waiting for her by the front door. She had gone back into the living room to answer the phone, and when she'd said, ‘Hallo,' and a less impersonal ‘Oh, hi,' he saw the door pulled shut. She had shut herself in with the phone, leaving him alone in the hall. He felt the sudden swift descent of the worst loneliness he had ever known in his life. It made him cold. He shivered with the cold. She was only on the phone a few minutes, three at most. She came out and took his arm and said it had been Alkmini.

Iris and Jerry were sitting at a corner table with a couple Iris said lived down the road from them. Barry immediately thought of Terence Wand's mother. Could this possibly be her? Iris never introduced anyone to anyone. You were supposed to know who people were without being told. Carol knew all right. She called the woman Dorothy. Barry found himself studying the sixty-year-old, raddled, sagging face, the bravely painted mouth, the henna'ed grey hair, looking for a likeness to Jason. In the nose perhaps, in the eyes which were faded now but once might have been as blue as cornflowers. He was working out ways of finding out what he wanted to know when the Dorothy woman and her husband or boyfriend or whatever he was got up quite abruptly and said they must be going. Barry was rather disappointed. It was only afterwards that he realized that, just before they left, just before a glance passed between them and they got up, Iris had spoken to him and had called him for the first time that evening by his Christian name.

Carol looked rovingly round the saloon bar, twining a curl round one of her fingers. A great cavernous place it was, of Edwardian etched glass and red plush and a ceiling whose scrollwork was chestnut-brown with nicotine. Jerry sat silent, dumb with gin, his face a dull blue. Her claw of
a hand on Barry's arm, Iris cocked her head in the direction of the departing neighbours.

‘Don't take no notice, Barry. There's some get very funny about folks what have contact with the police.'

Her habitual placid half-smile lay on her mouth. It was a fat woman's smile on a thin woman's face. Iris pushed two cigarettes into the smile, lit them and handed one to Carol.

On the way home with Carol, taking her arm and putting it into his, he asked her if Dorothy's surname was Wand. She was preoccupied. He didn't wonder at that. He asked her again, looking into her face this time, though he never much liked doing that after dark in Winterside Down. The khaki, colour-draining light was unkind to even the prettiest face. It made skulls out of faces and gave them empty eye sockets.

‘You what?' she said.

‘I thought she might be a Mrs Wand.'

‘Well, she's not, she's a Mrs Bailey. What's made you so nosy all of a sudden?'

The tall single tower block dominated the estate, lights on all over it. It was like a chimney full of holes which the fire inside showed through. They went across Bevan Square where Hoopoe and Black Beauty and Nose Ring and a couple of girls with black lips and fingernails – or lips and fingernails that looked black in this light – stood outside the Turkish takeaway, eating chips. Hoopoe said something as they passed but he didn't say it loudly and all Barry caught was the word ‘woman'.

‘They're just ignorant,' said Carol loud enough for them to hear. ‘That's what you have to put up with living round here, ignorant scum and scrubbers like those two.' Her body trembled against his side and he was filled with a fierce pride that she should be angry for him. Then she said, speaking softly, to him alone, ‘I'd do anything to get away from here. I hate this dump. Sometimes I think I'll be in this dump till I'm old, till I die.'

‘Carol,' he said. ‘Carol – a year or two, just give me a
year or two. I'll make money. I'll get the down payment on a house for us.'

She looked away from him. Her words were rough but she didn't speak them unkindly. ‘It'll just be piddling little bits of money, won't it? I want real money, I'm sick of struggling. I had a chance of that with my husband and he had to go and die.'

‘I'm young. I can make as much as Dave ever could. Let's get married, Carol. I want it to be me you mean when you say “my husband”.'

‘How can I get married?' she said. ‘I can't get married when we don't know if Jason's alive or dead.'

Her voice sounded sincere yet he had a feeling it was something entirely different she was saying, some far more genuine excuse she was really making.

The police came in the morning and told Carol they had established beyond a doubt that the dead child wasn't Jason. Carol didn't say anything; she lifted her shoulders in an indifferent little shrug. They had caught her as she was leaving for Mrs Fylemon's, her first day back since Mrs Fylemon's return from Tunisia. The detective sergeant told her that the boy whose body they found had been nearer three than two and, from the shape of his skull, was shown not to have been Caucasian. In any case he had been dead for at least six seeks, a fact which didn't surprise Barry, remembering that face.

He had an unreasonable urge – unreasonable only because he knew they wouldn't dream of doing it – to ask the police to put posters and banners up all over Winterside Down saying,
Barry Mahon Is Innocent
, or something like that. Maybe have a car going round and a man with a loudspeaker like they did before elections, shouting that he hadn't done it, that he was in the clear. His imagination was running wild, he knew that. He watched the sergeant go, having said not a word.

What did it matter anyway? Sticks and stones may break my bones but hard words cannot hurt me. His mother had
taught him that when he was a little kid and had been subjected to verbal bullying in the school playground. He had always remembered. It wasn't important that an old bag with dyed hair didn't want to sit in a pub with him or that Hoopoe called after him that some folks wouldn't dare show their faces outside – for he was certain now that this was what had been said – without a woman to protect them.

But it was in the forefront of his mind as he and Carol walked together to the bus stop. Not that there was anyone for her to ‘protect' him from this morning. Going along the path to the Chinese bridge, they met no one but the old boy in the Sherlock Holmes hat who sat there fishing in the canal most wet mornings under a green umbrella. Barry's bus came first. He didn't want to go to Finchley, he never wanted to go there again. He was hours late anyway.

One bus to Wood Green and then change on to another. What curious trick of chance brought that double decker bus with an L plate rather slowly and steadily past the stop? No buses to Hampstead or through Hampstead came this way but this bus, out on a practice run, had Hampstead on its front. The address on the paper that had fallen from Carol's coat came back to him. 5 Spring Close, Hampstead. Terence Wand. It had said Terry on the paper but Barry didn't want to think of him like that, it sounded too close to his own name, it put it in the same
class
of name. Terence. Terence Wand, who lived in Hampstead at a classy address that was a far cry from what Carol called ‘this dump', from Winterside Down.

Getting on the next bus that came, climbing up to the top deck, Barry found himself looking at all the men about, looking for the kind of man he sought. He sat in the front, looking at the men in the street. It seemed to him that there were more of them about at this time of day than there had used to be a few years back. That was all the unemployment, of course. Barry didn't want to think about unemployment, it made him go cold down his back.

A lot of the men were black or Indians or men he instinctively knew to be of Irish descent like himself, dark and wild of face with a light in their eyes. Some were fair and sharp-nosed but none he could see really looked like Jason grown-up. The idea formed and grew solid in Barry's mind that for his own peace of mind – or if not for peace, for the easing of his mind – he would have to go up to Hampstead and find Spring Close and take a look at Terence Wand.

IT GAVE BENET
a curious feeling when she read in the newspaper about the discovery of the child's body in Finchley. If they decided it was Jason she wouldn't have to give Jason back. There were two major faults in this hypothesis: one that the child's body couldn't be Jason's since Jason himself was standing a yard or two from her feeding his rocking horse with sugar lumps, and secondly, that nothing could be more disastrous for her, nothing so militate against her work and her life as feeling herself obliged to hang on to Jason. Yet the discovery of the body had strangely pleased her. For that she castigated herself. It was dreadful and wrong to feel that way, for whoever this wretched little corpse might have been, it had once been a child, some child, murdered or killed by a violence that went too far, and buried in squalid suburban earth.

Just as she had been almost pleased by the unearthing of the corpse so she was vaguely and irrationally disappointed when it was identified as that of Martin M'Boa, a Nigerian child who had been missing for more than three months. It brought her back to something she had shelved or suspended while there was doubt about the child's identity, it brought her back to decision-making. She still had to fix on a way of returning Jason, though it was a week now since she had decided to return him clandestinely. Jason had taken to waking up in the night, waking just once and calling for her. The first time he called ‘Mummy' she felt a sort of horror because, momentarily, as she woke to that cry, he had been James. She hadn't wanted to go in to him, to see him instead of James, but she had gone. It wasn't his fault, he was responsible for none of it, and he
called her what he would have called any young woman who had the care of him. After she had quietened him, she lay awake for a long time wondering at herself and what had happened to her. Mopsa, of course, was mad. But hadn't she too been a little mad from shock and grief in that she had kept Jason so long after she knew who he was? She wasn't mad now. She was sane and level-headed – she was even writing again, working well in the study room after Jason had been put to bed – but it was
too late now
. A rational mind had been recovered too late. That mind looked askance at Mopsa-type ideas for taking Jason back, restoring him to the wall where he had been when Mopsa found him, taking him into a store crowded with Christmas shoppers and giving him into the care of the management as a lost child, placing him in the arms of a policeman in the street and then running like a hare. Mopsa ideas all of them, if Mopsa could ever have been persuaded Jason must be returned home.

She hadn't spoken to Benet since her return to Marbella. It was Benet's father who had phoned to say her mother had arrived safely, had a good journey, been in good spirits and talking constantly of her visit. It made Benet wonder what story she had told to account for Jason's presence. If she had told any. She must have said something for John Archdale asked just before he rang off, ‘How's the boy?'

It wasn't until an hour or two afterwards that Benet understood he had meant James.

She needed someone to confide in. Curiously enough, in an unsatisfactory and inadequate sort of way, Mopsa had filled that role. In the middle of this populous place, Benet was aware of her isolation, a solitude she had created for herself and must maintain until Jason was gone. Since Antonia's, there had been only one phone call and that had been from Ian Raeburn. He asked her to come out for a meal with him.

Benet longed to go. Her abruptness to him, her coldness, when she met him in the street with Jason and the rocking horse had troubled and nagged at her ever since. Without
Jason, in some restaurant and later on their own, she could get to know him better. It surprised her how very much she wanted to do this. But Jason couldn't be left and there was no one she could ask to sit with him. All the people she could think of as possibilities had, in the past, sat for her with James. This was an excuse she couldn't make to Ian. She had to tell him she was busy every evening.