Whitstable (9 page)

“Lovely morning.”

“Hello, Mr C. Yes it is.” She wiped the dry earth from her hands to her apron. “The sun’s done us proud. For February.”

“I should like one of these, please.”

The Fount of All Knowledge took the cabbage from his hands and popped it into a brown paper bag tugged from a butcher’s hook. The tiny stigma in the corner torn.

“Good to see you out, sir.” She looked down at her shuffling feet. “We know how it must be for you. Everyone’s been saying.”

“Bless you.”

“Everybody knows how much you loved each other. I’m sure that’s no comfort to you at all.” Her cheeks reddened appreciably. “Still…”

He held out a handful of coins—the new decimal currency, still a struggle—and allowed her to take the required amount. “I am comforted by the certainty that I will be united with her one day. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever.” He smiled. The woman nodded to herself, then rang up the money in a till secluded in the shadows under the awning. “Tell me, my dear. You may be able to help me. Do you by any chance know a woman by the name of Mrs Drinkwater? She has a boy named Carl.”

“Annie?”

“Possibly. She lives in a bungalow on Rayham Road.”

“That’s the one.” She picked up a broom and started brushing between the stalls. “Her brother had a hole in the heart. You know, like that footballer.”

Cushing nodded but had no idea what she was talking about.

“I wonder, do you know whether she still takes in ironing? I believe her circumstances may have changed recently. I don’t want to cause offence by enquiring unnecessarily. Someone tells me she has a new young chap in her life.”

The Fount of All Knowledge shook the box of potatoes. “For all the good it’ll do her.”

“Oh? You sound sceptical.”

“I wonder why.”

“I’ve heard nothing but good reports of him. Les, I think his name is. He’s excellent with the boy, apparently. Perhaps I’ve heard wrongly.”

“Not got a great track record, has he? Married before. Divorced.”

“We don’t condemn people for that, do we? Not these days.”

“I don’t condemn anybody for anything, me.” She took a large handful of carrots from a new customer. “I don’t repeat what’s told to me in confidence. I just wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw that building over there.”

This was exactly the kind of information he wanted. But he wanted more. “His first wife? Now, was that Valerie Rodgers, the hairdresser from The Boutique, by any chance?”

“No. Nice girl from Tankerton. Sue something. Blezard, as was. That’s it. Works in a tea shop in Canterbury. Pilgrims, I think it’s called.”

That was all he wanted to know, and the rest of the conversation consisted in a short discussion of who might take in his ironing. He weathered that particular storm until the Fount of All Knowledge ran out of intellectual steam, for which he was abundantly grateful. He touched the rim of his hat.
Bless you. Goodbye.
Which is when
Mr
Fount of All Knowledge appeared from the back of the shop holding aloft a pleat of garlic in two hands, eager to share the joke as if it were the first time he’d thought of it—which it most surely wasn’t.

“Garlic, Mr C?”

“Very droll, Mr H,” Peter Cushing said, as he always did. “Very droll.”

***

He ran for the bus fearing he’d miss it, and by the time he settled into a seat his lungs were on fire. The pain and breathlessness reminded him of Helen’s lungs as the vehicle pulled away from the bus station.

Sadly he realised that he had always kept working to provide for their future together. An old age together without financial worries that was not to be. It made him feel foolish, not that he could have known it would happen like this—never
like this
—but somehow feeling God, a force for good, unaccountably laughed at one’s futile plans. Still, the income he had provided from films was able to give Helen a few luxuries, as well as the all-important medical care and attention when her cough got worse and her breathing painful and difficult. He remembered the arrival of the oxygen mask and canister necessary to assist her lungs. Meanwhile he, as Frankenstein, effortlessly transplanted brains and brought back the dead.

Frankenstein always failed because his morality was flawed, because his drive to help humanity was misguided. But in reality doctors failed for much more mundane reasons. When they went to Dr Galewski, the pulmonary specialist, he’d said: “You have left it too late. You should have come to me ten years ago.” Frankenstein had never uttered a line so heartless.

He’d taken Helen to France, driving his spanking new blue Mark IX Jaguar to the thermal springs at Le Mont-Dore, spending hours on meditative walks in the hills while his wife rested. Encountering solitary goatherds as he grew a moustache for his next role. Telling her his silly adventures every evening. He remembered how, day by day, her laughter had grown stronger. How she was revitalized by the experience. The doctor from Poland had performed a minor miracle after all. Her cough had disappeared.

But the precious respite was to be hideously short-lived. Her throaty laughter cut short.

The Return of the Cybernauts
in
The Avengers
;
Corruption
;
The Blood Beast Terror
…

All as her illness worsened.

They decided to sell Hillsleigh, their place in Kensington—Helen had said London “smelled of stale food and smoke”—and move permanently to their beloved holiday home by the sea. He remembered the pitiful sight of her sitting at the bottom of the stairs saying, “Can we go there, please?”

“Of course, my love. Of course.”

He had kissed her and held her in his arms. He’d always joked in interviews that they’d married for money: he had £15 and she had seventeen and ten. That came back to him now.

He thought mostly of all the wasted time travelling back and forth to London when he could have been at her side. Fifteen televised hours of the horrid, under-rehearsed BBC
Sherlock Holmes
, an experience he loathed, distracted as he was by Helen’s condition, barely able to remember his lines. He remembered the stair lift being installed in 3 Seaway Cottages whilst he was shooting
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
—”Hammer’s Olivier, impeccably seedy in his spats and raspberry smoking jacket,” the New York Times said of him in that one. He remembered her reading it aloud to him, delighting in the phrase as she repeated it. And Amicus’s Jekyll and Hyde variation
I, Monster
, catching the milk train to filming because he couldn’t bear to spend so much as a night away from her.

After a short, callous period when she’d seemed to recuperate, Helen’s respiration had become laboured again. He’d employed dear Maisie Olive to help with the housework because his wife was unable to function any more as the wife she wanted to be. That cut him to the quick, when she’d said it with tears in her eyes. But he didn’t want a wife. He wanted
her
.

Her spirits lifted slightly as she decided almost on a whim that breathing exercises were the answer. He’d been buoyed by her sudden optimism but just as quickly her hopes were dashed by a young locum who told her they were a waste of time. He had wanted to strangle the man there and then, just like one of his villains would have done. He’d done it endless times on screen: how difficult could it be in real life? Or take one of those hacksaws of Baron Frankenstein and cut round his skull like a boiled egg, as he did to poor Freddie Jones. Take out that thoughtless brain of his. But the truth was, nothing he could do or think or dream would make the slightest difference to Helen’s future, as well he knew.

As it was, that slap in the face by the locum took the heart out of her. He saw it. At that point exactly her spirit crumbled. And he feared his would too, but he dare not let it. He dreaded that her seeing an inner agony written in his features would compound her own. He would act. Act. Act. Act.

He gazed out of the filthy window of the bus. The countryside lay under a gauze of grime and dead insects.

On December the sixteenth, he had his last job before Helen died. Recording
The Morecambe and Wise Special
for transmission on the coming Christmas Day. As scripted, he was required to appear unexpectedly beside Eric and Ernie to complain he hadn’t been paid the five pounds for an earlier show. It was a running gag: quite a good one, he thought. People had enjoyed his “corpsing” when he had guest-starred for the first time playing King Arthur, and it was gratifying that the team had asked him back. Helen had said, go on, it would do him good to play against type. To show there was a side of him that was warm and humorous and bright. The side she knew and loved.

Bring me sunshine…

He had thought he could get through it, and he had. Now, once again, he could hear the audience laughing through the grime and gauze of the world around him.

Bring me sunshine…

Even then, he had known deep down that, while the nation roared with laughter, his wife was at home, dying.

***

“Cream tea for two, please.” He said it automatically, without thinking. “No, how stupid of me.” He smiled. “I mean a pot of tea for one, and a single scone with jam and clotted cream. If you’d be so very kind.” He placed the plastic menu back behind the tomato sauce bottle. “Thank you, my dear.”

“Thank you.” She finished scribbling on her little pad using a Biro with a feather Sellotaped to it in order to resemble a quill pen.

“Excuse me. I’m terribly sorry. Sue?”

“Yes?”

It hadn’t been hard to find The Pilgrim Tea Room on Burgate after a short meander through Canterbury’s narrow streets. It couldn’t have looked more like a tea room if it had tried, with its dark timbers and white-painted plasterwork overhanging a bulging bow window. If not Elizabethan it had a distinctly Dickensian feel about it. He could imagine Scrooge walking by, muffled against the cold in a heavy snowfall, wishing everybody a Merry Christmas and carol singers holding lanterns on sticks. Not a bad role, Scrooge. He would have made a decent fist of it, he thought, had it ever been offered. Standing outside the restaurant, it struck him The Pilgrim was exactly the kind of emporium he and Helen would have gravitated to on one of their day trips. Exactly the kind of place Helen would have chosen. He had almost felt her arm tighten around his, guiding him in.

“Do you mind if I have a quick word? Whilst it’s not too busy. I don’t want to interrupt your work. It’ll only take a moment, I promise.”

The woman looked confused and a little frightened. As well she might be. He didn’t blame her.

“We’re about to close.”

“It won’t take long, I promise.”

She hesitated. “I’ll put this order in first, if you don’t mind.”

“No, of course, my dear. Please do.”

He watched her glide to the far end of the shop, collecting empty plates and cups on the way. A Kentish Kim Novak dressed in a black ankle-length dress with a pinny over it, her hair pinned up under a frilly bonnet, the sort Victorian kitchen maids used to wear. It was an illusion dissipated somewhat by white plimsolls that had seen better days, and the lipstick. The overall effect was cheap and, combined with the ridiculously Heath Robinson quill, somewhat absurd. But the whole place was grubbily inauthentic, designed to milk the tourists for a quick bob or two. History was merely its gimmick. She returned with a damp cloth in her hand and wiped down the plastic table cloth. He lifted his elbows to give her room for her comprehensive sweeps and lunges.

“I’ve seen your films.” She lifted the duo of sauce bottles out of the way one by one. “You’re Christopher Lee aren’t you?”

He corrected her with consummate politeness, tugging on his white cotton glove.

“No, I’m the other one.”

“Vincent Price?”

He kept his smile to himself. “That’s right.”

He pulled the ash tray towards him and lit one of his cigarettes.

“I’d like to talk to you about Les Gledhill.”

The sweeping actions of her arm were energetic but he detected the tremor of a pause which she quickly attempted to hide. The skin on her face seemed to tighten, betraying a tense irritation. Her former relaxed, if busy, manner was suddenly gone. It was as if he had flipped a switch in one of his Frankenstein laboratories and she suddenly looked ten years older.

“You know what? I don’t want to know about him. I don’t want anything to do with him. He’s a nasty piece of work. A sick, nasty piece of work.” The swirling motions of the damp cloth on the table became violent, as well as repetitive.

“Did you know he’s with another woman now?”

“I hope they’ll be very happy together.”

“She has a boy.”

The woman stopped wiping the table top within an inch of its life and stood up straight. He saw her hand tighten round the dish cloth which she had swapped from one hand to the other. Her knuckles whitened and a few drops of water exuded, hanging like tiny baubles from the joints of her fingers.

“Look, I don’t know why you’re interested in him and I don’t want to know. I don’t even want to remember his name. But I have remembered it, thanks to you.”

She turned away but he shifted quickly onto the nearer chair and caught her hand. The one with the damp rag. He felt its wetness seeping through her fingers to his.

“The boy is called Carl. I’m concerned about him, and I’m concerned about his mother.” He was looking up into her face but her eyes were darting around the room now, afraid that the scene was drawing attention.

“Please. I don’t want this man to ruin any more lives. I want to stop him. Is there anything you can tell me? Anything?”

She looked down into the blueness of his eyes. She pulled away her hand, abruptly, to her side, holding it there, then seemed to realise it was an unkindness that was unnecessary to an old man.

“I wish I knew then what I know now, that’s all.”

“Which is what? Please.”

Her voice remained hard, terse with discomfort and something else swimming vast and unpleasant under the surface.