“Shall I tell Miss Field that this is a personal call?”
“No.”
“Are you by any chance the caller who was trying to contact Miss Field last Friday?”
“Not me.”
She had finished. She had exhausted her repertoire of frustration and snub, and she was finished now. He put the phone down. Where is she? Just out, that’s all. She will not tell him enough about her work for him to be able to envisage it; as if her clients’ paltry secrets were of any interest to him, as if his life could possibly touch theirs at any point. She is seeing people, or at that childrens’ home she goes to. She was out on Friday. Three times he had called on Friday, and had gone into the weekend hollow and lost. Now he had put the phone down on the secretary cow and antagonised her. Now she would say Isabel was out when she was in. Now she would say Miss Field cannot accept personal calls during office hours. What is your name, rank, or number, whether married divorced single, number of children in box provided, state professional qualifications, whether subject to epilepsy or visual defects, whether certified sane or insane, state whether dead or alive and name a referee. (Isabel ring me.) I don’t want to make a great performance of it, it’s not a lot to ask, no messages, no names, no packdrill, whatever that expression means. (Ring me. I need to hear your voice.) The bell. Lesson Four.
Give me this God and I’ll take myself off and give you some peace. I’ll not be back asking favours year after year. There’s only one thing I want. I won’t ask you to bring my blood pressure down. When I get cancer I’ll not even squeak. You’ll never hear me say I’m hard done by. Come God, I’ll praise you; isn’t that what you like? Form 3A, the American Revolution. Is it so much to ask, is it so bloody much?
How she laughed and said, you have all the women’s lines. Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence. Thank you, Lord Byron, mind how you go. Have a nice day.
CHAPTER 4
Evelyn had to take her time now. Coming downstairs, with her bad knees, was more painful than going up. She kept her head down, bowed over her hand tight on the banister rail. I’ll just get a bit of breakfast, she thought, and then I’ll have to get to the shops. I’ll lock Muriel in the back room. She’s not to be trusted.
What a lucky thing, to have a solid old-fashioned house with locks on the inside doors.
She stopped on the second step from the bottom. Muriel was standing by the front door.
“Muriel?”
She raised her eyes to the dark shape that swung gently above Muriel’s head. Its folds were dense in the half- light. Clifford had come back, and hung his coat on the hallstand.
Isabel left the office in a hurry. She had been reading the file on Axon, Muriel Alexandra, when the Hollies Day Centre had called to say did she know anything about Anderson, Louisa Jane? Was she still staying with her daughter in Kidderminster, because it was her morning, and she hadn’t turned up. Miss Anderson was seventy-six, she lived alone, and the weather was cold. The temperature had dropped several degrees overnight. She had never missed a day before, the Centre said, she looked forward to the hot meal and the sociability. She was in good health but—“I have a file,” Isabel said. She rummaged in her desk drawer for the A–Z.
“All right, that will take me ten or fifteen minutes and I’ll call you. She’s not answering the phone? No, I see. Well, she won’t if she’s still in Kidderminster. If she’s okay I’ll drop her into you and if she’s not I’ll sort things out. Leave it with me.”
Miss Anderson was a vague lady. She had an application in for Sheltered Housing. She had two years to wait. Social Services had got her a telephone but she kept it off the hook, because she was harassed by obscene callers. This might be true or it might be a delusion. She had told the police, and they had made a note of her and taken her home in a car. She would not go to Kidderminster permanently because her daughter’s husband was a Communist. This might be true or it might be a delusion.
When Isabel reached her car she realised she had Muriel Axon’s file under her arm, gathered up with her street map and her note of Miss Anderson’s address. I shouldn’t keep reading it, she thought, it only scares me, it only makes me sick. I should go there, but I won’t. If anything went wrong at Buckingham Avenue someone would call for help. It was a responsible middle-class neighbourhood. The file shouldn’t go out of the office; but she didn’t want to delay herself by taking it back. She tossed it into the back seat.
Probably Miss Anderson was still away. But she hurried, in rising apprehension at what she might find. As a trainee she had visited a geriatric hospital, and it had shocked her profoundly. She blew her horn at a caped and dripping cyclist who meandered into her path, and swore at him under her breath.
“Whatever have you done to your face, Missus?”
“I had a fall,” Evelyn said. “On the stairs.”
“You want to watch yourself,” the meter man said. “Given it a fair old bash, eh? Whatever will your young man say?”
The gas meter was in the kitchen. It was a nuisance. She followed the man. “You don’t get any natural light coming in, with all that stained glass,” he said. “Like a bloody funeral parlour. Haven’t you got a light in this passage?”
“This hall,” Evelyn said. “The bulb has gone.”
“Well, you don’t want to go climbing up there. You could come a right cropper. You want to get your friend to do it.”
“Friend? What friend?”
She stood over the man, watching his bent back as he flashed his torch into the little dark cupboard. He twisted round, squatting, and looked up at her.
“Well, you’ve got somebody stopping with you, haven’t you?”
“What?”
