‘You like it here?’ he said, taking one.
‘As Maurice Chevalier said in a different context, Mr Dryden, it’s better than the alternative.’
‘Must be expensive though?’
‘Very. I married late and well. Ideal,’ she smiled. She slurped coffee and pressed on. ‘Then something happened – to Maggie. She stopped seeing Johnnie.’
‘This was when, exactly? Sorry – if you can remember.’
‘Oh – I can remember all right. It was her birthday – Maggie’s. It was 1976, she’d be sixteen then. February the tenth.’
She stopped then, lost again in the past. ‘It was her birthday?’ prompted Dryden.
‘Yes. Yes. I’d been at Black Bank five years, five wasted years, five years of my life. I’m angry about that, even now. But Maggie had spent her whole life there. It was remarkable she was as normal as she was. I saw her grow up in those years, from a child to a mother in that time. Very little perturbed that child. She was innocent, I know, that’s what my brother said when they found out she was pregnant, but innocence isn’t stupidity. She was never that.’
‘Her birthday?’ prompted Dryden a second time.
‘Yes. There’d been a party at home. A bit half-hearted, I’m afraid. The baby was a cloud over her parents. Maggie was an only child and I think they had high hopes for her. Suddenly those hopes seemed misplaced. Then Sally had called, that was her friend. She was quite different, very modern. She wore a low-cut blouse that could stop a plough team.’
Dryden thought of the disappointed woman he’d met at the dog stadium. They laughed and sipped their coffee in perfect synchronization.
‘I think they’d gone dancing – the old Mecca in Broad Street. It’s a bank now but it was pretty much the most exciting place on earth then. I got the impression they’d meet the boys there, as a rule. Anyway, I heard her come in. They’d given me a room in the attic at Black Bank. Servants’ quarters, how appropriate!’
The old woman’s eyes narrowed with malice. ‘Maggie was up there too – a teenager’s room next to the old retainer. Ha! That’s the problem with my life, things have gone too fast.’ She sipped the tea and looked beyond the sunlit garden.
‘She came home?’
A nurse approached to remove the tray and touched Connie on the shoulder. ‘Connie?’ he asked.
She laughed again. ‘I’m enjoying Mr Dryden’s visit,’ she said, clasping his hand.
Her smile vanished with the biscuits. ‘Horrible man,’ she said. ‘Pinches the senile ones for fun.’
She looked into Dryden’s eyes then, making her decision. ‘I found the photos on the stairs. I got up to see if she was all right; I could always tell. The quick steps and then the sound of Maggie throwing herself on the bed. So I went out and the moon was pouring in through the skylight above the stairwell. And they were there, three of them.’
Dryden didn’t help her then. Only she could finish Maggie’s story.
‘At first I thought they were all of Maggie. I was shocked, of course. But my life has been a lot less cloistered than people seem to think. They were naked, both of them, making love. Tangled up together. I could see it was Johnnie. But then I sat and looked at them when my hands had stopped shaking. And they weren’t her at all, they were other girls.’
She tapped Dryden’s knee firmly with her book. ‘Then I picked up the one she’d torn up. I knew, of course… I was putting them together when she came back out. I knew it was her this time. Just like the others. Naked with Johnnie.’
‘What did she say?’ asked Dryden, the scene Connie had brought to life as vivid as a memory of his own.
‘We never said anything. I just gave them to her and said something reassuring and bland – something about fish in the sea, or experience, or such rot. She took them and went back to her room.’
‘And Johnnie didn’t come back after that?’
‘Apparently. Not for some time, anyway. I left within a few weeks. I’d got a job – a library assistant in Peterborough. I was glad to go. They’d shown charity but never bothered to disguise it as anything else. I wrote to Maggie often. She wrote back. Guarded, of course, but she told me things, about the baby. About how Bill – my brother – wanted her to bring Johnnie to Black Bank, to give the baby a father. I think she was in despair, actually. I even thought she might take her life. I told Bill not to push. But he was quite rude, told me to leave family matters to the family. Very pointed.’
Dryden stood and dropped the blind on one of the windows so that a slatted shadow fell over them.
‘What do you think the pictures meant?’
She pushed a call button on the wall beside her. ‘Does it matter? Johnnie was always decked out with a camera. He was a pornographer – that’s clear, I think. Perhaps he thought the pictures were funny. Perhaps he sold them to his friends. Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter. But it did, Mr Dryden. And Maggie made him pay for it in the end by giving away the one thing he really wanted – a son. I don’t think she could have faced life with Johnnie, so she gave Matty away and there was no need to marry any more. She’d give Matty a life away from Johnnie, and herself a life away from him. It was very neat, but she paid a terrible price, didn’t she? And the worst thing, of course, is that the price went up as the years went on.’
The proprietor came up behind them.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Tompkins,’ said Dryden, rising. ‘One last question. You didn’t keep in touch with Maggie, or Estelle?’
‘We move on, do we not? I told my husband about my life at Black Bank and he was horrified – he said it sounded Dickensian. He didn’t want anything to do with them, and Maggie moved anyway – from Black Bank. A few Christmas cards… then it was easier to send nothing.’
