Andrew Taylor - Bleeding Heart Square

‘Looking for jobs.’

‘Oh — so you’re out of work, are you?’

‘I’m just back from India,’ Mr Wentwood said. ‘I’ve a number of irons in the fire.’

‘But no regular income, eh?’

‘Not at present. But I do have savings. There won’t be a problem.’

‘There’d better not be, Mr Wentwood. I tell you what. You pay me a month’s rent in advance as a returnable deposit, and you can move in on Monday. I’ll need references, naturally. All right?’

‘Absolutely, Mr Serridge.’

‘Rent day is Saturday.’

‘I’ll write you a cheque now, shall I?’

‘I’d prefer cash, if you have it. You know where you are with cash, I always say.’

Mr Wentwood looked embarrassed. ‘Of course.’ He took out his wallet.

‘Four weeks at twenty-five bob a week,’ Serridge said cheerfully. ‘A five-pound note will do nicely.’ He turned to Lydia, who was assembling cups and saucers in the kitchen. ‘And now, Mrs Langstone. All the talking’s made me parched. What about that tea?’

The speaker addressed his audience as comrades. His name was Julian Dawlish, and he wore very wide flannel bags, a grey pullover and muddy brown shoes. Horn-rimmed glasses gave the only touch of stern angularity to a round, smooth-skinned face.

The international situation was very bad indeed, he told them in a high-pitched, well-bred voice, because of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini, who were now revealing themselves in their true colours. Even in England’s green and pleasant land, Fascism was on the march, grinding the poor and the vulnerable beneath its jackboots. But all was not lost. There were gleams of hope in Spain and a positive beacon of light in Russia. If the workers of the world united, there was nothing they could not achieve.

Mr Dawlish’s talk was followed by questions from the floor which had a habit of turning into lengthy statements. The meeting tailed away a little after nine o’clock. Afterwards, tea, orange squash and stale biscuits were served. The audience stood about smoking, chatting and relishing the fact that they were no longer sitting on chairs designed for children.

‘Shall we go?’ Rory said. ‘I’m dead beat.’

‘All right.’ Fenella glanced towards the knot of people around the speaker. ‘I was going to ask the time of the next meeting, but they’ll put up a notice.’

They joined the trickle of comrades slipping out of the church hall. In Albion Lane, the pavements shone with rain.

She took his arm. ‘It was interesting, wasn’t it?’

‘It was a lot of hot air. I don’t believe that chap’s done a day’s work in his life. Silly ass.’

‘I think what Mr Dawlish says makes a lot of sense. He can’t help his background. In a way that makes what he does for the cause all the better.’

‘You know him, do you?’

‘I’ve met him once or twice.’

‘How old is he?’

‘I don’t know. Early thirties? Why?’

He grunted. ‘Old enough to know better.’

They walked in silence.

‘You’re angry with me, aren’t you?’ she said after a moment. ‘About not being engaged.’

‘Of course I’m not angry.’

‘Of course you are. But it’s better this way, truly.’

‘Better for who?’

‘For both of us. We’ve talked about this.’

Rory let the silence lengthen. Then he said, ‘I’ve found a flat.’

‘That’s wonderful. Where?’

‘In Bleeding Heart Square.’

Fenella snatched her arm away. ‘In Aunt Philippa’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought we agreed to leave all that.’

‘We agreed nothing. Listen, it’s a perfectly good flat in exactly the right place for me. I can walk into the City, I can walk into the West End. They know nothing about us, nothing about my connection with your aunt. There’s no harm in it. Besides, I’m fed up with Mrs Rutter’s.’

All this was perfectly true. There was also a small malicious pleasure in going against Fenella’s wishes, something Rory did not choose to examine too closely. If she had given him any encouragement, he might also have told her about Sergeant Narton. But she didn’t. They turned into Cornwallis Grove.

‘Did you hear anything about Aunt Philippa while you were there?’ Fenella asked.

‘No.’

‘Who did you meet?’

‘Some of the lodgers. There’s a dressmaker, and an old chap and his daughter. Perhaps other people. And the landlord keeps a room on, but I gather he’s not always in residence.’

‘So you saw him too? Mr Serridge?’

‘Yes. How often did you meet him?’

‘Once or twice. Mother didn’t take to him, and Father was awfully rude. Aunt Philippa was furious. She wanted us to like him.’ Fenella walked on in silence for a moment. Staring straight ahead, she said, ‘What did you think of him?’

They paused at the gate of number fifty-one. He sensed that she didn’t intend to ask him in.

‘Bit of a brute, probably, but quite straightforward in his way,’ Rory said. ‘I shouldn’t have thought he’d have much in common with your aunt, or she with him.’

Fenella lifted the latch. ‘Aunt thought he was wonderful.’ She pushed open the gate with such violence that it clattered against the retaining wall of the lawn. ‘Aunt thought he was God.’

There was a time very early in their acquaintance when Lydia had considered Marcus to be a god. Not God himself, whom they visited every Sunday in church, and who was supposed to be uncomfortably omnipresent, seeing everything one did or failed to do; Marcus’s divinity was of a different kind.

When Lydia was nine, she had had a governess who told her stories from Greek and Roman mythology. Marcus was the sort of god who appeared in classical legends. There was something anarchic and capricious about him. Though enormously powerful in some areas, he was weak, even powerless, in others. He could be cruel and he could be kind, switching from one to the other with bewildering rapidity. But he was always impersonal, for gods are like that. It was she who interpreted his actions as cruel or kind, whereas for him such labels were meaningless.

His standing as a god was further supported by the fact that he was six years older than her, and by the brief and unpredictable incursions he made into her life. Also, she later came to realize, if she came to see him as a god it was partly because she wanted a god and he was the only realistic candidate available.

Even at the time, she bore him no malice for the episode of the child-eating slugs at Monkshill Park. Later, she looked back on what had happened in the shed at the end of the kitchen garden almost with pleasure. After all, it had been the first time she had met Marcus. Moreover, she had never been in any real danger, either from the allegedly man-eating slugs or from the less obvious but more serious risk of falling off the shelf from sheer terror. Nor had he actually put the slugs on her legs. And there had been, at least in retrospect, something almost pleasurable in being so utterly powerless and so utterly terrified.

It was true that Marcus had examined what Nanny used to call her ‘front bottom’. Lydia had known for as long as she had known anything that this part of her anatomy was something to be ashamed of, which it was best to cover up and pretend did not exist. But Marcus clearly thought it was not something to be ashamed of: on the contrary, it was something he found profoundly fascinating. That was rather flattering, if anything. He examined it for what seemed like hours and probably was at least a couple of minutes, moving her legs this way and that, so he could get a better view. Finally he touched her, very gently, at the point where the crack was, the very epicentre of all that shame.