Andrew Taylor - Bleeding Heart Square

Rory grinned up at her. ‘And that’s the way the world goes round, eh?’

The fat woman roared with laughter and told him he was a caution. She waddled away from their table. Lydia and Rory exchanged plates.

‘She likes you,’ Lydia said in a low voice. ‘She barely tolerates me.’

Rory looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s because I’m a man.’

Lydia shook her head. ‘It’s more than that.’ Talking with a silver spoon in your mouth, she realized, could be more of a curse than a blessing. As far as most of the population was concerned, it made you a social leper and also almost unemployable because ladies weren’t supposed to work. That wouldn’t have mattered perhaps, if you actually owned the silver spoon and everything that went with it. But if you didn’t, you had the worst of both worlds.

She and Rory were both hungry, and at first they ate in silence. Then Rory laid down his fork and looked at her.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘May I ask you something?’

‘Fire away.’

‘How long have you known Mr Serridge?’

‘I’d never even heard of him until I moved into Bleeding Heart Square.’

‘And your father?’

She put down her own fork. ‘I believe they knew each other in the army. I’ll say this for Mr Serridge — he’s been very kind to him.’

Rory sat back. ‘Did you know that Morthams Farm used to belong to your father?’

‘What?’

‘The farm that Mr Serridge and Miss Penhow bought. Your father sold it to them. Did you know?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’ She was surprised to hear her voice was calm and level. ‘I had no idea. Look here, I-’

‘Have you ever heard him mention Rawling?’

Lydia pushed her plate away. ‘I don’t like this. I don’t see why I should answer questions about my father. And I don’t really understand why you feel you should ask them.’

He spread his hands out, palms up. ‘I’m so sorry. Unforgivable of me.’ He gave her a rueful smile; he was rather good at those. ‘You know how it is — one gets carried away.’

Despite herself, she smiled back. They continued with their meal. Rory diverted the conversation to neutral subjects. He made her laugh with the story of Hitler’s oranges. There had been an item in today’s paper, he said, about a hundred thousand Spanish oranges which had been withdrawn from auction at Spitalfields yesterday because they had been wrapped in paper with a portrait of Hitler on it.

‘All one hundred thousand of them?’ Lydia asked.

‘So I understand. Individually wrapped. It caused a lot of excitement when they tried to sell them. There were cries of “Heil Hitler.” In the end the auctioneer decided to withdraw them. They say the consignment was meant to go to Germany. Though personally I would have thought that an orange is an orange is an orange.’

‘Not if it’s wrapped in a picture of Hitler,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s a political statement.’

‘I don’t know.’ He sat back in his chair, reaching for his cigarettes. ‘People make such a lot of fuss about politics. What would you like for pudding? I wouldn’t recommend the trifle but the apple pie is relatively harmless.’

Afterwards he asked for the bill. Lydia offered half-heartedly to pay her share and was relieved when he wouldn’t let her. He pulled a handful of change from his trouser pocket. There was a solitary cufflink among the silver and coppers.

‘Is that yours?’ she asked.

‘What? Oh — you mean the cufflink.’ He counted out four shillings and sixpence and added a small tip. ‘No. A souvenir of last night.’

‘Cinderella.’

‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ He helped her into her coat. ‘Find the other one, and perhaps I find one of the men who attacked me. Perhaps.’

‘May I see it a moment?’

He fished it out of his trouser pocket and dropped it into the outstretched palm of her gloved hand. While she looked at it, he put on his own coat and hat.

‘Ring any bells?’ he said. ‘Looks like some sort of badge.’

‘I’m surprised you don’t recognize it. That gold thing in the middle is a fasces. Or is it fascis? Anyway, it’s the symbol of the British Union of Fascists.’

He frowned. ‘So it is. That’s the problem with having been in India for five years. I’m not quite at home here any more. I didn’t feel at home in India either. Odd, isn’t it? The British Union of Fascists didn’t even exist when I was last in London.’ He gave a little laugh as if trying to suggest that what he had said was halfway to being a joke, though it clearly wasn’t. ‘What are you doing now?’

She wondered why he had avoided the obvious implication. ‘Going back to the flat.’

‘I’ll walk with you.’

He held the door open for her. Lydia thought that she didn’t belong anywhere either. Bleeding Heart Square wasn’t home. But neither was Frogmore Place or Upper Mount Street, let alone those tumbledown mausoleums in the country that her stepfather and Marcus were so attached to. But there was no point in worrying about it. At least she knew what she wanted now. Virginia Woolf had been right all along. One needed a room of one’s own and a minimum of?500 a year. And something to do with one’s life.

As they were waiting for a gap in the traffic in Hatton Garden, Rory said casually, ‘Serridge isn’t involved with those Fascists, is he?’

So he had come to that conclusion after all. Lydia said, equally casually, ‘Not as far as I know.’

‘You see, if the cufflink belonged to one of the toughs last night, it puts rather a different complexion on things.’

‘Even if the man was wearing a BUF cufflink, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were attacked by Fascists. Anyway, someone else might have lost the cufflink.’

A baker’s van slowed to allow them to cross the road. Rory took Lydia’s arm and they jogged across to the opposite pavement.

‘I take your point,’ he said as they were passing Mr Goldman’s shop where Lydia had sold her great-aunt’s brooch. ‘On the other hand, these chaps knew exactly what they were doing. What’s the word? They were disciplined . They didn’t smell of drink. I should have thought of that before. I’m not even sure they wanted to rob me. I think they just wanted to give me a thrashing. Or worse. I’m pretty sure if you hadn’t come along when you did, the police would have had to scrape me off the cobbles with a shovel.’

She winced. ‘Don’t.’

‘Sorry. But it really doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason why the British Union of Fascists should know of my existence. I haven’t the slightest interest in politics. Whichever way you look at it, it’s damned odd.’ He glanced at her. ‘Has anything else odd happened? Or was this just an isolated incident?’

There were several answers to that question, Lydia thought, and some of them involved her father and some of them involved Marcus. There was no avoiding the fact that the only people she knew with Fascist connections were Marcus, her own family and their friends. In the end she mentioned the one thing that could have nothing to do with them, partly because it was also the one thing that worried her most of all.

‘Someone’s been sending Mr Serridge parcels,’ she said.

‘Oh yes?’

‘There was one on the day I arrived. It had been hanging around for a few days and it filled the house with a horrible smell.’ She stopped beside the Crozier, reluctant to turn into Bleeding Heart Square. ‘In the end we had to open it. There was a piece of rotting meat inside. Nothing else. No letter or anything. Mrs Renton said it was a heart, a lamb’s, perhaps, or a ewe’s. It — it had dried blood on it. I’ve never smelled anything quite as foul.’