An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [67]
‘She was young,’ Lily said. ‘She wanted a bit of life.’ She was making the excuses to Vernon, not O’Hara.
‘She came back again when the baby was born and for a few months she tried, I’ll give her that. But she had some daft ideas about this place. She was always trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. The upshot was she got herself a room in a house full of artists round the corner. The place was filthy and the neighbours were always complaining.’
‘She found herself a job as a telephonist at the GPO,’ Lily said. ‘She did quite well . . .’
‘She won that competition,’ said Vernon. ‘There were thousands of entries.’
Lily put the shoes on a piece of newspaper on the table and began to pick the mud from them. She said, ‘I wanted Renée to leave Stella with us.’
‘She wouldn’t countenance it,’ Vernon said. ‘Then we heard she’d lost her job and was up to her old tricks, going out to dances and things.’
‘But we didn’t know she was leaving the child on her own,’ cried Lily. ‘We never thought she’d do that.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We never thought she’d do that.’
That was why it had been such a shock when the neighbours came round to tell Lily the baby was screaming and there was nobody answering the door or any lights on in the house. He had to break a window in the basement to get in. The place stank of paraffin and turpentine and dry rot. He wrinkled his nose as if the smell was still in his nostrils. She was in a cot in the back room with a row of night-lights set along the floor. The daft thing was there was a rose on her pillow. It was withered, of course.
O’Hara had risen and gone to stand at the mantelpiece. From time to time he had nodded politely. Now he drummed his fingers on the edge of the shelf; he looked bored.
‘There could have been a fire,’ said Lily. She came to the hearth, worried lest O’Hara should get his hands dirty. She began to turn the pictures round and flap at the mantelpiece with a duster.
‘Life is full of conflagrations,’ O’Hara said. ‘We can never be sure when we’ll be consumed by the past.’
She nodded. He had a lovely way of talking, but then, he was an actor.
When O’Hara had gone Vernon hobbled upstairs to ring Harcourt. ‘They’ve all been round,’ he said, after telling Harcourt of his accident. ‘That director chap came and a couple of the actors . . . the leading ones.’
‘I thought you weren’t going to the match.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Vernon, ‘Stella insisted. I didn’t like to let her down. She was very upset when I fell over. She cradled my head, you know.’
‘That was decent,’ said Harcourt.
‘I told this O’Hara fellow about her mother this morning. I had to. Something’s cropped up. He’s going to keep an eye open.’
‘It’s nothing serious, I hope.’
‘Nothing me and Lily can’t handle. She’s been telling her fibs again.’
‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said Harcourt unwisely.
‘Renée wasn’t all bad,’ snapped Vernon. ‘She had a spark, if you remember. She won that competition to be the speaking clock out of the whole of England.’
‘The girl with the golden voice,’ said Harcourt, by way of apology.
Vernon told him how he’d been taken home from the football field in a chauffeur-driven car. He said it had smelt like a bar parlour.
O’Hara rode his motor-cycle to the Pier Head and parked it against the granite bollards at the entrance to the Albert Dock. He waited until the policeman disappeared inside his prefabricated hut before dodging under the railings and walking rapidly away across the giant crazy paving towards the blitzed warehouses. He had some notion of hiding in the ruins until it was time to go to the theatre. He wanted to howl like a dog and hear the echoes all around him.
Crossing the swing-bridge above the water he lost his footing on a streak of black oil. Falling, he struck the back of his skull hard on the edge of the bridge. He swung his head from side to side, trying