Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [35]
‘I’ve a good mind to have a word with that Harry man,’ she said. ‘It was very naughty of him. Men never think of the mess they make.’
‘Good Lord, don’t,’ warned Edward, full of misgivings. ‘It’s quite the wrong attitude to take. We have to strike up a rapport . . . It’s a question of psychology . . . We’re all in it together. At the same time we must strive to achieve a certain delicate balance between abject cooperation and some degree of firmness. There must be no aggravation, but on the other hand we shouldn’t crawl . . . if you follow me. We should endeavour to show them what’s what—’
Alma smiled.
‘I’ve read about it,’ he said defensively. ‘It’s vital not to seem hostile.’
‘Don’t be silly, Ted darling. They’re no different from you and me. They’ve just got caught up in an everyday problem that’s gone a teeny bit wrong.’
Edward began to bluster. He found Alma infuriating, quite apart from the way she addressed him. He jiggled Binny up and down on his agitated knees. ‘It may be an everyday problem to you, but personally I’m not used to being hijacked in my own home by armed thugs.’
‘Here, here,’ said Simpson.
‘They’re alien to us,’ insisted Edward. ‘It’s a different breed, a different culture.’
Binny put her lips to his temple. His hair smelt of tobacco. She knew he had made a slip, thinking this was home, but all the same it was nice of him. At the back of her mind she thought she was making a fuss of him for somebody else’s benefit. To gain attention.
Edward jerked his head away; he was trembling. Surely it was perfectly natural to go for aspirins if one’s wife was feeling groggy. One would do it for the dog. None of them knew each other well enough, that was the difficulty. They were all behaving in an unreal manner. He couldn’t count on their reactions under stress. One of them was potentially dangerous – it might even be himself.
Simpson said, ‘Mussolini used to say, whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.’
‘Exactly,’ cried Alma, though she didn’t know what he meant.
‘Be quiet,’ said Muriel. She was staring into the kitchen.
They stopped breathing and looked fearfully at the woman by the sink. She had ceased to roll the pram and was now hunched over the shot gun, nursing her ribs.
Binny felt she was taking part in some sort of documentary – one of those programmes that used members of the public and portrayed ordinary lives from a melancholy point of view. She realised she’d been in it right from the moment she went shopping with Alma. Those old ladies posed on the bed down the alleyway . . . the waitress in the Wimpy Bar so reluctant to serve them. The woman in the chair was the character who’d left her pram outside the bank. She wasn’t instantly recognisable because her face was altered by that scene in which she’d been battered; her stockings were a different colour. They’d been shooting her from various camera angles in the National Westminster, that’s why she kept moving from queue to queue at the counter. The black man with his neck in plaster also fitted in somewhere.
‘Why has she changed sides?’ Simpson whispered. He thought the woman must be incredibly fit. Had he been treated half as brutally he was sure he would have succumbed from shock. He recalled his mother who had taken to her bed every afternoon, prostrate from a fatiguing morning spent attending to the furniture with a feather duster. His aunts had been the same – fragile, languid. He thought of Marcia living with two men, and Muriel quite capable of pushing the car single-handed round the block, when it was a cold morning and the engine wouldn’t start. It was a generation of Amazons.
‘She hasn’t changed sides,’ hissed Binny. ‘She’s the same side but she’s double-crossed them or something. She was on the wrong route. She tried to explain it to them but they wouldn’t listen. They were looking for her.’
‘They don’t have mixed prisons,’ Alma said. ‘She must be an outside contact. She probably had a change of clothing for them in the pram.’
Edward had come to the conclusion that the guns couldn