Fallen Angel. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ glanced at Jenny Wren. ‘Not as photogenic as this one.’ She tapped the photograph of Alison with a long fingernail. ‘What was her name?’

      Eddie told her. Angel patted his hand and said that children were so sweet at that age.

      ‘Some people don’t like that sort of game.’ Eddie paused. ‘Not with children.’

      ‘That’s silly. Children need love and security, that’s all. Children like playing games with grown-ups. That’s what growing up is all about.’

      Eddie felt warm with relief. Then and later, he was amazed by Angel’s sympathy and understanding. He even told her about his humiliating experiences as a teacher at Dale Grove Comprehensive School. She coaxed him into describing exactly what Mandy and Sian had done. The violence of her reaction surprised him. Her lips curled back against her teeth and wrinkles bit into the skin.

      ‘We don’t need people like that. They’re no better than animals.’

      ‘But what can you do with them? You can’t just kill them, can you?’

      Angel arched her immaculate eyebrows. ‘I think one should execute them if they break certain laws. There’s nothing wrong with capital punishment if the system is sensible and fair. As for the others, why don’t we put them in work camps? We could make the amount of food and other privileges they get depend on the amount of work they produce. Then at least they wouldn’t be such a total liability for society. You have to admit, it would be a much fairer way of doing things.’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      ‘There’s no suppose about it. You have to be realistic.’ Angel’s face was serene again. ‘One has to use other people – except one’s friends, of course; they’re different. Otherwise they abuse you. Obviously one tries to be constructive about how one uses them. But it’s no use being sentimental. They’ll just take advantage, like Mandy and Sian did. In the long run it’s kinder to be firm with them right from the start.’

      Angel furnished her little palace as a bed-sitting room. She and Eddie brought down the bed which had belonged to Stanley and installed it on the wall opposite the long window. The reupholstered Victorian chair stood by the window. Beside it was a hexagonal table which Angel had found in an antique shop. She scattered small rugs, vivid geometrical patterns from Eastern Anatolia, over the floor. There were no pictures on the severe white walls.

      Eddie went down to the basement only by invitation. By tacit consent, the new shower room was reserved for Angel’s use. If they needed something from the big freezer in the former scullery, it was always Angel who fetched it.

      ‘I know where things are,’ she explained. ‘I’ve got my little system. I don’t want you confusing it.’

      She bought a small microwave and installed it on a shelf over the freezer.

      ‘Wouldn’t it be more convenient in the kitchen?’ Eddie asked.

      ‘It would take up too much space. Besides, we’ll use it mainly for defrosting. And having it down there will be handy if I want to heat up a snack.’

      Despite the bed, Angel did not usually sleep in the basement, but in Thelma’s old room upstairs. There was not enough space for her clothes in the wardrobes which had belonged to Eddie’s parents, so she asked Mr Reynolds to fit new ones with mirrored doors along one wall of the front bedroom.

      One morning in early May while Mr Reynolds was working upstairs, there was a ring on the doorbell. Eddie answered it. Mrs Reynolds was on the step, both hands gripping the strap of her handbag. For a second she stared at Eddie. She had bright brown eyes behind heavy glasses, a snub nose and small lips like the puckered skin round an anus.

      ‘I’d like a word with my husband, if you please.’

      Eddie called Mr Reynolds and went back into the kitchen, closing the door behind him with relief. Sometimes, when he was washing up in the winter months, he looked through the kitchen window, through the screen of leafless branches, and glimpsed Mrs Reynolds with her binoculars on the balcony of the flat. Mr Reynolds had told Angel at great length about how he had bought a new and more powerful pair of binoculars as a surprise birthday present for his wife.

      There was a tap on the kitchen door. Mr Reynolds edged into the room.

      ‘Sorry – something’s come up. I’ll have to go now. I’ll give you a ring in the morning, if that’s OK?’ He looked perfectly normal. It wasn’t what he said but how he said it. His voice trembled, and his breathing was irregular. He sounded ten years older than he really was.

      Eddie stood up. ‘Is everything all right?’ He knew that Angel would want to know why Mr Reynolds had left early.

      ‘It’s our Jenny,’ said Mr Reynolds, retreating backwards out of the room as if withdrawing from royalty. ‘There’s been an accident.’

      Poor Jenny Wren. Who better than Eddie to know that patterns repeated themselves? Sometimes he thought of his father and wondered what had happened to him when he was young; and so on with his father’s father and his father’s father’s father; and back the line went through the centuries, opening a vertiginous prospect stretching to the birth of mankind.

      Even as a child, Jenny Wren had been marked out as a failure. Fat, clumsy and desperate for love, she carried her self-consciousness around with her like a heavy suitcase handcuffed to her wrist. Her children, Eddie learned later from Mr Reynolds, had been taken into care. And after the third one was born, Jenny Wren plunged into a post-natal depression from which she never really emerged.

      She lived in Hackney, in a council flat on the fourth floor of a tower block. On that morning when her father was putting the finishing touches to Angel’s fitted wardrobes, she took a basket of washing on to her balcony. Instead of hanging out the clothes, however, she leant over the waist-high wall and stared down at the ground. Then – according to a witness who was watching, powerless to intervene, from a window in the neighbouring block – she lifted first one leg and then the other off the ground and rolled clumsily over the wall.

      Characteristically, the suicide attempt was a failure. Though she dived head first on top of her cerebral hemispheres, the fall was partly broken by a shrub. She did a good deal of damage to herself – a badly fractured skull and other broken bones – but unfortunately she survived. A week after the fall, Mr Reynolds returned to 29 Rosington Road to finish off the wardrobes.

      ‘Jen’s in a coma. May never wake up. If she does, there may be brain damage.’

      Angel patted his hand and said how very, very sorry they were. She and Eddie had sent flowers to the hospital.

      ‘How’s Mrs Reynolds coping?’

      ‘Not easy for her. The chaplain’s been very kind.’ The shock had made Mr Reynolds less talkative, and everything he said had a staccato delivery. ‘Not that we’re churchgoers, of course. Time and a place for everything.’

      ‘Are you sure you want to carry on with the wardrobes?’ Angel asked. ‘I’m sure we could find someone else to finish off. You must have so much to do. We’d quite understand.’

      ‘I’d rather keep busy, thanks all the same.’

      Halfway through June, about six weeks after Jenny Wren’s fall, the first little girl came to stay at 29 Rosington Road.

      Chantal СКАЧАТЬ