TWENTY-NINE
Ani Patel gazed bleakly past the stick-on holly and tinsel, out of the shop window, into the dark cold night. At least, she told herself, it had not snowed. The snow she found difficult to accept. So, she thought, with a slight quiver of humour, did the British. They were always surprised by it. Every year people came into the shop saying, Oh, what a surprise, and meaning it.
She noticed the card she had placed there for Miss Phoebe Glen. Out of date and, anyway, no more use for it. She reached up to take it down. Miss Phoebe Glen was now quite suited, thank you. So she said. Ani Patel was invited to a little gathering at the house tonight but she was not sure if she would go; she certainly did not feel up to it. If she did, she would take some Tropicana and a box of fudge. Not the bottle of wine Miss Phoebe suggested.
Pamela, hurrying swiftly along on the cold pavement outside, looked up and waved. Mrs Patel brightened and waved back. Pamela stopped.
‘Are you OK?’ she mouthed through the glass.
Mrs Patel opened the locked shop door.
‘Did you want anything?’ she asked.
‘Why,’ said Pamela, staring at her very hard, ‘Mrs Patel, you look upset.’
Ani Patel shook her head as if to say it was nothing.
‘And you,’ she said, ‘look very well.’
‘I am,’ said Pam. She had been on a sun-bed twice this week, despite its being carcinogenic Russian Roulette. But she liked the glow it gave her and what was the occasional risk?
‘How is that son of yours?’ asked Ani Patel, fiddling with the card in her hand.
‘Fine, as far as I know,’ said Pam.
‘He is coming home for Christmas?’
‘He is not coming home for Christmas.’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Ani Patel.
‘Don’t be. I’m going away.’
‘Ah.’
‘And you? Are you and Ari going back for Christmas?’
Ani Patel shook her head. Behind her glasses her eyes went watery.
Pamela came right into the shop and pushed the door closed behind her.
‘Can I help?’ she said.
Mrs Patel did not speak.
‘Is it Ari?’
Mrs Patel nodded.
‘Would you like to tell me about it?’
She shook her head. ‘I have a little party to attend,’ she said, ‘and I must not be late. But thank you for asking.’ She swallowed and blinked and then added in her usual neutral voice, ‘Are you going somewhere nice?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Pam.
Odd, thought Mrs Patel after her visitor had left, that she should look brown. She closed up, locked up, collected the Tropicana and the fudge, and set off for Miss Phoebe Glen’s house with a heavy heart.
From her sideboard Miss Phoebe Glen took the bottle of sherry, unopened, good quality, Spanish. A cut above. She removed three glasses from the back of the shelf and dusted them on her sleeve. They reminded her of sitting with her mother in a far-off time, when the neighbours would call in at this time of year and sit and talk politely over port and lemon. Now her neighbours would not be seen dead in her house. The Baldwin man next door complained all the time. She put some cardboard where the plank came from and said, very firmly, that it was her fence, in deed if not in fact, and that the landlord would hear of his insults.
‘Cardboard will not keep the cats out,’ said the Baldwin man.
‘My cardboard will,’ she said triumphantly.
She felt on top of the world and there was no answer to that. Clearly. Because he went back indoors and said no more.
In the kitchen she put on one ring of the cooker. Just to take the chill off. It caused a little smoke and what not, since it had not been used for some time, but it was not unbearable. Out there in the cold would be unbearable. In here, in this house, she was warm and secure and she had her lodger. It would all be very jolly.
Miss Phoebe pulled the cork and helped herself to a little on account. It tasted delightful – delicate. She sipped it, having no need now to gulp it down in one go to feel the warmth from within. Phoebe Glen is coming home, she said to herself, borrowing a phrase from one of the tabloids.
The fat man arrived with a flourish. He had a small cardboard suitcase and a canvas bag of army origin. He brought these into the kitchen, since the front door was wide open, and even in this neck of the woods it might not be sensible to leave goods on show.
‘Did you leave the plank off, Norman?’ asked Miss Phoebe. ‘I have asked Mrs Patel as our guest of honour, since she it was who brought us together in our trials.’
‘Very fair,’ said the fat man, who sat down on a red leatherette stool.
‘I hope she gets here soon. That draught is fair whipping around my ankles.’
The fat man touched his beret reluctantly. It was chill, even with the kitchen door closed.
‘You may keep it on in the house, you know. Being military,’ said Miss Phoebe kindly.
‘Thank you –’ He could not bring himself to call her Your Ladyship, but he intended to when he had plucked up courage.
When Ani Patel arrived, looking pinched and tired and swathed in a number of shawls and scarves that gave her – as the fat man whispered to Miss Phoebe – a look of where she came from, Miss Phoebe nodded. She took the Tropicana and the fudge as if they were something quite disgusting, and said, ‘Tonight, for a change, Mrs Patel, you will have something Spanish.’
‘Spanish oranges,’ said the fat man helpfully, reading the packet.
Miss Phoebe gave her friend a brimming glass while sending the fat man to close the plank. She was aware that she owed the shopkeeper a lot. Of course, she was also aware that the shopkeeper owed her a lot too, if not as an individual, then as the nation which she represented. How much they had taught them, and all those ship’s halfpennies going into the jam jars at school every week, she thought, feeling a little hazy. Or were they for fishermen? Anyway. The sacrifice. As a girl she had made her sacrifice for the likes of Mrs Patel. In a way, Mrs Patel’s help during her own crisis was no more than a repayment for getting her out of a grass hut all those years ago.
Ani Patel was not inclined to drink alcohol. Indeed, so far as she knew, except for a brandy when her husband died, none had passed her lips – but Ani-Vashtak was guiding her tonight, and she was among friends, so she thought she would. She took a sip. If she thought the British potty before, this just about confirmed it. Bad medicine, she thought, trying not to pull a face. How they could sit there and drink it for pleasure was beyond her. But then, so was Coronation Street. Nevertheless, she felt a warmth in her belly shortly afterwards, so she took another sizeable mouthful. It was like getting into a warm bath from inside. Perhaps the British were not so daft. She was certainly feeling better for it.
Miss Phoebe Glen stood up and raised her glass. The fat man gazed up at her admiringly. With the hat and the mittens and her bearing, she was every inch a lady. The Widow MacNamally drank Guinness only, and not without noises. He would serve Miss Phoebe Glen – as he had once served his mother, before her second marriage had sent him off to the Ford works at Dagenham, and never allowed him back.
‘I give you a toast,’ said Miss Phoebe. ‘To Mrs Patel. Without whom. . .’
Mrs Patel, prone to something like a giggle, finished her drink. ‘Oh, please,’ She held up her hand in a gesture of modesty.
The chill of wintertime seemed to blow all the harder. Despite the ring burning on the stove and the breath of the kitchen’s inmates, something stirred the air around, bringing the ice of Siberia and the frosts of Norway into the room. Miss Phoebe paused. She was about to check if her plank was still in order when the kitchen door was flung back, apparently of its own accord.
In the entrance stood a girl with flaming hair, diamond eyes and the remnants of a very large bump on her forehead. She held up a plank.
‘Your door is open to the elements,’ she said. ‘You are in need. You cannot stay here with the door flapping. . .’
She looked around her. Her voice trailed off.
‘You!’ hissed Miss Phoebe Glen, rising another inch on her toes. ‘You!’
The fat man jumped and spilled a little of his drink.
But the girl with the flaming hair and the diamond eyes put her hand up to her bump and winced. This was all wrong. She had four single girls of under seventeen about to give birth, one of fifteen just confirmed up the spout by a schoolboy, three families at risk, and now this old trout, who was supposed to be easy and past it and on the register for Sunnybank Basic Unit, was entertaining a party of friends. Incapable of managing alone, it said on the form, and therefore not supposed to be found sitting in a bloody kitchen full of good cheer.
‘The door,’ she said miserably, ‘is swinging open.’
‘My friend the repair man is just about to fix it,’ said Miss Phoebe Glen, and she leaned over and touched the head of the fat man as he bent low over his bag.
‘I have a man,’ she said proudly.
At which the fat man froze.
And the girl with the flaming hair and the diamond eyes thought, peevishly, There’s no arguing with that. She looked about her. The diamonds fell upon Ani Patel, and hardened. ‘I am surprised at you,’ she said. ‘Out drinking at a time like this.’
‘I have a screwdriver here,’ said the fat man, riffling through his things, feeling, though not bringing out, various garments and tubes of ointment. ‘Somewhere.’
‘Always leave it to someone else to pick up the pieces,’ said the girl to Ani Patel. ‘Your sort.’
‘A big screwdriver,’ said the fat man firmly. But he skewed his head around to look at Mrs Patel. They all looked at Mrs Patel.
Mrs Patel looked back at them all in turn. An answer was required.
Very deliberately, she held up her empty glass to Miss Phoebe Glen, who immediately filled it.
She drank a little.
They waited.
Ani Patel drank a little more.
Ani Patel thought of her namesake and took courage. ‘My son,’ she said. ‘Ari,’ she said, ‘is pregnant.’
There was a stunned silence.
Miss Phoebe Glen drank her own glass dry. And then, wiping her lips with the tips of her fingers, said, ‘I don’t think you mean that exactly, now do you? A little confusion with the syntax, I fancy?’
Ani Patel nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for pointing that out. What I mean is, I am going to be a grandmother.’
‘You’ve decided, then?’ said the girl with the diamond eyes.
Mrs Patel shrugged. ‘There was never,’ she said with dignity, ‘any question in my mind.’
‘This calls for a celebration,’ said Miss Phoebe Glen, refilling her glass.
That’s what you think, thought Ani Patel, but she kept the consideration to herself.
The girl with the diamond eyes gave a low moan and backed out of the room. Sometimes these women just could not be persuaded. Old, young, foreign, they would dig in their heels and make everybody’s life difficult. She went out, banging the door. Which promptly swung back open.
‘Dregs,’ she said to the night sky, which made her feel considerably better.