The Saint Zita Society (2 page)

Henry was sending a text on his iPhone. ‘Who’s Saint Zita?’

It was June who had found the title for the society. ‘She’s the patron saint of domestic servants and she gave her food and clothes to the poor. If you see a picture of her she’ll be holding a bag and a bunch of keys.’

‘This boy that was stabbed,’ said Henry, ‘his mum was on the TV and she said he was down to get three A levels and he’d do anything for anyone. Everybody loved him.’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘Funny, isn’t it? All these kids that get murdered and whatever, you never hear anyone say they were slimeballs and a menace to the neighbourhood.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t when they’d died, would they?’ Henry’s iPhone tinkled to tell him a text had come. It was the one he wanted and he grinned a little at Huguette’s message. ‘What’s the society for, anyway?’

‘Solidarity,’ said Jimmy. ‘Supporting each other. And we can have outings and go to shows.’

‘We can do that anyway. We don’t have to have a servants’ society to go and see
Les Mis
.’

‘I’m not a servant,’ said Thea.

‘Then you can be an honorary member,’ said June. ‘Well, that’s my lot. It’s got quite dark and the Princess will start fretting.’

Montserrat didn’t come and no one knew what the ‘mysterious task’ was. Jimmy and Thea talked about the society for an hour or so, what was it
for
and could it restrain employers from keeping their drivers up till all hours and forced to drink Coke while they awaited their employers’ call. Not that he included Dr Jefferson who was an example to the rest of them. Henry wanted to know who that funny little guy with the bushy hair was, Dex or something, he’d never seen him before.

‘He does our garden.’ Jimmy had got into the habit of referring to Simon Jefferson’s property as if it belonged equally to the paediatrician and himself. ‘Dr Jefferson took him on out of the kindness of his heart.’ Jimmy finished his lager, said dramatically, ‘He sees evil spirits.’

‘He what?’ Henry gaped as Jimmy had intended him to.

‘Well, he used to. He tried to kill his mother and they put him inside – well, a place for the criminally insane. There was a psychiatrist saw to him and he was a pal of Dr Jefferson and when the psychiatrist had cured him they let him out because they said he’d never do it again and Dr Jefferson gave him that job with us.’

Thea looked uneasy. ‘D’you think that’s why he left when he did without saying goodbye? Talking about stabbing was too near home? D’you think that’s what it was?’

‘Dr Jefferson says he’s cured,’ said Jimmy. ‘He’ll never do it again. His friend swore blind he wouldn’t.’

Henry left last because he fancied another glass of lady
juice. The others had all gone in the same direction. Their employers’ homes were all in Hexam Place, a street of white-painted stucco or golden brickwork houses known to estate agents as Georgian, though none had been built before 1860. Number 6, on the opposite side to the Dugong, was the property of Her Serene Highness, the Princess Susan Hapsburg, a title incorrect in every respect except her Christian name. The Princess, as she was known to the members of the Saint Zita Society among others, was eighty-two years old and had lived in this house for nearly sixty years, and June, four years younger, had been there with her for the same length of time.

Steps ran down into the area and June’s door but when she came home after having been out in the evenings she entered by the front door even though this meant climbing up eight stairs instead of walking down twelve. There were evenings when June’s polymyalgia rheumatica made that climbing up a trial but she did it so that passing pedestrians and other residents of Hexam Place might know she was more of a friend to the Princess than a paid employee. Zinnia had bathed Gussie that day and brought in a new kind of air-freshener so that the doggy smell was less pronounced. It was very warm. Mean in most respects, the Princess was lavish with the central heating and kept it on all summer, opening windows when it got too hot.

June could hear the Princess had
Holby City
on but she marched in just the same. ‘Now, what can I get you, madam? A nice vodka and tonic or a freshly squeezed orange juice?’

‘I don’t want anything, dear. I’ve had my vodka.’ The Princess didn’t turn round. ‘Are you drunk?’ It was a question she always asked when she knew June had been to the pub.

‘Of course not, madam.’ It was the answer June always gave.

‘Well, don’t talk any more, dear. I want to know if this chap has got psoriasis or a malignant melanoma. You’d better go to bed.’

It was a command, and friend or no friend, even after sixty years, June knew it was wiser to obey. The young ones in Saint Zita’s might be pals with their employers, Montserrat even called Mrs Still Lucy, but when you were eighty-two and seventy-eight things were different; the rules had not relaxed much since the days when Susan Borrington was running away with that awful Italian boy and she was going with her to his home in Florence. June went off to bed and was falling asleep when the internal phone rang.

‘Did you put Gussie to bed, dear?’

‘I forgot,’ June murmured, barely conscious.

‘Well, do it now, will you?’

T
he areas of these houses were all different, some with cupboards under the stairs, others with cupboards in the wall dividing this area from next door’s, most with plants in pots, tree ferns, choisyas, avocados grown from stones, even a mimosa, the occasional piece of statuary. All had some kind of lighting, usually a wall light, globular or cuboid. Number 7, home of the Stills and next door but three to the Dugong, was one of those with a cupboard in the wall and no pot plants. The hanging bulb over the basement door had not been switched on but enough pale light from a street lamp showed Henry a figure standing just inside the wall cupboard. He stopped and peered over the railings. The figure, a man’s, retreated as far as it could go into the shallow recesses of the cupboard.

Possibly a burglar. There had been a lot of crime round here recently. Only last week, Montserrat had told him, someone had just walked through the window of number 5,
home of the Neville-Smiths, taken the television, a briefcase full of money and the keys to a BMW, and walked out of the front door to drive away in the car. What could you expect if you had no window locks and you had actually left a downstairs window open two inches? This man was obviously up to no good, a phrase Henry had heard his employer use and which he liked. Lord Studley would tell him to call the police on his mobile but he didn’t always do what Lord Studley recommended and was in fact off to do something of which he would have deeply disapproved.

He was turning away when the basement door opened and Montserrat appeared. She waved to Henry, said hi and beckoned the man out of the cupboard. Must be her boyfriend. He expected them to kiss but they didn’t. The man went inside and the door closed. Fifteen minutes later, having forgotten about the burglar or boyfriend, he was in Chelsea, in the Honourable Huguette Studley’s flat. These days the pattern of Henry’s visits followed the same plan, bed first, then arguing. Henry would have preferred to forgo the arguing and spend twice as long in bed but this was seldom allowed. Huguette (named after her French grandmother) was a very pretty girl of nineteen with a large red mouth and large blue eyes and hair her grandmother would have called frizzy but others recognised as the big curly bush made fashionable by Julia Roberts in
Charlie Wilson’s War
. The argument was always begun by Huguette.

‘Don’t you see, Henry, that if you lived here with me we could stay in bed all the time? There wouldn’t be any arguing because we’d have nothing to argue about.’

‘And don’t you see that your dad would sack me. On two counts,’ said Henry, who had picked up a certain amount of parliamentary language from his employer, ‘to be absolutely clear, like not living at number 11 and like shagging his daughter.’

‘You could get another job.’

‘How? It took me a year to get this one. Your dad’d give me a reference, would he? I should cocoa.’

‘We could get married.’

If Henry ever thought of marriage it would be when he was about fifty and to someone with money of her own and a big house in the suburbs. ‘No one gets married any more,’ he said, ‘and anyway, I’m outta here. You want to remember I have to be outside number 11 at 7 a.m. in the Beemer waiting for your dad when he chooses to come which may not be till nine, right?’

‘Text me,’ said Huguette.

Henry walked back. An urban fox emerged from the area of number 5, gave him an unpleasant look and crossed the road to plunder Miss Grieves’s dustbin. Upstairs at number 11 a light was still on in Lord and Lady Studley’s bedroom. Henry stood for a while, looking up, hoping their curtains might part and Lady Studley look down, preferably in her black lace nightgown, bestow on him a fond smile and purse her lips in a kiss. But nothing happened. The light went out and Henry let himself in by the area door.

I
nstead of opening the door to her bedsit with en suite bathroom (called a studio flat by her employers), Montserrat had led the caller up the basement stairs to the ground floor and then the next flight which swept round in a half-circle to the gallery. The house was silent apart from the soft patter of Rabia’s slippered feet on the nursery floor above. Montserrat tapped on the third door on the right, then opened it and said, ‘Rad’s here, Lucy.’ She left them to it, as she put it to Rabia five minutes later. ‘If they’re all asleep why don’t you come down for a bit? I’ve got a half-bottle of vodka.’

‘You know I don’t drink, Montsy.’

‘You can have the orange juice I got to go with the vodka.’

‘I wouldn’t hear Thomas if he cries. He’s teething.’

‘He’s been teething for weeks, if not months,’ said Monserrat. ‘If he belonged to me I’d drown him.’

Rabia said she shouldn’t talk like that, it was wicked, so Montserrat started telling the nanny about Lucy and Rad Sothern. Rabia put her fingers in her ears. She went back to the children, Hero and Matilda fast asleep in the bedroom they shared, baby Thomas restive but silent in his cot in the nursery. Rabia puzzled sometimes about calling a bedroom a nursery because as far as she knew – her father worked in one – a nursery was a place for growing plants. She never asked, she didn’t want to look foolish.

Montserrat had called out goodbye and left. Time passed very slowly. It was getting late now and Rabia thought seriously of going to bed in her bedroom at the back. But what if Mr Still came up here when he got home? He sometimes did. Thomas began to cry, then to scream. Rabia picked him up and began walking him up and down, the sovereign remedy. The nursery overlooked the street, and from the window, she saw Montserrat letting the man called Rad out by way of the area steps. Rabia shook her head, not at all excited or amused as Montserrat had expected her to be, but profoundly shocked.

Thomas was quiet now but he began grizzling again when laid down in his cot. Rabia had great reserves of patience and she loved him dearly. She was a widow, and both her children had died very young. This, according to one of the doctors, was due to her having married her first cousin. But Nazir himself hadn’t lived very long either and now she was alone. Rabia sat in the chair beside the cot, talking to Thomas softly. When he began to cry again she picked him up and carried him to the table where the kettle was and the little fridge in the corner and began making him a warm milky drink. She
was too far from the window to see or hear the car and the first she knew of Preston Still’s arrival was the sound of his rather heavy feet on the stairs. Instead of stopping on the floor below where his wife lay sleeping, they carried on up. As she had expected. Like Jemima Puddle-Duck, – a book Rabia sometimes read to the children and which, they said, sounded funny in her accent – Preston was an anxious parent. Quite a contrast to his wife, Rabia often thought. He came in, looking tired and harassed. He had been at a conference in Brighton – she knew because Lucy had told her.

‘Is he all right?’ Preston picked up Thomas and squeezed him too hard for the child’s comfort. Playing with Thomas or even talking to him were rare occurrences. His care was concentrated in concern for his health. ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there? If there’s the slightest thing we should call Dr Jefferson. He’s a good friend, I know he’d come like a shot.’

‘He’s very all right, Mr Still.’ The use of given names to Rabia’s employer did not extend to the master of the house. ‘He doesn’t want to sleep, that’s all.’

‘How peculiar,’ Preston said dismally. The idea of anyone not wanting to sleep, especially someone of his own blood, was alien to him. ‘And the girls? I thought Matilda had a bit of a cough when I saw her yesterday.’

Rabia said that Matilda and Hero were sound asleep in the adjoining room. There was nothing wrong with any of the children and if Mr Preston would just lay Thomas down gently he would certainly settle. Knowing what would please him, get rid of him and let her go back to her own bed, she said, ‘He was just missing his daddy and now you are here he will be fine.’

No paediatrician then, no more disturbance. She could go to bed. She could sleep for maybe five hours. What she had said to Mr Still about Thomas missing his daddy wasn’t true.
It was a lie told to please him. Secretly, Rabia believed that none of the children would miss either of their parents for a moment. They seldom saw them. She put her lips to Thomas’s cheek and whispered, ‘My sweetheart.’

O
n the tray was a small tub of the kind of yogurt that claims to regulate the consumer’s bowel movements, a fig and a slice of buttered toast, marmalade and a pot of coffee. The Princess was halfway through her yogurt phase. June knew she was halfway through because her phases always lasted about four months and two had elapsed. She fished out the tray-on-legs – neither of them knew its name – and set it up on top of the duvet. The Princess always put her hair in rollers at bedtime and now proceeded to take them out, shedding dandruff on to the toast.

‘Sleep well, dear?’