The Saint Zita Society (21 page)

‘Dr Jefferson employs him and so does Mr Neville-Smith.’

‘With all due respect, sir, though Dr Jefferson’s a real saint, kindness itself to everybody, he does take on people you wouldn’t have set foot in your home.’

‘All right. I believe you. What is it about this Dex?’

‘He looks like a hobgoblin but he hunts evil spirits. He’s got a god lives in his mobile and he does what the god says. He calls it Peach like the communications service people. I call it blasphemy. I’m sorry, sir, but you did ask.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Still. ‘Thank you, Beacon. I’ll steer clear of him.’

But Mr Still didn’t steer clear of him. Beacon knew that because while he was giving the Audi a wash in the mews next
day Jimmy came out of the back garden of number 3 and said he had heard Dex was coming to do the garden at number 7.

‘Not that it doesn’t need it,’ Jimmy said, ‘and I did tell Mr Still to think again. He came round while Dr Jefferson was at work and asked for his mobile number. Dex’s, I mean. I had to give it to him, didn’t I? I mean, it went against the grain but I had to give it to him.’

‘I warned Mr Still myself, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘Maybe I should have told him about Peach.’

‘I did that,’ said Beacon. ‘Disgusting irreligious rubbish.’

‘C
anapés,’ said Roland. ‘Not pineapple and cheese or celery with faux caviar, not rubbish. We had in mind quails’ eggs and foie gras, that sort of thing.’

Thea said, ‘Have you thought about caterers? It’s getting near Christmas.’

Glancing out of the window, she saw that the first flakes of the predicted snow were falling. Snow in November! Unheard of.

‘You mean they’ll all be booked up? Well, my dear, the thing is we thought you might do it.’

Canapés for fifty guests, somehow get all the raw materials in, carry them up the stairs, for no one else would. Marry Jimmy and she’d never have to do it again – except perhaps for her own wedding.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you want.’

T
he snow began to fall while Dex was working in Dr Jefferson’s garden. Using his narrow trowel with the sharp pointed tip, he was removing from earthenware tubs the plants the frost had killed, first wilting their leaves, then blackening
them. Dex loosened the soil around the dead plants and dropped their roots and shrivelled stems into a black plastic bag supplied by Jimmy. When the last tub was done, the first flakes floated out of a heavy grey sky. First they scattered like petals on the soil, then covered it with a thin white sheet. Dex began packing up. He cleaned off his tools under the outside tap, put them into his tool bag and knocked on the back door to tell Jimmy no work could be done in this weather.

‘You tell Dr Jefferson I did my best but it snowed. Will he still pay me?’

‘He left your money.’ Jimmy produced an envelope and handed it over. ‘He
would
. I wouldn’t, I don’t mind telling you, but he’s like that.’

Dex’s mobile rang when he was turning into Ebury Bridge Street. This was a rare happening. He answered it just with his name as Dr Mettage had taught him was the best way. Then people knew they had the right number.

‘Dex,’ he said.

‘Peach,’ a voice said. It seemed to come from very far away but it was a beautiful voice, different from any he had heard before, the voice of a god who lived in the sunset. But Peach had many voices.

Dex said his own name again. He didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t go on walking while his god spoke to him. The snow was falling on his hands and on his phone. There was a bus shelter a few yards on. He crept into it and crouched on the narrow bench.

‘Peach,’ the voice said again. ‘Are you still there, Dex?’

Dex nodded, then realising Peach couldn’t see him, said, ‘Yes, I am.’

‘Listen to me. There’s an evil spirit you must destroy,’ Peach said and when Dex had said yes and what must he do, said, ‘It’s a woman. I mean, it looks like a woman. It’s about the
same height as you and it’s got a lot of thick dark hair, long hair. It lives at number 7 Hexam Place and you must follow it. Follow it and destroy it. Tell no one.’

‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘Do it soon,’ said Peach. ‘I will reward you.’

Dex wasn’t sure what a reward meant, what the
word
meant. Perhaps one of those messages which appeared and said Peach was going to give him ten free calls. He knew better than to tell anyone. He had tried talking about his god in the past, to Beacon for instance, who spoke angrily to him and said a long word beginning with b that he had never heard before. Jimmy wasn’t angry when he told him about Peach but said he was mad. Dex knew that already, ever since he went to that place where everyone was mad, so he must be. Neither Beacon nor Jimmy understood. Dex got up and walked out on to the pavement, enjoying the feeling of the cold flakes falling on his face and hands, now his mobile was safely in his pocket.

D
ecember came in bitterly cold. The pond froze over in St James’s Park and the pelicans all huddled on their island. During a sunny spell while the snow held off and the sky was blue, Rabia pushed Thomas to Harrods along pavements sticky with thaw and red grit and bought him a scarlet quilted coat with a hood. It was trimmed in grey fur, not white, to avoid making him look like a baby Father Christmas.

Having left her car out in Hexam Place overnight, Montserrat found the door handles frozen shut, so she went out on foot to buy snow boots. Unable to afford Uggs, she bought a cheap imitation, pale blue suede with white fleece tops, at a shoe shop in Victoria Street. She took a bus back, climbing to the upper deck, and looking over her shoulder, saw Dex get on behind her. Perhaps he’d got that gardening job with Preston
after all but he was nowhere to be seen when she came to get off. Beacon, walking by, said to use a hairdryer on the frozen door handles, only possible of course if she had an extension lead long enough to reach from an electric point inside her flat, up the area stairs and out into the street. She asked him what time he expected to bring Mr Still home that evening.

‘That’s not your business,’ he said. ‘What d’you want to know for, anyway? You ask Mrs Still if you want to know things like that.’

Montserrat went inside to look for an extension lead. Zinnia didn’t even know what she meant, Rabia was out with Thomas and Lucy was out to lunch. Montserrat tried heating up the car key but only succeeded in burning her fingers. Best wait for the thaw and take the Tube to Preston’s. After that evening when he took her out to dinner at her request and, again at her request, came back to Hexam Place to spend the night with her, she had heard nothing from him. Yet he had been nice to her, had talked to her in quite a cheerful pleasant way over dinner and when they were in the taxi going back, kissed her in a passionate way – well, passionate for him. Only when they were turning into Hexam Place did he start behaving cautiously. He got the driver to drop him outside the Dugong while he took her on to number 7. There she waited for him in the area but he came into the house via the front steps and the front door. Five minutes later he came to the flat. Montserrat thought they were by now sufficiently close for her to ask him why but all he said, with a reversion to his old manner, was that it was his house and he was damned if he was going in by the servants’ entrance. That was the first time she had heard anyone say ‘damned’ since her grandfather said it when she was a little girl.

She had expected him to phone next day. By this time she ought to be used to him not phoning when anyone else would
but she wasn’t. She was scared to call him at work and when she left messages for him at the flat in Medway Manor Court he never answered them. It was time he talked to her about his divorce, she thought, and her moving in with him, even mentioned marriage as something to be thought about. She had to see him and preferably tonight. A face-to-face talk was needed. She would steer him towards planning for the future.

Perhaps it was just as well that she hadn’t succeeded in thawing out the handles on the car doors because it was snowing again and her mobile told her that a heavy overnight frost was forecast. The car would look like an igloo by the morning. Her new boots were not glamorous or elegant enough for meeting Preston, so she put on black pumps, but leather rather than suede and with a heel only an inch high. Now was no time to break her ankle. Her only thick coat, black wool with faux baby lamb lapels, was shabby but the warmest thing she had. The first thing she’d get Preston to buy her when they were living together was a real fur coat.

The pavements between here and Victoria Station had been gritted. The snow falling onto them turned into a kind of reddish soup. Her shoes squelched in the gritty liquid and she regretted the boots. There were very few people about, so it was odd that for the second time that day she saw Dex. She had turned round before crossing the road to check there was nothing coming and there he was, apparently following the same route that she had followed. He lived round here somewhere, didn’t he? He too must be getting the Tube one stop.

Inside the station she stopped and phoned Preston on his landline. It had to be his landline because she didn’t know his mobile number. Of course he didn’t answer but that meant nothing. He was bound to be at home by now. She went down the escalator and halfway down heard the public address
system telling her there were delays on the Circle Line. Nothing, though, about trains not running. The platform was crowded, densely packed with people. Montserrat knew it was wise to stand at the extreme left-hand end or the extreme right-hand end because seats were usually available in the first and last carriages.

She struggled along, forcing her way through towards the left-hand end. The sign told her a train was due in one minute. That this part of the platform, like the end of the train, would be less crowded, wasn’t true this evening. Someone at the platform edge turned round and said to her, ‘Don’t push,’ and she said, ‘Sorry,’ but went on pushing and got to the edge herself, calculating exactly where the double doors in the last carriage would open. The train could be heard quite a long way off, a kind of roaring rattle on the rails just before the gleam of its lights. Something pressed against her back, a light touch, then a heavier pressure. She cried out, stumbled over the edge but grabbed hold of the man beside her and the woman on the other side, clutching at them and letting out a loud scream. She would have toppled over but for the two of them pulling her, swinging her back.

The train came in, filling in the lethal space where death by electrocution waited. Most people got on to the train but not the two who had held her back. They supported her to one of the seats, the last one on the platform, and she half sat, half lay there, making little whimpering sounds. The man asked her what had happened.

‘I don’t know. Someone pushed me.’

‘Did you see who it was?’

‘I didn’t look.’ Montserrat turned from one to another. ‘Thank you. I nearly fell. I would have but for you.’

The woman helped her back up the escalator and put her into a cab. Montserrat had told him Hexam Place but once
the car was moving said to go to Medway Manor Court instead. She badly needed someone to care, to hold her, to sympathise. Really what she needed was someone to love her, though she doubted if Preston would do that.

‘You imagined it,’ he said when he had let her into the flat. ‘You must have. These things don’t happen.’

‘This one did.’

He didn’t hold her or show any sympathy but he did give her brandy which was a kind of caring.

‘Please, Preston, can I stay here? I’ll be all right in the morning. It’s just that I’m afraid to go out there tonight.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk to me as if I were a monster. “Please, Preston, can I stay here?” Of course you can stay here.’

She said, ‘Thank you,’ in a humble way, then, ‘What does the Q in your name stand for?’

‘You don’t want to know.’ But he was smiling.

‘I do. I really do.’ She’d be able to say it when they got married.

‘Quintilian,’ he said.

T
he snow fell to a depth of about five centimetres. ‘You mean two inches,’ said June.

The oldest servant in Hexam Place, she was the only one to sweep the pavement outside the house they occupied or worked in. Zinnia refused to sweep outside anywhere at all, saying to anyone who cared to listen that it wasn’t her job. At number 11 Richard and Sondra agreed not to mention the subject unless asked by one or other of their employers. Simon Jefferson told Jimmy he wouldn’t dream of expecting him to perform such a chore and swept his bit of pavement himself. Elsewhere the snow lay untouched, was ground down by those pedestrians who ventured outdoors, thawed out one milder day and frozen again overnight, creating sheets of ice.

It was on a day of renewed cold that June slipped when she was pushing the Princess in her new wheelchair. June fell, the wheelchair overturned and the Princess toppled out. This mishap was witnessed by Lucy, alighting from a taxi, Roland mounting the steps to number 8 and Thea looking out of her front window. She too saw Lucy and Roland ‘passing by on the other side’, as she phrased it to herself. The Good Samaritan parable was then enacted as she ran downstairs, clutching and talking into her mobile, and doing her best to set both old women on their feet.

The Princess was shouting that she had broken her hip, without much foundation for this claim. June really had broken her wrist, putting her right arm out in a vain effort to break her fall. An ambulance came and took them both away. Thea was asked by a paramedic, under the mistaken impression that she was the Princess’s daughter or June’s, if she would like to come with them, and though she didn’t want to, said yes, of course.

Life came to something of a standstill. The only work Dex now had was his three hours a week for Dr Jefferson. Everyone knew that he had it only because of the kindness of Dr Jefferson’s heart. Dex had considered going from door to door, offering to clear snow, for more had fallen at the weekend. But it was only a thin covering that thawed on the mild Saturday afternoon. Beacon had told him that because he had money from the government called something he couldn’t pronounce, he shouldn’t earn other money by working. But Dr Jefferson gave him the money and so it must be right. Dex was more troubled because he had failed Peach and he wondered if he should make a second attempt.