I put on the skirt, but my usual flat boots look silly with it. My eyes fall on the wine-coloured boots I bought in a rash moment with Molly. I slip into them. High heels feel odd to me—it’s only rarely that I wear them: in spite of their sophistication they make me feel somehow childlike, as though I’m just trying on grown-up things. Like when Ursula and I would borrow our mother’s shoes and put a jazz record on the ancient wind-up gramophone she’d inherited from our grandmother and stomp around the living room. Conjuring up a life of unguessable glamour, of glasses of Martini with little umbrellas in them, and dancing under a pink-striped awning and the sound of the band.
I glance at myself in the mirror. I’m taller, thinner, more vivid. I look like somebody different.
Amber is dressed now, but she says her mouth is too painful to eat, and really she can only manage a can of Dr Pepper for breakfast: so she won’t be able to concentrate, so what’s the point of school. I don’t respond.
I’m late: I hate being late. I have a case conference at the hospital and I’ll only get there in time if there’s hardly any traffic. I go out to the road, into a sodden world of thick brown water-laden light. The traffic is always slower in the rain. I start up the car. In my unfamiliar shoes, the pedals seem to be at the wrong angle: and then I realise the problem isn’t the shoes. The grinding sound from under the car is louder than yesterday. I don’t know enough about cars to guess what’s wrong with the engine: perhaps the rain has got in.
Where the side road joins the main road, I pull out in front of a bus and press on the accelerator, and there’s no response from the car—no power, nothing. The car creeps forward, the bus driver hoots aggressively. Panicked, I pull in to the side of the road and switch on my hazard flashers and crawl to the nearest garage, where a stooped and rather smug man who smells of engine oil informs me sombrely that my gearbox has gone.
I know my hair will be frizzing in the rain. My new red boots have mud on. I ask tentatively what kind of money we’re talking about.
‘I could do a reconditioned one for about five hundred quid,’ he says. ‘New, we’d be talking seven.’ He casts a pitying eye over my car, taking in the rust marks and the moss round the passenger window. ‘But, to be honest, love, there’s no point putting a new one into this, now, is there?’
Briefly, I feel ashamed, as though my mossy car is a moral failing.
It will take two days, he tells me. I manage to get a taxi, but I am still late for my meeting. I arrive with mud on my legs, self-conscious in my new boots.
At lunchtime, looking through my To Do list, I see where I have written the number of Fairfield Street police station, and Will Hampden’s name.
I ring.
A woman’s voice, brisk and sibilant. ‘Sorry, he’s in a meeting. Can I take a message?’
I leave my number and say it’s about a patient—nothing current, I just need some information.
At the corner shop I buy baguettes for Clem and for me. It’s still raining. We eat in Clem’s office.
‘The boots are fab,’ she says. ‘You ought to wear things like that more often.’
Clem’s in a rather mournful mood. She’s just had a date with a rather hunky medical insurance broker who explained between the sorbet and the espresso that he really enjoys her company but she has to know commitment isn’t his thing.
After lunch there is a team meeting. Peter lectures us on the vexed subject of the waiting list, and how cutting patient waiting times really has to be our priority. Brigid talks with passion about the coffee fund. Rain traces out its spider patterns on the windows: pigeons, plumped-up, pink-eyed, huddle on the sills. Bad temper has its claws in me.
The phone rings as I go back to my office and I hope it will be Will Hampden, but it’s the man from the garage, saying he needs to revise his estimate upwards.
I try the police station again. It’s the same woman.
‘Like I said, he’ll ring you back. You must understand, he has to prioritise, he’s very busy,’ she says.
There’s an edge to her voice, but I know she’s probably responding to some crossness in my own.
There are days that you can’t make right or mend. I make more calls but no one is in. I have a desultory session with Kerry James, a ten-year-old girl who’s been referred with suspected depression: she draws immaculate little pictures of cats, and nothing I say gets near her. In the end I just leave, rather early. The rain has stopped. I’ll walk for part of the journey and pick up the bus when I’m tired. Perhaps the walk will calm me.
I need my street plan, I have to go down roads where I’ve never been. These streets are dreary, with bleak terraced houses with grimy curtains and gardens full of old motorbikes. I turn into Acton Street, where there’s an ugly purple-painted pub with advertisements for Sports Night and a wide-screen television. I pass a grim tower block, where the playground has a high wire fence, like an exercise yard in a prison. But over all this there’s a wide washed sky, and a light that makes distant things seem near, so you feel you could see for ever. Birds fly over, grey geese like in Amber’s poem, clapping their wings together: six of them, in a black ragged V, against the shining sky. I watch them till they’re out of sight and their creaking cries have faded in the distance. I feel the day’s irritations start to seep away.
As I study my map on a street corner, I see that my route will take me near to Fairfield Street. And something perhaps can be retrieved from the general mess of my day.
CHAPTER 6
The desk sergeant is young and angular, with gelled hair.
‘Is it possible to speak to Detective Inspector Hampden?’
‘It should be. Who shall I say it is?’
I tell him. ‘I did try ringing earlier. I just wanted some information about a case.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says. He speaks into his phone. ‘He isn’t answering,’ he says, ‘but I know he’s somewhere around.’
Suddenly I wonder why I’m here.
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell him. ‘Not if he’s busy. I can ring him. I just dropped in on the off chance. You know, as I was passing.’
‘You might as well see him now you’re here,’ he says. ‘I’m sure I can get hold of him. Why don’t you sit down for a moment, Mrs Holmes?’
In the waiting area there are metal seats fixed to the wall. The only other person waiting is an elderly woman: a faint smell of urine hangs about her and she has three bulging Aldi bags and many large safety pins fixed to the front of her coat. A voice crackles over an intercom: it sounds like traffic information. The woman shuffles sideways towards me, catching her capacious skirts in the space at the back of the seats.
She reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. ‘You’re pretty, aren’t you?’ she says. Her voice is surprisingly cultured. There’s a fierce scent of spirits on her breath.
‘Mrs Holmes,’ says the desk sergeant. I get up, go to him. ‘Let me take you through,’ he says. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long.’
He takes me down a corridor; through the open doors on either side, you can hear phones shrilling and cut-off scraps of conversation. He shows me into an empty office, which smells of tuna and of illicit cigarette smoke.
‘I thought you might prefer to wait in here,’ he says. ‘Maureen does go on a bit.’
‘Thanks,’ I say.
He closes the door behind him.
It’s a cluttered, disorderly office: on the