Selected Stories

They all did. He took pains, they said; he found his way. ‘She wasn’t very nice, you know,’ he said about the old woman, talking about her in the room where Bea had to wake up on the sofa. He often didn’t look at you when he spoke and because of his whispery voice you sometimes couldn’t hear. Bea didn’t know why Mr Hance made her nervous, why he had even on the first day, why most of all he did when he sat beside her in the coach, one of his fingers tracing over and over again the outline of the little label that was sewn into the edge of his plain brown scarf. On every journey his milky eyes turned away from the coach window before the journey ended and his fingers became still. He gazed at her, saying nothing, and at first she thought he was practising the part. She’d seen them doing that, trying something out, hearing one another’s lines, but in the coach it didn’t seem like practising. The room with the sofa in it was in his house, where he took her after the old woman was dead, the sofa all sagging and old, two empty milk bottles on the window-sill, cat litter on the floor beneath it. They kept having to do the scene in which she woke up, getting it right.

‘We take in a film today?’ Dickie suggested. ‘Meet Me in St Louis’s come back.’ In the cinema, listening to the songs, Bea tried not to think about being bored again tomorrow or Mr Hance making her nervous in the coach. She tried not to see the moisture on his squashed forehead when he knelt down by the sofa and asked her to forgive him. She tried not to hear him saying something she couldn’t hear in the coach, or not saying anything when he gazed at her.

‘Wasn’t that grand!’ Dickie said when Judy Garland sang for the last time and The End

went up on the screen. ‘I’ve got some hot-cross buns,’ he said when they were on the street, although it wasn’t Easter, the wrong time of year by ages. In his bedsitting-room they toasted the hot-cross buns because they were a bit on the stale side. They squatted on the floor, each of them with a fork, poking their buns at the bar of the electric fire.

It was warm in the bedsitting-room, Dickie’s overcoat hanging from the hook on the back of the door, his bed under the sloping windows, a curtain drawn over so you wouldn’t know the sink was there. He had little sachets of jam, blackcurrant and strawberry, and he offered her a choice.

‘There’s Swiss roll,’ he said, and he laughed. What was left of one, he meant. He’d kept it for her. ‘Iris busy this evening?’ he asked when they had finished everything. ‘Going out, is she?’

Bea shook her head, but when they got to the flat Iris didn’t ask him in. Iris wasn’t sure yet, Bea said to herself, and later on, when she was in bed, she went over the signs there’d been – Iris saying they must tell Dickie about the audition and then about Ann-Marie and the newspapers, and the canary singing. But when Bea fell asleep it wasn’t Dickie being back that came into her dreams. In the room with the milk bottles on the window-sill Mr Hance was showing her the label on his scarf and she kept saying she must go now. She kept trying to get up from the sofa but she couldn’t.

‘It’s like you pity Mr Hance,’ Roland said, turning a chair round so that he was facing Bea in the viewing-room. He dangled a leg over one of the chair’s arms, which was his favourite way of sitting. His earrings were crucifixes, Bea noticed, which she hadn’t before. ‘The piece is about stuff like that, chick.’

Yesterday on the screen Mr Hance had walked away from the funeral and then walked on, through the streets by the river and the gasometers. In a startling way his features had suddenly filled the screen, tears glistening on his lean cheeks.

‘We’re into compassion here,’ Roland said.

Bea tried to blank out Mr Hance’s weeping face, which she could still see even though the screen was empty now. The tears ran down to the corners of his mouth, droplets becoming snagged there or slipping on, into the crevices of his chin.

‘Like some poor wounded bird,’ Roland said. ‘Some little sparrow with a smashed-up wing. And you’d be sorry for it because maybe the other sparrows would be quicker and take the crumbs. You’re with us here, Bea?’

Her mother looked sharply at her, which quite reminded her of a sparrow’s beady gaze. Bea knew Iris was being sharp because she didn’t want her to say she didn’t like feathers, that they never put crumbs out because of that. The time in Trafalgar Square the pigeons were frightening the way they rushed by you, their wings crashing into your face. ‘Never again,’ Dickie had promised. ‘You give your nuts to that little boy there.’ But she hadn’t wanted even to do that. She didn’t want to have the nuts in her hand for a minute longer.

‘Try for it, shall we?’ Roland said. ‘The pity thing?’

Bea began to nod. ‘Why’d he have to murder her?’ she asked, because she had always wondered that.