The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(16)

It was late June before she gave me a smile and said, “You can call me Liz.” I tried, but I didn’t feel easy; for me, I’m afraid, she’ll be Mrs. Bathurst forever. Still, I was pleased at the time, that she seemed to want to get on good terms. You see, I’ve had some problems in my personal life—it’s too complicated to go into here—and I suppose I was looking out for an older woman, somebody I could confide in.

One night I said, will you come out? Let’s go somewhere! I towed her along to a little French place I used to go to with my boyfriend. It’s a gem—old-fashioned, very cheap, and probably the last place in London where the waiters are authentically unpleasant in the Parisian style. I can’t say the occasion was relaxed. Mrs. Bathurst didn’t seem interested in the food. She spent the evening perched on the edge of her seat, staring at what the waiters were carrying through, and sniffing. When the next table ordered steak tartare, she looked at me: “People eat that?”

“Apparently.”

“What,” she said, “anybody?”

“If they can face it.”

“Right,” she said. She frowned. “I never knew you could get that.”

“You’ve never lived,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I have.”

The bill came, and I said “My treat—really, Liz, honestly.” Right, thanks, she said: yanked her cape from the hook by the door and fluttered off into the night.

I wanted to like her, you see, but she’s one of those people who can’t take simple friendship where it’s offered. She was more taken with Bettina—though as far as I could see then, they had nothing in common. Bettina came whining to me: “That woman’s always hanging about in my basement.”

“Doing what?”

She pouted. “Offering to help me.”

“Not a crime.”

“Don’t you think she’s a lesbian?”

“How would I know?”

“I’ve seen you drinking tea with her.”

“Yes, but God blast it. Anyway, Mrs. Isn’t she?”

“Oh, Mrs.,” Bettina said scornfully. “Probably she’s not. She just thinks it sounds more respectful.”

“Respectable, you mean.”

“Anyway. Lesbians often get married.”

“Do they?”

“Definitely.”

I said, “I bow to your worldly wisdom.”

“Look at her!” Bettina said. “There’s something wrong there.”

“Thyroid?” I said. “Could be. She’s thin. And her hands shake.”

Bettina nodded. “Eyes bulge. Mm. Could be.”

I feel sorry for both of them. Bettina is on some sort of Grand Tour, earning her way around the old world—she’ll stop off and take blood in various European cities, then fly home and settle, she says. Mrs. Bathurst’s own relatives live abroad, and she never sees them.

After our meal out—a disaster, probably my fault—I’d have suggested something else—film, whatever—except that, as I’ve said, I rent a flat in Staines, thirty-five minutes from Waterloo, and Mrs. Bathurst has recently moved from Highgate to Kensal Green. What’s it like? I asked her. A hole, she said. Midsummer, she took a fortnight off. She didn’t want it, she said, was dreading it in fact—but Smear was going on a sponsored conference, and she wasn’t wanted.

The day she was to finish work, she sat with me in my cave, her eyes hidden in her palms. “Mrs. Bathurst,” I said, “maybe London’s not for you. It’s not—I don’t find it a kind place myself, it’s not a place for women alone.” Especially, I didn’t say, when they get to your age. After a bit—perhaps she’d been thinking about what I was saying—she took her hands away from her face.

“Move on,” she said, “that’s the way. Move on, every year or two. That way, you’ll always meet somebody, won’t you?”

My heart went out to her. I scribbled my address. “Come over, some night. I’ve got a sofa, I can put you up.”

She didn’t want to take it, and I pressed it into her hand. What a cold hand she had: cold like an old buried brick. I revised my opinion on the state of her thyroid gland.

* * *

SHE DIDN’T COME, of course. I didn’t mind—and I mind less, in view of what I know about her now—but I very pointedly didn’t ask her what she’d done with her holiday. Her first day back, she looked drained. I said, “What have you been doing, moonlighting?”

She dropped her head, gnawed her lip, turned her big pale face away. She annoyed me, at times; it was as if she didn’t understand the English language, the disclaimers and the catchphrases we all have to take on, all of us, wherever we come from. “Anyway,” I said, “you’ve missed all the excitement, Mrs. Bathurst. A week ago we had a break-in.” I’d turned up one morning, and there was Mrs. Ranatunga and Dennis. Mrs. Ranatunga was in tears, wringing her J Cloth between her hands. There was a police car outside.

“Could you credit it?” Mrs. Bathurst said. She looked more animated. “Drugs?”

“Yes, that’s what Shinbone said. They must have thought we kept stuff on the premises. They ransacked the basement, there was glass all over the place. They practically ripped the fridge door off. They took Bettina’s samples, what would they have wanted with them? What would they do with tubes of blood?”