The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(20)
When the landlord, who was a likable sort after all, gave his version of the evening, there was some sniggering from the clerks around me, and roars of laughter from the public gallery. Potts, who was sitting and was known for having every element of humor left out of him, threatened to clear the court, so there was soon a hush. But I can’t give an account of the case as, just as the police officer took the stand, I felt a kick in my stomach, something like a cloven hoof, and I had to fold myself double to scrabble in the bag at my feet, edge past my father, nod to Potts and back reverently out of the court in the direction of the lavatories. My father, who was now attuned to the biology of young women, gave me a sympathetic glance as I went. I turned at the door, glanced up, and saw that Nicolette was perched in the gallery, squeezed on either side by the landlord’s friends, who bounced silently in their seats at every sally in the court below.
When I came back the court had risen for lunch. Nicolette was in the corridor talking earnestly to my father, her face raised to his. The place seemed deserted. My father was somber, eyes fixed on her face. But he must be hungry, I thought. He looked up, he scanned the corridor as if for rescue or a waiter. His eyes passed over me, but he didn’t seem to see me. He looked drained, gray, as if he’d been left standing by the curb and one of the lowlifes from Ancoats had been siphoning off his blood.
Then the corridor began to fill up with the bustle of the various people hurrying back from lunch. A miasma of extinguished cigarettes, of pale ale and cheese and onion and whisky billowed before them, a smell of wet mackintosh and wet newsprint came in with them, as damp pages of the early edition of the Evening News were unfolded and flapped in the air. Nicolette clipped over to me, smiling, her heels spearing the floor. She seemed keen to strike up a friendship. She clicked open her bag. “Your father thought you might need two of these.” She pulled out a bottle of aspirin.
“I usually have three.”
“Be my guest.”
She unscrewed the top with an air of liberality. But there was a cotton wool twist in the neck of the bottle, and when I tried to fish it out it flinched away from my forefinger and impacted itself out of reach. “Give it here,” Nicolette said. She probed the glass with her pearly claw. “The little bugger,” she said.
My father had joined us. Holding up his thick digit, he showed that he was helpless in the matter. Nicolette flushed, her face downturned. Across each eyelid there ran an eely flick, teal-blue, drawn with a fine pen. I positioned myself next to her so that I could try to see down her neckline, and find out where her caramel hue ended, but all I could see was an ugly mottling of frustration, spreading crimson to where the buttons of her silk blouse blocked my view.
The forces of the Crown arrived. “What’s up, Frank?” Bernard Bell said.
My father said, “My daughter’s started her … she’s started her headache.”
“Touch of the sun.” It was February. Nobody smiled. “Oh, suit yourselves,” Bernard said. “Tweezers will do it.”
I almost glanced behind me for Tweezers, a rachitic clerk with fingerless gloves. Then I saw that Bernard was digging in his pockets. He came out with some treasury tags, small predecimal currency and some fluff. He sifted it, plunged his two hands in again, and ferreted down there for quite a while; it was a tribute, I thought, to the charms of Nicolette. My father snorted, “Bernie, you never carry tweezers into court? Nail-clippers, yes…”
“You may scoff,” Bernie said, “but I have known nasty injuries occur from slivers of flying glass, where in the hands of a man trained by the St. John Ambulance, a handy pair of sterilized…”
But then Nicolette gave a squeak of triumph. She held up the plug of cotton wool between her fingertips. Three aspirin rolled into my palm. If they’d rolled into her palm, I could have settled a question.
Early in the afternoon the case was thrown out. The Irishman tumbled into the corridor to greet his well-wishers, punching the air and crying, “Drinks all round.”
It surprised me to see that Nicolette was still there. She was standing alone, her bag looped over her elbow. She’d lost her papers, whatever they were. She looked as if she were queuing up for something. “Very honorably prosecuted, sir, and in a gentlemanlike manner,” the landlord flung in the Crown’s direction. When he passed Nicolette, fists flailing, feet flashing out, I saw her step back against the wall with a briskness almost military, and clamp her forearm across her tiny belly.
That night my father took my mother aside. She kept walking away from him, in little aimless drifts, so he had to follow her down the hall and into the kitchen, saying listen to me Lillian. I went up to the bathroom and looked in the bathroom cabinet, which I normally avoided as the thought made me sick. I sorted through what was in there: a small bottle of olive oil, some oozing ointments, a roll of sticking plaster and some round-ended scissors with a rust spot at the junction of their blades: crepe bandages packed in cellophane. There was more provision for casualties than I had imagined. I pulled some cotton wool out of a packet, rolled it up into balls, and put it in my ears. I went downstairs. I watched my soundless feet go before me, like scouts. I didn’t look through the kitchen door, though it had a glass panel. But after a while I sensed a vibration under my feet, as if the whole house were shaking.
I went into the kitchen. My father wasn’t there and being quick on the uptake I deduced he must have slipped out through the back door. The room was filled with a dull thudding sound. My mother was beating on the edge of the kitchen table the ovenproof dish in which she usually shriveled his dinner. It was made of toughened glass and took a long time to break. When it shattered at last she left the wreckage on the floor and brushed past me on her way upstairs. I pointed to my ears, as if to warn her that any commentary on the situation was wasted on me. But left to myself I picked up all the shards of the dish, and carried on picking them up and placing them on the table. Not having the obliging tweezers by me I took up the fragments from the carpet tiles with my fingernails. This detailed work of recovery occupied a satisfactory amount of time. While the muffled evening continued on its way without me I arranged the jagged fragments so that the pattern of onions and carrots with which the dish had been decorated was complete again. I left it for her to find, but when I came down next morning it was gone as if it had never been.