The Child (Kate Waters #2)(6)

“Well, you have to make compromises sometimes. Perhaps Paul’s course was getting a bit tired. Well, that’s what someone said.”

“I’m sure that’s not true, Lynda. Would you like a ginger nut?”

Placated, she munches through the plateful. We are now on her daughter, Joy—“she is our pride and joy so that’s what we named her”—and Joy’s children. They are a handful, it seems, and I notice Lynda doesn’t refer to them as her grandchildren when she is listing their faults and misdemeanors. They are Joy’s children. And they are, apparently, “too independent,” which, in her closely fenced world, is a terrible sin.

“Josie told me to mind my own business the other day,” she says, the outrage still rankling. “Nine years old and telling her grandmother to mind her own business.”

Go Josie, I think, and say, “Poor you.” Default position.

“Of course, you haven’t got that worry,” Lynda says, “not having any children.”

I gulp and cannot trust myself to reply. Instead, I look at my watch and mutter: “Sorry, Lynda. It’s been lovely catching up, but I’m on a deadline so must get back to work.”

“Well, you working women,” she says gracelessly. She looks disappointed but smiles her Great White smile and puts her hands on my shoulders to kiss me good-bye. When she steps back, she says in an exaggeratedly caring voice, “You should go back to bed, Emma.”

I bat her and her faux concern away.

“Tell the new Assistant Director of Student Welfare brackets Undergraduates congratulations from us,” I say as I usher her out. “Have a good day,” I add.

Stop it, I think. You sound like a shop assistant pretending to care.

I go upstairs to my office and sit with the baby in the paper in my head, in my lap, and on my back.





FIVE


    Kate


WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21, 2012

Howard Street on the edge of Woolwich was not looking its best. A herd of heavy machinery blotted out the houses, heaving clouds of smoke and dust into the air as it forced the transformation of this area of London.

Kate stood at one end, an escapee from the office.

She concentrated on picking out the houses that were still occupied. It looked as if there were only two or three left. She knew from the local free newspaper that the homes had been compulsorily purchased after a long planning battle. Now work had begun to tear them down, leaving the street looking like a retouched photograph from the Blitz. Kate counted herself lucky that her own corner of east London had largely escaped the notice of the planners determined to reimagine the capital as a series of villages, and her terrace remained untouched.

She and Steve had bought their ex-council house in Hackney in the early nineties, the first of the professional newcomers in the street. The night they moved in, next-door Bet had brought round a liver casserole in a flowered Pyrex dish, like the one Kate’s gran used to have. Bet had hovered in the kitchen, taking it all in—their matching kettle and toaster, the witty magnets on the fridge—and asking all sorts of nosey questions, but their worlds rarely collided after that beyond a warm “Hello, how are you doing?”

When they’d invited their friends to noisy barbecues or pretentious dinner parties and popped corks in the garden, they felt rather than heard the sucking in of the neighbors’ breath. But, gradually, others of their kind arrived, lured by the affordable prices, and the street saw its first glossy black front door with a bay tree in a pot on the doorstep. The bay tree was nicked the second night but its message remained.

Now, only next-door Bet and an old couple at the end of her street survived, surrounded by a rising tide of topiary and roman blinds. The recent arrival of a Marks and Spencer food emporium, on the corner where the dodgy video rental shop used to be, seemed to be the final straw for the old neighborhood.

Thank goodness we don’t have to put up with this, Kate thought as she surveyed the scene. Here, the interiors of three-story houses gaped like life-size dollhouses, curtains flapping miserably. The only sign of human habitation, apart from the lorries, was a light in a front kitchen, shining through the industrial gloom.

Kate walked up to the door and rang the bottom bell of three. The name written in biro beside it was Walker.

An older woman opened the door, peering round it nervously. “Hello. Mrs. Walker?” Kate said, in performance mode. “Sorry to bother you, but I’m doing a piece for the Daily Post on the changes around here.” She’d decided not to bring up the baby immediately. Easy does it.

The woman looked at her carefully, weighing her up, and then pulled the door open.

“It’s Miss. Come in then. Quickly. I don’t want to let all that dust in.” She led the way into her ground-floor flat, shifting a moth-eaten Jack Russell off the sofa, and nodded at Kate to sit down.

“Sorry about Shorty. He’s shedding,” she said, brushing the hair off the cushion. “Which paper is it again?”

“The Daily Post.”

“Oh, I buy that one. That’s nice.”

Kate relaxed. A reader. Home and dry.

The two women chatted about the work going on just outside the window, raising their voices when a lorry thundered past, revving hard to get up the incline.

Kate nodded her sympathy and gently led Miss Walker round to the subject of the building site grave.