pointing, though there was nothing there, or hardly anything, just a warning shimmer in the air outside Rhoda’s bedroom. Bernard looked up and Apricot made a dive to undo his zip. He shook her off and made his way, groping through a dark lit only by the red light of the fish-tank heater, to the front door and out into the street and away.
‘I didn’t think you were that kind of girl,’ he said, ‘and I shan’t see you again. But do please get Rhoda to a doctor.’
Apricot persuaded Rhoda to go to the hospital.
‘What I don’t understand is this,’ said Apricot to Brenda, Belinda and Liese, ‘why was Bernard Parkin sitting next to me on the stairs in the dark if he didn’t want sex!’
They searched for an answer but couldn’t find one. They were full of complaints. They compared notes. What was it men wanted? They asked around. Liese’s father replied, ‘True love.’ They thought this was very continental of him. Ken, when they put the question, replied, ‘A quiet life,’ but they didn’t believe that either.
Exams were approaching; and, with them, trouble on all fronts. Mr Rowse refused to see Rhoda any more because she’d been seen talking to Young Catholics Against Witchcraft. Ken chatted Belinda up so she said she wouldn’t come round any more, or so Brenda reported. Apricot had a row with Belinda. Brenda sided with Belinda, Liese with Apricot. Rhoda vomited blood over the breakfast table. The hospital said she had cancer of the stomach, the throat, the liver, the bladder and everything. Ken, upset, tried to drive his van through the line of Mr Rowse’s patients: he broke the ankle of an elderly man too feeble to jump out of the way. The police were called: arrest narrowly averted. Mr Rowse’s Sunday Angels, or someone, put a dog turd through Ken’s letter box. The council tried to take Mr Rowse to court for fraud and deception, and asked Rhoda to be the star witness for the prosecution but she refused, and had a startling remission, as Mr Rowse had promised her she would if she were only loyal. Mr Rowse left the area and set up elsewhere. He had millions in the bank, rumour went, and had never in all his life paid any tax at all. He went without even paying the cleaner.
Apricot waited until her exams were over and then went down to the Catholic church and hung about until she met Bernard coming out of confession.
‘What were you confessing?’ she asked, bold as brass, walking up to him in her everyday short skirt and torn black stockings, as if the terrible incident on the stairs had not happened at all.
‘Sins of the flesh,’ he said, ‘committed in the head with you.’ That quite compensated for the insult he had offered her on the stairs.
‘Please marry me,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun any more at home. If I don’t get out I might go under.’
He understood her predicament, of seemed to, and, much to Brenda, Belinda and Liese’s disgust, married Apricot in a registrar’s office, in a civil ceremony. She was seventeen. This would do, he told her, until such time as she became converted to Catholicism and they could marry properly. Or not, as the case might be. They set up house in No. 93, which was now to let. She would have to go out to work, it appeared, to see him through college. But at least it was no longer theological college. He could not marry and be a priest. He would be a social worker instead. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ said Ken, who had given his consent without argument. He had started a new career as a singer. ‘Let’s hope she won’t have to do a milk round.’
When Rhoda died, a month or so later, Ken married his ex-saxophonist’s widow, who understood the rigours and demands of the musician’s life, and who had a teenage daughter. It was the kind of household he understood. Nevertheless, he felt abandoned and betrayed by the women in his life.
Eleanor Darcy speaks to Hugo, and Valerie listens
A: WHY ARE YOU so buttoned up, Mr Vansitart? So singularly ungiddy? You have a love bite on your neck, yet you go on asking me for my views on the multicultural society, on secularism, on Darcian Monetarism. What you really want to know is what men always want to know about women, namely would she, if asked, and if not, why not. And