Stone Cold Red Hot - страница 41

“Good trip?”

“Top. I’m knackered. And starving. I must eat – you want anything?”

“No, I’ve got to get going. See you soon.”

Frances Delaney had a baby draped over her shoulder when she answered the door. “Typical,” she said, “he always sleeps at this time, until I arrange something. Come in.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “mine was just the same.”

“How many have you got?”

“Oh, only the one of my own but we share a house so there’s a little boy as well.”

“I’ve four,” she said, “well, four at the moment.”

“You’re having another?”

She smiled. “I always wanted a big family, sometimes you get what you want.”

We sat in a large room, strewn with baby gear and children’s toys. There was a distinct smell to indicate she’d just changed a nappy. She wore a shapeless, navy jogging suit and moccasin slippers. Her dark wiry hair was pulled back in a yellow hair band. The baby wriggled on her shoulder, she rocked and patted its bottom. She looked ridiculously happy.

I asked her to tell me about the weeks before Jennifer left. I wouldn’t let on to Frances that Jennifer had never gone to Keele; it was my job to find things out not divulge them. Roger Pickering was paying my way and any information belonged to him first and foremost.

“I remember it well, actually, with it being so hot. It was incredible, everything drying up. We used to watch her father watering his plants, every night after work he’d be out there.”

Like my Dad with his vegetables.

“You watched him?” I was trying to picture where the girls had been.

“From my room, it overlooked the gardens. Jenny would come round a lot, our house was right at the back of theirs. We could see across to each others bedrooms.” The baby grizzled and made climbing motions, the stretch fabric of the baby-gro outlining his small limbs and feet. Frances shifted him onto her lap, laid him across her knees on his stomach and stroked his back. His head bobbed like those nodding dogs people used to have in the back window of their cars.

“Jenny would come over through the back, climb over the wall and come in our back door. We even had a code,” she laughed, “if I was going out I’d close my curtains so she’d know not to call.”

“She always came to yours?”

“Yes, her family were pretty old fashioned, it was easier at mine,” she shrugged. “That summer Jenny was working up at The Bounty and I was just messing about. I’d got a place at Manchester University. Jenny and Lisa went off to Knebworth, I don’t know why I didn’t go, short of cash I suppose. I went up to the Lakes with my family for a week. When I got back Jenny came over. She told me about the baby.” She looked at me to check my reaction, had I known? I nodded, it wasn’t news to me.

“Did she say whether she was going to keep it?”

She shook her head, her expression clouded. “We didn’t talk about it much. I was pretty anti-abortion then, Jenny knew that. We had a lot of visits from LIFE at my school, gory slide shows.” She sighed. “So, I told her places she could go, have the baby adopted, but she was very mixed up. After that we skirted round it, really. I was pretty blinkered back then. You know how teenagers can be, everything’s black and white, we all think we know it all. I think I’ve mellowed since then, I hope so. When I got to university I got involved in the Catholic Feminist Society.”

Something of a contradiction in terms I thought to myself.

“It was all very radical, certainly opened my eyes. We wanted to reform the position of women in the Church and challenge a lot of the dogma. I suppose my position changed but I never saw Jenny again.”

“Can you remember the last time you saw her?”

The baby wailed, a loud, harsh cry as though the world had suddenly ended. “Shush, shush, come here,” she turned him over, cradled his head and body in one arm while she lifted the corner of her top with the other and slipped him onto her breast. “You’d think he hadn’t had a feed for hours,” she commented. The baby was quiet immediately.

I had a flash memory of the sensation of breast-feeding, breasts tender and heavy with milk, the initial buzz almost painful as Maddie latched on, the relief as she sucked, the other nipple leaking in sympathy. I’d had my share of problems, two bouts of mastitis when it felt as though someone had poured hot concrete laced with acid into my breast but apart from that I’d loved it.