Fallen Angel

‘There’s a good girl. Stand up now and Angel will dry you.’ With Angel’s help, Lucy struggled to her feet. Water and foam dripped down her body. Eddie stared at the pink, glistening skin and the cleft between her legs.

‘Uncle Eddie will pass the towel.’

He hurried to obey. There had been an unmistakable note of irritation in Angel’s voice, perhaps brought on by tiredness. He noticed dark smudges under her eyes. He knew she had gone out the previous evening and had not returned until well after midnight. Eddie had tried the door to the basement while she was out, only to find that it was locked.

Angel wrapped the large pink towel, warm from the radiator, around Lucy’s body, lifted her out of the bath and sat her on her knee. Eddie thought they made a beautiful picture, a Pre-Raphaelite Virgin and child: Angel in her long white robe, her shining hair flowing free; and Lucy small, thin and sexless, swaddled in the towel, sitting on Angel’s lap and enclosed by her arms. He turned away. His head hurt this morning, and his throat was dry.

The clothes they had bought for Lucy were waiting on the chair. Among them was a dark-green dress from Laura Ashley, with a white lace collar, a smocked front and ties at each side designed to form a bow at the back. Angel liked her girls to look properly feminine. Boys were boys, she once told Eddie, girls were girls, and it was both stupid and unnatural to pretend otherwise.

‘Perhaps Lucy would like to play a game with me when she’s dressed,’ Eddie suggested.

The girl glanced at him, and a frown wrinkled her forehead.

‘She might like to see the you-know-what.’

‘The what?’ Angel said.

Eddie shielded his mouth with his hand, leaned towards her and whispered, ‘The conjuring set.’

He had bought it yesterday morning and he was longing to see Lucy’s reaction: all children liked presents, and often they showed their gratitude in delightful ways.

Angel rubbed Lucy’s hair gently. ‘Another day, I think. Lucy’s tired. Aren’t you, my pet?’

Lucy looked up at her, blinking rapidly as her eyes slid in and out of focus. ‘I want to go home. I want Mummy. I –’

‘Mummy and Daddy had to go away. Not for long. I told you, they asked me to look after you.’

The frown deepened. For Lucy, Eddie guessed, Angel’s certainty was the only fixed point among the confusion and the anxiety.

‘Now, now, poppet. Let’s see a nice big smile. We don’t like children who live on Sulky Street, do we?’

‘Perhaps if we played a game, it would take Lucy’s mind off things.’ Eddie removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the corner of a towel. ‘It would be a distraction.’

‘No.’ Angel picked up the little vest. ‘Lucy’s not well enough for that at present. When we’ve finished in here, I’m going to make her a nice drink and sit her on my knee and read a nice book to her.’

To his horror, Eddie felt tears filling his eyes. It was so unfair. ‘But with the others, we always –’

Angel coughed, stopping him in mid-sentence. It was one of her rules that they should never let a girl know that there had been others. But when Eddie looked at her he was surprised to see that she was smiling.

‘Lucy isn’t like the others,’ she said, her eyes meeting Eddie’s. ‘We understand each other, she and I.’ Her lips brushed the top of Lucy’s head. ‘Don’t we, my poppet?’

What about me?

Eddie held his tongue. A moment later, Angel asked him to go down and warm some milk and turn up the heating. He went downstairs, the jealousy churning angrily and impotently inside him as pointlessly as an engine in neutral revving into the red. The two of them made such a beautiful picture, he accepted that, the Virgin and child, beautiful and hurtful.

He altered the thermostat for the central heating and put the milk on the stove. His headache was worsening. He stared into the pan, at the shifting disc of white, and felt his eyes slipping out of focus.

Virgin and child: two was company in the Holy Family. Poor old Joseph, permanently on the sidelines, denied even the privilege of making the customary biological contribution to family life. The mother and child made a whole, self-contained and exclusive, Mary and the infant Jesus, the Madonna and newborn king, the Handmaiden of the Lord with the Christ Child.

Where did that leave number three? Somewhere in the crowd scene at the stable. Or leading the donkey. Negotiating with the innkeeper. No doubt paying the bills. Acting as a combination of courier and transport manager and meal ticket. No one ever said what happened to old Joseph. No one cared. Why should they? He didn’t count.

What about me?

It seemed to Eddie that almost all his life he had been condemned to third place. Look at his parents, for example. They might not have liked each other, but their needs interlocked and they excluded Eddie. Even when his father allowed Eddie to join in the photographs, Stanley’s interest was always focused on the little girl, and the little girl always paid more attention to Stanley than to Eddie; they treated him as part of the furniture, no more important than the smelly old armchair.

When Stanley died, the pattern continued. His mother hadn’t wasted much time before deciding to find a lodger. But why? There had been enough money for them to continue living at Rosington Road by themselves. They could have managed on Thelma’s widow’s pension from the Paladin, her state pension, and what Eddie received from the DSS. They would have had to live frugally, but it would have been perfectly possible with just the two of them. But no. His mother had wanted someone else, not him. She found Angel and there was the irony: because Angel preferred Eddie, at least for a time.

Only Alison and Angel had ever taken him seriously. But Alison had gone away and now Angel no longer needed him because she had Lucy instead. But what made Lucy so special?

Eddie’s eyes widened. The milk was swelling. Its surface was pocked and pimpled like a lunar landscape. A white balloon pushed itself over the rim of the saucepan. The boiling milk spat and bubbled. He lunged at the handle of the saucepan and a smell of burning filled the air.

I blame you.

Mummy, Mum, Ma, Mother, Thelma. Eddie could not remember calling his mother by name, not to her face.

Angel had taken charge when Thelma died. Eddie had to admit that she had worked miracles. When he finally managed to drag himself downstairs on the morning of his mother’s death, he had sat down at the kitchen table, in the heart of Thelma’s domain, and laid his head on his arms. Still in the grip of an immense hangover, he hadn’t wanted to think because thinking hurt too much.

He had heard Angel coming downstairs and into the room; he had smelled her perfume and heard water gushing from the tap.

‘Eddie. Sit up, please.’

Wearily he obeyed.

She placed a glass of water in front of him. ‘Lots of fluids.’ She handed him a sachet of Alka-Seltzers which she had already opened to save him the trouble. ‘Don’t worry if you’re sick. It usually helps to vomit.’

He dropped the tablets one by one into the water and watched the bubbles rising. ‘What happened to her?’

‘I suspect it was a heart attack. Just as she expected.’

‘What?’

‘You knew she had a heart condition, didn’t you?’

A new pain penetrated Eddie’s headache. ‘She never told me.’

‘Probably she didn’t want to worry you. Either that or she thought you’d guessed.’

‘But how could I?’ Eddie wailed.

‘Why do you think she gave up smoking? Doctor’s orders, of course. And those tablets she took, not to mention her spray … Didn’t you ever notice how breathless she got?’

‘But she’s been like that for years. Not so bad, perhaps, but –’

‘And the colour she went sometimes? As soon as I saw that I knew there was a heart problem. Now drink up.’

He drank the mixture. At one point he thought he might have to make a run for the sink, but the moment passed.

‘It’s a pity she didn’t change her diet and take more exercise,’ Angel went on. ‘But there. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, can you?’