Chapter 3 Miss Ogilvie #3
There was a small French restaurant on the ground floor of the building, where Flynn sometimes ate (usually an omelette—reliable and cheap) and often drank (fresh coffee or stale red wine).
A tailor—Mr. Rakowski, a shy little man—occupied the first floor, while Leonora Kane lived on the fourth, above Flynn.
A prostitute, far from the first flush of youth, Leonora was stout of body and firm of mind and had a revolving cast of loyal customers, all gentlemen of a certain age who, according to Leonora anyway, came for tea and sympathy rather than any “how’s your father.
” (“I mother them, Mr. Flynn. That’s why they come to me.
”) They were not good for much else, she said, once they had climbed the four flights of stairs to her accommodating little eyrie.
Mr. Rakowski was extremely fond of Leonora Kane, to the point of volunteering to make “an honest woman” of her.
She declined the offer. “I’m an honest woman already, duckie,” she said to Flynn.
Everyone was “duckie” to Leonora. It meant she didn’t have to remember the names of her many gentlemen.
Flynn had once dated an actress who addressed everyone as “darling” on the same principle.
On the landing beneath Flynn lived a pair of elderly spinster sisters—Hilda and Gertie Murgatroyd.
Flynn had expected the pair to be as quiet as church mice, but they were permanently crotchety with one another, arguing on and off, day and night—a simmering rumble of dissatisfaction that Flynn found perversely comforting.
Better to complain than to be dead, he thought.
They spent their time knitting and embroidering, producing goods to sell in a shop run by a Distressed Gentlewomen’s Society somewhere in Kensington.
They seemed to have no one but each other, although there was a much-vaunted niece who was always about to visit but then had to cancel at the last moment.
Flynn sometimes carried groceries up the stairs for them, and checked the gas meter when it was giving them problems—the problem usually being that there was no money in it, and he would sneak a handful of threepences into the slot.
As he passed the door to their flat, Hilda opened it, empty milk bottle in hand.
“Oh, Mr. Flynn,” she said. “I was just putting the bottle out for the milkman tomorrow morning. Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea?
The milk is finished though, I’m afraid.
We shall have to do without our bedtime Horlicks.
” Flynn suspected that he was being invited in because the meter needed feeding, but then castigated himself for his lack of charity.
Nonetheless he said, “No tea, thank you, Hilda. I’ve got things to get on with. ”
He was not in the mood for conversation.
He had been growing increasingly edgy ever since his exchange with that man Dangerfield.
(Did you serve?) Solitude, experience had taught him, was the best way to numb these feelings.
That and the panacea of whisky. He poured himself a large tumbler, but before he could down it his conscience pricked him, and he ran downstairs and bought the last bottle of milk in the shop on the corner.
He placed it outside Hilda and Gertie’s door and, as they were both very hard of hearing, knocked as if trying to wake the dead.
He scooted back up to his flat before either of them could answer.
They would have their Horlicks, after all.
The waiting glass of whisky was all the gratitude Flynn needed.
After the second large tumbler he fell into bed and the welcome anaesthesia of sleep.
—
He woke up screaming his head off. The dark had been suffocating him, like thick wool in his throat and lungs. He fumbled for the bedside light and lay for a long time trying to calm his racing heart.
After he returned from the East he had been plagued by nightmares every night.
The first time he woke howling like a dog during his brief sojourn in Wealdstone, Ivy Shears had immediately turfed him out of their narrow double bed and dispatched him to sleep on the rough moquette of the even narrower sofa, where he was joined in exile by Mrs. Betty.
The dog had been more sympathetic to his sufferings than his new bride.
Ivy had firmly closed the door on the past and refused to sully her everyday life with the distasteful details of Flynn’s war. Not that he had any wish to share them.
The luminous dial on the clock by the bed in Romilly Street told him it was three o’clock, but there didn’t seem much point in trying to go back to sleep.
He would be awake now until the morning.
He poured another whisky. Hair of the dog, although that particular dog was no longer the loyal soldier it had once been.
Against his expectations, he did eventually return to a—thankfully—dreamless sleep.
He woke to his alarm clock and a bad head and a sour stomach, both accompanied by a vague feeling of dread.
If he had been inclined to fantasy, he would have said that something dark was on the prowl and he was to be its quarry.