The Saint Zita Society Read Online Free PDF Page A

introduced him to Lucy Still at a party the Princess had given in this house a few months before.
    The Princess addressed him as ‘Mr Fortescue’ because she thought this was funny. Rad had told her not to but she took no notice. The conversation was always centred on gossip. Film and TV gossip, not Hexam Place scandal-mongering asthis might be rather close to the bone for Rad. June knew he came to number 6 as often as he did not because of his fondness for the Princess but so that when he was seen the neighbours would think his visits were to his great-aunt rather than to Montserrat.
    The Princess, as always, wanted him to tell her about the private lives of the cast of
Avalon Clinic
and he obliged with a diluted version. It seemed to satisfy her.
    ‘Can I offer you a brandy, Mr Fortescue?’
    ‘Why not?’ said Rad.
    None was offered to June but she helped herself just the same. She was tired and she still had to walk Gussie round the block. Rad wouldn’t leave for hours if she didn’t give him what she called a nudge, though it was rather more than that. ‘Time you went, Rad. HSH wants to go to bed.’
    Gussie was put on his lead and Rad, in June’s habitual phrase, was seen off the premises, out of the front door and down the steps. It was a fine night but growing cold. Rad picked up a taxi in Ebury Bridge Road and June and Gussie walked on round the block. It was very late but some lights were on in bedrooms, while Damian and Roland were still up in their living room, though the blinds were down. There was no one about, no one to see June let herself in by the front door, so she and Gussie entered the house by the more comfortably negotiated stairs to the basement.
    T hea lived in the top flat at number 8, Damian and Roland occupying the ground and first floors. Roland did some of the cleaning in a grudging way and Thea did what he didn’t do, but no one cleaned for Miss Grieves in the basement. She couldn’t afford it. Thea already shopped for her and sometimes took her the kind of food that was an improvementon Meals on Wheels but now she also pushed the vacuum cleaner around and dusted the ancient furniture. It was one of the many tasks she performed unasked because she felt she ought to. For the same reason she did what they called ‘little jobs’ for Damian and Roland, staying in to open the door when a plumber was coming or the postman with a parcel, phoning Westminster City Council whenever a complaint was to be made, putting out their recycling, changing light bulbs and mending fuses. She disliked doing these things but didn’t see how she could stop now. Nor was she proud of her goodness in helping her neighbours. If only doing these things made her happy, if she could acquire a consciousness of virtue, a sense of satisfaction in performing useful and
unpaid
services, but all it amounted to was a weary fed-upness and sometimes resentment. She just did it in a weary fed-up sort of way.
    Montserrat always seemed to have someone but, as for her, it was two or three years since she had had a boyfriend. The years were passing, as her married sister Chloe told her, or in Roland’s words, quoted from something or other, time’s winged chariot was hurrying near. She sometimes thought that if any man asked her out, so long as he wasn’t positively ugly or gross, she would say yes. He was becoming a dream lover, this faceless man, as she envisaged him arriving in a nice car to take her for a drive and then for lunch, and she saw herself waving to him from the window, saying goodbye for now to Damian and Roland, and running down the stairs to the front door.
    There was no one she knew, however vaguely, to fill this role. On her way to work in the Fulham Road she would look at the passengers on the bus or the men who passed her on foot and wonder. What did you have to do, how did you have to look, to gain the attention of this one orthat? She had known once and put her knowledge into practice. They had