Free Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge Page B

a side street behaving very oddly.’
    ‘Take your coat off,’ snapped Binny. ‘This minute. And be quiet.’
    ‘You could have got run over, darling. Waving your arms about like that.’ Alma clung to Muriel’s elbow to steady herself. ‘She keeps thinking she’s on television, you know.’
    ‘I don’t do any such thing.’
    A plaintive, almost childlike expression came over Alma’s face. She allowed her lip to tremble. She whispered loudly to Muriel. ‘She’s cross with me. You’re not cross, are you? I’m only showing concern.’
    ‘I’ve no reason to be cross,’ said Muriel, feeling inadequate.
    Alma tottered on her feet and squinted reproachfully at Binny ‘Why didn’t you say your sister was coming? You’re so secretive, darling.’ She and Muriel, joined together at the elbow, took a few little lurching steps across the room.
    ‘You know perfectly well it isn’t my sister,’ said Binny. She stood behind Alma and, jerking the coat from her shoulders, laid it over a chair. Alma was wearing a little red dress with an inch of torn petticoat showing. She spun round with a cry of distress, wounded by the exasperation in her friend’s voice and alarmed at the savagery with which her outer garment had been removed.
    Muriel put her arms about Alma. Murmuring sympathetically, she began to pat her back. Simpson was astonished. Once at Christmas, his eldest sister Jessie had grown tiddly on vodka and lime. Apart from a fiery complexion and a tendency later to be argumentative at bridge, her inebriation was hardly noticeable. But Muriel had remarked upon the incident for months afterwards, saying how ugly it had been, how positively disgusting; one would have thought poor old Jess had run amok with a samurai sword and spewed up all over the carpet.
    For a moment the two women remained in an embrace. When they drew apart there was a slightly malicious smile on Alma’s face. She said sorrowfully to Binny, ‘I’ve gone through fire and water getting here. I thought you needed me.’ She collapsed into a chair and laid her cheek against the tablecloth; her hair, darkened by the rain, trailed in the debris of the meal.
    ‘Perhaps a pot of strong coffee would be in order,’ said Simpson. For some reason he was irritated beyond endurance at the sight of his wife seated beside that boozy female, stroking her bowed head with a tender smile on her lips. And where the devil, he wondered, had Freeman disappeared to?
    ‘I haven’t got a sister,’ Binny told him, going through into the back room to fill the kettle at the sink. ‘I’m an only child. She knows that perfectly well.’
    ‘An only child,’ repeated Simpson sentimentally, limping from cupboard to draining board in search of cups. ‘How lonely that sounds.’
    Alma began to complain about the difficulties she’d encountered coming to Fulton Street. ‘Those pigs,’ she said loudly. ‘Strutting about in their uniforms making their dirty insinuations. If I had my way I’d put them against the wall and shoot the lot of them. I’d shoot the bastards.’ She raised her head and banged her fist angrily on the table.
    ‘Stop it,’ cried Binny, running from the stove and removing the vase of carnations out of her reach. ‘You’re knocking food all over the carpet.’
    ‘What pigs?’ asked Simpson. ‘Who does she mean?’
    ‘She doesn’t like policemen,’ said Binny. ‘Her sympathies have always been with the criminal classes.’
    ‘Asking me my business,’ Alma said indignantly. ‘Demanding to know where I’d been, where I was going. Wanting to take down my address. Crawling along the kerb beside me in their nasty little car, trying to intimidate me.’
    ‘They’re only doing their job,’ protested Binny. ‘They probably thought you were a battered wife.’
    ‘Oh darling,’ cried Alma, eyelash askew and cheek dimpled with the imprint of bread crumbs. ‘How little you know. They’re not out to help me. They’re far more corrupt