Read No Man's Nightingale for Free Online

I’d never heard such rudeness. But there it is. She used to come out with things like that, she called them anec-somethings. Anecdents? Anecments? Never mind. I thought she was sending me up, that’s what it looked like. Not right, is it, in a person who’s supposed to be religious?’ Maxine was moving along the shelves, polishing the glass while she talked. ‘Not that there was much sign of religion in that house. Many a time I’ve seen her sit down to a meal with that Clarissa and no one never said grace. And language too. She lost her mobile one day, ran about the house saying “Where’s my bloody phone?” I was shocked, I can tell you, and the F-word once. I said to her to call the phone number and then she’d know where it was and she did and it was down under the cushions on the settee. Well, that’s where they always are, aren’t they? She didn’t know. “You’re an angel, Maxine,” she said, and I just wondered what my old dad would have thought to that. Taking the name of the Lord in vain, he’d have said.’
    The glass brightly polished, Maxine, carrying the glass spray and a clean duster, climbed with surprising agility onto a low shelf and then onto a higher one. Wexford resisted telling her to mind or to be careful as window cleaners know this already or else long ago decided they led charmed lives. ‘She christened my Jason’s Isabella. When he told me she was going to do it – well, it shocked me, it really did. I’d got to know her by then, though she was a decent enough woman in spite of the language, and she was kindness itself, always giving me little presents and once or twice she kissed me, but a woman christening a baby? Now I don’t go to church, never have, except for weddings and funerals and suchlike, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong. And I couldn’t get my head round a woman doing a christening. And I wasn’t alone, I can tell you. There was those in this place who couldn’t stomach her being coloured and there was those who took against her for being a woman. The anominal letters used to come, there was no end to them. I knew they was anonimal on account of her name printed on the envelope. Anyway, I read some of them.
    ‘You needn’t look like that. People who leave letters lying about are just asking you to read them is what I say. I can see you want to know what was in them. Well, it was mostly bad language, the F-word and the S-word and even the W-word, though that was a funny one to send to her. “Call yourself a woman of God?” was in a lot of them and “Go back to India”. One day she asked me if I’d ever been married. I thought that was a bit of a cheek considering she knew I’d got four kids. I said no, I hadn’t, and had she? I could tell she didn’t like it but if she could ask me why shouldn’t I ask her? “Yes, I was,” she says. “He died.” “When was that then?” I said, thinking that Clarissa was no more than seventeen, and d’you know what she said? “Long ago,” she said. “Long, long ago.” And I don’t know how to put it, but there was like
agony
in her face. Well, she went up to the study to write her sermon. And the opportunism like never arose again.
    ‘My Jason never liked his mum working in a place where they got anonible letters. He kept on at me about it. Ever since Isabella was born he’s got ever so responsible like he never was before, telling me what I ought to do and telling his sisters things, like not to go with boys before they was sixteen. That don’t go down a treat, I can tell you. The eldest one, that’s Kelli with an i, she went to church one Sunday – never been before or since, needless to say – on purpose to speak to the Reverend Hussain about her brother. Would you credit it? “You tell him he ought to get married to that Nicky,” she says, “and them with a baby. You’re the vicar,” she says, “and you want to teach them what’s right.”’
    Unable to resist, Wexford