Eliza
I was walking from the Tube up the hill towards my pretty house, in the pretty square in this the prettiest, leafiest part of London. It was a quarter to six but there was still some heat in the sun and I took off my brown velvet jacket and stuffed it inside my bag. Feeling the warm breeze through the thin wool of my dress made me think of that first day each spring when, as a child, I had been allowed at last to swap the itchy woollen tights for knee-length socks and my bare legs had emerged into the sunshine like Cabbage Whites from their pupas.
As I neared the square the streets grew narrow and there were few cars and it was easy to imagine yourself in a country village. I skirted the churchyard, which was comfortingly obsolete. No fresh corpse had been lowered into its hallowed ground for over a century and the years since had served to soften the grief like the moss softened the gravestones, so you had to be right up close to think of loss rather than beauty. The sudden warmth after a cold early spring had prompted shrubs and flowering trees all to come out at once and the birds were singing.
Multi-tasking, I thought, was the thing. Or was it compartmentalising? One was meant to be female and the other male. Either way, all I needed to do to enjoy my new life was to keep my mind firmly fixed on the present and the future. No looking right or left. No looking back. It was perfectly easy. A bit like walking a tightrope suspended across the jaws of hell. Of course there were many different versions of what hell might be like. Hot, seemed to be a generally held opinion. Uncomfortable, dark, hopeless. A place of endless torment, a place of nothingness. Different fears, different imaginings. To me it was a place of eternal What Ifs? What if it had been Virgil we had studied that term, not Ovid? What if the rain had continued instead of giving up around seven in favour of a huge moon? What if I had checked behind me? What if I had kept my nerve?
I thought of Pollyanna. She and I had had an uneasy relationship over the years. She ignored me. In fact you could say that she was entirely unaware of my existence, whereas I, on the other hand, alternated between ardent admiration and sullen contempt. At times I had tried to emulate her and played the ‘Glad Game’. It almost always ended with me coming back with, ‘I’m glad that I only abandoned one best friend to her death,’ and of course that got repetitive after a while. I realised that like all true optimists Pollyanna was obviously unhinged. Of course she did have the excuse of living at a time when there was a dearth of news from outside the immediate community, which in turn meant that if it were a good year in Little Old Rock Bottom one could be led to believe it had been a good year all round and that there was nothing in this life that could not be cured by a positive attitude. And yet, and yet I wanted to believe she was right to be the way she was just in the same way as I wanted to believe that Uncle Ian really had received a visit from Rose telling him she forgave me everything and loved me still.
I had resolved to give as much of my salary as I could manage to Rose’s Foundation. Of course the upkeep of my house would be considerable but if I were careful I should be able to set money aside each month. Rose herself had shown no great tendencies towards philanthropy, protesting more loudly than most when, in Sunday morning chapel, we were ‘encouraged’ to give a third of our pocket money to the needy in our community. ‘Who are they, these Needy? Where are they? Not in town, that’s for sure. The shopping centre’s packed every time I go.’ Yet who was to say that, had she been allowed to live, she might not have grown and matured into a dedicated helper of the poor. It had happened to her father. Uncle Ian had played his own version of the Glad Game when it came to philanthropy, telling me that he was glad he had never thought of making the kind of will which left all his money to charity should his heir, that was Rose, pre-decease him. When I had asked him why that was, he’d said it was because in his darkest moments he might have suspected God of letting his daughter die for the common good. I had told him I’d rather not believe than believe in a God who would think up something like that. His reasonable reply had been that he didn’t think there was a choice.
I was on my doorstep when my phone rang. It was my mother. I was glad she called. The other day, over Skype, Uncle Ian had asked, out of the blue, ‘And how is that nice ex-husband of yours?’ This bore the nose-print of my mother, and I had wanted to ask her to please not put ideas into an old man’s head.
‘You’re on your mobile?’ my mother said. ‘You shouldn’t use those things.’
‘You called me up to say that?’
‘No, of course not. I just wanted to say hello and see how you were doing.’
‘So you called on my mobile?’
‘You never answer the other one.’
I decided not to argue the point. Instead I just said, ‘Well, we don’t need to talk long. It’s very early for you to be phoning. Is everything OK?’
‘You’re always in a such a hurry. We haven’t talked for days. Did I tell you about Joan? I did, didn’t I? How are you? How is the house? Are you using earphones? You should at least be using earphones.’ There were so many thoughts, most of them anxious, coursing through my mother’s mind that, like a cat chasing its tail, she was forever going round in circles.
‘What does Gabriel think about it? He must be pleased for you. I know he worried. He didn’t understand why you wouldn’t take what was after all your fair share . . .’
Of course I was grateful to have a mother, almost any mother tended to be better than no mother and my mother was better than most. I just wish she wouldn’t insist on seeing the sun shining from my behind even when I was sitting on it. It made for unrealistic expectations. Any question posed by her, however harmless, made me determined to give nothing away other than name, rank and number. The answers to her questions now were, ‘I am fine. The house is wonderful and Gabriel thinks so too.’
See, that wasn’t so hard. But it was. Give away that much and what next? Would the massed armies of motherly love batter down the walls around my heart? Then there would be no telling where it would end.
‘Did you say you were using your earphones?’
‘No. What did you say to Uncle Ian about Gabriel and me?’
‘About you and Gabriel? I don’t think I’ve said anything at all other than that I always liked him and that I never did understand why you parted. Why do you ask?’
I sighed. ‘You’ve encouraged him, Uncle Ian I mean, that’s the problem. He’s running out of work on my home and I’m worried he’s planning on moving on to my heart. It’s bad enough that he wants me to be happy without him asking me to be in love too.’
My mother’s reply was drowned out by a man’s voice bellowing, ‘Fine. Good idea. Let me help you pack.’
I had met Archie Fuller at Number 4 and Jenny Howell at Number 5 and I had waved at a distance to a couple of other residents of the square, but apart from being nearly mown down by their large environmentally unfriendly car I was yet to be formally introduced to the family at Number 12. I had seen a dark-haired man with a face that, at least early in the morning, looked as if someone had slept in it, come out of the gate and get into the large black car, and once or twice I had spotted a blonde woman pottering in the small front garden or leaving with a tan briefcase that I had rather admired. There was a little girl too, but I had only seen her through the windows.
It was a woman’s voice next and it was shrill with fury. ‘You bastard! You complete and utter pig!’
The window slammed shut. A bird trilled. The soft breeze gave the cherry petals a ride across the cobbles.
‘Are you there?’ my mother asked. ‘You really shouldn’t be talking on your mobile.’
I turned the key in the lock and for a moment I remained on the doorstep. Like a vampire who had received a standing invitation, I still could not quite believe I had the right to come and go as I pleased. The builders had left for the day. Apart from a slight clanging coming from the radiator on the landing and some creaking in the wooden panels, residual noises like the gurgling of a stomach after an upsetting meal, the little house was quiet. Quiet and all mine. As I kicked off my shoes I admired the way the evening sun shone through the leaves of the evergreen clematis, reflecting on to the paler green of the walls, turning the hallway into a glen.
It had seemed an unnecessary expense to rent somewhere while the work on the house was being carried out so once the basics had been done I had camped in a small room at the top of the house. Builders like to start from the top and work down but I had persuaded them to leave that room be once the rewiring had been carried out. I liked it up there, apart but not isolated from the rest of the house. As I walked up there now I wondered who had lived in my room. The wallpaper was in bad shape and some of it was peeling but what was there was beautiful. Branches of flowering pink cherry trees reached skywards against a pale yellow background. Bronze-coloured birdcages hung from the branches but the birds themselves, pearlescent moon-white, were outside of the cages, flying free. My room had been shut up all day and the air inside felt depleted as if there weren’t quite enough for a decent intake of breath. A bluebottle was panicking, buzzing hither and thither, bashing its unlovely body against the windowpanes. I walked across the worn floorboards and tugged open the sash window.
‘And please arrange for your furniture to be removed at your earliest convenience; I never could abide white leather sofas.’ It was that same loud voice that I had heard some minutes earlier, and, curious, I leant out of the window.
He was standing in the doorway of Number 12. From here it looked as if he were grinning in an exaggerated way. The pretty blonde who I had seen in the garden was marching down the short front path, pulling a suitcase. As she reached the gate she paused, as if she might be waiting for him to come after her, and when he spoke again she turned round eagerly.
‘Are you sure you won’t let me call you a cab?’ he asked.
‘Fuck you,’ she yelled. ‘Fuck you to hell and back.’
I could hear in her voice that she was crying. The man with the slept-in face looked as if he were about to go after her but then he seemed to think the better of it and went inside instead, slamming the door behind him.
I sat down at the small desk and switched on my laptop, dialling up Uncle Ian. Since the purchase of the house we had learnt together about the three subsections of the Georgian style: Palladian, Neoclassical and Regency, establishing that our little house came under the impossibly grand Palladian. We had learnt that the true determination of the style, whatever the size, was not pediments or pilasters or columns but the principle of proportion; the proportion of room length to height, of wall space to window space and of each individual façade. After that we had mugged up on Plato, having discovered in the course of our reading that his teachings lay at the root of much of the thinking behind the principles of the Georgian style. Recently our discussions had moved from the general to the particular. I had found some old slabs of marble of the kind you used to find in butcher’s shops and around washstands in an architectural salvage yard and thought they would do very well for the kitchen, but Uncle Ian had cautioned me against using marble as it was porous and would stain too easily. Stainless steel was much better, he said. I told him I thought stainless steel would look brutal. In the end we had made a deal. I could use the marble slabs in the kitchen as long as there was a good area around the sink in stainless steel.
Katarina had assured me that no detail was too tiny, too humdrum for Uncle Ian. She told me that since the whole project had started – the project being me, apparently, rather than just the house – he had regained some of his old vitality. He felt ‘affirmed’, she said. I thought I knew what she meant by that. It was something to do with calling out into the wilderness, ‘Can anybody hear me?’ And having someone answer, ‘Yes, yes, I hear you.’ I had thought it strange that a man like uncle Ian could feel the need to call out in the first place but then I had realised that it had to do with age. If the past was another country then old age was another world, one to which few of us wanted to go even for a visit. When we were young and needed we resented the claims on our time and energy, yet as we grew old and people were looking past us as if we had already moved into the shadows, all we really yearned for was to be needed. So mindful of this I had taken to starting most of our conversations with the words, ‘I need your advice . . .’ But now the house was almost finished and I was searching my brain for something new to tell him, to ask him about, something relevant to the project but which preferably did not involve soft furnishings.
I dialled him up and Pow! I shied back as his face burst into close-up. I never got used to the way that happened. I imagined sometimes that he sat waiting, stiff and straight-backed in front of his laptop, that gaped open like a giant baby bird, always ready, always waiting for the next morsel.
‘Good evening, Eliza.’ His voice, as always when we spoke this way, was stately, as if he were appearing on television. ‘Are the kitchen units in? And the stainless steel looks good, yes?’
‘Really good.’
‘I thought it would. Not too, how did you put it, brutal?’
‘No. Quite pretty in fact. Maybe because it’s brushed steel and that . . .’ my words were interrupted by loud banging followed by a woman’s voice. ‘And this time it’s it, do you hear? I’m not coming back.’
‘What’s that?’ Uncle Ian asked me.
‘Oh, just some neighbours calling to each other. As I said . . .’
‘Come outside when I’m talking to you. I said, this time I’m not coming back. Never.’
The next morning was Saturday and I had only just shut the front door behind me on my way to get the newspapers when I heard my name called. It was Archie Fuller from Number 4. Archie had knocked on my door the day after I had moved in. It had been a quiet knock at first – the kind that made you wonder if you had just imagined it – escalating to the kind of loud banging normally associated with a fire. When I had opened the door, out of breath, having run from the top of the house, he had smiled blithely, and explained that he didn’t like using the bell, ‘in case it disturbed people’.
I had quickly realised that most people in the square avoided Archie Fuller. I guessed because he was old and lonely and never stopped talking and had unidentified stains down the front of his tweed sports jacket and insisted on planting busy lizzies in tubs made out of old beer-barrels outside his front door. At the same time, and as Jenny from Number 5 said, everyone agreed that he was ‘real’, ‘a character’ and ‘old school north London’ and there should be more like him to counteract the influx of ‘bankers and non-doms and property developers’. I thought they should take better care of Archie or else they might have to start hiring in picturesque ‘real’ people.
‘Off to get the papers?’ Archie said. ‘I wouldn’t bother if I were you.’
I plastered on a smile and said, ‘I’m sure you’re right but I still like to see what’s going on in the world.’
‘Did you hear all that kerfuffle yesterday?’ Archie’s mouth was turned down at the corners in a show of disapproval but his small deep-set eyes shone as he nodded in the direction of Number 12.
‘I did hear something, yes.’
‘I would ask you in for a cup of tea but my kettle’s given up the ghost and I haven’t had the opportunity to replace it.’
‘Oh. Well, why don’t we have tea here.’ I stifled a sigh and unlocked the door again. ‘Come in.’
Archie bustled past me into the hall. ‘Well, if you’re sure?’ He looked around him. ‘My goodness, the place is a mess, isn’t it?’
‘Better than it was.’
One of the builders had put back an empty carton in the fridge, fooling me into thinking I didn’t need to buy milk. I apologised to Archie, saying we’d have to drink our tea black, but he waved away my concern with an air of someone who had more pressing things on his mind than milk. ‘I must say I wasn’t expecting such goings on from the household of a hospital consultant.’
‘I didn’t know he was a doctor. What’s his name again? Maybe my ex-husband knows him?’
‘Dr Bauer. Jacob Bauer. Well he’s Mr really I suppose, being a surgeon. Anyway, you might expect that type of behaviour over at the estate.’ He lowered his voice when he spoke the world ‘estate’ as if uttering a swear word. ‘But not here. Not in the square.’
Remembering the night I tipped the contents of Gabriel’s underwear drawer out on to the street I felt unable to say anything much on the subject other than to ask if Mr Bauer made a habit of that kind of thing.
‘I can’t say that he does,’ Archie admitted with evident regret. ‘But I can’t say that he is very neighbourly either. He’s been here the best part of three years and he hasn’t turned up to a single residents’ association meeting. She came along once but he, never. As for that car he drives . . .’
‘Big,’ I said.
‘A gas-guzzler.’
‘Oh well,’ I said.
‘And I must say I was surprised to hear such language from her. She’s always been very friendly to me but I suppose working in television you get inured to that kind of thing.’
I felt the morning slipping away from me and I thought of all the things I would like to be doing, none of which included sitting on a paint-speckled stool in my half-finished kitchen gossiping about people I’d never even met. Then again, Archie Fuller was obviously lonely. I was lonely too sometimes but it was easier to remedy that condition when you were young and didn’t smell of mothballs.
‘Of course I was just a baby when the war ended,’ he said and I realised that I had missed a part of the conversation. ‘Not many people know this but the bombing of Coventry was the inspiration for a very famous piece of music by Pink Floyd.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, indeed. Which one was it now?’ He began humming something that sounded nothing like Pink Floyd. After a while he gave up. ‘Speaking of the entertainment business,’ he said instead, ‘That actress’s died. Cass Cassidy.’
I looked blank.
‘You know the one? She played Beth Howard in Our Street.’
‘I never watched it,’ I said. ‘Still, that’s sad. Poor old thing.’
‘Oh no, not old at all, no, no. Cass was your age, I’d say, or thereabouts. Which reminds me, they said on the news last night that house prices are down again.’ He studied me, his head tilted to one side.
‘Oh dear,’ I said. I knew I should offer him more tea but I was beginning to worry that the newspapers might all be gone by the time I got to the shop. Archie drained his mug then looked expectantly at the pot. ‘Lovely tea.’
‘I’m sorry about the milk.’
‘Didn’t miss it at all.’
‘Would you like another cup, Archie?’
He glanced at his watch. ‘No, no, I must let you get on.’
I was halfway out of my chair when he picked his mug up.
‘Well, if you’re sure.’ He helped himself to a teaspoon of sugar then sat back, mug in hand. ‘So where were we?’
I smiled brightly. ‘Papers.’ I realised I was sitting so far forward on my chair I might slide off so I pushed back on the seat, leaning back and crossing my legs in an attempt to look relaxed.
‘Ah yes, the papers. Nothing in them. Apart from the sad news of Cass Cassidy’s untimely passing away, of course. You can have a little read of my paper. Save you the bother of buying your own. I’ll bring it over later.’ He turned his head on its thin neck hither and thither like a telescope.
‘And they’re not cheap these days, the papers, are they. Yes, you must be feeling pretty dark about buying that house when you did. We none of us could believe you paid the asking price. I suppose you didn’t realise the relatives were desperate to sell?’
‘No, no, I didn’t know that. Still, if they were desperate I’m glad they achieved a good price.’
This caught Archie on the back foot but he recovered fast and countered with, ‘Julie, my daughter, and her husband, you haven’t met them, have you? No, I didn’t think you had. Well, Julie and Malcolm, Malcolm being her husband, you understand, sold their old property last autumn. They’re renting for now, biding their time, waiting to snap up a bargain. There’re repossession sales most weeks around where they live. She’s very clever like that, Julie. She had a good old chuckle when I told her about you.’
‘I bet she did.’
‘Oh yes.’ He laughed heartily himself.
‘Well, bully for Julie, I say. But I’m still glad I didn’t have to take advantage of someone in desperate circumstances.’
Archie frowned. ‘Not everyone can afford to have scruples like that. Not if they want a fourth bedroom and a utility, that is.’
Now I felt bad. ‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t meant as a criticism of . . . well, of anyone wanting a fourth bedroom and a utility. And you’re quite right. It’s easy to have scruples when you can afford to.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ He turned towards the window. ‘You wouldn’t believe it was April, would you? I knew yesterday was too good to last.’
I looked out at the darkening sky. ‘Oh, I don’t know; it’s quite mild. And at least it’s not raining. I don’t mind as long as it’s not raining.’
Archie gave me a reproachful look. ‘You’re always very cheerful, aren’t you? Very positive.’
‘Do you think? Perhaps I am.’ Unaccustomed as I was to accusations of excess cheerfulness I began to warm to the whole concept. ‘I think it’s a duty to anyone in this harsh and unforgiving world who is in reasonable health and not suffering from a recent loss or severe financial difficulties to try to be reasonably cheerful,’ I said. It sounded good and I wished Uncle Ian had heard me.
But Archie was not that easily discouraged, and rising to the challenge he informed me that ‘Malc’s got a dreadful cough. Had it for months.’
‘Has he seen a doctor?’
‘He has.’ He shook his head.
‘Oh dear. Bad news?’
‘No. Fellow insisted it was just a cough. But what do they know?’
‘Quite a lot, actually.’
‘Of course, you were married to one, you just said. Raking it in, these GPs.’
‘Not all of them. Anyway, Gabriel isn’t a GP.’
Archie winked. ‘Earns enough to buy you a nice house, though.’
I was about to take exception to his blithe assumption that I had had to have some man buy me my home when I remembered that in fact I had. Archie had simply picked the wrong man.
So I simply told him, ‘Actually, no. My ex-husband had nothing to do with it.’
It was obviously none of Archie Fuller’s business how I had got the money to buy the house so I don’t know why I went on but I did. Maybe it was those blinking bullfrog eyes eternally on the lookout for some new and juicy information. Maybe he lived on gossip, quite literally. I mean, had I ever seen him eat? No. Instead he was always around, by his window or on his doorstep or out and about on the streets, whether it were breakfast, lunch or suppertime. So I told him, ‘The house is actually a gift from my godfather.’ Archie’s cheeks puffed up and I only narrowly resisted the temptation to add, ‘My godfather from the Ukraine,’ just to make the information a bit more gossip-worthy.
‘A gift? He gave you a house? Generous, is he?’
‘Very. He’s not very well so he doesn’t spend much on himself.’
Archie sucked his teeth. ‘Cancer, is it? On the increase, you know. Of course they’re trying to tell us that it’s not an actual increase as such but more that we don’t die of the things we used to die of, but that’s just what they’d like us to think. No, it’s the toxins, the toxins and the rays.’
He sounded perfectly happy about this, quite comfortable, as if the Toxins and the Rays were personal friends of his.
‘Not that old is he then, your godfather?’ he went on.
‘In his eighties.’ I looked at my watch and this time I made it obvious that I was. ‘Oh well,’ I said.
‘Ah right.’ Archie stood up. ‘I’d better be off. Got a busy day.’
‘I’ll come out with you,’ I said.
Out on the street a gust of wind, so wild and chill it seemed to belong to autumn, swept leaves and blossoms hurtling round our feet. Archie waved his stick at the clouds. ‘I told you it was going to rain. If you were going out you’ve missed the best part of the day.’
I fled.
As I hurried down the street Jacob Bauer drove past in his anti-social car, slowing down just enough to allow me to jump up on to the narrow pavement.