A Sight for Sore Eyes (23 page)

Chapter 26

There was much more in that small quilted leather handbag than a key to the house. The bunch of credit cards might be of use to him. He would have to think about it. But he also found in the wallet nearly a hundred pounds in notes and a small leather-bound address book, as well as the usual women's stuff, pressed powder, lipstick, a phial of perfume. The handbag itself he tried to imagine Francine using, but the image he conjured up was all wrong. High heels went with it and a mincing step, red nails and slave bracelets. Shuddering, he put the handbag in his waste bin. The day gone by and the night seemed like a dream to him now, and so surreal was the memory of it, so bizarre the events, that he had to go outside as soon as he woke up and check that the Edsel's boot really was empty. It looked innocent and ordinary - if anything about the Edsel was ordinary - a clean, empty space that seemed as if it had never held anything more sinister than a suitcase. Of the thing that had been inside it for nearly eight months there was no sign or hint. Any smell there was had gone with Keith into the cellar. Inside that garage, he remembered, had been a stack of bricks. To someone who knew about these things it was clear what had happened. The rear wall had been considered too low and at some point, recently a further two feet had been built on to it. The calculations had allowed for more bricks than were needed and hence the pile in the garage. He would need some ready-mixed cement and maybe a flagstone. Stone, he knew, was very expensive but perhaps there was an alternative... He closed the boot lid, stepped back and viewed the car. Would it help to clean it once more before he took it to Miracle Motors? Megsie appeared suddenly on the far side of the fence, seeming to materialise as if she had sprung from a trapdoor in the ground. 'I've never seen you open that boot before,' she remarked conversationally. 'I said to Nige, I've never seen him open that boot before, and he said, neither have I, never.' 'I'm selling it for Keith,' Teddy said, more expansively than usual. 'He said to sell it if I can get a good price.' 'You'd think he'd got something in there he doesn't want us to see, I said. And Nige said, yeah, maybe he's got drugs in there with a street value of untold millions. Funny the things you think of, isn't it? Many's the time I've cursed that Esme, taking up the whole garden, but I don't know, I reckon I'll miss it when it's gone.' 'Edsel,' said Teddy, more as a matter of form than because he thought she would learn. If cleaning the car meant doing it under her eyes he decided against it. Whatever happened, he had a busy day ahead of him. The phone rang and he was sure it must be Francine. There had been some talk of his going with her to look at that Holly's new flat, and then he and she and Holly and some guy called Christopher going out somewhere. He hated the whole idea, but he would do it if that was what she wanted. It wasn't Francine on the phone but a man in Highgate who had come upon Teddy's old advertisement, had noted it down at the time or kept the paper or something, and wanted to know if he could have an estimate for a couple of built-in wardrobes. Having long ago decided to turn nothing down with the exception of rough labouring, Teddy told Mr Habgood of Shepherds Hill that he would be along at three in the afternoon. The man he saw at Miracle Motors wasn't the one he had talked to on the phone. This was the manager, or perhaps the managing director, and when Teddy said he had practically had a promise of a sale he pursed his lips and began shaking his head from side to side in a discouraging way. Then the one he had talked to came out and behaved very differently from what Teddy had expected. 'Now if it was part exchange,' he said, 'that would be a whole different ball game.' The manager stopped shaking his head and started nodding it. 'Then we could be talking a couple of K, right, Mick?' 'Two thousand pounds?' said Teddy, aghast. 'That's about the size of it' 'And I'd have to buy another car from you?' They looked amused. Then Mick said quite sharply, 'Frankly, I'm surprised Mr Brex wants to sell. Or maybe what I mean is I'm surprised he didn't come himself if that's what he wants. Where's he got to, anyway?' 'He's living in Liphook,' said Teddy. 'Is that right? He's down there and you're up here with his car?' Both men looked him up and down. They looked at him in the way people in their forties and fifties do look at young men, with a mixture of contempt and envy and suspicion. A layabout, they were very likely thinking, a drawer of benefit and probably a fiddler of benefit, on the fringes of crime. 'If we're talking about a straight purchase,' said the manager and, from having exhausted his gaze on Teddy, turned at last to eye the Edsel, 'a grand is the kind of area that'd be realistic.' Appalled, he thought of the ten thousand he had had in mind. But to be rid of the thing, for it no longer to be the first object he saw when he woke up in the morning, no longer to fill his garden and press its rear against his windows. Even its colour was becoming his most hated colour, that insipid pastel-yellow... 'Would you give me a thousand for it, then?' 'I take it you've got the vehicle registration document with you, the MOT and a valid certificate of insurance?' He had never even heard of these things. What was the MOT? He dared not ask. 'I'll tell you what, you get Mr Brex to come in here and have a word with us himself. Franldy, I'd rather do business with Mr Brex in person. Liphook's not at the end of the world. You take that motor away for the time being and maybe if Mr Brex puts in a personal appearance we can come to a more satisfactory arrangement for all.' Teddy said nothing. He walked towards the Edsel. 'You tell him Wally says all the best,' the manager called after Mr Habgood lived in one of those sixties townhouses without a single cupboard. He had just moved there from a Victorian villa that was amply supplied with storage space. Teddy looked at the bedrooms, measured up, lost his enthusiasm when the client said chipboard would do for the doors, he didn't want any fancy stuff, not a lot of expense, but again he felt that he could barely afford to turn down anything of this nature. 'That's quite a vehicle you've got there,' Habgood said, showing him out. 'You must be in a fair way of doing, getting your hands on a nice job like that at your age. Drinks juice, I bet.' Teddy was almost too angry to speak. But he told himself that if Habgood believed him successful he would be likely and willing to pay more and he resolved to ask double what he had first intended. On the way home he stopped at a DlY centre and bought ready-mixed concrete. It was a strange sensation using the Edsel's boot for a legitimate purpose, actually puffing something into that space which had been for so long a forbidden area. Petrol was the next requirement. As he served himself he watched the car drinking juice. With its ugly fish mouth and its cocked-up tail, it had something animal-like about it and it was easy to imagine it greedily slurping up the oil that sustained it. He wouldn't have been surprised to see a yellow tongue pop out of its mouth. Thank God for the money in the handbag. But it brought him almost physical pain to see so much of it vanish into the service station's till. He was experiencing that sensation of hopelessness that follows when we plan to be rid of an encumbrance, are positive it will vanish if certain steps are faithfully followed, anticipate the relief that will result from its disappearance, only to find ourselves back in the situation as before, the position that has always been. It can't be done. The best-laid plans have failed. The thing, whatever it may be, the rash of pimples on one's face, a plague of flies, the next-door neighbour's night-long hi-fl, is still there. So it was for Teddy. Deep humiliation was what he felt as he drove the Edsel back through the gates and under the hated carport. His shame was exacerbated by his remembering, at exactly that moment, that he had told Nige and Megsie he was selling the car. Yet here it was, back where it had always been. For a while he tried manoeuvring it backwards and forwards in an attempt to find a new position for it, but all he could achieve was to leave a couple of yards instead of a couple of feet between its tail and his window. He was so preoccupied with the Edsel and his money problem that a curious, even terrible, thing happened to him. When Francine phoned a few seconds passed by before he knew who it was. It simply failed to register. Her voice spoke to him and she spoke her name and he could almost have asked, who? Then he collected himself. She, his woman, the wearer of his ring, she who saw herself in his mirror, came back to him. But it was with actual relief that he heard her say she couldn't come over that evening, she really couldn't. Her father had gone away again, would be away for a week, and her stepmother - here Francine hesitated, searching for the right term - was 'in a nervous state', she had begged her not to go out and had made wild threats. This was all beyond Teddy's comprehension. He made no effort to understand. If she wanted to stay at home with that crazy woman, that was all right with him; as it happened he needed no distractions this evening. A fficker of anxiety was teasing him now, the remote possibility of someone else entering Orcadia Cottage and opening that cellar door... Naturally, he said none of this to Francine, merely that he would see her the next day. 'Then can we go and see Holly's place? And go out with her and Christopher? We could go to the cinema. I can't go to a club because Julia will fuss - well, she'll fuss anyway, but if I'm out late she'll go mad.' For the sake of peace and to keep her happy, he agreed. If it had been left to him he would have stayed at home with her or, maybe, if they had to go out, taken her for an afternoon at the V and A. 'You are a dear,' she said. 'You're so good to me.' 'I'll see you tomorrow then,' he said. It was a funny thing, but unless he could see her she was scarcely there. Asleep, gazed at appreciatively, she was more real than this disembodied distant voice. He felt suddenly angry and resentful, he didn't know why, it must be the prospect of the company of Holly and Christopher. Again the notion of someone coming into the house came to him. But who could? There was no one, Harriet had lived alone. In the unlikely event of a cleaning woman arriving, the dirty state of the cellar was evidence that she never went down there. But the sooner he was back there the better. He got the Edsel out again. By the time he reached Orcadia Place it was growing dark, the gleaming damp dusk of a London autumn evening. Lamps shone like beads of amber against the far backdrop of a hazier chemical light on Grove End Road. The sky was reddish-purple, an ugly colour. This time he was seen as he drew up at the garage doors. But there was no element in it of being caught out. A woman with two small fluffy dogs on leads smiled at him, or smiled at the car which she evidently recognised. Probably she thought he was a mechanic returning it after a thousand-mile service. Now he was well-supplied with keys, he could enter the house by the back door. Carrying his toolbag, he paused inside the kitchen and listened. Somehow he thought that if anyone had been there, even if someone had been and gone, he would know, he would sense it. But all was emptiness and silence. Nothing was disturbed, not even the air in the place. He opened the cellar door and looked down, but without putting the light on. In the dimness he saw a silvery sheen on the plastic, the pale fun-mess of the blanket and, less comfortably, protruding from it, Harriet's foot. Not long, though, and he would never have to see it again. No one would see it, ever. He spread newspaper on the floor and set out his tools. The first thing he did was remove the screws on the hinges and take off the door. An ordinary sort of door, consisting of six panels and with a brass handle. Perhaps he could find a use for it. The next stage would take longer. Using his mallet, he set about freeing the architrave from the brickwork and plaster. It was a noisy task, but Orcadia Cottage stood on its own, a road to one side of it, its nearest neighbour twenty feet away and separated from it by a wall and a fence and bushes and trees. There were no Megsie and Nige next door and no common wall for them to bang on. For all that, the heavy hammer blows made him uneasy, even though he knew that people in London are rarely alerted by building work going on in a neighbour's house. It was different up in Neasden. Almost as disconcerting was the mess he was making, splintered wood lying everywhere and plaster dust making him choke. He realised quite suddenly that he was going to have to make a new skirting board, even perhaps carve it if he couldn't find the right beading to match the existing one. Once the door frame was off, he could clear up for the night. There would be no more noise. Soon there would be no more cellar. He found a broom, dustpan and brush and a roll of bin-liners, and swept up meticulously. Then the vacuum cleaner came out and he removed the last vestiges of dust. Should he transport the bricks in preparation for tomorrow's work? He decided yes. It would have to be done in the morning as he was going on this horrible visit in the afternoon. His anger returned, flickered. Outside in the backyard the night was growing cold, there was frost in the air, reminding him of the night Keith died. He needed a bricklayer's hod but must manage without. His father had been a bricklayer and presumably had had his own hod, but where it was, what had happened to it, Teddy didn't know. He felt an obscure resentment at the disappearance of that hod - along with the absence of so many things which should by rights have been his. Something he had forgotten, mat white wall paint to match the existing paint. He must buy some on his way in the morning. Bringing bricks into contact with the beautiful velvety carpet or the hardwood floor at the top of the steps pained him. He hunted around until he found a stack of magazines, Vogue, Ha7per~, Hello!, and spread their glossy pages on the floor before carefully depositing the bricks on them. It might be best to dispose of the cellar door and door frame splinters at once. He carried them outside to the Edsel. The door would have failed to go into the boot if it had been a centimetre longer. Returning, looking at the manhole cover, he had a thought which made him smile and then laugh. It was another beautiful idea, almost amounting to genius. Julia worried Francine and made her increasingly uneasy. It was not only that she was like an animal of uncertain temper, which must be constantly placated, but