She wonders if settee is right. Couch she might have said, but it wasn’t called that when she was there, and she remembers now that the grandmother said sofa. Finger-ring was Miss Rapp’s word. ‘Grey soapstone,’ Miss Rapp said when someone asked. ‘Mother’s grey soapstone.’ Just say a ring and it could be a curtain ring or something for an ear.
‘No, sentimental only,’ she says when he asks if it’s valuable.
She must have fiddled with it, nervous because of the interview, she says, because she wanted the position so. She must have slipped it up and down her finger. She only noticed afterwards, in the train.
‘I didn’t like to bother you before, sir. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, a time like this for you. But then I thought that’s silly.’
‘It’s no trouble at all.’
‘I was the last girl that came on the Friday. I think you remarked I was the last.’
‘If you could let me have a phone number or an address we’ll let you know if your ring is found.’
There are twenty pence left, registered on the screen. She has another coin ready in case it’s necessary, a fifty. She wonders if he’s wearing his fawn shirt and light-coloured trousers, the brown leather shoes that could do with a shine. He doesn’t wear a chain or anything, nothing on the wrist or at the neck.
‘D’you think I could come out, Mr Davenant? Could I look on the driveway in case it slipped off there?’
He doesn’t say anything and for a moment she thinks the money has run out, that they have been cut off. But the screen says 16p. Once he had other shoes on in the garden, canvas, light-coloured like his trousers.
‘I’m afraid it’s a little like a needle in a haystack.’
She can feel his concern, as she did when first she said she’d lost something. Thaddeus suits his voice as well as his appearance. It suits an older man. When you get used to it you realize he couldn’t be called anything else.
‘Maybe it’s silver, or only silver-coloured. The gem’s a soapstone. Grey.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to say we haven’t found it.’
‘I’d have a look along the lane I walked on. All right to do that, Mr Davenant?’
‘Of course it is. And if you do, please come back here and see for yourself.’
For a moment Pettie cannot speak. In the silence she hears his breathing and knows everything is different because he has said that. No two people could have more in common than a baby: Georgina Belle, and the long days of his bereavement becoming shorter, time the healer. In the silence she can feel the closeness again, like there was when he held his hand out, the moment their hands touched. Like when she looked at the photograph among the flowery paperweights, when he saw her looking and didn’t have to say anything.
‘I’ll come,’ she says, and asks him when she should.
*
‘I never wanted her here.’
‘It’s only temporary, Mrs Biddle. Pettie’s down on her luck, but that’s just for the moment. Pettie’ll walk in with news of a job and it’ll be like it used to be.’
‘She’ll get up on her legs and go is what she’ll do.’
Albert mentions the Dowlers. He explains that he has looked up Dowler Drains in the telephone directory, 21A Side Street. No way the Dowlers won’t take Pettie back when he puts it to them.
‘Pettie’s got into a muddle, Mrs Biddle.’
‘The time I woke up she was standing there with a camel in her hand.’
‘Pettie was only looking at the camel, Mrs Biddle.’
‘She could look at it on the mantelpiece, nothing stopping
her. She could stand there looking at it all day, only she never come in when I’m lying awake. Creeping about the place, that girl’d get you into an early grave. She was nicking that camel. She’d nick the whole display, give her a chance.’
‘Soon’s she hears no problem with the Dowlers she’ll be ok.’
‘You have a room, you pay for it.’
‘It’s only I’m worried what’ll happen to her.’ Albert mentions Bev gone missing and Marti Spinks and Ange up Wharfdale. He mentions Joey Ells.
‘You told me about Joey Ells. We’re talking about paying the rent.’
‘If the chutes wasn’t clogged, there’d have been water in that tank. Could’ve been she was lying there drowned.’
Propped up on her pillow, the backs of her hands cool at last after the day’s heat, Mrs Biddle quotes thirty-six pounds as the sum due to her. It isn’t much to pay for getting rid of a girl you didn’t want to have near you in the first place, but she refrains from saying so.
‘Joey Ells can’t hardly walk ever since.’
‘You told me, Albert. It lowers me to hear about Joey Ells. I’m low enough without hearing about Joey Ells all over the place.’
The hot weather brings out a testiness in Mrs Biddle. All day long, wafting in through her open windows, the comments of the pedestrians on the pavement outside have had to do with the unabating heat. A drought is spreading throughout the country, the television News has three times informed her. Even though it’s gone eight and the evening cool has come, grown men go by in shorts.
‘She can creep about somewhere else. You tell her that
from me, Albert. You tell her if she paid what’s owing ten times over she’s not coming back to that room. Par for the course, this is.’
‘I’d call in at the Dowlers’ tonight.’
‘That girl ain’t coming back here.’
He’ll call in at the Dowlers’ all the same, he says. His smile has gone; his eyes are dull. There isn’t often any kind of disagreement between them. In a flat voice he asks:
‘You got an appetite now the warmth’s gone? You fancy pilchards?’
She says she would and he goes to open a tin, leaving the door open because she likes to hear him in the kitchen. Smells waft in and she likes that too. ‘Make us a bit of toast?’ she calls out, and he says he will.
Extraordinary, that he’d be mixed up with a girl who’d sweet-talk her way into a bed-ridden woman’s house. All you have’s your house, the view from the window, folk going by You can’t be expected to take in all and sundry. ‘Lovely animals,’ was what the girl said when she was caught with the camel.
‘All right then, Albert?’
He calls back, saying he is. She tries the television, but all that happens is snow coming down. She turns it off and watches a woman across the street sweeping the pavement in front of her door. He’s far from all right, with that girl affecting him, that Joey Ells coming up the way she always does. The last few weeks he’s not been himself by a long chalk.
The woman across the street leans on her brush, talking to a gas man. A car turns into the terrace and West Indian people get out of it, a man laughing, a girl with a sleeping
baby. She can smell the toast now. When he comes in with the meal she’ll soothe him. They had to have the upset, but it’s behind them now. She’ll try to get it to him that they’ll be like they used to be.
‘Television’s gone on the blink again,’ she says when he comes back, not wanting to rush in with the other immediately. His arms are tense, carrying the tray in the careful way he has, clutching it tightly. When he pushes the door closed with his elbow she says that the upset’s over and done with, that she had to put her foot down. She advises him to put the girl behind him, same’s he should that Joey Ells. ‘You forget them bad things, Albert. There’s no one can look after me better’n you do. No one ever did.’
He places the tray on the bedclothes the way she likes him to do, not too far down, so that she doesn’t have to sit up more.
‘You having enough there, Albert? You make more toast if you want to.’
‘No, I’ve enough.’
‘You don’t want to starve yourself. You take what you want.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘I like a pilchard, Albert.’
She brings in Bolton then, reminded by the fish. Tomkins Avenue, Number Seventeen, and Harvey Clegg put the breakfast herrings down the armchair. Nineteen forty-nine it would have been.
‘A Mrs Frist that landlady was, thin little woman, sharp’s a tooth. Couldn’t stand her, Harvey couldn’t, and the herrings was off. Stank the house out inside of a day and she knew, of course. She said she’d have the law on him.’
He wags his head; she can tell he’s interested. He’s interested in everything, he likes to hear. She takes a mouthful of tea, washing bits of pilchard from under her teeth, then settling the teeth back into place.
‘He was always up to something, that Harvey Clegg. The time he brought the Widow Twanky into
Little Red Riding Hood
you’d have laughed your head off. “Next for shaving, the Widow Twanky!” he shouted out when Red Riding Hood’d just said what big eyes. Not a pick of sense it made, but they roared.’
His head is cocked to one side a bit, as it is when he listens for his planes, but all there is to hear is the distant traffic in Bride Street. He finishes his pilchards, always quick with his food. He turns the television on, then goes behind it.
‘You getting a picture now?’
There’s sexual intercourse, which is on constantly these days. Either that or people at death’s door in a Casualty. Or it’s the female who reads out letters and winks at you, some kind of tic she has.
‘That OK now, Mrs Biddle?’
She changes the channel, pressing the numbers on the remote control. Blood spatters a wall and drips over a vase of flowers. A boot is kicking the stomach out of a body on the ground.
He goes on fiddling, then comes round to look himself, and she says that’s OK now, they can turn it off. He does so and the picture disappears, taking with it another thump of the boot, and frenzied music that is beginning to give her a headache. On the street outside an old man goes by, unkempt and bleary-eyed in the gathering dusk.
‘She took advantage, Albert.’
He piles his own dishes on to her tray and waits for hers. One morning he didn’t come in and she thought he was dead. Out on the streets in the night hours, someone like him could easily be set on because he’s the way he is, because he’s different.
‘I’ll make a jelly,’ he says. ‘Greengage. For tomorrow.’
The door closes behind him and then she hears him beginning to wash up. After that he’ll go and have his evening rest. They told him down the platforms he must have his sleeps and he always does. She listens to the clatter of the dishes, then drops off for a moment, waking to hear his footsteps in the room above her. The day she managed the stairs when he was resting, his sleeping face was like an angel’s, the empty eyes closed over, lips parted a little. Everything in the room was tidy around him, the little decorations on the walls. Sometimes all she wishes for before she goes is to have his worries taken from him, to know he’ll be all right when she isn’t there to think about him. When she can’t move at all, which won’t be long now, she wouldn’t mind it if he washed her. He could bring the basin in and lift her nightdress off. She’d he there with something else private between them, not anyone else’s business, like the upset over the girl isn’t.
Mahonia shoots shrivel, the elaeagnus is arrested. The climbing hydrangea droops, the leaves of the smoke shrubs have lost their sheen. Thaddeus’s spinach goes to seed, the potatoes he digs are small. The drought is worse than the drought of 1976; the worst, so people interested in such matters say, for two hundred years. In the fields the sheep are fed hay, cattle are parched when streams dry up.
But the apple trees in Thaddeus’s garden are laden, the pear trees and the plum orchard. Gooseberries and redcur-rants ripen before their time. Cosmos has grown high, its misty foliage heavy with purple flowers, and pink and mauve and white. Butterflies flap silently through the buddleia.
Beneath the catalpa tree, with her grandchild on a tartan rug beside her deckchair, Mrs Iveson reads. Casting shadows on the pages of her book, lacy white panicles hang among the vast leaves, their scent delicate in the heat.
On a cold grey morning in late December Mr Charles set forth as usual, his letters stamped and sealed. Miss Amble greeted him, Mrs Mace a moment later. To both he raised his hat
. The plump housemaid did it, Mrs Iveson’s thought is, before
The Mystery of the Milestone
slips from her fingers.
*
When you had collected seven transfers from seven tins of cocoa you sent away the seven pictures they made and
received in return a statuette of Snow White. With a crust of bread clamped between her teeth, skinning and chopping two onions, Zenobia remembers that. She washes carrots and parsnips beneath a running tap, then trims the fat from a tenderloin of pork. Duplicates wouldn’t do. She had Sneezy twice and Happy four times and still had to go on collecting. Her father said you’d maybe drink forty gallons of cocoa to get it right. He declared the whole thing a disgrace, on a par with chain letters and brush salesmen at the door.
‘She has settled in,’ she hears, as from a distance, her husband admit. ‘I have to say you were right.’
Removing the bread from her mouth, she is startled: that does not come easily from him. He was certain there would be fireworks, unease at the very least. In spite of a loss two days ago at Ascot, he has given in gracefully; and Zenobia knows better than to gloat.
‘It’s early days yet, of course,’ she acknowledges, since that seems only fair.
‘She has come to accept what must be accepted.’
Maidment has inspected the newcomer’s correspondence. Letters are often left not yet completed on her dressing-table, all to her friend in Sussex, whose replies later tie up loose ends. At the kitchen table, replacing one of the lugs that hold the strap of his wristwatch, he agrees that the blood tie of the child has made the difference.
‘As you said yourself,’ he graciously repeats. His beaky features are bent close to his task, the spigot in the spring of the metal lug repeatedly slipping as he attempts to prise it home with the blade of a knife. He experiences neither frustration nor impatience. Sooner or later, he knows he
will succeed. Mr Nice Guy he should have gone for, but that is water under the bridge.
‘Whoever’s that?’ Zenobia exclaims when the jangle of the hall-door bell sounds.
Achieving success before this dies away, Maidment returns his watch to his wrist and goes to answer the summons.
*
Kneeling on a plastic fertilizer sack, scattering the seeds of his winter parsley in a shady corner, Thaddeus wonders if in these conditions they’ll germinate. Carefully, he waters, then places a sheet of glass on the four lengths of wood he has used to construct a square around what he has sown. Weeks will pass before the first green specks arrive, for if they do so at all they’ll come slowly, the dendritic formation following at that same slow pace.