Quiet Neighbors (5 page)

“Not here. I'm not here.”

She let herself in, thinking she would see what he meant about going up another floor then start the search for a B&B. How close was the nearest Travelodge? That would be anonymous
and
sterile. How far would four hundred pounds go?

But then, at the bottom of the dark stairwell, she looked up and was surprised to see, high above, a clear and pale brightness. It grew as she climbed the stairs and, as she turned and climbed again, it opened and admitted her. She arrived on a little landing with white walls turned blue by the cold winter sunshine.

There were two doors, one on either side. In the left-hand room, the walls were yellow and the window, tiny and deep-set, looked out over the front garden and across the fields and
there
was the sea! A low, slack ribbon of still water in a bay. There was a kitchen corner in here, with a small, square china sink on metal legs like something from a laboratory or—she realised—a medical surgery. And on a wooden counter beside it, a small fridge and a two-ring cooker were plugged into a single socket on a big square adaptor. There was no other furniture in the room and no carpet on the floor, just the bare, broad floorboards and the light bouncing around the coombs and angles, making a hundred shades of sunshine yellow.

Jude stepped across the landing. This room was painted a pale medical pink and was utterly empty. It didn't even have a window, just two small skylights, one on either slope of the ceiling. She imagined lying on a mattress on the floor looking up through them at the stars, knowing that, even if someone heard she was here and followed her north, in this room, at the top of this tall house, with its windows facing the sky, they still wouldn't find her.

Five

It didn't take Mrs.
Hewston long to sniff her out. She got four days of peace—long enough for a shopping trip to Stranraer in Lowell's ancient Volvo, long enough to choose a bed and a couch, a table and chairs to set about in the pale attic rooms; not to fill them, but just so that she could spend her days inside their emptiness. She cleaned the bathroom, boil-washed the towels. He didn't mind; she suspected he didn't notice. She put some of the tasselled, mirrored clothes from downstairs into a cupboard out on the landing, took some of the dishes and glasses Lowell pressed on her—“far too many, dear me, I never have dinner parties these days”—and, of course, she selected some books.

Without a television, a computer, a phone, or even a radio, the small stack on her bedside table was a miser's hoard of gold. O. Douglas was at the top of the pile, small and perfect with the fringe of a blue leather bookmark curling softly out from between its pages. Under it was a green Penguin of a Margery Allingham, one of the playful ones; a reprint of
Midnight's Children
with a jacket like an album cover (she had always meant to read it one day); an old cloth-covered
Rebecca
, with fine floppy pages like a Bible; and one more, chosen solely for the picture on the jacket. It was the kind of book that didn't exist anymore. It wasn't a mystery, nor a romance, nor even what Lowell called Literature. It was simply a story, a ripping yarn, a tall tale of derring-do. It had an inheritance, a misunderstanding, and a small plane crashing in a desert, throwing two people together, man against wilderness and woman with man. The picture on the jacket, in perfect condition forty years later, showed the aftermath of the crash: sunset and scrubland and two people, the man strong and suave and the woman with a streak of dirt on one cheek and her hair escaping a chignon. She had even found time to tie her shirt in a knot just under her bosom and turn up the hems of her khaki trousers to show off her slim, brown ankles.

Not what most people looked like as they hauled themselves away from the brink of near disaster and stood reeling, catching their breath. Not what Jude looked like as she tackled the bookshop, one room at a time, with rubber gloves and buttoned cuffs, her hair in a scarf and a paper mask on her face.

By the fifth day, though, the shadows were gone from under her eyes and those odd yellow streaks that might be what people meant when they said “pinched” were gone from the sides of her nose too.

“Ho!” said Mrs. Hewston, standing in the kitchen doorway. “You're looking well on it.”

“Guilty,” said Jude. “It's the sea air.”

Mrs. Hewston said nothing but smirked and bridled so much that Jude took her upstairs to show her the little bedsit to prove she was sleeping alone.

“Of course, I haven't been here much since the doctor died,” said Mrs. Hewston, looking round the bedroom landing with the quick, angled glances of a blackbird, although the doors were closed. “He was one of the last true gentlemen. Always treated me quite like one of the family. Chocolates on my birthday, brandy at Christmas, always lifted his hat when he drove past.”

Jude couldn't think of anything less like family membership than lifted hats and neutral gifts on expected days, but she said nothing. She didn't even realise she had missed the cue until Mrs. Hewston offered it up again in a different form while they were climbing the second set of stairs.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh, “you don't come across his like much anymore. And it was a mutual regard. He called me the salt of the earth. ‘You're the salt of the earth, Nurse Hewston,' he'd say.”

What with her age and all the talking, she was labouring before they reached the attics, and she sank into one of the kitchen chairs in the yellow room as soon as Jude opened the door.

“It was the great sadness of his life that this one didn't follow him into medicine,” she added, taking three breaths to get through it.

“Lowell?” said Jude, confused enough to look around for who else she might mean. The Scots with their
thises
and
thats
caught her out ten times a day.

“It's
Lowland
,” said Mrs. Hewston. “He was named for his mother's family. They were gentleman farmers down Whithorn way. A great big spread. They looked down on the doctor when he went courting Miss Lowland. Can you believe it? But there, the family died out and the farm's away. Sold on to a bunch of bankers and they're living off cheques from Brussels, like all farmers these days.”

Jude nodded, barely listening. The fields around the edges of the town were dotted with sheep and cattle, she thought, and the shops were full of lamb and beef; it didn't seem like much of a con to her. But then, Mrs. Hewston would look at a babe in arms and see a grifter. She was still sneering at man of sixty because he didn't want to take up medicine when he was a boy.

The woman had seen Jude's attention wandering and changed the subject. “And so what's brought
you
here?” she began.

“Like Lowell said,” Jude replied evenly, “I'm helping out with a project in the bookshop.”

“All the way to London for consultants!” Mrs. Hewston said. “That's the mother's side. A fortune they let slip through their fingers. And all that land. The doctor built up his practice from nothing and retired very comfortably. It
was
London, wasn't it?” she added. Jude nodded. London was a big place. “And you jumped at the chance, did you? Ah, well. I've seen it too many times not to know it again. Galloway is just that kind of place for some reason.”

“What kind of place is that?” said Jude, sounding less even now, she knew.

“Galloway attracts runaways,” Mrs. Hewston said. “I don't say it in judgment, dear. But when you've been a village nurse like me, you can't help seeing clearly.” She beamed at Jude, delighted with herself.

“I did need a break,” said Jude. “So the timing was good, it's true.”

“We never had ‘breaks,' the doctor and me,” said Mrs. Hewston. “We left school and started our training, worked our forty years, took our statutory leave, enjoyed our public holidays, and did our jobs. Grateful for the privilege, we were. None of this ‘gap year' and ‘downtime.' ‘
Me
time.'”

“But you're surely much younger than Lowell's father, Mrs. Hewston.” Jude didn't mean to flatter; she only wanted to kill the Greatest Generation talk before a second wind.

“Cut from the same cloth,” said Mrs. Hewston vaguely. “No running away for either of us, no matter what life served up. You wouldn't understand. I don't say that meanly, dear. It's just different times.”

Jude couldn't help herself. “My parents died,” she said. “In an accident. Their funeral was a week ago.”

Mrs. Hewston cocked her head up to one side and looked at Jude from the corner of her eye. The blackbird again. “No,” she said. “I'm not trying to contradict you, dear, but that's not it.”

Jude felt a flush begin to spread up over her neck from the collar of the peasant blouse, flooding her cheeks with heat and her eyes with tears. “My mother and father both passed away in a freak—”

“I don't doubt it,” Mrs. Hewston cut in. “But that's not all that's going on. That's a clean thing, if you take my meaning.” She sat back after she spoke. She had completely recovered her breath now, quite comfortable after the climb, and she took the chance while Jude was speechless to have a proper look round, blandly cheerful as she noted the dishes and the pans.

“
Clean?”
said Jude at last.

“Bereavement,” Mrs. Hewston said, “is an open thing. You gather friends and family round you. You clear the house and do the paperwork. Bereavement isn't trouble. Bereavement isn't … ”

“Dirty?” said Jude.

“Now, now,” Mrs. Hewston said. “There's no need to be upset. We're just talking.” She stood up and placed the kitchen chair very carefully under the table. “But I'll take my leave. Plain talking has gone the way of hard work, I sometimes think. I don't mean that to hurt, dear. But I was a nurse when nursing was more than looking at a screen and dressing in pyjamas. And being a doctor meant more than signing notes and passing people on to specialists. He did tonsillectomies downstairs in the dining room, you know.”

“The good old days,” said Jude, still recovering.

“I hope you don't mind me saying something to you before I go, dear,” Mrs. Hewston said. She pointed to the shelf of crockery. “Those are full sets of good china you've broken apart. Some of those plates were wedding presents.”

Jude tried to laugh it off to herself once Mrs. Hewston was gone. “China shaming!” she said out loud, shaking her head, but the woman's words had spoiled the peaceful rooms, and although she had been planning a quiet morning, she decided to go to the shop instead and tackle another bay there.

Lowell was gone, in search of a possible Audubon. “A renowned birder,” he'd said that breakfast time. “Moved to Galloway from the Essex marshes specifically to work on his list. I tried to get a squint at his library when he went into sheltered housing five years ago, but his daughters would have none of it. We'll see.”

“When did he die?” said Jude, watching him count out a thick stack of twenties and fold them into his inside pocket.

“Tuesday,” Lowell said. “So they'll be past the shock and just getting round to packing. The housing trust will have mentioned a final bill. The undertakers might have sent an estimate already. Definitely the florists.”

“Right,” said Jude. “This is a new side to you.”

Lowell only grinned, wolfishly, and patted his pocket, the pad of banknotes making a dull, smacking sound through the wool and the lining.

She had never been alone in the shop before, although Lowell had given her a key that very first day, and she felt a flip of excitement in her belly as she unlocked the door and hurried in out of the rain. Excitement or something similar, anyway. The long passageway to Lowell's desk seemed welcoming now, a primrose path to certain pleasure.

Soon she would work her way through each of these bags, up one side and down the other, sorting, dusting, wiping the books, stuffing the empty carriers into a bin bag, and then sweeping and mopping the floor, washing down the walls with long firm swipes. Maybe, she thought, once the floor was clear, Lowell could hang some of his photograph collection on the walls, make a display.

For now, she turned sideways and edged along towards the curtain. Were the photographs framed already, she wondered, and she pulled the little brass handle on one of the shallow drawers. Still locked. She turned away and surveyed her battleground.

She was winning. There was enough order to warm her librarian's heart, still enough disorder to gird her librarian's loins. To the left of the desk, where Lowell could see them, the large and expensive Art and Architecture volumes were now arranged on the deep shelves where they could stand upright, as their beauty deserved. To the right of the desk, the side room was cleared, and everything of local interest—gathered from three floors and every corner—was stacked in there by subject matter, the shelves lately scrubbed with a soapy cloth and now dry again, waiting to receive them. The small room behind the desk, where that single Scottish Fiction case had been, held all the Scottish Fiction now. She had named it Miss Buchan's Boudoir and added the poetry too, of which there was much, Galloway being the sort of place that drew poets and shook out poems from the usually prosaic as they strode the shores and stood on the headlands.

Jude had decided the arrangements after interrogation. What did most people come in for? Fiction. Did those buyers browse other sections? Yes, they often did. Who didn't, if anyone? Tourists. Coach-trippers looking for the printed equivalents of coasters and key rings. And who were the most avid readers of all? Who were the rabid ones, the frantic ones, the bookworms who'd lost all sense of proportion completely? Crime fiction fans, Lowell told her. Mystery and horror and sci-fi too. And amongst the nonfiction? The bird-watchers, as one would expect, although there were increasing numbers of hard-bitten quilters and knitters these days too.

It made sense then, she explained to him, to have Local Interest and Scottish Fiction—the coasters and key rings—nearby, so the bus-trippers' bunions wouldn't be troubled by too long a walk and their old knees (or new knees) wouldn't protest at the stairs.

General Fiction and Literature were in the two big draughty rooms on the next floor, the rooms above the neighbours' shops, with the tall windows onto the street, the good daylight letting discerning customers read pages and pages, whole chapters at a time, before they made up their minds.

Exiled to the top floor were Natural History, for those unhinged twitchers; all the Handicrafts, for those beady-eyed quilters; and the whole dark kingdom of Fantasy, Horror, and Crime. Lowell insisted that Children's Books be tucked under the eaves up there too.

“I'm not so sure,” Jude cautioned. “Parents might not want their little ones climbing the stairs.”

“Good,” said Lowell. “Plenty of children's bookshops around. Mine are for collectors but, dear me, there's a stink if you say so.”

The stairs. Jude lifted the latch on the door between Coasters and Key Rings (the name had stuck) and Miss Buchan's Boudoir and began to climb. Each rise was steep and each tread was shallow and the turn was tight and the rail was loose, and if ever a health and safety inspector came near the place, Lowland Glen Books would be gone forever.

“I get the odd claustrophobe,” Lowell had said. “But if they tell me what they're after, I can dot up myself and bring it down to them. I made a mint from a very … Ah, a very … Well, quite a solid Canadian lady who wasn't so much claustrophobic as in real danger of getting jammed—Winnie-the-Pooh-style, you know? So she sat out the back in the shade of the apple tree and I brought everything we had on the Russian royals. An Anastasia complex opens the wallet wonderfully.”