Over the weekend, I let the card languish. I’d seen adverts for tutors on the community noticeboard in the big Sainsbury’s in Balham. I knew £15 was way below market value. Also, in my experience any regular commitment can start to feel claustrophobic. I remembered that from the time I signed up to AquaFit at the leisure centre. But the idea didn’t go away. It had been gratifying, even over one afternoon, to watch Max grow gradually more enthusiastic towards the written word. I felt sorry for him. I liked the thought of arming him in a small way, against the other members of his family. Helping my sister Faith with her homework, when we were teenagers, was always enjoyable. Her gratitude itself was rewarding. Also, even with my commitment to the OED, time did sometimes hang heavy on my hands.
I picked the card up to study it. This book cover was Memory by Ian M. L. Hunter, and included a picture of a finger tied with a piece of string. I imagined Ailsa taking out all the cards out of the box and choosing the one she felt was most applicable. It was Max’s memory, after all, she was concerned about. It was this that swung it, really, the notion that she had put care and thought into it. I rang her to accept.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘That’s fantastic news. You’ve literally saved my life.’
‘Well not literally, I hope.’
‘No, not literally.’ She laughed, but then when she’d stopped, said, ‘But no, seriously, you literally have.’
The following Wednesday, I turned up at 4 p.m. on her doorstep, dressed in a manner I thought appropriate. My office clothes were not in the best condition; I couldn’t lay my hands on the skirt and blouse that would have been perfect. But I spent most of Tuesday trawling the charity shops on Northcote Road and I’d found a couple of suits that were only a little big; not in the best nick, but serviceable. I would alternate.
I think I was hoping we would have a little chat first, but she was business-like when she opened the door. She was in gym kit, and in the short time it took to set us up at the table her phone buzzed several times. She took the call out in the garden eventually, smiling into the phone as she walked up and down across the terrace, occasionally leaning down to pick up a leaf. After a bit, she sat down on a step and hugged her knees. She played with her hair; not picking at it the way she had in Tom’s company, but puffing it up, giving it body. I wondered who it was on the other end of the call who made her so relaxed, and I felt a little left out and jealous. Which was absurd.
Max wasn’t an easy pupil, and after a while I became absorbed in trying to work him out. Faith was just lazy. ‘Oh, you just do it, V,’ she used to say, one eye on Blue Peter. Max’s brain was clearly wired differently; sitting still was an effort for him. He had a comprehension, ‘The Drummer Boy’, to do, and I defaced the paper with different-coloured highlighters, to pinpoint the alliteration, the metaphors, etc. He worked better if I made him run up and down to the basement between questions. I discovered what interested him – not rugby, the sport his father wanted him to be good at, but football (Chelsea in particular), and dogs and an Xbox game called World of Warcraft, and also magic, and various Netflix shows, including Stranger Things, which I had read about in the Radio Times. I’m not bad on football – the tabloids keep me updated on the Premier League, and the glitzier players often have spreads in Hello!. One of the questions was ‘How do you think the drummer boy feels?’ and I suggested he imagine the lad was a mascot for a big game, and he almost immediately picked out the relevant language, ‘smiling triumphantly as tall men grin and nod’, etc. The hour went quickly – for me at least – and when Max got down from the table, he seemed visibly relieved to have polished off a task that usually, I imagine, weighed on his shoulders for a full week.
‘You’re a star,’ Ailsa told me, coming back in from the garden.
There was no mention of money. Perhaps this was a trial session. For the moment, it didn’t matter. I’m not embarrassed to admit, I left with a spring in my step.
The following two Wednesdays, Melissa opened the door, calling for Max who gingerly made a cup of tea – they didn’t own a kettle but used a special narrow tap from which spluttered boiling water: quite perilous. Bea, I learnt, had drama club and was dropped back at the end of the session. There was a little bit of awkwardness with the woman, ‘Tricia’, who brought her home on the first week. I’d left Max at the kitchen table to open the door, but she called for him to come up and see her and then gave him quite an interrogation: ‘Do you actually know this woman?’ Apparently satisfied, she apologised for doubting me, flicking her blonde hair behind her ears with shiny white-tipped fingernails, but after I closed the door I could hear her on the phone – obviously to Ailsa – explaining how she had ‘felt uneasy’ and ‘needed to check it was “kosher” ’, that ‘she’ – i.e. me – was ‘genuinely allowed to be there’.
Still no sign of any money, which was a little concerning, though I told myself perhaps I was to be paid monthly, as in a proper salary. I should have raised it early on, but I was enjoying myself too much, really quite throwing myself into it.
I looked online for guidance, read up on kinaesthetic learning and memory tricks on dyslexic websites and school hubs. I got him to talk about World of Warcraft, ‘a land called Azeroth peopled by mighty heroes’, and taught him some card tricks I remembered from my own childhood. We discussed the knockout stages of the Champions League and I found a football which we kicked back and forth while we went over his spellings. On the third week, I texted Ailsa to ask if I could bring Maudie, and when Max had written a whole sentence on ‘Why World of Warcraft leads to limitless adventures’ he gave her a single stroke, double if there were no spelling mistakes, and when he had completed a paragraph, with the requisite number of adverbs or prepositions, he and she had a game of ball. Something about the irregular reward system, and the sensory feedback, as with dog training, seemed to help his concentration.
I tended not to think too much about my environment while I was teaching. We kept our heads down. The kitchen was always spotlessly tidy and a little cold; I do remember that. Once or twice, I wondered whether to light the wood-burning stove, but on closer inspection, it seemed to be as yet unused, the pretty basket of logs and kindling next to it solely for show.
It was on my fourth session that things changed. Bea had just got home – my cue to leave – and I was packing up my papers and pens, when my phone rang. It was Ailsa. She was coming in and out of signal, but I quickly gathered she wasn’t at her food bank but in town; she was at a job interview and they’d asked her to stay on. Melissa was at a play rehearsal, she said, and wouldn’t be back until 9 p.m. though Tom had promised to be home by 6 or 7 p.m. at the latest. Could I hold the fort for an hour, tops? Did I mind terribly?
Amazing. I was an absolute angel.
When I hung up, I was alone in the kitchen. I could hear gunfire and shouts from the basement; shrill voices and laughter from the TV in the front room. I glanced back at Max’s comprehension, unable to resist adding a full stop and altering a lower-case letter into a capital. It was early April and still light out, but the room was east-facing. I had taken my shoes off, and the limestone floor felt cool beneath my feet. I gazed out of the back doors into the garden. No one had said anything more to me about my overhanging bushes, but they’d had a go at them from this side – any greenery they could reach had been trimmed down to the height of the new trellis. The olive stood erect in a pale terracotta urn on the new limestone terrace, and several new shrubs had been planted, as well as lots of squat dobs of green. The back was still lit by the low sun; despite the towering wall of my trees, and next to the trampoline, someone had created a bed out of railway sleepers. Her wildflower meadow? Still empty, it was bathed in a shaft of golden evening light; I could see insects whirling.
I chanced the boiling-water tap for another cup of tea and then, clasping it in my hands more as a prop than refreshment, stared about me. On the counter, next to the stove, was a small lasagne covered in clingfilm. The week before it had been a c
hicken pie. Before that, a stir-fry, the vegetables neatly chopped in preparation. Was that odd, or normal, to be so methodical? I worked with a woman at the library who had OCD and she told me that, after cleaning her teeth in the morning, she would prepare her toothbrush for the evening – even in the knowledge it would dry out. I asked if she thought that otherwise she would forget? She said it wasn’t about that, it was about fear and control.
The fridge was half empty: not much more than milk, orange juice, a bottle of wine, a pack of butter. No mint sauce or chutneys past their sell-by dates, no piece of old cheese disintegrating into clingfilm. I am not the best judge of these things but the pull-out cupboard that housed the PG Tips also seemed unnaturally neat, the boxes of tea lined up in height order. The other cupboards were the same: cereal packets, and jams perfectly displayed, plates stacked. Even the cutlery drawer was clinically tidy, none of the elastic bands and glue sticks, and muddle of tape measure and takeaway chopsticks that you find in most cutlery drawers. It’s a long time since you’ve been able to open mine. The effect was disconcerting. I thought of that film Sleeping with the Enemy, when Julia Roberts knows her ex-husband has been in the house because all the labels on her tin cans have been turned to face the same way. Not that order necessarily indicated the presence of a psychopath.
I’d been down into the basement where Max had now escaped to, the week before. I knew it had an enormous screen on one wall and a large, pale-grey linen, L-shaped sofa; not much else. The double sitting room, where Bea was ensconced in front of the TV, was equally minimalist; white shutters, a light-blue velvet sofa, some sheepskin rugs, that dangly swan-feather chandelier. The back half of the room, which I could see up some steps from where I was sitting, contained a black upright Yamaha piano, nothing else. There were no pictures. It was only the downstairs loo that was decorated, exclusively with things from Tom’s past; group photographs of his school rugby team and Cambridge college year, and a framed New Yorker cartoon of two cats waiting outside a mouse hole. Caption: ‘If we were lawyers this would be billable time.’
Upstairs was uncharted territory; even the builders hadn’t let me up there. My mind turned to it. I was about to say I didn’t mean to snoop, but I might as well be truthful: I did.
On the half-landing were two doors; the first opened onto a bedroom, a mirror image of Faith’s, but this one was square and bland and neutral. Next to this was a small bathroom decorated in shades of green and white; an unused cake of soap sat in a porcelain dish, both the dish and the soap shaped like shells. Half a flight up, the space had been reconfigured. The loft conversion had shrunk the landing, and whereas we had three doors, here were only two. The first opened onto the equivalent of my bedroom: a study containing a desk, computer, shelves of files, and neatly stacked piles of paper. The other door was closed. I hesitated for a moment before pushing it open.
It was a beautiful room – the same shape and size as my mother’s – with three large sash windows (invisibly double-glazed, I knew from talking to the builders). A door led to an en-suite bathroom. Fitted cupboards ran along one wall, and to the right, facing me, was a light oak four-poster bed; one of those modern ones with posts but no curtains. A full-length mirror rested on a matching wood stand, and there were two bedside tables, but otherwise: nothing. An empty wastepaper bin. No baskets of make-up, or dirty socks. No cascading piles of books; no magazines; no overflowing boxes of jewellery or tide-marked glasses of water.
I crossed to the bed, and carefully pulled open the drawer of the closest bedside table. It contained a pair of Sony headphones, an iPad and four passports. The cupboard beneath was empty.
I walked round the bed, to the side closest to the window, and this time I had to tug hard to open the drawer. It burst open to reveal earplugs and eye-masks, a charger in a silk bag, a vial of ‘black onion oil’, several boxes of prescription pills, tubs of vitamins – evening primrose and black cabosh. Books were crammed into the cupboard beneath. They were all self-help tomes – Eat, Drink, Run: How I Got Fit Without Going Too Mad and You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Live an Awesome Life. Underneath was a slim volume, Bit Sad Today, but that seemed to be a collection of essays.
A door creaked open downstairs and I heard Bea shout at Max to check the wi-fi. I’d been crouching but I stood up and shut the cupboard and slid the drawer in and made to leave the room. I was aware of suddenly coming back to my senses, of saying, ‘What am I doing?’ to myself. I can only think I had got swept up in my search for some sign of warmth, some indication that the Tilsons had stamped their taste, their personality on the place. Perhaps, as the house had sat empty for so long, I also had a sense of entitlement. Totally misplaced, of course.
Bea was still talking, but in a different voice and with long pauses and sudden giggles; she was on her phone. ‘I know, right? It was fierce.’ I tiptoed to the door and was about to leave, when I noticed through the holes in the wicker wastepaper bin a scrap of grey; it wasn’t empty after all. I reached in – there were some scrunched-up tissues with what looked like blood on them. And a curled-up piece of thin, smokey grey, fabric which I unravelled: a cotton scarf, not square, but long and thin and badly damaged. Several jagged tears, or even cuts, ran along the edge of the fabric, and at one end was a dark reddish stain. But it might wash, I told myself, rubbing the cotten together to test, and when I had a moment, I could take a needle and thread to it. I put it in my pocket. Yes, I suppose looking back, I did already want a little bit of her. But waste not, want not: that was always our mantra growing up. And it’s a habit I confess I have found hard to let go.
‘Oh my God,’ Ailsa cried, seeing me at the kitchen table. ‘You’re still here! I don’t believe it. You poor thing.’ She took off her wedged boots. ‘No Tom?’ She frowned. ‘He told me he’d be home.’ Her expression changed; she looked thoughtful. ‘OK, so he won’t even know I’ve been out. OK. Fine.’ Then she smiled, recovered. ‘I’m so sorry. What must you think of us?’
‘It’s quite all right,’ I said. ‘These things happen.’
She was wearing black tights and a loose charcoal-grey silky dress with a cardigan around her waist; it was slipping, and she pulled it up to re-tie it. ‘The children must be starving. You must be starving.’
‘I’m afraid I cooked,’ I said. ‘Bea and Max were asking for food, so I put in the lasagne. Was that OK?’
‘Did they eat it?’
‘Yes.’
‘All of it? They’re such fussy eaters. Bea keeps trying to be veggie.’ She looked around the room, then she opened the fridge, and the dishwasher, and looked in the sink, as if she didn’t believe me. In fact, the twins had turned their noses up. I’d thrown most of theirs away. I was the one who had taken the lion’s share. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘We didn’t leave any for you.’
‘I didn’t need it anyway.’ She patted her stomach. ‘I’m on a diet. Thanks for washing up. I’m embarrassed, that’s all. You shouldn’t have had to. I’ll just check on the twins.’ She left the room then and I could hear her, clambering between the basement and the front room, harrying them both upstairs. ‘What will Verity think of you, being on screens so long?’ I was putting on my jacket, thinking how both she and Tom seemed to care what I thought of the children, and also if they minded so much about screens, perhaps they should buy a few games, when she walked back in and stood in the doorway. ‘It’s only eight o’clock. It’s not even that late.’ She looked disappointed suddenly, deflated; all dressed up, slightly pissed, no food to eat, the evening stretching ahead of her. ‘Oh well.’ She opened the fridge door and brought out a bottle of white wine, then reached up for a couple of glasses. ‘You’ll have a quick drink, won’t you, before you go?’
I hesitated. I needed to get back to Maudie but the evening stretched long ahead of me. Smiling with what I hoped was devil-may-care abandon, I slipped back onto my chair. ‘Yes. Why not?’
She brought the bottle and the glasses over and sat down next to
me. ‘What a treat,’ she said, pouring it out. ‘You’re always rushing off [not true], so it’s nice to have a chance for a chat.’
For a moment, I thought she would bring up the trees, but her head was clearly elsewhere, and for a few minutes she talked non-stop, about the guy she’d just been up to meet, how it wasn’t exactly an interview, more of an informal chat; how brilliant he was, and unexpected, totally self-made, well, he and his wife, and how massively their company was expanding, and how he’d told her they always needed people, but she wasn’t sure she’d sufficiently impressed, she’d been out of the job market so long; the children, and a few health problems, and elderly parents, both now sadly dead, and how she hadn’t had it easy and how difficult it was being an only child. She’d done her best to impress, though, ‘That’s the thing about me, I always throw myself into things.’
I listened, and made the odd noise. I was interested by the way she spoke. She seemed oblivious to her audience, but occasionally her eyes darted to meet mine, and I think it was an illusion. Now I know her better, I believe it to be a habit she developed as a child, a means of blocking out the silence between warring parents. She got used to people being not so much a sounding board as an echo chamber for her own narrative. Listening, you get the impression half the time she is trying to convince herself.
‘Anyway, it was good to be out. Just to get the Tube into town, to be in bars, surrounded by people, music. You forget what that’s like. I thought, moving back to London, I’d be busier than I am. I’ve tried to sign up for things, but Tom’s so often out, and I do seem to be spending a lot of time on my own, and I’m not very good at it.’
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 5