His mother put her head round the door. ‘Tea or coffee?’ she said. ‘We’ve got real beans and one of those Italian machines. Claire’s checked online, and she’s allowed one cup a day.’
Lily
Somewhere in London, a charming, affable, well-educated, well-travelled, articulate, outgoing, talented, independent, attentive and hung-over man opened his eyes on the new day and gingerly turned his throbbing head to look at yesterday’s blind date sleeping beside him. What a bore she had turned out to be. In five minutes, he’d be well-dressed and out of here.
Every date had gone bad lately. That disfigured witch who’d tricked him into buying her champagne must have put a hex on him or something.
Mrs Jones let the dog off the lead on the Common and sent a chewed tennis ball scudding across the litter left by yesterday’s picnickers. Back in her kitchen, the family were grunting their way through bowls of cornflakes, their eyes glued to their smartphones, but she preferred to be out in the world.
The dog dropped the ball at her feet and she threw it again, shading her eyes against the morning sun. He lolloped off but got distracted by a boxer pup and a chihuahua who were disputing a stick, their owners yelling at them to desist. By the time she’d fetched the ball herself and had a chat with the puppy’s owner about the silliness of dogs, it was nearly eight o’clock, her small slice of freedom all too soon gone.
She re-attached the lead – ‘Playtime over. No peace for the wicked’ – and set course for home, catching her breath, because here came the woman with the birthmark, striding across the grass towards her, pulling not a dog but a suitcase.
It was only last night she had seen her on YouTube. ‘Wow, Mum, come and look at this,’ her daughter had yelled. ‘It’s Raspberry-face from over the back fence.’
She’d insisted her daughter explain what she meant by ‘Raspberry-face’, delivered her a lecture about respect for people with differences, and told her off for spying from her bedroom. But she’d watched the clip herself too, several times. It showed, not only her neighbour, but also dishy Quentin from Tomorrow’s Tycoon hugging a young man, and Mariella whispering that this was Quentin’s camera-shy brother. It was the fellow she’d seen here last Saturday, laughing and clinking glasses with her neighbour. He had her by the wrist in the internet clip, she looked more and more cross, and finally she broke free and ran off.
The dog halted, sniffing a cola can. The woman with the birthmark was approaching and passing, offering a radiant smile. ‘Lovely morning,’ said Mrs Jones to cover her stare.
‘Yes, isn’t it,’ Lily replied.
At Clapham Junction, Lily chose a seat in the near empty carriage and smiled through the window at the commuters crammed on the opposite platform.
She’d slept badly and woken early, unsettled and cross with herself. She had misunderstood Richard, misjudged him, been completely wrong to get angry. Why be unnerved by a few cameras – what harm could they do her? He’d been brave to stop running, to turn and face what he feared, to try to make her face it too.
Giving up on sleep, she’d got up and gone to the laptop, daring to look on YouTube for Tomorrow’s Tycoon. And yes, as she’d feared, there she was, struggling to free herself, running away, and it was she who had looked like an idiot, not Richard, standing there courageously silent.
Like an idiot yes, but not too bad otherwise, even full screen. ‘What a beautiful woman,’ Quentin said. She’d listened a dozen times to him saying it, and he wasn’t being snide – he meant it. She looked fine in the blaze of TV light. More than fine. She’d never seen that before, never discounted the splodge on her cheek.
Richard discounted it – she’d noticed that from the start. She couldn’t remember feeling so unselfconscious with anyone except her grandparents. She really liked that, and lots more, about Richard. More than liked, although – slow down – she mustn’t be impetuous. Was she still suffering from post-Martin stress disorder? Karen from Martin’s work was emailing all the gossip to her. He’d quit some hell-hole of a bedsit to shack up with Tamara. They’d given up pretending to arrive at work separately and started walking in together, Tamara simpering and smirking, Martin scowling and growling, daring anyone to snigger. Not a happy bunny, wrote Karen. An idiot to leave YOU. Which warmed Lily, and amused her, and had her telling herself she had no wish whatsoever to see Martin again. Whereas Richard...
‘I love you,’ he’d said as he’d caught up with her from the pub. A reckless, mad thing to say, but it had felt right at the time, more than right, wonderful. That was what she remembered this morning, not why she’d been angry. Then his text had pinged into her phone. Are you ok? I couldn’t be sorrier. Hope we can talk. Want to explain. She had rung him straight back, cut short all explanation, said she understood everything, asked what was he doing today?
‘Café. Then planning a trip to India. A real one, I promise.’
Just hearing his voice gave her goose bumps. He sounded so much like his father, she realised. ‘I was a cow and a coward to run,’ she’d said. ‘Shall we start over? Shall I come back again?’
His delight swept her worries away. ‘I can take today off, and stay the weekend,’ she’d told him. ‘May I help in the café?’
It was stupid and premature to talk of love, she warned herself now as the train began to move. She really must not, nor must Richard. They’d known each other only a week, and half of that time they’d been brother and sister. But she liked him. His lovely voice, his warmth, his sense of humour, his independent spirit, his take on the world, and yes – admit it – his arms around her, the welcoming smell of him.
He was attractive and sexy.
She was looking forward to seeing him.
She was going to give it a chance.
The train gathered speed, through suburban stations, past back gardens, shops, office blocks, cemeteries and small stretches of woodland and grass, burrowing through shopping centres and gliding over viaducts. Beneath a brick arch, as it whipped past overhead, the man with a van drove towards his next assignment without a thought in his head of Lily Caruthers.
Harry
‘His punishment is neither your fault nor your concern. We expect our operatives to come under pressure from spirits. It is what they are trained to encounter. It was Pickles 64123’s clear duty to resist you. He has shown himself unsuitable for this level of responsibility. I am here to inform you that you will be assigned a new mentor when your case comes up for review in eleven-point-five months’ time.’
Barely looking at me, the woman speaks as though stringing together pre-programmed sentences. She gives off the same golden glow as my little curly-haired saviour and looks barely out of her teens. She has on silver sandals, and her slim, pert-breasted figure is draped in a banally angelic white-toga affair. She stands in my hall, her eyes vacant, her pretty arms motionless at her sides, while behind her the stairway sweeps up to the first floor like an invitation to heaven. I ought to fancy her, but I don’t. Scotty’s supervisor is exactly as he described her: a jobsworth with an eye on advancement, parroting unexamined nonsense.
‘But where’s the heart in all that?’ I say.
Briefly her smooth forehead puckers. I’m not sure if she disapproves or is merely trying to access the correct response from the manual. ‘A spirit’s fate depends on the heart that he or she had in life,’ she says finally.
I had feared, as she began listing Scotty’s misdemeanours, that she’d come to throw me back into hell, but it seems I’m to be allowed to continue as I am. My son Richard found the cat and carried him and me home. Perhaps the universe cannot undo itself.
I was here in the hall when she materialised because I’ve been contemplating the Hockney. Not for its ever-pleasurable and reassuring image of myself, soon to be lost to me, but for its portrayal of my darling Henry V, who once sat so plumply and proudly alive at my feet. His painted green eyes gleam at me still. How I love him. Please Henry, be well.
‘I’ve grown a hea
rt in the afterlife,’ I tell Scotty’s supervisor. ‘My cat, my son, my neighbour, my guardian angel. I care about all of them now. Doesn’t that count just a little?’
I may as well put my case to a robot. Again there’s a short pause before she responds. ‘I trust,’ she says, ‘that Pickles 64123 explained during his introductory interview with you that the first level of attainment is emotional investment, the second is letting go.’
What can she mean? Dimly I remember some such words from Scotty on that terrifying journey in a van full of corpses. From his mouth they sounded softer, more poignant and profound, less of a non sequitur.
‘Did he make sure that you understood that?’
‘Yes, yes, he did, very clearly.’ I mustn’t land him in worse trouble, although I understand nothing. But then, maybe I do understand? I’m suddenly excited. ‘Have I done it then – achieved the first level of attainment?’
She looks at me pityingly. ‘Your life was your chance to do that,’ she says. ‘It’s time now to accept and let go.’
She has me feeling spiteful. ‘Did you come up the same way as Scotty?’ I ask.
She looks blank.
‘The same way as Pickles, I mean. Alive, then a spirit?’
‘I don’t see what relevance this has to your case, but yes of course, we all did.’
‘So you must have had a heart once? Such a pity you lost the use of it.’
Her face twitches in a brief frown. She regards me for a moment before her gaze loses focus. ‘Today’s interview is terminated,’ she says, and she begins to fade out, leaving me none the wiser about poor Scotty’s fate.
Next to arrive is Mrs Butley, who steps over the threshold billowing smoke from her nostrils and dropping keys and cigarettes into her bag. ‘Tommy,’ she calls as she wheezes up the stairs. I follow her up and then down again, cheered by her disgruntlement. ‘Where the hell’s the damn cat when he’s needed?’
In the garden room she finds the cat carrier and props open its lid. Then she unlocks the French windows and steps outside, banging a spoon on a tin and calling, ‘Tom, Tom, Tommy.’
Behind me another key turns in the lock, and I’m flinging myself at Simon, relieved to see him, anxious for news.
‘Would you credit it?’ says Mrs Butley, dropping ash as she emerges from the garden room. ‘Just when Cat Rescue are coming, the pesky animal has to go walkabout.’
Simon closes the front door. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d be worried. The poor creature was run over last night. He’s at the vet, in a very bad way. They don’t hold out much hope.’
His eyes glisten with emotion – he always had a soft spot for my Henry – but Mrs Butley is not to be moved. ‘Typical,’ she says. ‘All my trouble finding someone to take him, and I shall have to stand them down now.’ She’s grumbling her way up to the living room, where the landline phone is.
Simon stays in the hall, where he and I gaze sorrowfully together at Henry by Hockney. He blows his nose when he hears Mrs Butley returning. ‘I do have one piece of good news,’ he says mournfully.
‘Oh yes?’
‘This painting doesn’t have to be sold, after all. I emailed a photograph to the Royal Shakespeare Company, with dimensions and so on, and they rang back at once to put a halt on the sale. Harry left plenty enough for his new Dorchester theatre, it turns out, and they think the portrait will look nice in the foyer.’
I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Why did I not think of it myself while I lived? I should have earmarked the Hockney for exactly this purpose. Rather than haunt this empty shell of a house, I can follow Harry and Henry V to Dorchester and spend eternity in my very own most wonderful and glorious Whittaker Theatre!
‘Nice for some,’ snorts Mrs Butley.
‘“Rather splendid” was their actual phrase,’ Simon says.
‘An effing disgrace is what it is,’ she comes back at him. ‘The conceited old bugger. A fortune to throw about, and what does he do with it? A sodding great memorial to himself, and not a penny for the likes of you and me.’
The ungrateful hag. She’s had a thousand pounds and several bucket-bagloads of small lootables.
Simon sighs. ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I’m coming round to the idea of the theatre. I agree his motives were grossly egotistical, but so many people are going to enjoy it, Mrs B, and it will give work to actors and so on. Acting was Harry’s life, after all.’
There’s no persuading her. ‘Charity begins at home,’ she says with the air of someone inventing the idiom. She’s as grossly egotistical as I am, which thought carries with it the pleasing corollary that her experience of the afterlife may be not unlike my own.
My dear, forgiving, loving and understanding friend Simon spreads his arms, smiling. ‘They’re thinking of copying this hall and staircase for the foyer design,’ he says, ‘to give the portrait the right setting.’
Genius! I take a spin round the hall, looping the loop twice past the brilliant Hockney. My dear Royal Shakespeare Company, a million thanks. I was never more inspired than to leave my money and the guardianship of my memory to you.
Three years later
‘In other news, the immortal actor Harry Whittaker will be remembered tonight when the new theatre he bequeathed to the nation opens in Dorchester. Over now to our arts correspondent, Gerry Matterson.’
‘Thank you, Angela. I’m in Dorchester, gazing up at the splendid new Whittaker Theatre. As you can probably hear, there’s a real buzz outside. So many celebrities arriving, there should be a red carpet...’
Richard
‘I’ve been telling them they ought to rename the café “Breakfast@Tiffany’s”,’ the soup woman was saying to Simon. ‘Don’t you agree? Like the film, but with the twirly “at” sign.’
Simon glanced over his shoulder and met Richard’s eyes. ‘Ingenious,’ he said.
‘They won’t listen to me, though,’ she persisted, ‘so tell me honestly, what do you think, Mr Foyle?’
‘Please, you must call me Simon.’
Simon, heroically burdened with Richard’s mother on one arm and the soup woman on the other, led the way up Dorchester High Street. Richard intervened, smiling firmly. ‘You have great ideas – keep them coming, Veronica. It’s a wonderful name, but the trouble is, it doesn’t fit with the food we do.’
‘It’s up to you,’ he’d murmured to Tiffany yesterday when Veronica’s back was turned. ‘You’re the best judge of what name will bring customers in.’
She had shaken her head. ‘It’s a rubbish suggestion – we’re not a greasy spoon, and if I’ve not heard of some old movie, who else will have done?’
‘It’s an awesome idea,’ she chipped in now, from behind Richard, ‘but we’re mainly coffee and cakes, that’s the problem.’
‘And soup,’ Richard added. ‘That was such a winning idea of yours. We haven’t looked back since the day we put soup on the menu.’
They were making slow progress up the high street. Little Harry had so far insisted on toddling all the way from the car park, refusing to be carried or pushed in his buggy, and every now and then the party had to halt to let Claire catch up.
Richard squeezed Lily’s hand. The pace suited her, heavily and radiantly pregnant beside him. There was no hurry and nothing to worry about. The invitations said arrive any time between five and six. He turned to review the rest of the procession. Tiffany just behind in her rainbow-coloured minidress and yellow Doc Martens, her hair pink as ever. Her new boyfriend, Zed, had dyed his for the occasion, electric green with blue highlights that dazzled Richard’s eyes in the afternoon sun. Beyond them Veronica’s husband and daughter with Quentin. Lastly, way down the hill, straggling in the rear, Claire and little Harry.
Spring flowers bloomed in the window boxes of the pub they were passing, where the locals spilled onto the pavement, pints in hand. The drinkers’ eyes followed them. They were gawping at Lily as ever, at Tiffany’s clothes and Zed’s hair. No one spared Que
ntin a glance, Richard noticed. His brother rarely got recognised these days. His hairline was receding and he’d grown a beard to make up for it. He wasn’t too bad a chap, for all his superficial charm and megabucks. They sometimes sank a brotherly pint together in The Hand in Hand, and no one took any notice.
Veronica, with her nose into everything, had brazenly insisted on coming with them today, so Richard, rather mischievously, had invited Maurice along too, offering to kit him out for the occasion and give him a bath. But Maurice had declined with disdain. He had no use for new clothes or inane chatter with luvvies when he had Moby Dick to get on with. He’d spent much of yesterday objecting to the one-day closure and threatening to take his custom elsewhere. When asked for his opinion on ‘Breakfast@Tiffany’s’, he’d growled threateningly that ‘The Eclectic Café’ was a fucking pretentious name, but at least it didn’t make him want to heave.
Veronica wasn’t about to give up. ‘But it would be so brilliantly apt,’ she said, ‘now that Tiffany’s in charge at last. Don’t you think, Simon?’
The café partners had recently become three. Simon, their new backer, was about to open a second Eclectic Café in Brighton in what used to be his antiques shop, and Richard was spending most of his time helping to fit it out and get it off the ground. His South Downs cycle-tour business was taking another great chunk of his time, so Tiffany was running the Worthing café pretty much single-handed again.
‘Nonsense,’ chipped in Richard’s mother. ‘No breakfast. No diamonds. No Holly Golightly.’
‘I’m afraid you’re outvoted, dear lady,’ said Simon.
‘Of course we do breakfasts,’ Veronica said, but she was waving a hand, palm out in front of her face, in defeat.
‘Little Harry looks tired,’ said Lily. ‘How about a piggyback ride from his daddy.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Richard and set off down the hill.
The Posthumous Adventures of Harry Whitaker Page 22