I looked upstairs, knowing they must have come from the flautist in the top flat. Only he had access to the hall. Anyone else would have needed to ring at the front door. I hesitated a moment. Should I go up there now? Introduce myself? Say thank you? Or should I leave it until later? Get myself showered and half-decent? I looked at the card again, struck by the rightness of the message. Home. How come he could echo my own thoughts so exactly? How come he knew? I grinned, not knowing the answer but recognising that little tingle of anticipatory excitement which occasionally signalled something special in my life.
Nikki came later with the cats, Pinot and Noir. We shut them in the kitchen with saucers of milk and a big fat mountain of boiled fish, and spent lunchtime in a pub in Stamford Hill. Afterwards, Nikki braced herself for a tearful parting from the cats then pushed off. By mid- afternoon I was alone again, buried in the Sunday papers, promising myself an evening with the sander. I’d make a real start on the floorboards. With luck, I could have the front room finished by Christmas.
I was halfway through an article on flamenco dancing when I heard a door closing overhead and the sound of footsteps on the stairs. By the time I got to the hall, he was standing by the front door, his back to me. He was wearing jeans and an old suede jacket and a nice pair of desert boots. His tousled hair was beginning to grey in exactly the way you’d associate with soulful flute music, and when he turned round, the low winter sunshine through the glass panes of the front door rimmed his face in gold.
I thanked him for the flowers and told him it was a lovely gesture. At first, I wondered whether he’d heard me but then he shrugged and made a loose, eloquent movement with his hand and said it was nothing.
‘I hope you’ll be happy here,’ he murmured.
He had the door open now and with the sunshine pouring down the hall it was even harder to see his face but I thought I detected the remains of a bruise under his left eye, the flesh yellowed and purpled. I heard myself asking about milk deliveries, and which day of the week the dustmen called, anything to prolong the conversation. He gave me the name of a local dairy. He spoke softly, taking his time. An educated man, I thought, trying to guess at his age. Forty-five? Fifty?
‘We were listening to you playing the flute yesterday?’ I said. ‘You play wonderfully.’
‘We?’
I nodded, explaining about Nikki. She was my best friend. She was off to South Africa. I paused, expecting a comment. None came.
‘Do you mind cats?’ I asked him.
‘Not at all.’
‘You like them?’
‘Very much.’
‘Thank God for that.’
He looked at me with a quizzical smile, saying nothing. He had a big broad face and the fact that he hadn’t shaved for several days gave it a strange depth. His eyes were slightly sunken, and his nose was a little bent, and I remember thinking it was the kind of face that belonged on the moodier book covers. It spoke of a life lived to the limits, of numberless experiences barely survived. It fascinated me.
I was telling him about Pinot and Noir, how much they meant to Nikki, what a responsibility I’d taken on.
‘It’ll work out,’ he told me. I know it will.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I can see it in your face. You have an aura, an affinity. The cats will know that. They’ll sense it.’
Something in his voice snagged, just the tiniest tremor on the nerve ends, and I asked him what he meant, relieved when he explained about his own cats. He’d adopted two strays. They’d been old and fat and he’d spoiled them to death.
‘Literally.’ He frowned.
‘You mean they died?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Don’t you miss them?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Why don’t you get a couple more?’
‘Good idea.’
We looked at each other for a moment longer and then he stepped out into the sunshine and pulled the door shut behind him. The abruptness of his departure took me a bit by surprise and left me wondering whether, in some subtle way, I’d offended him. Maybe it was uncool to get so effusive about a bunch of flowers. Maybe they should have gone unacknowledged. I frowned, retreating back into my flat, and I went into the front room and stood in the bay window for a full minute, watching him walk to the top of the road. He walked slowly, with a great deliberation, his head bent. My father had been like that, for a year or so before he’d died, and I found myself revising my estimate of his age. Definitely fifty. Probably older. Nice, though, in that mysterious, rather enticing way that goes with the unexpected and the unusual.
Christmas came and went - I spent most of it with my mother - and over the next month or so my new neighbour and I saw less of each other than you’d probably imagine. For one thing, I’d become maniacally busy at work, filling in for another girl called Solange who’d got whiplash in a traffic accident and spent hours visiting some far-flung chiropractor. This, oddly enough, turned out to be a blessing. My computer skills are pretty good and the stuff they gave me - booking contracts and production schedules - got churned out quicker than usual with the result that I began to lose my bimbo image. The last thing that Brendan Quayle would ever do was take me seriously but there were a couple of occasions when yours truly dug him out of nasty corners and the little notes he took the trouble to send me afterwards seemed genuinely grateful.
With my usual insight, it had taken me the best part of my first month to realise that Brendan was in fact married to the other partner in the company, a savage blonde called Sandra Merricks, and the more I saw of her, the more I understood Brendan’s incessant womanising. The extravagant plays he made for me, and for more or less anyone else in a skirt, were obviously pleas for help. How else could he survive a marriage to someone who’d long ago abandoned real life for the tyranny of the Sage spreadsheet?
We were friends enough by now for me occasionally to say yes to the constant invitations for meals or a drink, and over a bowl of noodles in mid January he dropped his guard long enough for me to glimpse a little of the bewilderment that lay behind.
‘When we go public,’ he told me, ‘I’ll be worth nearly three million quid. I’ve done the sums. It’s kosher. No bullshit. Three million quid.’
‘So when does that happen?’
‘It won’t. Not if I’ve got anything to do with it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then we’d be together all the time. It would be like early retirement, only worse. Can you imagine?’
To be frank, I couldn’t, and I told him so. It was a symptom of the kind of company Sandra Merricks ran that everyone, including her husband, put her in the same category as Saddam Hussein or bowel cancer.
‘Wait for the three million,’ I suggested. ‘Then leave her.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Why not?’
He shook his head, refusing to elaborate, and for weeks afterwards, in those milliseconds when I wasn’t doing anything else at Doubleact, I’d try and work out exactly what it was that she had on him. Was it great sex? Some amazing kink of his that only she could unfold? Or was it something altogether more prosaic? Like the fact that he was too terrified of reprisals to even contemplate digging the tunnel? Either way, bottom line, I didn’t much care, and although the pressures at Doubleact were crippling there were parts of me - terrible confession - that were beginning to thrive on eighteen-hour days and a non-stop succession of crises that no one else seemed able to sort out.
Thus it was, for week after week, that I’d get back to Napier Road the wrong side of midnight only to disappear again for nine o’clock next morning. And thus it was that I began to depend on the dozens of little kindness that my neighbour upstairs extended to me.
By now, I knew his name. According to the post that landed on our shared mat every morning, he wa
s a Mr G. Phillips. G. could have meant anything, of course, but the second time we met he introduced himself as Gilbert, extending a hand and offering the lightest touch of flesh on flesh. It was on this occasion that he suggested he might field my milk for me, an offer I was only too happy to accept. The milkman delivered daily, mid-morning, by which time I’d been bent over a Doubleact keyboard for several long hours, but Gilbert retrieved my two pints from the doorstep, keeping it in his fridge upstairs, then leaving it outside my door an hour or so before I returned.
After the milk, he took it upon himself to do the odd bit of shopping - cat food especially - leaving me a list in the hall to which I’d add any little items I might be needing. We’d settle up afterwards, often days afterwards, and I took to inviting him in for coffee while I tried to find the right change. He was very easy to have around - polite, interested, gently amusing - and what I especially liked about him at this stage was the way he preserved the distance between us. Having a neighbour on top of you all the time can be a real pain but it seemed to me that Gilbert had a rare talent for discretion. Almost to the inch, he sensed the exact limits of the friendship we both wanted to establish. He never crowded me. He never intruded. Yet he was always there with those tiny delicate touches on the domestic tiller that can make so much difference. A new brand of Colombian coffee he’d spotted in the delicatessen. A flier for an antiques fair he thought might tickle my fancy. A warning not to bother shopping in Highbury when Arsenal were playing at home. Little things, but so, so important.
The more we meshed our domestic routines in this way, the more intrigued I became about his background. It was the obvious things, really, like work, and money, and family, and friends. How did he make ends meet? How come he never seemed to have a job? How come no one seemed to visit at weekends? I put the questions in a disguised form one Saturday morning. We were drinking coffee in the front room after I’d hung a new pair of curtains.
‘It must be hard getting work as a musician,’ I mused. ‘I know how tough the competition can be.’
‘Work?’ Gilbert savoured the word, as if it belonged to a language he didn’t entirely understand.
‘Yes. I thought you must play for a living.’
‘No, not at all. In fact never.’
I waited for him to elaborate. When nothing happened, I tried another tack.
‘Did you learn as a child? Were you taught, you know, properly?’
‘Of course.’
‘With a view to…’ I shrugged,’.… playing in an orchestra? Or a jazz band? Or by yourself, as a soloist?’
‘By myself.’ He nodded. ‘Yes.’
There was a long silence. I’d noticed that this was a habit of his, pausing a conversation at a place that intrigued him, or made him think, or perhaps even puzzled him. He seemed totally unembarrassed by silence, and that I rather liked. After the clamour and madness of another week at Doubleact, silence was a godsend.
Finally, he asked whether his playing bothered me. I told him it didn’t. On the contrary, I liked it very much.
‘Even late at night? After you’ve got in?’
‘Even then.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Not at all.’
He was studying me carefully.
‘Some people hate it,’ he said. ‘Your predecessor, for instance.’
‘The man who used to live here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he . . ‘ I shrugged, ‘…. protest?’
‘Worse than that.’
‘You had words?’
‘Worse still.’
I watched his long, bony fingers stray to his face, and I remembered the fading bruise I’d noticed when we first met.
‘You’re telling me he hit you?’
‘Yes.’
He lowered his voice, describing the encounter. There’d been trouble before. The man used to hammer on his ceiling with the end of a billiard cue, the slightest noise, anything. Playing the flute had been the last straw. The attack, when it came, had been unprovoked. They’d met in the hall. He’d been carrying the billiard cue.
‘Smack.’
Gilbert nodded, pale and wide-eyed, driving his fist into his open palm. Then he did it again, and his shoulders sagged at the memory, and his head went down, and for a moment I really thought he was crying. I moved closer to him, meaning to help, but he reached out, fending me off. Like this, vulnerable, he looked about twelve.
‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘It must have been terrible.’
He nodded, his fingertips back on his face, tracing the ridge of bone beneath his eye.
‘Did you go to the police?’
‘I…couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘He told me…’ he began to blink, then shook his head, ‘… he frightened me, Julie.’
He’d never used my name like that before. I patted his hand. It felt cold to the touch.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘He’s gone now.’
‘And you really like the music?’
‘Of course.’
He left shortly afterwards, and the music - when it came - was sweeter than ever.
My mother’s birthday is February 4th. Spending it alone, after my father’s death, would have been miserable and so my brother and I arranged a surprise weekend for her. My brother runs a pub on the Isle of Wight. On the Friday night, I arranged to take the train down to Petersfield. On the Saturday, mum and I would drive to Portsmouth and ship across to the island. On the Sunday, her birthday, we’d celebrate.
The only problem was what to do about the cats. My mother’s allergic to them and my brother keeps a huge Alsatian. For most of the previous week I’d wondered about boarding them out while I was away but doing that seemed a shame, especially since they’d both finally settled in the flat. I was still no closer to a solution when I heard a tap on the door. It was Thursday morning. For once, thanks to a mid-series’ production lull, I didn’t have to be at Doubleact until half past ten.
I opened the door. Gilbert was standing in the hall, holding a white paper sack. Some days he seemed more cheerful, more together, than usual. Today, he was radiant.
‘It’s called Science Diet,’ he said.
I peered at the sack. Science Diet is hi-tech cat food. Gilbert had happened across the stuff at the local pet shop. I was to see what Pinot and Noir would make of it.
I thanked him, taking the sack. Then the obvious occurred to me.
‘I’m going away this weekend. It’s my mother’s birthday.’
I told him about the arrangements, then I mentioned the cats.
If I gave him the keys to the flat, might he pop in and see they had enough to eat? Change their water? All that?
He nodded.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course I will.’
The weekend, apart from the weather, was a huge success. My mother, who hates getting her feet wet, even deigned to pull on an old duffle coat and a pair of wellies and tramp the path across Tennyson Down to the Needles. By Sunday night, very late, I was back in London, glowing with fresh air and alcohol.
Next morning, early, I was on the bus to work. After the usual succession of crises, I returned to Napier Road, stopping at an off- licence to pick up a bottle of chilled Chablis. From what little I’d seen, the cats were in wonderful nick. I owed Gilbert, and maybe the Science Diet, a big thank you.
Gilbert was even quieter than usual. We sat in the kitchen with the bottle between us while I told him how my brother’s kids had got together and bought their granny an enormous box of fudge. Their present, I’m convinced, had been the highspot of her weekend.
‘She was speechless,’ I said, ‘for once.’
I picked up the bottle and emptied the remains into Gilbert’s glass. I could tell from the slightly absent expression on h
is face that he hadn’t been listening. He toyed with the glass, lifting it in a silent toast when I. thanked him again for looking after the cats. I was saying something nonsensical about the Science Diet when - unusually - he interrupted. He’d produced my flat keys from the pocket of his jeans, laying them carefully beside my glass.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘but over the weekend, I slept in your bed.’
I stared at him, chilled to the bone, not believing what I’d just heard.
‘You did what?’
‘I slept in your bed.’ He smiled reflectively. ‘And it was lovely.’
I spent that night on a mattress on the floor in the front room, dreading the footsteps that might descend from the flat upstairs, trying to sort out exactly how I felt about Gilbert’s little bombshell. At first, more in hope than expectation, I thought I must have misunderstood him, but after he’d commented on how nice and soft my new pillows were, and what an unusual pattern I’d chosen for the bottom sheet, I knew he hadn’t made it up. At the very least, he’d been poking around my bedroom, and that - in itself - was sinister enough.
Gilbert, on the other hand, seemed completely untroubled by what he’d done, as if it were utterly routine to borrow a stranger’s bed, and the more I thought about it, the more inclined I was to give him the benefit of the doubt. We’d been alone together more times than I could count yet not once had he made a move on me. On the contrary, he’d been an absolutely model neighbour, kind, thoughtful, forever inquiring whether there was anything he could do to help. In these and so many other ways, he’d tucked me in and made me feel at home, and if the fault lay anywhere, then maybe it lay with me. I’d been over- friendly, over-trusting. I hadn’t realised quite how ambiguous some of my gestures had been. In this light, giving him the keys to the flat might have seemed like an open invitation. Share my life. Make yourself comfortable. Help yourself to everything. Whatever.
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