by Rebecca Tope
That wasn’t going to happen now.
Scott peered through the window of the shed when Harry failed to offer to unlock it for him. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Looks to be a good size. Is that one of those brushcutter things? I always fancied one of those.’
‘I got it for the bits the mower can’t cope with,’ said Harry. ‘I could leave it for you, if you like. I won’t need it again.’
‘Looks good as new,’ said Scott, suddenly showing a much more human aspect. ‘I’d pay you the proper price for it.’
‘As you like,’ shrugged Harry.
In the house again, the couple exchanged a few words, showing no inclination to exclude Harry from their deliberations.
‘I think this will be ideal,’ said Scott. ‘I don’t know why you were dithering.’
‘I thought it might be a bit small. And the road …’ defended the wife. ‘We’ll be able to hear the traffic.’
‘We’ll replace the windows, of course.’ He looked around the sitting room. ‘And it might be an idea to move the staircase. That way we could make another room upstairs.’
Move the staircase? Harry almost screamed aloud. How could such a thing even be possible? He made a choked, snorting sound, which attracted two very different responses. The wife expressed silent sympathy, while Scott just smiled. ‘It’s not as hard as you might think,’ he said. ‘If it opened into that second bedroom, we could turn the existing landing into a room – do you see? It takes a certain sort of imagination, I suppose,’ he finished immodestly.
‘I see,’ said Harry weakly. He didn’t see at all. Where would the bottom of the staircase be, he wondered. How very odd the hallway would look without it. He closed his eyes against the images of devastation. It wouldn’t be his problem, he told himself. He’d have a nice town house somewhere, easy to maintain and close to the shops. It was all his own fault. He had brought it on himself. This was his punishment and he must take it like a man.
‘Well, I think you’ve got a sale,’ said Scott heartily, determined not to recognise the pain before his eyes. People made their own destiny, in his opinion. Harry had put the house on the market, after all. Why should he be sorry when the logical result took place? It was the same with his wife. She’d been more than happy to marry him and have all those babies. It was exactly what she’d said she wanted. Why did she sometimes seem so gloomy about it these days? It was past his comprehension.
Harry took a deep breath, fighting the sudden vertigo that gripped him. Was it really happening? Would he pocket the hundreds of thousands of meaningless pounds and walk off into the sunset to enjoy his final years in futile comfort? It made him angry to think of it. Angry? He paused, listening to himself. Where was the guilt that had impelled the move?
Ah – there it was, sitting like a malevolent spider in his middle. It hadn’t gone away, after all. He was in its thrall, and there was no escape.
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
Scott laughed. ‘Don’t you want to know what I’m offering? I’m knocking twenty grand off your asking price, given that there’s so much work to be done on it. That’s generous,’ he added, pushing his face forward to emphasise the point. ‘You’d be very lucky to get that much from anyone else.’
‘I expect I would. Thank you,’ he repeated. ‘What happens now?’
‘I’ll phone the agent tomorrow. We’d be looking at completion by Michaelmas.’
Michaelmas? When was that? Harry had a dim memory of his father referring to the date as one by which rent must be paid and accounts balanced. It was never mentioned these days. Then he remembered the daisies of the same name, which flowered in the autumn. ‘That’s September, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Twenty-ninth. That gives us over two months. Should be time enough, wouldn’t you say? No chain, as I understand it.’
‘That sounds an awfully long time,’ said Harry worriedly. Another two months in the cottage struck him as unbearably long. ‘Couldn’t you make it quicker?’
Scott sucked his lower lip for a moment. ‘Sooner might be awkward. Cash-wise, I mean. I’d lose by it, you see.’
Once again, Harry did not see at all. The man was a banker or stockbroker or fund manager or something equally incomprehensible. His instincts were going to be to maximise investments and juggle interest rates and play all kinds of unwholesome games with numbers. And good luck to him, Harry thought, with a glance at the wife, whose eyes had grown round with something that definitely wasn’t excitement.
‘Well, perhaps I could move out before that,’ he said.
Scott tilted his head like a disappointed schoolmaster. ‘Really? Before you get the money? That would be very rash. What if I change my mind? Nothing’s sure, you know, until the contracts are signed. My advice to you would be—’
‘Come on, Scott. Let him do what he wants.’ The voice was startlingly firm. The wife, the dithery, unhappy little wife, had spoken. ‘You won’t change your mind, will you? Let’s just shake hands on it, and get home.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I want to see how Laurie’s cold is. I know he had a temperature when we left.’
‘All right, then,’ said the husband affably. ‘Mission accomplished. We’ll soon have this place licked into shape. I always wanted a pad in the Cotswolds. Well done, kid. You did well to find it for us.’
Harry watched them go, his heart sagging unhappily in his chest. It was all his own fault, he reminded himself.
Thea was on the doorstep just before ten-thirty next morning, minus her spaniel. She was eyeing the For Sale sign by the gate when Harry opened the door. ‘Funny how they always make you feel sad, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I suppose nobody really enjoys change.’
That gave him pause. He had never regarded himself as a person resistant to change. There was nothing virtuous or admirable in such an attitude. And Thea herself had just undergone a very large change in her life. ‘I’m not sure that’s the problem,’ he said slowly.
‘So what is?’ she asked directly.
He looked at her, matching the reality with the memory of a woman not seen for three years. She was small and slim and beautiful as he remembered her. The style of her haircut had changed, and something about her clothes struck him as different. Hadn’t she been ever so slightly scruffy before? Now she was neat and clean, although the garments did not look new. He gave this a moment’s thought, concluding that it had been the disarray and personal neglect of grief in that earlier encounter, in which hair was not cared for and shoes were not brushed. She was recovered, then, insofar as a person ever truly recovers.
‘You look wonderful,’ he told her.
‘Thanks. Are we going in? Or shall we sit out in the garden? I do love your garden.’
‘The kitchen,’ he decreed, trying to ignore the stab of regret at the mention of his garden. ‘Coffee in the kitchen.’
‘Okay.’ She was giving him the same close inspection that he had given her. He turned away, trusting her to follow him down the hallway and into the room at the back.
‘The new people are going to move the staircase,’ he said, almost too softly for her to hear him. ‘Can you believe it?’
‘What? That’s ludicrous,’ she said. ‘I never heard of such a thing.’
‘I suppose anything’s possible,’ he said.
‘I need you to explain the whole business. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Where are you moving to? What about your sister?’ She laughed. ‘I’ll never forget your sister.’
‘Nobody does.’
‘Well?’
He postponed his replies until the coffee was poured and a fruity farmhouse cake was sliced and proffered. He was mentally rehearsing his opening lines, unable to judge what to explain and what to leave out. Inside him somewhere a juddering panic was building. What had he been thinking of, to invite this lovely inquisitive woman into his tainted home? Didn’t he know that she would extract the truth from him? Had confession been his intention all along?
‘Are you ill?’ she a
sked with devastating directness. ‘Is that it?’
‘Oh no. There’s nothing the matter with me. Not physically, anyway.’
‘So what? You’ll have to tell me, you know. Isn’t that why you phoned me?’
‘I’m not sure. I was just asking myself the same thing.’
‘Come on, Harry. It can’t be anything too terrible.’ Then she caught herself, with a quick little shake of her head. ‘That’s a stupid thing to say,’ she reproached herself. ‘Of course we both know that things can be absolutely terrible. They come out of the clear blue sky at us, don’t they. Just when we’re minding our own business.’
He had no advance warning of his reaction. The flood of tears was at first bewildering. He couldn’t think when he had last cried. It felt as if it hadn’t happened for about fifty years. The heat and damp and impossibility of control were overwhelming. He could hear the small explosions emerging from inside his face and marvelled that he could make such sounds.
Thea laid a gentle hand on his arm and waited.
‘I wasn’t minding my own business, though,’ he said thickly, after a few minutes. ‘I was going where I should not have gone. And I killed. I did a wicked, horrible thing, and it won’t leave me alone. I can’t stay here any longer. I can’t get it out of my mind while I live here.’
‘Who did you kill?’ She looked out of the window at the garden, as if knowing the answer. And yet, she couldn’t know – not the horror of it, the blood and screams and bone-deep guilt and sorrow.
‘You might not understand,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t think anyone could understand. It was just one small unimportant life. One of countless that die every day. You’ll think I’ve gone insane.’
‘An animal,’ she realised.
‘An animal,’ he agreed. ‘Whose deaths we seldom even mark as of any meaning. I never marked them myself. I have witnessed hundreds of little deaths, been responsible for some of them, eaten their flesh and worn their skins. And then, as you say – from a clear blue sky, it all changed. It was like having a blindfold torn off.’
‘Because you did it yourself, without intending to. What was it?’
He blinked away the last of the tears, the emotion too deep for weeping. ‘I was using my new brushcutting machine on a patch of nettles and brambles at the end of the garden. I wasn’t doing it carefully. Just charging at it like a brainless old bull. I couldn’t really see what was in front of me, with the flying debris and dust. I didn’t even hear the scream at first. It was the blood that alerted me. It sprayed all over the machine.’ He felt the contents of his stomach heaving upwards, his throat burning with disgust and shame.
‘You killed a hedgehog,’ she finished for him. ‘Any other creature would run away, but the poor thing just rolled into a ball and hoped for the best.’
‘Just as they do in the road,’ he nodded.
‘I’m guessing it didn’t die right away.’
‘Two legs were sliced off, and a great gash down its side,’ he said thickly. ‘I picked it up, but the prickles hurt my hands, so I dropped it again. Its little face – have you ever looked closely at their faces? They’re desperately sweet. And I dropped it because it pricked me. It died, but not right away. I did nothing to assuage its suffering. I see that pathetic wounded thing every time I close my eyes.’
‘And you think by moving away that’s going to change?’
‘It will be better,’ he said with certainty.
‘I hope so.’ She looked dubious. ‘Though it might take more than that.’
He gave her a look. ‘You’re going to suggest I open a hedgehog sanctuary – atone in some way. I thought of it. But it’s too big a matter for that. I have come to abhor the whole human race, you see. There’s a bottomless pit of cruelty and exploitation and unimaginable guilt. I could so easily have left that wild area to its own devices. I should have known there were creatures living in there, whose well-being I ought to have cared about. Do you know – if I could be granted one wish, it would be to reduce the intelligence of human beings to about one per cent of what it is. The world would be so much better if we could manage that.’
‘The world is what it is,’ she said. ‘That sounds trite, but it’s true.’
‘And I intend to tread upon it as lightly as I can. I shall find a little house in a row in a town, eat no meat and perhaps find my way to some kind of acceptance. I shall have plenty of money, at least. Perhaps I’ll find some constructive use for it.’ He gave a wan smile. ‘The new people might have a dog. Man’s accomplice in subduing and tormenting other species.’
She sighed. ‘I wish you luck, Harry. I fear you’re going to need it.’
Little Boy Lost
Stephanie was ten and a half, fond of Studio Ghibli films, drawing and Thea’s dog Hepzibah. She tried to like Pokémon stuff for Timmy’s sake, but that was more than she could manage. The best thing about her dad marrying Thea was that the dog lived with them now. She was there in the kitchen every morning, curled in her basket, waiting for someone to come and talk to her. Stephanie was always first down, to enjoy a private cuddle and a little walk in the garden before anybody else got up. She had always wanted a dog of her own from when she was about three, but Dad always said they didn’t have time to look after it properly, with her mum so ill, and the job so unpredictable.
The move to the new house had been exciting, at first, although Timmy didn’t think so. He had wet the bed every night for the first month, and cried a lot. The people at the new school had called him a wimp and a freak, because his dad was an undertaker. Then at last the summer holiday had started and everything got a lot better, right from the very first day.
It was now the fifth day, and the strange laziness of not finding school clothes, arguing about the packed lunches, scrambling into the car, was still a novelty. Thea was painting the house, quite slowly, letting Stephanie and Timmy help, even though you could see she didn’t want to. There was wallpaper all the way up the stairs, which she said had to be pulled off, so they did that mostly. ‘I like wallpaper,’ said Stephanie, rather to her own surprise. ‘Can I have some in my room?’
‘Surely not,’ said Thea. ‘Nobody has wallpaper any more. It’s expensive.’
She was always saying things were expensive, even though they were nowhere near as poor as they had been before. Dad was busy with the burials, and people kept asking him to give talks, and Thea had people living in her other house, who paid her.
‘I like it,’ Stephanie insisted. ‘Dad’ll let me have some, you see.’ She tried not to do that too much, but the fact remained that Dad was her parent, and Thea was not. He obviously had the final word on things.
The summer holidays were a problem for Thea, as anyone could see. She couldn’t just go off anywhere she liked, because of the kids. They didn’t have anybody else they could go to, unless somebody took them all the way down to Somerset, where they could stay with Maggs. Timmy often asked if they could do that. He missed Maggs a lot. He wanted to play with her baby, and tell her what was happening in his Pokémon comics. Thea would only listen to about one minute of Pokémon talk before she just stopped taking any notice. It was very rude.
But the Maggs idea was never taken seriously. ‘Where would you sleep?’ Thea always said.
‘On the sofa, or the floor,’ Stephanie replied impatiently. ‘It’s summer. We could have a tent outside.’ She had once slept in a tent when her friend Donna asked her to go on a holiday to Dartmoor with her and her mum. It had been wonderful.
Dad had laughed. ‘In Maggs’s tiny garden? Where would you pitch a tent?’
‘It’s not tiny,’ said Timmy. ‘She’s got blackcurrants and potatoes growing in it.’
‘And no space for anything else,’ said Dad.
All this frustrating stuff cluttered her mind now, as she watched Hepzie go round the garden. The one here wasn’t nearly as big as the Somerset one, although the house inside had more rooms. Everything was different. There were big cupboards, like
little rooms, here. The windows wouldn’t open unless a strong person heaved them upwards, using curved metal handles. Stephanie really didn’t like the windows. Two of the stairs creaked, even when a small person like Timmy trod on them. The telephone was in a square little hall at the foot of the stairs, and when it rang, it made an echo all round the house. When you went outside, you couldn’t tell what time of day it was by the passing traffic. At North Staverton, there were busy times every morning and afternoon. In the road here, nothing ever went past, because it didn’t go anywhere. It just stopped at a field, which was a stupid thing for a road to do.
‘Morning!’ came Thea’s voice from the back door. ‘Looks like another nice day.’
Stephanie lifted her face to the sky, only now noticing how blue it was. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
‘What did we say we might do?’
This was surely a trick question, the sort of baby talk that adults often went in for. Checking to see if the kids had been listening properly, was how it felt. ‘Can’t remember,’ she said.
‘Neither can I,’ said Thea with a laugh. ‘We’ll have to think all over again.’
‘Dad’s got a funeral at twelve. We should polish the vehicle.’ The children never called it a hearse, although Stephanie knew this was the proper word for it. She and Timmy were expert at buffing the chrome to a gleaming finish and washing off any streaks of mud. The vehicle was big and expensive and very special. In North Staverton, they hadn’t needed anything like it, because the burial field was right beside the house and people carried the coffins. Now it was nearly half a mile to the field, and that was too far.