by Jo Verity
His father had turned away and was standing at the sink, staring into the garden. He recognised this strategy. He used it himself when people started speaking their minds.
His mother pushed the hanky into the folded-back cuff of her cardigan. ‘If you really want us to come, we’ll come, won’t we Dad?’ Without waiting for an answer, she stood up, gathering the things off the table into a Co-op carrier bag. His father locked and bolted the back door and they made their way to the car.
Alone in the house, Fay soon completed the outstanding tasks on her list. As she worked, she considered what Isabel might wear to a barbecue but soon abandoned that train of thought. If Isabel wanted to feed people in a garden, the last thing she would do was incinerate sausages and beef burgers. She would hire a marquee and bring in caterers. Probably give her guests ‘themed’ food. Moroccan or Swedish. Black or green. And her outfit would be appropriate to that theme.
Searching through her pre-Nottingham wardrobe, she chose cropped denim trousers and a pale blue tee-shirt. Barbecues were greasy affairs and the whole lot could go in the machine on a forty-degree wash.
The doorbell rang. Jack had his keys and Dylan would come round to the back. Fay glanced at her reflection in the hall mirror and flicked her hair before opening the door. It was Neil Bentley. He was holding a bunch of, what Caitlin scathingly referred to as, ‘garage flowers’ and six cans of lager.
‘I’m not too early am I Mrs Water— Fay?’
‘Neil. No. Not at all. You’re bang on time. Are those for me? Lovely.’ She took the flowers, in their dusty wrapping, and held them to her nose. ‘Mmmm.’ It was almost possible to imagine a scent.
He followed her into the silent kitchen and peered out of the window at the empty garden. ‘I am too early, aren’t I?’ He looked miserable and confused. ‘Shall I go away and come back later?’
‘No, it’s fine. Dylan should be here soon and you can help him get the barbecues going.’ She gave him a tea towel and pointed towards the tray of already sparkling glasses. ‘Could you wipe those for me?’ It was a long while since anyone had done what she instructed, without arguing. Handing him a polythene bag filled with the trimmings from the salad, she tested his willingness a little further. ‘Be a dear and pop these bits in the dustbin for me.’ He smiled, set down his cloth and glass and trotted out to the bin.
When he returned, she noticed how diligently he wiped his feet on the doormat before stepping inside. ‘Any news on the job applications?’ she asked.
‘Well, I haven’t heard anything on either of them. But I see that as a positive sign, don’t you?’
Polite, compliant, tidy and optimistic. Neil Bentley would be an asset to any organisation. ‘And life in general?’
‘There is one problem that I wasn’t anticipating. The landlord wants us out of the house. He’s selling it.’
‘Can he do that?’
‘Yeah. We’re on a month’s notice. At least I’ve got time to look round and sort some accommodation out before all the students get back.’
Jack turned the last few sausages and checked to see what his parents were doing. The sun was fierce and they had dragged their chairs into the corner of the garden, under the ash tree. Caitlin was with them so he could relax for a minute. He was still feeling sick in the pit of his stomach as a result of his mother’s outburst of honesty. Fay’s failure to get on with them had gone on for so many years that he’d accepted it, supposing they would muddle on somehow. Now he had to find a way of persuading her not to treat them like distasteful peasants, without reporting the exchange he’d had with his mother.
Where was Fay, anyway? Dylan, Nia and Sheila were in the kitchen, looking at yet more pictures of the wedding. She must be somewhere with that Neil lad.
‘Another sausage anyone? Burger? Drink?’ There were no takers so Jack removed his butcher’s apron and announced ‘Comfort break. Won’t be long.’
Caitlin laughed ‘We can probably cope until you get back, can’t we Gran?’
Vi nodded and patted her granddaughter’s hand.
‘Has it changed much since you used to come here?’ Fay and Neil stood in Kingsley’s room.
Neil went across to the window and looked down into the garden. ‘Well the view’s the same but with three or four of us and all King’s stuff—’
‘Rubbish, you mean.’
‘Whatever, the room used to look smaller. And darker.’ He sat on the bed, bouncing a few times and smiling. ‘They were great days.’
‘They all are, when we’re young.’ She had no idea why she said this because she certainly didn’t believe it. Hers had been a miserable adolescence, dominated by old-fashioned, overanxious parents and she’d never had the courage to rebel. When she was parenting teenagers, she’d intended to leave them to make their own decisions but it wasn’t always possible to bite her tongue as they rushed headlong towards the next mistake. Wasn’t a mother supposed to protect her offspring? It seemed to have worked with Caitlin and Dylan. Perhaps two out of three was a reasonable result.
Neil was talking about something, ‘… and there were always arguments going on. Correction, not arguments, discussions. You all discussed things. I loved that. In our house, whatever my Dad said, went.’
Did we discuss things? ‘You make us sound like a debating society. What sort of things Neil?’ He looked confused and she shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. I can’t expect you to remember conversations that took place six or seven years ago.’
‘I do, actually. There was one about whether it would be better if families swapped children and brought up someone else’s.’ He paused, ‘And another to do with why we shouldn’t eat food off our knives.’
She reached across and picked a thread of white cotton off the back of Neil’s shirt, picturing Kingsley, defiantly shovelling mashed potato into his mouth with his knife. ‘I’d better get back and sort out dessert. You can come and give me a hand.’
As they came down the stairs, Jack was emerging from the sitting room. ‘There you are.’ He held a small leather-bound volume aloft. ‘Found it. Come on.’
Fay looked at Neil and shrugged but followed Jack, who Pied Piper-like had rounded up Sheila, Nia and Dylan on his way through the kitchen. Once out in the garden he took up a position in the centre of the lawn. ‘I want you all to listen to this.’ He waved the book in the air again. ‘It’s absolutely fantastic.’
It took him five minutes to read The Highwayman from start to finish. When he snapped the book shut there was a smattering of applause, reinforced by Dylan’s wolf-whistles. Caitlin gave her father a hug and suggested that he might like a strong black coffee. Sheila was giggling with delight. Vi and Harry remained impassive.
Fay took Neil’s arm and pulled him onto the recitation spot. ‘While we’re all here it seems a good time to make an announcement.’ It was Jack’s turn now to look bemused. ‘You all remember Neil, I’m sure. He was Kingsley’s best friend—’
‘Well, I wasn’t exactly his—’ Neil, looking apprehensive
‘And he’s going to be living here with us for a while, until he gets himself sorted out with a job and new digs. Aren’t you Neil?’
Neil looked as though he had been doused with icy water. ‘Blimey.’ Then his confusion changed to delighted amazement. ‘Yeah. Thanks. Blimey. Thanks.’
15
‘I still think we should have discussed it.’ Jack bit into his slice of toast and marmalade. ‘It’s a big step – taking in lodgers. There are implications.’
‘We aren’t “taking in lodgers”. It’s more like having a friend to stay for a couple of weeks.’ Fay got up from the table and took her breakfast plate to the sink.
‘Well, not really.’ It had gone too far to rescind Fay’s invitation but he needed to register his misgivings so that, if the whole thing went wrong, he couldn’t be blamed. ‘It could be months before he finds a job. And having a stranger about the place is going to have a huge impact on our lives.’
She
turned towards him and raised her eyebrows. ‘Huge impact? We’ll put a television in his room. We’ve got two bathrooms. Obviously he’ll have to use the kitchen but, apart from that, I don’t imagine we’ll see much of him at all.’
‘You won’t be able to wander around in your nightie.’
‘Is that a good enough reason to deny someone a roof over their head, when we have several spare bedrooms? I’d like to think that someone, on the other side of the world, might be doing the same for Kingsley.’
Jack had to hand it to her – she was good.
*
The holiday weekend had thrown up the customary dental emergencies. As well as dealing with the routine appointments, Jack replaced a crown – yanked off by reckless chomping of seaside rock – smoothed the jagged edge of an incisor, chipped by a ricocheting frisbee and made a temporary repair to a disintegrating molar – probably caused by tooth grinding.
Whilst he drilled and polished, he thought back over yesterday. Immediately after Fay made her startling announcement, the barbecue party had foundered. For once, his parents obsession with needing to be ‘safe home’ by six o’clock was a godsend, giving him the excuse to escape before it became obvious that Neil’s imminent residency had been as much of a shock to him as everyone else. By the time he had deposited Vi and Harry back in their kitchen, then crawled back to Cardiff with the rest of the holiday traffic, only Caitlin was left. As she helped clear things away, she had kissed his cheek and whispered, ‘It might be exactly what Mum needs.’ What on earth could she mean?
The morning sped by and it wasn’t until lunchtime that Sheila and he had a moment to chat. ‘Thanks for yesterday, Jack. It’s always good to catch up with Dylan and Caitlin. I don’t see so much of them these days.’ She offered him a segment of orange.
He was reluctant to talk about Neil Bentley, a topic which Sheila was bound to bring up, and was trawling around for a means of diverting the conversation when she clapped her hands to her mouth. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot, someone called in to see you. It was rather odd actually. He didn’t seem at all sure that you were the right Jack Waterfield. But he gave a reasonably accurate description so I thought he must be bona fide. Said he’d come back at five-thirty.’
Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘Did he leave a name?’
Sheila lifted the notepad pad from the desk and wriggled her spectacles on to her nose. ‘Evans. Iolo Evans. Rather a nice name, Iolo.’
A piece of orange caught in Jack’s throat. ‘Back in a minute,’ he choked, rushing to the cloakroom and locking himself in.
He kept swallowing but the fibrous fruit refused to go down, lodging somewhere around his Adam’s apple, burning and stinging. His eyes streamed and he began to fear that he was in danger of inhaling it into his lungs and he leaned against the cool tiled wall, taking shallow breaths, swallowing continuously until the obstruction cleared his oesophagus.
Sheila called gently from beyond the door, ‘You okay?’
‘Yes, thanks. I’ll give it a couple of minutes.’
Had he used an alias and made out that he was a bus driver, from Aberystwyth, when he visited Llangwm, he could have kept his two worlds apart. To be honest, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to him that he had been found out. With a name like Waterfield and a carelessly abandoned British Journal of Dentistry, it wouldn’t take MI5 to track him down.
At six o’clock that evening, sitting in the bar of the Park Hotel with Iolo, the topic of Fay, his children and his life in Cardiff didn’t arise. Iolo was in such an alarming state that he wasn’t interested in hearing about anyone else. His bank manager had summoned him to Cardiff, to discuss the loan that he’d taken out when they’d bought the guesthouse. The Welcome Stranger had needed a lot of attention. It was a listed building and the restoration work had to be done properly. The business plan he’d presented, to back up his case, had underestimated the time it would take to recoup the outlay and now he was behind with his repayments.
‘It looks like we’ll have to sell up.’ Iolo drew the palms of his hands down his face. ‘Sorry to bother you with all this, Jack. Thank God I saw your name on the brass plate. It’s comforting to see a friendly face after those cold-blooded bastards at the bank. I can’t tell anyone at home. It’d be all round the place in minutes.’
‘You mustn’t,’ Jack shook his head. ‘You mustn’t sell. What about re-mortgaging?’ He was sketchy about finance but he knew it was the sort of thing people did to raise capital.
‘No one wants to back a loser. I don’t know why we thought we could make a go of it. Stupid. Christ. How am I going to tell Zena? She doesn’t have a clue that we’re in trouble.’
This astonished Jack. As he and Fay fell out of step with each other, he’d been thinking a great deal about Iolo and Zena. He’d taken for granted that they shared everything, from the last chocolate in the box to candlelit baths. In particular, during his long solitary night-musings, he imagined that, when the Evans’s made love, they reached mutual climax and the proof of this perfect conjunction was their faultless daughter.
‘I can’t go home.’ Iolo lifted the glass and gulped down the dregs of beer. ‘Can’t put it off much longer, though. She’ll have the police out.’ His gloomy face was flushed and shiny with perspiration. Dressed, as he was, in a crumpled navy blue suit, top button of his shirt undone and his tie askew, he was no longer the jaunty scarecrow nor the Formula One pancake flipper, whom Jack so envied.
‘Did you drive down?’ Jack tried to sound off-hand, but before Iolo could reply his phone rang.
It was Fay. ‘Where are you? It’s gone seven. I thought you’d be home by now.’
‘Aaahhh. Sorry love. Last minute emergency. Young lad with an abscess. Didn’t have the heart to turn him away.’
‘But where are you? You’re not in a pub are you?’
‘Course not. I’m—’
‘Well don’t be long. I’m putting the potatoes on.’
Jack hadn’t appreciated how drunk Iolo was when he’d come back to the surgery after work. He could well have been drinking all the afternoon and now here he was, fishing in his pocket for his car keys.
‘You can’t drive, man.’
Jack filtered the options. The simplest, but the least possible, was to offer him a bed for the night. There would be no problem in concocting a story about bumping into an old colleague from somewhere or another but Iolo was too far-gone for playacting.
There was no way he could drive him home. Fay was already cross with him for ruining her supper schedule and would instantly sniff out a lame excuse for another two or three hours’ absence.
Sheila could put him up. If only he’d confided in her last week and brought her up to speed on his Llangwm adventures. But maybe it was asking too much to expect her to spend the night with a drunken stranger.
He toyed with the idea of contacting Zena, but how would she get down to Cardiff? And anyway he didn’t want to get involved in the row they would surely have over the business with the bank.
Iolo was slumped on his chair, head back and eyes closed, moaning slightly.
‘Come on, mate.’ Jack took the car keys from his limp hand, patted him on the cheek and, standing in front of him, grabbed the shoulders of his jacket, lifting him up off the seat. ‘Let’s get you in a taxi. You can come back for the car tomorrow.’ He slipped the car keys into one of Iolo’s trouser pockets and buttoned the flap.
The cooler air outside the bar revived Iolo to some extent and Jack steered him around the corner, to the taxi rank. He coaxed him into the back of a car and negotiated a price with the driver to deliver the already sleeping passenger to Llangwm.
As Jack drove home, he felt drunk with excitement. An element of recklessness had entered his life, too, and although he would pass a breathalyser test, he wasn’t sure that he was in a fit state to drive. Visits to Llangwm would be risky and challenging but he felt confident that he was up to it. Was this the buzz that youngsters got from a shot in the arm, or a
snort up the nose, of the latest ‘designer drug’? Then there was the recent satisfying reminder that he had once, albeit philanthropically, made love to another woman. See – it was perfectly possible to bend the rules without bringing the world crashing down around his ears. His morale was high. No one made films or wrote books about moderately successful, middle-aged dentists but, now that he was emerging as a more colourful character, whom would he cast in the role of Jack Waterfield? Nigel Havers? Women seemed to go for him. No, too English. Too good-looking. Someone a bit grittier; more of a working-class hero. James Nesbitt would be the man for the job.
He pictured Iolo, fast asleep as the taxi sped north. He should be back at The Welcome Stranger in an hour or so and would have some tough questions to answer, but it was high time that Zena knew what was going on. He wished he could be there to help and comfort them, but he had his own corner to fight.
Fay was tipping vegetables into the serving dishes as he came into the kitchen. ‘Sorry about that, love.’ He kissed her warm cheek. ‘Something smells good.’
‘Coq au vin. I thought we’d better have something civilised after all that rubbish we ate at the barbecue yesterday. Could you open the wine?’
He rinsed his hands under the cold tap and took the wine from the fridge. He would have liked time to relax and change out of his work clothes but the meal was ready, so he slipped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. ‘Busy day?’
‘I sorted out the room for Neil.’