‘Yes, and I’m eternally grateful to you.’ She swallowed as her eyes flickered to his. ‘And – yes, of course we’re friends … only –’
‘Then please let me try to help you. You’re looking very distraught.’
She allowed him to walk her back to the sitting room. She may have only come for her money but the need to pour out her heart to someone, was suddenly overwhelming. And right now Harvey was the only person in her life who seemed to understand.
‘I’ve a rather nice white wine in the fridge,’ he was saying to her from the kitchen, ‘or – second thoughts –’ he hurried back to where she sat – ‘perhaps a brandy would be better right now.’
‘No, no. No alcohol for me, thanks. I’ve … got a long drive ahead.’
‘Drive?’ He paused on his way to a drinks tray. ‘And where are you driving off to?’
‘London. I’m going to London. I’m … leaving the family, you know.’
‘Leaving?’ A start of surprise seemed to catch him. ‘No, I didn’t know.’ He walked round her so he could face her. ‘That’s … an odd way of putting it, though, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve heard of women leaving their husbands, and of husbands leaving their wives – who hasn’t these days? – but …’ He waited for her explanation.
‘Well, you see, Paul’s got himself posted to Glasgow, but I’ve decided I can’t go with him. And as for the rest of the family – well, I’ve just got to get away.’
She began to pace about the room, thoughts of her family making her agitated all over again.
‘I really can’t take any more.’ Her voice wobbled and she choked on the words. ‘I’ve reached the end of my tether.’
She didn’t realise she was crying until a clean white handkerchief appeared in front of her nose. And then she gave way to huge, heaving sobs of self-pity.
‘Oh, why can’t I be what they want me to be?’ she wailed, her face buried against Harvey’s chest.
‘Because you’re you, Susannah,’ he said gently.
‘I don’t want to be me! It’s too difficult! It was all much simpler before.’
‘But wrong. You know it was wrong, now don’t you?’ His hand fell softly on her hair. ‘You’ve done the right thing, taking charge of your life the way you have.’
‘And where the hell’s it got me?’ She pulled away from him quickly, appalled at the way things were developing. She knew she couldn’t cling to him like this a moment longer. A brief hug of comfort might be just permissible, but spin it out a second too long and trouble must surely ensue.
She sniffed and bunched up the handkerchief. ‘I’ve alienated my whole family, following the selfish path, and –’
‘Sod it!’ Harvey suddenly cursed. ‘That sounds like Julia’s car.’ He grasped Susannah by the shoulders and forced her to look up at him. ‘You are not being selfish,’ he almost shouted at her, ‘so stop chastising yourself. Now, where are you staying in London?’
‘M-my uncle’s old house.’
‘The one in Haringey you told me about? Remind me of the address.’
Susannah had never mentioned the address before: the information had been superfluous. But now, finding herself incapable of inventing a reason for not doing so, she breathlessly rattled it off, her teeth clattering together all the while.
Harvey went over to the bureau and scribbled the details down. ‘Just in case there’s more interest in the mural,’ he was saying loudly by the time Julia opened the door, ‘so that I can pass more customers on to you.’
Julia glanced up in surprise as she stepped over the threshold in high-heeled boots and trousers that moulded her bottom. She was clutching a carton of semi-skimmed milk and a small paper bag from the chemist’s, and had looked preoccupied on opening the door.
‘More make-up, I suppose,’ Harvey commented, the scathing remark being aimed at the pink-striped paper bag.
Julia flushed, obviously aware that they had a visitor and that he was being less than polite, and tried to make as small a package as possible of her purchase.
‘Oh –’ Harvey remembered better manners – ‘you haven’t met Susannah yet, have you? Susannah’s the lady who did the mural. I’ve talked about her a lot.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, of course.’ Julia smiled, her lips sliding apart over perfect teeth. ‘I wish I was clever like you,’ she added wistfully. ‘It must be nice to be really, really good at something.’
‘You’re very kind,’ Susannah murmured, touched by her heartfelt words. Julia was not as she had imagined her; she was much more likeable than she’d thought. But Harvey hadn’t treated her with much respect, and the thought disturbed her a little. She rallied herself with difficulty. ‘I’m afraid I have to be going. I – er – just came to collect some of my things.’
‘I wish you good luck for London,’ Harvey said, formally seeing Susannah off the premises. His face revealed little as he waved and shut the door.
As she hurried away Susannah couldn’t help wondering what might have happened had Julia not turned up.
‘So, how was bonny Scotland?’ Jan asked, attempting to lighten the atmosphere. The cottage hadn’t seemed the same since Susannah left. Funny how one person could make such a difference … but she didn’t want Paul to feel it too much.
‘Scotland,’ he said slowly, like someone coming out of an anaesthetic, ‘was – well – bonny, as you said. At least, once you get out of the city it is …’
‘And?’ Jan prompted. But Paul was miles away. He seemed incapable of concentrating on anything for long. His eyes kept roving the kitchen, his ears listening out for the right sounds.
‘I suppose … she’s actually gone?’ he forced out.
Jan sought silent opinion from the rest of the family as to how she ought to proceed. They were squashed round the pine table at the moment, waiting for the evening meal. But one after another they glanced away from her; she would get no help from them.
Jan went over to the cooker, her hands padded in big mitts with a hen design on each. She took out a large pot of chicken fricassee, lifted the lid with difficulty and stirred the contents around. Jan’s meals were irresistible, and even Simon and Natalie now succumbed to them daily – no matter what they contained.
Dumping the dish in the middle of the table Jan said with conviction she did not feel: ‘She’ll be back before long, I’m sure she will. You’ll see, Paul, if I’m not right.’
But everyone knew it was unlikely in the extreme. Why, even Frank had had a good go at his daughter, just before she’d left. Not that that had really helped much; in fact it might have even made things worse. But at least he had done his bit.
Paul let Jan ladle the mixture on to his plate and took rice as it was passed around. Then he got up from the table. ‘Sorry, but I’m not very hungry. I’ll just …’ But whatever he intended to do, he was keeping it to himself.
‘Oh dear, he’s taking it badly,’ Jan said. ‘And I always thought he was so strong.’
‘I don’t think I’m hungry, either.’ Katy sat back in her seat.
‘Nor am I,’ Jan had to admit.
And yet the food managed to disappear somewhere; not a scrap was left after a quarter of an hour.
‘Life,’ Jan said to herself as she stacked the empties, ‘goes on regardless.’ But she was deeply concerned about Paul.
Dora Saxby wanted none of Bert’s personal effects. ‘Just his old pullover, pipe rack, and foot stool,’ she said, having given the matter careful thought.
Susannah gathered the items together, thinking how appropriate Dora’s choices were. Nothing else could have brought the man’s presence back to earth more assuredly than those shabby possessions.
She glanced out of the window, as she often had done at home when lost in thought, and encountered a row of red chimneys. They gave her a shock, used as she had been to seeing fields, and she was smitten with painful awareness – with the enormity of what she had done.
Had she really walked out of her previous life,
her beloved cottage, for this? She glanced around. There was no need to look further than Bert’s threadbare curtains to experience the vast differences in her environment.
Whereas the cottage had been pleasantly antiquated, Bert’s two up, two down was decrepitly old; whereas signs of maturity had there been welcomed – and even manufactured at times for the sake of consistency – here they were causes for concern. Here, if surfaces looked stressed and parched of paint, it wasn’t the result of expertise and expense; it meant something had to be done – and very quickly – if the place wasn’t to fall apart.
Susannah sighed at the amount of work ahead of her.
‘I only want to empty one or two rooms,’ she had told Dora the day she arrived, ‘so that I have space to do my work.’
‘Clear the lot,’ the woman told her grandly, making a drastic decision. ‘I think, after all, that when you’ve finished with the place I’ll sell it; and that will be much simpler when it’s empty, I believe. I only wish I could help you with sorting it all out.’
But help from her was out of the question. Her husband still clung to life – if such it could be called, for he was in a very bad way – and he needed her full attention. Uncle Bert’s old neighbour, however, claimed to have plenty of time to spare.
‘I’ll give you a hand, Susannah,’ she said, wrinkling her nose with a sniff. She didn’t quite approve of Dora Saxby, who was standing close by at the time.
‘That’s … very kind of you, Mrs Wardle,’ Susannah managed to say. She hadn’t bargained on having to clear the whole house, and something told her that Mrs Wardle wouldn’t prove to be the biggest help she could have wished for.
She was right. Mrs Wardle wore Susannah out with her constant chatter as she emptied cupboards and drawers. She had no method of dealing with the contents and constantly consulted Susannah as to whether things should be saved.
‘You never know,’ she would say, peering into a tobacco tin containing what looked like fossilised worms – and probably was, ‘you never know whether something is valuable or not.’
‘Junk sack’, Susannah would tell her. Or ‘Boot sale’, if that were the case. She might as well have tackled the whole job herself.
And when it came to cleaning the place afterwards, the woman was no more effectual. It appeared that Mrs Wardle didn’t approve of Hoovers – or anything with a conveniently long handle. Floors had to be scrubbed on hands and knees with an old wooden brush and polished up afterwards with a tin of wax. Spray polishes and cleaning liquids were anathema to her, and windows had to be rubbed with wads of newspaper.
Later, she would complain of chronic back pain, and stiffness in all her joints. Mrs Wardle was soon laid up, and Susannah’s sanity preserved. She got on much more quickly from then on and the mini-skip she’d had delivered to the roadside began to fill.
After three more days of hard work, Harvey Webb turned up.
CHAPTER 25
Susannah was emptying a sack of old paint tins into the skip when she saw Harvey’s car pull up at the kerb. And the clatter of the tins as they hit the metal sides was no louder than the sudden thumping of her heart. She hadn’t imagined he would come here – and yet had wondered if he might. She found to her disgust that she began babbling at him, out of nervousness, the minute he stepped from the car.
‘Not a good place to leave it – lucky to find a space – kids around here are little terrors, you know. You’d better lock the – that’s right – and does that bonnet thing come off?’ And all the time she was trying to pull her sweater down over her stretch trousers to eliminate any unsightly bulges, and straighten her gypsy-style scarf.
Harvey looked her over and grinned, then glanced up and down the road. His keen eyes took in the shabby, hemmed-in houses with their filthy paintwork; the numerous boarded-up windows; the piles of scattered litter and damaged property. There was even a half-wrecked car opposite them, its wheels long since spirited away. Harvey’s immaculate model shone smugly from under its soft-top hood.
‘What have you done to deserve this?’ he wanted to know. ‘You must feel like a fallen angel.’
Pain passed over her face. ‘Long way from Upper Heyford, isn’t it?’ she agreed. Sometimes over the past few days she’d had the feeling she was being punished for her defection from the family, and Harvey’s words didn’t help. This could hardly be seen as a step up in the world. And there were times, too, when she thought she must have taken leave of her senses.
‘You OK?’ He looked at her uncertainly as a gleam of sun struggled through the morning’s clouds.
‘Rushed off my feet,’ she told him, leading the way indoors.
‘Tea or coffee?’ she offered him, once they were in Bert’s old front room. She took a surreptitious breath, but the place still smelled damp and unused in spite of all her scrubbing. ‘I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got in at the moment.’
She watched Harvey step over her mosaic stuff, immaculate in a Harris tweed jacket and light wool trousers, his shoes as polished as his car. She had dumped things all over the floor while she cleaned up the back room for a studio. There was nowhere to sit: all the furniture had been taken to the auction room, except for two tub chairs that were at present stacked under a pile of household articles, and the carpets had been taken up.
‘I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to organise anything much in the refreshment line,’ she apologised, ‘I really wasn’t expecting –’
‘Me?’
‘– any visitors yet.’ Her mouth had become clumsy and dry again, because of the way he was looking at her. What, she thought, scurrying out to the kitchen, had he come here for?
Once out of sight she snatched off the gypsy scarf and ran her fingers through her hair. She wished she could put a hand on her lipstick, but unfortunately it was up in the bedroom. She checked her face in a small square of speckled mirror that her uncle had wedged behind some pipework – for some reason best known to himself – and let out a groan of despair. Pasty-faced and hollow-eyed, this was not one of her better days.
When she came back into the lounge with a small tin tray on which she had balanced two blue-striped mugs and some Hobnobs, she found Harvey pacing about in the confined space and running a finger round his collar. He was hardly likely to be too warm, she thought; the house wasn’t centrally heated and all the grate had in it was an empty ash pan and a cleaned out grid.
‘I was wondering whether you could do with some company,’ he said, taking a mug of coffee from her. ‘Better still, a helping hand? I mean, you shouldn’t be wasting your time cleaning and sorting stuff out, should you? You’re supposed to be establishing your business.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ She looked at him over the rim of her mug and tilted her head to one side in a wistful attitude. ‘It would be wonderful if you could help. But really, I can hardly expect you to do so. You aren’t even suitably dressed. Apart from which it would be a huge imposition.’
But Harvey correctly deduced that some of her uncle’s clothes might still be hanging around in the black sacks he’d just passed. They were currently lined up in the hall, waiting to be taken to the nearest textile bank. And he said he wouldn’t at all object to wearing old trousers and a sweater, so long as she didn’t mind.
‘Great!’ She shrugged and smiled her consent; then her smile faded. ‘But … er, what about – well – Julia?’
Harvey’s face froze as he looked across at her. ‘What about Julia?’ he grunted, before taking a gulp from his mug.
‘Well … what would she think of you doing this? I mean … well, you know’
He set the mug down on the mantelpiece. ‘Julia,’ he said, as though the name was a bad taste in his mouth, ‘has no idea that I’m here, and it wouldn’t make any difference if she did. She’s supposed to be visiting her mother right now – if you can believe a word of that.’
Susannah eyed him shrewdly. She had thought when he first walked in that he wasn’t quite his usual ebullient self. Now
, seeing him leaning dejectedly against the fireplace, she knew for certain that something was up.
‘You sound as though you don’t believe she’s at her mother’s.’
‘Too right. I don’t. Not a word.’
Susannah, a little embarrassed at being told things that were surely private between husband and wife, shook her head. ‘I – I’m sure Julia doesn’t tell lies. I mean, she just doesn’t look the sort.’
‘Shows how wrong you can be.’ Propping an elbow on the mantelshelf he picked at a flake of paint with one of his nails. It was several seconds before he went on. ‘My dear sweet Julia has been lying through her teeth for weeks on end. I’ve only recently got to know about it.’
He told Susannah how Julia had been attending college without telling him a word about it and that then he had quite by chance seen her with another man.
‘Oh, but surely that doesn’t mean a thing,’ Susannah said, when she had considered his detailed description of the event. ‘Two people meeting on their way into a building and having a bit of a laugh? It’s hardly anything to go on, is it?’ He was surely making a mountain out of a molehill. ‘Take that as evidence to a solicitor,’ she said, ‘and I think they’d laugh in your face.’
Harvey swivelled his jaw. He seemed intent on believing the worst. ‘She’s been lying all this time about college,’ he pointed out.
‘And perhaps there’s a very good reason.’
‘She seemed shifty when she told me she was going to her mother’s,’ he added.
Susannah closed her eyes. ‘In your present state of mind, Harvey, you could convince yourself that the tower of Pisa doesn’t lean.’
‘Well, I just happen to know that I’m right.’ He rubbed his chin, hesitated, and plunged on. ‘There are other matters to take into consideration too. Since I became redundant, things haven’t been going all that well between us. Our marriage is – not what it was.’ He held her eyes with his. ‘So you see, that makes two of us, doesn’t it? You and me both. And if you can consider yourself a free agent, then so can I.’
Puppies Are For Life Page 22