The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  ‘You mean Michael needs help?’

  ‘Anyone in your position needs help.’

  They finished the washing and drying in silence. Oliver went to check on Michael. Meanwhile, desperate for the activity, Sally emptied the contents of the dirty-clothes basket into the washing machine. When she had switched it on, she realized that she hadn’t bothered to sort the clothes, and that the machine was still set for the fast-coloured programme.

  ‘He’s asleep.’ Oliver leaned against the jamb of the kitchen door. ‘Sally?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This isn’t my case. I’ve got no jurisdiction.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘That I can’t do much to help.’

  ‘You’re not doing badly so far.’

  ‘I mean I can’t tell you any more about what’s in Maxham’s head than Michael can.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Sally’s voice sounded low and reasonable, which was all the more remarkable because simultaneously she was screaming to herself, I don’t give a fuck about Maxham: I just want Lucy. Oliver stood aside to let her pass into the living room. I am ordained. I must not use language like that even in my own mind. As she passed him, she was aware of his height and of the way he held himself back to minimize the possibility of accidental contact between their bodies. In the living room she crossed to the window and looked down to the street.

  Oliver picked up his jacket from the back of the armchair. ‘Still there, are they?’

  ‘I can see six of them, I think. Two of them are talking to the neighbours.’ She moved back from the window. ‘We’re besieged.’

  ‘You could go and stay with relations or friends.’

  ‘But this is where Lucy would come. She knows the phone number and the address.’

  ‘We could transfer the calls and leave someone here just in case Lucy turns up on the doorstep.’ Oliver stared down at Sally, making her feel like a specimen on a dish. ‘Think about it. This is just the beginning. If it goes on, there’ll be more of them. Maybe radio and TV as well. The whole circus.’

  She shrugged, accepting that he might have a point but unwilling to think about it.

  ‘I’ll phone this evening if that’s OK.’ He rubbed his nose, which was long and thin and with a slight kink to the right near the end. ‘Shall I leave my number?’

  As she passed him a pen and a pad, their eyes met. She wondered whether he was being diplomatic; whether he realized that Michael had erected an invisible barrier between his family and his friends. Sally knew that the Rickfords had bought a flat in Hornsey, but she had no idea of the address or the phone number.

  ‘I’m on leave till the new year,’ he said.

  ‘You and Sharon aren’t going away, then?’

  ‘Sharon’s already gone, actually.’ Oliver rubbed a speck of paint on his jeans. ‘Permanently. She moved out a couple of months ago. We decided it just wasn’t working out.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She had stumbled on another of Michael’s failures in communication. She was past feeling humiliated.

  ‘She got a chance of a job with our old force – Somerset.’ Perhaps Oliver sensed a need for a diversion, any diversion. ‘It came up at just the right time.’

  ‘It gave you a positive reason to separate as well as all the negative ones?’

  He nodded. He was very easy to talk to, Sally thought – quick on the uptake, unthreatening. She was not surprised that Oliver and Sharon had separated. They had made an ill-assorted couple. Sharon had struck her as a tough, sharp-witted woman, very clear about what she wanted from life.

  ‘We’re still good friends.’ Oliver’s fingers twitched, enclosing the last two words with invisible inverted commas. ‘But you don’t want to hear about all this now. Is there anything I can do before I go?’

  Sally shook her head. ‘Thank you for bringing Michael back.’

  The words sounded absurdly formal. Sally felt like a mother thanking a comparative stranger for bringing her child home after a party. A silence ambushed them as each waited for the other to speak. The sound of a key turning in the lock was a welcome distraction. They both turned as Yvonne came into the flat. She looked pale beneath her make-up.

  ‘You haven’t watched the news, have you?’ she blurted out. ‘Or had the radio on?’

  Sally took a step towards her, swayed and clung to the back of a chair. ‘What’s happened?’ she whispered.

  Yvonne opened her mouth, revealing the prominent and expensively regular teeth. No sound came out.

  ‘Come on,’ Oliver snapped.

  ‘It was those journalists, sir.’ Yvonne blinked rapidly. ‘They asked me if I’d heard.’ She turned to Sally. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this. They said someone found a child’s hand this morning. Just a hand. It was lying on a gravestone in Kilburn Cemetery.’

  4

  ‘… we carry private and domestick enemies within, publick and more hostile adversaries without.’

  Religio Medici, II, 7

  On the morning of Saturday the thirtieth of November, Angel opened Eddie’s bedroom door and stood framed like a picture in the doorway.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  He sat up in bed, reaching for his glasses. Angel was wearing the cotton robe, long, white and in appearance vaguely hieratic, which she used as a dressing gown. As usual at this time of day, her shining hair was confined to a snood. Eddie liked seeing Angel without make-up. She was still beautiful, but in a different way: her face had a softness which cosmetics masked; he glimpsed the child within the adult.

  ‘Just the two of us for breakfast today. We’ll let Lucy sleep in.’

  ‘OK. Have you been down yet?’ He had heard the stairs creaking.

  ‘You know I have. And yes, Lucy’s fine. Sleeping like a baby.’

  He felt relief, a lifting of guilt. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  A few moments later, Eddie trotted downstairs to the kitchen. He filled the kettle and set the table while waiting for the water to boil. The washing machine was already on, and through the porthole he glimpsed something small and white, perhaps Lucy’s vest or tights. In the quieter phases of its cycle, he heard Angel moving about in the bathroom. He had hardly slept during the night and now felt light-headed. He did not know whether Angel had really forgiven him for acting on impulse the previous afternoon. But he could tell she was pleased to have Lucy safely in the basement. The latter, he hoped, would outweigh the former.

  At length Angel came downstairs, carrying the receiving end of the intercom to the basement. She plugged it into one of the sockets over the worktop. The tiny loudspeaker emitted an electronic hum.

  ‘I thought I’d do a load while Lucy’s asleep,’ Angel said. ‘Lucy’s things, mainly. That toy of hers stinks.’

  ‘Jimmy?’

  Angel stared at him. ‘Who?’

  ‘The doll thing.’

  ‘Is that what she calls it? It’s not what I call a doll.’

  Eddie shrugged, disclaiming responsibility.

  ‘It had to be washed sooner or later,’ Angel went on, ‘so it might as well be washed now. It’s most unhygienic, you know, as well as being offensive.’

  Eddie nodded and held his peace. Jimmy was a small cloth doll, no more than four or five inches high. Yesterday Lucy had told Eddie that her mother had made it for her. It was predominantly blue, though the head was made of faded pink material, and Sally Appleyard had stitched rudimentary features on the face and indicated the existence of hair. Eddie guessed that Jimmy was special, like his own Mrs Wump had been. (Mrs Wump was still in his chest of drawers upstairs, lying in state in a shoe box and kept snug with sheets made of handkerchiefs and blankets made of scraps of towelling.) The previous evening, Lucy had kept Jimmy in her hands the whole time, occasionally sniffing the doll while she sucked her fingers. She had not relaxed her grip even in sleep.

  ‘Lucy looks rather like how I used to look at that age,’ Angel told Eddie over breakfast. ‘Much darker colo
uring, of course. But apart from that we’re really surprisingly similar.’

  ‘Can I see her this morning?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Angel sipped her lemon verbena tea. ‘It depends how she is. I expect she’ll feel a little strange at first. We must give her a chance to get used to us.’

  But it’s me she knows, Eddie wanted to say: it was I who brought her home. ‘She wants a conjuring set,’ he said. ‘You can get them at Woolworth’s; they cost twelve ninety-nine, apparently. I thought I might try and buy it for her this morning. I have to go out for the shopping in any case.’

  ‘I think she’s like me in other ways.’ Angel’s voice was dreamy. ‘In personality, I mean. Much more so than the others. She’s our fourth, of course. I knew the fourth would be significant.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Because –’ Angel broke off. ‘What was that about a conjuring set?’

  ‘Lucy wants one. Perhaps I could buy it and give it to her this afternoon.’

  Angel stared at him, her spoon poised halfway between the bowl and her mouth. ‘Lucy isn’t like the others. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He dropped his eyes: facing that blue glare was like looking at the sun. ‘I think so.’

  Eddie didn’t understand: why wasn’t Lucy like the others? She was no more attractive than Chantal or Katy, for example, and probably less intelligent, certainly less articulate, than Suki. And why should the fact that Lucy was their fourth visitor be significant?

  As he spread a thin layer of low-fat sunflower margarine on his wholemeal toast, he thought that Angel resembled one of those rich archaeological sites which humans have occupied for thousands of years. You laboriously scraped away a layer only to find that there was another beneath, and another below that, and so the process went on. How could you expect to understand later developments if you did not also know the developments which had preceded them and shaped them?

  Angel dabbed her mouth with her napkin. ‘If you want to give Lucy a present, why don’t you buy her a doll?’

  ‘But she wants the conjuring set.’

  ‘A doll might distract her from that little bundle of rags. What does she call it?’

  ‘Jimmy.’

  The intercom crackled softly.

  Angel cocked her head. ‘Hush.’

  A cat-like wail drifted into the kitchen.

  Jenny Wren had liked dolls, especially the sort which could be equipped with the glamorous accessories of a pseudo-adult lifestyle. Her real name was Jenny Reynolds but Eddie’s father always called her Jenny Wren. She had been overweight, with dark hair, small features and a permanent look of surprise on her face.

  Her father was a builder in a small way. He and his wife still lived in one of the council flats on the estate behind Rosington Road. The Reynoldses’ balcony was visible above the trees from the garden of number 29. When Eddie discovered which flat was theirs, he realized that the woman on the balcony whom he and Alison had seen, the woman who stared at the sky over Carver’s, must have been Mrs Reynolds.

  Jenny Wren was their only child, about two years older than Eddie. She started to come to the Graces’ house in the summer of 1971, the Alison summer, always bringing her favourite doll, who was called Sandy. Alison used to laugh at Jenny Wren and Eddie had joined in, to show solidarity.

  Eddie did not know how Jenny Wren had come to his father’s attention. Stanley did house-to-house collections for several charities and this helped to give him a wide acquaintance. Or Mr Reynolds might have done some work on the house, or his father might have advised the Reynoldses on financial matters. Stanley might even have stopped Jenny Wren on the street. Eddie had witnessed his father’s technique at first hand.

  ‘You’ve got a dolly, haven’t you?’ Stanley would say to the girl. ‘What’s her name?’ Eventually the girl would tell him. ‘That’s a pretty name,’ he would say. ‘Did you know I make dolls’ houses? Do you think your dolly would like to come and see them? We’d have to ask Mummy and Daddy, of course.’

  If there were concerned parents in the picture, as with the Reynoldses, he took care to reassure them. ‘Yes, Eddie likes a bit of company. He’s our only one, you know, and it can get a bit lonely, eh? Tell you what, I’ll get my wife to give you a ring and confirm a time, shall I? Around tea time, perhaps? I know Thelma likes an excuse to bake a cake.’

  Thelma lent her authority to the invitations, though they sometimes made it necessary for her to talk to neighbours, an activity she detested. But she had as little as possible to do with the girls as soon as they had crossed the threshold of 29 Rosington Road. Among themselves, Stanley and Thelma referred to the girls as ‘LVs’, which stood for ‘Little Visitors’.

  The proceedings usually opened with tea around the kitchen table. This would be much more lavish than usual. There would be lemonade or Coca-Cola, chocolate biscuits and cake.

  ‘Ah, tea.’ Stanley would bunch up his pale cheeks in a smile. ‘Splendid. I’m as hungry as a hunter.’

  During the meal Thelma spoke only when necessary, though as usual she would eat greedily and rapidly. Afterwards Thelma and Eddie cleared away while Stanley took the LV down to the basement, closing the door behind them. Eddie and Thelma carried on with their lives as normal, as though Stanley and a little girl were not in the basement looking at a dolls’ house. When it was time for the LV to go home, Thelma and Eddie often walked her back to her parents, usually in silence, leaving Stanley behind.

  If all had gone well, there would be other visits. Then Stanley would introduce the subject of his second hobby, photography. As ever, he was meticulously careful in his handling of the parents. Would they mind if he took a few photographs of their daughter? She was very photogenic. There was a national competition coming up, and Stanley would like – with the parents’ agreement, of course – to submit a photograph of her. Perhaps the parents would like copies of the photograph for themselves?

  It was after Alison moved away that Stanley Grace first asked Eddie into the basement when one of the little visitors was there.

  ‘I’d like a two-headed shot in the big chair,’ he explained to the space between Thelma and Eddie. ‘Could be rather effective, with one fair head and one dark.’

  Eddie was excited; he was also pleased because he interpreted the invitation as a sign that he had somehow earned his father’s approval. The LV in question was Jenny Wren.

  He remembered that first afternoon with great clarity, though as so often with memories it was difficult to know whether the clarity was real or apparent. He and Jenny Wren had been too shy to talk much to each other, and in any case, the two-year age gap between them was at that time a significant barrier. His father posed them in the low Victorian armchair, which was large enough to hold both children, their bodies squeezed together from knee to shoulder. He arranged their limbs, deftly tweaking a leg here, draping an arm there. The camera was already mounted on its tripod.

  ‘Now try and relax,’ Stanley told them. ‘Pretend you’re brother and sister. Or very special friends. Lean your head on Jenny’s shoulder, Eddie. That’s it, Jenny Wren: give Eddie a nice big smile. Watch the birdie now.’ His father squinted through the viewfinder. ‘Smile.’

  The shutter clicked. Jenny Wren’s breath smelled sweetly of chocolate. Her dress had ridden up almost to the top of her thighs. The rough fabric of the upholstery rubbed against Eddie’s bare skin and made him want to scratch. He remembered the musty smell of the chair, the essence of a long and weary life.

  ‘And again, children.’ Click. ‘Very good. Now hitch your legs up a bit, Jenny Wren: lovely.’ Click. ‘Now, Eddie, let’s pretend you’re kissing Jenny Wren’s cheek. No, not like that: look up at her, into her eyes.’ Click. ‘Now let’s have some with just you, Jenny Wren. How about a chocolate first?’

  It wasn’t all photographs. Stanley encouraged them to examine the dolls’ house. He allowed Jenny Wren to push her doll Sandy about the rooms and sit her in the chairs and lie her on the beds,
even though Sandy was far too large for the house and Jenny Wren’s movements were so poorly coordinated that the fragile furniture was constantly in danger. The children helped themselves from the large box of chocolates. Eddie ate so many that he felt sick. At last it was time for Jenny Wren to go home.

  ‘You can come again next weekend, if you like.’

  Jenny Wren nodded, with her mouth stuffed with chocolate and her eyes on the dolls’ house.

  ‘By that time I’ll have developed the films. Tell Mummy and Daddy I’ll give you some photos to take home for them.’

  Next weekend the photographs were ready. There were more chocolates, more posing, more games with the dolls’ house. Stanley took some of his special artistic photographs, which involved the children taking off some of their clothes. Next weekend it was very warm, one of those early autumn days which until the evening mimic the heat of summer. At Stanley’s suggestion the children took off all their clothes.

  ‘All artists’ models pose without their clothes. I expect you already knew that. And I dare say neither of you would say no to a little extra pocket money, eh? Well, famous artists always pay their models. So I suppose I shall have to pay you. But this is our secret, all right? That’s very important. Our secret.’

  After taking the photographs he suggested that they played a game until it was time to go home. It was so hot that he decided to take off his clothes himself.

  ‘You won’t mind, will you, Jenny Wren? I know Eddie won’t. He’s seen me in the buff enough times. All part of our secret, eh?’

  So it continued, first with Jenny Wren and later with others. The children who excited Stanley’s artistic sensibilities were always girls. Even as a child, Eddie was aware that he was of secondary importance. In the photographs and in the games his role was not much more significant than that of the Victorian armchair. His father’s attention was always on the girl, never on him. As time went by, the invitations to the basement became rarer and rarer.