The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  ‘No.’ She heard a clatter from the kitchen. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Phone me, Sally. Any time. All right?’

  ‘All right.’ She broke the connection as Yvonne came in with mugs of tea. ‘Just checking with Oliver Rickford. Michael’s not there, either.’

  Sally sat down with the tea. What hurt, then and later, was the way Michael had locked her out. For better or for worse: didn’t it mean anything to him? If it didn’t mean anything, why did he bother getting married? He could have found someone else to screw. Maybe that’s where he was now: with a prostitute, paying for what his wife was too tired to give him.

  Yvonne went to the lavatory. The phone began to ring. Sally flung herself at it, spilling uncomfortably hot tea over her leg.

  ‘Shit. Hello.’

  ‘Is that the Reverend Appleyard speaking?’ A man’s voice; unfamiliar. ‘Sally? This is Frank Howell. Remember me? I did that piece on St George’s for the Standard.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve nothing to say.’

  ‘I understand, Sally.’ The voice was unctuous. ‘I don’t want to ask you anything. Truly.’

  She remembered the man’s face now: the balding cherub with red-rimmed eyes; Derek’s friend. ‘I’m going to put the phone down, Mr Howell.’

  He began to gabble: ‘Sooner or later you and Michael are going to have to deal with the press. Maybe I can help. You need someone who knows the ropes, someone on your side, someone who –’

  ‘Goodbye.’ She broke the connection.

  ‘Who was that?’ Yvonne asked, a moment later.

  ‘A journalist named Frank Howell.’

  ‘He’s already rung twice before. Leave the phone to me.’

  ‘I thought it might be Michael.’ Or Lucy. Sally started to cry again.

  Yvonne gave her a handful of paper handkerchiefs. ‘Try not to worry, love. I’m sure there’s some perfectly simple explanation. He’ll be back. You’ll see.’

  Through her tears Sally snarled, ‘I’m not sure I want him back.’ I want Lucy.

  Afterwards, Sally learned that Michael turned right into the main road, walking towards the tube station. He went into the saloon bar of the King of Prussia and ordered a pint of beer and a double whisky. He sat by himself at a table in the corner of the room. According to the barman he gave no trouble. He drank two more double whiskies and repelled an attempt to draw him into conversation.

  He took the underground to King’s Cross Station, where he bought a standard single to Cambridge. He had time to kill before catching the train so he killed it in a bar. From Cambridge railway station he walked slowly into the centre of the town and out the other side, stopping at two pubs on the way. He staggered up the Huntingdon Road. Just before eight-thirty he reached a small but ugly block of modern flats near Fitzwilliam College. He rang one of the bells and lay down on the wet grass to rest. Soon he was asleep.

  A little later, the telephone rang in the Appleyards’ living room in Hercules Road. Yvonne answered. She listened for a moment, pressed the mute button and looked across the room at Sally.

  ‘It’s someone called Father Byfield. Do you want to speak to him? He says your husband’s with him.’

  Sally was furious and relieved when she heard Uncle David’s voice. Jealousy was there, too, and also a sense of failure. She should have realized that in times of trouble Michael would turn not to her but to his godfather.

  6

  ‘Therefore for Spirits, I am so far from denying their existence, that I could easily believe, that not onely whole Countries, but particular persons, have their Tutelary and Guardian Angels.’

  Religio Medici, I, 33

  ‘Mummy. Mummy, where are you?’

  Over the intercom, Lucy’s voice sounded mechanical, like a juvenile robot’s. Without the intercom and with the doors closed, they would not have heard her because the basement was now so well soundproofed.

  ‘Mummy.’ The voice sharpened and rose to a wail. ‘Where are you?’

  Angel dropped her napkin on the table and stood up, stretching her long white arm towards the keys on the worktop. At the door she glanced back at Eddie.

  ‘You sort things out in here. I’ll deal with her.’

  Lucy was crying now. Eddie imagined her standing by the door or curled up in bed. She was wearing the pyjamas he had bought especially for her at Selfridges; they had red stars against a deep yellow background and in normal circumstances would suit her colouring Last night, however, Lucy had not been looking her best: by the low-wattage light of the bedside lamp, her face had been white, almost green, mouth a black, ragged hole, the puffy eyes squeezed into slits.

  ‘Daddy. Mummy.’

  The intercom emitted a series of crackles: Angel was unlocking and opening the door to the basement.

  ‘Mummy. I want –’

  ‘You’ll see Mummy very soon.’ Angel’s voice was tinny and precise. There was a click as she closed the door behind her. ‘Now, what are you doing out of bed without your slippers?’

  ‘Where’s Mummy? Where am I? Where’s Daddy?’

  ‘Mummy and Daddy had to go away for a night or two. Don’t you remember? Eddie and I are looking after you.’ There was a pause, but Lucy did not respond. ‘I’m Angel.’

  Lucy began to cry again. The intercom twisted and distorted her sorrow.

  ‘That’s enough, dear. I don’t want to have to get cross. Think how sad Mummy would be if she heard you’ve been naughty.’

  The crying grew louder.

  ‘Lucy. You won’t like it if I have to get cross. Naughty children have to be punished.’

  The wails continued. There was a sharp report like the crack of a whip. The crying stopped abruptly.

  ‘We don’t allow cry babies here, dear. You’re going to have to pull your socks up, aren’t you?’

  Eddie could bear it no longer. He switched off the intercom and listened to the silence seeping into the kitchen like water flowing into a pool.

  Here we all were on this overcrowded planet, Eddie thought, all members of the same species and yet each of us a mystery to everyone else. Especially Angel, who, like Churchill’s Russia, was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. For example, where did she come from? How old was she? Who was she? If she did not particularly like little girls, why did she spend so much time with them? Last but not least, why had Angel said that Lucy was special? What made Lucy different from the other three?

  Nothing about Angel was straightforward. To all intents and purposes she might have been born adult less than six years before, on the March evening when Eddie met her. She came to the house in Rosington Road in answer to an advertisement which Eddie’s mother had put in the Evening Standard. The advertisement gave the name of the road but not the Graces’ name or the number of the house. Eddie’s mother said that you couldn’t be too careful, what with all the strange people roaming round the streets today.

  From the start, Thelma refused to consider male applicants. ‘They’re dirty beasts. Women are tidier and cleaner.’ Eddie himself was excepted from this general view of the male sex, which confirmed his suspicion that his mother did not think him entirely masculine.

  When Angel phoned, Eddie’s mother gave her the number of the house almost immediately. She liked Angel’s voice.

  ‘At least she speaks the Queen’s English. More than you can say for the rest of them. And she says she’s got a job. I don’t want one of those Social Security scroungers under my feet all day.’

  There had been nine other calls before Angel’s, but none of them had led to an invitation to see the room. Thelma disliked the Irish, West Indians, Asians and anyone with what she termed a ‘lower class’ accent.

  When the doorbell rang, Eddie and his mother were watching television in the front room.

  ‘She’s on time,’ Thelma commented, looking at her watch. ‘I’ll say that for her.’

  Eddie went into the hall and peeped through the fish-eye lens at the person on the doorstep. He c
ould see very little of her, because she had turned to stare at the traffic on the road; and in any case, she was wearing a long, pale mackintosh with a hood. As he opened the door she turned to face him.

  She was beautiful. For an instant her perfection paralysed him. He had never seen anyone so beautiful in real life, only on television, in pictures and in films. She stared at him as though she were assessing his suitability rather than the other way round.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, Miss – ah – come in.’

  There was an infinitesimal pause. Then, to his relief, she smiled and came out of the rain. Angel was about his own height, which was five feet six. She had a long, fine-boned face, the skin flawless as a child’s. Thelma, pop-eyed with suspicion, escorted her upstairs to see the spare room. Eddie lurked in the hall, listening.

  ‘How lovely,’ he heard Angel say. ‘And, if I may say so, how tastefully decorated.’ Her voice was self-assured, the crisp enunciation hinting at a corresponding clarity of thought.

  By the time they came downstairs again the two women were chatting almost like friends. To Eddie’s amazement, he heard his mother offering hospitality.

  ‘We generally have a glass of sherry at this time, Miss Wharton. Perhaps you’d care to join us?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  Thelma stared at Eddie, who after an awkward hiatus leapt to his feet and went to the kitchen to search for the bottle of sweet sherry which his father had opened the Christmas before last. When he returned with three assorted glasses on a tray, the women were discussing how soon Angel could move in.

  ‘Subject to a month’s deposit and suitable references, of course.’

  ‘Naturally.’ Angel opened her handbag. ‘I have a reference here from Mrs Hawley-Minton. She’s the lady who runs the agency I work for.’

  ‘A nursing agency?’

  ‘Nursery nursing, actually. Essentially it’s an agency for nannies with nursing training.’

  ‘Eddie,’ Thelma prompted. ‘The sherry.’

  He handed round the glasses. Angel passed an envelope to Thelma, who extracted a sheet of headed paper and settled her reading glasses on her nose. Eddie and Angel sipped their sherry.

  ‘I see that Mrs Hawley-Minton knew your parents,’ Thelma said, her stately manner firmly to the fore.

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s why she took me on. She’s very careful about that sort of thing.’

  Thelma peered interrogatively over her reading glasses.

  ‘An agency like hers is a great responsibility,’ Angel explained. ‘Particularly as children are concerned. She believes one can’t be too careful.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Thelma; and after a pause she added, ‘I do so agree.’ She folded the letter and handed it back to Angel. ‘Well, Miss Wharton, that seems quite satisfactory. When would you like to move in?’

  In those days, Angel was always Miss Wharton. Thelma took refuge in obsolete formality. Eddie avoided calling Angel anything to her face, but sometimes at night he whispered her Christian name, Angela, trying it for size in his mouth, where it felt awkward and alien.

  By and large, Angel kept to her room. She was allowed the use of the bathroom, of course, and she had her own latchkey. For a time she had all the virtues, even negative ones.

  ‘I’m so glad she doesn’t smoke,’ said Thelma, who had converted her former pleasure into a vice. ‘It would make the whole house smell, not just her room. But I suppose she wouldn’t, being a nurse.’

  Before Angel moved in, Thelma had worried a great deal about the telephone. She had visions of Angel making unauthorized calls to Australia, of the phone ringing endlessly (a woman who looked like that was bound to have an active social life), of long conversations with girlfriends and, even worse, boyfriends.

  Angel soon calmed Thelma’s fears. She rarely used the phone herself, and when she did she kept a meticulous record of the cost. Nor did she receive many incoming phone calls. Most of them were to do with her work – usually from Mrs Hawley-Minton’s agency. As the weeks went by, Thelma developed a telephonic acquaintance with Mrs Hawley-Minton.

  ‘They value Miss Wharton very highly,’ she reported to Eddie. ‘Mrs Hawley-Minton tells me that her clients are always asking to have her back. One of them was a real prince. His father was a king. Bulgaria, was it? He was deposed a long time ago, of course, but even so.’

  Eddie envied Angel her job. He thought a good deal about her children and what she might do with them. Sometimes he tried to imagine that he was she, that he was in her clothes, in her skin, behind her eyes.

  ‘She’s working in Belgrave Square this week,’ Thelma would say, telling Eddie for want of anyone better to talk to. ‘He’s a Peruvian millionaire, and she’s something to do with the embassy.’ And Eddie would see dark-haired children with solemn faces and huge eyes in an attic nursery with barred windows; he would see himself looking after them and playing with them, just as Angel did.

  Thelma was curious about Angel’s antecedents, and about her apparently non-existent social life. ‘If you ask me, she’s been unlucky in love. Don’t tell me a girl like that hasn’t had plenty of opportunities. I bet she has men chasing after her with their tongues hanging out every time she walks down the street.’

  Thelma’s coarseness surprised Eddie, even shocked him. She had never shown that side of herself when Stanley had been alive. He noticed that the hypothetical fiancé appealed greatly to her.

  ‘I wonder if she was engaged, and then he was killed, and since then she’s never looked at another man.’ Thelma also had a strong sentimental streak, buried deep but liable to surface unexpectedly. ‘Perhaps he was in the army. Miss Wharton’s father was, you know.’ It transpired that Mrs Hawley-Minton’s late husband had been a brigadier, and he and Angel’s father had served together in India during the war. ‘I think both parents must be dead,’ Thelma confided. ‘She seems quite alone in the world.’

  Thelma’s curiosity about Angel extended to her possessions. Angel kept her room clean and made her own bed. But Thelma retained a key, and every now and then, when Angel was out, she would unlock the door of the back bedroom and cautiously investigate her lodger’s private life.

  ‘I’m not being nosy. But she’s my responsibility in a way. And I have to make sure she’s not burning holes in the bedspread or leaving the fire on when she goes out.’

  Eddie watched his mother on one of these incursions. He stood in the doorway of the back bedroom – a landlady’s dream: clean, tidy, smelling faintly of polish and Angel’s perfume. Thelma moved slowly round the room in a clockwise direction. She opened doors and pulled out drawers. On top of the wardrobe was a large modern suitcase.

  ‘Locked,’ Thelma commented, curious but not annoyed.

  In the cupboard by the bed was a japanned box, and that was locked, too. ‘Probably keeps family papers in there, mementoes of her parents and her fiancé. Funny she doesn’t have any photographs of them. There’s plenty of room on the dressing table.’

  ‘You haven’t got any pictures of Dad,’ Eddie pointed out.

  ‘That’s quite different,’ Thelma wheezed, her attention elsewhere. ‘She’s got an awful lot of books, hasn’t she? I wonder if she’s actually read them.’ She peered at the spines. ‘You wouldn’t have thought she was religious, would you?’ His mother spoke the word ‘religious’ in a tone in which incredulity, pity and curiosity were finely balanced. ‘You’d never have guessed.’

  Eddie noticed a bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. He ran his eyes along the row of spines and other titles leapt out at him: G. K. Chesterton’s biography of Thomas Aquinas; the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne; The Christian Faith; The Four Last Things; A Dictionary of Christian Theology; The Shield of Faith; Man, God and Prayer.

  ‘She doesn’t go to church,’ Thelma said, her voice doubtful. ‘I’m sure we would have noticed.’ She drifted over to the dressing table, picked up a small bottle of perfume and sniffed it. ‘Very nice.’ She put down the perfume. ‘Mind you, it s
hould be. That stuff isn’t cheap. You could feed a family of four on the amount she spends on dolling herself up.’

  Insignificant though it was, the remark lodged in Eddie’s memory. It was the first sign of a rift developing between Thelma and Angel. His mother was by nature a critical person, always willing to find fault and never satisfied with anyone or anything for long. She pursued perfection all her life and would not have known what to do if she had caught up with it.

  As a mild grey spring slipped into a mild grey summer, the carping gathered strength. Thelma fired criticisms like arrows – at first one or two, every now and then, but steadily increasing in number.

  As with Stanley, so with Angel: Thelma did not try to get rid of her lodger any more than she had tried to get rid of her husband. Angel’s unwillingness to take remarks in the spirit they’d been uttered infuriated Thelma. But there was nothing she could do about it – Angel wore her placidity like a suit of armour.

  On a sunny morning in the middle of summer, Eddie took a cup of coffee into the garden. His mother was out of the house for once – every four weeks she went by taxi to the health centre where she had her blood pressure checked and collected her monthly ration of pills and sprays – and he felt unusually relaxed. He wandered towards the trees at the far end.

  The peaceful mood was shattered when he heard the back door opening behind him. He turned. Angel came towards him, picking her way between a weed-infested flowerbed and the long grass of the lawn. Her hair was loose, and she wore a short green dress and sandals. The sun was to her right and a little behind her, casting a golden glow over her hair and throwing her face into shadow.

  ‘I’m not disturbing you?’

  ‘No.’ He shrank back towards the fence.

  ‘It’s such a lovely day. I couldn’t resist coming outside.’

  He sipped his coffee, scalding his tongue.

  ‘Do you know, I saw a fox the other day.’ Angel pointed down the garden towards Carver’s. ‘It went down there. Probably into the wasteland at the back.’