The Fearsome Particles

by Trevor Cole

  In the back of the store, where the space was cluttered with old wooden filing cabinets, broken-limbed hat stands and dusty stacks of magazines, and where the ancient linoleum was chipped and worn away in a trough, exposing subflooring all the way to the rear door, Vicki sat on the edge of a bentwood chair and sipped too-strong tea from the cup that Edward had given her.

  He rolled up a tippy wooden office chair that was missing one of its casters and slid into the low side. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said, “how’s Kyle? Have you heard from him lately?”

  Vicki stared at Edward, not quite comprehending.

  “He’s in Afghanistan, isn’t he? Among the dunes?”

  “Oh.” She smiled and looked down at her cup. “No, he’s home, actually. He flew home last week.”

  “Well, that year went by quickly, didn’t it? I remember you telling me –”

  “No,” she said. “He came home early.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “There was some problem.”

  Edward’s pale green gaze seemed to search for a place to land. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” He pushed the hair back from his forehead. “Is he all right?”

  Vicki shook her head as she beamed. “Completely,” she said. “He’s taking some time to think about what he wants to do now that he’s home. I expect he’ll go back to school.”

  “Pick up where he left off,” said Edward.

  “Exactly.”

  “He’s quite the science whiz, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes.” She wanted to set her cup down, because the tea was too acidic for her, but there didn’t seem to be a handy surface. She began to reach with it toward the shelf of a dilapidated cabinet that held what Edward called his “undecidables,” which included a nineteenth-century silver-mounted French violin bow that had belonged to a renowned local prodigy named Stephan Brunett. The odd thing about the bow was that the bow hair had been severed cleanly, as with a pair of scissors, at each end. What made it an undecidable, in Edward’s eyes, was that a few months after the bow had come into his possession, Stephan, then a young man in his twenties, had committed suicide by jumping into the path of a subway train. In the view of some collectors, that raised its value, and Edward was disinclined to profit from tragedy, or allow anyone else to.

  “Here, I’ll take that,” he said, reaching out for Vicki’s cup.

  “Thank you.” She rose and smoothed her skirt over her hips. “That was lovely, Edward. A lovely break in a hectic day.”

  He was hunting for a place to put both cups down and finally cleared a space on his desk with an elbow. “I left the tea steep too long, didn’t I?”

  “No, no. I just have to get back.”

  “I’m always doing that.” He put a palm to the side of his face. “I get talking with elegant women, you see. And then things like tea just …” He filigreed the air with his fingers to show the thoughts escaping his head.

  Just now, looking at Edward’s shy smile, a boy’s smile, Vicki felt a terrible sadness wash over her. “It was very kind of you, Edward. And just what I needed. Thank you.”

  She turned and began to walk back through the store.

  “So it’s that gorgeous Lightenham Avenue house you’re working on now,” he said as he followed.

  “That’s right.” She opened her purse and rummaged for a Kleenex. “The builders want to list it on Saturday, and Avis has a private showing tomorrow, which gives us no time.”

  “And it’s only the one room you’re having trouble with?”

  “Just that one.”

  “Well, when you’ve got some ideas, please call, all right? And I’ll do –”

  She had turned at the door, just to say goodbye, and the sight of her had stopped him. His hand went to his mouth.

  “Victoria?”

  She swept a thumb under her eyes and chuckled. “I’m being silly. Everything’s fine.” The heavy iron door latch seemed to be sticking.

  His eyes shone with alarm. “Are you sure?”

  “I think I’m just feeling a lot of pressure to get this house ready.” She opened the door and then, with a smile, touched the air between them. “Thank you, Edward. I’ll come back as soon as I know what I’m doing.”

  He held on to the edge of the door with both hands as she left. “I know it’s a ridiculous thing to say, but I want you to call me if there’s anything I can do.”

  At the moment the brick steps took her into the sunshine, she turned and lifted a hand.

  Where was the box of artificial fruit?

  “Hella?” called Vicki. She was in the kitchen of the Lightenham house, well over her little moment in the doorway of Caughley Antiques, and the Peruvian fruit was missing. Hella was outside, on the front steps, having one of her cigarettes, but Vicki was sure she could hear.

  “Hella! Hella, sweetheart!” She heard the front door open.

  “Sorry?” came Hella’s voice.

  “The fruit,” she called. “Where have you put the box of papier mâché fruit?”

  She heard a sigh and the sound of the door closing, and then Hella appeared under the arch between the kitchen and hallway, binding her dark, shoulder-length hair with a thick elastic band. “You’re missing what? The fruit?”

  “Yes, all of it.” Vicki stood at a kitchen island whose marble surface should have been polished and blank, save for a reticulated Worcester basket in white porcelain filled with a bounty of oversized artificial apples and rustic pears, but which was instead laden with four heavy but decidedly fruitless cardboard boxes. “I’ve looked in every one of these,” she said, lifting cardboard flaps at random, “including the one labelled ‘fruit,’ which I gather is old, and I can’t find them anywhere.”

  “They should be there.”

  “Yes.” Vicki nodded. “They should be.” She told herself not to worry, that Margeaux was not one to fuss over a thing like artificial apples and pears handmade by artisans in Arequipa and she could easily send Hella out to buy six pounds of real fruit if it came to that. But the trouble was Avis would be arriving in half an hour expecting the main level to be ready and this was bad timing for a setback.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Hella.

  “Hmm,” said Vicki with a nod and a tight pursing of her lips. “What do you think we should do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She set her hands on her hips. “Well, only that we’re expecting Avis at one, aren’t we?”

  “I think so.”

  “Yes. And she’s going to want to see how we’ve set everything up, and if we can’t find the fruit, I have nothing to put in the Worcester basket.”

  Hella stared for a moment at the porcelain basket sitting empty on the counter. Her eyes brightened. “We have that extra set of linen napkins, right? You could put them in there and it could be like a napkin server.”

  Vicki offered a thin smile, like a gift. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” Hella folded her arms and seemed slightly hurt. “I think it’s a good idea. It’s kind of fun.”

  Vicki closed her eyes and shook her head as her smile held fast. “It’s not a napkin server, Hella, it’s meant specifically for fruit. And the point, let’s remember, is colour.”

  “Okay, well …” Hella looked off and shrugged. “I don’t know what else to suggest.”

  There were days when Vicki wondered whether Hella really enjoyed her job, days when she found wrinkles in the bedspreads Hella was paid to make smooth, when bathmats failed to line up square to the flooring tiles and now when boxes of artisan fruit disappeared without explanation, and without any sense that Hella understood why it mattered. Vicki took these events as proof that, even when one made the best choices available, things didn’t always work out as planned, because when Hella had started with her three years ago, she seemed to have such potential.

  “Anyway,” said Hella, “I don’t know why we’re so worried about a bowl of fake fruit when there’s a whole bedroom upstairs that
’s hardly been started.”

  Vicki dropped her head without a word, then picked up a box filled with Longton Hall china and took it into the dining room, where the drapes and the Matthews series of wood warbler illustrations had been hung (as per Margeaux’s affection for northern hemisphere perching birds), but the table and sideboard had yet to be finished.

  She began unpacking the plates and stacking them at the head of the dining table, and kept at it when Hella came in.

  “I can do that,” Hella said, wadding up a handful of packing paper.

  “Actually I’d prefer it if you located the papier mâché fruit,” said Vicki, her eyes on the plates. “At the moment that’s where you could be the most help to me.”

  “But I looked. I don’t know where they are.”

  Vicki lifted her head. “Exactly where have you looked?”

  “Well” – Hella waved an arm behind her – “this whole floor to start with. And some of the boxes upstairs too.”

  Vicki exerted the great energy to smile. “Then why don’t you try looking in the boxes that you haven’t checked?”

  “There’s no point, they’re not up there. I think we should just try some –”

  “I can’t tell you what a tremendous help it would be to me,” stressed Vicki, her jaw as tight as the fist she was butting against the table, “if you would just look high and low for the artificial fruit.”

  For a moment Hella, who was already a thin, wiry woman, seemed to become thinner and more wiry. She dropped her eyes to the balled paper in her hands and began pulling at its edges. “There’s probably a better use of my time, though, Vicki,” she said quietly. “Because I know I’m not going to find them.”

  Vicki forced the muscles of her neck and jaw to ease, but she still found it necessary to keep her fist pressed against the table. “How do you know, Hella? What are you not telling me about the fruit?”

  Hella’s chest rose with a deep breath and fell. “I feel really stupid, but” – she looked up – “you know how one of the apples was chipped on the top?”

  “Yes, we always put that one at the bottom of the bowl. It’s never a problem.”

  “Well, I was telling my husband about it. He’s a wood guy, you know? Refinishes wood? Mostly pine stuff, for cottagers.” Hella was making intermittent eye contact with Vicki, but most of the time kept her eyes on the ball of paper, which she was now turning in her hands. “And he said he could probably fix it. And I thought that would be a nice thing to do for you. And then, so, I brought the box home with me, because it was easier than searching through the whole thing at the warehouse. And while it was at home with me, my kids got into it.” She paused and looked up, as if to gauge Vicki’s state of mind, then continued turning the paper ball. “I was in the basement, doing the laundry, and I don’t know where the heck my husband was, but anyway my, well, one of my kids got into the box. You know Jeremy.”

  Yes, she knew Jeremy. He was Hella’s little terror. A product, Vicki suspected, of inappropriate habits during pregnancy, though her other two children had turned out all right.

  “And he started throwing the apples and pears around and, see” – Hella looked up again – “we have a dog.”

  Vicki closed her eyes.

  “Normally he’s not like that, really. Like, he doesn’t wreck things? He’s really a good dog? But something got into him. I don’t know what, but he just went to town and by the time I came upstairs it was like, wow, crunchy bits of fake fruit everywhere.”

  Hella stopped for a moment, and in the silence, Vicki thought she could hear the shush of a car outside, driving too quickly down Lightenham Avenue. The new owners of this house, whoever they turned out to be, would probably not like that very much, though Robert and Margeaux were the kind of people able to tune out that sort of thing.

  “I see,” said Vicki.

  Hella stared down at the ball of paper, her angular face taking on the wide-eyed look of someone reliving a bad memory. “For a while I was really worried, you know, that maybe he’d eaten a lot of it, because that wouldn’t be good for him, all that glue and varnish. I was going to take him to the vet, but –”

  “Actually,” said Vicki, “it’s fairly edible.” She could feel herself giving Hella a reassuring smile, though the muscles of her face seemed to be functioning without her having to be very much involved. “It’s really just flour paste and paper, and the type of varnish most of these artisans use isn’t poisonous once it’s dry. I’m sure your dog will be fine.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my husband said.”

  “Well there, you see?” Vicki looked down and discovered a pretty Longton Hall dinner plate in her hands, its delicate bouquet garni pattern seeming quite pale against the creamy background. She wondered for a moment whether this pattern, so faint and frail, was really the sort of which Margeaux would approve. It was possible, thought Vicki, that she had made a terrible mistake, and with Avis arriving in twenty minutes, it was one she had no time to repair.

  “Anyway,” said Hella. “I’m really sorry. I thought I was doing something nice, and it turned out really shitty. And I’m really, really sorry.”

  “Yes,” said Vicki.

  “Are you upset?”

  It was clear she had to make the best of things with the china, she had to move on because it was too late, and there was nothing to be done. She set down the plate in her hands and reached into the box for another. “There should be a set of side plates to go with these,” she said to Hella. “And a sauceboat. Do you think you could find them for me?”

  Hella reached back and lobbed her paper ball through the doorway toward the sink in the kitchen, and seemed chagrined when she missed the mark. Then she turned and faced Vicki with her arms crossed. “Do you want me to, you know, repay you for the fruit or anything? I don’t know how much they cost, but I could. I could pay you back in, like, instalments. If you wanted.”

  Vicki shook her head. “No, Hella. These things happen. I’ve lost a number of fragile items over the years and it’s always unfortunate, but you can’t dwell on it.” She unwrapped a plate and folded the paper into a tight package. “Now listen,” she said, looking into Hella’s eyes and gripping the paper hard, “let’s try to work very quickly over the next twenty minutes, so that we have the downstairs as ready as possible when Avis arrives. All right?”

  Hella sighed as she checked the band in her hair and then sang out an “Okay” that suggested she was far from convinced. “What’ll we put in the bowl in the kitchen?”

  Vicki reached across the table and handed Hella the wedge of folded paper. “Why don’t I leave that up to you?”

  At five minutes after one, Avis trilled a sweet “Halloo” when she opened the door. She had slipped off her shoes and was setting them beside Vicki’s blue pumps when Vicki entered the foyer from the library.

  “Have you seen what they’re doing to that beautiful Georgian on the corner?” she asked, stretching to her full height to meet Vicki as Vicki leaned down to kiss her on the cheek.

  “You’re warm,” said Vicki as she straightened.

  “Oh” – Avis fluttered a hand – “there’s something wrong with the air conditioning and Peter refuses to lift a finger about it and I’ve been in the car since about nine this morning. Anyway I’m furious. You know the one I’m talking about?”

  “Where they’ve added an addition and covered the whole west side with stucco?”

  “Can you believe that?” Avis’s fury sounded like the caroling of meadowlarks. She pulled the silk scarf from around her neck and pushed it fiercely through the handles of her purse. “I sold that house two years ago, and three years before that. It was simply gorgeous. The stone work! And now they’ve really made it a dog’s business.”

  “It’s a shame.”

  “It’s a shock. I hate what’s become of that whole end of the street, all those stucco additions spreading like disease.”

  “They finished the one on the corner about two months
ago.”

  “Well, I hadn’t noticed. I hardly ever come up that way.” She was pressing the hair at her temples into place. “Anyway, dear, let’s see what you’ve been up to!”

  She stepped forward into the circular foyer and Vicki felt her heart quicken as Avis passed her eyes over the flanking oyster-veneered mirrors, up to the Viennese chandelier with glass pendants, and down to the fresh flowers exploding from a coppery Pilkington’s vase set on an enormous tripod table with a piecrust top.

  “I’m never disappointed,” Avis said, “to see that table in one of my houses.”

  Vicki smiled.

  “Cherry, isn’t it?”

  “Walnut,” said Vicki.

  “But I don’t think you’ve ever used it with that particular vase before.”

  Vicki crinkled her eyes, because she had.

  “Well, whether you have or not,” said Avis, “it’s lovely. And the flowers.”

  As she continued her tour of the main level, Avis seemed pleased, even delighted, by nearly everything Vicki had done. In the grand living room, she cooed over Vicki’s juxtaposition of swooping Regency curves against straight-backed Edwardian rigour, appreciated her medley of silk cushions and admired each of the topiaries she had placed in majolica jardinières. In the library, she paused for a moment when she spied the thin, tapered legs of what Vicki thought of as Robert Lightenham’s Carlton House desk, before pronouncing the desk – and Vicki’s arrangement of a bound leather journal, a blue-and-gold Sèvres inkstand and several loose tea-coloured papers featuring her own impersonation of a man’s dashed handwriting – “inspired.”

  She approved of the kitchen counter arrangements, which included a set of buttery glazed Savoie pottery jugs under the window and a Victorian syrup dispenser in the corner, and said not a disapproving word as she passed by Hella’s concoction of dried flowers in the porcelain Worcester basket.

  In the dining room, she seemed to hesitate over the George III drop-leaf table, and bent down to peer closely at one of the Longton Hall plates. It was then that Vicki had an urge to admit to Avis that these particular plates were not ideal, that in fact she would probably change them before the weekend, to bring in something more appropriate (though of course she would not say “appropriate for Margeaux”). But before she could say a word, Avis straightened and proceeded to purse her mouth and lift her eyebrows in a way that suggested she was calculating the outcome of an intricate equation. And she said, “The couple I’m bringing tomorrow – he’s in tire manufacturing, and she’s on a huge number of committees – and of course I’ve been to their home for dinner many times … unless I’m mistaken” – she bent down again to examine the plate’s pattern – “I think they have a set with this exact design.”