by Helen Harris
She shook her head vehemently. ‘That’s what I mean,’ she said. ‘In that respect, it’s not what it’s cracked up to be: a Mecca for lovers, the “Capital of Romance”. A load of nonsense!’
That seemed a bit surprising coming from someone as keen on romance as Mrs Queripel, but when I tried to ask her more she clammed up and sat staring disapprovingly ahead in frosty silence. I got only one clue when she said that they had stayed in a horrid little hotel in not a nice part of town at all, and that when she thought of what had gone on in that hotel it still gave her the creeps, even now.
She seemed in rather a bad mood all round after that, and it was the first Sunday for ages that she didn’t tell me another instalment in the ‘Romance of Leonard and Alicia Queripel’.
When I got up to go, she asked a bit pathetically, ‘I’ve not been very good company, have I?’
‘Oh yes, you have,’ I lied brightly. ‘You’re just a bit under the weather, that’s all.’
She said something so dismal then that, it really filled me with gloom.
‘You’ll never get your youth and beauty back, my dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t squander it on stony ground.’
I said sharply, ‘What are you talking about?’ and she gave a gusty sigh.
‘Mrs Queripel,’ I said, ‘I know you think I shouldn’t talk back to my elders and betters. But, really, I do think it’s a bit much your telling me what I ought to do about Rob when you’ve never even met him.’
Mrs Queripel started. She peered at me for a moment as if trying to work out whatever had put such an idea into my head. Then she grinned wickedly. ‘My, you do take things very personally, don’t you?’ she said maliciously. ‘Who knows, maybe I wasn’t thinking about you and him at all?’
*
Alicia realized that she was falling behind with her furniture removal. She laid the blame for it fairly and squarely on Alison. How could she arrange herself a haven in the front room when she had to entertain her visitor in there week after week? She had kept on carrying things down all through the past three months, but they tended to be little frippery things. She was putting off her final commitment to the front room because of Alison. She had almost reached the last irreversible stage of bringing down her bedding, which she intended to spread at night on the settee and to hide during the day behind it. All that needed to be carried down beforehand was her bedside table and her lamp, her two pillows and her necessaries. But she suspected that bringing down the bedding would be beyond her. She had dreadful visions of slipping and falling, dragged headlong by the eiderdown and crashing into the hall to be smothered as she lay stunned beneath its pink weight. So here she was dithering, as she had been for days, between the relative evils of risking a fall and of being caught short downstairs without her comforts, between the shame of Alison seeing her domestic shortcomings and the pain of having to toil up the stairs again every night. Her breathing had never quite gone back to normal after her cold. At the slightest exertion, something like a sea mist rose from the marshy bottom of her lungs and fogged her chest and her vision. To accompany this, there was a squealing, squawking effect of seagulls as her breath fought its way in and out of her constricted whistling tubes.
She found that the dilemma would come upon her in odd moments and she would discover that she had been sitting or standing, frozen, dwelling on some unhappy aspect of it. She would come to with a tea-towel in her hand, or a powder-puff, and realize that more than minutes – maybe hours – had gone by.
The first time Alison came round after the New Year, Alicia had been dwelling on what an obstacle to her arrangement Alison was and, try as she might, which she did not, she could not help being snappish and resentful to her. It occurred to her, as she watched Alison bad-manneredly crunch a biscui, that considering how young and strong she was, with all her cycling and God knows what, the least she could do was offer to help Alicia carry down some furniture in return for all her hospitality. She glared at her quite angrily for not having offered of her own accord, and then she nearly started out of her skin because she realized that of course Alison could not possibly have offered, since she had no idea what Alicia was up to. Besides, Alicia suddenly thought, could she trust her enough to have her help?
The week after the New Year holiday, Pearl came back. There was no word of warning and, initially, no explanation. Her big shadow just reappeared at the front door early on Wednesday morning and when Alicia at last brought herself to open the door to her, her heart in her mouth, Pearl sang out, ‘Mornin’, Mrs Queripel,’ as though nothing at all had happened.
Outraged, Alicia barred her way. ‘Wherever have you been?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought you weren’t coming any more.’
Pearl grinned shamefacedly. ‘I was off sick, wasn’t I? Didn’t they send someone else instead? Didn’t they let you know?’
‘No, they certainly didn’t,’ Alicia answered. She repeated, ‘I thought you weren’t coming any more.’
Pearl said something unpardonable, but since she had already taken off her turban and begun to unbutton her mac on the doorstep, Alicia had no option but to let her in. ‘No such luck, Mrs Queripel.’
Alicia gave a sour snort. ‘No such luck,’ she agreed in an undertone.
She followed Pearl into the kitchen and grimly surveyed the brilliant pink blouse and bulging maroon slacks which emerged from under her raincoat. No consideration for other people’s sensibilities, she concluded bitterly to herself.
She sat in a corner of the front room and sulked as demonstratively as she knew how for most of the morning. It was only when Pearl was nearly due to leave that she had an inexplicable change of heart and wondered if she wasn’t being unfair. She went graciously into the kitchen and asked Pearl condescendingly what had been the matter with her.
Pearl said, ‘The flu, I was in bed all over Christmas. It passed me by, Christmas.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Alicia. ‘I had a shocking cold myself; I didn’t take to my bed though.’
‘No?’ said Pearl vaguely. She was wringing out cloths fiercely at the sink.
‘No, I soldiered through. I was more or less right in time for my visitor on Boxing Day.’
‘My daughters had to do everything,’ Pearl said. ‘Cook the meal, lay the table, do the washing and the clearing. I couldn’t even swallow a mouthful. I was weak as a baby.’ She chuckled indulgently. ‘Yeah, weak as a baby.’
Alicia looked at her primly. ‘We had mince-pies for tea,’ she said, ‘and I got a lovely brooch.’
‘My husband gave me a nightie,’ Pearl giggled. ‘And my youngest a box of beautiful chocolates.’
Alicia turned her back on Pearl and walked angrily out of the kitchen. She couldn’t think why she had given in to that ridiculous impulse to try and be kind to her.
In the days before Alison’s next visit, she tried to decide if it was wise to ask Alison to help her with the furniture. On Thursday, she decided it wasn’t; on Friday, she decided it was; on Saturday morning, she decided it wasn’t; but on Saturday night, climbing up the stairs, she had a funny turn and she decided once and for all that it was.
When Alison arrived on Sunday, she had it all worked out. They would drink their tea and have their chat and then lightly Alicia would say to her, ‘I wonder if you would mind doing me a little favour, dear?’
It threw everything out when Alison arrived in a great state because she had been knocked off her bicycle at the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout and, although not badly hurt, was understandably shaken. Alicia was glad to notice that the fur had survived unscathed. They were no sooner over that, and a painstaking examination of the cuts and bumps on Alison’s hands and knees, when she announced in great excitement that her boy-friend was going to be on television in three weeks’ time and Alicia must make sure to watch him. Apparently the programme, some discussion group, had been recorded a short while ago and they had been waiting on tenterhooks for the transmission date to be decided. Alison wrote it down carefully fo
r Alicia on a piece of paper, with the time and the channel, and she said, ‘Promise me you won’t miss it? I’ll remind you nearer the time. I’d love to hear what you think of him.’
Alicia couldn’t stand discussion groups. They weren’t actors, they weren’t at home performing, and they usually did it so badly; twitching, jerking, upstaging one another, fluffing their lines. She couldn’t stand to see such raw amateurs making a spectacle of themselves on her screen. She was put out that Alison kept sticking her petty little concerns in the way of what Alicia wanted. Honestly, she thought, as if I didn’t have enough on my plate without having to minister to all her troubles too!
‘I’ll see if I’m free when the time comes round,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ve got such a lot to do these days, you know.’ She felt a little embarrassed when she saw Alison’s eyes widen at this obvious lie.
Before Alison could ask sceptically, ‘What?’ she rushed on, ‘I wonder if you would mind doing me a little favour, dear?’
‘What?’ Alison asked sulkily.
Oh, be like that! Alicia raged internally. Be like that. See if I care. She raised her chin and she said hastily, ‘Not if you don’t want to, dear, not if it puts you out. I should hate to put you to any trouble.’ Pointedly, she bent forward and offered Alison another biscuit. Each biscuit represented one hard-won step down the street to Mr Patel’s. Alison quite understandably, said, ‘No thank you.’
They sat for a moment in an awkward silence.
‘Well, why don’t you try telling me what it is?’ Alison asked impatiently. ‘Do you want some shopping done? That’s no trouble.’
‘No, it isn’t shopping,’ Alicia said irritably. ‘It doesn’t even require stepping outside the house.’
‘Well?’ Alison repeated, ‘what is it?’
Alicia wasn’t at all sure she wanted Alison upstairs amid her belongings now. She had shown such a streak of temper. Dubiously, she weighed her head from side to side. ‘It’s nothing urgent,’ she heard herself say. ‘It can perfectly well wait.’
‘Oh, Mrs Queripel!’ Alison exclaimed. ‘Please!’
So she gave in to the girl, as a kindness. It would have been wrong to let her leave feeling unforgiven. And she was so happy to agree to help. Alicia very nearly had to restrain her from rushing straight upstairs there and then to heave whatever Alicia wanted over her ready shoulders and carry it down the stairs. But Alicia needed time to get used to the idea. So they agreed to start on the removal the following week and Alison said she would make sure to come in suitable clothes for carrying things.
Alicia and Leonard had thought to finish their days in this house. Finish their days together, with firelit evenings and lamplit suppers, serenely sinking down into their sunset years. They had turned a blind eye to the house’s obvious shortcomings – poor state of decoration, drains, damp in the kitchen and scullery – thinking that would give them something to busy themselves with, if time ever hung on their hands. It was, not counting the boarding-house, their first and last home of their own. But, less than two years after they moved in, before they had a chance so much as to ask a man in to look at the damp or the drains, Leonard had caught his cancer which was horribly enough his birth sign also, and in a matter of months he had wasted away and died. Alicia had been left in a dingy house full of memories; wardrobes and chests of drawers and photograph albums full of memories, a house which reminded her cruelly of Leonard at every step. The decoration and the drains and the damp had never been seen to. It wasn’t a woman’s business, Alicia believed.
She felt quite agitated at the thought of Alison penetrating so much deeper into the house. All right, a lot of her memories were already on display downstairs and Alison was a sharpish little thing; who knows what she might well have spotted already? But there was something undeniably more intimate about her coming upstairs into the bedroom, seeing, lifting up their bedding. Alicia worried that Alison might tramp roughshod through her secret kingdom, that in her innocence she might blurt out some question which Alicia wouldn’t be able to answer without weeping.
She spent a miserable week. She couldn’t shake off her cough nor an accompanying feeling that she was drowning, which came over her when the tide rolled into her chest and the seagulls started squealing. One day, during a coughing fit, she had a clear vision of a summer bandstand on a promenade, with a blue and white striped awning flapping and the sunshine sparkling off the instruments and the waves. When she got over it, she found herself half-dead in her armchair.
Dr Chowdhury, the Indian doctor whom Miss Midgley had sent round to see her just before Christmas, had shaken his head solemnly when he listened to her chest. He had prescribed her two types of capsule and a cough mixture, but tuttingly refused the only thing which Alicia had asked him for: a tonic. She left the capsules contemptuously on the table-top where Dr Chowdhury had put them, although she did grudgingly take small spoonfuls of his cough mixture. She didn’t hold with Indian doctors and she was blowed if she was going to take his potions.
*
I thought I would tell Rob about Mrs Queripel straight away when he came back from his last sitar lesson. I knew he would be in a relaxed frame of mind, pleased with his new resolution, with an end which was also a beginning. And, having just come back from Mrs Queripel’s, I knew I would have the determination to stick by her. She had asked me to help her move some of her furniture the following week and that was a guarantee that, however much I weakened at the moment of the revelation, I knew I had to go back.
I did it badly. I was so tense when Rob got back that I didn’t pay any attention to him or think about his feelings. I took his good mood for granted. Obsessed by my own worry, I didn’t see his depression.
‘Rob, I’ve got something to tell you,’ I said. Anyone but an idiot would not have used that sentence.
Rob looked horrified. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he exclaimed.
And I laughed. I laughed merrily and gaily because what I had to tell him was not nearly as bad as that.
‘Not that,’ I said. ‘Not that! We’re safe. It’s to do with what I’ve been up to all this time while you were at your sitar lessons.’
Then I told him. I told him quite simply and factually how I had been put in touch with Mrs Queripel, roughly where she lived, how old she was and what her house was like. I finished feeling rather hot and embarrassed, as if I had built the whole thing up into something much more important than it was.
Rob sighed and said, ‘Do you mind if I make myself a coffee before we go into this?’
Disappointed, I followed him into the kitchen. I got out the biscuit tin for him over-eagerly and I sat opposite him at the kitchen table as he began to drink his coffee. He just drank.
‘She used to be an actress, you know,’ I volunteered. ‘It’s extremely interesting talking to her.’
‘Uh huh?’ said Rob.
‘You’re not angry, are you?’ I insisted. ‘You’re not cross with me?’
‘Come off it,’ said Rob. He looked at me with a vaguely irritated expression, as though I were tiresomely thrusting my petty concerns on him when he had much greater matters on his mind.
‘Because I would have told you sooner or later. You do realize that? It’s just now seemed convenient since you were stopping your lessons.’
Rob concentrated on me with an effort. ‘Look, if you choose to spend your Sunday afternoons having tea with old ladies, that’s your affair,’ he said rudely. ‘I can’t pretend I think it’s the most wonderful way in the world to spend your Sundays. But if it gives you a kick –’
‘It’s not so much that it gives me a kick,’ I persisted. ‘It’s just that I feel I’m getting something out of it which I was missing before.’
Rob shrugged. ‘Well, great,’ he said sullenly. ‘Great. There’s no accounting for tastes. Just don’t expect me to get excited about it, that’s all.’
‘So you’re not annoyed that I’ve been being a bit … well, deceitful?’ I said desperately. ‘You don’
t resent that I didn’t tell you?’
Rob looked at me almost blearily. ‘I’m getting used to your funny ideas,’ he said.
The next night, he brought the subject up of his own accord, in bed.
‘Tell me what you think you’re getting out of it, then,’ he said in the dark.
‘Out of what?’ I mumbled, which was ridiculous since of course I knew perfectly well what he was talking about.
‘Out of visiting this old biddy of yours.’
‘She’s not an old biddy.’
‘OK, Alison, let’s just try and be rational about this, shall we? Yesterday, you announce out of the blue that for the last three months you’ve been making weekly visits to some old biddy which you kept quiet about. Now that’s such an innocent thing to do that I can’t help wondering why you went to such lengths to keep it secret; if there isn’t maybe more to this than meets the eye?’
We were lying in such a way that we were not touching each other at all and I made sure by lying rigid that we wouldn’t.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, who is this old biddy? You are … quite sure she exists?’
‘Rob!’
‘No need to sound so shocked, Alison. You must admit it would be an excellent cover if you were seeing someone.’
‘Rob!!’
‘Don’t start straight away getting into a state. I’m not for a moment suggesting you are. I’m just trying to work out why you should be being so extraordinary secretive about this.’
‘You’re disgusting,’ I said shrilly. ‘You’re absolutely disgusting! You only think in those terms, don’t you? You just can’t imagine anyone wanting to go and talk to an old person out of interest, can you? You’re supposed to be a writer,’ I said furiously, ‘and you can’t imagine anyone having a different motivation from yours.’
‘Wow!’ said Rob.
We lay in silence for a moment. Then, simultaneously, Rob said, ‘I didn’t mean to –’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry I –’
‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Rob said, ‘but I can’t help feeling there is something a bit fishy about this. I mean, do you do lots of other things which you haven’t told me about either? You’re not secretly a member of a witches’ coven, are you? You don’t dress up and fly through the streets at night on your broomstick?’