Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “Ho!” said Mrs. Hewston, standing in the kitchen doorway. “You’re looking well on it.”

  “Guilty,” said Jude. “It’s the sea air.”

  Mrs. Hewston said nothing but smirked and bridled so much that Jude took her upstairs to show her the little bedsit to prove she was sleeping alone.

  “Of course, I haven’t been here much since the doctor died,” said Mrs. Hewston, looking round the bedroom landing with the quick, angled glances of a blackbird, although the doors were closed. “He was one of the last true gentlemen. Always treated me quite like one of the family. Chocolates on my birthday, brandy at Christmas, always lifted his hat when he drove past.”

  Jude couldn’t think of anything less like family membership than lifted hats and neutral gifts on expected days, but she said nothing. She didn’t even realise she had missed the cue until Mrs. Hewston offered it up again in a different form while they were climbing the second set of stairs.

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh, “you don’t come across his like much anymore. And it was a mutual regard. He called me the salt of the earth. ‘You’re the salt of the earth, Nurse Hewston,’ he’d say.”

  What with her age and all the talking, she was labouring before they reached the attics, and she sank into one of the kitchen chairs in the yellow room as soon as Jude opened the door.

  “It was the great sadness of his life that this one didn’t follow him into medicine,” she added, taking three breaths to get through it.

  “Lowell?” said Jude, confused enough to look around for who else she might mean. The Scots with their thises and thats caught her out ten times a day.

  “It’s Lowland,” said Mrs. Hewston. “He was named for his mother’s family. They were gentleman farmers down Whithorn way. A great big spread. They looked down on the doctor when he went courting Miss Lowland. Can you believe it? But there, the family died out and the farm’s away. Sold on to a bunch of bankers and they’re living off cheques from Brussels, like all farmers these days.”

  Jude nodded, barely listening. The fields around the edges of the town were dotted with sheep and cattle, she thought, and the shops were full of lamb and beef; it didn’t seem like much of a con to her. But then, Mrs. Hewston would look at a babe in arms and see a grifter. She was still sneering at man of sixty because he didn’t want to take up medicine when he was a boy.

  The woman had seen Jude’s attention wandering and changed the subject. “And so what’s brought you here?” she began.

  “Like Lowell said,” Jude replied evenly, “I’m helping out with a project in the bookshop.”

  “All the way to London for consultants!” Mrs. Hewston said. “That’s the mother’s side. A fortune they let slip through their fingers. And all that land. The doctor built up his practice from nothing and retired very comfortably. It was London, wasn’t it?” she added. Jude nodded. London was a big place. “And you jumped at the chance, did you? Ah, well. I’ve seen it too many times not to know it again. Galloway is just that kind of place for some reason.”

  “What kind of place is that?” said Jude, sounding less even now, she knew.

  “Galloway attracts runaways,” Mrs. Hewston said. “I don’t say it in judgment, dear. But when you’ve been a village nurse like me, you can’t help seeing clearly.” She beamed at Jude, delighted with herself.

  “I did need a break,” said Jude. “So the timing was good, it’s true.”

  “We never had ‘breaks,’ the doctor and me,” said Mrs. Hewston. “We left school and started our training, worked our forty years, took our statutory leave, enjoyed our public holidays, and did our jobs. Grateful for the privilege, we were. None of this ‘gap year’ and ‘downtime.’ ‘Me time.’”

  “But you’re surely much younger than Lowell’s father, Mrs. Hewston.” Jude didn’t mean to flatter; she only wanted to kill the Greatest Generation talk before a second wind.

  “Cut from the same cloth,” said Mrs. Hewston vaguely. “No running away for either of us, no matter what life served up. You wouldn’t understand. I don’t say that meanly, dear. It’s just different times.”

  Jude couldn’t help herself. “My parents died,” she said. “In an accident. Their funeral was a week ago.”

  Mrs. Hewston cocked her head up to one side and looked at Jude from the corner of her eye. The blackbird again. “No,” she said. “I’m not trying to contradict you, dear, but that’s not it.”

  Jude felt a flush begin to spread up over her neck from the collar of the peasant blouse, flooding her cheeks with heat and her eyes with tears. “My mother and father both passed away in a freak—”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Mrs. Hewston cut in. “But that’s not all that’s going on. That’s a clean thing, if you take my meaning.” She sat back after she spoke. She had completely recovered her breath now, quite comfortable after the climb, and she took the chance while Jude was speechless to have a proper look round, blandly cheerful as she noted the dishes and the pans.

  “Clean?” said Jude at last.

  “Bereavement,” Mrs. Hewston said, “is an open thing. You gather friends and family round you. You clear the house and do the paperwork. Bereavement isn’t trouble. Bereavement isn’t … ”

  “Dirty?” said Jude.

  “Now, now,” Mrs. Hewston said. “There’s no need to be upset. We’re just talking.” She stood up and placed the kitchen chair very carefully under the table. “But I’ll take my leave. Plain talking has gone the way of hard work, I sometimes think. I don’t mean that to hurt, dear. But I was a nurse when nursing was more than looking at a screen and dressing in pyjamas. And being a doctor meant more than signing notes and passing people on to specialists. He did tonsillectomies downstairs in the dining room, you know.”

  “The good old days,” said Jude, still recovering.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying something to you before I go, dear,” Mrs. Hewston said. She pointed to the shelf of crockery. “Those are full sets of good china you’ve broken apart. Some of those plates were wedding presents.”

  Jude tried to laugh it off to herself once Mrs. Hewston was gone. “China shaming!” she said out loud, shaking her head, but the woman’s words had spoiled the peaceful rooms, and although she had been planning a quiet morning, she decided to go to the shop instead and tackle another bay there.

  Lowell was gone, in search of a possible Audubon. “A renowned birder,” he’d said that breakfast time. “Moved to Galloway from the Essex marshes specifically to work on his list. I tried to get a squint at his library when he went into sheltered housing five years ago, but his daughters would have none of it. We’ll see.”

  “When did he die?” said Jude, watching him count out a thick stack of twenties and fold them into his inside pocket.

  “Tuesday,” Lowell said. “So they’ll be past the shock and just getting round to packing. The housing trust will have mentioned a final bill. The undertakers might have sent an estimate already. Definitely the florists.”

  “Right,” said Jude. “This is a new side to you.”

  Lowell only grinned, wolfishly, and patted his pocket, the pad of banknotes making a dull, smacking sound through the wool and the lining.

  She had never been alone in the shop before, although Lowell had given her a key that very first day, and she felt a flip of excitement in her belly as she unlocked the door and hurried in out of the rain. Excitement or something similar, anyway. The long passageway to Lowell’s desk seemed welcoming now, a primrose path to certain pleasure.

  Soon she would work her way through each of these bags, up one side and down the other, sorting, dusting, wiping the books, stuffing the empty carriers into a bin bag, and then sweeping and mopping the floor, washing down the walls with long firm swipes. Maybe, she thought, once the floor was clear, Lowell could hang some of his photograph collection on the walls, make a display.

/>   For now, she turned sideways and edged along towards the curtain. Were the photographs framed already, she wondered, and she pulled the little brass handle on one of the shallow drawers. Still locked. She turned away and surveyed her battleground.

  She was winning. There was enough order to warm her librarian’s heart, still enough disorder to gird her librarian’s loins. To the left of the desk, where Lowell could see them, the large and expensive Art and Architecture volumes were now arranged on the deep shelves where they could stand upright, as their beauty deserved. To the right of the desk, the side room was cleared, and everything of local interest—gathered from three floors and every corner—was stacked in there by subject matter, the shelves lately scrubbed with a soapy cloth and now dry again, waiting to receive them. The small room behind the desk, where that single Scottish Fiction case had been, held all the Scottish Fiction now. She had named it Miss Buchan’s Boudoir and added the poetry too, of which there was much, Galloway being the sort of place that drew poets and shook out poems from the usually prosaic as they strode the shores and stood on the headlands.

  Jude had decided the arrangements after interrogation. What did most people come in for? Fiction. Did those buyers browse other sections? Yes, they often did. Who didn’t, if anyone? Tourists. Coach-trippers looking for the printed equivalents of coasters and key rings. And who were the most avid readers of all? Who were the rabid ones, the frantic ones, the bookworms who’d lost all sense of proportion completely? Crime fiction fans, Lowell told her. Mystery and horror and sci-fi too. And amongst the nonfiction? The bird-watchers, as one would expect, although there were increasing numbers of hard-bitten quilters and knitters these days too.

  It made sense then, she explained to him, to have Local Interest and Scottish Fiction—the coasters and key rings—nearby, so the bus-trippers’ bunions wouldn’t be troubled by too long a walk and their old knees (or new knees) wouldn’t protest at the stairs.

  General Fiction and Literature were in the two big draughty rooms on the next floor, the rooms above the neighbours’ shops, with the tall windows onto the street, the good daylight letting discerning customers read pages and pages, whole chapters at a time, before they made up their minds.

  Exiled to the top floor were Natural History, for those unhinged twitchers; all the Handicrafts, for those beady-eyed quilters; and the whole dark kingdom of Fantasy, Horror, and Crime. Lowell insisted that Children’s Books be tucked under the eaves up there too.

  “I’m not so sure,” Jude cautioned. “Parents might not want their little ones climbing the stairs.”

  “Good,” said Lowell. “Plenty of children’s bookshops around. Mine are for collectors but, dear me, there’s a stink if you say so.”

  The stairs. Jude lifted the latch on the door between Coasters and Key Rings (the name had stuck) and Miss Buchan’s Boudoir and began to climb. Each rise was steep and each tread was shallow and the turn was tight and the rail was loose, and if ever a health and safety inspector came near the place, Lowland Glen Books would be gone forever.

  “I get the odd claustrophobe,” Lowell had said. “But if they tell me what they’re after, I can dot up myself and bring it down to them. I made a mint from a very … Ah, a very … Well, quite a solid Canadian lady who wasn’t so much claustrophobic as in real danger of getting jammed—Winnie-the-Pooh-style, you know? So she sat out the back in the shade of the apple tree and I brought everything we had on the Russian royals. An Anastasia complex opens the wallet wonderfully.”

  “I was just going to say what a sweet man you are,” Jude told him, straight-faced and twinkle-eyed. “But then you kept talking.”

  Russian royals were still in need of a permanent home. All the royals were, come to that; Biography in general, and History too, and Travel and Non-Scottish Poetry, and Plays and all the really dusty stuff like Theology, Philology, the Humour that was never funny, and the now heart-breaking Reference section. As she emerged from the staircase, there on the landing was a beautiful set of the poor old Encyclopaedia Britannica, half calf, buff buckram, tooled in gold, tissue over the woodcuts, clicked into Wiki-oblivion.

  I know how you feel, she said silently to them, trailing a hand over their gilt-edged pages as she passed. You and me both, Britannica. Then the portcullis came down.

  Up here it was easier to see that Lowland Glen Books had once been someone’s home. There were fireplaces in Fiction and Literature. Shame they couldn’t be lit when the wind whistled in around the rags plugging the windows. Jude looked at a shelf or two in each and tried not to form a view. John Irving and his brothers were in Literature; Sarah Waters and her sisters in Fiction. She turned away from both and from the awkward conversation she might need to have with a kind man who’d taken her in, given her a roof over her head and a bed to sleep in, and filled her pockets with tenners.

  The little back room above Miss Buchan’s Boudoir that Jude had earmarked for Poetry and Plays, since its shelves were so narrow, was actually a bathroom. It had a plate screwed over the old toilet hole, but the washbasin was still there, filled with Beatrix Potter, heaped up against the taps, held together with cobwebs. She could look at it, holding one wrist in the other hand, and feel her pulse slow and steady, like a lizard’s. One day soon she would have to empty that sink, and then she would soak herself pruny in scalding water in the cavernous Jamaica House bath as every stitch she’d had on sloshed around downstairs in the drum of Lowell’s washing machine.

  The room next to it, above … Jude wasn’t familiar enough with the layout to say … but the next room was a bedroom decorated in the sixties with those emetically cute rabbits on the wallpaper—long lashes and little satchels—and Blu-Tak marks from where posters had been removed. As though the child that chose the bunnies had been stuck with them into the pop group years and had covered them with posters.

  She was at the landing window, by the foot of the stairway to the attic floor (even steeper, even narrower, behind an even smaller door), when she heard something. It was a short chunk of sound halfway between a squeal and a groan, and it stopped dead after less than a second. Jude cocked her head and, as she turned, she thought she saw something too. Just a flicker of movement and nothing to concern her since it was outside, glimpsed through the half-bare branches of the yellowing apple tree down there. As she moved closer to the tiny grimy pane to take a better look, though—bam bam bam! Someone was pounding the front door loud enough to shake the building’s rickety bones, stirring dust and setting the mice in the walls—silent till now—scurrying and scrabbling. Jude heard the beat of wings and wondered if gulls had risen from the roof or if somewhere in the eaves of the attic floor an owl or even a bat had been woken.

  Six

  Bam bam bam!

  Police! Jude thought. Who else would pound on a door like that? But police usually shout through it too.

  And as she thought it, the shout came. “Hurry up and let me in—I’m drowning!”

  Jude fumbled the door open and was bundled aside, staggering against the nearest carrier bag of paperbacks as a woman, coatless despite the drizzle, hurried inside.

  “What a pigging awful day,” she said, shaking the two flaps of her cardigan. She had poolside flip-flops on and the toes of her socks were wet from the puddles.

  “He’s—I’m—We’re not really open,” Jude said.

  “I’m not buying,” said the woman. She was perhaps sixty, but her hair was older than the rest of her, from years of home perms (or at least cheap perms) and a colour chosen when she was young and never noticed again. “Maureen,” she said, wiping her hand on her jeans and holding it out. “From the Cancer. Charity shop,” she added, seeing Jude’s eyes widen. “I’m overdue for a rootle.”

  She strode off along the corridor, clicking on lights, quite at home.

  “Lowell lets me have his Dan Browns and I give him our Bookers.”

  “Well, okay, if you�
��re … ” Jude said. She had never lived in a small town. “How do you know where to start?” she said, looking up and down the choked passageway and thinking about the three floors around and above them.

  “You’re not wrong!” said Maureen. “I could have danced a jig when I heard you’d arrived.”

  “Me?”

  “To take a shovel to it.” Maureen turned sharp left at the desk, into the short off-shoot by Art and Architecture, where Lowell kept a kettle and some mugs on a counter. He filled the kettle from a spout above the tiny washbasin in the toilet and Jude tried not to think about the pipes, nor about the coffee-crusted spoon in the sugar bag and the sugar-crusted spoon in the coffee jar. She would take them back to Jamaica House and soak them. Better, she would buy plastic ones at Tesco. He might not notice that either.

  “Can I get you a cuppa?” she asked.

  Maureen shuddered, making her smile. Then she batted back a curtain just beyond the kettle counter, another of Lowell’s curtains, and opened a door Jude had never seen. She followed to the doorway and peered in.

  It was a room about ten feet square, stacked high with carrier bags, wall to wall, all the way from the back to the door.

  “I—I didn’t—” Jude said.

  “O-ho!” said Maureen. “He’s kept this bit quiet, has he?”

  Jude let her eyes travel over the mound of bulging bags. It filled the room, washing up the walls and brushing the ceiling. She had seen something like it once before, an illustration in a history text about the third Reich. Inside a bookshop, it was obscene.

  Some of the bags were tied shut, but most gaped, showing a coxcomb of yellowing paperback pages, the odd flash of colour from a jacket or glint of gold from an embossed title. Jude couldn’t bear to imagine the bottom layer—crumbled bindings, torn pages, crushed spines.

  Maureen had fished out her phone and was scrolling through her pictures.

  “Here we go,” she said. “This is the only way I can do it.” She held the phone out and showed a photograph of the room taken from exactly the same spot where she was standing. “Three new ones,” she said, comparing the image on the screen with the view before her. She slipped her phone back into her cardigan pocket and poked open a Safeway bag halfway up the front of the pile.