Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “Casual Vacancy, Bake Off, Fifty Shades, Picoult,” she said. “This is your typical Supermarket Sadie. Save a fortune if they’d just put their name down at the library. I’ll just bob up and check Lowell’s got these already before I nab them, though. I know where to look.”

  Jude nodded dumbly. She pulled at a thin, yellow carrier that had bulged out of place at floor level like a lumbar disc. Jilly Cooper’s Riders was just visible inside. If it had been discarded after one reading by another impulse buyer that meant there was roughly thirty years’ worth of mouldering paperbacks in here. And she had actually thought she was winning.

  “I’ll leave the Picoult.” Maureen had returned. “But he’s got the rest. Well, not Fifty Shades. Ask him why not if you want a laugh sometime.” She had rechecked her phone and was reaching up to a second bag. “Now then, what do we have here? Oh, this is different. Yellow hardbacks. I know better than to touch them.”

  “Gollancz edition,” said Jude. When she’d first started in the library, the long stretch of yellow Gollancz Michael Innes was something to navigate by when she was shelving. Like the soft pink block of Mazo de la Roche and the fat spines of the Susan Howatch blockbusters. All gone now.

  “And … ” said Maureen, stretching to the final new bag, “ … comics. I’ll tell the lads up at Kapow! Lowell can’t be fashed with comics.”

  Jude barely heard her. She had walked away to Coasters and Key Rings. “I’m not here, I’m not here,” she said.

  “That’s me sorted, hen,” said Maureen, coming to join her with a short stack of books under one arm. “Do you want to get the door after me?”

  Jude nodded and smiled, over her slump already. It was all good. That’s what the happy people were saying these days to anyone who’d listen. It’s all good. Yes, there was an extra week’s work in there; a fortnight’s maybe. But that meant an extra fortnight’s pay and an extra fortnight’s—she tried to stop the thought before it was finished, but it came anyway—safety.

  “I’ll let you out the back if it’s easier,” she said to Maureen. “This weather! Are you parked out that way?”

  “Parked?” Maureen said. “There’s no parking out there. It’s a garden.”

  “But didn’t you come round?” said Jude. “I thought I saw you.”

  “Round where?” said Maureen. “There’s nowhere to … you thought you saw what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Jude. She walked briskly and opened the front door, then watched as Maureen scuttled up the street with the paperbacks held tight inside her cardi. Then she locked the door again and wandered slowly back through to the Boudoir. It had been a laundry room once, or whatever a utility room had been called in those days, with a door to the drying green.

  Jude opened it as quietly as she could and thought she saw, was almost sure she saw, through the high stalks of old hollyhocks and the lowest branches of the apple tree, that same flitting movement again.

  She knew she heard the sound; the squeal that was more like a groan. But this time it ended with a sharp smack. Jude made sure the laundry room door was propped open, misusing a tattered copy of Highland Verse Vol II that lay on the floor, and picked her way down through the tussocky November grass, feeling the cold and wet begin to seep in at the seams of her shoes. The apple tree had outgrown its space over the years and now filled the garden side to side, like a bouncer in a nightclub doorway. Jude ducked under its lowest boughs but must have brushed against at least a twig because she showered herself with droplets and shivered as she straightened again.

  When she got to the end of the garden, she knew what the noise had been. There was a door in the high, stone wall. Peeling paint and sodden wood with an iron handle rattling loosely on its one remaining screw. And, on the path, an arc where the moss had been scraped down to the stone as the old door opened as far as it would go. Jude tried it, just to make sure, and there was that noise for a third time. She poked her head out and looked up and down the lane, but it was empty. Just clusters of wheeliebins standing in groups like gossiping housewives and no noise but the rain, heavier suddenly, pattering on their plastic lids.

  Someone, Jude thought, had been in the garden, creeping around until they were startled by Jude coming out the back. They were gone now, leaving nothing behind but a single footprint in the mud at the edge of the lane, the toe distinct but the heel a skidding swipe, like the mark left on the path. Jude felt in her pocket, ready to take a picture—already the print was softening in the rain—then remembered her shattered phone.

  The rain had soaked through at her shoulders and the top of her head was cold, so, with a final glance both ways, she shoved the gate shut and hurried back up the garden again.

  Police wear Docs, she told herself, not Nikes. But plainclothes police—detectives—could wear anything, could leave a footprint exactly like that one. But detectives wouldn’t run at the sound of a loud knock. It was probably kids. One kid, she corrected herself, and felt her spirits lift. Police detectives went round in pairs, and it was definitely a single flitting figure she had glimpsed.

  Back inside, with Highland Verse kicked away and the door locked behind her, she leaned against it and closed her eyes. Concentrate, Jude. What had she really seen? Something dark. Very dark. Black, in fact. Too long to be a face, too narrow to be a piece of clothing across someone’s shoulders, and too high to be a cat, which was what it had looked like most. The glossy flank of a black cat.

  Trick of the light, she told herself. Trick of the gloom; trick of the rain.

  “Lonely?” she said, in answer to Lowell’s hearty greeting. He had returned before lunch, the hoped-for Audubon carefully wrapped in brown paper and a bagful of Ian Flemings (unexpected and so extra-welcome) slung over his shoulder. “I haven’t had a chance to be lonely. I had Mrs. H. just after breakfast and then Maureen popped in for a rummage. And someone was in the garden too.”

  “Maureen?” said Lowell, and shifted a little. “Ah. Yes, right. A rummage. Did you … ?”

  “I did,” Jude said. “You’re lucky I stayed. Lucky it’s raining.”

  “But of course I didn’t ever mean the dead room to be part of your remit,” Lowell said. “Shut the door on it and pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s what I do.”

  “I believe you,” said Jude. “But I was joking. Now I know it’s there, I’ll have to dig in.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lowell. “I couldn’t possibly ask it of you.” He was unfolding the brown paper with great delicacy.

  “It’s that or leave,” Jude said. She was being honest. It had worked once. “It’ll keep me awake at nights.” Lowell unwound the last turn of the parcel. “Occupational hazard,” she added, shrinking back into the comfort of lies. “Twenty years a book wrangler, you see.”

  “Well, well,” said Lowell. “I’d have said a librarian and a bookseller were kissing cousins.” He looked around himself. “Perhaps not though.”

  “Anyway, the dead room?” asked Jude. “Is that what you said a minute ago?”

  Lowell gave her a shrug and a sheepish smile. “I can’t say no,” he said. “Sometimes the relatives still have tears standing in their eyes when they bring the bulging bagfuls round. I can’t just say ‘no time to sort them; take it all to the dump,’ now can I? But once I’ve accepted them, I can’t let the grieving children see the books just lying around.”

  “So what’s all that then?” said Jude, pointing at the choked passageway.

  “Kindles and divorce,” Lowell said. “They don’t count.” He had finished unwrapping the Audubon, and he took his spectacles from his breast pocket and hooked the wires round his ears. “My precious,” he said in a voice that left Jude halfway between laughter and alarm.

  “You’re an enigma, Lowland Glen,” she said. “So do you get many grieving children coming round?”

  She never forgot it. Those words were still hanging in the a
ir when the street door opened. The words were in the air, Lowell was wearing his reading glasses, and she, Jude, had just decided she could cope with the “dead room.” Was patting herself on the back for taking it in her stride.

  “Oh! Oh!” Lowell said. He slumped in his chair and his face drained until it matched the fawn cardigan on the seat back.

  “Ah!” said Jude. She recognised it as the girl turned away to close the door. It was too small to be a jacket and too long to be a face; it was a sheet of hair as black as a witch’s cat, still wet at the tips from her skulking in the garden.

  As the girl turned back to face them, Lowell pushed his spectacles up his forehead and rubbed one of his large, papery hands over his jaw.

  “Dear me,” he said. “You remind me of someone I … ” Then the words died in his mouth.

  She was ethereally thin, small and bird-boned, but her belly stuck out in front of her as round as an apple.

  “No,” Jude breathed, and she knew from the twitch of Lowell’s forehead that he had heard her.

  The girl picked her way towards them between the books. Her eyes were wide with fear and her chest was hitching with each breath, but she spoke with a voice as clear as a bell, liquid and warm, with an accent Jude couldn’t place.

  “Are you Lowell Glen?” she said. Jude saw him nod once and saw too that the hand resting on the Audubon was shaking. “Well, then, I think you’re my dad.”

  Seven

  For the next few hours Jude was underwater. Or no, not that exactly. More as if she’d been put in Plexiglas. She was the decoration in a paperweight, and everyone could see her and she could see out and she could almost hear too, but a dull plug of sour plastic filled her and a dome of it surrounded her and nothing could touch her through it and even if she hurled herself at a wall, nothing would shatter her free or even make a crack she could scream through.

  As soon as the girl spoke, Lowell leapt to his feet and led her by one of her pale tapering hands to his chair. Was she warm enough? Could he put a hassock under her feet? She was fine; her ankles were fine. Lowell nodded, frowning. He knew she might want her feet up, but he didn’t know why.

  As she was settling herself back, patting the rosy cheek of the apple, Jude turned away—lurched away, really—and filled the kettle, splashing her face with cold water and drying it on the tea towel, always slightly sour from the way it hung in its damp folds from a cup hook.

  “Tea?” she said, coming back with a smile.

  The girl nodded. Her shoulders dropped; even her eyelids drooped as she relaxed, and she took a huge gusty breath in and almost laughed as she let it go again. All from a smile Jude didn’t really mean.

  “I was bricking it,” she said. “I nearly didn’t come in.”

  “My dear,” said Lowell, as he had to Jude so recently. “My dear.”

  “Eddy,” the girl said. “Eddy Preston.”

  “Preston?” said Lowell. He was searching her face so intently that Jude itched to remind him his spectacles were still halfway up his forehead. He could use them to take a better look.

  “My step-dad,” said Eddy. “For a bit.” Jude watched the emotions passing over Lowell’s face like clouds in a high wind. Disappointment then relief. Guilt, finally. “My mum,” Eddy went on, and then paused, Lowell still as a stone, waiting. “I’m Miranda’s daughter.”

  “But—” said Lowell, then caught it. “Miranda,” he repeated, and his cheeks showed a very faint pink flush. “Of course, dear me. My goodness. How is she? Is she here? Is she with you?”

  Eddy’s lids lifted again, her eyes larger than ever, and Jude knew what she was going to say. But Lowell kept the same mild expectant look on his face, and it hit him like an anvil.

  “She died,” said Eddy. “Three weeks ago.”

  Through all the hurt that was coming in the days ahead, the one thing that kept Jude from running away, even walking into the sea, was that right then—a moment after learning he had a child, the same second he learned his lover had died—Lowell remembered about her parents, about her. He flashed her a look of concern, just a flicker, before turning back to Eddy again.

  “Why did she keep you from me?”

  No ums and ahhs. No dear me this time.

  Eddy shook her head, staring. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Miranda,” said Lowell again and then, “Didn’t you ask?”

  “I didn’t bloody know,” said Eddy. “She only told me when she was dying.”

  The water was starting to bubble.

  “What do you take?” asked Jude, but Eddy didn’t hear her; didn’t answer anyway.

  Then the kettle clicked off and Jude filled three mugs, pushed one into Lowell’s hand, and set another one down beside the girl.

  “I didn’t know if you wanted sugar,” she said, “so I haven’t stirred it.”

  Eddy was staring at Lowell, who was staring back. They were drinking each other in. It had never seemed true enough to deserve becoming a cliché, but Jude understood it now.

  “I always thought you were—” she said. “I mean, I thought he was dead. Then really late on her last night she told me, ‘Lowland Glen—it’s a bookshop.’ I just assumed it was the painkillers. Then a bit later she said, ‘Lowell is your father.’ I didn’t even put the two things together till days later. Lowell and Lowland. I Googled you.”

  “Painkillers?” said Lowell.

  “Cancer,” Eddy said. “Pancreas. She tried so hard. She wanted to see the baby.” She took two slow breaths, through pursed lips in a silent whistle, the kind of breaths learned in baby classes, then sipped the tea and gave Jude a watery smile. “Lovely,” she said. “Just how I like it.”

  No one likes their tea half sugared and half not, Jude thought, and her heart softened. The poor kid was walking on her eyelashes, choking down horrible tea, scared to ask for anything.

  “I’ll leave you two to it,” she said, thinking it would be easier on the girl not to have two of them gawping at her. Telling herself that was what she was thinking anyway.

  Last she heard as she turned the bend in the stairs was Lowell asking, “And is your, um, I mean, dear me, yes, are you all alone on this trip?”

  Jude stopped.

  “Trip?” said Eddy. Then she gave a little laugh. “My ‘um’? I’m not married or anything, if that’s what you mean. It’s just me.”

  Jude started walking again and her feet on the bare wooden steps covered the voices even though the close walls deadened their echo.

  She walked back and forth between the two front rooms and barely heard a murmur. Just once, Lowell’s sharp bark of a laugh startled her, and she dropped the book she had reached for. It fell flat—smack—on the floor, and for a moment there was quiet downstairs.

  “I’m okay!” she sang out and the murmuring began again.

  She could no longer deny it, the thing she had been trying not to see. Joyce Carol Oates in Fiction, Daphne Du Maurier in Fiction; John Steinbeck in Literature. Mighty Hunters and Ladies Who Pen. She searched for Iris Murdoch as a litmus test but couldn’t find any.

  Engrossed, she had almost forgotten them when Lowell came and stood in the doorway. He had the dazed look of someone very drunk who can hold it well, or someone newly concussed and not diagnosed, still going about his business. Then he blinked and came back. He grinned at her.

  “My dear, you have the most delightful streak of dirt on one cheek,” he said. “Let me.” He shook out a handkerchief and wound it round one finger, advancing. Jude wiped her face roughly with the back of her hand before he reached her. But the dazed look had come back and he didn’t notice.

  “I’m going to take Eddy—that’s really her name, you know; it’s not shortened from Edwina or Theresa. Extraordinary!—I’m going to take her round to Jamaica and make her rest.”

  I walked there by myself when it was
me, Jude thought but didn’t let it show.

  “Only, I wondered—could I borrow my spare key back? I’ll get another cut of course as soon as I can slip up to Newton Stewart to the cobblers, but I don’t want to leave the poor child stranded. Do you see?”

  “Of course,” said Jude. Blood, she thought, was thicker than ink. And babies trump everything.

  Stop it, she told herself. Don’t be that person. Look where it led you last time.

  “How long is she staying?” she asked, and then added hurriedly as she saw him frown, “She’s Irish, right? What a journey in her condition. She’ll need a good long break before she travels again.”

  Lowell’s brow cleared as he decided she was being kind.

  “Northern Irish,” he said. “Miranda’s family was from Cork, but she seems to have settled in Derry, of all places. Poor soul, poor soul. It’s hard to believe. She was a good bit younger than me, you know.”

  “But pancreatic,” said Jude. “That’s one of the worst.”

  “And as to ‘home’,” Lowell said. “She’s quite alone, you see. And she’s on her gap year, as they say. Not twenty yet. Dear me. Quite alone. And I didn’t want to push too hard too soon and startle her, but I really think, dear me, I really do think she might stay.”

  Jude nodded. Of course she would stay. Who wouldn’t? Nineteen, pregnant, and suddenly not alone after all. “I’ll clear out soon as I can,” she said.

  He came back without a hitch. “Not a bit of it. Why, the house is large even for three of us. No need at all, my dear. In fact, it’ll be just like the old days. I had friends all around me in the good old days. Beach picnics, music parties, every room occupied.”