Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  Lowell nodded. “Mrs. Hewston guessed as much,” he said. “And shared it, of course. Just to be helpful, you understand. She waylaid us on the way in.”

  “Was she asking questions?” Jude said, her mouth suddenly dry.

  “I wouldn’t answer them even if she did,” said Lowell, smiling.

  Jude, with great effort, tried to think of what she’d say if she had nothing to hide. “What did she make of Eddy?”

  “I shoved her inside out of harm’s way and kept my hand on the door to stop Mrs. Hewston barging in after her.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jude, “I know she’s an old family friend, but she really is … ”

  “Ha!” Lowell said. “You should have met her before she mellowed with age.” He sighed. “But she was my father’s nurse and she was very kind to him. Loyal and so on, you know. What can one do?”

  “I’m delighted you’re such a pushover of a landlord,” said Jude, and Lowell raised his glass to drink to that. She hoped he wouldn’t question whether anyone meeting Eddy and hearing her tale would be thinking, first and foremost, that she was single.

  Nine

  It was in her head as soon as she opened her eyes, proof that “sleeping on it” works even when you don’t know it’s there to be slept on.

  Kirk is Scottish for church. The thought was as clear as if someone lying beside her had whispered it in her ear. And the other name that Jackie in the shop had said was Digger. But it was too PG Wodehouse for his name to be Jolly, and so she didn’t believe it until she saw it with her own two eyes.

  She drove Lowell’s Volvo, with him directing. Eddy was having a bath.

  “I’ll shave my legs,” she’d said, not noticing Lowell turning pink. “I look like a cactus. I’ve only got a shower in my flat and I’m so awkward now, like a bloody hippo.”

  She was wearing a pair of men’s pyjamas with the legs rolled up to show her little pipe-cleaner legs, as smooth as peeled peaches. She looked about as awkward as a faerie sprite, not even pregnant amongst the folds of the striped pyjama jacket.

  “Be careful,” Lowell said. “Don’t stand up in the water. Just stay sitting down safe and sound until it’s drained, then put the mat thingy in the bottom and shuffle onto it.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Eddy said. “Don’t worry.”

  “You said you were too awkward to shave your legs in a shower,” Lowell chided her. They were both enjoying themselves. Jude could tell. Loving the stern fatherly words and the pose of a child bridling under the yoke.

  “Fine! Whatever!” Eddy said.

  “Well good then,” said Lowell, and he went over to where she was leaning, standing on one leg like a stork with the other foot against her calf. He made as though to hug her, then as though to kiss her, but in the end he patted her head, stroking her hair down and back as if she was a dog. Jude would have winced to have that large hand dragged across her hair that way, but Eddy either had a sweeter temper or better manners because she only gave him a shy smile and nudged his arm with her knuckles, the faintest ghost of a friendly punch.

  “See you soon,” she said. She took a breath to say more but stalled.

  “I thought we agreed on Pa-pa,” said Lowell.

  “Pops?” said Eddy

  “Pater!”

  Jude said nothing until she and Lowell were out on the cobbles and then only, “She’ll get there. You can tell already she wants to.”

  “I want her to call me Daddy for a few years until I graduate to Dad,” he said. “She’s only nineteen and I shouldn’t like to have completely missed Daddy.”

  “I suppose you’re sure—” Jude began before she was aware of deciding to. Then she managed to stop.

  “Oh absolutely,” Lowell said. “It never even crossed my mind. When she walked in, I thought I’d seen a ghost.”

  “But you didn’t know Miranda was—”

  “Not Miranda!” Lowell said. “Gosh, no, nothing like poor Miranda at all apart from her colouring. All that black hair. And some of her expressions and whatnot. In fact, it took me a moment or two to realise who exactly she reminded me of—one’s brain does turn to absolute mush as the years pile up, my dear. But it’s my mother. She’s like my mother come to life again. Nothing of me in there, thankfully for the poor child.”

  He was bubbling over with the fun of tracing lineage in a loved one’s face. Jude wouldn’t have been any less excited, if it was her.

  “Can I tell you a—Well, dear me, not a secret exactly, but a shameful thing?” he said.

  They were at the car. Jude nodded encouragement but hoped by the time they were settled and belted, the mood would have left him.

  “I’m hoping,” said Lowell, clicking his seatbelt and tugging it tight, “since Eddy looks like my mother, that the baby, when it comes, if it’s a boy—dear me, yes, my goodness, only if it’s a boy—might take after its poor old grandpapa.”

  “That would be lovely,” Jude said.

  “But only if it’s a boy,” Lowell repeated, flipping down the sun visor and peering at himself in the cracked mirror there. “I wouldn’t wish this face on a little girl.”

  Jude was busy with the seat and mirrors—she was a foot shorter than Lowell and always had to adjust them—then with the ignition, which didn’t have much zip left, and she didn’t notice for a moment that he was sitting in his seat, staring up at the visor.

  “What is it?” she asked finally, when the engine was running.

  Lowell pointed with one wavering hand at something tucked into the perished elastic strip beside the little mirror.

  “That’s hers,” he said. “I never sit here and I never—Well, there’s never enough sunshine in Wigtown.”

  Jude squinted up at it, a small gold cylinder, tarnished and dusty.

  “A cigarette lighter?” she said.

  “Lipstick,” said Lowell. “Heavens above. Miranda’s lipstick. Good grief. I can see her now, fag in one hand, putting her … What did she call it? Putting her … ?”

  “Slap on?” Jude was guessing, but Lowell shouted with joy.

  “Slap!” he cried. “That’s it. Good heavens, I wonder what else is still here. Eddy will be charmed, don’t you think? To see her mother’s things. Don’t you think that would make the poor child feel at home?”

  “I should put her clothes back,” Jude said. “I’ll wash them all and return them.”

  Lowell dragged his eyes away from the lipstick tube and looked Jude up and down.

  “Those aren’t Miranda’s,” he said. “She’s Am—Dear me, she was Amazonian. A Valkyrie. Twice the size of you.”

  “Oh,” said Jude. “That’s good then.”

  “Eddy showed me a photograph,” Lowell said, in a very different voice. “One of the nurses took it. Eddy was on the bed and Miranda was in it. Both of them were smiling, but dear me, I shouldn’t have known her. All her hair was gone to wisps, like straw. She had a mane of black hair. A pelt of hair. I kept finding them all over the house for years. And she had a high colour too, lips as red as cherries. Even without that.” He nodded at the open sun visor and then, seeing his face there and seeing upon it the pain of the memory, he snapped it shut again. “The woman in the bed was withered away to nothing,” he said. “When one looks at the very elderly or the very ill, one forgets they’re not some exotic tribe, but just ourselves at a different moment.”

  “I suppose so,” said Jude. “I’ve never really … ”

  “There’s a tradition in care homes,” Lowell went on, “to keep a portrait of each resident prominent in their rooms, to remind the staff that they once were young. It never works. Portraits of youngsters dancing the Charleston looked like museum exhibits to me, and I daresay snaps of me dancing the jitterbug will look like history to whoever spoons mush into my toothless gob when the time comes.”

  “Which way will I go?�
�� said Jude, after a moment of silence. Perhaps the moment wasn’t long enough, because Lowell shook his head, bewildered by the question. “To get to the cottage,” she added, and he started back to life and leaned forward, pointing.

  She saw the steeple as they made the final turn, driving between brambly hedgerows, leaving the last of the paved streets behind them. The road, rough now under the wheels, led to a pair of weathered-sandstone gateposts, bright with lichen, and stopped there.

  “Now the kirk itself isn’t used every week,” Lowell said. “Just Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Christmas Eve. We have the new kirk in town for everyday services, Boy Scouts, and whatnot. So it’s extremely peaceful here.”

  It was as though he hoped she wouldn’t notice, Jude thought, as they rolled in through the open gates onto the gravel and drove around the side of the church where Lowell was pointing. As though the rows of gravestones, some of them ancient and wind-scoured, corners softened like half-used soap bars and lettering reduced to mossy dents, were not worth mentioning. They leaned like drunks this way and that, several lying flat, passed out; a few were broken where they fell.

  Every so often, though, there was a newer one, in sparkling granite with black letters and even sometimes a pot of flowers wilting at the base. Jude turned to look at one of them as they passed but couldn’t read the writing.

  The cottage was towards the back, beyond it just two ranks of free-standing gravestones and one final row against the far wall. She tried to look at it with a Londoner’s eye. A detached stone-built house, full of period charm, hers for buttons, or even for free.

  And to be fair, it was lovely. Like something from a fairy tale. It had two big windows below and two little windows above and it showed its ecclesiastical connections by having its door on one gable end like a chapel, sheltered from the weather by a tiny black-and-white-painted wooden porch that made Jude think of a lych-gate. She wished she didn’t know, or at least she wished she hadn’t remembered, that the lych-gate began as a place to keep coffins while the graves were dug.

  The charm diminished as they grew near enough to see the blisters in the paint, the missing roof slates, and the line of damp around the base of the single chimney. The windows were dappled where rain had run through summer dust and this, along with the darkness inside, left the place looking closed and yet watchful. A fairy-tale cottage indeed.

  “Yes, dear me. Well, I haven’t been out here for a while,” Lowell said, climbing out.

  “Why do you own it?” Jude asked. “Shouldn’t the diocese—”

  “Presbytery in these parts,” said Lowell. “And yes, of course, indeed, they did. But they sold it to Todd Jolly, who was the last groundskeeper here, and he left it to my father, and so it came to me.”

  “How long has it been empty?” Jude asked. She was out of the car but put her hand back on the door, thinking to climb in and drive away. She couldn’t remember when Lowell said his dad had died—or was it Mrs. Hewston who had told her?—but she knew it was decades ago, and if the doctor had inherited this from its last inhabitant …

  “Gosh well, dear me, um,” said Lowell.

  “Let’s have a look then.”

  They were parked under a single tree still studded with shriveled red berries—she fought the absurd notion that the very birds of the air didn’t come near here—and Lowell, after some fussing with a pair of identical keys, threw the front door open.

  Jude let a held breath go, almost laughed as she did so. Todd Jolly had obviously had what estate agents call “pride of ownership,” which was code for “no taste but lots of time.” The living room, opening straight off the porch, had stairs climbing up its back wall and had been brought bang up to the minute sometime in the seventies with a pink and burgundy carpet that washed up to the first ledge of a complicated fireplace. The recesses under the windows, deep from the thickness of the old walls, had been turned into drinks cupboards with frosted glass doors and, Jude would have taken a bet on it, lights inside. The furniture consisted of a three-piece suite in a rusty red that screamed holy murder at the carpet and a coffee table of orange pine with a tiled top, each tile a different city of Europe painted Gypsy-style and labelled in jaunty black script: Roma! London! København!

  “I’m very interested,” Jude said. She heard Lowell let go a mammoth breath of his own. “It only needs Hoovered and wiped down. There’s no detritus … ”

  “In that case, I’ll ah … I’ll ah … Well, dear me, yes, I think I’ll potter off and let you explore,” he said, holding out the house keys. “I need to pop into LG and then ahh ...”

  “I can walk back,” said Jude, trying to swap the car keys for the house keys.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” said Lowell, backing towards the door. “It’s gathering itself to rain and I need the fresh air and umm.” He patted his stomach, looking sheepish, and then he was off, striding up the weedy path to the gravel track, practically trotting when he got there, back to Eddy and the baby and everything that mattered to him.

  Jude took a minute, sitting on the red sofa, which gave up a cough of dust but no smell of mice or damp. She had to let it go. It was nothing whatsoever to do with her past or her future that Lowell—her employer—had a daughter or that that daughter was having a child. She still had work for a while and a friendly boss, and now she had a whole house instead of a scraped-together pair of attics. A dead house, she couldn’t stop herself thinking, instead of those airy, light-filled rooms with the long view to the sea, where Eddy instead of her would now be lying looking up at the stars, her father sleeping below her and her baby curled inside her.

  Jude stood up. She hadn’t even looked at the view from upstairs here. And it was only one flight, not the long slog to the top of Jamaica House. Wasn’t it odd that a heavily pregnant girl wanted to hide herself away up there instead of staying down with her father, who would wait on her hand and foot?

  The kitchen made her wonder if T. Jolly had been in the Navy before he took a job as a gravedigger with a cottage thrown in. There was something about the neat arrangement of homemade cupboards and shelves, even the cup hooks at strict intervals and the spice racks and knife racks precisely centred on the only spot of bare wall, that made Jude think of a submarine. When she started opening drawers and found that one was an ironing board and one was a breakfast bar, she felt almost sure, and when she opened the back door and noticed the stout rubber block that let it get an inch away from the spice rack then stopped it dead, she decided not only that T. Jolly was an old seadog, probably an engineer, but also that she liked him. She imagined him, elderly but still upright, with shiny shoes and a clipped moustache. But that was the Army, wasn’t it? A sailor would have the rolling gait that kept him steady on a high sea, and he’d have a white beard trimmed close.

  He had never married, she decided, never been entangled in messy emotions at all, had left his estate to his doctor in gratitude for … Actually, it was hard to explain, unless Dr. Glen had found the cancer that the specialist missed, or had been through the war with Jolly and had carried him over one shoulder from a battlefield. Not in the Navy, she told herself, and shook the daydreams away.

  She stepped out onto a small patch of paving at the back door. There was a single clothes pole at the far end of it and a cleat on the cottage wall. Jude could imagine a line of shirts and tea towels waggling in a stiff breeze, tugging at their pegs, and a row of geraniums and petunias planted in the thin strip of soil hard against the house. And despite the gravestones three feet away, she could imagine sunshine—no matter what Lowell said about Wigtown—and clean windows and something like happiness.

  Then a gust of wind blew the kitchen door shut and, with timing she couldn’t help finding malevolent, the rain that had been threatening all morning finally began. One drop hit her head right in the parting of her hair and the paving stones were spotted and then blotched and then, as the heavens opened, Jude hunched
her shoulders and ran round the cottage towards the front door.

  Halfway, despite the shower, she stopped. The black letters on one of the newest gravestones had caught her eye, glittering in the wet. jolly, it said.

  in loving memory of

  todd robert jolly

  beloved husband of the late margaret payne

  and adored father of todd and angela

  “he sees each sparrow fall”

  31st dec 1905—21st may 1985

  She stood there until a convergence of raindrops ran down the bridge of her nose and dripped from its tip, then she shook herself, hurrying under the porch and back in at the living room door.

  Now she could see Margaret Jolly neé Payne everywhere: in the choice of pink and burgundy for the carpet and in the whimsy of the tiles on the table. What she couldn’t see was why a father of two children—an adored father—would disinherit them and give the cottage to Dr. Glen.

  She had noticed a roll of kitchen paper, yellowed and rather brittle-looking, but she had no option, so she went through and used it to blot her hair and wipe her face dry, wadding some up and putting the pads under the shoulders of her shirt to soak up the rain there before it chilled her.

  Then, newly intrigued by T. Jolly, she climbed the stairs.

  They must have moved here once Todd Jr. and Angela were grown and off their hands; there were only two bedrooms, a large one above the living room and a small one at the far end of the house sharing space with a bathroom. This had been T. Jolly’s library. It was lined with shelves, handmade by the same careful workman who had built the kitchen cupboards. Jude’s librarian heart thrilled to see them. He had planned them meticulously; there was a single folio shelf near the floor by the doorway and a low run of quarto all around the rest of the room. Above them were six shelves precisely sized for octavos and above the window a couple of very shallow slots for maps. The only furniture in the room was an easy chair drawn close to the light, a side table beyond it, a standard lamp behind it, and an upholstered footstool before it with two heel dents in its plump dome.