Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “So get your star sign ready and warm up your chakras.” She was rewarded with a small smile.

  “Aries,” Eddy said.

  “Sagittarius,” said Jude, to be companionable, but Eddy had stopped listening. She was staring at the desktop with a frozen look on her face. Jude peeked over the cubbyholes, but there was nothing to see except the blank sheet of the desk calendar Lowell never used.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Yep,” said Eddy. “This is going to sound daft, but you know what? I’ve just worked out why Mum was so nuts about me going to a hospital for the baby. It’s because I nearly died when I was born. I was so early.”

  “What’s made you think of that?” Jude said.

  “Oh, because of how she used to talk about whether I should go by when I popped out or when I was supposed to. Cancer or Aries? How do you decide? Mum reckoned Cancer was a curse, so she went the other way.”

  “It’s true when you think about it.” Jude said. “Cancer! So … she didn’t really believe in it then if she let you pick your own? Somehow I thought, living in a commune and all … ”

  “Oh yeah, she totally believed in it,” said Eddy. “She believed in everything from Allah to Zoroaster. But not me. I went with Aries because the birthstone’s a diamond, and why not, eh?”

  “What’s the one for Cancer then?” said Jude.

  But Eddy just stared at her, eyes wide. “She’d have loved Pandora’s,” she said at last. “Speaking of which, I might just shoot over there now. Ever since I read that damn book I’m convinced I’m having Braxton Hicks. Bet it’s all in my mind.”

  She edged past Jude with an unhappy smile and, in the light coming through the open door to the Boudoir, there was a sick sheen to her skin.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Fresh air,” Eddy said. “It’s stuffy in here with all these books. Mouldy, probably.”

  Jude watched after her and then sat down in the vacated chair. What had just happened?

  Nothing. A normal conversation. And then all of a sudden Eddy shut down, just as Lowell said she did on the way to the doctor. He described her scrolling on her phone and chatting then … a guillotine of her own. A portcullis to rival Jude’s.

  And this time she wasn’t even looking at her phone. She was … As it hit, Jude felt like laughing. She was looking at a calendar and she said she was an Aries and then tried to change her story and say she was a Cancer. And she didn’t know the Cancer birthstone.

  When was the OJ verdict? Jude longed for her phone, but at the side of the desk there was a collection of reference books: Whittaker’s Almanac, Concise Oxford, Norton/Grove, Roget, Brewer, Bartlett, Burke, and a short 20th Century. She rifled through the index and found it. The verdict in the OJ Simpson case was delivered on October the third, 1995. If Eddy was conceived that night, she’d have been due in July, a Cancer. If she was born in April, under Aries, she would indeed have been premature and in danger.

  Jude even thought she understood the problem with the doctor now. If Eddy really was pregnant—if!—then what would be the first thing her new physician would ask when he signed her on, with her beaming “father” right there beside her? Her birth date.

  Fourteen

  Jude’s euphoria lasted less than an hour. It carried her through another few shelves of sorting and dusting in the Biography corridor and the perk she awarded herself at the end of it: choosing the volume she’d place in a pool of lamplight on the octagonal wine table beside the armchair when Maureen delivered them at the end of the day.

  It had to be someone everyone loved, a national treasure. The problem with most national treasures, she thought, after discarding Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood, and Stephen Fry, was that the few who didn’t adore them really loathed them. All that left was Stephen Hawking and Helen Mirren, and she hadn’t come across them so far.

  “Danny Kaye it is then,” she said, plucking him out from between Kourtney Kardashian and Hedy Lamarr. “And Russell Brand for the under-nineties.”

  Then, checking that they were priced up, she saw what she’d missed before: T. Jolly in the flyleaf of the Danny Kaye, and a book-club plate opposite the title page: To Dad with love from Angela, Christmas 1979.

  She turned to the back and felt an unaccountable lift in her spirits when she saw a few lines of notes there.

  There’s something suspicious about a man who changes his name to hide his background, T. Jolly had written. You’d never catch John Wayne at that game.

  Jude laughed out loud and then felt a cloud of sadness descend on her. In 1979, he was sparky and cracking jokes. Five years later when he read On the Beach, he was reduced to This is a sad book and I miss my wife. But then, On the Beach was nothing to joke about, really.

  And grief did strange things to people, she told herself. Look what it had done to her.

  To cheer herself up she went into the dead room and burrowed in behind the yellow bag with the Jilly Cooper, hoping for another review from his late period—larky and witty and proving that On the Beach was a blip. But the heap had settled for some reason—maybe Eddy had been in here rummaging—and none of her tugging and prodding worked.

  As the sadness closed back in around her, even her brainwave about Eddy’s birth started to crumble. There had to be a different explanation, because if Lowell and Miranda slept together on OJ night when she was already three months pregnant, wouldn’t he have noticed? And what had Mrs. Hewston really heard and seen?

  Probably no and probably nothing, she decided. Three months was too early, and Mrs. Hewston was mad. But she wished she was still staying at Jamaica House, where she could start casual conversations and not have to go round specially, looking nosy.

  At six o’clock that night, when it was completely black outside the cottage, she heard the crunch of a steady tread on the gravel path and then a knock at the door.

  Police! Instantly she was shaking. Before they could shout Come out with your hands in the air, before they could break down the door, she inched it open.

  And of course it was Mrs. Hewston, unconcerned about looking nosy, saving Jude the trip and the trouble.

  “I’ve come to see how you’re settling in,” she said, her head waving like a cobra’s as she tried to see past Jude into the living room.

  “Come in,” said Jude, sweeping the door wide.

  “Ah, he always kept it nice,” said Mrs. Hewston, settling into one of the rust-red chairs and smoothing the nap of one arm. “Kept all those books of his nicely tidied away and not cluttering up the lounge. There’s nothing like a book for trapping dust.”

  “Fair point,” said Jude through the open kitchen door, thinking it was interesting to know that Mrs. Hewston had seen the upstairs of the cottage at some point. “It’s nice to hear about him,” she went on when she got back with the tea tray. She reckoned Mrs. Hewston was the type to appreciate cups and saucers on a tray.

  “The doctor?” Mrs. Hewston said. “Yes, it’s a pleasure to talk about him.”

  “Um, I meant Mr. Jolly actually,” said Jude. “Keeping his books out of the way, you know.”

  “Oh! Right,” Mrs. Hewston said. “I had wandered. When you get to my age you live more and more in the past.”

  “And yet your memories get sharper,” Jude said, passing her a cup. “I remember someone saying that to me. Like your memory of Miranda’s last night at Jamaica House. Twenty years ago and you remembered so much detail. What was on the telly and everything.”

  “Shocking news,” said Mrs. Hewston. “Yes, I remember that night. I was paying extra attention because his son had gone off and left strangers in charge. I had an ear cocked for trouble. Parties and what have you.”

  “He wasn’t in America, though,” said Jude. “Plymouth, apparently.”

  Mrs. Hewston sniffed. “I’m only going by what he told me. He’d gone off
somewhere and left the monkeys in charge of the zoo. This was years before the music festival, of course. Wickerman! Nobody had even heard of such a thing before that nasty film gave us a bad name. But there had been ‘raves’ on the beach over at Port Logan, and I didn’t want one messing up the doctor’s nice house while his nibs had left them to it.”

  The passage of twenty years and the fact that there hadn’t been a rave at the house after all didn’t seem to count for much with Mrs. Hewston.

  “And you really had no idea Miranda was pregnant?” Jude said.

  “Not a bit of it!” Mrs. Hewston cried. “Not till I heard them at their nasty business.”

  It seemed to Jude she was beginning to conflate two stories now. Nasty business presumably meant the conception; a nurse would never speak of a birth that way.

  “When you say you heard them,” she began, but then wondered how to go on.

  Mrs. Hewston bristled. “I never went snooping,” she said. “That’s not my way. I serve the community any way I can, but I don’t interfere.”

  “I wasn—”

  “The baby was born before I knew a thing. Afterbirth delivered and all.”

  Jude didn’t want to put the woman’s back up any more, but there didn’t seem to be a delicate way to tiptoe towards it. “You didn’t actually see Miranda in labour then? You just heard a baby cry.”

  “I heard a newborn cry,” said Mrs. Hewston. “It’s not like any other sound, the sound they make before they suck for the first time.”

  “And how long did it go on for?” Jude asked, thinking maybe it was a fox or a kitten.

  “I reckon her milk wasn’t in yet,” said Mrs. Hewston. “That baby cried sore. Oh, a good twenty minutes.”

  “Poor mite.”

  “I agree. But there’s always one that thinks if you drink enough raspberry tea you don’t need help from anyone!”

  “You mean, she was all alone?” It would explain why, twenty years later, she was nagging Eddy about it, Jude thought. And Maureen had said Miranda was the last to go. Jude couldn’t bear thinking about it: a woman alone and a baby crying. And the very person who should be helping—a nurse!—staying away. She had heard Max on the subject enough times. You must attend, he would say. Doesn’t matter if it’s not your shift or you’re on your holidays. If you’re a medical professional and someone needs you, you must attend. The day we’re told to stand back in case we’re sued is the day I hang up my jump pads. It used to thrill her. Her hero. Until she realised she was the only exception. If she needed him, she could raffle.

  “It must have been quite loud for you to have heard it all the way down here,” she said to Mrs. Hewston.

  “Well, it was a lovely night,” Mrs. Hewston said. “I had my curtains open to the last of the sunset. And my windows open to the let the scent of the flowers drift in. A beautiful night. He was always very particular about his garden—kept it full of blooms.”

  “Lowell’s not doing so badly,” Jude said, and Mrs. Hewston’s face suddenly clouded and then crumpled. She put a hand up to her neck and fussed with the buttons of her blouse.

  “Yes, well, the doctor was a very busy man. He kept things shipshape but he had no time for hobbies, did he?”

  It took a couple of minutes for Jude to sort through what had just happened. The woman was confused. Mrs. Hewston was definitely slightly confused. She had remembered the lovely scent of the flowers and had credited her beloved doctor, as usual. It upset her to be reminded that it was Lowell and not his father who had planted them. Or maybe it just upset her to realise she was mixed up. And she had to be mixed up. No way the same person who had walked all the way from her bungalow to the graveyard to check up on Jude’s doings wouldn’t have poked her nose into a birth. Taking place next door. No more would she have kept quiet about it for twenty years either. Mrs. Hewston might have seen something at Jamaica House that night through her open curtains or heard something through her open windows, but it wasn’t a baby being born.

  “I hope you don’t mind me being nosy,” Jude said, “but can I ask you something else?” Mrs. Hewston nodded. “What did you mean by nasty business?”

  “Well, that was hours later, of course,” Mrs. Hewston said. “Out in the garden.” Jude waited. “She was burying the afterbirth. Right there in his blessed garden.”

  “Get out!” said Jude.

  “As sure as I’m sitting here.” Mrs. Hewston was thrilled with the effect she’d caused. “She had the placenta in the doctor’s washing up basin from the kitchen and she was burying it in the asparagus bed! She looked like a wild thing, hair all hanging down and blood on her feet.”

  “On her feet?”

  “From the birth. She was like a savage. She wheeled around when she heard me coming, dropped the whole mess and then scraped it into the hole with her bare hands. She was all set to drop the basin in after it until I stopped her. I steeped it in bleach overnight and took it back in the morning. They’d all cleared out. She was the last of them. I had a right good go at the place before he came back from his wandering.”

  Another nugget Jude could believe: Mrs. Hewston probably would go barging in cleaning the doctor’s house when it was empty again. Except Lowell had come home and spent that last night with Miranda. He hadn’t mentioned Mrs. Hewston turning up with her dustpan in the morning.

  “And I’ll tell you this,” the woman said, in a summing-up kind of voice, “that end of the asparagus bed was like Jack’s beanstalk compared to the other. A good ten years the bumper crops lasted, and he puzzled and pondered more than once why it was and I never let on. Miranda asked me not to, and I never did.”

  “You’re a good loyal friend keeping the secret that way,” Jude said. The woman did that rolling wriggle of her shoulders that made Jude think of a plump little robin in a birdbath.

  “I try,” she said. “But this is a thankless place to move to. No matter what you do. I was nurse to young and old for twenty years and did plenty else besides for everyone. Brownies, whist nights, you name it. But I’m still an outsider.”

  “Well, what does that make me?” Jude said.

  “You!” Mrs. Hewston cried. “You’re a blow-through. Londoners never settle here. It’s the quiet. It gets to them all in the end.”

  “I might surprise you,” Jude said. But her heart wasn’t in it. She would use every last minute of this stolen time the best she could, try to work out a way out of the mess that didn’t involve bars and an orange jumpsuit. Or was that only on films? They didn’t still have arrows on their clothes anyway. She was sure of that much.

  Mrs. Hewston was still talking; on and on about this southerner and that southerner who hadn’t made it through a rough winter or went back to Hampshire for the schools. Maybe it made her feel better, to compare herself with incomers who couldn’t stay the course at all.

  When she finally got rid of the woman, Jude found herself in the bathroom, scrubbing her hands in water hot enough to leave them pounding, trying to wash away Miranda, barefoot and bloody, wheeling round, and the basin of gore spilling onto the dark earth, the rich harvests for years afterwards. “I’m not here,” she said. But she was looking right at herself and she didn’t believe it. “It didn’t happen,” she tried instead, and that made much more sense.

  It couldn’t have happened. Eddy was born in April in Ireland. Whatever gore Miranda was burying in the asparagus bed in October, it wasn’t a placenta.

  But even the gore-burial couldn’t be true, really. Miranda was waiting at Jamaica House on OJ night, three months pregnant and hiding it, probably decked out in a loose negligee, certainly not—what? Killing a piglet that screamed like a baby to feed the soil?

  Jude looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and was unsurprised to see that her cheeks were pale and her eyes purple all round, as if she’d been crying.

  Book dust, she told herself, even though
in all her years in the library, even when she was recataloguing the basement stacks, she’d never so much as sneezed. Books had never harmed her. Books were her friends.

  She could see a portion of Todd’s library reflected in the mirror, just a slice through the two open doors: Lauren Bacall and Salvador Dali had joined Danny Kaye: A fine woman who deserved better he had written, and Out to shock for the sake of it like a wee boy swearing at his granny. She had discovered a run of James Herriot paperbacks, the old Corgi edition with the cartoons on the covers, but without the line drawings inside. A true gent and good company over a pint, I bet.

  And she had begun her own little collection on a separate shelf, just in a very small way. Finding a nice Collins copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps, she had put the price of it in the till and shelved it with The Day of Small Things, trying not to think about Penny Plain, The Setons, and Pink Sugar, stuck in London. Trying not to think of London at all.

  Fifteen

  Jude looked at the two books she held in her hands: Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s granite face would make a dramatic display for a shelf-end in Poetry and Plays, but who knew he was these days? Heaney would have legions of fans in Galloway, but he looked like an angry drunk, no getting away from it.

  She was still trying to decide when she heard Eddy coming up the stairs with a slow, halting tread.

  “You okay?” Jude called out.

  Eddy arrived on the landing balancing two cups of coffee on a Tiger Who Came to Tea and holding two Twixes in her teeth by their packet corners.

  “Nice tray,” said Jude. “Don’t let Lowell see you.”

  “I need to talk to you,” Eddy said, spitting out the Twixes and handing over one of the cups. “I want to ask you something too. But, seriously, there’s something I’ve got to say.”

  “I believe you,” said Jude. Coffee, biscuits, and a solemn face left no doubt. She watched Eddy settle herself in the new armchair. She was wearing another one of the colourful dresses from the wardrobe in Lowell’s spare room, unflattering and complicated, with its wrap ties that poked through eyelets and its long, bell-like sleeves. Her breasts made it gape and Jude could see blue veins spreading in filigrees across the impossible underwater white of her skin.