Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “Tush now, you’re already doing so much. Even the cottage is a weight off my mind, more than anything. Dear me, yes.”

  “What did you come in here just now to say?” Jude explained, trying not to speak so loud or slow he would have hurt feelings.

  “Me? Oh! Ah yes indeed, quite. You flummoxed me with your hard-nosed hustling. I just wanted to ask where young Eddy had got to. I’m afraid she and I have had words.”

  “What about?” said Jude. And then followed it up with, “And since I’m being nosy, can I ask something else that’s none of my business?”

  “My business is your business,” Lowell said. “Since you are bringing it back from the brink.”

  “In that case,” said Jude, “it’s about your pictures. The photographs you’ve got under lock and key. Are you really just a collector or do you sell them too?”

  Lowell was standing in the shadows, but he stepped forward then. “Funny thing,” he said. “That’s just what young Eddy and I were discussing so heatedly.”

  Jude tried to look surprised but suspected she had failed. Not least because Lowell was wearing his spectacles and could see her clearly.

  “I’m not trying to make you sell them if you don’t want to,” she said. “I’ve only got as far as thinking you should frame them and hang them on the walls. In the corridor. Once it’s cleared.”

  “No,” said Lowell. “I don’t think so. I don’t think that would be wise.”

  “Are they valuable?” Jude said. “Would it be a security risk to have them on display?”

  “Not exact—No,” said Lowell. “I mean they have a value, certainly. Some of them.”

  Jude knew it was more suspicious not to ask and so she forced herself. “What are they?”

  “Early work,” said Lowell. “Victorian. Rare pieces.”

  “But what are they?” said Jude. “Landscapes, street scenes, portraits?”

  “Portraits, yes,” said Lowell. “In a way. I mean, of a sort. Figure studies, I suppose one would say.”

  “Figure studies,” Jude said. She trusted the low light to hide her change of colour. “And are you a dealer?” she said. “Or just an admirer?”

  “Neither,” said Lowell. “So far I’m a searcher, buyer, and locker-up in a drawer.”

  It sounded noble.

  “So you’re not gathering them with a view to putting them out in a collection?”

  “A book?” said Lowell, with a sharp laugh. “I’m a used bookseller, my dear. No one knows better than I the folly of publishing.”

  “Did Eddy try to persuade you?” Jude said. “Is that why you argued?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” said Lowell. “Dear me, I forgot about her. Where is she?”

  “She shouted through a while back that she was going home. She was tired.”

  That was all it took. “Tired?” he said and was off, halfway to the door, shouting over his shoulder. “Lock up when you’re finished, my dear, won’t you? Good Lord, she shouldn’t be wandering the streets alone when she’s faint from exhaustion. What if she fell?”

  He was gone and didn’t hear Jude’s answer. “If she fell on her ‘belly,’ she’d bounce if it’s foam and if it’s feathers … soft landing.”

  It wasn’t until Jude had lugged the lucky bag right to the cemetery gates that it occurred to her these might not be Todd’s after all.

  “Pillock!” she said to the nearest gravestone, glancing at the name.

  “Not you, Archie,” she added, passing on. “Me.” Then she turned back and read the rest of the epitaph;

  here lies archibald patterstone, master engineer,

  a true friend and a much-loved man

  “sleep well, my good and faithful servant”

  No wife and no kids, Jude thought, so she couldn’t have run into a Patterstone descendant in the town. Yet the name felt familiar. When she was in the bright kitchen of the cottage, lifting out the first of the books, reverentially, hardly daring to hope, she remembered.

  “Archie Patterstone is dead!” she said, then shivered. “I will tell Dr. Glen enough is enough.”

  She looked down at the book in her hands. It was a Patricia Highsmith: the Patricia Highsmith—The Talented Mr. Ripley—and when she glanced inside the front flyleaf her heart leapt. Immediately she turned to the back and couldn’t help a chirp of laughter. It’s clever, he had written, but it’s nothing to curl up with. Neither was Miss Highsmith if anyone’s asking me. Since none but me will ever read these words, I’m giving the talented Miss Highsmith this review: she needs a night out.

  “Oh, Todd!” said Jude. “You’ve just broken every rule in the lit crit book and I love you.”

  She put the kettle on, took the casserole dish of leftover pasta-bake out of the fridge to come to room temperature, put the oven on for when it did, and settled down to unpack the bag of books like a child under the tree on Christmas morning.

  There was Rosemary’s Baby (Blimey!), Gone with the Wind (She should have saved some of this and written a sequel, doubled her wage), Catch-22 (He’s been on the wacky baccy and no mistake), The World According to Garp (If this is New England, God help California), and I Capture The Castle (Not exactly action-packed and I could draw a ruddy floor plan).

  And that was just in H to L. Jude began to think she was being greedy keeping Todd Jolly to herself. LG Books should have his reviews laminated and stuck to the shelf edges.

  And then she found another one. It was Lolita, a beautiful late edition, with a sugared-almond-coloured cover, powdery surface and all, and creamy silken pages. Todd had loathed it.

  This book is admired because Mr. Nabokov uses a lot of fancy words for a dirty business but a plain man can sometimes see clearer than a clever one. M. tells me Etta Bell is fading fast and her family has been sent for. This plain man is sick of the world tonight.

  Jude was staring at his words with tears pricking her eyes when the knock came at the kitchen door. For one wild moment she was scared to open it. Archie Patterstone was out there, and no doubt Etta Bell too. Todd himself was feet away from the doorstep. Who had come knocking this black night?

  Then the door opened. He started apologising even before his face appeared.

  “Filthy cheek barging in like this, my dear, but it’s as cold as a well-digger’s—That is, a witch’s—That is, it’s dreadfully cold, but I—What is it?”

  “I was miles away,” said Jude. “Well, years away. Communing with the dead.”

  Lowell nodded absently. “Eddy is missing,” he said.

  Jude sat down suddenly. “Packed and gone?”

  “Just gone,” said Lowell. “Left everything behind and fled.”

  “But she might just be out,” said Jude. “Was there a note or anything?”

  “She came clean,” Lowell said. “Told me the truth about the pregnancy. My so-called grandchild. What an old fool I am.” He had been studying the floor and so, when he suddenly looked up, he caught Jude’s face before she could hide the thoughts plainly written there.

  “She told me too,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought I took it well,” he said. “I certainly didn’t say anything to make her bolt. I mean, dear me, I was terribly excited about the idea of grandparenthood, but on the other hand it was almost too much coming at the same moment as sudden fatherhood. I was perfectly happy to take things one at a time.”

  “And you weren’t angry with her for telling tales?”

  “Not at all,” Lowell said. “She wasn’t to know I would approve, was she? Plenty men my age are perfect old fuddy-duddies. I might have dropped dead from the shock of it.”

  Jude had been nodding but as she tried to follow his words, she found herself frowning.

  “Disapprove of … ?” she echoed. Of not being pregnant? Drop dead from the shock of a daughter turning up with
out a grandchild on board? What did he mean? “I think we’re at cross—” she said and then the back door burst open and Eddy came flying in, muffled in a crocheted hat and a long afghan coat, looking like someone from Fleetwood Mac.

  “Fuck-a-doodle-doo,” she said. “How can you live here with all these bloody corpses?” Then she caught sight of Lowell and her face fell.

  “Oh,” she said. “You. I came to speak to Jude.”

  “It’s all right,” said Lowell. “I’ve told her I know. And I know you told her first. I’m not angry. I understand that you wanted to confide in a woman and someone nearer your own age than your old papa.”

  “I didn’t confide,” said Eddy. “She guessed the gist. I didn’t tell her the details.”

  “Someone tell me the details,” Jude said.

  “Okay,” Eddy said. “So you know I’m doing a surrogacy. What else? The dads’ names are Liam and Terry. I’m going back to Derry for the birth, so’s they can be there and so’s I’m with the same doc and midwife I’ve had all along. That’s it, really.”

  It was genius, Jude thought.

  “They don’t know I’ve taken off,” Eddy added. “They don’t even know my mum died.”

  “They’ll understand,” said Jude.

  “Course they will,” Eddy agreed.

  “But it’s right for you to return,” Lowell put in, beaming. “The living—the about to be born, in this case—matter more than the dead. The celebration of life must take over from mourning. Babies come before us all!” He stopped. “My dear, have I said something to upset you?”

  Jude didn’t even know there were tears in her eyes until he mentioned them.

  “Yes, Dad, actually you have,” Eddy said. “Jude’s shitbag husband knocked up some bint and that’s why he left her.”

  “Oh my dear!”

  Jude managed a stiff smile. It was so much more complicated than that. She stared at both of them, trying to catch the thought and examine it. The living tell the tales and the tales of the dead die with them. Unless, like Todd, they write them down and leave them behind. But that wasn’t it either.

  “We shall leave you in peace to continue your … ” Lowell stopped talking and stared her. “What did you say when I arrived?” he asked. “Communing with the spirits of the dead?”

  “Interleaved ephemera,” Jude began. They were words to make ninety-nine out of a hundred listeners glaze over—Eddy snorted like a hog with hay fever—but Lowell was the hundredth, and his eyes lit up.

  “Such a change of view in that quarter even in my lifetime!” he said. “Although, dear me, I’m getting rather old to use my lifetime as unit of short measure, I daresay. Forgive me.”

  “What for?” said Eddy.

  “People do PhDs on it now,” Jude agreed. “And not just Dickens’ Shakespeare or Joyce’s Dickens.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought Joyce was a Dickens man.”

  “You just keep saying the same words over and over,” said Eddy.

  “Ephemera,” Jude began, “is when—”

  “I don’t care,” said Eddy.

  “Well, anyway as I was saying, Lowell, I’m reading the book club notes of this lot’s first owner and … it’s hard to explain.”

  “Not to me, my dear,” Lowell said. “Although the prevailing view is that the dead should go and one should commune with the living. ”

  Jude looked uncertainly out of her window. It was a black square. Night had fallen like the snow in a fairytale and blanketed everything.

  “I’m certainly better off for the dead than the living in this place,” she said.

  “Creeporama,” said Eddy. Then she stood up very suddenly, from where she had been leaning against the sink. “Oh!”

  “What is it?” said Lowell, leaping to his feet. “Pain? Contractions?”

  “I just had a brilliant idea,” Eddy said. “Dad, can you wait outside while I tell Jude something privately?”

  He hurried out, falling over himself to do her bidding.

  “Brainwave,” she said when he was gone. “Jesus, I can’t believe you never thought of it, living in a bloody graveyard surrounded by nothing but headstones!” She waited for Jude to catch on and then rolled her eyes. “Lowell doesn’t know your second name, right? And Jude could be a nickname, right? And you want to start again, yeah? Well, look around.” Jude glanced to either side. “Not the kitchen, Einstein! Outside. You need a name and fresh start. Well the ground is full of people who don’t need their names anymore, isn’t it? Knock yourself out —you could be anyone!”

  Seventeen

  Jude woke the next morning to a strong sense that she’d been dreaming of someone, but she couldn’t remember who.

  She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, groping for it, knowing it was gone.

  “Todd Jolly, Archie Patterstone, Etta Bell,” she said to herself. The bathroom threw her voice back at her, cold and hollow. There was nothing in here to stop the sound bouncing around, just the painted floorboards, shiny-tiled walls, and bare window.

  She knew it wasn’t any of them she’d dreamed of. There was a face to go with the name. “Eddy, Lowell, Maureen, Jackie,” she said, turning the taps on. The water thundered out and steam began to soften the air. Then there was Jen at the tarot and Ela in the knitting shop. She smiled as she dropped her dressing gown and lowered herself into the water. She was making friends.

  And what of Eddy’s brainwave? Could she really go to a big cemetery in Glasgow and look around for a Judith or Jennifer or even a Jane, born in the mid-seventies and soon after dead again? She had told Lowell that her name was Jemimah, but he might not remember. And she hadn’t breathed her last name to anyone.

  She felt her smile fade. Did they count as friends if they didn’t know her last name or she theirs? Yes, she decided. First names all round was just part of the friendly Wigtown way. Except for Mrs. Hewston. No one ever called her anything else. Despite the hot water, Jude shivered suddenly.

  She meant to ask Lowell about it as soon as he got in that morning. She was in Home Crafts, looking in the pitiful collection of interior design books for ways to warm up her bathroom and finding nothing, when he came slowly up the stairs sounding like a tired old man. He appeared in the doorway, like Eddy the day before, with two cups of coffee and two chocolate biscuits.

  “Like father like daughter,” Jude said.

  He pushed one of the cups onto a shelf full of gardening books. Jude, proprietorial about the volumes she had sorted and wiped, couldn’t help glancing at the single splash of milky Nescafé rolling down the spine of The River Cottage Year, a pest of a book you couldn’t properly shelve in either Cooking or Gardening because it was exactly half of each.

  “Ha!” she said.

  Lowell, startled, slopped a good glug of the cup he was still holding, tutted, and rubbed it halfheartedly into the floor with his toe.

  “I’ve just remembered what I dreamt about last night,” she said. “Mrs. Hewston in the asparagus bed.”

  “With a scythe.”

  “Right. She … I don’t even want to tell you what she said about it to me. But is she totally off her nut or is it true that one end’s better than the other?”

  “All true,” said Lowell. “Dear me, yes, it’s been an asparagus bed of two halves ever since we dug it. Well, I say we, but it was Miranda.”

  “And where would Mrs. Hewston have got the idea that she was out there in the dead of night burying … things?”

  “Oh, no doubt she was,” said Lowell. “She believed greatly in planting at the full moon and putting roadkill under the rhubarb. Oh yes, absolutely. She was tireless in the garden. Quite tireless. Shoveled barrowfuls of ordure, laid paths, moved enormous shrubs six inches to frame a view. Fan-trained all the fruit trees against the south wall. That was Miranda. I’ve only had to go over them with a pair of c
lippers to keep them trim—she was a marvel.” He took a bite of his wagon wheel, looking disconsolately at the shelves closest by.

  “She must have liked it here,” Jude said.

  “She loved it. I thought it was the crowd. That summer, you know. Inez and Gary and Tom Tres—Goodness, I’ve forgotten his name! Tom Tres-something. Cornish, you know. But it wasn’t that, because, after they all left, after the end of that summer, she stayed on. I hadn’t dreamed she harboured feelings and … Well, she went in the end, of course, and only visited once.”

  “What?” said Jude. “I thought you said when she was gone she was gone for good?”

  “No, she’d been off on her travels for a while before her last visit. That last fateful visit.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “I see,” Jude said. “Well, thank heavens for that. Otherwise, no Eddy.” She knew Lowell was far from shrewd, but it was unbelievable that he had no doubts at all about this tale. Miranda had taken off, returned for one night only and then twenty years later her daughter turned up and claimed him. “Do you have pictures of your mother?” she said.

  “Miranda?” said Lowell. He had misheard her. “Yes, I’ve a lot of snaps of … ”

  “Of the summer of love?”

  Lowell gave his bark of laughter. “It really was,” he told her. “My father was dead and I filled the house with laughter at last. There was one particular week in July where every room was full and we had bunks in the drawing room too. The weather was beautiful and we sat outside every night until the small hours in the scent of the Lonicera.

  “Of course I know they were humouring me. I know that now. Dear me, yes, I’m quite reconciled to that these days. They were all a good deal younger than me and from very different walks of life. But I had the house and I bought all the wine—filthy wine one drank in the country then, wouldn’t clean brass with it. I shall indeed have a rummage for some photographs. Eddy would like to see them, I’m sure.”

  They sat companionably finishing their tea and then he stood, clamping one of his large hands on each knee and levering himself to his feet.

  “I like the reading corner, by the way, my dear,” he said, with a smile.