Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  “It’s a funny expression, got yourself pregnant, isn’t it?” Jude said with another mouthful of wine.

  “Unless you’re a stick insect,” Eddy said. “Yeah, so I’ve been trying to work out what she was playing at. Because what I’m thinking is this: why did she send me back here if Lowell’s not my dad? And the only answer I’ve come up with is that the deed was done that summer, while she was here, by someone who was here. See? Someone who was at the big party that lasted all summer long. And sending me back here was the only way she could set me on the path to finding him. Maybe she never meant to say Lowell was my dad, just that he was here and he’d help me start searching.”

  “For some guy from a wild time twenty years ago?”

  “I can try,” Eddy said. “Lowell’s going to show me his photos.”

  “Really?” said Jude. “Seriously?”

  Eddy snorted. “Not those ones! What is wrong with him with that, right? Photos of Mum, I mean. Summer of ’94. Perfect chance to ask everyone’s name. You never know. And I might recognise him.”

  There was a creak upstairs and both of them stiffened. Then Jude looked at her watch.

  “Only five to,” she said.

  “He’ll be just getting on his marks,” Eddy said. “You should see him. Hunched over the keyboard like a vulture. He goes bright red.” She leaned back and hooted with laughter. “I’m not being rotten. I think he’s great.”

  “So why not leave it?” Jude said. “He loves you, like I said. And you’re getting fond of him too.”

  “Because I’m normal,” said Eddy. “Unlike you.”

  Jude took a careful slow sip from her glass and then made her voice as light as she could get it. “How’s that?”

  “Are you really not looking?” Eddy said. “How can you not be looking? How is that not killing you?”

  “What at?” She remembered as she said it Jackie’s two darts of sound earlier. Fit what?

  “At the news! The Internet. All the buzz!”

  Jude froze. It was her own fault, trusting a bloody kid.

  “Look,” she said in an urgent whisper, “I’ll make a deal. I won’t talk about ‘Liam and Terry’ if you don’t talk about Max and Raminder.”

  “It’s not the same though, is it?” Eddy said. She was right. Max and Raminder were real; hundreds of thousands of hits in the online news was how real they were.

  “I didn’t say it was. But I can’t keep talking about it every time we’re alone.”

  “Sorry!” said Eddy. “Jeez. But just tell me one thing and then I’ll never mention it again. How right did the papers get it? Likes of, did you really go round to the house?”

  And just like that Jude was back. She could feel the cheap black shoes chafing her heels through the tights and the awkward tug of the ill-fitting jacket across her shoulders. She could taste the sourness in her mouth from three cups of stale coffee at the reception and smell the stink of her sweat, drying cold on the polyester shirt. She could hear the unfamiliar sound of her own breathing, muffled and close, panicky quick, and the too familiar sound of Max stumbling on his way up the stairs, opening the door to the bedroom. She held her breath. He had never, in all the years they were married, put his clothes away when he came home drunk. He would kick his shoes off, one toe against the other heel, and then he’d fall like a tree, facedown on the bed with his head hanging over.

  “Say what you like about Max,” a colleague had drawled once. “Doesn’t matter how blattered he is, he’s still a paramedic. Sleeps on his front with his airways clear.”

  She heard one shoe, the other, then at last she felt the floorboards shudder and heard the creak and thump as he let himself fall, knocking the headboard against the wall. In less than ten more of her frantic heartbeats, he was snoring. She’d stood, batted away the sweet folds of Raminder’s clothes, careful not to jangle the coat hangers, and opened the wardrobe door.

  She drained her glass. “I can’t talk about it,” she said.

  “Right, right, got it,” Eddy said. “I’m only asking.”

  “Hail the conquering hero!” Lowell strode into the room and beamed at both them—briefly, before his face fell. “Oh my dears, I’ve done it again, haven’t I? You were talking about your mothers.”

  “Not this time,” said Eddy. “Scumbag boyfriends. How’d the auction go?”

  “I triumphed,” Lowell said. “Fifteen pounds within my budget. And I picked up a Richard Scarry in mint condition while I was waiting.”

  “Children’s book?” said Jude, trying and failing to sound cheerful. “You’ll only attract them if you keep buying books for them, you know.”

  “Mint Scarry?” said Lowell. “It’s a collector’s piece. I’ll price it out of range of their grubby little fistfuls of pocket money.” He glanced at Eddy’s belly, particularly prominent in a skimpy skinny-rib polo neck. “Not that I’m speaking against children in general.”

  “You’re off the hook, Dad,” Eddy said. “This isn’t your grandchild, remember?”

  And she sounded just about as miserable as Jude.

  “Are you—forgive me, dear child—but are you going to be a part of its life at all? Am I? I’m not au fait with the rules governing this kind of thing. Dear me, no.”

  “Nope,” said Eddy. “I’m just babysitting. It’s not—Well, if you must know, it’s not my egg. It’s no relation to either of us.”

  “I see,” said Lowell. “Yes, I see.”

  “The egg donor’s a big high-flying lawyer or something and she didn’t have time. If I’d known about you back then I would have been able to brag a bit more about my genes, but I didn’t, so there it is.”

  Stop talking, Jude willed her silently. It was sounding more ridiculous by the minute. But Lowell didn’t bat an eyelid.

  “I shouldn’t have thought I’d be any great recommendation,” he said. “Doddery old bookseller from the back of beyond.”

  “Your dad was a doctor!” said Eddy.

  “A GP, also in the back of beyond, with a third-class degree,” said Lowell.

  “Don’t be like that,” Jude said. “I mean, from what I was hearing this afternoon, he might have been a bit bossy, but he really took care of people.”

  “Ah,” said Lowell. “Mrs. Hewston has been back, has she? Singing his praises. She really has got Queen Victoria knocked into a cocked hat for posthumous devotion.”

  “You don’t half talk a pile of shite,” said Eddy.

  “Jackie in the post office, actually,” Jude said. “She said he made house calls and kept people alive. And you said yourself he didn’t retire while any of his long-timers still needed him.”

  “What does Jackie know about it?” said Lowell. “And how on earth did it come up?”

  “She was eulogising her Auntie Lorna.”

  “Eulogising!” said Eddy. “You’re as bad as him.”

  Jude ignored her. “Saying she would have made it to a hundred if she’d stuck with Dr. Glen and not gone into the nursing home.”

  “Was that the nursing home you worked in?” Eddy said. Again, the notion seemed to tickle her. “Jeez, people couldn’t get away from the Glen family and die in peace, could they?”

  “How damning!” said Lowell. “Well then, let me see. Let’s turn to something happier shall we? I fished this out earlier.” He patted the pile at his side. There was the usual Telegraph folded in quarters and open at the crossword, the junk mail and magazines, but also now the bulk of a photograph album, one of the ones with a bulbous spine hiding thick internal rings and stiff pages covered with sticky clear plastic to clamp down the pictures.

  Eddy took it and laid it on the table in front of her, pushing her Coke can away. Jude sidled into a chair beside her, and Lowell got to his feet and came to stand behind both of them.

  “I’ll get supper started in a minute,” he sai
d. “Bacon sandwiches okay? I’ll have to toast the bread though. It’s not in the first flush of youth.”

  Jude looked over at her box of mints meant to make up for being scruffy and felt a surge of happiness. It was the first time in her life a housekeeping shambles had made her happy.

  “But I wouldn’t mind a quick trip down memory lane first,” said Lowell. He put a hand on Eddy’s shoulder and patted it gently as she opened the front cover.

  Someone—surely not Lowell—had gone to a bit of trouble here. The first page had a handmade label under the plastic. Wigtown, Summer 1994, it said. The top corners were decorated with water-colour paintings of bees and butterflies, long grass along the bottom edge with buttercups and plantain heads.

  “They were so very young,” Lowell said.

  Eddy turned the page and Jude heard her let her breath go. There were four pictures in the double-page spread, but all were of the mud flats down by the shore. Different times of day from dawn until sunset and different weather days too: a periwinkle blue sky or angry banks of rolling grey thunderclouds. The photographer had caught the dimpled look of raindrops hitting the surface of the water and the dream look of the sky darker than the land.

  “Bo-ring,” Eddy said and flicked the page over.

  These four were of the beach. Someone had lain flat on the sand to make a sandcastle loom in the foreground. First it was new and dark, with shells for windows and a feather flag on top, then pale and beginning to crumble with some of the shells lying around it. The third photograph showed it with the tide sloshing into the moat, and finally it was no more than a bump, shells and feathers long gone.

  “Bloody hell,” said Eddy.

  “It was Inez’s camera,” Lowell said. “And she was more interested in—”

  “That’s better!” Eddy said. It was the same beach but this time with a bonfire in the foreground, the flames showing up as faint purplish wisps, and around it a ring of faces, all young, all reddened by the sun. The women sat cross-legged or Little Mermaid style and the young men, two of them and another hidden by the fire, just his legs visible, were stretched out. One had his head in a girl’s lap, her long hair hanging worryingly close to the glowing tip of the cigarette he held clamped in his lips. He was laughing around it, his face crinkled and his hands wide as if he had just clapped them together with glee. And yet the girl who cradled his head was looking off to the side in the other direction, unsmiling.

  “That’s her,” Eddy said. She pointed at one of the faces distorted by the heat.

  All Jude could see clearly was an elbow and a knee, a tented skirt, and a rolled sleeve. And then with a gasp she recognised the pinafore Eddy had been wearing the day before. Eddy recognised it too and traced it with a careful finger.

  “Who are the rest, Lowell?” said Jude.

  “Well, that’s Tom with the cigarette, and John … dear me, I’ve forgotten his name, with the guitar. He strummed it endlessly, never quite getting as far as what you’d call a tune but never quite stopping either. And the girl in the jeans was called … Diana. And the other two were … oh, I think they just joined us for the evening. I’m not sure I was ever introduced.”

  “Where are you, Lowell?” Jude asked him.

  “I was there somewhere,” Lowell said. “I think—Yes, those are my legs!”

  Eddy began turning the pages again. There were shots of the empty road outside Jamaica House with a sea fog rolling across it, shots of cows standing in the rain by a field gate, shots of the garden, looking raw with tiny roses in yards of bare earth and new paths laid out in the muddy mess caused by their laying.

  “That was all your mother’s doi—” Lowell said, as Eddy whipped past to another page.

  Every so often she stopped. Whenever there was a picture peopled with figures. Most of them were set pieces like the bonfire; another was of a supper table laid in the garden of the shop with fairy lights and lanterns hanging in the branches of the apple tree, and two rows of faces, red again, perhaps from wine this time, leaning in to be seen from both sides. Lowell was at the head of the table, with a paper hat on his head and his arms thrown wide.

  “Such a wonderful evening,” he said. “Two of the lads—Tom and … Golly, I wish I could remember … But they brought a little table-top cooker and set it up under the bin store. We made a feast on those two rings you wouldn’t believe. Well, Miranda did. Beef en daube and a—”

  “Mum never ate beef!” Eddy said.

  “Look at her plate!” said Lowell, pointing.

  And even Jude could see that there were bones pushed to the side of the plate in front of Miranda. She was tapping ash into a small pool of something dark—sauce or gravy—and smiling broadly at whoever was behind the camera. Her hair was a cloud of absolute black around her head and her eyes were just as dark, the way the camera had caught her, only a pinpoint of light in each. Her mouth was wide open in laughter. Jude couldn’t see the cherry-red lips Maureen had mentioned, but inside the wide mouth more points of light glittered. The phrase that sprang to Jude’s mind was she-devil.

  “One of the best nights of my life,” Lowell was saying. “Which probably says quite a lot about my life, dear me, yes. But looking at their faces, perhaps it wasn’t just me.”

  Jude looked closely then. And he was right; they were shining with more than heat or alcohol. Bathed in the soft light of the lanterns, they looked even younger than they had on the beach. Even Lowell looked young, his teeth lighter and his hair darker. And he had only a shirt on, missing the top layers of cardigan and jacket Jude had never seen him without.

  “The wonder of it was that I knew it at the time,” Lowell said. “I knew that very evening it was one of the special moments. Well, actually, I thought it was the start of something, but I knew how special that was. Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.”

  “Bullshit,” said Eddy. “What about what you don’t know can’t hurt you?”

  “What are the names of them all?” Jude said. “Tom, I recognise. And John … ”

  “Talport!” said Lowell. “Johnny Talport. And Miranda looking marvellous there. Inez behind the camera, as usual. And that’s a couple who cycled down from Edinburgh.”

  “Ouch,” Eddy said.

  “Calum and Sandra? Sarah? And those two were from Dumfries. Inez and Miranda met them when they went on a bus trip one day to see the Ruthwell cross. I have no idea what their names are.”

  “Another couple, were they?” Eddy said, peering closely. Jude knew what she was wondering—whether the man might have hooked up with Miranda—but Lowell squirmed.

  “It might seem tawdry now, but it truly was not, dear child. It was a wonderful summer. Sunny and hot day after day. Inez hasn’t really done it justice, interleaving all the photographs of autumn when the rains came. There wasn’t a shower from June to September.”

  “Tawdry?” said Eddy. “Like an orgy, you mean?”

  “It was an innocent time,” Lowell said. “Love was in the air. We were happy and the sun shone and young people came and went, sang and swam.”

  Eddy was almost at the end of the album now. There were more pages of the beach and the sky and the mud flats, then two double-page spreads of what looked like a village show: two young men shearing sheep while a ring of onlookers watched them; children jumping over lumpy grass in hessian sacks with their hair flying up; a beer-tent table covered in empty glasses with a wasp floating in the dregs of a pint; and a long trestle table with vegetables laid out in formation and a rosette in the foreground, bright yellow with the light catching its gold script: Five potatoes of any kind, Commended.

  “She was a wonderful photographer, wasn’t she?” Jude said.

  “Best dead wasp I’ve seen today,” said Eddy. “Here’s one of Mum. About bloody time!”

  “I took that,” Lowell said.

  And Jude could tell the d
ifference. The background was half wall and half window, so that one of the women was silhouetted and one was not. Miranda stood against the white wall, grinning again, her red lips obvious this time. The woman she had her arms around showed up mostly as a nimbus of brilliant hair, almost pink in the light. She was tiny and Miranda’s tanned arms, bare under a rainbow-coloured vest top, engulfed her.

  “She looks so very alive,” Lowell said.

  Jude gave him a glance. To her the little pink and gold woman looked like a ghost, or an angel. But of course he was talking about Miranda.

  “Yeah, that’s the best one,” said Eddy. “Can I copy it?”

  “I wish I had made more of an effort,” Lowell said. “I despise most modern ways, but it is rather marvellous to know whether one’s pictures have failed before it’s too late to try again.”

  “I miss going to Boots in the rain and getting the packet back though,” Jude said. “Sitting in the car remembering what sunshine felt like.”

  “I miss the Christmas Day film,” Lowell said. “The whole family—the whole country—all sitting down to watch something no one had ever seen before. Box of chocolates to pass around. Everyone dashing for the lavatory during the adverts, loath to miss anything.”

  “And all for sixpence if you showed your ration book,” said Eddy, making Jude and Lowell laugh.

  “Right then, Lowell,” said Jude. “Let’s shake these names out of your memory. They’ll be in there somewhere.”

  “Why?” said Lowell.

  “Because young Eddy here has had a wonderful idea,” Jude said, ignoring Eddy’s face going still. “She’s going to try to get in touch with everyone who knew her mother throughout her life. Most of them will be in Ireland, of course, but some of them will be elsewhere, including some in Scotland from that summer. So.”