by Louise Voss
He leaped up as if I’d scalded him. ‘So, what, now you don’t want to leave me on my own? Don’t you dare treat me like a, like a…’
I didn’t supply the missing word but it hung between us like a rotten fruit: invalid. In-valid. Ed had been diagnosed as an invalid person. No wonder he was angry. Normally if he used that tone of voice on me, I’d rise to the bait and we’d be yelling at each other within seconds. But how could I blame him for being angry?
I was torn. If I was offered the job and didn’t take it, he’d be upset. But if I did take it, I had no idea how I’d be able to enjoy it, if I was worrying about him the whole time…
Hopefully I wouldn’t be offered it. That would just be easier. I flopped back on the bed, my arms spread wide in surrender.
‘When will you know?’ Ed asked, calm again.
‘Soon. Alvin – the boss – said in the next couple of days if not before. They need someone to start ASAP. The new students have already arrived for Orientation Week, and next week is Induction. Lectures start the week after that.’
At that very moment my mobile rang. I picked it off the bedside table and answered it, Ed leaning close to me so that he could hear too.
‘Lynn? Professor Cornelius; Alvin. We all loved you, you walked it. Can you start next week? We’re happy for you to do Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, if that suits. HR will email you some details.’
I bit my lip and turned to face Ed. To my surprise the clouds had cleared from his stubbly face and he was laughing at me, nodding his approval and giving me a thumbs-up. I’d meant to ask for a day or two to think about it, but Ed’s reaction sealed the deal.
‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much! See you on Monday morning.’
When I finished the call, Ed kissed me effusively.
‘Hey, well done you. I knew you’d get it!’
By the time I put our lamb chops on the table at seven-thirty that night, I’d changed my mind again, several times. It wouldn’t be fair for me to take the job if Ed’s health suddenly went downhill and he couldn’t be left alone.
But it might be a year or two before he got worse…
Suzan next door could keep an eye on him, she worked from home. I could have a discreet word with her.
The job was only three days a week, and we did need the money. Ed’s pension wasn’t enough for us to live on comfortably, and our savings were in case of emergencies. Now they’d most likely all have to be used for his residential care, at some point in the future.
I called up the stairs. ‘Dinner’s ready!’
Ed appeared, took one look at the food on the table, and turned around again. He was wearing his pyjamas.
‘I’m going to bed. Not hungry.’
He stomped back upstairs, in sulky teenager mode again. I heard him crash about in the bathroom, the flush of the toilet and the buzz of his electric toothbrush then, finally, the decisive bang of our bedroom door.
Suddenly I had no appetite either.
When I crept up about half an hour later to check on him, I could hear him snoring through the closed door. All his clothes had been discarded on the landing in an untidy pile, so instead of disturbing him, I draped them over the banister and went back downstairs.
I couldn’t concentrate on the TV, so I poured myself a large brandy instead and sat in the armchair in the conservatory with my socked feet up on the radiator, staring out at the dark garden, until the tumbler contained nothing but fumes and my eyelids were heavy with worry. I was just nodding off over a programme on the radio about the miners’ strike when a sudden noise made me jerk awake. The miners’ programme was still on, so I couldn’t have been asleep for long. The noise sounded like the front door clicking shut, but Ben was the only other one with a key, so it couldn’t have been that.
‘Hello?’ I called, sitting bolt upright, every sense awake and tingling. ‘Ben? Is that you?’ I knew it wasn’t, though, because he and Jeanine were on their way back from a safari in South Africa.
I reached over and switched off the radio, straining my ears into the silence. I’d have assumed it was the cat, knocking something off a shelf – except that Timmy was here with me, curled up on one of the other chairs, one ear twitching.
I got to my feet, looking around for something to use as a weapon. Our house was so isolated, ours and Suzan’s next door, two halves of a whole, standing alone on the towpath. We’d been the target of burglars in the past when we’d been away on holiday.
The knife block in the kitchen felt too far away, and there were no heavy lamps or anything in the conservatory. Outside, the darkness still pressed against the windows and I felt a shiver play up my spine, a finger across harp strings. Had someone just been standing out there, watching me? Perhaps they knew that Ed was asleep upstairs and I was alone down here.
Our conservatory was, unusually, at the front of the house so that we had a direct view of the Thames, with only the muddy towpath and our front garden in between. Hardly anybody came along there after dark, so I’d never minded sitting in the lit room before.
Heart thudding, I grabbed a table mat I had made myself, gluing and varnishing pebbles from Jersey beaches onto an old heatproof mat. It was heavy – I’d used far more pebbles than I’d anticipated and I’d ended up supplementing them with gravel from our own driveway. As I stared at it, in a weird kind of mental synchronicity I was sure I could hear the faint crunch of a footstep outside on that same gravel.
Maybe it had been one person who had just left, or maybe there were two of them; one inside and one out? My imagination was going into overdrive. I raised the mat high in the air, holding it with both hands, ready to bring it crashing down on the head of an intruder. Slowly pushing open the door from the conservatory with one foot, I crept into the hall. There was nobody on the stairs and no sound from above. The hall was quiet and empty and felt cold, and I tried to work out if it had been like that earlier or if it felt cold because the front door had recently been opened. It was closed now, but not Chubb-locked. Ed usually did that before we retired to bed.
I checked the front room, then the kitchen and back doors – all secure – and then padded up the stairs in my socked feet, still brandishing the mat. Bathroom, study and spare room were all empty. Finally I pushed open my bedroom door. It was pitch dark and silent, not even any green light coming from the digital display on the clock. Ed always leaned a coaster against it because it bothered him when he was trying to get to sleep.
‘Ed? Ed? Are you OK?’ I went over to the bed and poked him.
‘Whaaargh?’ he grumbled, stirring.
I put down the mat and lay on the bed behind him, spooning him through the duvet, curling my arms and legs around his broad back. ‘Did you just come downstairs?’
His voice was thick with sleep. ‘Er … no, not unless I was walk sleeping.’
‘Sleepwalking.’
‘Wharrever,’ he mumbled before subsiding back into gentle snores.
I kissed the back of his head and went back downstairs to lock up and turn off the lamps. I must have imagined the noise. Stress, probably. Or my justifiably over-developed sense of suspicion.
3
‘It’s what his dad died of,’ I concluded, looking away as our neighbour Suzan’s eyes filled with tears. Other people’s tears never failed to make me itch with discomfort, however much I empathised.
Suzan’s house smelled, as always, of white spirit and oil paint. She’d answered the door with her paintbrush in her hand, and sat at her kitchen table twirling it absently while I gave her our grim news.
‘Oh Lynn,’ she said. ‘This is awful.’
‘I know. But what can we do?’
She gave a watery smile. ‘I’ll get you a mug with Keep Calm and Carry On written on it.’
‘Please don’t.’ I tried to sound light-hearted but it didn’t work.
‘He’s too young.’ Suzan picked at an oil paint scab on the back of her hand.
‘I know,’ I repeated mise
rably. I paused. ‘Suze … were you here on your own last night?’
She nodded. ‘I’m working flat out to get that finished. My art class is having an exhibition next month. Why?’
She gestured with the end of her paintbrush towards a splurgy-looking seascape on her easel. I didn’t know anything about art, but to me it looked like someone had thrown up on the canvas. Similar paintings hung all around the room, crowding me, looming down on us, their smeary colours and slimy stripes unsettling me. I imagined them like the inside of Ed’s brain.
‘I thought I heard someone prowling round on the gravel.’
I wasn’t going to tell her that the noises I’d heard had been inside the house as well; she’d been nervy enough since her husband died a couple of years before. Keeled over one Saturday morning over his cornflakes. It had been horrendous. She’d come round screaming and crying, and Ed and I had run straight over there. Ed had performed CPR on Keith while I rang the ambulance, but it was no good.
Now she threw herself into her painting. She was in her early seventies, a former Biba model and photographer’s muse, and her house was full of amazing monochrome photographs of her – I was fairly sure that was partly why Ed enjoyed going round there so much.
‘I probably imagined it.’
‘Darling, don’t you think you should tell the police?’
Most likely, I thought. But that wasn’t going to happen. ‘I’m sure it’s fine. I feel silly for mentioning it. Anyway, the other reason I came over is to tell you that I’ve got a new job.’
‘You’ve got a new job – now?’ Suzan looked over her glasses at me and I felt hot with guilt, which immediately made me defensive.
‘It’s only part-time, three days a week,’ I said. ‘I don’t have to do it forever! Ed’s basically fine on his own, it’s only words and stuff that he keeps forgetting at the moment. I left Henry’s eight months ago and Ed’s pension isn’t really enough for us both. But it would really put my mind at rest if I knew that you were…’
‘Keeping an eye on him?’
I bit my lip. ‘I wasn’t going to say that, not exactly. I was going to say, “aware of the situation”. So if he locked himself out or anything, you could let him back in. Or perhaps invite him over for coffee occasionally. As long as he doesn’t think you’re keeping an eye on him…’
‘I’d be happy to,’ she said, reaching over and covering my hand with hers. ‘Where’s the job, and when do you start?’
‘Thanks, Suze. It’s only up at Hampton Uni – the music department at Fairhurst House, you know? Round the corner really. I could be back in twenty minutes if there was a problem. I start on Monday.’
‘I’ll do what I can.’
I thanked her and said goodbye, as she gave me a turpentine-scented kiss on the cheek.
Walking back up our garden path, I glanced affectionately at the house, then paused. My gaze swept across the front door, living-room and conservatory windows – then back to the living room. That was it – the blinds were down. They hadn’t been down last night because we hadn’t been in there. Ed had gone to bed at seven-thirtyish and I’d spent the evening in the conservatory, until I’d heard the footsteps on the gravel. Last time I’d been in the front room had been at some point yesterday afternoon, fetching a couple of dirty coffee cups left from when we were watching TV the night before that. Obviously the blinds had been up then, because it was still daylight. So Ed must have got up in the night. Weird that I hadn’t heard him. But then I had heard other noises when Ed had definitely been asleep. It was all rather unsettling … unless Ed wasn’t the only one having memory problems.
It was horrible leaving the house the following Monday morning to start work. I’d come into the kitchen to say goodbye and found Ed slowly banging his head against the fridge door, fists bunched by his sides.
‘Ed! What’s the matter?’ I rushed over and hugged him from behind, trying to tug him away from the refrigerator.
‘I. Just. Can’t. Bear. It,’ he said, punctuating each word with another bang. When he turned around and I saw the tears in his eyes, I felt my heart breaking.
I couldn’t dwell on it, though, once I arrived at Fairhurst House and took my place at the spare desk in the music school office. Not with the brain-overload that accompanied the deluge of new information I was required to retain.
The other administrator, Margaret, was helpful and polite, in a slightly distracted way. She was a tall, slender woman with a short crop of bleached hair, who seemed to glide from filing cabinet to Xerox machine as she filled me with a stream of facts I had to scribble down in order to have the faintest chance of remembering.
I called home once, ringing Ed on my mobile from the toilet, trying to pee silently when he answered. He was fine, he said. Round at Suzan’s doing a painting of some tulips with her.
‘Nice one, Pablo Naismith,’ I said, relieved that he sounded better than he had earlier.
My new boss Alvin appeared just as my stomach was rumbling and I was asking Margaret what refreshment options there were.
‘Come on then, I’ll show you the staff canteen,’ he announced. ‘In fact, I’ll give you a tour of the campus, shall I?’
I scrutinized him surreptitiously as we walked along together. He must have been at least six foot six, with a shiny-bald tonsure, but a mass of thick, curly auburn hair and matching beard. He was ridiculously skinny, one of those people who seem entirely composed of angles and knobbles, but strangely, he somehow managed not to look like a nerd, despite the silly hair and pipe-cleaner limbs.
After a soggy panini and a tepid latte, he gave me the grand tour, ending up back at Fairhurst House, where we had a look at the computer lab, the equipment hire office and the seminar rooms. In the final corridor, Alvin showed me into a damp room full of random bits of percussion, half a drum kit, and some scuffed amps. A stepladder and tools lay around, along with a digital radio that someone had left on, and a pile of crumbled bits of plaster on the floor.
‘This is one of the band practice rooms,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a work order in for months to get the damp removed. Right – that’s everywhere, I think. Next stop Asda – we need to buy booze and crisps for the Freshers’ party tomorrow.’
‘Oh! We don’t have caterers then?’
Alvin snorted. ‘You must be joking. No, we do it ourselves. There’s a kitchenette outside the gamelan room. Always thought it was risky, having a drawerful of sharp knives with a load of hormonal teenagers around – but how else are we supposed to cut up the cheese to have with our wine?’
We were just leaving the room when a voice from the radio stopped me in my tracks. I gasped and Alvin turned. ‘Everything OK?’
I made a ‘hang on’ gesture and peered at the digital read-out on top of the radio. It was tuned to 5 Live – not a station that we ever listened to at home.
So what was Ed doing on 5 Live talking about cuts to the NHS?
‘Sorry,’ I said, not wanting to sound like a maniac, but needing to explain. ‘That sounds just like my husband!’
The Ed-soundalike was spouting off about zero-hours contracts, exactly the sort of topic that he used to get very aerated about – except that Ed had shown no interest whatsoever in current affairs for several months now. He no longer read the paper or watched the news. He talked aimlessly over the top of all the radio news bulletins. It was one of the things that first alerted me to the changes in his personality. I felt a stab of overwhelming sadness that I’d never again hear him doing anything like this.
‘Is it him?’ Alvin enquired. I could see he was keen to get on, but I couldn’t leave. It felt like I would be walking away from the man my husband used to be. The caller did sound exactly like him – if Ed had a cold; the voice was deeper and croakier than his usual one, but it had the same timbre. He was talking in an articulate, concise way, using all the cadences and expressions that Ed used to, before he began to forget how to construct sentences properly. I realised how much I already misse
d him.
Just as he was saying something about erosion of civil rights, the DJ cut him off: ‘Well, I’m afraid we’re coming up to the news now so we’ll have to leave it there. Thanks very much for your input, Steve from Cheam…’
‘My husband’s called Ed. But he sounded so like him,’ I said slowly.
Alvin looked at me. ‘Been married long?’
The question seemed loaded.
‘Eight years now. No kids, just a grown-up stepson.’ I always preempted the inevitable next question about children. It just seemed better to get it out of the way, on my own terms. ‘Ed’s a bit older than me – he’s been round the block once already.’
I didn’t know why I’d said that. Perhaps deep down I knew I’d have to admit to Alvin about Ed’s diagnosis sooner or later and I was subconsciously preparing for it.
‘Ed? Ed Naismith?’
Alvin had that amused ‘small world’ look on his face.
‘Yes … do you know him?’
‘Only vaguely. Was his nickname Edna? Many moons ago, before I married Sheryl, I dabbled in a bit of am-dram with the Molesey group. Fancied myself playing Hamlet, truth be told, but they never recognised my obvious talent and the sort of parts I got were more along the lines of “second spear-carrier on the right” so I didn’t last long. I’m sure Ed was the director of whatever the play was that I ended up almost doing, before I decided it wasn’t for me.’
I laughed, relieved. ‘Yes. Edna I. Smith, that’s what they called him in MADS. That’s where he and I met, actually. I joined MADS when I first moved to the area and didn’t know anybody, as a way to meet people. So you know him? What are the chances of that?’
A slightly hooded expression crossed Alvin’s features and he looked suddenly reticent.
‘What indeed?’ he asked. ‘Come on then, let’s go and buy some cheap wine and E numbers.’
4
‘So, I never thought I’d end up pushing a trolley around Asda on my first day at work,’ I told Ed. ‘You should’ve seen the cashier’s face when we went through with all that wine and beer – oh, and a bottle of Jack Daniels for his office drawer. He said, “This should keep us going for a day or two, honey,” to me, you know, like he was pretending we were a couple and it was all for us.’