‘Has he gone out?’ asked Alexander.
‘No,’ she said blithely. ‘He’s upstairs, in his study. Stewing. Composing his next speech.’ She looked out at the garden, and from her unfinished smile he understood that she would not leave Philip.
That summer, on midweek evenings, Alexander came to expect the clang of her sandals on the iron spiral staircase that connected the terrace to the alcove by his back door. For an hour or more he would listen as she repeated the arguments that had occurred since she had last talked to him. Week after week, recounting conversations and disagreements that became more convoluted with every visit, she described her gradual reconciliation.
‘He’s sulking,’ she said to him.
‘Why’s that?’
‘He’s making out he thinks I’m having an affair. Spaniel eyes when I leave the house to see the lover in the basement.’
‘He doesn’t believe that?’
‘Of course he doesn’t. He’s trying hard, but he can’t make himself believe it.’
‘Hardly surprising.’
‘But he really is jealous. Which makes him feel better, in a way. Making some sort of reparation for adultery.’ She was holding an orange, and she peered at him over its horizon. ‘Of course we could have an affair now, and we’d get away with it. A perfect double-bluff,’ she smiled, and the humiliation of her betrayal was in her eyes.
‘He looks right through me,’ said Alexander. ‘If he can’t get away first. Dives into the car when he sees me coming up the path, or jumps back into the house. He can’t stand me, can he?’
‘You’re a witness to the crime, Alex.’
‘Yes, but it’s more than that.’
‘Perhaps,’ she conceded. ‘He thinks you’re an under-achiever, and there are few things worse in Philip’s world,’ she said, picking up her cardigan. They took a stroll around the garden, arm in arm. ‘Of course, Alex, none of this would have happened if you’d married me,’ she whispered, and she looked at him intensely, confusedly, as though momentarily she might have meant what she said. Then he saw her glance over his shoulder before she kissed him, like a child thanking a relative for a gift, and he saw that Philip was watching them from the living room.
54. Flat 3
Alexander was working at the Wilsons’ house, up by the school, the day after he told Jane that he would be leaving. Soon after six o’clock, on his way home, he stopped in the centre of the village to buy some milk and the evening edition of the local newspaper. As he entered the newsagent’s shop, the assistant was pinning advertisement cards onto the board in the window, and one of these was for a one-bedroomed flat in a street near the crest of the hill. From the telephone box by the car park Alexander rang the landlord, Mr Adams, who arranged to meet him an hour later, outside the house. It was a whitewashed semi-detached house, with carmine windowframes and the number of the house in carmine wooden numerals, like the numerals on the side of a fishing boat, above a carmine door. To the right of the front steps a steep and narrow flight, barred by a small iron gate, descended to the door of the basement flat, which was fronted by a rockery that almost touched the glass of its window. When Alexander arrived, Mr Adams was sitting on the ground, holding a small plastic pot in one hand and in the other a slender brush, which he was dabbing onto the spring of the gate. Mr Adams was Alexander’s age, but stout and bald, and he wore an old blue tracksuit with the letters CCCP across the shoulders and a pair of thick-soled trainers that were speckled with plaster and paint of various colours. ‘Be with you in a second,’ said Mr Adams, inserting the brush into the spring. ‘You’re the chap who rang?’ he asked, withdrawing the brush and dipping it in the pot.
‘Mr MacIndoe, yes.’
Mr Adams glanced at Alexander’s boots. ‘You’re not a student,’ he remarked, as if Alexander had claimed to be one when he phoned.
‘No, I’m not,’ replied Alexander.
‘Students of all ages nowadays, mind you. Not like when we were youngsters,’ said Mr Adams.
‘Indeed.’
‘But you’re not a student.’
‘No,’ said Alexander.
Mr Adams rocked an inch one way and then an inch the other, as though he were being jostled on a bench. ‘So what is your line of work? Something agricultural, I’d guess.’
‘I’m a gardener. I have my own business.’
‘You have your own business but not your own home?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Local man?’
‘I’m from London.’
‘Thought so. Solvent, are you?’
‘I am. I prefer to rent,’ Alexander explained.
‘Seventy pounds a week. Is that within your range?’
‘It is,’ said Alexander. ‘That seems very reasonable.’
‘I’m a very reasonable man,’ said Mr Adams, making jabbing motions with the brush. ‘It’s semi-furnished. Bills extra. Gas heating and hot water, radiators throughout. Gas cooker. TV aerial point, but you’ll need your own TV. One month’s deposit. I won’t have pets.’
‘Neither will I,’ said Alexander.
Mr Adams looked at Alexander’s face for the first time. Placing the pot on a step, he dug a hand into his tracksuit and held a fat bunch of keys over his shoulder for Alexander to take. No two keys were of the same type, and each was marked with a dot of paint. ‘Top of the stairs, flat 3. Yellow’s the front door, green’s the door to the flat. Take your boots off before you go in, would you? Don’t want mud all over the carpet. I’ll be with you in five.’
The staircase was bare and the colour of creosote, and the runnels of paint on the door of Flat 3 looked like a sweat of milk. Against one wall of the front room a low bed had been set, with a mattress that was still wrapped in polythene. By the window there was an old armchair, its sagging seat bolstered with a couple of brown velvet cushions. A flimsy white wardrobe with turquoise handles stood at the far end, by a matching chest of drawers. A square table with corkscrew legs occupied the centre of the room; a single dining chair was tucked under it. The thin brown carpet had risen into ridges that resembled a net of veins, and the wallpaper had been repainted so many times that a narrow band of half a dozen different colours ran around the switches and above the skirting boards. It was so quiet that Alexander could hear the chimes of a clock in the flat below.
Mr Adams grunted as he put his toolbox down in the hall. ‘Have you seen the kitchen?’ he asked, and he beckoned Alexander into a room that was panelled with varnished boards, like a mountain chalet, and contained a small refrigerator, a cooker that had not recently been cleaned, one cupboard, a table topped with green Formica, and one green plastic chair. ‘You might appreciate the view,’ said Mr Adams, looking out of the window at the neighbours’ overgrown gardens. ‘Better out the front, though,’ he added, putting out a hand to receive the keys.
The windowframe knocked in the wind as they regarded the sea. ‘Does you good, they say,’ Mr Adams remarked. ‘Contemplating the waves. For myself, it makes me a bit low after a while. All that action. Up and down, up and down, all day and all night, day in, day out. But a lot of people like it.’
‘I like it,’ said Alexander.
‘You’ll find it’s a quiet house. Not much traffic. They keep themselves to themselves next door. Been there fifty years, thereabouts. The Tomlins. Retired, they are. They go on holiday a lot. To Majorca. Spend more time in Majorca than here. Ever been to Majorca, Mr MacIndoe?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Nor me,’ admitted Mr Adams, frowning at the window. ‘Excuse me a second, will you?’ he said, and he went over to the toolbox, from which he took a box of matches. He struck a match, extinguished it, bit it with dentures that were as bright as toothpaste, and slotted the halves between the windowframes to stop the knocking. ‘Went to Marbella a couple of years back. The wife’s idea. I didn’t much care for it. Been to Marbella yourself?’
‘I haven’t. I’ve been in that area, but not actually to Marbella.’<
br />
Mr Adams prodded the windowframe with a forefinger, and seemed to find his handiwork adequate to the situation. ‘You’ve got a lovely girl downstairs,’ he resumed. ‘Been there a year now. Theo’s her name. At the university. You’ll hardly know she’s there. And in the basement you’ve got Colin. He works at the Newhaven docks. Does a lot of night shifts. The basement doesn’t get a lot of light, so it’s right up his street. Nice young man. You’ll not see him from one week to the next.’
‘Would you mind if I redecorated?’ asked Alexander. ‘A lick of paint. Nothing extravagant. White emulsion.’
Mr Adams looked around the room, as if to root out the defect that had provoked Alexander’s question. His gaze came to rest on the rash of tarnished drawing pins that covered the wall above the bed. ‘Can’t see any reason why not. So you’re interested?’
‘It’s exactly right,’ said Alexander. ‘I can supply a reference from my present landlady. And from my previous landlord.’
With his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his tracksuit, Mr Adams inspected the room, as if he were the prospective tenant. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, Mr MacIndoe,’ he decided. ‘But perhaps you should take a look around again, to be sure.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Alexander, taking his chequebook from his jacket. He wrote a cheque for one month’s rent and his deposit, and a week later he moved into Flat 3, where he was to live for the rest of his life.
One evening each week, most weeks, he would drive over to Lewes to eat with Roderick and Cornelia. Once a month, most months, he would take the train to London to spend a Sunday with Sam and Liz. In the summer they sometimes went to Kew or Richmond or Hampton Court, but usually they wandered around the West End, where they would go for lunch in a café or a pub, and browse in the shops, and perhaps see a film in the late afternoon. Occasionally he would meet Jane in the teashop by her clinic. Philip was rarely mentioned, and nothing from their past was ever discussed, except on the day she told him that Sidney Dixon had died. He had died the year before. Her father had only heard a couple of weeks ago, she told him, and she put a hand on his and immediately withdrew it. Sidney had married, it turned out. His wife ran a jewellery shop, and was a lot younger. In his will he left half his savings to her; the other half he left to the hospital in East Grinstead, where Sir Archibald Mclndoe had worked.
Alexander worked from eight or nine to five or six o’clock each day, from Monday to Friday, sometimes on a Saturday, when necessary on a Sunday as well. In the evening, if he was not visiting Roderick and Cornelia, he might go to the cinema, or watch a film on video, or read a book about history or the natural world. He went to bed at eleven o’clock, as a rule. He would lie in bed, listening to the murmur of voices in the flat below, or Theo’s music, or the beat of her fingers on the keyboard of her computer. Nobody came to the flat, except Theo, who once in a while dropped in for a cup of tea, and Mr Adams, who called on the first Wednesday of every month to collect the rent, and stayed sometimes for an hour or so, to play a few games of draughts or backgammon.
He lived this way, contentedly, for more than two years.
55. Carpe Mañana
Shortly after seven o’clock on a mild September evening the doorbell rang. Laying down his knife and fork, Alexander leaned out through the open window and saw a young woman with dyed black hair, scrutinising a postcard or a photograph. She pushed back a sleeve of her top to look at her watch, then pressed the button again. Having posted the picture into a pouch on the thigh of her trousers, she stepped back and looked up before Alexander could withdraw. She waved at him. ‘Mr MacIndoe?’ she called, in a voice that was keen and pleasant.
‘Yes?’ he replied.
She took another step backwards, onto the pavement, and her smile broadened as she gazed at him. ‘Mr MacIndoe, could I have a word? I’m not selling and I’m not conducting an opinion poll or anything like that. A couple of minutes of your time?’ Alexander noticed that she was wearing silver trainers. She looked down at her feet, then up at him. ‘I really won’t keep you long,’ she promised. ‘But it’s a personal matter.’
When he opened the door she was standing with one foot on the step and one on the pavement, with her arms folded and her head tilted interrogatively.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I hope this isn’t an inconvenient moment.’
‘Not at all,’ Alexander replied.
She stayed where she was for a few seconds, looking at him with assertive dark grey eyes. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ she said.
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘We’ve met before, but a long time ago. A very long time,’ she smiled, and stood upright before him on the step, with her hands behind her back, offering him a last opportunity to solve the mystery of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Alexander.
‘You don’t remember.’
‘I don’t.’
‘That’s OK. Neither do I. But I know we met once.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Esmé,’ she said. ‘Esmé Clarke. Shaun’s daughter.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Alexander, and Esmé smiled again, as if receiving a compliment. ‘Oxford Street.’
‘Apparently. You remember?’ Esmé asked, theatrically incredulous.
‘Yes, I do,’ he told her, and he recalled the child kneeling in the aisle between shelves of toys, but he could not see a face that in any way resembled this young woman’s.
‘You bought me a present,’ said Esmé, and then she added, ‘so Megan says.’ She looked at him directly, awaiting a reaction to Megan’s name. Seeing none, she said: ‘Can I come in?’
His body felt encumbered as he climbed the stairs, as though he were raising his limbs through water. ‘How did you find me?’ he asked at the door of his flat.
‘That really wasn’t difficult,’ said Esmé, surveying the hall. ‘She told me where your shop was. I went there, and found it had gone, but I spoke to the manager of the shop that’s there now. He was very helpful.’
‘Charlie,’ Alexander said, pointing the way to the front room.
‘I didn’t get his name. He gave me an address down here. I’m in Brighton for the week, so I went along a couple of days back and got your address from a very impolite man, who seemed to think there was something funny about being asked where you were.’
‘Philip.’
‘Whoever.’ The fluttering curtain caught her attention, and then she noticed the unfinished meal on the table. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I can come back.’
‘No,’ said Alexander, directing her to the armchair. ‘Do sit down. I’d finished, pretty well.’ He returned to the chair at the table and pushed the plate away. ‘So you’re in touch with Megan,’ he said, and his tongue felt clumsy on the word.
‘We were never out of touch, not totally. She sent me a card every year, on my birthday, without fail.’
‘But you’ve spoken to her as well, evidently. You’ve seen her.’
‘I have,’ she confirmed, and she smiled to transmit to Alexander the pleasure of her conversations with Megan. ‘Many times, in the last year,’ she continued, tantalisingly, but Alexander did not say anything. ‘Shall I explain?’ she asked.
‘It’s why you’re here. Please.’
‘You sure? You don’t seem too thrilled by this.’
‘Thrilled is probably not the way to put it.’
‘I’ve thrown you a bit.’
‘That’s closer, I’d say.’
‘I’m sorry. I would have phoned first, but I couldn’t find a number. Don’t you have a phone?’
‘I have a phone,’ he said, nodding towards the table in the corner.
‘But you’re not in the book.’
‘I’m not in the book, no.’
Esmé looked at the table, at the telephone and the books piled by it. She looked at the room in its entirety, and seemed to be considering how she could describe his flat without making it sound depressing.
‘Please,’ said Alexander. ‘Go
on.’
She looked out of the window, regaining her resolve from the sight of the sky. ‘Well,’ she resumed, ‘to cut it short, I had a bad time a couple of years back. A very bad time,’ she said, shaking her head at the memory of it. ‘I’d come out of a bad relationship, with a guy who really messed me around. My mother had taken off. Disappeared to some commune somewhere. For the fifth or sixth time. Attention span of a gnat. Should I be telling you this?’ she wondered. Alexander replied with a noncommittal gesture of his open hands. ‘So she’d gone, and my father was smashed all day, and I’d been ill for months. Washed out all the time. Then I hit thirty, and I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I had a crisis. You’re meant to know what you’re doing by then, aren’t you? Thirty is when you’ve got to know yourself.’
‘So I believe.’
‘Well, I didn’t. I had no idea who I was, where I was going. Not a clue. I’d lost the plot in a major way, and there was nobody I could turn to. And then it came to me: I knew I had to see Megan again. It was so obvious. I’d loved her when I was a kid. More than my mother. I’d loved my mother, but I’d really loved Megan. She’d been such an influence on me,’ she told him, but something in Alexander’s demeanour made her stop. ‘You think I’m babbling, don’t you?’
‘Please, continue.’
‘You wanted me to explain,’ Esmé objected, glancing out of the window again.
‘I do.’
‘I’m just telling you what happened. I’m sorry if it sounds ridiculous to you, but that’s how it was.’
‘It doesn’t sound ridiculous. Carry on.’
For a few seconds she worried at the zip of her top. ‘I knew I had to see her,’ she went on. ‘She’d cared about me when she lived with my father, and I knew she still cared, in some way. She’d stayed in touch. She didn’t have to, but she did. She hadn’t seen me for years, so she’d be able to see me clearly, because she was coming from outside. But she was close as well. I knew I could talk to her. It made sense. You see that?’
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