THE PARALLEL GRAVE
DAY FIVE
Day Five / 1
Going down a little earlier than usual next morning, Alaric was surprised to find his aunt warming her hands on the old kitchen range, which she’d lit an hour before. She was still dressed for sub-zero temperatures, however, in a padded blue anorak over her yellow dungarees, with a multicolored scarf encircling her neck twice, and a pair of thick knitted socks bulging out of tartan flip-flops. It was so long since there’d been any real warmth in the house that Alaric registered pleasure before remembering that pleasure wasn’t something he did these days, and hunched his shoulders over his customary bowl of honey-nut cornflakes. Liney, having already consumed her daily portion of grapefruit segments, seated herself at the other end of the table to munch the wedge of wholemeal toast she’d just burnt to a lip-smacking crisp.
‘When are they coming to look at the heating?’ Alaric asked.
‘Good question,’ she replied.
‘I thought you’d arranged it.’
‘So did I. The man said he’d be here at eight-thirty, which I took to mean the first one of the day. I’d blame the snow, but he only lives in the village. I’ll give him another half hour, then send you round to give him a piece of my mind.’
‘I’m not doing that!’
She smiled sweetly at him. Her teeth were black from the burnt toast.
A minute or two later the phone rang in the hall. Liney was off her seat and out there before Alaric could blink. When she came back, she said: ‘Your father. He’s going to be delayed. Couple of extra days, he thinks.’
‘Why, what’s happened?’
‘It’s been snowing there non-stop since yesterday, he says, and some of the roads are impassable.’
‘Probably an excuse,’ Alaric said uncharitably.
‘Excuse for what?’
‘What do you think?’
Liney sat down again. ‘We’re managing, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘We can get by without your dad a bit longer.’
‘Don’t you have to get back to the shop?’
‘I close the shop from the end of Jan to mid-March. Very little call for crafty stuff in Sheringham this time of year.’
The prospect of two extra days in his aunt’s company alarmed Alaric less than it would have done twenty-four hours earlier. She was, after all, someone who’d come ‘that close’ to not existing, which made her more worth putting up with somehow. Also, with his father away for two more days he would be spared Kate’s arrival that bit longer. Better loopy Liney than unwanted mother-substitute Kate Faraday.
‘But I can’t just sit around in this ice house doing nothing,’ Liney said. ‘I’ll go barmy if I don’t keep myself occupied.’
‘Too late for that,’ he muttered.
‘What do you say to a spot of decorating?’ she asked.
‘Decorating? Decorating what?’
‘This dump. Tart it up a bit in the little time we have. In tandem. The pair of us.’
‘I’m no good at things like that.’
‘Well neither am I, but I don’t let it hold me back. Your mum used to keep all the painty things in that storage area over the garage, I remember. Know if they’re still there?’
He shrugged. ‘Never go there.’ Decorating the house with Liney. Nightmares didn’t get much more real than that. ‘Got to go out anyway,’ he said.
‘You have?’
‘Yes. Promised yesterday.’
‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed.
He gulped the rest of his cereal and fled to the River Room for the Folly, which he took up to his room and put on the bookcase, where Naia had put hers. When he was dressed he went down again – just in time to see Liney go out of the front door. He went to the porch and peered round the bags and boxes she’d restacked at some point; saw her lugging one of the garage doors back – no easy task with all the snow that had piled up against it in the past two days. She disappeared inside. Good. Now he could claim to have left while she was going through the paints in the garage. No, wait. The milk had been delivered but the post was late, so there were only the milkman’s footprints on the drive, coming and going. Whatever else Liney was, she wasn’t stupid. When she concluded that he’d gone out while she was in the garage she would expect to see a second set of prints leading away from the house. He considered running across the garden and creating the extra footprints, but decided against it when he couldn’t think of a way of getting back without leaving return prints.
He grabbed his boots and parka and went back to his room, placed his hands on the Folly, concentrated on the house inside the dome. He steeled himself for the agony, and when it didn’t come he realized that he had no more idea how to use the thing than he had the first time it had sent him to Naia’s. Even last night, when he’d been so mad about her tidying up exercise, he hadn’t known what to do, but the pain had overtaken him anyway, and then he was in the garden, and after that her bedroom. So what had he done then that he wasn’t doing now?
‘On those three occasions were you upset in any way? Angry, distressed, particularly emotional?’
He’d dodged the question when she’d asked it, but could she be on to something? He thought back. Just before the first trip he’d been longing, really longing, for Withern as it was before his mother died. The second time he’d yearned to revisit the version discovered the day before. And last night? He’d been in a real strop. So…
With his hands on the dome he dredged up a longing for Naia’s Withern Rise, Withern as it should be – but, perhaps because it was a manufactured emotion, he got nowhere. He tried to make himself angry for not succeeding, and that didn’t work either. He made further attempts, took different approaches, but the nearest he could get to any real passion was frustration, and frustration clearly wasn’t enough. He gave up.
Day Five / 2
Naia spent half the morning in her room in case Alaric came. He wasn’t obliged to come, and they’d made no definite arrangement, but she didn’t see how he could bear to stay away with so much still to work out. She gave up waiting around eleven, but couldn’t settle downstairs and continually visited her room in case he’d turned up in her absence.
‘You like it up there, don’t you?’ her mother said after one of these brief returns.
‘It’s my room,’ she replied. ‘Shouldn’t I?’
Alex thought she had a pretty good idea why Naia was so restless. She was expecting a call from that boy she was keen on. Robert. She’d seen a photo of him. Nice-looking lad, dark curly hair, bright smile, starting at art college in September. What she didn’t know, because Naia hadn’t told her, was that Robert was away this week, visiting grandparents in Bristol. His grandmother had just learned that she had liver cancer, and was unlikely to see the end of the year.
Ordinarily, Naia might have missed Robert. They’d been getting closer lately. Bit too free with his hands, but that was boys for you. But Robert had barely crossed her mind since Alaric appeared on the scene. There was no betrayal in this. She wasn’t attracted to Alaric. Appalling idea. It would be like fancying a brother who’d been away all her life. But why didn’t he come? What was so fascinating at that dismal house of his that could keep him from the world of knowledge and speculation that they’d only just begun to explore?
Day Five / 3
It was a single garage with a grey slate roof in keeping with the main roofs, though it had been built many years after the house for the first car owned by the Underwoods then at Withern Rise. Alaric peered into shadows that smelt of dust and oil. Strange to see Liney’s little green Fiat there instead of Dad’s old blue Daimler. The Daimler had been in the family from new; his grandfather had bought it to celebrate the birth of his son, never dreaming that it would still be on the road forty years later – driven by that same son.
‘Hello?’
‘Up here!’
At the dim far end of the garage a steep open-sided staircase climbed to the storage space under the eaves. Reaching a sta
nding position at the top, Alaric was forced into an uncomfortable stoop. Even at its highest point the roof’s inverted ‘V’ was so low that no one of average height could hope to stand upright. He couldn’t and Liney couldn’t. When he last came up here with his mother, she’d been able to stand upright in the middle, just about, and he had been able to stand on tiptoe. He’d never thought of it before, but Mum hadn’t been that tall.
‘Thought you were going out,’ Liney said.
‘Changed my mind. Go later. Or tomorrow.’
He watched her rooting through boxes, lifting tins of paint to inspect the color on the label or round the rim by the fragment of grey light admitted by the skylight. There were many other things up here as well as paint – pieces of old furniture, a roll of cocoanut matting, carpet off-cuts, bits of junk that should have been chucked years ago. In the gloom Alaric picked out the rusty tricycle he’d careered round the garden on until the age of four; boxes of games and puzzles; his old orange football. There were also a great many picture frames. His mother had collected frames the way other people collect stamps or snuff boxes or thimbles. If she saw one she liked and it was in fair condition and reasonably priced, she bought it. Only a percentage of her frames had ever been allocated pictures and hung in the house, but he remembered her saying that one day she would find a picture and a place for every one of them. She hadn’t, of course. There hadn’t been time.
‘Which room should we tackle first?’ Liney asked. ‘Which room, which color?’
‘Not bothered,’ he replied.
‘Come on, nephew, input, input, too damn cold to crouch up here all day.’ He looked through the tins, but remained unable to commit his interest to any of them, or any room. ‘All right, I’ll choose,’ Liney said in exasperation. ‘This one, and we’ll do the kitchen because it’s the warmest while the heating’s out of action.’
The color she’d picked for the kitchen was a faintly yellow emulsion called ‘Morning Mist’.
‘How boring can you get?’ Alaric said.
‘You can still choose,’ Liney said.
‘It’ll do. It’s only the kitchen.’
A large walk-in pantry off the kitchen had been an all-purpose utility room for years. It contained a washing machine and tumble drier, an immense freezer that grumbled and juddered, and the substantial enamel sink in which Liney placed some stiff brushes in bowls of turps. She asked Alaric to spread newspaper over the kitchen floor so they wouldn’t drop paint on it.
‘Probably improve that floor,’ he said.
‘Maybe it would, but we’re painting the walls.’
‘What do I do for newspaper?’
‘Try the front porch.’
He raided one of the rubbish bags in the porch and commenced to lay sheets of newspaper on the floor. It took longer than it might once have done because since his mother’s death Dad had switched to tabloids. ‘Filthy,’ Liney said. He glanced up from the bare breasts in front of his knees, but Liney was looking at a licked finger she’d run down the wall. ‘Have to wipe them over first.’
‘Your fingers?’
‘The walls.’
‘That’ll take ages.’
‘No it won’t. I’m a whirlwind once I get going.’
She filled a plastic bucket with hot soapy water, began swabbing the walls down with one of two large sponges she’d found under the sink, and told Alaric to follow her example with the other sponge.
Liney proved a whirlwind indeed, finishing three walls before he’d done one. ‘Brighter already,’ she said, admiring their handiwork.
‘Don’t really need to paint now, do we?’ he said hopefully.
‘Oh yes we do, you’re not getting out of it that easily.’
He scowled. ‘I didn’t know I was forced to help.’
‘You’re not,’ Liney said with equanimity. ‘You’re under no obligation whatsoever. I, however, will do my best in the time available to improve your home. And when I’ve done what I can I shall return to my lonely little spinsterish flat in Sheringham knowing that my endeavors have gone quite unappreciated by the work-shy men of this household.’
‘I was kidding,’ he said lamely.
She flashed him a fake smile. ‘So was I. So let’s get cracking, eh?’
Day Five / 4
When Mr. Dukas the heating engineer still hadn’t arrived by twelve, Liney rang his number. His wife answered and informed her that Jim was out on a job.
‘Not this job,’ Liney said, and asked if Jim had any plans to visit Withern Rise as agreed.
‘Hang on, I’ll look in the book.’ Liney heard pages being turned, and finally: ‘Nothing here.’
‘What do you mean, nothing there?’
‘No mention of an appointment at Withern Rise.’
‘But I arranged it with him yesterday. He was coming here to work out an estimate for central heating repairs.’
‘I was visiting my mother at the Home yesterday,’ Mrs. Dukas said.
‘Is that… relevant?’
‘How’d you mean?’
‘I mean do you have to be there when your husband makes appointments.’
‘It helps. Jim never writes things down. Trusts to memory.’
‘Perhaps he shouldn’t,’ Liney said.
‘You’re right, I’m always telling him that. Like a sieve, his.’
The amiable Mrs. Dukas promised to phone her husband on his mobile and ask him to look in before he came home. Liney waited until half six before ringing back. This time the man himself answered. He had indeed forgotten the original arrangement, he confessed – and his wife had forgotten to tell him to come that afternoon. Liney asked him, through chattering teeth, when he thought he might find the time to actually pass this way. He once again promised to be there first thing in the morning, eight-thirty sharp.
‘Will you put it in the book to make sure?’ Liney asked.
‘I’ll get the wife to do it,’ he replied.
DAY FOUR
Day Four / 1
Mr. Dukas was almost as good as his latest word. He didn’t make the eight-thirty appointment, but he was there on the dot of five past one. Alaric and Liney were sitting down to a bread and cheese lunch.
‘We’ve earned this,’ Liney said, gazing about her at the freshly-painted kitchen.
‘Yep,’ Alaric said. ‘Hard bread and old cheese seem a fair reward.’
When the doorbell rang, Liney kicked back her chair and ran into the hall. She drew the door back so sharply that the man on the step almost had a coronary among the rubbish bags and boxes. He was a broad man in his forties with a narrow head topped by an island of matted ginger hair. He wore dark blue overalls – too short for him in leg and arm – and carried a large green metal box that looked as if it had been abused with a metal toe-cap on a daily basis for two full decades. When Mr. Dukas finally crossed the threshold he shivered, and said: ‘Chilly in here.’
‘Yes,’ Liney said. ‘We really ought to call a heating engineer.’
He asked to see the boiler. Liney led him into the kitchen, where Alaric was still eating. She announced him like a crown prince of Europe.
‘Mr. Dukas is among us!’
She showed him through to the utility room, where he removed the front panel of the boiler and got down on his knees before it.
‘Old boiler, he said, tapping a few things with a spanner.
‘No need to be personal,’ Liney said.
It didn’t take him long to find out what was wrong. A valve had expired. Liney asked him if he could replace it. Mr. Dukas said he doubted it as they didn’t make them anymore.
‘Well what are we supposed to do?’
‘Get a new boiler, that’s my advice.’
‘Wouldn’t that be expensive?’ Liney asked.
‘Wouldn’t be cheap.’
‘Are you sure you can’t get a new valve to replace the old?’
‘There might still be the odd one about,’ Mr. Dukas opined. ‘Long shot, though.’
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br /> ‘Could you find out?’
He unclipped his phone from his belt, pressed buttons, put the phone to his ear, waited, asked after the health of the person at the other end, quoted the number of the valve, and waited while the person at the other end ran a check of his stock and suppliers. When the call was concluded, Mr. Dukas turned to Liney.
‘He hasn’t got any. Obsolete.’
‘So… that’s it?’
‘Just about.’
‘You’re absolutely sure this valve is unobtainable?’
‘That’s what Mario said.’
‘Mario? You asked a waiter?’ Mr. Dukas looked puzzled. ‘Sorry,’ Liney said. ‘This Mario. He’s an expert in things valvish, is he? I mean, he’s the main man to go to with one’s valve problems?’
‘If Mario can’t get it, it doesn’t exist.’
‘I see. But I was wondering if there were others who might perhaps have a biscuit tin chock-a-block with obsolete valves.’
‘Biscuit tin?’
‘Or somesuch. You never know.’
Mr. Dukas mused. ‘Well, there’s old Blathering…’
‘Blathering?’
‘Reg Blathering. Used to have the ironmonger’s in Stone. You could buy a single nail from old Reg.’
‘Do you think a single nail would do the trick?’
‘I mean he stocked all sorts of odds and sods that no one else would bother with. If you couldn’t get what you wanted from the main suppliers you’d go to Reg and nine times out of ten he’d have it.’
‘He used to have the ironmonger’s, you say?’
Mr. Dukas nodded. ‘Till about ten years ago when he retired. But he still has most of his unsold stock. Garage full of it. I’ve had a fair few bits and pieces off him over the years.’
‘And you think he might have one of these obsolete valves we need?’
‘Highly unlikely. But I could pop along and ask.’
‘Couldn’t you phone him? You can use ours.’
The Realities of Aldous U Page 8