A City of Strangers

by Robert Barnard

  There was no evidence, of course. How could there be evidence, let alone charges, when she had refused to let him go to the police, refused even to talk about it after that first, frantic sobbing out of broken phrases? And though Jack Phelan had been in trouble with the police times without number, it had never been for . . . that sort of thing. And yet when Adrian thought about his brutality, his blatancy, his goatish gloating, the conviction that it was he, could only have been he, took hold of his heart in an iron grip. He knew his neighbors, knew the people on the Estate: They were decent, ordinary people. Only Phelan, chronically unemployed, hovering round the area like a malevolent, derisive shadow, would have been there that afternoon, in the vicinity. Only he would have been capable of—would rejoice in—smashing a thing of delicate beauty.

  He turned aside from the gray prospect outside the window and took his plate and cup to the kitchen. Then he went upstairs. He knocked as always at her door. She looked up as he entered, and smiled with that recollection of her wonderful beauty that lines and sunken cheeks could not entirely erase. She was wearing her pink day robe—she loved gentle colors—and was surrounded by the morning papers.

  “Are you off, dear?”

  “In a minute or two. Will you be all right, darling?”

  “Of course. I have the Angela Thirkell—I’m so happy to be reading it again. And I have my scrapbook. There’s such a lovely picture of the Princess of Wales at Dr. Barnardo’s—and such a wonderful speech she gave. I think I’ll paste that in too.”

  Rosamund Eastlake always referred to her as “the Princess of Wales,” or, in writing (she wrote quite often to newspapers about the royal family) as “Diana, Princess of Wales.” The solecism “Princess Diana” never passed her lips, and “Princess Di” made her shudder. The fact that she took newspapers that habitually used that form and frequently spoke of the royals in tones that were hectoring, lip-licking, or covertly contemptuous was attributable to the fact that they so often had awfully good pictures to compensate for the distress that the letterpress brought. Her scrapbooks filled two bookcases in her room, and had overflowed into the little spare bedroom. They were the source of much of the pleasure she got from life these days.

  “Is it your day for Burtle, Adrian?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I forget the days. . . . Don’t go through the Estate. You get so tensed up whenever you do that. Go up to the main road and round.”

  “All right, I will, my darling.”

  “I do so hate to see you worried. You are so good to me—I depend so much on you. What would you like for dinner?”

  “Whatever you fancy, darling.”

  “Would you like lamb chops?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  “Pick some up at Dewbury’s, then. You say he remembers me, the man there. Not many do, these days. Don’t work too hard, Adrian. They’re not worth it. I’ll see you this evening.”

  Rosamund Eastlake raised her cheek, and Adrian bent to kiss her goodbye. He went downstairs, checked that the back door was locked and bolted, and let himself out of the front, locking it carefully behind him. Then he went down the front path, past roses sad from the rain, and out into Wynton Lane. He turned right and continued up the main road, the route that would allow him to skirt the Belfield Grove Estate.

  “There goes Adrian Eastlake,” said Lynn Packard, his voice edged with contempt as he too stood at the window, looking out from York House, coffee cup in hand. His wife and sons sat finishing the remains of a hearty breakfast, but Lynn was a quick eater. “Look at him: Up to the main road because he can’t face the Estate, as usual.”

  “When did you last walk through the Estate?” asked his wife Jennifer. Lynn was not listening.

  “That man has a personality problem. He hasn’t got one.”

  “Poor Adrian. Just because he can’t face going through the Estate.”

  “He’s the archetypal wimp. That woman has him just where she wants him. The funny thing is, that’s where he wants to be too.” His mouth curled. “A quarter of a mile extra walking because he won’t go through Belfield Grove.”

  “You could do with a bit more exercise yourself,” said his wife. But she knew that Lynn was off on a track of his own and not listening.

  “A quarter of a mile, because he can’t face up to the Phelans,” he repeated.

  “The Phelans are going up in the world,” said his wife, in a special, distinct voice that she used when she wanted to get through to him. “Gareth says one of the boys is going to recite something at Speech Day.”

  “What?” Sure enough, this time Lynn Packard heard. He wheeled round on his wife and two sons. “What?”

  “Michael Phelan is going to read a poem at Speech Day,” said Gareth, shrugging.

  “He’s all right, is Michael,” said Tristram. “He’s not like the others.”

  “Oh, my God!” said Lynn, and Jennifer could see he was working up to one of his petty scenes. “We send our kids to State schools and what do we get? Tristram says ‘He’s all right, is Michael,’ like some Yorkshire yob. And some smelly kid from the council estate gets to take the star role at Speech Day. I tell you, Jennifer, this is political. Some smart-arse left-winger on the teaching staff is trying to score a point. Who’s arranging this, eh?”

  “Mr. McEvoy,” said Gareth. “He does all that sort of thing. I did read for him and he said it was quite nice, but it didn’t have quite enough life.”

  Lynn was not listening again. He swung round on his wife.

  “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The time is coming when we’ll have no choice. We’ll have to send the pair of them to a private school.”

  “You’d have done it long ago,” his wife pointed out, “if we could have afforded it.”

  And that was the rub. Lynn had many of the characteristics of a yuppie: He dressed like one, he spoke like one (his voice high, somewhere between the hectoring and the hysterical, the vowels twisted by some invisible vocal screw), he played squash and computer games, and got boisterous or objectionable in nightclubs and casinos. But when it came down to it he was not quite young enough or, crucially, quite upwardly mobile enough to be a yuppie. He was manager of the Foodwise supermarket in town—young to be a manager, quite well paid, and yet . . . not quite well paid enough. Not to send two boys to a private school.

  They had discussed it often in the last few years, and Jennifer had always detailed the changes in their life-style that the cost of a private education for the boys would entail: the smaller car, the end of holidays abroad, of those lavish restaurant meals that were adding to Lynn’s waistline, of the smart clothes, renewed every year. In the end Lynn saw sense: He was devoted to his life-style.

  Jennifer too, in her way. She had been an excellent wife for him, on his way up. She had entertained successfully—learned the right cutlery for each course and how to set it out, the right wine for each dish, learned that when the managing director of the Foodwise chain came to dinner one praised Foodwise frozen meals, though one did not serve them.

  A change had come over Lynn in recent years, though. Previously he had been aggressively out for himself. Now that had widened, had become an article of faith: Self-interest was the guiding principle of life, the market was supreme, and people who disregarded that fact were heretics, or just plain ignorant. He had become a born-again free marketeer. The thrusting young man she had found exciting; the strident evangelist, she had to admit, was something of a bore.

  “We’ve been into all that,” she said, trying to conceal the weariness in her voice. Lynn stood there fuming, as he always did when he couldn’t get what he wanted.

  “We could move,” he said. “Look at what Pickering is asking for The Hollies. Ninety-five thousand. These houses are going up-market.”

  “Maybe—but that didn’t stop Pickering moving away,” Jennifer pointed out. “Anyway, where would we move to? I must say I don’t see you moving anywhere further down-market.”
/>   “A cottage out of town . . . ”

  “Cottages cost the earth. And then you’d have the expense of the extra petrol.”

  Lynn stood there, his incipient second chin bobbing in irritation. He turned to the boys.

  “Come on. Get your things on. I haven’t got all day.” He looked at his wife as he began bustling the pair of them out to the car. “We’re stuck,” he said bitterly. “Stuck somewhere between the filthy rich and the filthy poor.”

  It was one of Lynn’s jokes, always brought out defensively when people came to dinner who would know that Burtle was not a socially acceptable part of Sleate. Jennifer smiled. She knew it was beyond a wife’s power to change her husband’s little jokes. As the three males raced to the car she began clearing away the breakfast things.

  “You should eat wholemeal,” said Evie Soames, looking up from the paper on which her breakfast plate was perched. “You’ve no idea what that muck contains.”

  “I don’t like wholemeal,” said Steven Copperwhite. “Particularly for toast.”

  He pressed down the toaster containing the slice of white, prepacked sliced loaf and looked around for the marmalade.

  The kitchen of Ashdene was a mess as usual. The washing-up from the night before had not been done, and Evie’s special dishes always seemed to involve so many pots and pans, not to mention the fact that the grill was thick with grease from his own pork chops. The kitchen table was littered with newspapers, New Statesmans, Spare Ribs, photocopies from books, and books from the university library that Evie was using for her thesis, Toward a Feminist Linguistics. Evie was eating muesli. He wished she would eat something else at breakfast time, something that was less obviously a fashionable joke.

  He poked around the table, looking for the marmalade. Evie absently plunged her hand into the clutter and produced it.

  “Your trouble,” she said, “is you’re not programmed for mess.”

  That was true. If Evie lived alone here, or alone with the occasional man for the night, she would live with the mess quite happily, and perhaps make a vigorous foray against it once a month. But he was not happy with mess, which was why it usually fell to him to clear it up. That was quite fair, and he acknowledged it: If it bothered him, it was up to him to do something about it. Evie had made it quite clear when they had taken up together that she had no interest in housework, nor any conscience about it. She had been admirably honest altogether. She was wonderful fun in bed, an excellent cook of a rather special kind of food he disliked, and an appalling housekeeper. It was working out, the two of them, working out fine, but there were times when he longed back to the ordered routines of his marriage, the peace and security of it, as the Magi longed back to their summer palaces.

  A smell of burning pervaded the kitchen for some seconds before the toast popped up.

  “You have to readjust it for white,” said Evie. “No gumption in it.”

  Steven scraped, and buttered, and spread marmalade.

  “What are you doing today?” Evie asked.

  “I thought I’d stay home and work on the book. The students are demonstrating against the plan for student loans, and all the lectures and tutorials are cancelled for the day.”

  “I know that, dumbcluck. I am a student. Aren’t you going to support them?”

  “Of course, I support them. It’ll be an appallingly retrograde step. We’ll soon find ourselves saddled with the American system, with students working half the night in fast-food joints or petrol stations to put themselves through university.”

  “I didn’t ask whether you supported them. I asked whether you were going along to support them.”

  “Oh well . . . I may well go along later. But the opportunity to do some quiet work at home for once seemed too good to miss. What are you doing?”

  Evie registered the change of subject but began collecting her things together for the day.

  “I’ve got a PND support group after work. Then I may go along to the youth club tonight. There’s a nasty bunch of National Front boys trying to infiltrate it. That horrible thug Kevin Phelan, among others.”

  Steven’s mind registered that PND meant Post-Natal Depression. He knew all Evie’s acronyms. He also knew better than to ask why Evie went to a post-natal depression group when she had never given birth. He knew that the point was the support rather than the parturition. It was really very good of Evie to go along to the youth club, because as a rule youth clubs weren’t her thing at all. In fact, Evie was altogether good.

  “I don’t like the thought of you tangling with a tough like Kevin Phelan.”

  “Oh, I’m more than a match for him,” said Evie breezily, slinging her bag onto her shoulder and waving goodbye.

  Steven ran some washing-up water and piled plates in the sink. Then he went through to his study. His desk was piled high with novels, with the manuscript of the first two chapters of his book placed neatly in the middle in front of the chair. His current project was a study of old age in the modern British novel, with special reference to works by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bailey, Kingsley Amis, and others. He hoped that this would be the book that would finally assure him of an associate professorship before it was too late. He would have felt more confident if his previous book, The Burden of Male Dominance (studies in Dombey, Middlemarch, The Mayor of Casterbridge, etc.) had not still been making the rounds of the academic publishers.

  He could never settle down to work immediately. He had to walk around the room, get his future day into some sort of shape in his mind first. It would have been easier if he had still smoked, but Evie was very hot on the subject of smoking. He touched books, took up the Times Literary Supplement and looked at the crossword, then peered at one of his most prized possessions, the photograph of Balliol College in 1957, with himself standing in the sixth row. Then he walked restlessly over to the window to look out toward the Belfield Grove Estate. He remembered Evie’s mother, on her one visit, looking over to the close-packed houses and saying in her horrible upper-class drawl: “What ghastly little rabbit hutches! They must be able to hear each other at the lavatory.” She had left quickly, after the row she had come intending to have, and before she had had the chance to test their own sanitary arrangements.

  He felt a sudden twinge of uneasiness at the thought of Evie confronting that vicious young thug Kevin Phelan. Then he wondered if it was uneasiness he felt. Certainly he felt it would have been easier if he could simply have volunteered to go along to protect her, or at any rate to make sure she was all right. But of course he knew Evie would reject that idea with a derisive laugh.

  He went back to the kitchen, cleaned the plates and put them to drain, then piled up all the saucepans and the frying pan in the water. Then he sat down at his desk in front of the manuscript that in his own mind he was beginning to call You’re Only Young Twice. Old age was a depressing subject. He himself, though not old, was beginning to feel his age. Fifty-two to Evie’s twenty-six. If it had been the other way round, people would have made ribald jokes, talked about “toy-boys.” Even as it was he knew that people talked. . . .

  There came upon him a niggling sense that his life had somehow become out of joint, that the shape and fitness it had once had were now gone, leaving muddle, frustration.

  He got up from his desk. Perhaps he would go along to that demonstration after all.

  Algy Cartwright, in Rosetree Cottage, cleared away the remainder of his breakfast and ran some water in the kitchen sink. The scrambled eggs hadn’t been perfect, but they had been better than they had been when he first had tried to cook them. He watched the sports news on breakfast television, then went backward and forward between the washing-up and the television. His washing-up was better than it had been too. In fact everything was better except the terrible gaping hole in his life left by the death of his wife. He looked out of the kitchen window. A drizzle seemed to be starting, and darkness hung in the air. What did the day ahead hold for him? He knew the answer to that. N
othing.

  After the nine o’clock news there would be a witless phone-in on television called Open Air. He always prayed he would have the strength to turn programs like that off—to settle down to reading, gardening, even housework. Today, with the drizzle outside and the murk inside, he knew he would not have the strength. There was nothing to be done in the garden, and reading had never meant much to him, apart from the daily paper. He was a man whose life had always centered round people, and now he was retired, and widowed.

  On days like this he longed for death.

  In The Laburnums Daphne Bridewell had called down the stairs and asked Carol Southgate up for a proper breakfast. As a former teacher and deputy-headmistress herself she had strong opinions on starting the day in a demanding job on no more than a piece of toast or a plate of cereal. Daphne Bridewell had strong opinions on most things, in fact.

  Carol enjoyed the poached eggs and bacon and mushrooms for a change, and enjoyed talking to Daphne. Though her basement flat was self-contained there were few days when they did not exchange the odd word, and many when they had long, absorbing conversations. Daphne knew all about her interest in Michael Phelan, and was sensible and experienced enough to treat it for what it was—not the “discovery” of a potential genius, merely concern for a talented and attractive child.

  “How are things going with Michael?” she asked.

  “Oh, fine. He’s going to do a piece from Old Possum for Speech Day. All the other kids seem pleased—they like him. Of course, there has been comment in the staff room.”

  Daphne Bridewell raised her eyebrows.

  “Why ‘of course’? Who commented?”

  “Dot Fenton.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Daphne in a neutral voice. She had an ex-teacher’s care about how much she said. “She was there in my time.”