‘She won’t.’
The Doc shook a grizzly head. He hated this kind of problem, couldn’t believe the contrast between fact and expectation. Nor could he believe any planner could have imagined care in the community was any kind of cheap option. Speaking for himself, he had no plans to quit drinking or smoking. Once he retired, he would look for other, carcinogenic things to do.
‘The only thing I can tell you, if you don’t already know, is that Social Services have a legal duty to your mother. They have. You do not. Odd though that may seem. But they won’t do a single thing about that duty as long as someone else is exercising it, see? You do have a choice.’
She nodded.
The Doc drained his cup and rose. ‘Shout for me any time you want,’ he said. ‘Good coffee. Get out and about more, I would. Now, will you do me a favour? Show me that living room of yours. I used to love that room, had some good times in there. They were great party-givers, your mum and dad.’
‘Would she be able to cope if we had a party now?’
Doc Reilly broke his stride across the kitchen floor. ‘I doubt it.’
He did not add that he knew of no one who would come voluntarily, and that you couldn’t dragoon people to a party. Not even his sainted wife, who had visited longer than most and whom Serena had called a pig, would come. You had to have a big heart to let an old lady get her rocks off by insulting you.
He strode to the west-facing window, looked into the rain-streaked garden, wanting to get his hands on it. Shrubs needed pruning, lawn was like a shrinking hayfield. A movement caught his eye: two sets of twinkling training shoes disappearing round the side of the house. In the distance he heard a door bang shut.
‘Do you get many kids coming up here?’ he asked sharply.
‘Yes, sometimes, asking for water, apples, that kind of thing.’
The doctor moved swiftly. Back in the kitchen Isabel’s handbag was open on the table, undisturbed. Outside the door of his car stood open.
‘They don’t want water,’ he snorted. ‘They want cash.’
All his loose change, in the glove compartment for parking, was gone. No sign of them down the road. Too cunning by far to let themselves be framed in the lights of the Volvo over the field; too swift for someone who had to pull on his boots. The Doc turned on to the road at the end of the track, purple with irritation. Could have been Serena’s purse they robbed, had probably done already, sodding little truants. He could hear them now, explaining it all: ‘We didn’t take it, Mister. She gave it to us, honest.’ He would take a bet that Serena Burley’s house was not as well stocked with small objects as it had been a year ago. These were sparrows, gathering to lead in the birds of prey.
There was a white van parked in the place by the graveyard, with windows slightly steamed up and two men inside, drinking their lunchtime tea. The Doc did not notice them. Thought instead of buzzards, hovering in a bleak sky and the way Serena’s body had moved in the days when they had danced.
George manoeuvred his old car between the holes in the waterlogged track, spirits lifting in direct proportion to his distance from the town. Beginning as it did at rock bottom today, his mood had a long way to go before it reached buoyancy. He called at Sal’s house, just to say hallo, received from her a piece of cake and the day’s letters. The mere sight of letters made George squirm: he had never again acted as postman for the Burley household’s outgoing letters: let Isabel take those. But the postman still left the incoming post with the neighbours. Nice, willing people they were, but the letters which he dropped on the sideboard at the house as if they were so much nuclear waste, burned a hole in his pocket. Letters should be for ever outside his remit. He was never going to write one.
‘Tell that girl to pop in and see us when she’s passing,’ Sal had urged him several times. ‘I don’t know why she doesn’t, really I don’t.’
George had never relayed the message. He had hinted to Isabel that the neighbours were private people who had never forgiven the débâcle of their wrecked car. Frankly, Sal was someone else he did not particularly want to share: George was anxious to keep his acquaintances in different pockets, in case they got together, pooled information and found out where he came from.
He heaved a sigh of relief when he got to the gates of the house. A trail of smoke emerged from a chimney. Back at the hostel, Derek had gone quiet, possibly ashamed. No repercussions for last week’s rejection. What a fuss over nothing.
Not quite nothing. Trying to avoid the shameful memory of fear, George could see what Derek meant about the unposted letter from Isabel Burley to her lover. ‘I’m sorry if I drew blood,’ she had written. ‘Sometimes I want you so much it makes me claw at you …’ The sentence had been reread dozens of times and made him hot. They were all like that, however they disguised it, bitches in heat. George could not catch Isabel’s eye, but after the business with the brother, when she had been so helpless, and after his slow absorbing of a letter containing more nonsense than sense, he found he did not mind her quite as much. It was a dull, sullen dislike he carried now; no longer acute. His mind would not stay still but skittered around like the dog when shown her lead: he wanted to chastise it.
Two skinny boys who should have been at school skulked by the gates and scattered as he drove through. Little kids, more down at heel than he had ever been and even less safe. He pitied them for having nowhere to go. George trusted small children and people far older. It was the swathe of humanity in between which made problems.
Everything was as he liked it. Quiet. He put down the letters (two bills, one personal) with care. Serena was dressed and waiting for the kiss to be given behind her daughter’s back. It seemed a long time since he had been free to intrude in her bedroom. Sit on the bed and listen to her telling stories, before he told his own. He still had the silver teapot in his car, but he already had enough. Nearer Christmas he would buy the princess her present. Something to help with the problem of words.
Darling Issy,
Yeah, I did get your second letter, also no. 3, but no, not the first, I’m afraid. Please don’t send any more to the office … even if you mark them private, they can get read. I’m not the managing director!!! As for apologies, well I don’t know if I deserve any of those. I probably deserved what you did. Even when I had to pass it off as a kind of mugging!!! One thing you do, Issy, is make a man think and you have made me think a bit. I’ve got to sort myself out, haven’t I? I hope you’ve got used to country life and I hope you come home soon, ‘cos I miss you.
Can’t stop. Must catch post!!
Joe
In the privacy of her room Isabel read this missive with something like distaste, trying to embrace the idea that it was wrong to judge a person by the style of letters he wrote, especially if letter-writing had never been part of the arrangement. A letter from Joe, although yearned for, had a strange effect. It was a revelation of limitations, rather like a very large and handsome man opening his mouth to speak and a high treble coming out. Isabel knew that she was not very bright, but even with the awkwardness imposed on them by her violence and sudden departure she knew she had written far better, more honest, letters than this.
Passed off a bite as a mugging, did he? How odd to be able to tell lies with such inventive ease, when she herself was congenitally incapable of telling them at all. And how passionless his prose. She had a funny sense of superiority, born of her personal, illogical and deep-rooted loathing for exclamation marks. They were like someone coming up behind you and making you jump for no reason.
Nor could she understand how she had acquired this aversion. There were so many books in this house, carried from the other houses. Books Mab had made her read and then describe to make sure she had understood. The habit of reading had not persisted into adulthood, although there had been book-worm phases, usually at times when all else failed. And the height of literary thrills in the remoteness of school had been Ma’s letters, which always flowed and told stories without eve
r resorting to using punctuation like cudgels.
Perhaps she would read aloud to her mother. The idea had a quaint, spinsterish charm: Isabel enjoyed thinking of herself as the kind of lady’s companion/governess found in the Jane Austen she had once adored. Readings by the fire. How genteel. If Joe could see her now.
There were books lining the walls up the stairs. Books in shelves in the spare rooms, on the old presumption that a guest might need to read. Books in the dining room, floor to ceiling, flanking the fire. Books simply hanging around, acquired on a weekly basis by Serena until only twelve months before. Books she still claimed to read in bed and at her desk. Books Isabel tidied away, noticing without a great deal of interest how the reading had never actually progressed beyond a favourite page, chosen by number; Serena was stuck at page twenty-five of anything.
‘George is just off, darling. Don’t you think you should say goodbye?’ said Serena.
It was one of those uncanny days. Sanity and mildness ruled the house. Water dripped through the bathroom ceiling upstairs and it did not matter. George had taken Serena out in his car to the horrible supermarket and peace had reigned.
‘No, there’s no need to say goodbye. Goodbye never meant anything, did it?’ Serena was yawning. ‘I shouldn’t look in there, if I were you,’ she added. ‘I really, really wouldn’t.’
Isabel was selecting books from those middle shelves in the dining room which were the easiest to reach, without stretching or bending. Book after book, hardbacked, softbacked, stored at random, fell to the floor with pages torn.
‘Coffee time,’ said Serena. ‘Or is it tea?’
‘Did you do this, Mother?’ Isabel held aloft a book from which the torn middle pages waved as she shook it.
Serena nodded vaguely. She seemed to be struggling with the temptation to lie.
‘Yes, I did. They …’ She struggled for expression. ‘Insulted me, I suppose.’ She went on in a sudden articulate rush, so rare now that Isabel thought wildly that the Doc must have given her a magic pill from his old bag. ‘You won’t know. You dust tables, you don’t read. I couldn’t read, you see. All of a sudden, I could not read. It broke my heart. Put them back, dear. It was a bad thing to do.’
Isabel gazed at her. Honesty made a person so endearing. So did the absence of exclamation marks. The times when she wanted to hit her mother were equal to those when she wanted to enfold her. Say, Yes, I do not read, but if I were told I could not do so again, if the books would not do what I wanted, I would scratch the pages in the way I would want to scratch a face. She bent to pick up fragments of paper containing all those elusive, tormenting words. Pages fluttered to the floor.
‘Silly old books, Mum. Time for tea.’
What did they do all day?
When Andrew left the town, past the park, straight through the roundabout, he saw the municipal bonfire, built to discourage the amateur from constructing some dangerous inferno in his own backyard. He passed his father’s house in the old part, near the church on the one-way system, where his car always wanted to stop, and stalled if he did not, from the transference of guilt from his head to the clutch cable. There was a white van on his tail as he hung left on to the road that led to the hamlet that led to Isabel, the lights of it in his eyes until he slowed down. The van dropped back and he turned up the track, so carelessly that rain from the puddles hit the screen in a great, muddy splash. He felt as if this were the middle of the night and he the bearer of contraband. Fireworks. The rain had stopped. If you wanted to court the daughter, which he did, court the mother first.
Bonfire parties had been favourite occasions in his adolescence. They were a convenient cover of darkness for uncertain fumblings. First put your arms round the girl’s waist, light the blue touch paper and wait for protest. That was the way he had been in his romantic, irresponsible years. All the girls, excluding Isabel, had said no. Not in so many words, but with plenty of shuffling excuses: I’ve got to go somewhere; wash my hair; meet a friend – and find someone better than you. Except Isabel, who did not say no, simply said where? Andrew did not envisage a repeat performance of Isabel’s uncomplicated acceptance of sexual overture, but after all this time, he saw a kindness in her generous obliging of a gauche young man which was quite inconsistent with her later unkindness. He had only to look at Isabel now to see that she was incapable of spite and always had been. And what had he done about it? Visited, briefly and awkwardly in the last month, brought flowers, and thought about her all the time.
This spontaneity and determination to beat down his own shyness came at the end of a dreadful day. Moving furniture in and out of the auction room, three valuations with garrulous housewives – two of whom considered their disgusting imitation Welsh dressers to be worth a fortune – and all that with the additional hazard of young Derek in tow, because his father had decided ‘the lad had a brain which deserved encouragement’. Derek was ignorant, but he got inside cupboards, shone a silly little pencil torch on things and made loud remarks. His own native dislike apart, Andrew had to confess that Derek was good company. His incessant questions about the value of things, his apparent fascination with their texture, made Andrew wax lyrical and lengthy in reply. Explaining, with his own residual excitement, how it was one piece of wood was worth money, another not; how some pieces of furniture would achieve value in a future generation because they had style, others not. Things did not need to be a hundred years old to acquire status: they only had to be good, built on pure lines and made with pride.
Neither of the Welsh dressers had been made with pride, unless there was any sense of achievement in knocking out a copy of a piece of furniture for shipment to a country you had never seen. Derek liked that. His own remarks on Mrs Brown, with her bouffant hair and best dress to greet the valuer of her goods, as if she was for sale herself, had been funny, but for all his enjoyment of a keen and caustic companion, Andrew did not feel easy introducing the man into the trusting heart of so many homes. Derek had eyes on springs: they seemed to leap out from his head and touch things, leaving a drop of moisture.
Wide eyes greeted Andrew now in the kitchen. When Serena smiled in that fashion, it made him think of Prospero’s daughter opening lovely virginal eyes to her first view of young mankind, and it made him feel a prince. Most males, in his experience, did not deserve the accolade of poetry.
‘I bought fireworks,’ he said. ‘In case you didn’t have any.’ Serena understood: the smile grew wider.
Isabel’s smile was graver, equally warm. ‘That was kind of you, Andrew. She used to love them. I didn’t dare …’
He understood: he would not have relished sole charge of Serena around a box of explosives, doubted if she was safe with matches.
‘Shall we?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes, yes, yes.’
They began with sparklers. Andrew planted three of them into a raw potato and put it in the middle of the table; then he encouraged Serena to hold one in her fist, waving it wildly to make ribbons of yellow. She was unafraid of the sparks which stung her wrist, but awkward at first, then fluent, brandishing the sparkler like a conductor’s baton.
‘I can write in the air! Look! Read it!’
The dog whimpered and shivered: the air was fuggy. They progressed to the damp outdoors, where Andrew’s long-distant and loathed boy-scout training came to the fore. He pinned Catherine wheels to a broken fence, stood the rockets upright in empty bottles, moved quickly to keep the display almost continuous. The first Catherine wheel was a blinding, whirring, furious thing, turning madly as if wanting to escape or kill in the process. The third one would not move at all, only spat at them.
‘Will someone worry that we’re on fire again?’ Isabel asked.
‘No. Too much distraction.’ He pointed. The sky in the direction of the town seemed to glow pink and black.
‘More,’ Serena begged. ‘More.’
Rockets, the biggest and best he could find, while wondering at the time if the expense was ludicrou
s, then failing to care. Andrew was a careful man only on his own behalf; for others, there was no limit. He steadied the rockets, lit the first. It rose heavenwards with a magnificent rush, like Concorde, he thought proudly. There was a second’s pause while it hung in the firmament, and Serena cried out in disappointment. Then a pop; a cascade of blue and purple stars; three more explosions as soft as polite burping; a shower of emeralds, rubies and pearls; then slow, red, hot, plummeting to earth. He lit the next and the next, all three of them breathing aahh as the rockets popped, a longer, more lingering aaaahhhh as they descended. There was magic in the sighing, pure magic.
Serena actually danced with joy. The lumbering body swayed in an ecstasy of delight. She put her hands over her ears, made little whoops of amazement at the Roman candles, whirled her arms and laughed. The laughter and the happiness were as clean as rain; looking at her face, innocent in such intense enjoyment, Andrew could see the point of caring for her. Witnessing such complete absorption made him glad to be alive. If that was Isabel’s reward for her labours, he could suddenly understand the sacrifice.
‘Soup? Sausages?’ Practical Isabel, captivated but, unlike Serena, still rooted to earth. One of us has to be, he supposed. Serena protested sadly, then accepted the show was over. Back inside Andrew persuaded the trembling dog out of her basket and fussed her into calmness.
In the harsh electric light which made them all blink Serena’s face turned a sudden and ghastly pale. ‘I wanted to dance,’ she gasped and was sick into her handbag. All very tidily done, as if she was in practice.
Isabel swept into action like a seasoned nurse.
‘Too much soap,’ she said cheerfully, increasing Andrew’s shock.
‘Soap,’ Isabel repeated. ‘My wretched sister-in-law brought her a present of pretty soap, shaped like apples and pears, highly coloured. I put it away but she was nibbling it this afternoon. Don’t know why. I can never persuade her to eat the real thing.’
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