by Morag Joss
’It couldn’t be easier! Simply ring to order your oil whenever you need it. As a valued direct debit account customer your payments will not fluctuate, whatever the current oil price. Then once a year we will work out the credit or debit on your account and arrange with you for part or full settlement!’
It did sound easy, but would they take an order by telephone from Michael? Could just anyone ring up and order oil for any address?
‘Say you’re the handyman,’ Steph suggested, but frowned. It might work, and it might not. What if the oil supplier would deal only with the customer direct? There were receipts going back five years, so presumably the suppliers knew Mr Standish-Cave, even if only as a voice on the telephone. ‘No, better not. No, you’ll have to say you’re him, Mr What’s-his-name.’
‘Well, that’s not a problem, is it?’ Michael said. ‘I can do voices, remember.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ Steph said witheringly, ‘but you’ve got to know what he sounds like first, haven’t you?’
‘He’ll be posh, that’s all. Won’t he?’
Steph looked even more withering and said, ‘That’s not the only problem anyway. What about a signature? They might want a signature, when they deliver.’
They fretted along these lines until she said firmly, ‘No, it’s too risky. We need to get hold of cash and just pay for the oil. What would it cost? We could sell some of the stuff here, couldn’t we?’
‘Jean wouldn’t like that. She likes to have all her things round her. Anyway, we need the oil now, today.’
‘Okay, but all this office stuff, she doesn’t need that. We could flog some of the stuff in here, for a start. The smaller bits, like them.’ She nodded towards the disconnected fax and answering machines and moved across to inspect them. Michael watched her dumbly, with nothing better to suggest.
‘Michael,’ she said, peering into the answering machine, ‘there’s a tape in here. Reckon it’s got what’s-his-name’s voice on it?’
Within half an hour Michael had produced a very passable impersonation of Oliver Standish-Cave, whose voice on the tape had sounded unsurprisingly public school, yet surprisingly pleasant. It was true that there was only his ’Hello. This is the office line at Walden Manor, 01249-588671. Please leave a message at the tone and we will return your call as soon as we can’ to go on, but with Steph’s encouragement Michael quickly found both the vowels and the correct pitch of assumed authority. Steph tried it too, until they both collapsed with laughter. Steph was finding that laughing hard could make her pee in her knickers, just a little, and when she told Michael this, he said, ‘Oh how absolutely frightful, for Heaven’s sake, woman, contain yourself’ in Oliver Standish-Cave’s voice, and they collapsed all over again.
‘But even if you phone up for the oil,’ Steph said, ‘we’ll need to sign something when it comes, won’t we? There’ll be stuff to sign some time.’ The thought sobered them again. Further rummaging in the filing cabinet produced any number of examples of the swirling, enormous signature on receipts and photocopies of letters.
‘Give it over here,’ Steph said, with determination. ‘I’m good at art, remember.’
And forgery, it emerged. The trick, she discovered, was not only to copy the shape of the signature but to work quickly. Oliver Standish-Cave had long ago given up signing his name in discernible letters; Steph had little trouble with the double hillocks of his first two initials and the huge, pretentious letter C that embraced them. Then all she needed to do was place, at just the right point, the long waving line of the rest of his name. It looked like a small rolling field, and one flick of the pen to dot the I of Standish became a bird tossed in the sky above it. She sat and practised at the desk, covering sheet after sheet of paper, while Michael carried on through the filing cabinet. Absorbed, they looked up at each other from time to time. Quiet elation at what they were doing hung in the air.
‘I think I’ve got it now,’ Steph said eventually, holding up a page for Michael to see. He shook his head in impressed disbelief and she turned pink with pleasure. ‘Go on, Michael, ring them. Say you won’t be in when they deliver and they should drop the receipt through the door. Then you can just send it back signed.’
Michael’s mouth had gone dry and his heart began to pound in his throat. For a moment he felt so dislocated that he was back in his old life, about to become some not-Michael or another from Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy, his entire body flooded with fear. He wondered about asking Steph to leave the room while he spoke, just in case he couldn’t do it. What if his Oliver voice gave way, or if he bottled out and slammed down the receiver? What if he burst into tears, or laughed? But he wanted her to stay and watch him, because he was doing it for her. It was for her, for all of them really, because now they were all- Steph, Jean, even Miranda, and he sensed it also in himself- growing blurred around the edges, more like one another. It was the resemblances he noticed, not the differences. They were becoming so alike in warmth, in little affectionate attentions to one another, that they were at times almost indistinguishable, fused into a trusting conglomerate of needs, all equally expressed and met. Even Miranda as she lay awake and motionless in her Moses basket reminded him of Jean’s smiled thanks when he brought in a load of logs, or tightened a washer on a tap, and he felt it, too, in Steph’s languid arms round his neck and it was there, too, when his mouth touched her skin. Perhaps that was what a family was, a sort of large healthy organism made up of smaller ones who did not have to survive everything on their own, or merely for their own selves’ sake. Nothing important that he now did or thought or felt could occur in the absence of these other people. Steph probably knew this already, as she somehow knew other things that he did not tell her, and so while he lifted the receiver and dialled, she stayed. She seemed also to understand that the joking part was over. She walked over to the window and looked out at the garden so that he could not see her face. She turned to him just once, to whisper, ‘Tell them we’ve run out and it’s urgent.’
As he stood waiting for the telephone to be answered he watched the halo of light that blazed round her head. Her hair was smoothed and pinned up today, and she had dipped her head forwards and was resting her forehead against the glass. How was it possible that such a little thing, daylight slipping through a window and falling on the simple curve of a neck, could inspire him to vow to himself that he would never, ever leave her? Michael stared at her head. He could see the back of her earring. He had no idea what the earring itself looked like from the front (he supposed he ought to) but now he set himself to memorising every tiny detail of the back of the metal clip, the private pinch and squeeze of gold on her earlobe. It was delicious to him in a half-forbidden, unofficial way, that he should know the back of her ear. It was like being admitted backstage, surreptitiously and discreetly, to discover that the guile and artifice behind some spectacle was even more thrilling than what the audience saw. He understood both the earring and the ear; he could almost feel the nip as if it were his flesh the little claw was clinging to, or his own teeth tugging at the lobe. He pictured the skin beneath her hair from which her hundreds and hundreds of thousands of fair strands sprouted and grew. How many? And why? Why did they grow like that, unless to hang like long threads that she could collect up and brush and fix in this almost-falling-down way, exposing her neck, whose beauty almost stopped his heart? It was only hair and skin and skull, after all, she was made of the same things as everyone else on the planet. He imagined the fine white shell beneath the scalp, round and hard, and under the helmet of bone, the warm coiled brain that made her think and talk and move and laugh. The ordinariness, the miracle of her. The telephone was suddenly answered.
‘Ah, hello?’
Steph did not turn from the window.
‘Hello. Yes. We need some oil. Urgently, I’m afraid, we’re out. Yes, bit of a cold snap, took us unawares! Yes, it’s Standish-Cave, Walden Manor. That’s right.’
Michael sailed through the negotiatio
ns; fill up the tank, about 3,000 litres please, put the receipt through the door, and then he confirmed breezily that they could manage to wait until six o’clock. He thanked the person at the other end for helping them out of a spot. Just before he rang off the woman said, ‘And how’s your wife doing?’
‘Oh, oh. My wife? Oh, she’s, er…’ Michael looked up desperately at Steph, who turned just then and smiled at him, lifting and twisting a loose lock of her hair. Michael said, ‘Oh, she’s absolutely fine, thank you. Very well indeed.’
‘Oh, glad to hear it. Do tell her I was asking.’
***
Men were deceivers, ever. Shakespeare, but I can’t remember where from. Father would know. And only half right, because women aren’t above a bit of deception either. I have come to believe that just about anyone will deceive to get what they need, if they have no other way open to them. In that strict sense there is no difference between me, Michael and Steph, and Mr Hapgood (in other, crucial respects there is all the difference in the world). And people who think oh no, they could never do the kind of thing we did, well, perhaps they are just people who have never had to, and who lack the imagination to see that if one day they found themselves in the same circumstances, they probably would. People who have landed in another category, who have somehow got what they needed by easier means, are no different from us. No, that’s wrong, they are different. They are luckier, that is all. Not better.
What Mr Hapgood did was this. He came to see the clock the next afternoon after I’d got back from school. I thought it only polite to offer him a cup of tea in return for his the day before, and while I was making it he had a good look at the clock. He came into the kitchen while the tea was brewing and leaned against the draining board. He would have to go and consult somebody, an ‘associate in the trade,’ he said, but it was without doubt a fine clock. I poured out a third cup of tea and took it to Mother, who was in bed, and when I came back he asked all about her, and I found myself crying again. He said he understood perfectly because his mother was much the same, not at all well. He said we should make ourselves comfy in the sitting room because life could be very difficult and what we both needed was a little cuddle. I think he might actually have been right about that.
The next day Michael and Steph returned to the study, bringing with them the pile of unopened post that had been accruing in the library desk. They opened the bank statements, which showed that whatever the Standish-Caves were living on while they were away, it was not being drawn from the Household No 1 account. Twelve hundred pounds a month were going in, and the account was in credit for a little over six thousand. Outgoings amounted to rather less. There were direct debits for electricity, water, telephone and oil, and to the local authority for council tax. Jean Wade’s monthly salary was the only other regular payment. They guessed that the statements for other accounts, that the owners must be using, were being sent by the bank directly to them.
They began to feel clever. Steph found reams of specially printed Walden Manor stationery. In the filing cabinet they found previous letters from Oliver Standish-Cave to his bank so that they could copy the style exactly. Michael fed a sheet into the typewriter and together they began to compose their letter. Steph lost all sense of proportion and wanted to clean out the account.
But it’s a fortune, six thousand quid,’ she said. ‘Once we transfer all that lot into Jean’s account we’ll be laughing, won’t we?’
‘And then what? Suppose the bank thinks it’s a bit funny and investigates? We got to do something quiet, something that’ll just slide past them without them noticing. Just a little rise that nobody’ll notice, so it can go on and on, see? Look, Jean gets four hundred a month. We just make it six, it’ll make a big difference.’
The clatter of the typewriter keys sounded cheeky and illegal, and it was hard not to laugh. The extra would make a difference, but not all the difference. And Jean’s next payment was not due for three weeks in any case, Michael thought, as he watched Steph sign the letter. She was laughing a little too triumphantly, not really taking in that the problem had been eased, not solved. They would have to do something more.
Michael sifted again through the post. Among the other unopened letters were credit card statements which proved the existence of a credit card that had not been used since shortly before Christmas. But the statements did not give the card’s expiry date, and that was essential, Steph declared, before they could order things by telephone. She had stopped laughing.
‘If only we had the card,’ Michael said.
‘Or a chequebook,’ Steph said, looking round as if one might be lying to hand somewhere. Then they heard Jean’s soft footsteps downstairs, crossing the hall from the drawing room to the kitchen. She would be putting the kettle on, and soon would come upstairs to fetch the sleeping Miranda. Then she would call them both down to tea, for which she might have made scones or a cake, although there had been less of those lately. It might be just toast, then. Since her outburst the day before she seemed again to move in her own unhurried way, perhaps even a little more slowly, Steph had remarked last night. Getting on, she and Michael had agreed.
He would not, could not fail Jean over the money. Because Michael thought that her slowing down was not entirely to do with ageing; the tread of her feet seemed to have something to do with a simple absence of strain. Perhaps Jean had ceased to strive. It was strange, he thought, remembering his desperation over paying his fines, that while there was now more point to everything, life for all three of them had grown less effortful. It was not that the struggle to find enough to live on had lessened, but rather that there was no longer any need to outrun a lurking sense of futility about everything. The question is it worth it? did not arise any more. There was peace in Jean’s footsteps, the work of her hands, her look of concentration as she peered at recipe books. She was sedate, but still busy most of the time. Her self-appointed duties in the house undoubtedly made demands upon her energy; towards seven o’clock she would sink into the big chair in the kitchen, tired, and Michael would give her the glass of sherry which she always said was just what she needed. But it seemed to Michael that her energy was freely and willingly expended. She had no need to hoard any, to hold a little in reserve against the day when it would be required in the struggle just to stay cheerful. He recognised in her a picture of himself in his freezing flat and remembered the tight battles fought between himself and the persistent nag in his head, telling him that nothing was ever going to get any better. It was an almost forgotten picture, now abandoned in the old attic of his life before Steph had come, but looking over at Steph now he could tell, now he thought about it, that the same voices had nagged in her head too. They must none of them ever again have to squander energy trying to hold off the conviction that nothing they did made any difference.
Steph and Michael resumed their search through the desk drawers and filing cabinets. Jean’s footsteps were crossing the hall again, and then they stopped. They listened to the silence. Jean must have paused in the hall, perhaps to consider the tall vase of daffodils on the carved chest opposite the stairs. She might have been drawing out the stems that were yellowing now and proffered flowers too crumpled and papery to deserve their places any longer, adjusting the fresher ones to fill the gaps they left. She would be humming to herself. Now came the faint creak and the sound of her climbing the stairs, another pause while she rested for a moment at the top. She might turn left to go to her room to change her shoes (sometimes she put on her slippers before tea) or, as they could hear her doing now, she might turn right along the broad landing. She did not, nor did they expect it, come into the study, but walked past the closed door towards the nursery. Michael and Steph smiled at each other. In a moment they would hear her talking softly to Miranda as she changed her, and then she would call them on her way past and they would all go down to tea. But the sound they next heard and which froze them where they stood was a rising, disbelieving scream.
***
It might have helped to be drunk. In a way I felt as if I were, in the sense that I still have no clear memory of the days following that one when I came upon Miranda dead. Glimpses, that’s all I have, and although I can’t be sure how many days it took, I know that Steph kept Miranda by her for too long, and that by the time Michael could persuade her to give her up so that we could bury her, some terrible things were happening.
I want it understood that the child was not neglected, whatever she might have died of. I hope that’s clear. Don’t think it hasn’t worried me, not getting a doctor. There must have been something wrong with her, perhaps her heart. I think now of the slight frown she sometimes wore when she was lying awake quietly; it seems to me now that she might have been listening to her little heart. I think it must have been her heart. It is hard to accept, but if that was the case then perhaps it was better to let her slip peacefully away, undisturbed by strangers. In the end, what do doctors know?
I prepared her with my own hands. There is no pain like it, the washing and dressing of the dead, because it is unbearable that one should be doing such things to a body that is so dear yet so changed, and equally unbearable that these necessities should be left undone or trusted to other hands. I used a strongly scented soap which I thought might do the trick at least for a while, but her skin began to wrinkle and slough, gentle though I was, and I feared that I was hurting her. I whispered that I was sorry, isn’t that silly? People sometimes say that dead people don’t look dead, they look as if they are sleeping. Miranda did not look asleep. Miranda was dead in my arms, gone. How else could I have contemplated placing her in the ground? I dusted her with talcum powder until I realised that it made me think of quicklime. I wrapped her in two white silk handkerchiefs. They covered her, tiny thing she was. She had hardly grown at all. I fancied that she looked even smaller than she had on the day she was born, though sometimes that happens when people die, they look emptied of something. I remember thinking that the silk would be soft against her skin, another silly thought, but it’s the kind of thing that comes to you in those circumstances.