In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  ‘But Catherine’s gone, hasn’t she, and I’m going too.’

  ‘But if …’

  ‘Enough! You’re like a bloody Jack Russell nipping at my heels all the time. I’ve given my notice – remember? I’ll be forty next year and this is a good time to make a change. All I’m thinking is that young Kim can’t manage on her own in the shop so if they’re going to replace Glenda and get someone in to manage it, that person could manage the bookkeeping and the ordering and so on for the lavender products, and you could do the production.’

  Of course he wants the job, but there is no way they’ll give it to him. And there’s no way he will ask. Alice has said she’ll talk to Declan for him and he has to leave it at that. Besides, he’s feeling a bit more sure of himself now. They’re really nice to him and keep telling him he’s useful. Alice has been teaching him to cook. Right now he doesn’t want to do anything to rock the boat.

  ‘Heard from your mum recently?’ Fleur asks.

  Todd nods. ‘Got another card last week. She’s still in Kuta, I think.’

  ‘That’d be right,’ Fleur says with a grin. ‘Bit of a party girl, your mum. Is she still with that Stanley bloke? What’s he like?’

  ‘A wanker,’ Todd says. ‘He wears a lot of gold chains and carries a man bag. He thinks he’s so cool but he’s a real dickhead. You’d hate him.’

  ‘Probably would,’ Fleur says, and she pushes the tray of plastic containers towards him. ‘These have been sterilised too so can you wash your hands and start filling them with hand cream, please? But your mum must see something in him.’

  ‘He’s got loads of money,’ Todd says, washing his hands at the sink. ‘He’s always flashing it around. He buys Mum lots of stuff, clothes and that.’ He hesitates, looking up at her, grinning. ‘She always says she’s like that woman on Kath and Kim – “high maintenance”.’

  Fleur nods slowly, watching as he dries his hands and sets up the hand cream dispenser. ‘Wouldn’t suit me, all that drinking and clubbing and being dependent on a man. But I suppose as long as she’s happy … and you’re getting on all right now, aren’t you? Here, I mean.’

  Todd nods. He wants to tell her that he’s worried about what’ll happen to him when the plaster comes off his ankle. He’ll be sixteen soon so he could go back to the caravan and social services wouldn’t bother about him. The doctor says he’ll have to take it easy on his ankle for a while when the plaster comes off but after that …

  ‘Well, if you’re not going to say anything to them then I will,’ Fleur says. ‘You know more about this than anyone else, all the times you’ve sat in here with me, all the stuff you’ve helped me with. I’m not going to stay around here forever waiting for them to find the right person for the job when the right person is here already.’

  ‘But they’re letting me stay here, I can’t ask them for something else.’

  ‘Well you don’t have to ask, do you? I’ll do it, that’s what I’ve just said.’

  ‘I dunno,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Todd, you’re irritating,’ Fleur says, stopping what she’s doing and turning to him, hands on her hips. ‘You’re pissing me off so much over this I could cheerfully break your other ankle.’

  Todd laughs and stretches out his good leg. ‘Yeah! Go on,’ he says, ‘then they’ll have to keep me on longer. Do it now. Be my guest.’

  ‘Gone?’ Lesley says. ‘Gone to Perth? But I saw him early this morning out there talking to that man who plays guitar in the pub.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Alice said, ‘and then he left to drive up to Perth.’

  ‘But why? Why has he gone there?’

  Alice opens her mouth, falters and shuts it. It’s really none of Lesley’s business why Declan has gone to Perth.

  ‘He … er … well he had some business to attend to.’

  ‘What sort of business? He didn’t say anything to me about it.’

  Alice blinks and tries to hide her annoyance. Maybe Lesley and Declan have unfinished business from the other night. But he does seem to have been avoiding her since then and Alice can’t assume that he would want her to know where he’s gone or why.

  ‘I don’t think it’s my place to—’ she begins.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ Lesley cuts in. ‘Just tell me where he is and when he’ll be back.’ Her face is flushed and her eyes very bright, she’s clearly quite hyped up.

  ‘Look, Mrs Craddock, I’m sure you can understand that I can’t discuss Mr Benson’s business with a guest.’

  ‘You have no right to tell me what I can understand or not,’ Lesley shouts into her face. ‘How dare you—’

  ‘Is there a problem?’ Ruby cuts in from the doorway.

  ‘I just want to know where Declan is,’ Lesley says.

  The shock of seeing Ruby has snapped her out of something, although she eyes Alice with disapproval before giving Ruby her best smile.

  ‘Well I think that’s his business, don’t you?’ Ruby says with a remarkable chill in her voice. ‘Had Declan thought you needed to know that he was going away I’m sure he’d have told you.’

  Alice is gobsmacked by the authority that Ruby brings to the situation. It’s not just what she says but how she says it, slow, cool, dignified.

  ‘How rude,’ Lesley says, ‘how dare you speak to me like that!’

  ‘Mrs Craddock,’ Ruby says, ‘Declan and I are the proprietors here and you are a guest. Declan’s business in Perth is nothing to do with you, or, as I said, he would have told you about it. We’ll certainly let him know you’d like to speak to him. I’m sure we have your number in the file. Now, is there anything else we can do for you this morning?’

  Alice is holding her breath, eyes flicking back and forth from one to the other.

  ‘You can tell me where he is and when he’ll be back.’

  ‘I will not tell you where he is but we do expect him back in a few days’ time. And I must ask that in future you do not harass members of the staff. If you have any other problems please come and see me personally.’ Ruby stands there, all five-foot three of her looking six-foot plus, unsmiling, immovable, implacable. Just waiting.

  ‘Well really!’ Lesley says, grabbing her bag from the desk where she’d put it when she came in. ‘I shall have something to say to Declan when he gets back.’ And swinging around she storms out of the office and slams the door behind her.

  Alice exhales and sinks down into the desk chair. ‘Wow! Thanks for rescuing me.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ Ruby says. ‘But don’t let anyone speak to you like that, Alice. Not ever, and most definitely not here.’

  Alice closes her eyes briefly. For a moment she thinks she might burst into tears. It’s so long since anyone actually stuck up for her she had forgotten how it feels. ‘Thanks anyway,’ she manages to say. ‘It means a lot.’

  Ruby nods and smiles. She is about to walk away but then stops. ‘I don’t think she’s a bad person, you know, just a very unhappy one.’

  ‘Probably, yes,’ Alice says, getting back to her feet. ‘But it might be a bit more complicated than you think.’

  Ruby turns back into the room. ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘so you saw it too. Declan doing his morning-after-the-night-before skulk. I wondered if you had. I know you’re often up and about early.’

  ‘Yes, I did see. Poor old Declan, he’s not really made for this sort of thing, is he?’

  Ruby laughs. ‘I suspect not. But men, they never learn, do they? Not where sex is concerned. He’s a very sweet man. Let’s just hope she’s calmed down a bit by the time he gets back.’

  Alice nods. This is the time to tell her, she thinks, all I have to do is tell her that I poked my nose into the internet to find out about her. Then she can tell me she did it too and we’re square. ‘Ruby,’ she says and Ruby, now heading out of the office, turns back.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s something I need to …’ But she just can’t make herself say
it. She needs more time, time to think about how to say it.

  ‘What is it, Alice?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘just thanks for sticking up for me.’

  Ruby nods. ‘I’m off to get into the tough stuff in Catherine’s room. See you later.’

  In Catherine’s room Ruby’s heart sinks at the prospect of what needs to be done. A few days earlier she had surveyed the mess: no curtains of cobwebs yet, no rats or bats, but the clock has stopped, dust has settled and the room reeks of Catherine’s attempts to hold on to the threads of a disintegrating life. Todd had been right, the overall mess was very personal: dirty clothes, old newspapers, unwashed crockery, dead flowers, the unmade bed. For a woman brought up as both she and Catherine had been Ruby recognised the effect of this. She understood how Catherine must have hated knowing that someone would have to deal with what she no longer had the time or energy to manage herself. Ruby had sunk down into the big chair and studied the painful evidence of those last weeks. ‘I wish you’d told me, Cat,’ she’d said aloud. ‘I could have come.’ But as soon as the words were out she wondered if it was true; she might have come but she would have resisted it, fought it. The last thing she ever wanted had been to be here, in this house with Catherine, either healthy or dying.

  She had got to her feet rapidly, gone to the shed and returned with boxes and plastic sacks and had cleared away the embarrassing surface of the mess. The scattered, unwashed clothes, the newspapers, empty envelopes, dead flowers and other rubbish she bagged and put into the outside bins. Then she stripped the linen from the bed and took it, along with the towels and a couple of crumpled tea towels, to the laundry and loaded the lot into one of the washing machines in which Paula did the laundry for the cottages and the house. She stacked the crockery and vases into the kitchen dishwasher, and carried a couple of almost dead plants out to the deck, soaked them with water and left them to recover in the sheltered sunlight. It didn’t take her long and she was rewarded by the dramatic improvement in the appearance of the room. But the bed still had to go.

  She remembered this bed all too clearly; a Benson family heirloom, a wooden frame with a slatted base and carved head and footboards. It was always an ugly bed and Ruby wondered why Catherine had chosen to use it at the end. Memories, perhaps. The mattress looked almost new. She had been on the point of going outside to find Declan to ask him if he had feelings about what should be done with it when she stopped. Declan was having trouble keeping up with everything, particularly with his feelings about Catherine. The last thing he needed now was to have to make a decision about the bed. Instead she asked the two young men he’d taken on to help with some repairs to the barn to dismantle it and carry it out to the storeroom. Its fate was something to be decided another day. She dusted, vacuumed and sat back and admired her own handiwork. The room was respectable now although the odd smell was still there.

  ‘Come with me, Todd,’ she had said later that day, ‘there’s something I want you to do for me.’

  Relief shone like sunlight across his face when he saw what she’d done but he was clearly too choked up with emotion to speak at first.

  ‘This is better, isn’t it, but there’s still a lot to do in here in terms of sorting out Catherine’s things. Would you feel okay helping me with some of it?’ Ruby asked.

  Todd nodded, getting himself back together. ‘Yeah, course, if you think she’d think it was all right.’

  Ruby turned to face him. ‘I think that you’re absolutely the best person for this. And the first thing I’d like you to do is to take this thumb drive and download all the files from her laptop onto it, and then delete them from the machine.’

  ‘Cool,’ he’d said. ‘That’s easy,’ and within minutes he was working silently at the long table under the window.

  Ruby perches now on the edge of that table, looking out of the window to where she can see Lesley Craddock heading up the path to the cottages where Paula is just about to emerge from number four, from which the guests checked out this morning. So now Lesley will start pumping Paula for information, but that too will be a wasted effort. Paula has no information to pass on. Late yesterday Declan had got a call telling him that a cancellation meant that the minor surgery he’d been waiting for could be scheduled for tomorrow if he could get to the hospital by four o’clock today. It was nothing too serious, but being Declan and embarrassed, he’d mumbled something which she couldn’t quite hear, but she did catch ‘pretty routine’ and he obviously wasn’t worried about it. Right now he is probably checking into his ward and if there is a delay, or if, as he suggested, he decides to take an extra day or two in Perth, Lesley will have left before he gets back. Ruby feels a touch of sympathy for her; the cloud of anger, frustration and general unhappiness that travels with her is almost tangible. Whether it’s mid-life angst, relationship problems or something else entirely, Ruby doesn’t know, but she can see that Lesley is battling with something, and it makes her a difficult person to like. She slips off the edge of the table as Lesley nabs Paula and starts to interrogate her.

  The boxes are her next task. Catherine’s personal things – private papers, letters, journals, photographs, news clippings, email printouts, certificates going back to childhood, jewellery, and mementoes. What else? And where to begin? The task seems enormous and Ruby knows that each box she opens has the potential to strip bare her own emotions, and start the unravelling of her own past. A process that’s certain to open up old wounds and splash acid into them.

  Once Todd had cleared the files from the laptop she had told him to disconnect it and gather all the leads together and put the whole thing away in its case. That was several days ago, and since then she and Declan have done some serious talking – about Benson’s Reach, about Todd and Alice, and about themselves. This business partnership that has been thrust upon them is working amicably, better than either of them had expected, but it’s still early days. Some things, though, need to be sorted out now.

  Through the window Ruby sees Todd heading back from the café towards the house. Leaning forward she throws open the window.

  ‘Have you got a minute, please, Todd?’ she calls, and he nods and changes direction slightly to come in through the kitchen door. Declan had planned to talk to Todd today but as he hurried to pack his bag she had volunteered to do it. Todd taps on the half-open door and comes in, perching on the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Good,’ Ruby says, walking over to close to the door. ‘We need to have a chat.’ And she sees a flash of fear cross his face. Surely he can’t think he’s in trouble?

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing wrong. Have you heard from your mum recently?’

  He shrugs. ‘When Declan took me up to the caravan the last time there were a couple more postcards. She’s still in Kuta …’

  ‘We can try to find her if you like, but if she’s okay there and you’re okay here – well, we can leave things as they are for the time being.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’ll be good, no need to get her back.’

  ‘Okay.’ She takes the laptop and hands it to him. ‘So, Todd, this is yours now. Declan and I think you should have it. You’ll use it, won’t you? I know it’s not the latest version but it’s pretty good and all the software’s there.’

  It’s clear that he’s over the moon but before he can start fumbling for words she begins again, handing him a roll of red dot labels. ‘We’d also like you to go through the bookshelves and stick a red dot on all the books you’d like to have for yourself. When Declan gets back he’s going to get the books down from the top shelves so you can go through them too, on the table. He was going to do it today but of course he had to go to the hospital. So don’t get up onto the steps, okay? You can take as many as you like but the one rule is that you don’t try getting onto the ladder with that plaster.’

  ‘Wow,’ Todd says, his face flushing. ‘Really? The laptop and books … that’s so … that’s so totally cool, thanks, Ruby.�
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  ‘Thank Catherine, it’s what she would have wanted.’

  He nods again. ‘Thing is though, I won’t have anywhere to keep them.’

  ‘There’s plenty of shelves and cupboards in your room,’ she says.

  ‘But … well … after that, when I have to go …’

  ‘You mean to the caravan?’

  He nods.

  ‘Do you want to go back? I don’t think you can manage yet.’

  ‘No, ’course not, I want to stay. I told Fleur just now, break my other ankle so I don’t have to go back.’ He laughs nervously.

  ‘Well you don’t need to go to those lengths,’ Ruby says, sitting down beside him now. ‘We should have sorted this out with you earlier. I guess you’ve been worrying about it, and we’ve been busy so we didn’t notice. This whole thing came as a surprise to both Declan and me, you know, and we haven’t decided yet what will happen to this place – it’s too soon for that. It’ll take a few months, maybe more, but one thing we are both clear about is that we will look after you. I don’t mean “look after”, like you look after a little kid – we will look after your interests. You can stay here with us until that decision’s made, if you want to. You’re earning your keep in all sorts of ways and when you’re back on both feet again there will be more for you to do. When we do make a decision we’ll talk to you about what that means, for you, for all of us. By that time you’ll be sixteen and you may have had enough of Benson’s Reach – who knows? Meanwhile, you can line up your books on the shelves and your laptop on the desk, and I’ll drive you up to the caravan so you can collect anything else you want from there and we can get the mail redirected so you’ll get your mum’s cards here instead of having to collect them. Is that okay?’

  A few minutes later she watches as he heads out towards the workroom. What a delight it had been to see the relief on his face, the sparkle in his eyes. Unable to find words he had lurched forward to hug her and she had hung on to him. He was a slight boy at the gangly age, long bony arms and legs, his feet seeming too large for his body. It was his eyes that revealed that he was so much wiser than his years. ‘He’s just as you described him, Cat,’ Ruby murmurs, ‘and I know just what you were trying to do and why.’