by Toby Faber
‘Ah well,’ said Dad. ‘No reason why he had to order books in advance, I suppose.’
Laurie was quiet for a while, looking at the titles of the three books he had never got around to reading. Two clearly continued with the theme of Central Asia, but it was the third title that caught her eye: Pension Fund Deficits and the Minimum Funding Requirement. Was that just an aberration, the only time William Pennington had strayed into this particular topic? No: a quick check within Older requests showed that he had ordered a number of similar titles at around the same time, and had at least got as far as picking those ones up from the issue desk. In fact, she realised, those had been the first books he had ordered that year, almost as if it was the desire to learn more about pensions that had brought him back to the British Library. What was he trying to find out?
Friday, 7 August – 8.30 a.m.
‘You two might as well be brick walls for all the reward I get from talking to you! I know mornings are meant to be difficult for the young, but it’s hardly the crack of dawn.’
Laurie looked up from her plate with a start. Her mind had been wandering, it was true: to Paul and when he’d call, to work, and whether she would ever be returning there, to Margaret, mourning the husband she was no longer sure she knew, and then to William Pennington himself, and his odd library requests. All in all, she reckoned, she had a good excuse for not being particularly talkative. She was about to say something to that effect when she realised Dad wasn’t really talking about her.
Laurie had been conscious of Jess shuffling into breakfast a few minutes earlier, but it was only now, following Dad’s gaze, that she took proper note of her appearance. She looked terrible; there was no other word for it. Her skin had a waxy pastiness to it that belied the sun outside. Deep rings under her eyes made her look old in a way Laurie had never seen before. She sat there, hunched over a plate that hadn’t been touched, just gathering her dressing gown around her shoulders, staring into space. Ordinarily, Laurie would have supposed she had a hangover, but she knew Jess had turned in early the night before. At the time she’d muttered something about needing to be up early for work. That was a point. Laurie might not have an office to go to, but Jess certainly did. What was going on?
Jess looked up and met Laurie’s eyes, then shifted her attention to Dad, as if she’d just realised that he’d been speaking to her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured in a voice so low they had to strain to hear it. ‘I don’t feel very well today.’ With that, she pushed herself up from her place, turned around and went back into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her in a way that made it clear she did not want to be followed.
Laurie watched her go, remembering what she had found behind that bedroom door. She felt herself colouring up. Had it really only been this week? If anyone had a right to be down it was Jess. Laurie had been a bad cousin to her. But she’d seemed so well before.
‘I wonder,’ started Dad. ‘I wonder if perhaps you’d both like to come back with me this evening? I’m not the kind of evangelist who believes country air is the cure for all ills, but it seemed to do you some good last time you came down.’
This evening? Was it Friday already? It was amazing how quickly Laurie had lost track of the days without the office routine to remind her. Anyway, what about Dad’s offer? She smiled at him. ‘Good idea; you know how Jess loves it down there. What time were you planning to leave?’
‘Soon after lunch. I’d like to beat the rush hour if possible. I told the Shillings I’d be back in time for supper.’
‘Fine. I just thought I’d spend one more morning at the BL, if that’s OK. I want to take a look at some of those books William Pennington ordered, see if I can get inside his brain. I guess you could come too, if you wangled yourself a reader’s card. I imagine twenty years as a lecturer at Cambridge must count for something.’
‘You imagine correctly. I was visiting the BL before you were born.’ It could have been a put-down, but Dad had made the remark in a false-old-man voice that made it clear he was joking, and that the joke was on him, not his daughter. ‘Not that I’ve got my card with me.’ He continued, more normally. ‘And I’m sure it will be out of date. The last time I went, it was still in the British Museum. No, you go without me. Just try to get back before three.’
Friday, 7 August – 4 p.m.
‘I’m sorry,’ Laurie hoped she sounded suitably contrite. ‘I had no idea UK pensions regulations could be so fascinating.’
Laurie had never actually heard someone snort before, but that was the only possible description for Dad’s response. She looked at the clock. Had he and Jess really been sitting there waiting for her all this time? Laurie remembered the bags she’d passed in the hall and groaned to herself. ‘Look, I really am sorry. I’ll just be five minutes packing my stuff.’
Laurie sat in the back of Dad’s old Fiesta, feeling like a naughty child ignored by its parents. Her efforts to make conversation had been rewarded with answers whose shortness left her in no doubt that she remained in disgrace. Dad gave all his concentration to the road, as if split-second reactions might be required, although they were currently travelling at a speed no faster than a brisk walk. That was Laurie’s fault too, she knew. This was all traffic that had built up in the last hour or so; if they had left when Dad wanted, they would have been well clear of London by now. As for Jess, her ostentatious thanks when Dad carried her luggage and held the front passenger door open for her had been evidence of some kind of recovery from her morning blues. Now, however, she seemed to be asleep.
Left alone with her thoughts, Laurie thought about what she had found out that day: specifically, about pension-fund deficits and the employer’s responsibility to cover them. She really hadn’t been lying when she said she found it fascinating. It reminded her a bit of the work she’d been doing with Michael. But what was the source of William Pennington’s interest?
A plane passed overhead, so close that its undercarriage seemed in danger of clipping the trees that lined the motorway. Without Laurie noticing, they had got as far as Heathrow already. The road was still busy, but at least it was free flowing. They stood a chance of making it home for supper. Perhaps that was why the atmosphere in the car seemed slightly warmer. Dad and Jess had turned on the radio, and were listening to the news. Laurie leaned forward to listen along with them, sticking her head between the two front seats. Dad glanced across at her, and then, with his eyes back on the road, said, ‘So, tell me what you found out.’
The edge to Dad’s voice told Laurie that she was not yet entirely forgiven, but she also knew he would not have asked at all if he wasn’t interested, so she took the question at face value. ‘Pensions. I’m trying to work out why William Pennington suddenly got interested in them a couple of months ago.’
‘Planning his retirement? That sort of thing?’
‘The sort of books he was reading were more detailed than that. They were more like what somebody in charge of a pension fund would read. Makes me wonder if he was thinking about going in that direction himself.’
Jess laughed, and that was a good sign in itself. ‘Listen to the two of you, nattering on about pensions. Anybody would think you were a pair of OAPs, the way you’re going on.’
‘Sorry Jess,’ Laurie was smiling herself now, as she injected a note of fake pomposity into her voice, ‘but it’s never too early to start planning these things, and Dad here isn’t so far off his free bus pass himself.’
‘Thank you for that darling, but there’s life in me yet.’
Laurie was going to reply, but Jess beat her to it. Her ‘Anybody can see that,’ somehow left no room for a rejoinder.
Saturday, 8 August
The weather was so beautiful it could hardly fail to be uplifting. Laurie took Jess out for a ride on Roxanne, leading her round the lanes. Jess seemed to enjoy herself – she was certainly grateful at the end of the ride – but was hardly talkative. It gave Laurie the chance to carry on puzzling over the mystery of William
Pennington’s reading habits.
Lunch was heavy on eggs and tomatoes: neither had ceased production while Dad had been in London. In the afternoon he dragooned both the girls – as he continued to insist on calling them – into helping out in the garden, where his brief absence had apparently allowed an unprecedented burgeoning of the weed population. It was hard, sweaty work, but Jess, in particular, seemed to flourish under Dad’s instructions. By the end she was taking a proprietorial pride in the alternating rows of onions and lettuces that emerged from a small thicket of chickweed.
The evening was spent watering. Laurie had thought little of it when Dad mentioned it earlier in the day, but she had forgotten about the hosepipe ban. She and Jess worked in relay, carrying buckets to Dad as he waited by various plants that seemed to require inordinate quantities of water. ‘It would be much worse if I hadn’t made sure everything was well mulched before I left,’ was Dad’s only response when Laurie questioned whether it was really necessary to pour this much liquid into the ground.
It wasn’t clear how he had found the time, but Dad turned out to have been making bread in the course of the afternoon. It went perfectly with the leek and potato soup he retrieved from the freezer and served cold. They all had seconds, and would have gone on if there had been more. Instead, Dad broke the remains of the loaf into three chunks, which they used to mop their bowls clean. None of them was in a hurry to move afterwards. Laurie let her mind wander off again, secure in the knowledge that neither Dad nor Jess would think her rude for failing to make small talk, but keeping half an ear on them as they continued the conversation they had begun at dinner.
‘Well,’ Jess was saying, ‘I suppose if you can cook like that then you’re entitled to be a bit of a slave driver. Where did you learn?’
‘Being a slave driver comes naturally. But if you mean who taught me to cook, then I suppose the answer is Fran.’ Dad’s voice tailed off for a moment, before continuing, in a more reminiscent vein. ‘I don’t know if you remember, but the kitchen was always her domain. I came back from work around seven, and every day she’d serve me a delicious meal. God knows how she managed it. Don’t forget she was working too. I guess I – we – just took it for granted, until she was ill.’
‘Go on,’ Jess encouraged.
‘Well this was before she was really ill, if you see what I mean. She had to go into hospital for something else: a hysterectomy, actually. She was meant to be out in a few days. I can’t remember how long it was meant to be, but she’d prepared for it: meals for every day she was going to be away. Put them in the freezer with strict instructions about what to defrost and when. I’d arranged my teaching load so I could pick Laurie up from school, then we’d eat that day’s meal together.’
‘I remember that,’ Laurie interrupted. ‘It was great, felt like a real adventure.’
‘Yes.’ Dad was smiling, but his eyes were sad. ‘You were ten, I think. I rather loved it too. Anyway, the day before Fran was due to come home there was a complication. Nothing serious – in fact, she eventually found it funny. They’d used a balloon to keep everything in place while her tummy healed, and they suddenly realised that it had burst. Apparently it had never happened before. She had to stay in hospital for another day. It threw out all her plans. She was more worried about that than anything else. What would we eat? I had to promise that I’d cook – spaghetti bolognaise. She gave me detailed instructions about softening the onions and grating the carrot, and how the meat had to be properly browned before I added the tomatoes. I still follow them today, really.’
‘And so do I,’ said Laurie. ‘I think spag bol was the first thing you taught me how to cook, too.’
‘Yes, well you always loved it. Anyway, I was rather surprised, but I found I really enjoyed it: the satisfaction of a job well done, I suppose. Fran came home and took over again, of course, but when she got really ill … well, it was something I could do. She seemed to like it when I used her recipes, but I would always experiment a bit too.’
‘So you’ve never used recipes from books?’
There was a note of incredulity to Jess’s question, which Dad could hardly fail to pick up. ‘Oh, I’m not dogmatic about it. Sometimes you need a book. And now we’ve got the internet as well, of course.’
Dad stopped with a look on his face that spoke volumes. Laurie reached across and held his hand. He looked across to her with a start, as if he had forgotten she was there, and smiled again.
Sunday, 9 August – 10 a.m.
If Mrs Pennington was surprised to hear Laurie’s voice at the other end of the telephone, her voice did little to betray it. ‘No, not at all,’ she said, when Laurie apologised for disturbing her. ‘I was just on my way to church, but I don’t need to leave just yet.’
Laurie responded to the invitation to speak before the moment was lost. ‘Oh good,’ she started. ‘In fact, I think we’re about to do the same ourselves.’ It was true. Dad and Jess had come into the hall while she was on the phone, and were getting ready to go out. ‘I just had a very quick question. Do you think you’d be able to tell me the date when your husband left Sanderson’s?’
‘Well, I’m not sure exactly, but now that I’ve looked at our bank statements I can see that he stopped receiving a salary in June.’
That figured. It was what Laurie had already deduced from William Pennington’s library records: he’d started reading about Central Asia again on 1 July. The next question was the crucial one. ‘And I don’t suppose you know what notice period he was on?’
‘Would you believe it was only six weeks? I asked him about it when they were making all those redundancies a few years ago. I said surely we needed more security. He said that now was hardly the time to be pushing for something like that.’ Mrs Pennington sniffed so deeply that Laurie had an immediate vision of her nostrils flaring. ‘It never was the time, of course. Would that be all?’
Laurie was halfway through nodding before she realised Mrs Pennington couldn’t see her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I think it is.’
‘What was that all about?’ Jess was still waiting by the front door with Dad.
‘I’m just trying to work out the timings of Mr Pennington’s library requests,’ Laurie replied, as they walked out of the door and headed up the lane. ‘And I think I have. He looked at all those books about pensions in the middle of May. Then there was a gap, and he didn’t go back to the library until the end of June. Mrs Pennington just confirmed what I guessed. He was working out his notice.’
‘That’s a bit harsh of them isn’t it? Making him work out his notice after they’d sacked him. I thought everyone in the City was sent on gardening leave the moment they were told to clear their desks.’ Jess stopped herself and caught Laurie’s eye. ‘Sorry. You know “tactless” is my middle name, don’t you?’
‘It’s OK. You see, the more I think about it, the more I don’t think he was sacked. I think he resigned – he really did take early retirement.’ Now she looked across at Dad, who was walking in step with the two of them. ‘Just like Mr Sanderson said in his letter of condolence.’
‘The one Margaret shredded? Well you might be right, I suppose, but I don’t see why you’re so sure. He might have known he was being forced into retirement and then gone to the library to check where that left him financially.’
‘No,’ Laurie felt even more certain as she spoke. ‘Like Jess says, if you sack someone, you don’t make them work out their notice. You want them off the premises as soon as possible. It’s only if they resign that you hang on to them. In any case, those books weren’t retirement guides. They were about pension schemes themselves. You said it yourself last night: you read books to find something out. Mr Pennington wanted to find out more about how his pension scheme operated. Whatever it was those books told him, it made him decide to resign.’
Dad looked as though he was marshalling his thoughts, preparing another challenge, or at least a question, but a loud ‘Hello’ from across the road preven
ted him: James and Alice Shilling, Dad’s neighbours, also on their way to church.
It was Alice who had called them, and it was she who now spoke, bringing forth a stream of consciousness at a volume that made no allowance for the fact she had come up to within a yard of them. ‘David, how lovely to see you – and Lauren as well. It’s always a treat when you come down and grace us with your presence. And Jessica – lovely to see you again. You’ve got Lauren as your tenant now, is that right? Alice and James, dear, in case you’ve forgotten. Well, it’s all I could do to tear myself away from the garden this morning. All this sun is lovely, of course. Don’t think I’m complaining for an instant, but it does make a lot of work for us gardeners, doesn’t it, David? You’re lucky to have two young things to help you. Yes, I saw you out there yesterday. Well done. I mean, who would have thought things could get so out of hand so quickly? I said to James, “Isn’t David lucky?” Of course we can’t expect any help like that from our two. John’s got the farm, of course, and the milking doesn’t wait for anybody. He’s busiest at the weekends when the cowman’s off and I don’t like to ask him to come into the village and look after our little garden. I mean, it would be like a busman’s holiday for him, wouldn’t it? Or do I mean coals to Newcastle? And of course Katherine has her two little ones now. I’m the one who has to pop over there to mind them while she snatches a bit of rest. I could hardly expect her to pull up my weeds now, could I? Anyway, I was in half a mind not to come this morning, but then James reminded me he was reading the lesson, so of course as a reader’s wife I could hardly be absent, could I? I mean, it wouldn’t be right.’
A sudden ‘hmph’ from Jess made Laurie turn around. She was clearly trying hard to suppress a giggle. Laurie looked at Dad. His cheeks were red and there was a tightness around his mouth. Either he was very annoyed about something and could barely keep his temper in check, or he too was struggling not to laugh. Both avoided Laurie’s eye. Mrs Shilling, meanwhile, continued her monologue. She only paused for breath, and a short prayer, when she reached her pew, one row in front of them. Still puzzled by what was going on, Laurie took the opportunity to follow her example, bending her head as she sat and burying her face in her hands.