A City of Strangers (2 page)

“It's a little bit long,” said Bob. “Perhaps we could try something from
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
A lot of people have seen
Cats,
or know the music.”

“Did he write a book about dogs too?” Michael asked innocently. “I like dogs better. I'd like to have a dog and—”

“Mike, you stupid git! How often do I have to tell you not to talk to strange men?”

The voice, recognizably that of Michael's imitation, came from the other side of the hedge. They stopped by the gate.

“It's all right, Dad,” said Michael. “He's a teacher.”

“What difference does that make? There's pooftah teachers, aren't there?”

“Don't worry. That's just my Dad,” whispered Michael.

They stood for a moment, looking at each other. He was a heavily built man, of under middle height, now into his forties and gone badly to seed. Though the day was not warm he was wearing a vest that displayed brawny and tattooed arms gone nastily to flesh, and a prominent beer gut. His trousers were filthy, and he sat on a crate in a garden littered with the dismembered remains of cars, a can of beer at his side, looking up at them with a derisive, gap-toothed smile. It was the smile that told Carol that he had
known that Michael was talking to teachers, that it was that had made him call out.

“I'm just going in to Mrs. Makepeace's, Dad,” Michael said.

“I don't give a bugger where you go,” said Mr. Phelan.

It was said with the same derisive smile through deplorable, blackened teeth. It was a challenge, a metaphorical thumbing of the nose. It said: I don't give a damn about teachers. They don't impress me. I don't change my behavior for them. I don't give a damn about anybody. My whole life is a rude noise made in the face of the world.

Bob and Carol made no gesture of greeting. It would have been jeeringly flung back at them. As Michael ran into the house next door they walked quietly on.

“The miracles of heredity,” said Carol.

“What are you thinking—that someone slipped in quickly while Jack there was out at the pub? That Mary Phelan had it off with a smooth-talking newsreader for Yorkshire Television? You wouldn't think so if you'd seen Mary, I assure you.”

Carol giggled.

“No, I just meant that funny things happen in families. I mean, look at good, conscientious, upright George III and his queen producing that long succession of appalling boys. It must happen the other way round sometimes. . . . What are you coming this way for, anyway?”

“I'm not turning back to have my masculinity impugned again by that jerk. Anyway, I wanted to see where you live.”

“Well, you'll soon see. We're coming to it now.”

The road was sloping down, and on their right was the last of the Belfield Grove houses. The narrow road that went from left to right of the Estate was Wynton Lane, and it consisted of a row of six near-identical houses, one of them currently up for sale. They were substantial late-Victorian residences, built of stone, with steps down to basement flats. The front gardens contained late roses, hydrangea and berberis bushes, and laburnums and flowering cherries in the process of losing their leaves. Behind them were further gardens, a lane with garages, and beyond that school playing fields stretching out to where the main road curved. The houses seemed confident, assertive, yet isolated.

“I live in the basement of the nearest one,” said Carol. “It's Daphne Bridewell's house. She's an ex-deputy headmistress at Burtle Middle School. She's a bit odd, but awfully sweet.”

Bob McEvoy was quiet, and she looked up at him.

“They're rather splendid houses, aren't they?”

“Yes. Very fine. But so isolated . . . so exposed. . . . Somehow they have a smell of fear.”

M
orning broke, or rather crumbled slowly, over Willow Bank, over Ashdene, The Laburnums, Rosetree Cottage, York House, and The Hollies, the houses that together made up Wynton Lane. Looking out at the light fog, thick with incipient drizzle and the threat of autumn, the inhabitants ate their chosen forms of breakfast before taking up a new day in their lives.

Adrian Eastlake stood at the window of Willow Bank, plate in hand, eating the last of his toast and marmalade. His toast was always cold after he had taken up the tray with the soft-boiled or scrambled eggs to his mother. But over the years Adrian had come to like it that way.

He looked out from the dining-room window over to the Belfield Grove Estate.

It was his day for working at the Burtle Social Security Office, checking up on their files and administrative procedures. It was long ago that they had stopped sending him out on casework. Blessed, blessed relief. He disliked his days at the Burtle office, though, because his shortest way there was through the Estate. Past the Phelans'.

It was foolish, of course, a weakness in him. The day when he had visited the Phelans after complaints about child neglect and had been comprehensively routed by that dreadful man was years ago now, and should have been forgotten. Only it had not been, either by him or by Jack Phelan. If he was sitting on his step, standing in his doorway with a can of beer, or tinkering
with an ancient car on the road outside, the occasion would be memorialized in a jeering epithet, or a rude question. “Snooper,” “mole,” even “workhouse master” had been flung at him at various times, and the fact that he had the sympathy of all the Phelans' neighbors did little to salve the wound, for Adrian was a man who desperately hated public embarrassment. The man was known to be a barbarian, but somehow that didn't make his barbarities easier to bear.

And there was something else, something the neighbors could know nothing about. This was the idea that had come to him in the aftermath of his routing. The idea that this was the man who . . . that this was the man who had . . . that Jack Phelan was responsible for his mother's condition.

At the thought of his mother Adrian Eastlake experienced that sudden contraction of the heart, that pain, that was so familiar to him. A memory of her as she had been, in all her fragile beauty, flooded through him. Thus had she been as he had grown from boyhood into his teens, twenty years ago, shouldering alone the burdens of parenthood, putting a brave front on genteel poverty. He saw her as some infinitely fine, delicate piece of china, waiting to be smashed by—by Jack Phelan?

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.