Blind Date (12 page)

“I'm hungry,” he said, sitting by her deckchair in a way which showed he was poised for flight. Diana rummaged in her bag and handed him a pear which he took with thanks even though she knew he would have preferred something else. A polite little boy.

“When's Elisabeth coming back?” he asked. “She said she would show me the bells.”

“Do you think it's time to go in?” she asked.

“No.” He was very definite, open to neither bullying nor persuasion. Had he been born like that, or made?

Take the way they had treated him after his mother's death. He had been in the house. He was found hiding in his room. Diana knew how unreasonable it was to despise him for that; he was too small for his intervention to have made any difference, but it still seemed unmanly, even in a child. Make him relive it, some counsellor had said. He must talk through it, otherwise the experience will traumatize him for life, as if it would not, otherwise. So they had tried, the professionals and the amateurs, battered him gently with questions, cross-examined him with kid gloves so the bruises never showed, while Elisabeth howled her protest. And a fat lot of good it did them all. Matthew failed to communicate: they were none the wiser and he became as silent as his mother's grave. I was sleeping, he had lisped with his thumb in his mouth; very sleeping. He looked so innocent when he was asleep and Diana did not believe it.

“T
hey
said Matthew was wearing his mother's rings when they found him,” Audrey Compton said to Donald as they sat enthroned at the back of the antique shop, one hundred yards away from the beach and comfortably situated at the top of the street. There was another shop, dealing in serious furniture, delicious porcelain and ancient lamps further down and better placed. Tasteful stuff, Audrey remarked cheerfully, not like us. Bric-a-brac stood outside on the pavement to lure in the customers and also because there was no room inside. There had been protests about this disfiguring litter on a public thoroughfare, until Audrey, never one to resist battle, had pointed out that it stood in the recess of their window, on their own property, and it came inside at night, and if the population didn't like it, they could lump it. Just because they didn't want three-legged chairs, 1960s table lamps and the sort of stock most of them would throw away, other people did, so there, and if they did not
shut up
, she would publish a list of all those well-to-do locals who came in to the shop to
sell
. Audrey had resisted what she called barrack-room language in this particular debate with the chief signatory of the petition. Otherwise, she could swear like a trooper or talk like the better kind of duchess. So Donald said.

“Poor little sod,” he remarked now. “Who says he was wearing his mum's rings, and why not anyway? He's nothing but a mite now, he was only eight then. I buried my mum's wedding ring in the garden at that age, couldn't remember where I'd put it. Christ, there was a fuss.”

“Someone
told me that it was
assumed
,” Audrey stressed the word, accentuating her appetite for gossip and also her unwillingness to accept reportage as correct, “that the boy had let in the man who murdered his mother. Matt's fingerprints were on the inside of the door, none others so clearly detectable. Not his mum's, not the murderer's. Mum must have cleaned awfully thoroughly. What the hell kind of household is it where people clean door handles?”

“Such persons are not sane,” Donald said.

“But they were selling their house, so they might have been keeping it sparkling. The way one does.”

“The way one doesn't.” They both laughed, his a deep belly rumble, hers a body-crumpling, tears-to-the-eyes cackle which erupted a minimum of ten times a day. She was a beauty, he thought, a beauty.

“But if they were selling the house, mightn't the murderer have been someone coming to look at it? Oh, they'd know if it was someone coming from the agents, the cops could find that out, but what if it was someone coming off the street. Looking at a ‘for sale' sign and thinking, I fancy that. Or I fancy what's inside that.”

Audrey and Donald had a deep and bitter mistrust of estate agents. Their shop stood opposite one: the proximity hurt, on a daily basis. They couldn't get over the idea of anyone being paid to sell something without risk or promise. Still, the fellows and the lady over there were at least well mannered, and if Steven did not work so near, they would never have had Matthew standing at the door and saying, “Can I please come in?”

Audrey was comfortably large, with a figure far more Victorian than most of her artefacts. She was rounded at every angle, a waist, a bosom, the calves of her legs and her forearms muscular, while her ankles and feet were particularly small. The laughter had shaken the crumbs which decorated Donald's sweater onto his lap. When he stood up, they would join the others round the legs of his chair. “Want any help?” he bellowed, peering round the alterpiece which stood on the table in front of them, sheilding them from view. Audrey was partially deaf: he partially blind: between them they could scent a customer from a hundred yards. Audrey continued mending the catch on a gold chain, while the customer stood bemused, reading a plethora of handwritten notices, attached to objects. PLEASE handle with care. SIT on this at your peril! NO credit cards! If you drop this it's YOURS!

There was
a huge armchair standing by the front door, occupied solely by an equally large box which held the skeleton of a chandelier.

Junk, from floor to ceiling, or that was what it looked liked. Nice things happened to jostle with not so nice. They did not care. Audrey officiated at local antique fairs with a few, selected items and behind the table and the alterpiece, stuck inside a Tesco bag, or hanging round her neck, was the serious side of the business. One had to have knowledge, or recommendation from an existing customer before one asked either to buy or to sell. Only Matthew was allowed to play with the emeralds.

“A boy who feels that way about stones has got to be a good boy,” was Audrey's verdict. Matthew had crept closer when she had been mending a broach, whenever that was, Easter time, in the holidays. She had ignored him and let him hover until he stood looking over her shoulder, breathing deeply. At one point he had sniffed and she had handed him her hankie without a word. The next day he was back, and the day after that he appeared again, this time with a topaz ring which he said he had borrowed from his granny.

“And you'll
take it right back in a minute,” Audrey said carefully, “before she notices.” His big eyes met her gaze and held the challenge. He was either truthful, an actor, or utterly stupid. She did not say she had seen the topaz ring before. Diana Kennedy had been disappointed in the valuation.

“I want to know what it is, first. Why does she like it?”

“It's a nice stone, topaz,” she told him. “Quite hard, nothing like a diamond, and it can be broken easily down a line. You might be able to scratch your name on glass with it, but you could still do it a lot of damage with an accidental knock. This one was pink, which made it rarer than other forms. It could range in colour from no colour to golden brown or blue.” Did he know that when it was found, it could look like any old pebble, rounded by water? And that you measured its weight in carats, after the carob seed? And that such a thing could have great value or none at all? No, he did not know, but he liked pebbles. His aunt had bought him a tumbler for polishing. Audrey showed him a small diamond, made him look at it, then showed him a fire opal which made him gasp. “There are flames inside there,” he said. After that, he came often, on the way home from school in term time. He had deft fingers where hers had grown less so. She taught him how to bite a pearl to test it and how to rethread a string making tiny knots in between each bead, and as a reward, gave him a lump of rose quartz to take home. “Put it on the window ledge and look at it in the light,” she told him. “There's another kind of fire in there.”

“Have you got any old dinky toys?” the customer asked now.

“Nope.”

“Railway memorabilia?”

“Nope.”

“Dolls?”

“Somewhere.”

Donald
turned to his wife. “How on earth can we be expected to know what we've got?” he said in an injured whisper.

“Rumour has it,” Audrey continued, immovable from the subject of Matthew because she had not seen him today and whenever he was absent for long, she worried, “that Mattie's grandad left a cache of jewels somewhere. He was always disappointed that his wife never took the faintest interest in what was his passion and by the time he died, he pretty well loathed her anyway. His shop wasn't doing well … do you remember it? He put his capital in raw stones and hid them somewhere, so that she wouldn't find them and she'd have to work for a living. Hid them in such a way that the next generation might find them,” she added dramatically.

“Rotten old miser.”

Donald unwrapped a boiled sweet of the kind no-one else liked any more and pushed it to one corner of his mouth. A sudden, unworthy suspicion assailed him.

“Audrey, my dearest darling, you aren't by any remote chance encouraging this little chap in the hope he'll lead you to buried treasure, are you? We don't even know what
we've
got.”

She slapped his knuckle, lightly. He was right: the thought was unworthy. What would they do with treasure, even apart from what they had? Furniture, objets d'art, chandeliers even; all acquired from those suffering temporary financial embarrassments over the years. It was both diplomatic and natural to forget who had sold them what.

“No, of course not. I don't believe a word of it anyway. Although I did know Dorian Kennedy all those years ago and he was a very strange, bitter man indeed. Done it!”

She slipped
the mended chain into a box and stuffed it into the Tesco bag. He marvelled at her eyesight.

“No, I like Matthew hanging round because he's an extra pair of eyes and because he's … he's …”

“A gem,” Donald finished. “Like his mother was?”

Audrey considered and shook her head. “Nope. That one was a softer stone. A nice piece of amber. Never fully formed.”

The day resumed.

I
f the church below and to the left of Joe's feet was still in use, and this was the sabbath, then the congregation would be gathering. On balance, and although he regretted it, Joe was pleased that the clock did not work. Imagine, sleeping here to the sound of a massive ticking: it would induce madness, a kind of tinnitus, hearing life marching forward in seconds. He could see all his movements being made in tune to a giant metronome, everything done to a set speed. In the clock chamber, the high windows were on his left and right and the bed faced the backside of the clock. From his pillow, Joe could see two double doors, one at floor level which opened on to the pendulum, the second set several feet above the first and approached by a rickety set of wooden steps leading to a platform. Open these doors and one could step into an aperture behind the clock, where a man could stand to adjust it or to wind it, as someone had, once a week. Joe had tried, just for fun, but although the key turned, the machinery was fractured, the pendulum lay detached inside its own shelter, like an anchor without a purpose, and the hands of the clock would always remain at ten to three. He had tried to work out what it needed: he used the clock as a plaything and it had often occurred to him, in the weeks before Elisabeth returned from Devon, to move the hands of the clock forward from ten to three, just by five minutes, to see if anyone outside noticed. Since he did not particularly wish to draw attention, he had desisted. Instead, he toyed with the idea of dispensing with a pendulum and running the clock off a large battery, making it into a sort of huge wristwatch. The thought of a digital face peering out of the tower amused him too. Typical, this endless absorption with ephemera. There is no sense of priorities in your life, Joe, he told himself. You are always allowing yourself to be distracted by things which have no real importance. But the clock, and above all the workings of the clock, had proved a marvellous distraction while he waited, an uninvited guest in Elisabeth's empty tower, and made him feel less guilty about insinuating himself into the Reverend Flynn's favour with all those lies. At least he was doing something. The clock was beautiful, even though it might never function again, or the bell above it ring, and that was the whole point.

Joe went
downstairs, squaring his shoulders. Stop messing about. Elisabeth was dressed and the bed tidy. Her hair was caught behind in a slide and he wondered if that had been difficult to do, because as he knew from his own, it took two hands to create a pony-tail and one of hers had only recently come out of a sling. But for God's sake, she was a convalescent, not a patient and, standing in the doorway, he reminded himself not to let slip the fact that he already knew even that much about her. She was a stranger, right? They were strangers to one another. He was relieved, but slightly miffed by her failure to recognize him. He was just a man who had taken her photograph and given her a rose and made no impact whatever. Typical.

Elisabeth was trying to open a tin. Beans, he noticed. Heinz baked beans, the stuff of student flautulence and good health. There were periods of his life when he had lived on little else. She was swearing.

“Good
morning,” he said.

“What's good about it?” she asked. “I've got a trespasser in my own home and I can't open a tin of beans. That's good?” There was a smell of burnt toast.

“Let me.” He took the tin and opener from her hands, removed the blackened stumps of bread from the very old, no longer regulatable, toaster and began again. The surface of the table was spotless; the kitchenette area shone: she had been busy. They sat without a further word and consumed beans on toast. A knife and fork presented her with no problem, he noticed; nor would most tasks demanding less specific strength than an ancient tin opener which required the user to lean on it with full body weight. Of which she had so little. Joe coughed and stood up to make coffee.