Drowning Rose (19 page)

Multi-tasking, I thought, was the thing. Or was it compartmentalising? One was meant to be female and the other male. Either way, all I needed to do to enjoy my new life was to keep my mind firmly fixed on the present and the future. No looking right or left. No looking back. It was perfectly easy. A bit like walking a tightrope suspended across the jaws of hell. Of course there were many different versions of what hell might be like. Hot, seemed to be a generally held opinion. Uncomfortable, dark, hopeless. A place of endless torment, a place of nothingness. Different fears, different imaginings. To me it was a place of eternal What Ifs? What if it had been Virgil we had studied that term, not Ovid? What if the rain had continued instead of giving up around seven in favour of a huge moon? What if I had checked behind me? What if I had kept my nerve?

I thought of Pollyanna. She and I had had an uneasy relationship over the years. She ignored me. In fact you could say that she was entirely unaware of my existence, whereas I, on the other hand, alternated between ardent admiration and sullen contempt. At times I had tried to emulate her and played the ‘Glad Game’. It almost always ended with me coming back with, ‘I’m glad that I only abandoned
one
best friend to her death,’ and of course that got repetitive after a while. I realised that like all true optimists Pollyanna was obviously unhinged. Of course she did have the excuse of living at a time when there was a dearth of news from outside the immediate community, which in turn meant that if it were a good year in Little Old Rock Bottom one could be led to believe it had been a good year all round and that there was nothing in this life that could not be cured by a positive attitude. And yet, and yet I wanted to believe she was right to be the way she was just in the same way as I wanted to believe that Uncle Ian really had received a visit from Rose telling him she forgave me everything and loved me still.

I had resolved to give as much of my salary as I could manage to Rose’s Foundation. Of course the upkeep of my house would be considerable but if I were careful I should be able to set money aside each month. Rose herself had shown no great tendencies towards philanthropy, protesting more loudly than most when, in Sunday morning chapel, we were ‘encouraged’ to give a third of our pocket money to the needy in our community. ‘Who are they, these Needy? Where are they? Not in town, that’s for sure. The shopping centre’s packed every time I go.’ Yet who was to say that, had she been allowed to live, she might not have grown and matured into a dedicated helper of the poor. It had happened to her father. Uncle Ian had played his own version of the Glad Game when it came to philanthropy, telling me that he was glad he had never thought of making the kind of will which left all his money to charity should his heir, that was Rose, pre-decease him. When I had asked him why that was, he’d said it was because in his darkest moments he might have suspected God of letting his daughter die for the common good. I had told him I’d rather not believe than believe in a God who would think up something like that. His reasonable reply had been that he didn’t think there was a choice.

I was on my doorstep when my phone rang. It was my mother. I was glad she called. The other day, over Skype, Uncle Ian had asked, out of the blue, ‘And how is that nice ex-husband of yours?’ This bore the nose-print of my mother, and I had wanted to ask her to please not put ideas into an old man’s head.

‘You’re on your mobile?’ my mother said. ‘You shouldn’t use those things.’

‘You called me up to say that?’

‘No, of course not. I just wanted to say hello and see how you were doing.’

‘So you called on my mobile?’

‘You never answer the other one.’

I decided not to argue the point. Instead I just said, ‘Well, we don’t need to talk long. It’s very early for you to be phoning. Is everything OK?’

‘You’re always in a such a hurry. We haven’t talked for days. Did I tell you about Joan? I did, didn’t I? How are you? How is the house? Are you using earphones? You should at least be using earphones.’ There were so many thoughts, most of them anxious, coursing through my mother’s mind that, like a cat chasing its tail, she was forever going round in circles.

‘What does Gabriel think about it? He must be pleased for you. I know he worried. He didn’t understand why you wouldn’t take what was after all your fair share . . .’

Of course I was grateful to have a mother, almost any mother tended to be better than no mother and my mother was better than most. I just wish she wouldn’t insist on seeing the sun shining from my behind even when I was sitting on it. It made for unrealistic expectations. Any question posed by her, however harmless, made me determined to give nothing away other than name, rank and number. The answers to her questions now were, ‘I am fine. The house is wonderful and Gabriel thinks so too.’

See, that wasn’t so hard. But it was. Give away that much and what next? Would the massed armies of motherly love batter down the walls around my heart? Then there would be no telling where it would end.

‘Did you say you were using your earphones?’

‘No. What did you say to Uncle Ian about Gabriel and me?’

‘About you and Gabriel? I don’t think I’ve said anything at all other than that I always liked him and that I never did understand why you parted. Why do you ask?’

I sighed. ‘You’ve encouraged him, Uncle Ian I mean, that’s the problem. He’s running out of work on my home and I’m worried he’s planning on moving on to my heart. It’s bad enough that he wants me to be happy without him asking me to be in love too.’

My mother’s reply was drowned out by a man’s voice bellowing, ‘Fine. Good idea. Let me help you pack.’

I had met Archie Fuller at Number 4 and Jenny Howell at Number 5 and I had waved at a distance to a couple of other residents of the square, but apart from being nearly mown down by their large environmentally unfriendly car I was yet to be formally introduced to the family at Number 12. I had seen a dark-haired man with a face that, at least early in the morning, looked as if someone had slept in it, come out of the gate and get into the large black car, and once or twice I had spotted a blonde woman pottering in the small front garden or leaving with a tan briefcase that I had rather admired. There was a little girl too, but I had only seen her through the windows.

It was a woman’s voice next and it was shrill with fury. ‘You bastard! You complete and utter pig!’

The window slammed shut. A bird trilled. The soft breeze gave the cherry petals a ride across the cobbles.

‘Are you there?’ my mother asked. ‘You really shouldn’t be talking on your mobile.’

I turned the key in the lock and for a moment I remained on the doorstep. Like a vampire who had received a standing invitation, I still could not quite believe I had the right to come and go as I pleased. The builders had left for the day. Apart from a slight clanging coming from the radiator on the landing and some creaking in the wooden panels, residual noises like the gurgling of a stomach after an upsetting meal, the little house was quiet. Quiet and all mine. As I kicked off my shoes I admired the way the evening sun shone through the leaves of the evergreen clematis, reflecting on to the paler green of the walls, turning the hallway into a glen.

It had seemed an unnecessary expense to rent somewhere while the work on the house was being carried out so once the basics had been done I had camped in a small room at the top of the house. Builders like to start from the top and work down but I had persuaded them to leave that room be once the rewiring had been carried out. I liked it up there, apart but not isolated from the rest of the house. As I walked up there now I wondered who had lived in my room. The wallpaper was in bad shape and some of it was peeling but what was there was beautiful. Branches of flowering pink cherry trees reached skywards against a pale yellow background. Bronze-coloured birdcages hung from the branches but the birds themselves, pearlescent moon-white, were outside of the cages, flying free. My room had been shut up all day and the air inside felt depleted as if there weren’t quite enough for a decent intake of breath. A bluebottle was panicking, buzzing hither and thither, bashing its unlovely body against the windowpanes. I walked across the worn floorboards and tugged open the sash window.

‘And please arrange for your furniture to be removed at your earliest convenience; I never could abide white leather sofas.’ It was that same loud voice that I had heard some minutes earlier, and, curious, I leant out of the window.

He was standing in the doorway of Number 12. From here it looked as if he were grinning in an exaggerated way. The pretty blonde who I had seen in the garden was marching down the short front path, pulling a suitcase. As she reached the gate she paused, as if she might be waiting for him to come after her, and when he spoke again she turned round eagerly.

‘Are you sure you won’t let me call you a cab?’ he asked.

‘Fuck you,’ she yelled. ‘Fuck you to hell and back.’

I could hear in her voice that she was crying. The man with the slept-in face looked as if he were about to go after her but then he seemed to think the better of it and went inside instead, slamming the door behind him.

I sat down at the small desk and switched on my laptop, dialling up Uncle Ian. Since the purchase of the house we had learnt together about the three subsections of the Georgian style: Palladian, Neoclassical and Regency, establishing that our little house came under the impossibly grand Palladian. We had learnt that the true determination of the style, whatever the size, was not pediments or pilasters or columns but the principle of proportion; the proportion of room length to height, of wall space to window space and of each individual façade. After that we had mugged up on Plato, having discovered in the course of our reading that his teachings lay at the root of much of the thinking behind the principles of the Georgian style. Recently our discussions had moved from the general to the particular. I had found some old slabs of marble of the kind you used to find in butcher’s shops and around washstands in an architectural salvage yard and thought they would do very well for the kitchen, but Uncle Ian had cautioned me against using marble as it was porous and would stain too easily. Stainless steel was much better, he said. I told him I thought stainless steel would look brutal. In the end we had made a deal. I could use the marble slabs in the kitchen as long as there was a good area around the sink in stainless steel.

Katarina had assured me that no detail was too tiny, too humdrum for Uncle Ian. She told me that since the whole project had started – the project being me, apparently, rather than just the house – he had regained some of his old vitality. He felt ‘affirmed’, she said. I thought I knew what she meant by that. It was something to do with calling out into the wilderness, ‘Can anybody hear me?’ And having someone answer, ‘Yes, yes, I hear you.’ I had thought it strange that a man like uncle Ian could feel the need to call out in the first place but then I had realised that it had to do with age. If the past was another country then old age was another world, one to which few of us wanted to go even for a visit. When we were young and needed we resented the claims on our time and energy, yet as we grew old and people were looking past us as if we had already moved into the shadows, all we really yearned for was to be needed. So mindful of this I had taken to starting most of our conversations with the words, ‘I need your advice . . .’ But now the house was almost finished and I was searching my brain for something new to tell him, to ask him about, something relevant to the project but which preferably did not involve soft furnishings.

I dialled him up and Pow! I shied back as his face burst into close-up. I never got used to the way that happened. I imagined sometimes that he sat waiting, stiff and straight-backed in front of his laptop, that gaped open like a giant baby bird, always ready, always waiting for the next morsel.

‘Good evening, Eliza.’ His voice, as always when we spoke this way, was stately, as if he were appearing on television. ‘Are the kitchen units in? And the stainless steel looks good, yes?’

‘Really good.’

‘I thought it would. Not too, how did you put it, brutal?’

‘No. Quite pretty in fact. Maybe because it’s brushed steel and that . . .’ my words were interrupted by loud banging followed by a woman’s voice. ‘And this time it’s it, do you hear? I’m not coming back.’

‘What’s that?’ Uncle Ian asked me.

‘Oh, just some neighbours calling to each other. As I said . . .’

‘Come outside when I’m talking to you. I said, this time I’m not coming back. Never.’

The next morning was Saturday and I had only just shut the front door behind me on my way to get the newspapers when I heard my name called. It was Archie Fuller from Number 4. Archie had knocked on my door the day after I had moved in. It had been a quiet knock at first – the kind that made you wonder if you had just imagined it – escalating to the kind of loud banging normally associated with a fire. When I had opened the door, out of breath, having run from the top of the house, he had smiled blithely, and explained that he didn’t like using the bell, ‘in case it disturbed people’.

I had quickly realised that most people in the square avoided Archie Fuller. I guessed because he was old and lonely and never stopped talking and had unidentified stains down the front of his tweed sports jacket and insisted on planting busy lizzies in tubs made out of old beer-barrels outside his front door. At the same time, and as Jenny from Number 5 said, everyone agreed that he was ‘real’, ‘a character’ and ‘old school north London’ and there should be more like him to counteract the influx of ‘bankers and non-doms and property developers’. I thought they should take better care of Archie or else they might have to start hiring in picturesque ‘real’ people.