Moving On (22 page)

Jenny spent the worst week she could ever remember after Karen, Bill and baby Angela left. She had never known Tom to be so irrit-able or short-tempered.

He complained all the time that he was bored, and nothing she did seemed to please him. He said that his leg was hurting and that he couldn’t get comfortable in his armchair or in bed, but he wouldn’t take the painkillers the hospital had prescribed.

‘I don’t believe in them,’ he stated. ‘You take pills for one thing and you then have to take some other pills to counteract what the first lot did. I’d sooner grin and bear it.’

‘Well then, I wish you would try grinning,’ Jenny told him. ‘At the moment you are scowling all the time like some old gargoyle.’

Tom gave her a withering look. ‘Thank you for being so understanding.’

‘I do understand and I know you must be in pain and discomfort with that splint contraption on your leg. That’s the reason the hospital recommended those painkillers. They will help to reduce the inflammation as well as make the pain more bearable,’ she added as she took away the pills and glass of water she’d brought for him.

Even though he was in pain Tom was restless. He couldn’t sit still for a minute and mooched round the flat picking things up and putting them down and constantly dropping one of his crutches in the process. Often he was unable to pick it up again for fear of overbalancing so Jenny had to stop what she was doing to go and help him.

On Tuesday the weather improved. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining from a clear blue sky so Jenny suggested a walk.

‘How do you think I can go for a walk with this lot,’ he said, struggling to lift up his leg encased in its splints.

‘Well, I thought we could take a short stroll along the promenade, sit in one of the shelters and watch what is happening on the river.’

Although he scoffed at the idea, after they’d had lunch he said he thought a walk along the prom might be a good plan.

Their walks became a regular feature of their day.

Sometimes they took them in the morning, sometimes later in the day. A lot depended on what Tom wanted to do. His confidence about walking improved rapidly and by the end of the week they were taking some really long walks along the promenade and his mood was slightly improved.

When they returned on Friday morning, Jenny opened the door to Tom’s flat and saw that someone had slipped a note under the door.

She waited until Tom had flopped down into his armchair before going into the kitchen to switch the kettle on and read it.

To her astonishment it was from Bill.

‘I’m in your flat finishing off the decorating,’ it said. ‘Don’t let Tom know. Pop along when you can manage to do so.’

She wanted to rush and see him right away but an inner caution made her carry on as if nothing had happened. She had left their midday meal in the oven and, as soon as she had cleared away after they had eaten, she went along to her own flat on the pretext of taking the rubbish out to the bin.

Tom was so tired after their walk and a good meal that he only grunted. He had switched on the television and was engrossed in one of his favourite programmes.

Jenny gasped when she let herself into her flat. All the dust sheets had disappeared and the steps from which Tom had fallen were leaning against one wall. The ceiling had been freshly coated and there was a strong smell of emulsion paint.

She found Bill in the kitchen making a cup of coffee.

‘Bill, this is a tremendous surprise. How did you manage to get in?’

He grinned as he gave her a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek. ‘I used Karen’s keys.’

‘Why didn’t you let us know you were coming? I would have had a meal waiting for you. Are you on your own? What on earth made you come? Are Karen and baby Angela all right?’

Jenny’s questions tumbled out in such quick-fire succession that Bill had no chance to answer any of them.

‘Coffee?’ he asked.

‘Well, yes, why not.’

‘Why not indeed. After all it is your coffee. I’m afraid you’ll have to drink it black because there’s no milk.’

‘If you wait a minute I can pop back to Tom’s flat and get some,’ Jenny said, moving towards the door.

‘No, don’t do that. I don’t want Tom to know I’m here, leastways not for the moment. I don’t want him to discover I’m finishing off the job he started until it’s all completed, in case he starts to protest and make a fuss.’

‘He probably will make a fuss,’ Jenny said ruefully.

‘By the time he finds out it will be too late for him to do anything about it though,’ Bill said, smiling. ‘I take it he’s dozing at the moment?’ he added.

‘Either that or he’s engrossed in something on TV, but he won’t be for long if he finds me missing.’

‘Well, you get back to his flat and make sure you keep him occupied. I’m planning on getting everything down here completed and all cleaned up by tomorrow evening.’

‘You mean you are staying the night?’

‘I am and what’s more I’m sleeping in your bed, so I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all. What about food and everything?’ she asked.

‘Don’t worry about me. I brought sandwiches with me and I intend to pick up some milk when I go out for a pub meal this evening.’

‘That hardly seems right,’ Jenny protested. ‘At least let me feed you.’

‘If you do that then Tom will know I’m here and we both know he will protest strongly about me working on your flat.’

‘So you are going to sneak off tomorrow as soon as you’ve finished and leave me to face the music are you?’ Jenny said with a laugh.

‘Not a bit of it. When I’ve finished I’ll let Tom know I’m here and keep my fingers crossed that when he sees the results he’ll be so pleased that it’s all finished that he won’t be annoyed.’

‘Well, I suppose there’s not much I can do in that case except say thank you, Bill. One thing I must insist on though is that I go out and shop for you tomorrow morning.’

‘I see. You don’t want me wasting any precious time on such frivolities as eating or shopping.’

‘You are quite right,’ she agreed, her eyes twinkling. ‘Don’t worry,’ she added as she moved towards the door. ‘I’ll be very discreet and I won’t let on to Tom what you are doing. I’ll leave you to tell him when you’re finished.’

She was still smiling to herself as she went back to Tom’s flat. It was such a relief to know that the work on her place was being finished and that there would be no need to argue with Tom about who was going to do it. She couldn’t get over the fact that Bill had made his way into the building and been in her flat since early in the morning without her ever knowing.

By mid-afternoon the following day Bill had finished his self-imposed task and knocked on their door. Jenny had been waiting for this moment all day and her heart pounded when she heard him there.

‘Finished?’ she whispered as Tom called out to ask who it was when she went to answer it.

Bill nodded.

‘We have a visitor, look who’s here,’ Jenny said as she brought Bill into the sitting room.

‘Bill? Good grief, what are you doing here? Where’s Karen and the baby?’

‘Oh, they’re at home. I popped up on my own to see how you were,’ Bill said, grinning broadly as he shook hands with Tom.

‘Well, sit down and Jenny will make some tea; that is unless you’d sooner have a beer or a tot of whisky.’

‘No, no, tea will be fine. I’m driving so I won’t have anything stronger.’

‘A long way to come just for a cup of tea,’ Tom commented. ‘Did you have some other business in this area?’

‘Yes, I did as a matter of fact,’ Bill said as he sank into an armchair facing Tom. ‘I had a bit of tidying up to do.’

‘Oh?’ Tom looked mildly interested and waited for him to go on.

‘Yes, a flat that needed finishing off.’

‘Oh yes.’ For a moment Tom didn’t seem to understand what Bill was telling him. Then he frowned. ‘You don’t mean Jenny’s flat do you?’

‘The very same,’ Bill agreed as he took the cup of tea from Jenny and ladled two spoonfuls of sugar into it.

‘You knew about this?’ Tom pushed aside the tea that Jenny proffered to him and stared at her angrily.

‘Not until it was too late to do anything about it,’ she said mildly. ‘Isn’t it wonderful though to know that it is all finished and that the flat is all cleaned up.’

Tom didn’t answer, but his scowl deepened and Jenny tried to move on to other topics. She could see that he was angry and she wanted to divert his mind from what had happened. She began to make enquiries about the baby but Tom cut across her conversation almost as if she wasn’t there.

‘So Jenny asked you to come and do it and let you in and didn’t say a word about it to me,’ he said in an angry voice.

‘No, it had nothing to do with Jenny. It was Karen’s idea and when she put it to me I agreed with her wholeheartedly that it was the least we could do to help. I came up very early yesterday morning …’

‘Yesterday morning! You mean you’ve been here for almost two whole days and never once thought to come and ask me what my opinion was or what I had planned on doing in that flat.’

‘Well, it was obvious what you were planning to do,’ Bill said with a laugh.

‘Really?’

‘You were putting emulsion on the walls and ceiling and freshening up the paintwork. Not that it really needed doing because it was very clean.’

‘It needed doing,’ Tom said assertively.

‘I always think it’s a waste of time decorating before you sell because the new people always want to put their own stamp on the place and usually their ideas are different from yours.’

‘Probably your ideas about how it should be done are different to mine,’ Tom grumbled.

‘I think it was very kind of Bill to give up his weekend and do this for us,’ Jenny intervened, hoping to pour oil on troubled waters.

‘Well, you would, seeing as you asked him to come and kept the entire arrangement secret from me,’ Tom retorted.

‘No, Jenny didn’t ask me,’ Bill said firmly. ‘In fact when she found me in the flat working she was very surprised and wanted to come straight away and tell you but I persuaded her not to. I was hoping that it would be a pleasant surprise for you and that you would feel relieved because it wasn’t hanging over your head that it needed to be finished.’

Tom’s bad mood continued. Long after Bill had left he sat in a sullen brooding silence, not even reading the newspaper or watching television.

‘If you are feeling annoyed and have something to say then say it,’ Jenny stated when she asked him if he wanted a cup of tea and he didn’t even answer her.

‘What does it matter what I think or what I feel about things since you completely ignore my wishes,’ he retorted. ‘You knew damn well that I wanted to finish that decorating myself and yet you cajole Bill to come and do it without even a word to me.’

‘I also knew that you couldn’t do it and that you were worried about it. As a matter of fact, it was exactly as Bill told you. I didn’t ask him to come and I was astonished when I found him in my flat and realized he’d been working there practically all day.’

‘A likely story,’ Tom said in a scathing voice. ‘Anyway, if it is true then why the hell didn’t you come straight back up and tell me that he was here and what he was planning on doing.’

‘Bill asked me not to do that. He wanted to finish the decorating and then tell you. He thought it would be a lovely surprise for you.’

‘It was a surprise all right! What does he know about decorating? I bet it’s one hell of a mess down there.’

‘No, he’s finished everything off beautifully. Why don’t you come and look for yourself?’

‘Not much point if it is all done,’ Tom said tetchily. ‘It’s too late now to make any changes. We’ll just have to hope that nobody notices how amateurish the painting is.’

Jenny bit her lip and said nothing. She could see that it was pointless arguing with Tom. He was obviously hurt and annoyed by what had happened even though she and Bill had intended it to be for the best.

It was almost a week before Tom finally agreed to go and look at the flat. They had been for a walk along the promenade and for the first time in days held a normal conversation.

As usual he had tired fairly quickly and they had sat down for a while in one of the shelters out of the hot sun.

There had been plenty of activity on the river to watch as well as children playing on the shore and paddling in the water. It was so hot that she helped Tom to remove his linen jacket and then offered to go down on to the shore, where there was an ice-cream van parked, and get them each a cone.

She had expected him to refuse but to her surprise he had seemed to be keen for her to do so.

When she returned with it he thanked her and seemed to be more relaxed than he had been since he came home from hospital. As they sat there enjoying the activity going on all around them, Tom talked about things in general and then finally about the flat.

‘We’ll go and check it over when we get back,’ he pronounced, ‘make sure it’s ready to go on the market.’

‘On the market?’ Jenny looked at him in a rather puzzled way.

‘That’s our next step, isn’t it, since my flat is preferable to yours because of the second bedroom.’

‘Well, that’s quite true but there’s no hurry to get rid of mine immediately, is there?’

‘No point in wasting money paying maintenance charges on both,’ he said decisively.

Tom was strongly in favour of putting Jenny’s flat on the market as soon as possible, but she was reluctant to do this. During the past week she had spent as much time as she could in it, usually when Tom was sleeping, and her fondness for it increased and she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to sell it.

She had liked it from the first moment she’d moved in there and now it seemed like a haven of peace after the unpleasant atmosphere in Tom’s flat. Furthermore, it contained all her own possessions, which she kept rearranging to make the most of the space and appearance of the flat.

However, to humour Tom, she agreed they should take a look on their return from their walk. He glanced round critically and Jenny waited for some adverse comment about Bill’s work but there was none. Instead he seemed to be summing up as many of the good aspects of the flat as possible. He commented on the lightness of the rooms, the view from the window and so on.

When they went back to his flat he immediately found a pen and paper and while she was making them a cup of tea he was busy concocting an advert to go into the local newspaper.

‘I think we should put this in the
Liverpool Daily Post
and some of the national newspapers such as the
Observer
or
The Times
and perhaps the
Manchester Guardian,
’ he told her as he passed it over to her so that she could read what he had written.

‘It’s fine but there’s no hurry to do anything at the moment is there,’ she murmured in a non-committal voice as she handed it back to him.

‘It’s about the only thing we can do at the moment since you refuse to go ahead with our wedding plans while I’m on crutches,’ he said brusquely.

‘That wasn’t quite what I said,’ she retorted quietly. ‘I do think it would be better to wait until you are able to walk without them though. It is only a matter of a couple more weeks now,’ she added in as bright a voice as she could manage.

‘How do you know that? My leg is still so damn painful that they may decide I need further surgery or something.’

Jenny said nothing. Indeed, her thoughts were not so much on Tom and the delay in fixing their forthcoming wedding date as on forfeiting her flat. She hadn’t dreamed that she would feel like this; it wasn’t possessiveness so much as realizing what a wonderful haven it was from the rest of the world and one she didn’t want to lose.

‘Let’s fix a price for the flat. I think we should ask the same as you paid for it or perhaps a bit more?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Jenny promised.

‘There’s nothing to think about,’ Tom said tetchily. ‘Let’s settle it now and then you can take the advert along to the newsagents in the morning when you go shopping. I’ll note down the newspapers we want it to go in and then if you ask the newsagent he will contact them all for you, so tell him you want three insertions in each of them. That should bring it to the attention of a good number of people and we’ll wait and see what happens.’

Jenny felt herself growing angry. It was her flat so surely it should be her decision about when they sold. After all, there was no hurry and once it was gone she would have nowhere to live even if she needed it. True, she was moving in with Tom, but his flat was in his name and he hadn’t said a word about making the ownership a joint one. Where would she stand if something happened to him or if they should decide to part company?

She wanted to talk this through with Tom but she was afraid that while he was in such an antagonistic frame of mind he wouldn’t be prepared to be reasonable. Come to that, she reflected, she wasn’t in the mood herself to discuss such a delicate subject.

Taking the sheet of paper from him she folded it over and placed it in her handbag.

‘We haven’t agreed on the price,’ he pointed out.

‘No, I’ll think about it and put a figure on it in the morning,’ she prevaricated.

All she wanted to do at the moment was to end this conversation so that she could give herself time to think and decide whether or not she actually wanted to sell her flat. There really was no hurry. They didn’t need the money.

‘It’s a very good time for us to sell,’ Tom went on as if determined to pursue the matter. ‘I can always be here to show prospective buyers around and talk over any points they raise; it won’t interfere with anything you might be doing like shopping or going to the hairdressers or anything else.’

Jenny didn’t answer. If she had to sell the flat then she’d prefer to deal with any potential buyers herself but she suspected the truth was she didn’t want to sell it.

She toyed with the idea of asking such a high price for the flat that no one would even consider coming to look at it. But that would only prolong things because as soon as Tom saw the advert in the paper he would argue that she was being ridiculous and telephone the newspapers and ask them to correct the asking price.

There must be some other way, she reasoned, and wondered if it would be better to rent it out as a furnished flat. If she did that on a fairly short-term lease then she would know that it was always there for her should she ever want to move back in.

It was an alternative, although she had to admit that she didn’t like the idea of other people, complete strangers, living in her flat and using all her equipment and even sleeping in her bed.

The only other ruse was to say she had put the adverts in the papers even though she’d not done so. Tom would find out eventually, of course, but it would give her time to decide what she really wanted to do.