New Welsh Short Stories (7 page)

I held it up now in front of my eyes. Everything was blurry, the shapes and colours of the furniture and the carpet swam like things underwater and as I looked, very softly, very faintly, as if from another world,
The Bartered Bride
began to play.

My heart paused. I put the magnifying glass down and walked across the hall into the sitting room where the hi
-
fi was but the room was silent and cold
-
looking and exactly as I'd left it the Saturday before. I put my hand on the newel post of the banister and looked up into the stairwell. I went upstairs onto the landing. His bedroom door was closed. Beyond it, the music played.

‘Dad?'

I stood with my palm on the fingerplate. My heart galloped, waited. I wanted so much to see him on the other side, sitting on his bed with his feet crossed at the ankles, eyes closed, left arm conducting. I turned the doorknob and stepped into the room and there was his cleaning lady. She shrieked, dropped her duster, her can of Mr Sheen. ‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I didn't mean to frighten you.'

Her name was Vlad
e
ˇ
na, I knew that.

The day Dad went into hospital I'd left a note for her on the kitchen table so she'd know the reason for his absence when she came. I told her now that Dad had died just over a month ago. I apologised that I hadn't thought of letting her know.

She looked cross, offended, upset. She picked up her duster and the can of Mr Sheen and snapped the lid back on it. ‘I think he is still in the hospital. I am taking key from under pot.'

‘Yes. I'm sorry.'

It seemed rude to say I hadn't noticed that she'd come between my visits, that the house had always looked the same to me, as clean and tidy as it had always been. ‘I'm Philip,' I said.

She had dry plum
-
coloured hair and wore a pair o
f
blue towelling mules and grey tracksuit bottoms, a T
-
shirt with some writing on it, a pair of yellow rubber gloves. I had always imagined, I suppose, a small elderly lady in a housecoat.

I pointed to the little CD machine on Dad's bedside table where
The Bartered Bride
had come to an end.

‘Do you like Smetana?'

‘Yes, I like.'

Downstairs I made us some tea and paid her for the hours she'd spent in the house since Dad died. I told her how much my father had liked having her come and clean the house. I didn't know if this was true but it seemed to me he would have enjoyed the scent of Cif and Windex and Mr Sheen. In his darkened and deadened world those things would have been a pleasure to him.

I confessed to having always assumed she was a little old lady.

‘I
am
little old lady. Forty
-
three in one month. Can I smoke? Can we go outside?'

In the garden she said Dad was a very nice gentleman. She was sorry to know he'd died. She called him Mr Alan. Her English was thickly accented, her voice raspy. I remembered she'd been the one who'd told Dad about the shoe museum in Zlín. Had she ever been to Zlín?

‘Zlín?' She blew out a long rough plume of smoke. ‘I am born in Zlín.' Crooked, slightly stained teeth. Maroon hair bright and harsh in the sun.

Had she been to the museum herself?

‘Of course. Many time.'

I asked her about the factory, the shop. I asked her about the Communist shoes. ‘Bad?'

She pulled a face. ‘Very bad.'

Did she know if Smetana's slippers were elasticated? She shook her head. She wasn't sure. Maybe.

‘My father wanted to see them. And King Wencelas's riding boots. But when we got there the museum was closed.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘He tell me.' She said it was a big shame. ‘Bad timing, I think.'

I told her I'd been steeling myself to sort through the house. ‘You know – one pile Keep, one pile Throw. Charity Shop. House Clearance.'

‘Difficult,' she said.

‘Yes.'

We walked through the rooms together. I showed her Dad's violin.

‘Keep,' she said.

‘Yes. Keep.'

In the dining room she pointed to a blue
-
and
-
white jasperware vase on the mantlepiece. ‘Also keep.'

‘No, you have it,' I said.

‘Oh no, no. No, Mr Philip. No.'

‘No really. I want you to.'

I gestured around and said she could have other things too if she liked them. My heart after all its pausing and galloping and waiting was beating fast again. I wondered if it showed. Vlad
e
ˇ
na seemed reluctant to accept anything. She seemed embarrassed by the idea. She tipped her head on one side, like a bird, as if scrutinising me, as if trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

‘Sure?'

‘Yes,' and although she still seemed uncomfortable she eventually let me, after a lot of persuasion, draw up a list: the vase and the small television from his bedroom and the computer. His kettle and his Morphy Richards blender, a canteen of Arthur Price stainless steel cutlery, his Bialetti coffee
-
maker, a set of felt
-
backed table mats with pictures of
Welsh castles on them, a seagrass laundry hamper, his Dyson vacuum cleaner, a pair of 1960s Danish kitchen chairs. Some napkins and some tablecloths, some towels and linens and various terracotta plant pots from the back garden. We would meet here again at the end of the following week. She would bring a car.

It was weird, I said, that our paths had never crossed till now. Her Thursdays and my Saturdays. She laughed.

‘Weird, yes. Crazy.'

All I can say is that I liked her straightaway.

I liked her raspy voice and her gaudy hair, I liked the loudness of her shriek when I walked into the bedroom, I liked how cross she'd been that I hadn't told her about Dad. I liked the short choppy way she spoke and the way she'd called herself a little old lady and had to be cajoled into accepting the things from the house. All I can say is, I was really looking forward to seeing her again.

I had the best week since before Dad died. I went into work. I made calls, I sent emails, I talked to people. I filed my first story in over a month. People said I looked like I was doing well, and I said, yes, I was doing a lot better, and when I said it, I thought about my last day with Dad in the hospital, his barmy last
-
minute attempts at matchmaking and I know this sounds mad but it seemed to me that in all his anxious confusion he'd managed somehow to leave me a sort of meandering breadcrumb trail that I'd been supposed to find and follow.

The day before I was due to meet Vlad
e
ˇ
na again, I got my hair cut, I went shopping: I bought a new sweater, new socks, new jeans. In the men's department at John Lewis, for £98.99, I replaced my old loafers with a pair of brown Timberland Earthkeepers® Stormbuck plain toe lace
-
up shoes. At the last minute, from the flower stand at Victoria, I bought a bunch of yellow tulips.

She was early, waiting when I arrived.

She was smoking, her hair was tied up in a high ponytail, she wore a white padded coat like a duvet. She smiled curtly at me and seemed embarrassed all over again about what we were doing here. Everything about her was awkward and prickly and self
-
conscious and shy and whatever connection I'd thought had sprung up between us a week ago had somehow vanished and I felt foolish in my new clothes. I moved the yellow tulips behind my back and if
Vlad
e
ˇ
na saw them, she didn't say anything. She dropped her cigarette and ground it with her heel and lit another and in between she cocked her head over towards the battered pale blue Peugeot in the driveway and the serious
-
faced man inside it with black hair and a large moustache I hadn't seen till now.

‘Jakub,' she said in her short choppy way. ‘Very shy.
Very awful English.'

Jakub. Oh.

I hadn't ever imagined there would be a Jakub; instead I had wrapped the kitchen utensils she'd chosen in tissue paper and swathed the computer and the television in a pair of velvet curtains because even though we hadn't included them on her list, I thought she might like them.

I'd packed the other things into cardboard boxes and plastic crates and put them in the hall next to the front door ready for her to take away. I now wheeled the Dyson vacuum cleaner out from under the stairs to join them and brought down the piles of towels and bedlinen that had been set aside upstairs. I went round the garden and gathered up the plant pots she'd eventually agreed to accept. In the driveway I could see Jakub putting down the back seat of their car to make room for everything while at the door I took off my now slightly muddy new shoes and went into the kitchen. At the sink I brushed off the cobwebs and dried leaves and bits of loose earth from the pots and pushed them into the waste disposal and ran the water on top of them. Through the window I watched Jakub moving to and fro between the front door and the car.
Vlad
e
ˇ
na stood silently behind me and I handed her the clean pots to take out. She smelled nice, a mixture of smoke and a powdery scent.

When everything was out of the hall and off the front step and into their delapidated car Jakub roped the tailgate to the back bumper so it was pulled down over all the stuff piled into the back, and when he'd secured the kitchen chairs to the roof
-
rack with an arrangement of bungee cords, the two of them drove away.

I stood at the open door and watched them go. Jakub took the speed bumps carefully. One, two, three, four.
The chairs bounced a little. I could see Vlad
e
ˇ
na's garish hair, the shoulders of her puffy white coat. Briefly they waited at the flashing lights of the Pelican crossing and then Jakub steered them around the curve in the road and their pale blue car disappeared and I turned back into the clean and silent house, which was where I discovered that along with the vase and the electrical goods and the kitchen utensils, the chairs and the curtains and the laundry hamper, the towels and linens and the plant pots and various other miscellaneous objects I'd added onto the original list and put into the boxes at the door for
Vlad
e
ˇ
na, she and Jakub had also taken my brand new size 11 Timberland Earthkeepers® Stormbuck plain toe lace
-
up shoes.

In the quiet and emptied hallway of my father's house I stood in my seven
-
league socks. I couldn't quite bring myself to believe it. I went into every room. I looked in the kitchen, the sitting room, the dining room, the study, the small laundry, both bathrooms, all the bedrooms. I went back to the front door. I even went outside and walked into the street and stood in the traffic, scanning the tarmac, the four evenly spaced brick
-
coloured speed bumps, the Pelican crossing up ahead but there was nothing.

I put the tulips in a jug and took them upstairs to Dad's bedroom.

In my stockinged feet I lay down on his bed and in the bright daylight I folded my arms across my chest and closed my eyes. Behind the lids, in the darkness, I could see the orange rectangle of his window, the black bars of the small individual panes and in the blotchy dark it felt like
everything
, absolutely everything in my whole entire life, had been leading me to this
exact
moment – Helen, and Dave Crater, and all the big and small surprises of the last few strange weeks in Zlín and Norman Park and the hospital and the house had somehow produced it, and none of it had been a breadcrumb trail, it had all been a slowly advancing length of horrible tangled knitting, impossible for me now to go anywhere or do anything; as if I had lost, not just my shoes, but everything.

In one of the neighbouring gardens a lawnmower hummed and from somewhere farther away the slightly creepy chimes of an ice
-
cream van floated closer. I wondered miserably if there was any way I could cram my feet into any of Dad's shoes and make it home, maybe the grey nylon webbing of his Clarks
Wayfarers
would be stretchy enough for me to get them part of the way on and I could stamp down the heels and wear them like a kind of synthetic clog and shuffle up the road to the station. Even more miserably I wondered how things would feel if
I went to work in the morning and sat down at my desk and prepared to begin the day, and then through the hum of the lawnmower and the weird off
-
kilter tinkling of the ice
-
cream van there came the ringing of Dad's phone from downstairs in the hall where a week ago I'd picked up his bat
-
sized magnifying glass and peered through it at the world, and it was Jakub.