Pleasure and a Calling (10 page)

The episode had ruined all thoughts of a quiet hour in the library.

Back at the office I found Wendy, my admin, cutting a cake for Josh’s birthday. ‘I did tell you, Mr Heming,’ she clucked. ‘
Friday
.’

Josh grinned as uncomfortable a grin as an eighteen-year-old could muster in the circumstance of being fussed over by three women at various stages of what he would consider old age.

‘So you did,’ I smiled, ‘and indeed here I am. On Friday.’

Zoe gave me a doubtful look and poured me a cup of coffee, brushing my fingers with hers as she handed it to me. I said a few words about Josh’s excellent progress, that he was a credit to his parents (whom I had once seen from a distance), and that the firm’s long-standing policy of providing our trainee with a course of driving lessons – generously inaugurated in my own time under old Mr Mower, about whom no one present but me had more than the vaguest inkling – would be set in motion the moment someone, perhaps Wendy, got round to arranging it. To the surprise of no one but Zoe, who feared I had forgotten, I reached into my desk drawer and presented Josh with his own
pair of opera glasses. Everyone clapped, no one more than Zoe, who shook her head as if I had been teasing everyone all along. The brief celebration petered out when a young couple came in off the street looking for a starter home. The phones started ringing, and Katya took the opportunity to debrief me in the back office on the day’s viewings and new business.

But my mind kept returning to Sharp and the young woman with the bicycle. Sharp was a textbook philanderer and predator, the house in Raistrick Road his secret love nest. Indeed it seemed more likely now that this house, too, had been divided into flats, and that Sharp rented one of them for precisely this purpose. I thought of the girl’s face – hopeful and eager, and yet innocent too. Perhaps she didn’t know he was married.

But then perhaps he
wasn’t
married. Maybe the Judith Sharp the man lived with was his sister, who had previously been married but had reverted to her maiden name and asked her brother to move in – perhaps following the break-up of his own marriage – to help pay the mortgage.

I knew nothing. And wasn’t this what Aunt Lillian meant when she said things were not always as they seemed? That I had made something of nothing? That the glimpse of a woman laying her hand on a man’s was as likely a sign of sympathy as passion? Indeed. Which is why I have made it my business to look further into things, to do good and put things right that are wrong. Perhaps my aunt would have died more peacefully had she condemned a little less and loved a little more.

T
HE WEEKEND IS NOT
ideal for snooping. People come and go more randomly but less interestingly. It is only good for following someone if you want to see the inside of a supermarket or garden centre. So, as the next day was Saturday, I decided to leave things a couple of days, waiting till Monday before taking a chance on an early-morning stakeout of Boselle Avenue.

I arrived at 6.45 and edged my car under the trees just in time to see a woman – presumably Judith – closing the wooden gate of number 4. It was barely light yet, but I saw she was a redhead, mid-forties and dressed for the City in suit and heels, and carrying a cream raincoat and a laptop bag. There was nowhere she could be going but the station, presumably for the 6.55 to Liverpool Street. An hour later, the postlady arrived pulling her red cart. Another half-hour passed before Sharp himself emerged, dressed as he had been on Friday but wearing a scarf and carrying a backpack. I got out my phone and took a picture of him. There was a new white 4×4 parked in front of the garage but he was walking. I got out of the car and followed. He too went
to the station, straight through the barrier with a season ticket. Was he travelling south or north? South, I guessed, scanning the timetable: three minutes. I bought a return that would take me three stops down the line, went through the barrier and crossed the bridge. There he was, buying a Danish. I sat on the bench and sneaked another picture of him. The train arrived. Sure enough it turned out he was only going as far as the next stop – nine minutes away at East Wickley. From there a short walk took us to the art school and teacher-training college. But between the two small campuses on the same road sat the town’s further-education college. Here he stopped, unlooped his scarf and plugged earphones in from a music player, clearly turning himself into a jaunty lecturer showing a youthful profile to the students of hairdressing and leisure management who attended here alongside A-level dropouts and adult learners taking IT classes.

I took the next train back up into town. I supposed that Sharp worked part-time, hence his being free on a Friday afternoon. Judging by the timing, he would have caught the train back to town after his morning shift. But why take the train, which then meant coming through town and walking across the Common, when there was a bus service direct from his college to the house in Raistrick Road? But then I remembered the library. Of course. He must have been returning books.

Back in town, I called the college office, approximating my voice to a younger person’s (I’d heard enough of Josh to carry it off). ‘Yeah, hi, really sorry to bother you but, like, I’m supposed to see Douglas Sharp about my essay after his class, but I can’t remember what time he said it was?’

‘Would you like to speak to him?’

‘God, no, I’ll be in more trouble if he thinks I’ve forgotten.’

‘OK, well, he has a lecture at ten and a class straight afterwards.’

‘I think it was this afternoon … History, yeah?’

‘History? He teaches English.’

‘English. Yeah, that’s what I mean.’

‘Well, Mr Sharp has nothing timetabled for this afternoon. He’s just Monday and Friday mornings and his Wednesday afternoon lecture.’

‘Cool. That’ll be it. Thanks.’

I supposed I had at least two hours. I headed back to Boselle Avenue and let myself in. There was a lingering smell of toast and cigarette butts. I leafed through the morning’s post in the hall, all of it addressed to Judith – bills, a catalogue, junk mail – then I put the kettle on for tea. I flicked through a diary on the kitchen table and a file of papers I found in a writing desk in the dining room. Here was their marriage certificate – dating from two years ago – plus bank statements, mortgage documents in her name and a credit agreement for the 4×4 out on the drive. There were divorce papers from Judith’s previous marriage, and various older letters to addresses in London, where it seemed she had lived and worked back then. A photo album showed snaps of the couple holding champagne flutes in some island paradise, draped in garlands and displaying their wedding rings. I moved from room to room, taking pictures and video. Upstairs was Sharp’s study, piled with books and papers. The desk was littered – pens, CDs, a pack of paracetamol, a brown apple core, a globular paperweight recycled from green bottles. On the wall were photographs taken at bookish functions and a chart showing garden birds. Under the desk was a pack of flyers for a reading he had hosted the previous July at the bookshop in town.

I sat low in his chair, my feet planted on the laminate wooden floor as I scrolled through his emails and checked his bookmarks and browsing history – news providers, internet porn, a ‘salon’ celebrating modern literature, a dating site, online poker. Amid a shelf of movies were three or four homemade DVDs in plastic sleeves labelled with their subjects – Forssinger, Gates, McLarrily. These I copied on to my memory stick and replaced on the shelf.

Of course I had no idea what I was looking for, but I did feel I was getting some measure of this Sharp. He was working in a job beneath his qualifications; he had married a woman eight years his senior; he was a magnet for debt; he was a philanderer … what else?

How did the girl on the bicycle fit in? I’d only seen her once, but her image floated into my mind again and my heart turned to marshmallow. I wondered about her own place – a flat, I guessed – and tried to imagine her in it, moving from room to room, relaxing in front of the TV, dancing in the kitchen to music. I closed my eyes. I felt that if I lay on the bed here for one moment I would be lost in the dream of her – that the Sharps would arrive back and find me there, an unwakeable estate agent, like someone in a fairy story.

Had I forgotten something? It wasn’t until I came downstairs and saw a vet’s leaflet among others on a chair by the phone – ‘National Flea Month’ – that I realized what it was. Where was the dog? There was no sign of it: no bowl out in the kitchen, no dog lead or rubber chew or other doggy paraphernalia. And, come to think of it – I sniffed the air – no doggy smell.

I opened the side door that led to the utility room and then another door to the garage. I switched on the light. Here was a chic pale-blue car, a stepladder, a golf club, shears, a lawnmower,
a tree-saw hanging on the wall. The car would be Judith’s. The mower and shears, judging by the state of the garden – both back and front – were not often used.

I turned off the light, washed and dried my teacup and left the house as I found it: frustrated. Strangely – or strangely for me – the more I knew about Sharp, the more I wanted to know about the girl. And, of course, the more I wanted to see her again.

A
T MIDDAY
I
DROVE
to the flat in Raistrick Road. What else could I do? No one showed up. I sat in the car watching for signs of life – a window opening, a shadow behind the curtains – but there was no one there. I returned to the office only when Katya called to remind me that we had a meeting at six with O’Deay’s, a firm of developers with a gated estate of retirement bungalows coming to market. I nodded my way through the meeting, allowing Katya to steer proceedings. Afterwards she suggested a drink, perhaps a bite to eat; we had other items of business to discuss, not least a proactive new strategy for the Cooksons. ‘They’re going to the Seychelles for ten days. We could get some buyers in while they’re away,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘They won’t do it. They’re afraid that we’ll walk dead leaves into the house. They think we won’t be able to switch their burglar alarm on and off. Anyway, selling isn’t their problem.’

I pleaded tiredness and raced in desperation back to Raistrick Road. My heart leapt when I saw that a downstairs light was on. But there was no cycle chained to the railings. Perhaps they had
taken it indoors. I took out my opera glasses and hunkered down in the car. Some time after eight a pizza delivery man arrived, his moped throbbing at the kerb as he mounted the steps with a box and rang the bell. At last. I rolled my car window down. A light went on in the hall and the door opened. The pizza man was in my line of vision as business was transacted but I distinctly heard a female voice and laughter as the box disappeared into the house and the door closed again. I waited. I felt nauseous as I imagined the two of them on the sofa sharing supper. At 10.35 the light went out. Then a landing light appeared, followed by a lamp in the bedroom. It wasn’t a flat then, as I’d thought, but a house. It somehow made things worse. The curtains glowed a deep red. But seconds later the place was in darkness. I wondered what excuse Sharp had given his wife. An educational conference? A sick friend?