Quiet Neighbors (7 page)

Seven

For the next few
hours Jude was underwater. Or no, not that exactly. More as if she'd been put in Plexiglas. She was the decoration in a paperweight, and everyone could see her and she could see out and she could almost hear too, but a dull plug of sour plastic filled her and a dome of it surrounded her and nothing could touch her through it and even if she hurled herself at a wall, nothing would shatter her free or even make a crack she could scream through.

As soon as the girl spoke, Lowell leapt to his feet and led her by one of her pale tapering hands to his chair. Was she warm enough? Could he put a hassock under her feet? She was fine; her ankles were fine. Lowell nodded, frowning. He knew she might want her feet up, but he didn't know why.

As she was settling herself back, patting the rosy cheek of the apple, Jude turned away—lurched away, really—and filled the kettle, splashing her face with cold water and drying it on the tea towel, always slightly sour from the way it hung in its damp folds from a cup hook.

“Tea?” she said, coming back with a smile.

The girl nodded. Her shoulders dropped; even her eyelids drooped as she relaxed, and she took a huge gusty breath in and almost laughed as she let it go again. All from a smile Jude didn't really mean.

“I was bricking it,” she said. “I nearly didn't come in.”

“My dear,” said Lowell, as he had to Jude so recently. “My dear.”

“Eddy,” the girl said. “Eddy Preston.”

“Preston?” said Lowell. He was searching her face so intently that Jude itched to remind him his spectacles were still halfway up his forehead. He could use them to take a better look.

“My step-dad,” said Eddy. “For a bit.” Jude watched the emotions passing over Lowell's face like clouds in a high wind. Disappointment then relief. Guilt, finally. “My mum,” Eddy went on, and then paused, Lowell still as a stone, waiting. “I'm Miranda's daughter.”

“But—” said Lowell, then caught it. “Miranda,” he repeated, and his cheeks showed a very faint pink flush. “Of course, dear me. My goodness. How is she? Is she
here
? Is she with you?”

Eddy's lids lifted again, her eyes larger than ever, and Jude knew what she was going to say. But Lowell kept the same mild expectant look on his face, and it hit him like an anvil.

“She died,” said Eddy. “Three weeks ago.”

Through all the hurt that was coming in the days ahead, the one thing that kept Jude from running away, even walking into the sea, was that right then—a moment after learning he had a child, the same second he learned his lover had died—Lowell remembered about
her
parents, about her. He flashed her a look of concern, just a flicker, before turning back to Eddy again.

“Why did she keep you from me?”

No
ums
and
ahhs
. No
dear me
this time.

Eddy shook her head, staring. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Miranda,” said Lowell again and then, “Didn't you ask?”

“I didn't bloody
know
,” said Eddy. “She only told me when she was dying.”

The water was starting to bubble.

“What do you take?” asked Jude, but Eddy didn't hear her; didn't answer anyway.

Then the kettle clicked off and Jude filled three mugs, pushed one into Lowell's hand, and set another one down beside the girl.

“I didn't know if you wanted sugar,” she said, “so I haven't stirred it.”

Eddy was staring at Lowell, who was staring back. They were drinking each other in. It had never seemed true enough to deserve becoming a cliché, but Jude understood it now.

“I always thought you were—” she said. “I mean, I thought
he
was dead. Then really late on her last night she told me, ‘Lowland Glen—it's a bookshop.' I just assumed it was the painkillers. Then a bit later she said, ‘Lowell is your father.' I didn't even put the two things together till days later. Lowell and Lowland. I Googled you.”

“Painkillers?” said Lowell.

“Cancer,” Eddy said. “Pancreas. She tried so hard. She wanted to see the baby.” She took two slow breaths, through pursed lips in a silent whistle, the kind of breaths learned in baby classes, then sipped the tea and gave Jude a watery smile. “Lovely,” she said. “Just how I like it.”

No one likes their tea half sugared and half not, Jude thought, and her heart softened. The poor kid was walking on her eyelashes, choking down horrible tea, scared to ask for anything.

“I'll leave you two to it,” she said, thinking it would be easier on the girl not to have two of them gawping at her. Telling herself that was what she was thinking anyway.

Last she heard as she turned the bend in the stairs was Lowell asking, “And is your, um, I mean, dear me, yes, are you all alone on this trip?”

Jude stopped.

“Trip?” said Eddy. Then she gave a little laugh. “My ‘um'? I'm not married or anything, if that's what you mean. It's just me.”

Jude started walking again and her feet on the bare wooden steps covered the voices even though the close walls deadened their echo.

She walked back and forth between the two front rooms and barely heard a murmur. Just once, Lowell's sharp bark of a laugh startled her, and she dropped the book she had reached for. It fell flat—
smack
—on the floor, and for a moment there was quiet downstairs.

“I'm okay!” she sang out and the murmuring began again.

She could no longer deny it, the thing she had been trying not to see. Joyce Carol Oates in Fiction, Daphne Du Maurier in Fiction; John Steinbeck in Literature. Mighty Hunters and Ladies Who Pen. She searched for Iris Murdoch as a litmus test but couldn't find any.

Engrossed, she had almost forgotten them when Lowell came and stood in the doorway. He had the dazed look of someone very drunk who can hold it well, or someone newly concussed and not diagnosed, still going about his business. Then he blinked and came back. He grinned at her.

“My dear, you have the most delightful streak of dirt on one cheek,” he said. “Let me.” He shook out a handkerchief and wound it round one finger, advancing. Jude wiped her face roughly with the back of her hand before he reached her. But the dazed look had come back and he didn't notice.

“I'm going to take Eddy—that's really her name, you know; it's not shortened from Edwina or Theresa. Extraordinary!—I'm going to take her round to Jamaica and make her rest.”

I walked there by myself when it was me, Jude thought but didn't let it show.

“Only, I wondered—could I borrow my spare key back? I'll get another cut of course as soon as I can slip up to Newton Stewart to the cobblers, but I don't want to leave the poor child stranded. Do you see?”

“Of course,” said Jude. Blood, she thought, was thicker than ink. And babies trump everything.

Stop it, she told herself. Don't be that person. Look where it led you last time.

“How long is she staying?” she asked, and then added hurriedly as she saw him frown, “She's Irish, right? What a journey in her condition. She'll need a good long break before she travels again.”

Lowell's brow cleared as he decided she was being kind.

“Northern Irish,” he said. “Miranda's family was from Cork, but she seems to have settled in Derry, of all places. Poor soul, poor soul. It's hard to believe. She was a good bit younger than me, you know.”

“But pancreatic,” said Jude. “That's one of the worst.”

“And as to ‘home',” Lowell said. “She's quite alone, you see. And she's on her gap year, as they say. Not twenty yet. Dear me. Quite alone. And I didn't want to push too hard too soon and startle her, but I really think, dear me, I really do think she might stay.”

Jude nodded. Of course she would stay. Who wouldn't? Nineteen, pregnant, and suddenly not alone after all. “I'll clear out soon as I can,” she said.

He came back without a hitch. “Not a bit of it. Why, the house is large even for three of us. No need at all, my dear. In fact, it'll be just like the old days. I had friends all around me in the good old days. Beach picnics, music parties, every room occupied.”

“But she's not just a friend, is she?” Jude said. “You and she need to … bond.”

“We've bonded!” said Lowell in a happy shout. “Already I feel I've known her all my life. She looks … ” He shook his head and his eyes were shining. His whole
face
was shining. “I'm a father and I'm going to be a grandfather in a month's time. We have a wonderful hospital at Ayr, although it's rather far away. Well, well. We shall just have to see what the doctor says. I shall ring and make an appointment.”

Jude dug in her dress pocket. She was wearing a smock today. Bell sleeves and ten cuff buttons, a square of embroidery on the front like a breast plate, and these capacious pockets. She held out her hand.

Lowell blinked.

“The key,” she said. “So Eddy's not stuck in the house.”

“Ah.” He took it and patted her hand. “Well, I'll probably stay with her, don't you know? There's not much on today and there's no foot trade when it's raining. I might just stay.”

Once they were gone, when Jude went downstairs again, she noticed the prized Audubon sitting not quite unwrapped on his desk where he had left it, the girl's half-empty mug on top and a drop of milky tea drying into its jacket in a tiny puckered dome.

She had found five volumes of Nevil Shute in various places and gathered them together in Fiction. (Fiction, not Literature. These were yarns as yarn-like as the tale of the burning plane, by her bed.) Five was a nice collection, she thought, and most were in good shape—although one had a bright yellow sticker on its jacket, proclaiming it to be “53”, whatever that meant—but she was almost sure she had glimpsed another in that bag protruding from low in the heap in the dead room …

It was disorganised and disorderly, a disgrace to library science, to go truffling after it. And she was at least as repelled as she was attracted to that lurking mountainous wrongness behind the locked door, crouched there like a toad, growing in the dark like a tumor.

She was close to nausea when she found herself sidling back in and feeling around for the light switch.

She was right. The bag—thin plastic, years old, and even crisper than it had begun—was just where she remembered it, and inside it, as well as the Jilly Cooper, there was indeed a garish, shiny-jacketed
On the Beach
. The same edition as the one upstairs, but this time without the sticker. Jude plucked it out, stiffened briefly as the toad resettled itself, and then bore the volume away upstairs to the others.

It was in good nick for its thirty years, none of its pages ever folded and no tears at the turn of the spine from being forced into an over-packed shelf. It was only a reprint for a book club, but book clubs back then put out well-made volumes, and it was still an attractive object to the right person. Jude flipped it open and saw that the owner had written his or her name on the flyleaf in that careful old-fashioned script so familiar to her from her grandmother's birthday cards:
T. Jolly
it said, in fountain pen ink. Jude wrote £5 in one corner with her soft pencil and flipped to the back flyleaf. She tutted. T. Jolly was a note-taker and had filled the back boards with his (or her) thoughts about
On the Beach
. Jude twirled the pencil like a six-shooter, rubbed out the
5
, wrote
2,
and inserted the book into the run, along with its stickered mate, between
No Highway
and
Requiem for a Wren
.

She worked steadily until half past four and then could no longer ignore her stomach rumbling. She would, she thought, stop in at the newsagents and buy a picnic of junk food to eat in her room, not get mixed up in the love-fest downstairs.

The fact was that without a store cupboard of oil, salt, pepper, flour, and all the things you never think of, without a sieve or a grater, it was pretty hard to make food up there, and she didn't know how long the four hundred might have to last her. Those women in the Anne Tyler stories didn't seem to need garlic presses or measuring spoons. Maybe they ate ready-made from the cook-chill, but Anne Tyler didn't seem the type.

Before she left, she took a look around and, despite everything, felt a small nut of satisfaction, plump and shiny, inside her. She'd winkled out all the short story anthologies and semi-fictional memoirs and, feeling less compunction about Lowell than before, had made her own decision about the Ladies and the Mighty Hunters, Fiction and Literature. Doris and Toni were in; Nevil and Nick were out. And every book she touched got a wipe and felt the soft caress of her pricing pencil.

If only, Jude thought as she killed the light and sank the room into greyness exactly the colour of the water in her book-wiping bucket.

If only what? she asked herself in the little toilet as she poured the water away. If only Eddy had stayed put in Derry all alone? How selfish could she get?

She pulled the street door closed. The rain had stopped and Wigtown was nestled in cosily for the evening with lit lamps and smoking chimneys. The lights of the Co-op and the newsagents shone out across the still-damp pavements, making them gleam.

And Lowell had told her straight: “Plenty room in Jamaica House for three.” There was no reason not to think he meant it. She tried not to look at the tabloids arranged on the low shelf in front of the newsagent's counter, kept her eyes trained on the glass cubicle of the post-office section while her mind circled. Eddy wasn't pushing her out either. Jamaica House was still a haven. As long as she was happy to go from treasured guest to tag-along, she was welcome to stay.