The Echoing Stones (9 page)

To her surprise, the front door was not only unlocked, it was ajar. Even if he was in, this was most unlike Arnold. So careful he’d been, ever since they’d come here – over-careful it often seemed to her – to make certain that everything in his care was safely under lock and key at all times. He never went anywhere in the
building without locking every door behind him, and a great nuisance it could be, she remembered, when he had the keys on him and she hadn’t. To have left the front door of the flat swinging open like this, even if only for a minute, was most unlike him. He was a man who shut doors; always had been.

Or was he? What about the door he had so devastatingly flung open onto an entire new life for both of them? That, too, she would have said was wholly uncharacteristic of her husband – until it happened. Twenty-five years of shared life, and all the time the man you knew so intimately had contained inside him a man you didn’t know at all. Perhaps that is the single most important factor that allows a marriage to break up at all – the sudden discovery that you are married to a total stranger. Towards total strangers you owe no duties, nor any sort of loyalty.

Minutes passed and Mildred, still hovering on the threshold, was finding that curiosity was gradually taking precedence over embarrassment. She ventured a step or two inside; and when nothing happened, and all remained quiet, she began to feel quite daring. Took another step forward … and another.
I’ll
show
them
! she thought, in vague defiance of Val and the Assertiveness Course.
I’ll
show
them
that I can do my own thing, I can assert myself without the help of any silly old course.

The flat was fuller of
things
than she’d remembered it. A metal filing-cabinet now loomed hideously in the almost-cosy little sitting-room she’d tried so hard to brighten with flowery material for curtains and
chair-covers
. The piles of paper had grown since her day, spilling down from desk-top onto chairs and coffee-table; and the kitchen was in disarray. Not exactly a mess – the actual washing-up had been done, but in typical masculine style, the washing-up bowl was fainty greasy,
and the sink itself hadn’t been scrubbed in weeks. Nor had the work-surfaces on which she had so
industriously
– and finally so frantically – knocked up plates of scones. On the draining-board saucepans stood,
forlornly
soaking, awaiting that magic hand whose image lurks for ever at the back of a man’s mind – the hand which will one day render them clean and dry and ready for use.

The whole place could do with a good spring-clean. Still cautiously – though it was abundantly clear by now that she was alone in the flat – she gently tried the door of her own old bedroom. It was unlocked like everything else, and pushing it open she stepped inside. This room, too, was untidy. An unfamiliar clutter of half-unpacked luggage lay strewn across the floor, and the bedside table was littered with magazines and dirty cups. Had Arnold taken to sleeping here himself since her departure? Certainly the big brass bed looked as if it had been slept in and then left more or less un-made, with just the flowered counterpane pulled sloppily up over the humps and bumps. Her ingrained housewifely instincts overcoming her – for of course it was no longer any of her business whatsoever – Mildred stepped forward to set the bed to rights, starting by flinging back the coverlet.

*

For a moment she couldn’t even scream. She just stared down, in incredulous horror, at the skull nestling so cosily against the down-filled pillow, slightly on its side, and with one of the eye-sockets peering coyly up at her. Then, with a blind, reflex impulse to blot the thing from sight, to make it all not have happened, she whisked the coverlet back into position and fled.

How she got herself out of the flat she never knew. She became clearly aware of what she was doing only when she found herself running, running, over gravel,
over flagstones over cobbles, bright flowers here and gone alongside, and with the golden afternoon sunshine beating unfelt upon her icy shoulders.

It must have been an hour or so later when Arnold returned to the flat, his afternoon’s stint of tour-guiding at an end. Whatever bits of gossip might already be
circulating
about his errant wife’s reappearance and eccentric behaviour, they had not so far reached his ears; and so when he arrived at the flat and found the front door wide open to any intruder who might happen along, his sense of outrage was directed – not unnaturally – against his wayward daughter. Typical! Wasn’t it just exactly like her – casual, sloppy, inconsiderate; utterly indifferent to any concerns other than her own. She was impossible! She could pack her bags and go, right now! He just wasn’t standing for it!

But, stepping into the little hall and closing the door securely behind him, he paused, and thought again.
Had
to think again, actually, for was not Flora right now saving the day in the Tea Room for him? Entirely of her own accord, and also entirely at variance with the character he had just been attributing to her, she had actually
offered
to help him out. Had spoken – almost – as that fantasy daughter had spoken inside his head a few hours earlier. Though in her own idiom, of course:

“It beats me, Arnold, why you make such a production of it! It’s a doddle, just a hundred or so teas in a whole afternoon! I’ve often served twice that number in half the time when I’ve had that sort of a job.
Teas,
for heavens sake! It’s not as if it was seven-course dinners! Those two
whinging ninnies could manage it on their heads, easily, they’re just stringing you along. Why don’t you tell them where they get off?
I
could soon sort them out …”

And sort them out she obviously had. Like Mildred a little earlier that same afternoon, Arnold had been impressed, when he peeped in, at the unwonted speed and efficiency with which the customers were being served, and in particular at the ease and professionalism with which his daughter was both supervising and undertaking – apparently effortlessly – what looked like a lion’s share of the work. In the course of scratching herself a living in the unsalubrious part of London she had chosen for herself, Flora must have undertaken a number of poorly-paid catering jobs, and being highly intelligent (as he knew she was, despite her scornful rejection of any form of higher education) she had learned quickly and well everything that could be learned about how to tackle the low-grade tasks which had come her way.

Thus her offer of help – motivated though it appeared to be by a desire to put her father in the wrong, and show him up as a fumbling old fuss-pot who couldn’t even handle a simple catering problem – this help was nevertheless welcome. As he checked over the few valuables in his small domain, and found nothing missing, his anger cooled, and it dawned on him that his hasty impulse to throw the girl out had been not merely unkind and ungrateful, but downright crazy. That she was capable of being of enormous help to him was now beyond doubt. Her continued willingness, of course, was an unknown quantity, but all the same … And as to the locking of doors – well, he’d just have to have a strong word or two with her some time when she was in an amenable sort of mood. It was difficult, because he’d learned already that she had these tiresome egalitarian principles about locked doors. Why should anyone be locked out of anywhere? Why shouldn’t everyone be free to come and go, to enjoy
everything there was to be enjoyed? Only last night, when she’d accompanied him on his locking-up rounds, they’d almost got into a quarrel about it. He didn’t want this to happen again.

Meantime, he must do something about that window, whose safety-catches she had so blithely wrecked the previous night. He must try and fix it so that it
couldn’t
be opened more than three or four inches; that would save a lot of arguing.

Collecting hammer and nails from his own private tool-box – no way was he going to involve himself in borrowing anything from Norris’ closely-guarded store – he went into the room that had been Mildred’s, switched on the bedside light – and now, for the first time, he noticed the curious hump beneath the coverlet. In his previous scrutiny of the room he had been concentrating on what might be missing – the radio set, the contents (not many) of Mildred’s abandoned jewel-box, and the rather nice etchings on the wall above the bed. But now the alien lump, suddenly floodlit by the bedside light, caught his attention and, just as Mildred had done earlier in the afternoon, he pulled back the cover to investigate.

For a second – no, less than a second, for the extent of his general knowledge was somewhat wider than Mildred’s – he reacted with total horror, just as she had done; but almost at once the initial shock had subsided into a residual thumping of the heart as he realised that the empty eye-sockets staring up at him were those of a sheep, or perhaps a goat. The skull nestling so cosily against the pillow was one of those that holiday-makers bring back from the Lake District, with tales of the shock they had had when they saw it glaring at them, white on white among the pale stones and rocks on the high reaches of the fells.

He was still staring at the thing, no longer frightened, but bewildered and angry – what sort of a trick was this
to play on anyone, especially your own father? – when a loud impatient ringing at the front door roused him to action, and a moment later he was confronted by the culprit herself. Rosy, bright-eyed, smiling (and how rarely did she smile at him!) and holding by its flimsy handle a plastic carrier bag, weighed down almost to the ground with money. Surely it was in danger of breaking open, money flying everywhere? And what a way to carry large sums of money, anyway. It was almost wicked.

“The day’s takings!” Flora cried, swinging the thing triumphantly towards him. “We’ve counted it roughly already, and Pauline says its nearly three times as much as they usually …”

She broke off: and then, “Arnold, whatever’s the matter? D’you know, I thought for a minute that you might be
pleased
For once in my life! Crazy, wasn’t I?”

Arnold could feel actual tears pricking behind his eyes – tears of anger, grief and bafflement all at the same time. Why did everything, always, have to be ruined between him and his daughter? Why did she always have to spoil, somehow, anything that might have brought them together? Here she was, having done a wonderful job with the Teas, for which he longed to give her unstinting praise – but how could he? This criminally casual way of treating hard-earned cash seemed like a calculated insult towards – well, everything. Everything that Arnold had always stood for, anyway: it was hard to explain. And on top of all this – linked to it somehow, no doubt – was the unforgiveably spiteful trick with the sheep’s skull. She was tormenting him for fun, like a cat with a mouse: seeking not merely to hurt his feelings, but to hold them up to ridicule.

“But, Arnold, for God’s sake, it was only Charlie!” she protested when, later, he steeled himself to remonstrate with her about the skull. “I
told
you I’d have to bring Charlie – and then I remembered he was in the bottom of my back-pack already, so I just fished him out and
put him in position ready for the rapists. It was
your
idea, Arnold, that the open window might attact rapists: I’d have thought you’d be
pleased
to find that your daughter knows how to look after herself.” She went on to explain the rôle played by Charlie in the life of her current squat.

“There’d been quite a few rapes in the local paper, you see, and so when Pete brought this sheep’s skull back from his trip somewhere or other, us girls, we thought, what fun, if rapist
does
get in. It’s a basement flat, you know, where we are now, and so he’d get the shock of his life! What I’d do, you see, if I heard an intruder, I’d slide down under the bedclothes, leaving Charlie on the pillow, so that when the rapist shines his torch down on what he thinks is going to be his victim’s face …”

The noisy shriek of laughter with which the explanation ended was in one way reassuring, in another unnerving. Reassuring because it meant – seemed to mean – that she hadn’t planted the thing with the specific intention of scaring her father: it was simply an ever-so-amusing facet of her current life-style. And that was the thing that was unnerving.

It was going to be an uncomfortable evening, obviously, and Arnold wondered whether the T.V. programmes – this being Sunday – would be sufficiently to Flora’s taste to render conversation unnecessary. The variegated turmoil of his emotions during the past twenty-four hours had now merged – as the colours of the rainbow are said to merge, if spun fast enough, into a uniform whiteness – into a single emotion, that of embarrassment. He wanted above all to be alone, not so much in order to sort out his thoughts as not to need to sort them out, and certainly not to talk about them.

And so when Flora, a trifle preremptorily, announced that she would be going out this evening, and didn’t know when she would be back, he was greatly relieved.
Surprised as well, of course, because where could she be going? Who had she managed to strike up acquaintance with in this short time? His curiosity was such that he found himself asking “Where?” without any regard to the enormity of such a question when addressed by a parent to his child. However, what’s done is done, and he braced himself for one or other of the appropriate responses: “What’s it got to do with you?” or: “Mind your own business!” Something like that. So there was a further surprise for him when Flora not only answered the question, but answered it quite politely.

“I’m going over to Joyce’s. I promised her I’d go and sit with her old father while she goes to the movies.
Lost
Days
of
Love
is on at …”

“The
movies
? But Joyce never goes …”

“I know she never does, She never gets the chance. Do you realise she’s stuck at home with that crazy old man every single evening of her life? Nobody’s ever offered to help her out, not ever! All you people here, who are supposed to be her friends and colleagues, not one of you, ever, has thought of offering …”

So that was it. An opportunity for needling her Dad under the guise of compassion for Joyce’s plight! And, of course, there was an element of justice in the implied criticism. Sorry as he had been for Joyce, in a vague sort of way, it certainly hadn’t occurred to him to do anything about it. Perhaps he should have done?

“If she’d ever asked me,” he began, “but she always seems so …”

“
Seems
! That’s all your generation ever notices, isn’t it, how things
seem
! So long as things
seem
all right, that’s all you want to know. Doesn’t it ever occur to any of you to dig deeper, to look beyond the seeming to the reality?”

Actually, no. Arnold didn’t say it aloud, of course, but he thought it, quite forcibly. It isn’t all that often that everything seems all right, and when it does, why hazard so
happy a state of affairs by looking for trouble? If open-cast is producing a good supply of coal, then why go to the expense, not to mention the danger, of deep mining?

Pointless, of course, to pursue the question. The
metaphor
from an industrial process was enough to damn his argument before it had even started, for wasn’t Flora against industrial processes in general, particularly those in which her parents might be presumed to have shares? Not that he still had shares in British Coal, he’d sold them out some while ago; not, alas, on any sort of socially significant principle, but simply because British Gas had seemed, at the time, to be offering a better return.

And anyway, Flora was by now preparing for her errand of mercy, rather noisily, and causing (it seemed to Arnold) maximum disturbance. Tipping the contents of her back-pack all over the carpet in a fruitless search for something or other. Asking if he’d got a scarf she could borrow? And where was the magazine with the “All about Your Horoscope” article that she’d left on his desk? And hadn’t he got any
sharp
scissors, not these grotty things?

She was gone at last. What peace! Seated in his most comfortable chair, the one with the high back and the big capacious arms, Arnold switched on the television. There was a Berlioz opera juat starting, what a piece of luck, and he settled down to enjoy it without having to worry about Flora being bored. And so superior about it, too, as if being bored was a particularly desirable state, far more so than being interested.

*

It was past eleven o’clock when he woke, and the
telephone
was ringing. He had an uneasy sense that it had been ringing for some time; and so indeed it must have been, for by the time he had managed to get himself out of his chair and across the room, it had stopped. He stood for a minute, uneasily, the humming receiver still in his hand. Who could be ringing at this time of night?
Was something wrong somewhere? He was reminded, uncomfortably, of that other call, a couple of nights ago, when the anonymous caller had simply breathed into the telephone and then rung off without a word.

Not that the present situation was at all similar. It was earlier for one thing – quarter past eleven isn’t all
that
late and for another there had been no mysterious silence at the other end. Whoever it was this time had simply given up and rung off before he’d managed to reach the instrument. And in any case, that former call hadn’t in fact been the prelude to any sort of disaster. No intruder had materialised, nothing had been stolen. It now occurred to him that the call had probably been from Flora – wanting to check that her father was indeed in residence, but not wishing to get into real contact with him lest he should raise objections to her planned visit. That he might be worried by receiving an anonymous telephone call in the small-hours probably didn’t occur to her, inconsiderate girl that she was.

Reassured, he began to prepare for bed. A pity about the Berlioz, but there, he must have needed the sleep. Maybe there would be a repeat some time.

And just then the telephone rang again.

Not any anonymous caller, Joyce. Joyce in a state of almost stuttering anxiety, so that he could hardly take in what she was saying, and she had to say it all over again.