The Four Last Things (32 page)

‘Memory of me,’ said Angel, her voice rising once again and then dropping back to an indistinct mumble.

Eddie backed away from the door. Better not to interrupt, he thought. The door was shut, after all. Angel liked to be alone sometimes. She had always made that clear.

As he backed away, his attention on the door to the freezer room, Eddie stumbled against the arm of the Victorian chair. He stopped, listening. The murmur behind the door continued. Lucy stirred in the bed. In the faint light he made out her dark head moving on the pillow.

‘Mummy,’ she whispered in a thin voice.

Eddie bent down. ‘Hush now. It’s not time to get up. Go back to sleep now.’

Lucy did not reply. Eddie counted to a hundred. Then he tiptoed up the stairs, slipped into the hall, and closed the basement door quietly behind him.

Memory of me
. The words wriggled uneasily in his memory, defying his attempts to pin them down. What had Angel been talking about?

The kettle had boiled. Eddie made a pot of tea. While he waited for it to brew, he parted the kitchen curtains and stared into the absence of darkness beyond. London was never truly dark. When he pushed his face against the glass, he saw the trees at the bottom of the garden outlined against the yellow glow of the sodium lamps far to the north. The three blocks of council flats rose like black monoliths on the right of Carver’s. There were plenty of lights in the flats, on the walkways and landings; over the front doors; at ground level. He wondered if one of the lights belonged to the Reynoldses’ flat.

On impulse, he opened the window and let the cool air flow on to his face. He felt it blowing away the wisps of his fever and leaving clarity behind. He thought of his mind like an empty desert beneath a starlit sky. Happiness caught him unawares. In the distance a goods train rattled over points and a whistle blew.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Angel.

He swung round, in his agitation knocking the dishcloth on to the floor. Angel was standing in the kitchen doorway, her face unsmiling, her eyebrows raised. She wore jeans and a jersey and had her hair scraped back from her face.

‘I’d shut the window if I were you. The gas bill’s going to be bad enough as it is.’

He turned away and wrestled with the catch of the window. He heard her coming into the room.

‘You’re early,’ she said.

‘I couldn’t sleep properly. I’ve still got a temperature.’

‘Have you taken some paracetamol?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh good – you’ve made some tea.’

He looked away from the window to find her opening the refrigerator. She glanced up at him as she slipped a package wrapped in foil and cardboard on to the top shelf.

‘I thought we’d have moussaka this evening. In this weather you need something warming.’

He poured them both some tea. They sat at the table to drink it.

‘I need to go out for a while,’ Angel said.

‘Now? It’s not even six.’

‘I’ve got one or two things to see to.’ She gave him no chance to ask further questions. ‘I think you should go back to bed. This fever’s really knocked you out, hasn’t it? You’re not yourself.’

As ever, her concern warmed him. ‘I am quite tired still,’ he admitted. ‘I spent a lot of the night tossing and turning. It wasn’t very restful.’

‘You go back to bed with another cup of tea. Lucy will be fine – she’ll sleep until nine, at least. I’ll look in on you when I get back.’

His body was reluctant to move, so Eddie sat at the kitchen table, sipping tea, and wondering when the paracetamol would begin to work. He heard Angel moving about in the hall and upstairs. A moment later, she returned to the kitchen. She was wearing her long, pale raincoat. On her head she wore a black beret, into which she had piled her hair. The collar of her coat was turned up. She lifted her keys from the hook behind the door. In her other hand she carried a buff-coloured padded envelope.

‘You’ll be all right by yourself?’

‘Fine. I’ll just get some more tea and I’ll go upstairs.’

‘Plenty of fluids.’ Angel touched his arm on her way into the hall. ‘Try to get some rest.’

He listened to her footsteps in the hall and heard the click of the front door closing behind her. He was alone. This won’t do, he told himself. Must get moving. Move where? If he looked inwards, he seemed to be enclosed by infinite space. As space was infinite, movement of any kind seemed pointless. But Angel would be cross if she found him here when she returned.

Supporting himself on the table, Eddie struggled to his feet. Angel had told him to have some tea. The teapot and the milk were on the worktop near the kettle. He crossed the room with enormous caution, like a man walking on ice which might be too thin to bear his weight. Not bothering to boil the kettle again, he filled up his mug with lukewarm tea.

Angel was a stickler for tidiness, just as Thelma had been. Eddie closed the carton of milk and opened the refrigerator to put it away. In order to put the milk inside, he had to move the moussaka which Angel had brought up from the basement. It was a supermarket meal for two, in a flat foil container enclosed by a cardboard sleeve. Eddie noticed a red dot no bigger than a squashed ant on the side of the sleeve. He touched it with a fingertip. The red smeared against the pale-blue background of the cardboard. A speck of blood from the moussaka? Poor dead lamb. Or perhaps Angel had pricked her finger like the princess in the fairy story.

As he staggered upstairs, Eddie wondered why Angel had gone out so early. The Jiffy bag suggested she was going to the post office; a packet that size would need weighing. Wasn’t there a twenty-four-hour post office in central London, somewhere near Leicester Square? But why the urgency? Why not wait until their local post office opened? Perhaps it was something to do with one of her clients. Eddie knew that Angel sometimes did extra jobs for them, little tasks that were paid in cash, that did not attract the commission from Mrs Hawley-Minton.

At six o’clock on a Monday morning?

Eddie shook his head, trying to clear simultaneously his headache and his confusion. It didn’t matter. Angel was a very private person, who liked to keep the different compartments of her life separate from one another.

He reached the landing. His bed looked very inviting through the open door of his room. But he hesitated on the threshold. What would he do if Lucy woke up? It was all very well for Angel to say that Lucy would sleep through, but what if she didn’t? Children were notoriously unpredictable. He should have thought of the possibility before Angel left. Angel should have thought of it.

Eddie crossed the landing and pushed open the door of Angel’s room. Although he was doing it for the best of motives, going into her room seemed almost sacrilegious. He remembered Thelma, who had so much liked to pry among Angel’s things: he wasn’t like that.

The room smelled of Angel. As he had expected, everything was very tidy. The bed had been made. The horizontal surfaces were empty of clutter. The doors of Mr Reynolds’s fitted wardrobes were closed.

The receiving unit of the intercom was plugged into the socket nearest to the single bed. Eddie pulled it out. He was sure that Angel would understand. Angel was scathing about adults who did not look after the children in their care.

Eddie turned to leave. At that instant it occurred to him that the intercom was useless. True, if Lucy woke up, he would hear her cries, but he would not be able to get into the basement to comfort her. Angel had the key. It was on the same ring as her keys to the van and the front door.

Eddie leant against the wall, grateful for its coolness against the warmth of his cheek. It was very worrying. If Lucy woke up, he could go downstairs and try to talk to her through the door. But the door was soundproofed, so communication would not be easy. Besides, what good would talking through a door do to a frightened child?

A possible solution occurred to him. Mr Reynolds had given Angel two keys when he fitted the five-lever lock on the basement door. As far as Eddie knew, she had taken only one of them with her.

He looked around the room, wondering where Angel would keep spare keys. She was the sort of person for whom everything has its place. It should be possible to work out the key’s location from first principles.

At that moment he heard a vehicle drawing up outside the house. The engine sounded like the van’s. He scuttled to the window and peered down to the street below. To his relief, it was the red Ford Escort belonging to the quarrelsome young couple next door. But the incident had shaken him, physically as well as emotionally. Angel might come back at any time. Her movements were unpredictable. It would be terrible if she caught him poking around in her room. His legs felt weak, partly because of the fever and partly at the thought of her reaction.

Eddie abandoned the search and went into his own room and plugged the intercom into one of the sockets. He wasn’t well. He needed to sleep. It wasn’t fair that when he was ill he should have so much to worry about. He half-lay and half-sat on the bed and sipped the tea, which by now was tepid. Angel had been kind to him this morning, which was such a relief after yesterday. He shied away from the memory of her lunging at Lucy with the scissors. He had never seen Angel like that before, even with naughty little Suki.
Lucy’s special
.

He tried to distract himself by thinking of Christmas. It was not much more than three weeks away now. He hoped Lucy would still be with them for Christmas. It would be wonderful to share such an exciting day with her. He would make a list in his mind of the presents he might buy her.

It was true that none of the other children had stayed as long as that – a fortnight was the norm.
But Lucy’s special
.

He lay back and closed his eyes. The intercom hissed and crackled, a comforting background noise, like the creaks and murmurs of a gas fire. Eddie drifted towards sleep. He was almost there when a wail emerged from the intercom.

‘Mummy …’

Eddie swung his legs from under the duvet and stood up. He waited, holding his breath as though there were a danger of Lucy hearing him. Perhaps she would slip back asleep.

‘Mummy … I’m thirsty.’

Eddie waited, hoping. But Lucy did not go back to sleep. Soon she began to cry. It was a little after seven-thirty.

The crying continued as Eddie pulled on his dressing gown and pushed his feet into his slippers. His breathing was fast and shallow. He went back to Angel’s bedroom. In desperation, he pulled out drawers and opened wardrobe doors. Lucy’s crying continued, more faintly because further away, and this made it worse. Distance lent a malign enchantment: it left more room for the imagination to play.

In the end it was not so very difficult to find the key. Angel hadn’t hidden it at all. Why should she? This was her home. He found it, along with other duplicates, in the top left-hand drawer of the chest. The black japanned box was there, too, the one that had contained Angela Wharton’s passport. The keys had been wedged between it and a bundle of letters.

Eddie lifted out the ring. It held a complete set of their keys – house, car, back bedroom, basement and a smaller one which he assumed belonged to the chest freezer.

The crying changed gear – it became louder, sharper, higher in pitch; the sobs increased in frequency, too, as if fuelled by panic.
Nobody wants me, nobody loves me
,
they’ll leave me here all alone until I die.

With the crying filling his head, Eddie stumbled down the stairs, at one point almost falling. His hand was shaking so much that he found it difficult to push the key into the lock.

‘It’s all right,’ he called, fearing that Lucy would not be able to hear him. ‘I’m coming.’

At last the door opened. The bed was empty. His heart seemed to lurch. The night light was so faint that he could hardly see a thing. He brushed his hand against the switch and the overhead light came on. Lucy was curled up in the Victorian armchair with Jimmy in one hand and Mrs Wump in the other. She wasn’t crying now. His appearance had shocked her into silence. She stared up at him with huge eyes, which in this light and from this angle looked black.

‘Now what’s all this, Lucy?’ Eddie clattered down the stairs, knelt by her chair and put his arms round the tiny body. ‘It’s all right now. I’m here.’

She burrowed into him. ‘I want to go home. I want Mummy. I want –’

‘Hush. Do you want a drink?’

‘No,’ Lucy wailed. ‘I want to go home. I want –’

‘Soon,’ Eddie heard himself saying. ‘You’ll go home to Mummy soon. But you have to be a good girl.’

Lucy’s breath smelt stale. Her eyes were partly gummed up with sleep. She yawned.

‘Angel won’t be pleased if she finds you out of bed.’ Angel would be even less pleased, Eddie suspected, if she found him down here. ‘Why don’t you snuggle under your duvet again?’

‘I don’t want to. I’m not tired.’

Eddie lifted her up and laid her down in the bed. She did not resist and her body was still heavy and uncoordinated.

‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me alone.’

‘I won’t.’ Eddie sat down in the Victorian armchair and passed Mrs Wump and Jimmy to Lucy. ‘Now, you go to sleep.’