Louise and Tessa were delighted with the recorders and the flowers and with Peter and the Wolf.
‘So many!’ exclaimed Louise, arranging the daffodils in two different vases.
‘A golden portent for the future,’ said Alan poetically.
He felt very happy. He had known a great armful of flowers would please her more than an azalea, or forced irises which would soon wither. The little room looked as if it had been invaded by sunlight.
Louise wanted to know all that had happened at the interview, and when he told her, said she was sure he had said the right things and that he would get the job. Alan, himself, was hopeful; he had left the room with a feeling the men talking to him had liked him.
‘You’ve done well, too,’ he said.
She had. She had walked to school and met Tessa without the slightest sign of her gremlins.
When Alan left, both felt the weekend stretching ahead as a vast gulf, but both knew he would come round again in the evening as soon as he could.
His chance came on the following Monday, and again on the next Wednesday. He skipped Thursday, when Daphne was out again, but it seemed a shame to miss Friday, too, with another weekend ahead.
Mrs Cox, down below, noted it all and waited. She’d find Tessa alone one day in the end.
Daphne was helping at a jumble sale in the village on that Saturday afternoon. Alan spent the afternoon doing odd jobs in the garden and was having a cup of tea in the kitchen when Daphne came in, bursting with news.
Kitty Gibson’s out-of-work husband had committed suicide the previous night. It seemed that he had taken some of Kitty’s sleeping pills, thoughtfully waiting to do it until she was asleep herself. Then he had crept out of bed and gone downstairs to swallow them with, it appeared, a great deal of whisky. Kitty had found him in the morning, dead in a chair by the electric fire, which still burned. A note was beside him.
Alan felt icily chill.
‘Poor bastard,’ he said.
‘Kitty will get no insurance,’ said Daphne. ‘You don’t, if it’s suicide – or so people were saying. What a cowardly thing to do.’
‘He must have felt very discouraged,’ said Alan. ‘Hopeless, really, trudging round applying for jobs and being passed over for younger men. No doubt that’s what had been happening,’ he hastily added.
‘He was feeble,’ said Daphne. ‘He must have been to give up so soon.’
Alan turned away. It was only meeting Louise, he felt, that had saved him from total despair, though he hoped he would never take that way out. But one day his own moment of reckoning might have to be faced.
10
In Alan’s car, Louise drove carefully through Berbridge on Monday afternoon. She reached the municipal multi-storey car park and circled her way round its floors till she found an empty slot near the top. She didn’t enjoy driving up the ramps with another car close behind, and when she had parked and switched off the engine she sat for some seconds, waiting, in case one of her attacks came on, but it didn’t, so she got out of the car and locked it, then went off along the walkway to the main street. She passed Boots and Marks and Spencer and crossed the road by the town hall, where she turned into a side street. Here the typing agency had its office on the third floor of a tall building. Louise felt cheerful and confident now; she wouldn’t have an attack for ages, she decided, if ever again. She stayed for a cup of coffee and received a new script. Walking away, she still felt compelled to keep close to the shops, away from the kerb, but that was a rational thing to do; there was less chance of being run over on the inside, she told herself, walking on swift feet to meet Alan with a delicious, excited flutter inside her.
She hated it when he left the flat to go home. Already his embrace was familiar. To her, it was strange that so large a man could be so tender. He brought with him a sense of warmth and security such as she had never known before, and Louise saw no reason why their affair should end, for even after he found a new job he could come round in the evenings when his wife was out; she went out a lot.
Louise had learned a good deal about Daphne. Alan had talked about her now, and she pictured a brisk hearty woman, in tweed trousers for golf, striding about like a human bulldozer regardless of people’s feelings. Yet from the way he spoke, he seemed very fond of her.
Louise knew that Alan loved her, too; she didn’t really see how you could love two women at the same time but supposed they were different sorts of emotion. Very likely he and his wife hadn’t made love for years, she thought. She hurried on through the town, eager to join him. They would go together to fetch Tessa from school, almost as if she had a father again.
A father: Louise herself had one now. She had been preoccupied with the idea of him until Alan had come into her life and driven out of her mind what was becoming almost an obsession. Now, that unknown man entered her thoughts once more. Her footsteps slowed as the familiar questions repeated themselves in her head.
She had to go past the car park to get to the library, where Alan would be, and all of a sudden the papers she carried felt heavy. Louise turned off to put them in the car; it was pointless to drag them round with her.
She placed them on the back seat of the Escort, and as she re-locked the door she noticed a Mini hovering, the driver apparently waiting to see if she was going to leave a free space.
Louise shook her head, and after a moment the Mini moved on. In it was Daphne, with Kitty Gibson. They had come to Berbridge to buy, a dark coat for the inquest on Charles Gibson and for his funeral. Kitty had only bright-coloured clothes, for those were what he had liked her to wear.
Louise walked on to the library, where Alan was sitting, as he had said he would be, in his usual place near the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
She was still thinking about her father.
That evening, Daphne said, ‘I thought I saw someone trying to steal something out of your car today, Alan.’
‘Oh?’ Alan looked up from the crossword which he was trying to finish. What was coming?
‘In the multi-storey park in Berbridge,’ Daphne went on. ‘A woman. She’d got the door open and was leaning in towards the back. But she shut the door and walked away with just her handbag, so I didn’t ask her what she was doing.’
Alan was sitting bolt upright with shock, but he thought swiftly.
‘It was the new girl from the office,’ he said smoothly. ‘The one taking over from Stephanie. She’d taken my car to go on an errand – something rather urgent cropped up.’ While he spoke, Alan continued to gaze at the crossword.
‘Oh,’ said Daphne. ‘Is she nice? Efficient?’
‘Very,’ said Alan. ‘Her name is Louise.’
It was lovely to say it like that, let the soft sound of her pretty name hang in the air.
‘That’s good,’ Daphne said. ‘I’m sorry you couldn’t persuade Stephanie to stay, though. Changes are tiresome.’
‘What were you doing in Berbridge?’ Alan asked. She rarely went there; her patients were all from the Stowburgh area.
Daphne explained about Kitty.
‘I took the afternoon off,’ she said. ‘I’ll make the time up some other day. It was worrying Kitty. We got a dark raincoat at Marks – quite smart. It’ll be useful for years so it wasn’t money wasted. Kitty didn’t want to borrow anything; besides, nothing I’ve got would fit her.’
What if she’d been a bit later and seen him and Louise return to the car from the library? Louise had been quiet at first but by the time they reached the car park she’d been laughing, and as they walked together in the dank interior of the building he’d taken her hand. The idea shook Alan. He’d thought Berbridge was safe.
‘Poor Kitty’s in a terrible state,’ Daphne said. ‘I hope she doesn’t go phobic, like that friend of yours. I asked her to stay with us for a while but she wouldn’t agree. I don’t think it’s at all good for her to be alone at the moment.’
Phew, Alan thought. Thank goodness Kitty had not accepted, for with Daphne o
ut such a lot, he’d have been left on his own with the widow. But how nice women were to each other, he reflected, how steady their friendships. It was unfortunate that Louise seemed to have no long-standing female friend, not even, as far as he could understand, one from her childhood days.
‘You were quite right to ask her, Daphne,’ he said, writing in BUSINESS AS USUAL at number five down in the crossword.
The next morning, Alan received a letter from the firm in Coxwell to say that they could not offer him the position for which he had been interviewed.
Alan had taken the letter into the lavatory with him, so that he could read it without delay and without Daphne being curious about any reaction he might show.
Sick disappointment filled him. He had allowed himself to become quietly confident that he would be appointed and now he felt real physical distress. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his heart pounded. This was what Kitty Gibson’s unfortunate husband had experienced, perhaps many times: this build-up of hope and then the bitterness of a new rebuff.
He rinsed his face with cold water and dried it carefully, then emerged with a bright smile to put Daphne’s golf clubs in her car and wish her a pleasant day.
Louise noticed at once that something was wrong although Daphne hadn’t, Alan thought – irrationally, for he had tried very hard not to let her. With Louise there was no need to be guarded.
‘They’re fools at that firm,’ Louise said, with passion, when he told her. ‘Fancy passing you up.’
‘I expect they took one of the younger men,’ Alan said. It would have been that smug one with the drooping moustache, he decided.
During the days that followed, he tried to put this fresh rejection out of his mind, but it had been a real blow. While he was with Louise and Tessa, he was able to forget the nagging anxiety, but driving in and out each day, and at home, the worry pressed hard.
On Thursday, Alan went for another interview, arranged by the agency. The firm made electronic games and puzzles, which Alan thought pointless, and he did not take to the man who interviewed him, or the girl with bleached hair, a slit skirt and stilt heels, who admitted him to the office. He was told that the firm was progressive and the staff, on the whole, young; what was lacking was business experience which he could supply. He thought, irritably, that they wanted some sort of father-figure to lean on, and would not only milk his knowledge but probably make use of his contacts, too. When they’d done all that, they’d cast him aside without a qualm. Yet if he were offered the job, he would have to consider accepting it; the fate of Charles Gibson had shaken him.
Daphne herself lived as nearly as possible from day to day; she was not one to anticipate bridges she might never encounter, except on behalf of her patients. Her work was going well that week; old Mrs Burt had settled in at her son’s, and the daughter-in-law, whom Daphne and the health visitor had felt some concern for, had begun to think of finding a part-time job. The extra money would help the household generally, and the daughter-in-law might as well make the most of her opportunity before, as must surely one day happen, the old lady fell ill again.
Kitty Gibson took up some of Daphne’s time that week. A verdict of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed was brought in at the inquest, and the funeral was arranged for the following Monday at noon.
‘Will you go to the office first?’ Daphne asked.
What? When?’ Alan frowned. What was she talking about?’
‘Charles Gibson’s funeral,’ said Daphne. ‘You’re coming, of course.’ How vague Alan seemed to be getting these days, she thought; it was often hard to get his attention but then he’d always been rather a dreamer. ‘Well?’ she prompted.
‘I must go in first,’ Alan said. ‘I’ll meet you there, shall I? At the crematorium.’ He wouldn’t miss seeing Louise.
11
He was up there again this evening. It was disgusting.
Mrs Cox was keeping a tally of the visits that man with the green car paid to Louise Waring.
Gone was her original concern for Tessa’s physical well-being; anger at the moral danger facing the child was now predominant in her mind. The pair’s conduct was brazen. Had they no shame, indulging in their goings-on right under the nose of the child? Mrs Cox muttered away to herself, peering out from behind the curtain to watch Alan’s legs go by.
By eleven, he still had not gone. He had never been so late before. Could she have missed him? It was possible, for she had had to go to the bathroom, and had been to her bedroom to switch on the electric blanket.
Mrs Cox was so curious that she put on her coat and went out, up her own steps out of the basement well and along the path to the road, to see if his car was still there. It was: the green car with the dent in the wing and the M registration.
She was quite out of breath with distress when she reached her own flat again and she sat in her chair for a while, brooding. Then she got up and looked at her bottle of baby sedative. She unwrapped the prepared Mars Bar and inspected it. There were the tablets, too, the large flat white ones which Mavis had used till the end.
Against one wall of Mrs Cox’s living-room was an old oak chest, once Mavis’s; it had a hinged lid, like the bunk in The Happy Maid, that cruiser where Grace had lain sleeping so sweetly, the last sleep of death. Mrs Cox raised the lid. Inside was a folded rug; nothing else.
The child would be well concealed in the chest, Mrs Cox decided, safely sleeping while she planned how to move her when the time arrived to put her scheme into action.
She mustn’t delay. Tessa’s soul was in mortal danger.
She looked at her large, wheeled wicker shopping basket and wondered if the child could be moved in that, and decided, regretfully, that Tessa was too big to be placed inside it.
She would need something else. The wheelbarrow Terence Henshaw used for his gardening, with a rug thrown over the child’s unconscious form?
She thought about it, sitting there waiting for Alan to pass the window, and still he did not leave the upstairs flat.
When he arrived at the flat that morning to take Tessa to school Alan had had an air of suppressed excitement, but Louise did not learn the reason for it until the afternoon when he returned from the library. He came in hung about with parcels, and unwrapped them in the kitchen. He’d brought a bottle of wine, some smoked salmon, steak, and a pineapple.
‘What is all this?’ Louise had said, laughing. ‘Is it your birthday?’
‘It’s a celebration,’ said Alan. ‘I can stay the night – that is, if I may,’ and he had caught her to him, covering her face with small, light kisses.
‘Really?’ Louise would not ask why; there were areas of his life that he might not want to discuss.
‘Yes, really,’ said Alan. He released her, and turned away so that she should not see his face. ‘Daphne’s gone away to visit our daughter for a few days,’ he said.
After Charles’s funeral, Pauline had telephoned. Her husband was going to a conference in Cambridge and she hadn’t been feeling very well. She didn’t want to be on her own so Daphne had cancelled her golf – luckily it wasn’t a match and her partner was understanding – and had set off this morning for York. She and Alan had rarely been separated before. He’d telephoned her to make sure she’d arrived safely, going home to do it during the afternoon and collecting his shaving kit. Louise never asked him awkward questions and he knew she would express no curiosity about why he had not left the car in Oak Way as usual that morning, if, indeed, she had noticed.
‘I see,’ said Louise softly. ‘How lovely.’
Daphne was not due back until Friday; they could have three whole nights together.
The next morning Alan went back to Cherry Cottage to pick up the mail and a clean shirt; he’d forgotten to stop the milk, and he took the bottle in. It was probably better not to cancel it, he thought, since Daphne might query the reduced bill. He telephoned her before leaving the house, and as on the day before, she thought he was ringing from the
office. Then he rang the employment agency in Berbridge, and was told of a possible job. The agency had mentioned him to the firm, which was on the other side of the county; they wanted to see him and he should lose no time in pursuing it, he was advised.
Alan telephoned and made an appointment for Friday afternoon. Then he drove to Oak Way to collect Louise and take her to lunch at a pub on the river. They went straight back to Oak Way; it was like a honeymoon.
That evening their dinner was Louise’s surprise. She had slipped out in the morning to shop, while Alan was away with the car. Elation buoyed her along; she had no onset of gremlins. They had melon, pork chops in a cider sauce, and apricot fool, eating at the small round table in the sitting-room. There were tall yellow candles, and a tiny vase of crocuses out of the garden.
Later, in bed, Louise said, ‘Alan, you’ve done so much for me. I’m very happy – very lucky. But I haven’t forgotten about my father. I still want to know more about him.’
‘You do?’ Alan could sympathise with her view. If he had discovered, in adult life, that his own father, thought to be dead, was alive, he would want to see him too.
‘Mm.’
‘What do you want to do?’ he asked.
‘Find him. I must, Alan – or find out what’s happened to him. He keeps coming into my mind,’ she said. ‘I think about you quite a lot,’ she added, tugging gently at the hairs on his chest. ‘But not all the time. How do I start to search?’
Alan sighed. He wished she would leave it; but perhaps, if she satisfied her curiosity, she would then come to terms with her early life.
‘Where were you born?’ he asked.
‘In London, I think,’ she said.
‘Your birth certificate will tell you,’ he pointed out. ‘And give your parents’ address at the time. You could start there.’
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