The Four Last Things

by Taylor, Andrew

  ‘There’s a lot of wildlife there.’

  ‘Shame it’s such a mess.’ She stopped beside him, and he caught a suggestion of her perfume. Her eyes swung towards the council flats. ‘Still, better a jungle than something like that.’

  Eddie nodded.

  After a pause, Angel went on, ‘Have you noticed the woman with the binoculars? She’s often on the balcony with the geraniums.’

  Only one balcony had geraniums. It stood out starkly from its neighbours partly because of this, and partly because of its tidiness, the fresh paint on the railing and the absence of a satellite dish. No one was standing there now.

  ‘I think she watches birds,’ Eddie said. ‘Her name’s Mrs Reynolds.’

  ‘She was there just now. I was looking out of my bedroom window, and for a moment I thought she was watching you.’

  ‘Are you sure? Why?’

  ‘She was probably looking at the house. Or at next door. Perhaps there’s a bird on the roof.’ She smiled at him. ‘In any case, even if she was looking at you, I wouldn’t take it personally.’

  ‘Oh no. Of course not.’

  ‘Old women do strange things.’ Angel glanced back at the house, and Eddie knew that Mrs Reynolds was not the only old woman she had in mind. ‘But it’s their problem, not ours.’

  Over the summer, as Thelma’s criticisms multiplied, Eddie found himself warming towards Angel. The process was gradual and subtle. She would smile at him as they passed in the hall, or ask him what he thought the weather was going to do this morning and listen to his answer as if his opinion really counted. When Thelma was being more than usually absurd, Angel would occasionally glance at Eddie; and when their eyes met there was the delicious sense of a shared secret, of shared amusement.

  Eddie was flattered and alarmed by these hints. Women had never shown any interest in him before, especially not beautiful women like Angel. Not that he liked her specifically as a woman, he told himself, but as a person. And there was no doubt that her beauty affected the way he responded to her: it added significance to everything she said and did.

  Then came the first Sunday in September. It was a fine late summer day, and after breakfast Eddie decided to walk up to the Heath. (Since his father’s death he had lost his fear of going out.) He happened to glance back as he was walking up Haverstock Hill and noticed, some way behind him, Angel walking slowly in the same direction. Her presence irritated him. On his walks he liked to be among strangers. He quickened his pace and cut down the next side road. He looked back more than once but there was no sign of her. He thought that she had probably continued up Rosslyn Hill to Hampstead Village.

  He spent a pleasant hour on the Heath. It was a place he avoided in the evenings because parts of it were rough and dangerous and, they said, haunted by men doing horrible things to each other. But in daytime at weekends and during the holidays the Heath was full of children, some with grown-ups, some without. Eventually he found a bench on Parliament Hill and watched irritable fathers flying kites for bored children. Below him stretched the city, brick and stone, glass and tarmac, blues and greys and greens, trembling like a live thing in the haze.

  To Eddie’s delight, two girls of about eight began to do gymnastics near his bench. They were of an age when they were still unselfconscious about their bodies, when competition came naturally to them. One was wearing jeans, but the other – a girl with a pale, serious face spotted with freckles – wore a sweatshirt over a skimpy dress. Eddie watched her covertly. He tried to decide whether she was consciously teasing him, as Alison used to do in that far-off summer when she swung higher and higher, revealing more and more, and pretending that she didn’t know he was watching her. He stared at her, wondering how soft the skin would be above the bony knees.

  Then, with an abruptness which made him gasp, this pleasant reverie was shattered.

  ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ Angel sat down beside him. ‘All that energy. Where do they get it from?’

  Eddie stared wildly at her. Her sudden appearance would have shocked him in normal circumstances and brought about another attack of shyness. But this was worse. Had his face revealed something of his thoughts? Angel was a nanny. She would be alert for strange men who watched children.

  ‘It’s a lovely day for the Heath. The best part of summer.’

  ‘Yes,’ he managed to say. ‘Very sunny.’

  The breeze blew a strand of her hair towards him. She smoothed it back into place. For an instant her sleeve brushed his and he smelt her perfume. She was wearing a blue sweatshirt and jeans. Her left hand was now lying on her leg, long-fingered, smooth-skinned, the nails not quite oval but egg-shaped, with the narrow ends embedded in the fingers; she wore no rings.

  He looked away, worried that she might think he was staring at her. To his relief the two girls were running down the hill, shrieking to someone below. He no longer had to worry about betraying his interest in them.

  ‘Would you like one?’ Bewildered, Eddie turned towards her, for a moment thinking she was referring to the girls. But Angel was holding out a packet of Polos to him, the foil at the end of the tube peeled back. He took one because a refusal might offend her. For a moment they sat in silence. The mint seemed unnaturally strong, and he coughed.

  ‘I like coming here,’ Angel said. ‘So nice to see the children playing.’

  Eddie bit hard on the Polo, and it disintegrated. Two boys on the fringe of puberty raced by on their bikes. One of them dropped a crisp packet as he passed.

  ‘When they’re older, they’re not nearly so appealing. Don’t you agree?’ She seemed not to expect an answer. ‘But I wouldn’t like to have children around all the time. They can be very tiring. What about you?’

  Hastily he swallowed the fragments of Polo, the sharp edges snagging against his throat. ‘I’m sorry?’

  She smiled at him. ‘I wondered if you’d like children of your own. I know I wouldn’t.’

  ‘No.’ The word came out much more vehemently than Eddie had intended. He thought of the boys on the bicycles, of Mandy and Sian at Dale Grove Comprehensive, and of all the children who grew up. He was frightened that he might have revealed too much, so he took refuge in a generality. ‘I think there’re far too many people in the world as it is. Five and a half billion, isn’t it, and more being born every day.’

  Angel nodded, her face serious. ‘That’s a very good point.’ Her tone implied that she’d never considered the question from that angle before. ‘Still, they are sweet when they’re young, aren’t they? That’s what I like about my job. I get most of the fun, but none of the long-term responsibility.’

  ‘That must be nice.’

  They sat there for another five minutes, talking in spurts about the city below them and its history. Slowly Eddie relaxed. He was surprised to find that he was enjoying the conversation, or rather the novelty of having someone to talk to.

  ‘By the way, how did our road get its name?’ Angel asked. ‘I asked your mother but she didn’t know.’

  ‘It’s because back in the Middle Ages the land round there used to belong to the Bishop of Rosington.’

  A cloud slid across the sun.

  ‘I thought it might be that. It’s getting cold.’ Angel hugged herself, dramatizing the words. ‘Shall we find a cup of coffee? There’s a café on South End Green.’

  Before Eddie knew what was happening, they were walking down the hill together. He felt lighter than usual, floating like a spaceman. This can’t be happening to me. Part of him would have liked to run away, but this was swamped by other feelings: running away would be a very rude thing to do; he was flattered to be in Angel’s company, and even hoped that someone he knew would see them; and he also liked the sense, obscure but powerful, that by being together he and Angel were somehow fooling his mother. For once, Eddie was not alone; he was part of a couple, and two was company. Soon they were sitting at a table by themselves, with coffee sending up twin pillars of steam between them.

  ‘Th
is is nice.’ Angel smiled at him. ‘It’s good to get out. I worry about your mother sometimes. She spends so much time in the house.’

  ‘Oh, she likes being at home. She’s always been like that, even when my father was alive.’

  ‘As long as it makes her happy.’

  ‘She’s getting old,’ Eddie said, meaning that he couldn’t imagine how old people could be happy.

  Angel answered the thought, not the words: ‘Old age is very sad. I’d hate to be old.’ For an instant, her face changed: she pressed her lips and frowned; wrinkles gouged their way across her skin, a glimpse of what might be to come. Then she smiled, and the years retreated. ‘That’s one of the things I like about children. It’s impossible to imagine them ever being old.’

  Eddie nodded. He thought of Alison again – at present she was in his mind a good deal – and wished with all his heart that she could have stayed for ever young in the summer when they’d played the Peeing Game, and that he could have been young with her. He smiled across the years at Alison.

  ‘What’s funny, Eddie?’ Angel asked.

  ‘What? Nothing.’ He bent his head to hide his embarrassment. Steam from the coffee misted his glasses.

  ‘You don’t mind if I call you Eddie?’

  He felt himself blushing. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But don’t call me Angela. Horrible name.’

  He looked up. She was leaning towards him, her face blurred by the steam like the city by its smog. It seemed to him that her features were dissolving in the vapour. She said something he didn’t catch.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘My friends always call me Angel.’

  Over the next four months it seemed natural to keep Thelma in the dark about what was happening, though there was no reason to be secretive about their growing friendship. Eddie derived great pleasure from pretending at home in front of his mother that he and Angel were still on the old footing of lodger and landlady’s son. It amused Angel, too.

  ‘Children enjoy make-believe,’ she told him on one of their outings. ‘I think I still do.’

  They met in a succession of public places – cinemas, Primrose Hill, the National Portrait Gallery, a coffee shop attached to an Oxford Street store, a pub near the Heath where children played while their parents drank.

  Being with Angel allowed Eddie to watch children without worrying about what adults might be thinking. After all, he and Angel were roughly the same age: they might be taken for a married couple; in any case, a man and a woman together were much less threatening than a single man.

  Once, in the garden outside the Hampstead pub, a little girl fell off a swing and scraped her knee. Angel picked her up and calmed her down. Eventually the child managed to tell them that her mother was inside the pub.

  ‘Then we shall go and find your mummy.’ Angel picked up the child, who was no more than three, and handed her to Eddie. ‘This nice man will give you a ride.’

  The girl nestled in Eddie’s arms. He could not help wondering whether Angel had known that carrying her would give him pleasure. The three of them went into the pub.

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Angel asked the girl.

  The mother found them first. She rushed in front of Angel and snatched her child from Eddie. She clung so tightly to the little girl that the latter, until then perfectly happy, began to cry.

  The woman stared at Eddie, her face reddening. ‘What happened? What –?’

  Angel cut in with an explanation which was an implicit accusation, delivered in her clear, confident voice. The mother reacted with an unlovely mixture of gratitude, guilt and surliness. She was a squat little woman in a long, dusty skirt; she wore no make-up and her arms were tattooed; piggy eyes glinted behind gold-rimmed glasses. She was also quite young, Eddie realized, perhaps not much older than the girls he had taught at school.

  ‘You can’t be too careful. Not these days,’ she said in an unconscious echo of Thelma. She backed away from them, swallowed the rest of her drink and towed the child outside.

  Eddie and Angel queued at the bar.

  ‘If I hadn’t been with you,’ Angel said casually, ‘that wretched woman would probably have thought you were trying to steal her child.’

  As autumn turned to winter, Thelma seemed to sense that the atmosphere in the house had changed, that the emotional balance had tilted away from her. She grumbled more about Angel to Eddie. She became suspicious, wanting to know exactly where he’d been. There was not an open quarrel between her and Angel, but the old cordiality was no more than a memory.

  Eddie was cautious by nature. (It was this which had kept him away from the networks of people who shared his special interests; he knew they existed because he read about them in the newspapers.) He did not want a rift with his mother. Sometimes he tried to imagine what life would be like if he and Angel could afford a flat or even a small house together. But financially this was out of the question. He had nothing to live on except what the state and his mother doled out to him.

  It was wiser to keep a foot in both camps, at least for the time being. This was why Eddie did not tell Angel about his mother’s snooping. He did not want to run the risk of provoking a quarrel between them.

  The policy worked well until midway through January. One evening Eddie ran downstairs. He was due to meet Angel in Liberty’s in Regent Street: they planned to see a film and then have a pizza before coming home.

  ‘Eddie,’ Thelma called from the kitchen. ‘Come in here a moment.’

  He glanced at his watch, irritated because he was already a little on the late side and he didn’t like to keep Angel waiting. He hesitated in the kitchen doorway. His mother was sitting at the table, breathing heavily. Her colour was high and there were patches of sweat under her arms.

  ‘I’m in a bit of a hurry.’

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Just out.’

  ‘You’re always going out these days.’

  ‘Just a film.’

  Thelma’s face darkened still further. ‘You’re seeing that woman. Go on, admit it.’

  Surprised by the sudden venom, Eddie took a step backwards into the hall. ‘Of course not.’ Even to himself, his voice lacked conviction.

  ‘I can smell her on you. That perfume she wears.’

  Powerless to move, he stared at her.

  ‘I tell you one thing,’ Thelma went on, ‘she’s paid up till the end of the week, but after that she’s out on her ear.’

  ‘No!’ The word burst out of Eddie before he could stop himself. ‘You can’t do that. There’s no reason to do that.’

  ‘She fooled me at the start, I admit that. But I’m not alone in that. She’s fooled everyone.’ Thelma tapped a sturdy manila envelope which lay on the table before her. ‘Wait till Mrs Hawley-Minton hears about this. Unless she’s in it, too. It’s fraud, I tell you, barefaced fraud. It’s a matter for the police, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  Eddie stared at her. ‘What do you mean? Are you all right?’

  His mother opened the envelope and took out a British passport. She flicked over the pages until she found the photograph. She pushed the passport across the table towards Eddie, pinning it open with grubby fingers.

  Reluctantly he came into the room and peered at the photograph, which showed a thin-faced, short-haired woman he had never seen before.

  ‘So? Who is it?’

  ‘Are you blind?’ his mother shouted. ‘Look at the name, you fool.’

  Eddie stooped, holding the glasses on the bridge of his nose. The name swam into focus.

  Angela Mary Wharton.

  Eddie’s memories of the next few hours were vivid but patchy. This was, he supposed later, a symptom of shock. He remembered slamming the front door of 29 Rosington Road, a thing he’d never done before, but after that there were missing links in the chain of events.

  He must have walked to Chalk Farm underground station and taken the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road. He could not remember whether
he had changed on to the Central Line for Oxford Circus or simply walked the rest of the way. But he had a clear picture of himself standing just inside the main entrance of Liberty’s: the place was full of people and brightly coloured merchandise; a security guard stared curiously at him; he tried to find Angel, but she wasn’t there, and he felt despair creeping over him, a sense that everything worthwhile was over.

  Suddenly she touched his shoulder. ‘Let’s go outside. I’ve got you a present.’

  Taking his arm, which was something she had never done before, she urged him outside. There, standing on the pavement in Great Marlborough Street, she gave him a small Liberty’s bag.

  ‘Go on, open it.’ Angel was like a child, incapable of deferring pleasure. ‘I knew I had to get it for you as soon as I saw it.’

  People flowed steadily past them like a stream around a rock. Inside the bag was a silk tie, blue with thin green stripes running diagonally across it. Eddie stroked the soft material, his eyes filling with tears as he tried to find the right words.

  ‘See,’ she said. ‘It picks out the blue in your eyes. It’s perfect.’

  Everything except himself and Angel receded, as though rushing away – the black-and-white frontage of Liberty’s, the people eddying along the pavement, the snarling engines and the smell of fast food.

  ‘Put it on.’ Angel did not wait for him to respond but buttoned the collar of his shirt, which he was wearing without a tie. ‘That shirt will do perfectly.’ She turned up his collar, took the tie from his hand and put it round his neck. Deftly she tied the knot, making him feel like a child or even a doll. She stood back and looked assessingly at him. ‘Yes, perfect.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s wonderful.’

  Angel looked at her watch. ‘We’re going to miss the film if we’re not careful.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late. My mother …’

  ‘What is it? Something’s happened.’