‘I suppose it only matters if he leaves property behind. Nobody’s going to care otherwise, are they?’
He nodded, quite openly, with no hint of embarrassment. ‘Quite.’
Why does a non-existent man with no relatives make a will? Where does a seventy-five-year-old, cello-playing tax inspector go? On holiday and forget to return? Walking the streets? But what about the cello? Does he carry it around with him? Every park bench, every shop entrance would have to be twice as big for a man with a cello. Perhaps he had had a second home somewhere, with a wife half his age and four children. They’d all be getting old themselves by now, wondering why there wasn’t a cottage to inherit. Or did he go abroad and get kidnapped? Bad luck if there’s no one to pay the ransom. Perhaps he’s died in a plane crash, or a bomb in London, a body that can’t be identified.
‘It’s amazing that more people don’t disappear like that.’ Carelessly, slipping away by mistake.
Piers Sackville laughed this time, out loud, and Doody felt pleased with herself. He was beginning to notice that he was talking to a real human being. ‘I expect they do. We just don’t get involved.’
‘No.’ She resented the fact that she now knew two people who’d disappeared. Which way round did it work? She made connections with people who disappeared, or people who were going to disappear were drawn to her? ‘I’d be careful if I were you, Mr Sackville. People I know often disappear. It could be you next.’
‘Well, let’s hope not, Mrs Doody. I still harbour ambitions of reaching that elusive hundred.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘You sign a few papers for me, and then I give you the key.’
‘Mother?’
‘Imogen. How are you?’
‘Fine. I want to know about Oliver d’Arby.’ She didn’t want to discuss why she hadn’t phoned recently.
‘Who? Oh, yes, your godfather. Goodness, I haven’t thought of him in ages.’
Hardly surprising. She didn’t think of anyone except herself and the characters in Coronation Street. ‘Were you very friendly with him?’
‘Of course we were, he often came round. He was a pilot, you know.’
‘No, he wasn’t. He was a tax-man.’
She hesitated, clearly confused. ‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that. But he did fly planes—those little old-fashioned ones that people have as a hobby. He took us to an airfield once, long before you were born. Didn’t take us up, though—far too precarious. I wouldn’t have felt safe.’
A thrill of pleasure swept through Doody. Oliver d’Arby was a pilot, a Biggles character, a genuine link to her childhood. He assumed a new image in her mind, one that she felt she could identify with. A young man in flying goggles, taxiing out on to a grass airfield, raising a hand to her as he passed. The roar of the engine, the blue sky—
‘Imogen? Are you still there?’
‘Yes, yes.’ Doody pushed back her excitement to a place where she could examine it later. ‘Why was he my godfather?’
‘Because we asked him.’
She didn’t normally say ‘we’. The subject of Doody’s father was meticulously bypassed, driven round at high speed. But it wasn’t easy discussing their life together during Doody’s childhood without a passing reference to him. ‘Why did you ask him? He was much older than you—nearly sixty. Wasn’t he an odd choice?’
‘I don’t know. It was all so long ago, Imogen.’
There was no point in pushing her—she’d never produce any information. Doody imagined her sitting in the tiny hall of her flat, wondering if she’d have the energy to water her African violets, counting her pills in her mind, making sure she wouldn’t forget to take any.
‘Did you know he disappeared?’
‘Disappeared? What do you mean?’
‘Twenty-five years ago, he just vanished. Nobody knows what happened to him.’
‘How mysterious.’
Doody wondered if her mother had secretly kept in touch with him all this time and knew exactly where he was. But she couldn’t imagine why anyone as interesting as Oliver d’Arby would willingly maintain contact with her mother.
‘How did you know him? Where did you meet?’
‘Oh, I can remember that. He was a friend of my father’s—your grandfather. They were in the services together—I told you he was a pilot, didn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I think they were in the war—it must have been the First World War, I suppose, a very long time ago.’
Doody made some calculations. Oliver d’Arby must have been ten at the beginning of the First World War, and her grandfather would have been even younger. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘You must stop doubting everything I say, Imogen. It’s not an attractive quality.’
‘But it can’t be right—’ She stopped. It didn’t matter. At least she now knew where Oliver d’Arby had come from. She might never understand his real connection with her mother or father. ‘And he played the cello.’
‘Did he?’
‘Well you’re the one who told me that.’
‘Then he must have done, I suppose, if you say so.’
Doody felt herself getting angry. This was the way all conversations went with her mother. The logic became slippery and facts shifted and abandoned their shape, so that she lost her sense of direction and everything became her fault.
‘I’ve been having trouble with my eyes,’ her mother said.
‘Have you had them tested?’
‘No, but I’m thinking about it.’
‘You probably need new glasses.’
‘It’s not easy, living on my own—’
‘Did you like Oliver d’Arby?’
‘Oh, yes, he was a lovely man.’
‘Was he married? Did he have a family?’
‘No—it was all rather sad. His wife died of some illness—pneumonia, I think—before we met him, so he didn’t have any children. That was why he was so pleased to be asked to be a godfather. But then he didn’t keep in touch. We never saw him again after the christening.’
Doody’s fault, then. ‘Did you find out why not?’
‘Not exactly, but I think it brought it all back, seeing the children he could never have. I distinctly saw something in his face when we went back to the house, as if he wanted to cry but couldn’t.’
Doody paused and tried to imagine her mother being compassionate, perceptive, caring. But it was a false picture. Her mother was just constructing the image that she felt would impress Doody most. Then Doody realised that the whole business of Oliver d’Arby not having children would have been out of date when she was born. He was too old—he must have gone through all that anguish long before. She decided that she wouldn’t tell her mother about the cottage—not yet.
Immediately after the telephone conversation, Doody collected together all her notebooks, pencils, sharpeners and rubbers. She arranged herself on the settee, leaning against one arm, cushions comfortably at her back and her legs stretched out in front of her. She picked up a new, unused exercise book and a pencil.
‘Chapter One’, she wrote—and stopped.
She couldn’t think of a title. The previous one didn’t have a title either, but that wasn’t important, because she’d already decided to abandon it. There were now six unfinished novels sitting upstairs under her bed, and she had no great desire to go back to them. She wanted to start afresh, to experience the surge of adventure and promise that came with a new idea. This was going to be the good one, the one that would go on to the end.
Her mind felt open, exhilarated by the discovery that Oliver d’Arby was worth knowing, a benefactor she would have approved of. She imagined meeting him, a thin, grizzled, ancient man, whose mind went backwards to the flying.
‘Did you fly a Camel?’ she would ask.
‘Sopwith Camels? Goodness, no. You couldn’t get hold of them after the war. We flew whatever was available.’
What was it like? She wanted to ask
.
She wrote down a sentence: ‘The little two-winged Gipsy Moth came out of the sun, a tiny speck in the massive sky—’
She looked out of the window at the darkening sky, heavy with rain, and thought of Biggles, who had accompanied her through her childhood, a fictional friend who always came back. He didn’t die, or disappear. She still half dreamed that he would turn up one day, fly low over the school, land on the playing-field, ready to rescue her from her tedious, lost life.
‘Come on!’ he’d shout.
She would race across the field, in full view of all the children, leap on to a wing and lie flat, and they’d take off together, with an unknown enemy firing pistol shots at them. Escaping.
Sometimes he would resemble her husband, Harry.
She sighed and looked back down at the page.
Suddenly, Detective Inspector Mandleson, better known to his friends as Mandles, heard a change in the familiar sound of the engine—
Mandles had lived in Doody’s imagination for years. After Harry had left, she had felt the need to withdraw from reality. She had crept back to her childhood fantasy life, crawled into the hidden labyrinths of her mind, searching for comfort, and rediscovered Biggles. She transformed him into Mandles, recognising a need for her own hero.
The needle on the altimeter was spinning madly out of control, and the Gipsy Moth revolved round and round on an invisible pivot, heading directly for the drink—
It started to rain, big heavy drops splashing against her window.
Doody drove down from Bristol on the next Saturday to see the house. In her mind, she told her father that she’d become a woman of property, but she didn’t think he’d heard her. He was too dead for that kind of news. He wouldn’t believe her, anyway.
The cottage gate was on a corner of the village road, with only a narrow strip of cobbled pavement outside, where cars dashed past blindly. She liked this. It was not a place where people would stand and watch.
She opened the gate and waded through the long grass, pushing aside poppies, dandelions and forget-me-nots. Huge red petals flopped down from the poppies, leaving the centres black and quivering.
This belonged to her. She owned land, a house, a space. She wasn’t worried about the garden. She didn’t even care if the house was falling down. Now that she was here, she could feel that it was hers—it entered her body, creeping along her veins, taking root in her mind.
It was very strange to enter a house that had been empty for so long. The furniture was still there, waiting, unaware that it had been abandoned. To a sofa in a corner where the sun can’t reach, one year or twenty-five years is all the same. The house wasn’t like the Mary-Celeste, abandoned unexpectedly, a meal left half eaten on the table. Oliver d’Arby must have planned his departure. There was no washing-up waiting for attention, no grease marks on the cooker. Everything was tidy. Neat and ordered, like a holiday home. One night he must have decided to go, so he packed a suitcase. Then the next day he got up, had breakfast, made the bed, put out the dustbin and went. There were still clothes in the bedroom, suits hanging in the wardrobe, jumpers in drawers. But there was no underwear, no socks. So he knew he would be away for some time.
The furniture would have to go. She couldn’t live in the shadow of Oliver d’Arby even if he did play the cello, even though he was her benefactor and might still be alive. But she didn’t want to get rid of it yet. She would like to spend some time here first, guiltily finding out about him, painting a picture of him in her head, conscious that she had had no interest in him until she had known about the will. There was a bureau full of papers, letters, bills. She wanted to go through it, but needed some time for that.
She could do anything here, and nobody would know where she was. A place where she could go if she wanted to disappear for a while. No children, no headmaster, no bunches of keys. She had a picture in her mind. A house in the woods. A gingerbread cottage. Smoke curling out of the chimney.
She needed some expert advice because she’d never renovated a house before. Her brother, Jonathan, was the man for this.
Back at the school during the week, she phoned him. ‘Jonathan. How do you fix tiles on a roof?’
‘Find a reliable builder.’
‘I’m not going to pay someone. I haven’t got any money.’
‘I thought you worked all week.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I live on that money. I can’t afford to pay someone else’s wages too.’
‘Buy a book, then.’
‘No. You tell me.’
There was a pause and she suspected he was silently yawning. ‘Imogen—’
‘What?’
‘Are you sure this is wise?’
‘Don’t patronise me. I’m very capable. I’m a caretaker, you know, and I can do things.’
‘Fixing a few dripping taps and mopping up a leaky radiator doesn’t qualify you to rebuild an old ruin.’
How did he know what condition the cottage was in? Had he opened her letter and gone down there to inspect it?
‘Jonathan, stop trying to lecture me. I need your advice.’
‘You’ll need tools.’
‘I already have tools. Well, I can borrow them from school.’
‘You need to get a good DIY book. Honestly. If you see it illustrated you can work it out.’
‘I’m not wasting money on a book.’
‘The first thing you need is a ladder.’
‘Why didn’t I think of that?’
Actually, his advice was good. She borrowed a book from the library, but didn’t tell him. He would have many years of usefulness ahead of him before she’d finished.
On the next Saturday, Doody drove down with a ladder on a roof-rack and tools on her back seat, and parked in the road round the corner.
There was no one there. She was fenced in, or hedged in, and didn’t have to speak to anyone. No children to shout at, nobody to give her helpful advice. She was alone under the clear blue sky and the hot sun.
First, she went into the loft to look at the rafters. She needed to know their condition before she examined the tiles outside. She now knew about purlins, wall plates, ties, etc., and she could see it didn’t look good. Some of the beams were damp and rotten.
She went back outside again and consulted the book. It was not helpful. She read each bit several times, but it didn’t explain properly. It seemed to think she knew things already. It described what a roof looked like, how it was constructed, but it didn’t tell her how to mend it. She gave up on the book and went to stand in the garden where she could examine the roof. There were several gaps between the tiles. It might be possible to replace them, which would do for a start. If she could stop the rain coming in, the beams might dry out inside.
She stripped off as many clothes as she could, made her ladder secure and crawled on to the roof. She wanted to know exactly how many tiles were missing, and she needed a sample tile, so she could find the right ones in B&Q. She felt strangely powerful, under control. An aeroplane droned overhead and bees were buzzing round an enormous white lilac tree that was hanging over the front of the house. She could smell honey-suckle, even up here. After a while, she stopped counting tiles, and sat still, ready to fall asleep in the warmth of the sun. She could see the lighthouse, shimmering in the haze of heat, and the sea beyond, calm and tempting, the horizon blurring into the sky.
She looked down and saw a man standing inside her gate with a shopping trolley. For a few terrible seconds, she was seized by panic. It was Oliver d’Arby come to reclaim his house. She shouldn’t be here, sitting on his roof.
But this man did not fly Sopwith Camels or play the cello. It was obvious, even from a distance. He was tall with an untidy beard, wearing a suit and tie and boots. He had a huge nose. He was very ugly, but not a hundred years old.
‘Who are you?’ she shouted.
He looked at her but didn’t answer.
Doody first discovered serious anger at the age of eighteen, when
it hit her like a surge of electricity and shocked her with its life-giving intensity. It had changed the nature of her existence, woken her up, made her think better. Now she has learned how to let it grow from a tiny pinpoint of light to a full-grown open fire, greedily hunting around for more fuel to burn. From the first moment when the spark ignites, a fierce excitement takes root inside her because she can feel something.
She knows that she irritates people by automatically taking the opposite view from them, but she’s waiting for the moment of self-belief, the rush of adrenaline that tells her she’s right and they’re wrong, that she’s indestructible. She doesn’t drink and she’s never taken drugs because she can’t see the point. They give an artificial high. Why bother when you can have the real thing?
This man is not predictable. When she trips over the roots in the grass and falls over, he comes back. She knows he’s there, even though she can’t look up, because she can hear him breathing. But nothing happens. She remains stuck and he doesn’t do anything to help her. She wriggles herself into an awkward kneeling position, scrabbling around in the long grass at the roots of the hawthorn, but there’s nothing without thorns that she can hold on to. When she finally manages to find a position from which to see him, she realises that he’s laughing. Shaking uncontrollably, gulping for air, tears rolling down his cheeks.
‘Very funny,’ she says. ‘How long is it going to be before you decide to help me? Five minutes? Half an hour? All day?’
But he keeps on laughing, twitching and jerking with the effort, completely unable to control himself.
‘Moron,’ she says. ‘Idiot, fool, imbecile.’
The trouble is, she needs his help. Her foot is caught upside down and her leg is awkwardly twisted. She can’t get into a comfortable position so that she can reach her foot and pull it out.
‘Haven’t you ever heard of being helpful?’ she yells at him, desperate to break up his hysterical laughter. ‘Didn’t you do the Good Samaritan when you were at school?’
He ignores her.
Natural Flights of the Human Mind Page 3
