by Helen Harris
‘I wonder how he and I would have got on?’ said Alison.
‘Who?’ exclaimed Alicia.
‘Why, Mr Queripel,’ laughed Alison. ‘Who else? You don’t mind my saying this, do you, but the way you talk about him, and with all the pictures, I almost feel I know him.’ She hesitated. ‘You make it seem as if he’s still alive.’
Alicia held her head on one side in a momentary tribute to her late husband. ‘For me, he’ll never fade away,’ she said. ‘Gone But Not Forgotten. For me, he’ll always be Only A Heartbeat Away.’
Even though she was not sure she had intended it, a tear came out on to her powder. She let it roll its way down the side of her nose and only dabbed at it with her hanky when it lodged ticklishly in the wing of her nostril.
‘Oh, Mrs Queripel,’ exclaimed Alison. ‘Don’t!’
‘It must seem foolish to you,’ said Alicia in a small voice. ‘Still mourning after all these years.’
‘Oh no, it doesn’t,’ Alison assured her. ‘It really doesn’t. It makes me realize what a wonderful relationship you must have had.’
Alicia gave her nose a good blow. ‘We had forty-one years of happiness,’ she declared. ‘Whatever people may have said, I thanked my lucky stars, year in, year out.’
Alison was hanging on her every word.
‘When you are a couple like we were, dear, you can never be sundered.’
She did wonder when Alison had left, if she hadn’t gone just a little bit too far. She wanted to show Alison the error of her ways, but she mustn’t overdo things. If she made her hero out to be whiter than the driven snow and her villain black as pitch, then Alison would smell a rat. She must go about matters in a more roundabout way, more of a nudge and a wink, as it were, and less, to quote Leonard on a different subject entirely, ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’. If she were to win the challenge she had thrown down in front of the television screen as the discussion group credits faded, she must proceed with great discretion.
She found a photograph album she hadn’t looked into for years. It was The Age of Youth and This Thing Called Love in the winter of 1938. There they all were, in the costumes which had served for The Truth Game and Abie’s Irish Girl the previous year, but smiling through. There was Harry Levy, his black hair shining under a spotlight, his glossy black eyebrows raised in a peak of query and derision, blowing a jaunty kiss at the camera off the upturned palm of his hand. And then it was the winter of 1939 and their ranks were depleted. It was the winter of 1939 and Harry had disappeared.
Being confined to her front room had precious few advantages. In fact, the only one she could say she genuinely enjoyed, apart from the negative notion of not having to climb up and down the stairs, was being able to keep a closer watch on goings on outside in the street. Previously, she had missed everything which happened once she went upstairs, because she didn’t like to be seen looking out from her bedroom, all by herself, and anyway you couldn’t see so well from up there. But now she could sit right by the window of an evening, without turning on the lights, and she could watch whoever chance blew past. That way, she found out that Mr Patel walked a shrivelled old woman in white round the block every night: a tiny, huddled old woman, dressed in a long white robe like a ghost’s, who hung on to his crooked arm as if the savage wind might snatch her away. She saw that the booming voices which regularly upset her as she fought for sleep on the settee belonged not to a pair of young layabouts, but to two shuffling old men who came groggily past most evenings when the pubs shut and bid each other disgracefully long and loud goodnights outside her window. She saw the occasional courting couple, of course, taking advantage of the dark, and whenever that happened she would feel a pang of pure jealous misery. They reminded her that Alison was snug at home with that rotter and with the winter rain lashing at the window, up to God knows what.
*
For a minute, I really thought that Rob might hit me. Well, I don’t know if I did really, because he never has and I don’t in fact think that he ever would. But I thought I had finally pushed him so far that, if he had, he would have been almost justified.
The background to my bad mood was that it was February the fourteenth, which I ought to point out to the likes of Rob is St Valentine’s Day. Now I know St Valentine’s Day is a cheap commercial exercise, just the sort of confectioner’s field day which Mrs Q would glory in. But nevertheless I was aggrieved, cycling back up the hill after visiting her, to compare the story of the adorable wartime Valentines which she had received from Leonard with the no-nonsense birthdays and anniversaries which are all I will have to look back on in my old age.
The next day, which was the fourteenth, I woke up already in a bad mood. Last year, I remember, I said to Rob brightly at breakfast, ‘It’s St Valentine’s Day today,’ and he handed me the only brazil nut left in the muesli packet with a ridiculous flourish: ‘Be my Valentine.’
On Monday morning, he prodded me mischievously in the small of the back. ‘Oy, get up, it’s after eight,’ he said. ‘You’ll be late for the office.’
I don’t know why he persists in calling it ‘the office’, as though I sat all day sending telexes about bananas around the world. It is particularly uncalled for in view of the news which Mr Charles broke to me that very day. But let Rob make fun of me if it makes him happy; I know I am not a skivvy. I am going to have my own room where I will sit importantly in my own circle of scholarly lamplight.
When I got back from work on Monday, Rob was out. What I had to tell him was so exciting that I felt personally slighted. I forgot that he had gone to meet a television man, because that was the sort of mood I was in. I made myself a cup of tea and I took it into the living-room and drank it broodingly in the dusk, without turning on the lights. What Mr Charles had told me was going to change everything, I thought. Mary-Anne was leaving at the end of the week. Two new college graduates were going to be recruited to sit at the Enquiries Desk and I was to become Mr Charles’s research assistant. A cubby-hole, right next door to his, would become my ‘office’ and articles which he published which I had helped research would have my name on too, in small print.
As it got later and later, and Rob didn’t come home, my excitement boiled over for want of an outlet. I lay on the living-room floor and I played the day back to myself: girls giggling about improbable Valentines in the cloakroom, Milton ribbing me, ‘Postman got his arm in a sling, Alison?’; my gloom suddenly lifted by Mr Charles’s announcement, and his twinkling admonition ‘not to read any undue significance into today’s date’. Rob was out drinking with his friends and he didn’t give a damn. I can’t explain the thought process which led me to telephone Mrs Q of all people, as if she would possibly be interested, but, to my surprise, that’s what I ended up doing.
Her voice crackled like a long-dead relative summoned by a medium into Rob’s living-room. ‘Is that you, Alison? Speak up. I can hardly hear a word you’re saying.’
I grinned to myself. I have taken to giving her these surprise telephone calls every now and then and, even though I know she’s pleased, she always puts on an act of being disturbed and put out.
‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘How’s the knee?’ The day before, she had had a most terrible bruise on her knee. She wouldn’t tell me how she had got it.
‘Knee?’ she said. ‘What knee? What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, go on,’ I said. ‘Your knee, the one you hurt.’
‘It’s on the mend,’ she said stiffly. ‘Most kind of you to enquire.’
After a minute, ‘Guess what?’ I said. ‘I’ve been promoted.’
‘Promoted?’ repeated Mrs Q. ‘Chief bottle washer, are we?’
I giggled. ‘I’m going to be the boss’s assistant. Remember Mr Charles, the one I told you about, the older gentleman? I’m going to be his research assistant.’
She said just what I know I had hoped she would say. ‘The boss’s assistant, eh? What does your Robert have to say to that?’
‘Oh, him,’ I said readily. ‘He’s out. He couldn’t care less, I don’t think.’
She sniffed. ‘Well, that’s a fine state of affairs.’
A bit guiltily, I added, ‘I mean, I haven’t told him yet. He doesn’t know.’
‘Well, what’s he up to?’ asked Mrs Q. ‘What’s he doing out at this time of night?’
‘Oh come, it’s not that late, is it?’ I said.
‘Late enough for an explanation,’ Mrs Q answered tartly. ‘You let him get away with murder.’
I squinted at my watch in the gloom. ‘It’s only half-past eight,’ I said defensively.
‘Half-past too late,’ she snapped. ‘I wouldn’t stand for it.’
‘I’ll give him a piece of my mind when he gets in,’ I mimicked her.
She didn’t notice my mimicry. ‘You do that,’ she said. ‘He’s had it all his own way for far too long.’
Rob’s feet came bounding up the stairs and his keys rattled out on the landing.
‘Must go now,’ I said quickly. ‘I think I can hear him coming.’
‘Give him what for,’ said Mrs Q.
I hung up without letting the telephone tinkle.
Rob bounded in, buoyed up over a probable commission, with three gin and tonics in an empty stomach. He did a war dance of triumph around the living-room and then he squatted down in front of me, balancing himself unsteadily at my outstretched feet. ‘We’re going to be fat cats,’ he crowed. ‘Rich sold-out fat cats.’
The first thing I did was snub him. ‘Not Carver?’ I said. ‘Not the dreaded Carver? What made you go sucking up to him?’
He flinched, poor Rob, and made an effort to focus on my bad temper in the dark and find out what the matter was.
‘He’s not that bad,’ he said placatingly. ‘A bit of a fat cat, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said rudely. ‘I’ve never met the man. I’ve only your word to go on.’
‘Sorry I’m late, Miss,’ said Rob in a piping voice. He yanked the unaccustomed tie he had put on for his meeting round under one ear. ‘Sorry I’m late, Miss. Can I be excused just this once, Miss? I’ll be a good boy, I’ll eat up all my greens.’
Grinning, he leaned towards me. I let him lean closer and closer, looking poker-faced into his grin. When he was nearly on top of me and had lifted his hands off the floor to hug me into gentleness, I put out my hand and I pushed him away, my palm flat in the middle of his chest. It was my fault he toppled onto my tea-cup.
‘Go away,’ I said coldly.
For a minute, I really thought that Rob might hit me. But he sat there and he simply shrugged. He shook his head dully. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Forget it. I’m in too good a mood, I’m too pissed to have a row.’
He went into the kitchen and jerked the fridge door open. I got up and followed him so that he could get angry with me.
‘What have we got to eat?’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a cheese omelette and some of this potato salad. Would you care to join me?’
I left the kitchen and washed my hands and face. When I came back I watched Rob grating cheese and humming. I said stiffly, ‘I’m sorry I pushed you.’
He shrugged again, but after a moment he winked at me. ‘You goose,’ he said.
I laid the table. ‘What’s this play they’ve commissioned supposed to be about, then?’ I asked.
Rob gave me a quick sideways look to see if I was going to continue being nasty or if I had made my peace. When he decided that I had, he knifed a big chunk of butter into the frying pan and he explained, ‘It’s quite complex, really. It’s going to be a polyphonic production, set in different depressed regions of the country simultaneously. But, basically, the theme is youth unemployment.’
We sat down to eat. I let Rod talk away. He tried not to be too full of himself at first, so that I should not feel envious and unimportant, but his happiness got the better of him and, involving his knife and fork, the salad servers and the cruets in his success, he talked on and on. I sat opposite him and encouraged him with kind condescending smiles. Smugly, I didn’t breathe a word about Mr Charles.
*
It was her punishment for having given in to such a daft idea. She had known all along it was a daft idea, even while she was sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast and considering it; even while she was standing in the front hall in the late afternoon having a last go at persuading herself not to do it; even while she put her right hand on the banister and her right foot on the first step. It was her come-uppance.
The noises upstairs had not gone away. If anything, over the past fortnight they had grown more noticeable, especially at night. She became convinced that if only she went upstairs and caught them at it, she would have a revelation. Left to their own devices, maybe the rooms upstairs were not crumbling away but were undergoing some strange change of life. So long as she had slept up there, her presence must have kept whatever it was at bay. But now that the last remnants of normal life were gone, who knew what festerings and hauntings might be under way? She had moved out, but maybe Leonard was still up there. She had the daft idea that if she could only get herself up the stairs at the right moment, she would see him in a vision. She had seen him in a vision once before, on stage at The Royal in Bournemouth playing the ghost of a dead pianist, with his wavy hair all silvery and a silver spot on his long thin fingers. That was how he would be sitting on the bare bed in their bedroom. That was how she would see him.
The trip up the stairs had gone smoothly. She hauled and rested, hauled and rested and only had her seaside impression once just before the very top. That time it didn’t bother her, for she felt the seagulls and the bandstand helped set the scene for Leonard’s appearance and she gave full vent to her windpipe. On the landing, she waited. She must get the timing exactly right. It was early evening, for that was when she had felt Leonard’s presence the strongest. It did all seem very deserted. The noises had stopped entirely, but that was only to be expected. She had to give things a chance to get used to her presence, to get back to their undisturbed state. She went and waited in the back bedroom, taking advantage of the opportunity to remind herself of the contents of a cupboard or two. As she ferreted, the boards outside on the landing gave a long crack. Her heart missed a beat. There he was! Unmistakably, the door of the front bedroom grated and the bedsprings squeaked. Alicia waited for him to be settled. She slipped out onto the landing and, squeezing the seagulls and the pom-pomming brass instruments back into her chest, she went silently to the bedroom door. With her hand on the handle, she mouthed, ‘Dearest heart, it’s me.’ Then, quick as a wink, she opened the door.
She didn’t pretend to be surprised that the room was empty, since she had known all along that it was a daft idea. But she was dreadfully disappointed all the same. She stood in the doorway and achingly took in the bare bed and the vacant air. She had been stood up.
She sat on the bed for a bit and grew weepy and picked at the mattress buttons. Of course, she scolded herself, if Leonard was going to return, why should he return here? He had never been especially attached to this house; he had only lived in it for two miserable years. It was not surprising she felt so estranged from him half the time, and had to work so hard to revive her sentiments. Leonard would want to come back somewhere where he had been young and fit and well; he would come back to Eastbourne in his prime.
She stayed sitting on the bed and thinking about Eastbourne for a foolishly long time. She might as well dream about Timbuctoo for all the chance she had of ever setting eyes on it again. At last she got up and hobbled to the door, stiff with having sat and thought for so long. She banged the door shut behind her and made for the stairs.
That was when it happened, as she was stamping bad-temperedly down the last few steps, thinking about her wasted journey and how tired she was. She missed her footing, or else a carpet tread betrayed her, and where there should have been a step there was nothing and she sank, turning like a grey stone through waves t
o her doom. But her knee caught in the banister posts and, despite an appalling pain which threatened to snap her leg in two, she managed to seize on to the banister and save herself. She slithered in a series of cruelly slow bumps to the bottom of the stairs.
