by Ruth Rendell
Living in Noor’s dad’s flat, even though sharing with Noor and Sophie, Molly had been spoilt. Two large bedrooms, one cleverly subdivided, a beautiful bathroom and unlimited hot water, a huge fridge, microwave, washing machine and dryer – and all for a nominal, a tiny, rent. As a kind of trial run she had spent a night in Carl’s room. It had been an eye-opener. Literally, as she had scarcely closed her eyes all night.
The room was up three flights of stairs at the top of a Victorian house in Cricklewood. It measured perhaps fourteen feet by twelve and instead of furniture was full of junk. There were no cupboards. Carl kept all his possessions, including his clothes and trainers, two or three broken radios and a couple of mobile phones, in transparent plastic bags. The floor was covered in carpet of a kind, though threadbare and dirty, and the bed was a double mattress pushed into a corner. The TV stood on the floor and a laptop next to it, hedged in by stacked rubbish bags, stuffed full. Outside the single, uncurtained, window the poles and planks of scaffolding kept out much of the daylight but did little to exclude the glare from street lamps.
From where she lay, under Carl’s dirty duvet, she had been able to view the contents of the nearest bag, old magazines, cans of lager, packets of crisps, one of those broken radios, CDs, two DVDs that she could clearly see were of Saving Private Ryan and Death Becomes Her, several empty cigarette packets and, rather frighteningly, a syringe. The remaining contents of the bag were hidden from her view by a rolled-up blanket and a T-shirt with a skull on it.
Lying awake, she asked herself if she was really going to live here. And if so, when? What about Sophie? When the three of them moved in together, three ‘best’ friends from school, it looked as if it would last the three years each intended to spend at their colleges. The generosity of Noor’s father had seemed at first to be too good to be true. A big flat in a new block on a bus route and near a Tube station! They didn’t even have to clean the place because Richenda did all that. The only cleaning she ever did had been for Stuart and that, she thought, had been out of love.
She tossed and turned, Carl snoring softly beside her. Did he ever change the sheets? And if he did where did they get washed? Molly had seen launderettes, had walked past them, but never been inside one. She couldn’t live here but where else could she go when Noor turned her out?
Now she needed to go to the bathroom. Wrapping herself in the blanket she pulled from the floor, she tiptoed down the long passage only to find a light showing in the glass panel over the bathroom door and the door locked.
The change in the weather was violent. In the last week of June the temperature changed overnight from thirty-two degrees (or ninety as Duncan put it) to seventeen, or sixty-five. The rain began and everyone knew, in spite of the optimistic forecast, that the real summer was over. Duncan, who had come to believe his home would always be warm, sometimes too hot to live in, now found himself shivering when he got up in the morning. Number 3 Kenilworth Avenue was actually cold, something he had never known in all the time he had lived there. Brought up in a little house on the Essex marshes where the fire was never lit before November, he was shocked at the idea of starting the central heating in July, even turning it on for a few hours. He went off to Brent Cross where the same man who had sold him a toaster in January and told him they didn’t sell room heaters in the summer, told him the same thing again. It was incredible but no matter how cold it might be in June they didn’t sell room heaters. Now if he wanted a fan …
Duncan shivered, wrapping himself in a blanket as he walked about the house. Heavy rain fell and soaked the recliner. He had never considered what to do with it in the winter, still less this premature autumn. There was no room for it indoors or even in his garden shed, so he covered it with ten of the black plastic bags he kept for putting the rubbish in.
While he was outside a uniformed police officer arrived in the Springmead garden and with him a man to mend the broken window. Duncan thought they would ask him if he knew who was responsible for breaking the glass, but all they said was good morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Estate agents’ boards sprouted all over the little garden at the front of Lichfield House. Columba Brown were handling the sale of Marius’s flat and Smith Mawusi Green the Constantines’. The late Stuart Font’s Flat 1 was in the hands of NW Woodlands, as had been Flat 2. Contracts were signed on Rose’s flat but NW Woodlands hadn’t yet removed their board. Olwen’s Flat 6 had long been empty, but while doubt remained as who it belonged to, it could neither be rented nor sold. In the middle of a cold wet July, on the day Michael and Katie Constantine and a mountain of luggage got into the taxi that would take them to Paddington Station and the train for Cardiff where her parents lived, the classiest agent of all, Wood, Lasalle & Stitch, arrived to put up the board that would offer Flat 5 for sale.
The prince had proposed and his father the nawab and Noor’s father the multimillionaire were engaged in arranging the wedding. Noor, with a palace in Kerala and a house in Mayfair in prospect, was in the giving vein and had told Sophie and Molly they could remain in Flat 5 until the end of August.
‘Or when Daddy accepts an offer. Whichever is the sooner.’
Sophie had given up. On 24 July Olwen’s money should have come into her bank account but, ready to go up the road and draw out the entire sum, she couldn’t find Olwen’s bank card. She remembered last taking it from the pocket of her Gap jeans and presumably putting it back there. Not presumably but certainly. And it fitted there snugly because the jeans were very tight and nothing could have been abstracted without her being aware of it. Therefore she must have taken it out and put it somewhere else. She searched Flat 5, searched through her clothes, looked inside all the books she had been reading or ought to have read for her uni course, and all in vain.
She thought back to that evening after the party when she and Joshua and Molly and Carl and Noor and the prince and some of those oldies had all gone into Springmead and rampaged about, running up and down stairs and drinking an awful lot.
Joshua – she hadn’t seen him since that night. He had stood behind her when she used Olwen’s card for the last time, watched her key in the pin number and kissed her neck. And later she had taken him back to Flat 5, he’d stayed the night and next day he’d disappeared. It had been a short-lived love affair.
By this time she had long got over hoping that she and he might find a place together. There was nothing for it but to go back to her parents’ house and live with them, not just until uni started again but until two more years had passed and she got her degree. It meant commuting from Purley, a long and costly journey. She was pondering on this and consoling herself with the thought that her own bank account would be in a better state than it had probably ever been, when Molly walked in.
‘What d’you think, Olwen’s dead.’
‘Olwen?’
‘You remember Olwen, don’t you? She’s dead. Mr Ali told me.’
‘How does he know?’
‘He always knows everything. And he said we’ve got a new caretaker coming and it’s a woman, how about that?’
‘Everyone’s a woman these days,’ said Sophie. ‘Soon there won’t be any men about.’
‘I can’t wait.’
With luck, Sophie thought vindictively, no money would have gone into Olwen’s account after 24 June, so that rat Joshua would be disappointed when he tried to use the card. Molly was beginning to see Carl as her fate – and her landlord. She couldn’t go home to her parents. After she left school they had moved to Torquay. Living with them was a possibility only until art school started again in October and maybe getting a job in one of the numerous restaurants or cafes. She hated the prospect. Almost better to throw in her lot with Carl. He told everyone she was his fiancée and he had given her a ring which she knew for a fact came from Topshop.
NW Woodlands called the little house in Finchley Marius and Rose were buying a ‘Georgian cottage’. Marius said that must be George VI, the Queen’
s dad, but never mind, it was ideal for them. He still had to sign the contract on the sale of Flat 3 and meanwhile Rose moved in with him while they waited to get possession of number 1 Fortescue Cottages.
One evening when they were coming out of the Almeida Theatre and walking down Upper Street they met Freddy Livorno. Marius thought Freddy wouldn’t have known him on his own or Rose on her own but he recognised them together and suggested they all go and have a drink somewhere. On the way to the pub he told them about his coming divorce, the prospect of which made him roar with laughter. After their single foray into champagne, Rose and Marius had sampled no more alcohol but they were happy enough to drink orange juice while Freddy drank whisky.
‘The cops have given up on me. I had a cast-iron alibi I fabricated,’ Freddy said, mixing his metaphors, ‘and they swallowed it.’
‘It wasn’t you,’ said Marius, ‘and it wasn’t Wally Scurlock. Possibly the Chinese pot-grower but I don’t think so. I suppose they’re still looking.’
‘They say they never give up but they do. You still living at Lichfield House?’
‘We’re moving into a little house we’re buying,’ said Rose, and she added, ‘We got married.’
‘Well, congratulations.’ Freddy sounded genuinely pleased. ‘Hope it turns out better than it did for me. I doubt if I’ll take the plunge again.’
Duncan was feeling quite excited. His offer to drive the rented van which would carry Rose and Marius’s furniture to Finchley had been accepted. It would give him the chance to drive again and cost Rose and Marius only the day’s rental instead of what a removal firm would have charged. Marius wanted to keep only his books. All the furniture that had belonged to long-dead aunts and uncles was to be taken away by flat clearers who had offered him £200 for the lot. He said it would be a relief to see the back of it. Rose had pretty painted furniture and delightful ornaments and pleasing watercolours which Duncan and Marius carried out to the van. McPhee sat on Rose’s lap in the passenger seat while Marius sat in the back in Rose’s pink velvet armchair to watch over the rest of the furniture and the nine large boxes of books.
Sitting high up in the driver’s cab, bowling along to Finchley, Duncan felt as if he were going on holiday. He rather wished Rose and Marius were moving to Scotland so that he could have driven all day.
*
Sophie moved out a week later. Her parents pretended they were delighted to have her back in Purley and she pretended she had been homesick and was happy to return. Of all the residents in Lichfield House now only Molly remained. Carl nagged her daily to move in with him but she intended to hold out as long as she could, clinging to the Micawberish hope that something would turn up. She had till the end of August, Noor had said so, and so she was unpleasantly surprised by the arrival of a small fat man in a silver-grey suit and wearing a diamond ring. He let himself in with his own key, announced that he was Noor’s father and seemed shocked by Molly’s emerging from the shower (decent in a towelling robe) at ten in the morning. She would have to be gone by the next day, he said, as he had decorators coming in to renovate the flat. And he walked about, scrutinizing tiny marks on the woodwork and a scrape on the floor tiles which he seemed to take for granted had been made by Molly alone.
Obliged to make two journeys, she struggled over to Cricklewood on buses, her clothes and books in a suitcase and three Sainsbury’s carriers. It rained lightly, then very heavily. Carl was out at his window-cleaning job or it might have been his car-washing job in the car park at Brent Cross. One of the other tenants let her in but didn’t help her up the stairs with her bags and her suitcase.
Surrounded by her own property and by Carl’s property, all similarly encased, Molly sat down, then lay down, on the bed. She started to cry, she couldn’t help herself. And like the rain which had begun as a drizzle and become a tempest, her snivelling turned into a full-blown storm of sobs and floods of tears.
*
Lichfield House was empty. The management had paid Richenda quite generously to clean those vacated flats to which they had access. This didn’t include Olwen’s. Flat 6 might remain untenanted for years. Olwen had died intestate, her parents and both her husbands were dead and she had had no children. Margaret had started proceedings to claim the flat, though she had been told it was a hopeless attempt. Meanwhile Flat 6 was locked up and inaccessible. Richenda could do no cleaning there, and Flat 5 was awaiting the arrival of decorators, though none had yet appeared. She spent a couple of hours at the Constantines, but it was so clean that there was really nothing to do except scour the place for unconsidered trifles. In somewhere so spick and span she expected nothing and was surprised and rather excited to find a condom still in its pack fallen down a crack in the floorboards where the bed had stood.
All that ugly old furniture was gone from Marius’s flat. There was nothing to do. Stuart’s place required only a quick once-over with the vacuum-cleaner brush and Rose’s not even that. Richenda went off to her jobs in Ludlow House, thinking with some satisfaction about her decree nisi which had come through that morning and Wally’s trial scheduled for a date in the middle of September.
Any housewifery skills Molly had she had learned while Stuart’s servant. You pushed the vacuum cleaner about and you wiped down surfaces with a bit of cloth. You scattered scouring powder over the basin and the sink and the bath and rubbed at it and rinsed it. You didn’t know what to iron so you ironed everything. This was the extent of Molly’s expertise but she had performed these actions from love so they had been pleasurable and she had been rapturous when receiving Stuart’s rare thanks. She felt very differently about Carl. While she was living with him – and she meant to live with him for as short a time as possible – she wasn’t going to sweep and dust but she must do something about the bed. It had begun to smell. No, he hadn’t got any other sheets. When the ones that were on the bed got in too bad a state he took them to the launderette, washed and dried them and then put them back on the bed. Because she wasn’t paying any rent to Noor while she was here, or any rent at all come to that, she went down to the British Home Stores and bought two sheets and two pillowcases and remade the bed.
‘You’re a star, you are,’ Carl said. ‘Do you know that? You’ll make a wonderful wife.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Carl.’
‘I do. We better fix a date to get ourselves married.’
‘I’m not twenty yet,’ said Molly. ‘I can’t get married.’
‘My nan was sixteen when she got married.’
‘Yeah, well, that was olden times.’
She took the dirty sheets to the launderette and learned how to operate the washing machine and the dryer. It was very different from the arrangements at Flat 5 Lichfield House. On the way back she found a charity shop where they had a pair of green-and-black-striped curtains for sale. If they were hung up and the light excluded she might be able to sleep at night instead of lying there looking at the street lamp and the car headlights flickering across the ceiling. And the workmen who came by day and walked about on the scaffolding wouldn’t be able to see in and whistle at her.
Carl said that when he’d finished work next day he meant to go down to the registrar’s office at Burnt Oak and find out what you had to do to get married.
‘I’m not getting married, Carl,’ Molly said, hanging curtains. ‘I’m not getting married for years and years. Before I even think of marriage I’m going to be an art historian or maybe the curator of Tate Modern.’
‘It won’t do any harm finding out how it’s done, though, will it?’
Someone with a car parked at Brent Cross offered him £20 a time to clean his car every week for the next six months. On the strength of that Carl bought two gold or gold-plated wedding rings.
‘I’ll want to have one too, so all the girls know I’m not in the running,’ he said.
Molly looked through all the papers for people advertising for a third or fourth tenant to share a flat. She phoned all the ones that looked po
ssible but so far they had been more than she could afford. Could she live in a hostel? Would she be able to bear it? In the evenings Carl brought in doner kebab and chips or pizza and they ate it sitting on the floor watching TV. Then they mostly went down the pub.
With nothing much to do all day but fruitless flat-hunting, Molly started sorting through the bags that furnished Carl’s room. She found a lot of Heat and Knave magazines but no essential bathroom requisites. ‘If you take a toilet roll down that bathroom,’ Carl had said, ‘you have to bring it back with you. But you like don’t, you forget. Same applies to soap.’
‘Then what do you do?’
‘Me, I do without.’
That made Molly shudder. She took the soiled T-shirts and torn jeans down to the launderette with the sheets but when they were washed they fell into rags. In another bag she found a couple of empty vodka bottles, a woman’s handbag with a broken strap, about a hundred old copies of the Star and a framed photograph of an old woman Carl said was his grandmother, the glass cracked diagonally across her face.
‘Is she the one that got married at sixteen?’
‘That was the other one,’ Carl said uncertainly.
Sometimes she saw herself spending the rest of her life groping through dirty rubbish in plastic sacks. In a gloomy half-dark dump with the workmen’s Radio 2 playing outside the window. Even though she’d be back at college in five or six weeks, she ought to get a job. In her school holidays she’d worked serving in a greengrocer’s and another one cleaning offices. Noor said she’d worked as a croupier but Molly didn’t believe it, though she was good-looking enough. But why would she when her dad was rolling in money? She wondered if Mr Ali might need an assistant and one morning she took the bus and then another bus to Kenilworth Avenue and his shop. It was more for the outing, for something to do and somewhere to go that she went, for she had no real hope. Mr Ali would want a Muslim girl who wore a headscarf. But he didn’t, or he couldn’t get one, and he agreed to take her on, three days a week, the 3 p.m. to 8 shift.
