The New Neighbours

by Costeloe Diney

  “I don’t suppose Anthony can get the time,” Jill muttered, still annoyed.

  Nancy smiled sweetly. “Why don’t you ask him?” she said.

  Anthony finished his meeting earlier than he had expected, and was already in the train on the way home when he thought he would give Jill a call at her mother’s and suggest that they go out for dinner. Then he remembered that he had lost his mobile phone. He racked his brains as to where he could have left it, and then it came to him. Yesterday he had grabbed a quick cup of coffee as he waited for the morning train. Someone had rung him as he sat in the cafeteria and he had answered the phone sitting at the table. He’d had to get some papers out of his briefcase to answer a question, and he must have left the phone on the table, or maybe it had fallen on to the floor as he re-packed his briefcase. He would ask when he got to the station, you never knew, someone might have handed it in.

  When he reached the station he hurried into the cafeteria and asked at the cash desk if anyone had found a mobile phone. The cashier shook her head “Nothing handed into me, dear,” she said. “Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Not these days. Finders keepers these days. You could try the lost property I suppose.”

  Anthony thanked her and turned away annoyed. He certainly hadn’t used the phone after the time in the cafeteria, so he must have left it and someone must have picked it up. As he went out to the car park he remembered a story he had heard about someone who kept having his phone stolen from his car, and an idea came to him, an idea which made him laugh. It probably wouldn’t work, but it was worth a try.

  As soon as he got in he made himself a cup of tea and sat down in the kitchen to write himself a script, then when he had read it aloud several times he decided he was ready. Picking up the telephone, he dialled the number of his mobile phone. The number rang, and after a moment or two it was answered.

  “Yes?” The answer was male and gruff.

  “Oh, good afternoon,” Anthony said cheerfully. “I’m ringing on behalf of Radio Belcaster. You’ve been chosen by our computer in a random selection to win a TV and VCR set or £350 in cash if you can answer a simple question.”

  “What question?” The voice sounded slightly less gruff, younger than before.

  “Can you tell me the name of the Honda garage in Pottage Street?”

  “Just tell you name of a garage?” The voice sounded suspicious.

  “Yes, that’s all. It’s part of an advertising campaign for Honda.”

  “Windridge Motors,” said the voice.

  “Congratulations, sir,” Anthony enthused, beginning to enjoy himself. “That answer makes you a winner. Now if you would like to choose whether you’ll take cash or the TV and Video…?”

  “I’ll take the cash,” said the voice.

  “Certainly. Now if I might just make sure we have your name and address correct. It would be a pity if your money went astray…?” He ended his comment as a question and then held his breath to see if he would get a reply.

  “Scott Manders. I live at Flat C, 19 Elmbank Close, Belcaster.”

  Anthony repeated the name and address and then said, “Thank you, Mr Manders, you’ll hear from us in the next couple of days.” He rang off and with a delighted laugh he phoned the police.

  The officer who answered his call was less than grateful for the information Anthony gave him, it was after all very small potatoes, but said he would look into the matter and they would be in touch.

  When Jill and the children arrived home for bath time, Anthony was sitting in the garden reading the paper. He greeted them with smiles and kisses and Jill remembered all of a sudden the man she had loved and married and she held him tightly in her arms.

  “Mum says she’ll have the children for a couple of weeks so we can get away on our own,” she said. “Can you get the time off so we can have a real break?”

  Anthony looked down into her face. “Definitely,” he said and kissed her.

  Four

  Nicholas Richmond turned into Dartmouth Circle and pulled up outside number seven. His daughter Madeleine, who was in the back of the jag, pointed to the house excitedly.

  “Look, Mum. That’s it. Number seven.”

  Clare Richmond looked at the peeling paint and the cracked panes of the front door. Her eye ran over the frontage, taking in the general state of neglect and decay. She didn’t know quite what she’d been expecting after the paroxysms of delight from Madeleine and the cautious admissions from Nick that “the place needs a lot spending on it, but has possibilities”, but whatever it was, it was not the reality of number seven.

  “So it is,” she said noncommittally.

  “What do you think, Mum?” Madeleine was scrambling out of the car. “Won’t it be great?”

  “Well,” said her mother, opening the car door, “let me see it all properly, before I say any more.” She paused on the pavement and glanced round the circle of the close. The houses had been built in the garden of a large old house, now demolished, and were grouped round an area of communal garden in the middle. It was a pleasant round of garden with flowering shrubs, two wooden seats set to catch the sun, and a tiny play area with a two swings and a small slide. The whole was fenced off with a low white fence, not to keep people out, but rather to delineate it from the grass verge that surrounded it. There was no one in the garden now, and it looked very peaceful in the May sunshine.

  “It looks a nice quiet area,” she remarked, and Nicholas gave a shout of laughter.

  “It won’t be when Maddo and her crowd have moved in,” he cried. “They won’t know what’s hit them.” He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and walked to the front door. Clare followed, and as she did so her attention was caught by a movement in the window of the adjacent house. She could see no one, but the twitching of the curtain told her that their arrival had been observed by the next door neighbour, anxious to see who was going to be living on the other side of the party wall. Clare paused again, glancing round the close to see if she could see any other surreptitious curtain-twitching, but the other houses stood quiet and still in the morning sunshine, their windows unoccupied and their curtains still. She turned back to number seven and glanced sharply up at the first-floor windows of number six. No one was there, the net curtains were now undisturbed, and the sun reflected brightly their innocence.

  I suppose it’s only natural to want to see who your new neighbours are, thought Clare as she followed her husband and daughter into the house.

  As she crossed the threshold, all thoughts of inquisitive neighbours and twitching curtains vanished as she inhaled the smell of damp and mould and cats. Maddo was standing at the bottom of the stairs, hopping from one foot to the other, for all the world more like a ten year old than a young woman of twice that age.

  “Come on, Mum, come and look.” She started up the stairs.

  Nicholas emerged from a door down the hall and said, “Let’s start at the bottom and work up. Then you can explain to Mum what we thought we could do.”

  “Yeah, great.” Madeleine led her mother into the room where he father stood. “This is going to be Ben’s room,” she said. The room had obviously been a study as there was still an old desk in it. It had a glass door to the garden. Though garden, Clare reflected, was hardly the term she’d give to the rubbish dump beyond the window.

  “Have the others been here yet?” Clare asked. “Or did you decide who was going to have which room?”

  “Oh, they’ve been here all right,” Madeleine said. “Mr Short let us come down straightaway. He moved out as soon as the contract was signed.” She waved her hand round the room. “Ben wanted to be on the ground floor, and the others didn’t mind, so it was an easy decision. Dean’s going to be in the new room… I’ll show you in a minute… and us girls are going to be on the top floor.”

  They made their way up through the house, Clare inspecting the big living room on the first floor, identical no doubt to that of the curtain-twitcher next door, the diminutive kitc
hen, up another flight of stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor.

  “This one will be mine,” Madeleine enthused, pulling Clare into the largest, which had a view out over the gardens. “I’m going to paint it yellow and have bright curtains and a duvet cover to match.”

  Clare smiled at her daughter’s enthusiasm, and finding it catching, suggested colour schemes for the other two upstairs bedrooms. These were smaller rooms, looking out over the close, but each could be made very comfortable.

  “Will the boys have to come all the way up here to use the bathroom?” she asked. “It’ll be a nuisance for Ben.”

  “No, no,” Madeleine explained, “there’s a downstairs loo on the ground floor, and Dad says we can easily put a shower in under the stairs. That’s really for the boys, and then we’ll be up here.”

  “Maddo, come and hold this tape for me,” called Nick from downstairs. While Madeleine had been showing her mother round the house, he had been making notes and taking measurements in the rooms that they were going to alter. The biggest alteration was to create a new room on the living-room floor. The present living room stretched the width of the house, and could easily have a section partitioned off to make another bedroom, looking back over the garden.

  Madeleine ran down the stairs and dutifully held the end of the tape measure, as her father worked out exactly where the new wall would go. Gradually they worked their way round the house, deciding what they wanted to do and how the alterations should be done.

  “We’ll have to do something about this kitchen, Nick,” Clare called. “It’s in a dreadful state. So’s the bathroom for that matter.”

  “Don’t worry,” Nick called back. “We’ll sort it all out, and when we’ve finished it’ll be a really nice little house. I’ll take care of the building and decorating side, you and Maddo will have to sort out furniture and curtains and all that sort of stuff.”

  By the time they left the house Nick had made copious notes about what he intended to do, and Madeleine and Clare had made other notes on what was needed for curtains and carpet and furniture for each room.

  “Let’s go to a pub for some lunch,” Nick suggested, “and we can talk this through.”

  “I told the others we’d probably go to the Dutch for some bar food,” Madeleine said. “I thought it would be a good idea if you met them all, Dad, because you’ve got to sort out the rent with them and all that. They’re going to look in at about lunchtime to see if we’re there.”

  “Fine,” said Nick. “We’d better go then. Anything anyone else wants to do here?”

  There wasn’t, so they got into the car and Madeleine directed them to the Flying Dutchman.

  The bar was quite busy, but they managed to get a table in a corner, and Nick ordered drinks while they decided what to eat. Before they had ordered the other four arrived and cheerfully squashed themselves into the corner, too.

  Madeleine introduced them all to her parents. They had met Cirelle before, as Madeleine had brought her home on a couple of occasions, but the others were new to them. As they drank their drinks and chose their food, Clare looked round at them all and wondered how they would get on together in the house. They were clearly good friends at the moment, but would that friendship survive living in fairly close proximity? She knew Cirelle was a quiet girl, used to working hard. At first, when Maddo had brought her home, Clare had wondered what her daughter had seen in her, but as she got to know Cirelle herself, Clare had come to recognise her dependability, and the generosity of her nature. Far more concerned about the consequences of her actions than Madeleine would ever be, Cirelle, Clare decided, might be a good influence on Maddo, perhaps even exercising restraint on some of her more flamboyant doings. She smiled across at Cirelle now, and was treated to Cirelle’s slow smile.

  She really is a very beautiful girl, thought Clare. Her skin is exquisite, and those huge dark eyes… well, you could drown in the innocence of those.

  The other girl, Charlie, was a tall slim girl with blond hair and grey eyes. She was far less exuberant than Madeleine, but she smiled and joined in the conversation readily enough, with a gentle Irish accent that Clare found attractive.

  “I’m reading History,” she said in answer to Clare’s question. “Unfortunately I had glandular fever last year and I missed so much I’ve had to repeat my second year. I can’t wait to get out into a house for my final year. I was so pleased when Mandy changed her mind and Mad offered me her place in your house.”

  Clare laughed. “Mad? Is that what you call her?”

  Charlie looked a little embarrassed. “Well,” she said, “we all do. It sort of suits her. She says she’s going to call the new house The Madhouse.”

  “Is she indeed?” smiled Clare. “Sounds most appropriate to me.”

  “We all call it that already,” admitted Charlie. “Don’t we, Dean?”

  Dean was another one Clare hadn’t met before. He was small, not more than five foot eight, with faded mousy hair and a rather feeble attempt at a beard, but his rather ordinary face was redeemed by his dark blue eyes. They were wide-set and shone with a luminosity that lit his whole face, and when he smiled, as he was doing now, he had an endearing quality that made Clare like him at once.

  “Says she’s going to have a house sign made,” he laughed.

  “He’s very easy-going,” Maddo had told her mother. “Never gets stressed about anything. Should be an easy guy to live with.”

  “Provided he does his share,” murmured Clare.

  “Yes, well, we’ll all have to do that,” agreed Madeleine. “I must say his room’s usually a tip, but that won’t matter if he keeps his door shut.”

  “And if he doesn’t leave the same tip in the kitchen,” said her mother.

  “He won’t.” Madeleine spoke in the long-suffering voice she kept for simple-minded parents. “He’ll be fine, OK?”

  Clare looked across at the last of them. Ben was obviously older than the rest, not just in years, but in experience. Clare thought him attractive. He was a big man, tall and broad with powerful arms, and Clare supposed if she could have seen them, powerful legs as well. She knew from Madeleine that he was a rugby player, and looking at him she could well believe it. He was good-looking, too. Not in a classically handsome way, but with a strong face, with deep-set dark eyes and a firm mouth and chin. He wore his thick, dark hair long, tied back in pony-tail, though wisps of it curled forward round his ears. Clare was only gradually coming to terms with men who wore their hair in pony-tails, she always felt that it was rather effeminate, but there was nothing effeminate about Ben Gardner. The strength of his face was echoed in the strength of his body, he seemed charged with a masculinity that Clare could almost touch. She wondered if Maddo was as aware of it as she was. There seemed to be nothing but friendship between them, and of course Maddo had Dan, but Clare knew if she had the choice which of those two she would choose. As she watched Ben talking with Nick, she was struck by the confidence with which he conversed, treating Nick with the ease of an equal. He seemed much older than the others, not only in age where the difference was not really that great, but in experience where he seemed to outstrip them by miles. Would the difference in age and experience make for difficulty in the house she wondered? Something told her that Ben’s room would not be a tip, nor would he tolerate fools gladly. There would be no rivalry between him and Dean, Clare was fairly certain, but, she thought, there would be no close friendship either.

  Ben caught her studying him, and raising his chin he let his eyes run over her in an equally appraising fashion, finally holding her own with a quizzical smile. He waited for her to speak and eventually she said, “Maddo was telling us that you’re a keen rugby player.” Even to herself it sounded trite and rather patronising, but it was the best she could think of on the instant.

  However, Ben answered easily enough. “Yes, I play for the university.”

  “Is it a good team?”

  “Good enough.”

 
The conversation suddenly seemed to be going nowhere and Clare was glad when Madeleine broke in to demand of Ben what he was going to eat and she was able to turn and speak to Cirelle.

  While they munched their way through jacket potatoes stuffed with a variety of fillings, Nicholas explained to them all how the finances of the house would be run.

  “There should be no problems if we all stick to a few elementary, but unchangeable rules,” he said, and went on to outline what these would be. Most of them were simple common sense and everyone readily agreed to them.

  “I shall get these written down as a sort of contract, so that we all know where we stand, and that part will all be safely on a business footing. Your own house rules are up to you!”

  They parted outside the pub with the general feeling that everything was going to work out perfectly. Madeleine walked back to the car to see her parents off.

  “I’ll be getting my men over some time in the next couple of weeks,”

  Nick promised her. “The problem is being so far away.”

  “Only an hour.”

  “Yes, but it’s an hour at each end of the working day. It is just one more thing to be organised. But don’t worry, we’ll sort it out. They seem a nice crowd,” he added as he gave her a hug. “I should think you’ll have a lot of fun living with them.”

  “Though goodness knows what their neighbours will think,” Clare said as they drove away.

  Nick shrugged. “They’ll just have to put up with them,” he said.

  Five

  The news of the student house percolated gently through the Circle and was met with various emotions ranging from unabashed delight from Chantal Haven aged fifteen through complete indifference of several of the working couples to the fear and indignation of Sheila Colby.

  “It’ll be great to have some real guys living here,” Chantal enthused to her sister Annabel when they heard the news. “Anything’s better that the Crosshills’ crowd.”