Pleasure and a Calling

by Phil Hogan

  ‘Misunderstandings?’

  ‘Your father and me.’

  I took a sip of tea and said grandly that that wouldn’t be necessary.

  She gave me a vexed look, and said my mother (her dear sister, as she reminded me) had been ill for some years. Since I’d been born, in fact.

  ‘Do you remember Riley?’ she asked.

  ‘The cat?’

  She opened her bag and handed me a photograph she had clearly unearthed for this occasion. It was a picture of my mother as a surprisingly young woman holding a cat. It was a close-up but you could see signs of a falling coastal path and the sea below. I had seen the picture before, but now it reminded me of how little I remembered my mother’s face – that it was her closeness I always sought to bring back when I visited her memory. More shocking, though, was that the person in the photograph resembled, more than anything, a slightly finer version of myself in a wig and make-up.

  ‘The resemblance is so exact. You can see it now. Do you understand? Afterwards your father could barely look at you.’

  Taken aback at first, now I almost laughed. What – because I reminded him of his dear dead wife? Because I was somehow the cause of my mother’s illness (I loved the way she slipped that in). How foolish I had been all these years, thinking that the reason he couldn’t look at me was that he was too busy looking at Aunt Lillian! Ha. I should have seen that coming.

  I wondered afterwards whether my aunt had some sort of illness herself; that this attempt to get my father off the hook, and thereby herself, was part of some final spiritual cleansing. She would get no shrift from me; not because I didn’t accept her version of events but because in fact I had thrown off the adolescent burden of wondering why some things happened to you and others you could make happen yourself.

  She continued. I had to understand, she said, how difficult – delicate – the situation was. Things were not always what they seemed. She had always been on call to help, had always been there for us, meaning my father and me, sometimes at the expense of her own child. And worse, in those last months my father had suffered from mental exhaustion. What else could she do?

  ‘Of course,’ I said brightly. ‘You fell in love. While I was out at the football with Uncle Richard.’

  ‘Your uncle was not a victim in this,’ she snapped.

  ‘And me? Wasn’t I a victim?’

  She lit another cigarette. Her hand was shaking. Her fingers had always been stained with nicotine. ‘You know what you did,’ she said, smoke hanging between us over the table. ‘Perhaps you’d best just take the money.’

  I never saw Aunt Lillian again. I came back for her funeral the following year (coincidence, I think, rather than the power of wishes), travelling alongside Mr Mower in his car under the wide skies of wind-flattened Suffolk and Norfolk. He was, I remembered, a friend of the family, though I didn’t know how (and, come to think of it, still don’t). Cousin Isobel spoke to him at length but greeted me without warmth. We didn’t go back to the house afterwards. Isobel’s husband, a man in uniform, looked hard at me. I can’t imagine what she might have told him.

  MORE THAN ONCE DURING the afternoon Zoe caught me staring over my coffee cup into the street and asked to the point of solicitousness if she could help with something. Zoe in her most helpful mood can be trying on a slow day. It was quiet. Katya was out seeing clients. I set Zoe to work supervising young Josh in our long-term project of embedding our web pages with video of neighbourhood facilities and street-view links.

  The man’s name, I had discovered from the electoral roll, was Douglas Sharp, and he lived with a Judith Sharp – presumably his wife, the Judith Bridgens who had bought the house on Boselle Avenue some years before. On successive days I found myself wandering down Boselle at around the same time in the morning I had seen him that first morning. Most dog-walkers fall into a routine, but I didn’t spot him. I could have watched the house (I am an extremely patient watcher) or I could have taken my key and gone back in. I was interested in him, and now I was interested in his wife, whom I must have met at least once before, when she bought the place. I wondered at the circumstances of their marriage. Perhaps some women were just attracted by rude oafs, I thought. Or maybe he was a powerful and charismatic rude oaf who was good in bed and had bags of money. But then wasn’t she the one who owned the property? They seemed to offer all the ingredients for a short project.

  My curiosity would no doubt have eventually got the better of me, but a week later I almost physically bumped into the man, coming through the swing doors of the library as I was going in. In his hurry he didn’t look at me – just edged his angular frame past with no word in response to my muttered apology, and strode towards the centre of town. I won’t say I wasn’t caught in two minds. I love the library. I had long been in the habit of taking refuge there from time to time. Understandably I made use of its research facilities – for one thing, the local paper is archived there – but I was drawn too by its homely warmth, its shady isolated corners, its soothing, dim corridors of books where a man might browse and pick up the murmurings of the two or three librarians who pottered around: Margaret, who had been there as long as I could remember, and her interchangeable younger colleagues who came and went, I learned, from a librarianship college course in Cambridge. I knew by heart (from patient watching) the pin number that granted access to the librarians’ secret room marked ‘Private’ beside the front desk where I assumed they made coffee and hung their coats and bags.

  Today, though, I turned instead to follow Sharp. He was some way ahead, ducking into the ground floor of the multi-storey. If he had a car, I was wasting my time, but he was just taking a short cut, and continued past the rows of parked vehicles, exiting at the other side. Now he crossed the road, and was heading for the Common, where he had walked his dog the week before. He wasn’t out for a stroll today, though he still seemed to be a man impatient to be somewhere else. Tall, in a suede jacket and casual trousers, his longish, thinning hair flapping in the wind, he might have just stepped out of some workplace, perhaps to run an urgent errand or grab a sandwich. It wasn’t far off lunchtime, though he was nowhere near the shops now. There was a firm of self-important architects near the library. Maybe he worked there. Or at the council offices. But where was he going now? He followed the river path as he had done last time, hurrying but also furtive, trying to keep out of the puddles. I kept my distance, but after one of the bends in the river he disappeared – presumably, I realized, up a steep set of stone steps that led to a section of Raistrick Road, one of the main routes circling the town. By the time I reached the top of the steps he was nowhere in sight.

  He hadn’t had time to get very far. Facing the wall and the steps down to the river was a terrace of substantial Victorian houses – four or five bedrooms with serviceable attics and cellars – flanked at one end by a used-car showroom. The stretch of houses ran half a mile to the Fount Hill crossroads with its bakery and newsagent and other shops. I’d once had a key to the house adjacent to the showroom, but the buyer, to my dismay, had immediately converted the property to bedsits. I knew nothing about the other houses, except that Sharp – unless he had jumped on to one of the buses that passed here – must now be in one of them.

  I kept my head down and walked slowly along. Judging by the array of doorbells on the top step of each address, it was evident that the entire stretch had been converted – probably, I now surmised, for student lets, this being on the bus route to both the art school and the teacher-training college, twenty minutes away in East Wickley. Only one house, the one with the blue door – number 84 – towards the end of the row, was intact, though it had seen better days: the marble steps were chipped, with weeds coming through, the fanlight was broken, the sills were peeling and the sash frames were probably rotten. As I passed, my eye was drawn by the movement upstairs of someone drawing the curtains.

  I walked along as far as the used-car showroom and stopped to inspect the vehicles on the forecourt.
The proprietor appeared in the doorway and asked if I was looking for anything in particular.

  ‘Just browsing,’ I said.

  ‘Go ahead, sir. If you need anything, give me a shout.’

  I walked up and down for ten minutes, then called the man back out. I had him explain the merits of one car versus another, keeping one eye on the house as we talked, until eventually I’d run out of questions and he’d run out of answers.

  ‘It’s actually for my wife,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should fetch her down to see for herself. She’ll probably go for the lime-green one,’ I joked.

  ‘Ah, quite so, sir,’ he said, laughing.

  Now, as I retraced my steps back towards the crossroads, I saw a figure surfacing at the top of the riverside steps. I carried on walking. It was a girl – a young woman, rather – in a red cagoule and boots, pushing a bicycle. We were approaching each other now. She seemed breathless, having hauled her bike up the steps, but a smile hovered in her expression like that of a child fresh from the playground. She didn’t look at me as we passed each other, not even when I turned and saw her chaining the bike to the railings outside the house with the blue door. She still wore the innocent smile as she skipped up the steps and let herself in.

  Do you believe in fate? I can’t explain it, but I felt caught up in hers. It was like opening a door on a bursting torrent. My heart flew to her – this lovely Red Riding Hood to Sharp’s wolf, no doubt already lying in wait, under the covers, his eyes ready to devour her. Ignoring my own cast-iron rules of discretion and hazard, I loitered an hour or more in the immediate vicinity (no one has referred more often to an estate agent’s sales précis in the street or inspected the small ads in a newsagent’s window more thoroughly), but neither of them emerged. I was exhilarated but also disoriented. And almost sickened. From a distance, I have loved couples, even illicit ones, in their joy and insularity. They say something about a town and its life. But here was something profoundly wrong. And this girl’s cares were instantly mine. She was devotion and duty in one.

  The episode had ruined all thoughts of a quiet hour in the library.

  Back at the office I found Wendy, my admin, cutting a cake for Josh’s birthday. ‘I did tell you, Mr Heming,’ she clucked. ‘Friday.’

  Josh grinned as uncomfortable a grin as an eighteen-year-old could muster in the circumstance of being fussed over by three women at various stages of what he would consider old age.

  ‘So you did,’ I smiled, ‘and indeed here I am. On Friday.’

  Zoe gave me a doubtful look and poured me a cup of coffee, brushing my fingers with hers as she handed it to me. I said a few words about Josh’s excellent progress, that he was a credit to his parents (whom I had once seen from a distance), and that the firm’s long-standing policy of providing our trainee with a course of driving lessons – generously inaugurated in my own time under old Mr Mower, about whom no one present but me had more than the vaguest inkling – would be set in motion the moment someone, perhaps Wendy, got round to arranging it. To the surprise of no one but Zoe, who feared I had forgotten, I reached into my desk drawer and presented Josh with his own pair of opera glasses. Everyone clapped, no one more than Zoe, who shook her head as if I had been teasing everyone all along. The brief celebration petered out when a young couple came in off the street looking for a starter home. The phones started ringing, and Katya took the opportunity to debrief me in the back office on the day’s viewings and new business.

  But my mind kept returning to Sharp and the young woman with the bicycle. Sharp was a textbook philanderer and predator, the house in Raistrick Road his secret love nest. Indeed it seemed more likely now that this house, too, had been divided into flats, and that Sharp rented one of them for precisely this purpose. I thought of the girl’s face – hopeful and eager, and yet innocent too. Perhaps she didn’t know he was married.

  But then perhaps he wasn’t married. Maybe the Judith Sharp the man lived with was his sister, who had previously been married but had reverted to her maiden name and asked her brother to move in – perhaps following the break-up of his own marriage – to help pay the mortgage.

  I knew nothing. And wasn’t this what Aunt Lillian meant when she said things were not always as they seemed? That I had made something of nothing? That the glimpse of a woman laying her hand on a man’s was as likely a sign of sympathy as passion? Indeed. Which is why I have made it my business to look further into things, to do good and put things right that are wrong. Perhaps my aunt would have died more peacefully had she condemned a little less and loved a little more.

  THE WEEKEND IS NOT ideal for snooping. People come and go more randomly but less interestingly. It is only good for following someone if you want to see the inside of a supermarket or garden centre. So, as the next day was Saturday, I decided to leave things a couple of days, waiting till Monday before taking a chance on an early-morning stakeout of Boselle Avenue.

  I arrived at 6.45 and edged my car under the trees just in time to see a woman – presumably Judith – closing the wooden gate of number 4. It was barely light yet, but I saw she was a redhead, mid-forties and dressed for the City in suit and heels, and carrying a cream raincoat and a laptop bag. There was nowhere she could be going but the station, presumably for the 6.55 to Liverpool Street. An hour later, the postlady arrived pulling her red cart. Another half-hour passed before Sharp himself emerged, dressed as he had been on Friday but wearing a scarf and carrying a backpack. I got out my phone and took a picture of him. There was a new white 4×4 parked in front of the garage but he was walking. I got out of the car and followed. He too went to the station, straight through the barrier with a season ticket. Was he travelling south or north? South, I guessed, scanning the timetable: three minutes. I bought a return that would take me three stops down the line, went through the barrier and crossed the bridge. There he was, buying a Danish. I sat on the bench and sneaked another picture of him. The train arrived. Sure enough it turned out he was only going as far as the next stop – nine minutes away at East Wickley. From there a short walk took us to the art school and teacher-training college. But between the two small campuses on the same road sat the town’s further-education college. Here he stopped, unlooped his scarf and plugged earphones in from a music player, clearly turning himself into a jaunty lecturer showing a youthful profile to the students of hairdressing and leisure management who attended here alongside A-level dropouts and adult learners taking IT classes.

  I took the next train back up into town. I supposed that Sharp worked part-time, hence his being free on a Friday afternoon. Judging by the timing, he would have caught the train back to town after his morning shift. But why take the train, which then meant coming through town and walking across the Common, when there was a bus service direct from his college to the house in Raistrick Road? But then I remembered the library. Of course. He must have been returning books.

  Back in town, I called the college office, approximating my voice to a younger person’s (I’d heard enough of Josh to carry it off). ‘Yeah, hi, really sorry to bother you but, like, I’m supposed to see Douglas Sharp about my essay after his class, but I can’t remember what time he said it was?’

  ‘Would you like to speak to him?’

  ‘God, no, I’ll be in more trouble if he thinks I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘OK, well, he has a lecture at ten and a class straight afterwards.’

  ‘I think it was this afternoon … History, yeah?’

  ‘History? He teaches English.’

  ‘English. Yeah, that’s what I mean.’

  ‘Well, Mr Sharp has nothing timetabled for this afternoon. He’s just Monday and Friday mornings and his Wednesday afternoon lecture.’

  ‘Cool. That’ll be it. Thanks.’

  I supposed I had at least two hours. I headed back to Boselle Avenue and let myself in. There was a lingering smell of toast and cigarette butts. I leafed through the morning’s post in the hall, all of it addressed to Judith – bills, a
catalogue, junk mail – then I put the kettle on for tea. I flicked through a diary on the kitchen table and a file of papers I found in a writing desk in the dining room. Here was their marriage certificate – dating from two years ago – plus bank statements, mortgage documents in her name and a credit agreement for the 4×4 out on the drive. There were divorce papers from Judith’s previous marriage, and various older letters to addresses in London, where it seemed she had lived and worked back then. A photo album showed snaps of the couple holding champagne flutes in some island paradise, draped in garlands and displaying their wedding rings. I moved from room to room, taking pictures and video. Upstairs was Sharp’s study, piled with books and papers. The desk was littered – pens, CDs, a pack of paracetamol, a brown apple core, a globular paperweight recycled from green bottles. On the wall were photographs taken at bookish functions and a chart showing garden birds. Under the desk was a pack of flyers for a reading he had hosted the previous July at the bookshop in town.

  I sat low in his chair, my feet planted on the laminate wooden floor as I scrolled through his emails and checked his bookmarks and browsing history – news providers, internet porn, a ‘salon’ celebrating modern literature, a dating site, online poker. Amid a shelf of movies were three or four homemade DVDs in plastic sleeves labelled with their subjects – Forssinger, Gates, McLarrily. These I copied on to my memory stick and replaced on the shelf.

  Of course I had no idea what I was looking for, but I did feel I was getting some measure of this Sharp. He was working in a job beneath his qualifications; he had married a woman eight years his senior; he was a magnet for debt; he was a philanderer … what else?

  How did the girl on the bicycle fit in? I’d only seen her once, but her image floated into my mind again and my heart turned to marshmallow. I wondered about her own place – a flat, I guessed – and tried to imagine her in it, moving from room to room, relaxing in front of the TV, dancing in the kitchen to music. I closed my eyes. I felt that if I lay on the bed here for one moment I would be lost in the dream of her – that the Sharps would arrive back and find me there, an unwakeable estate agent, like someone in a fairy story.