by Sarah Rayne
She looks straight at Xavier.
I do believe you, he thinks.
‘Anyway, I must stop chatting away, just ignore me, I’m terrible with a new person. I’ll get cracking on this.’
Xavier has an idea.
‘Would you . . . could you start with the study?’ He indicates the little room to the left of the front door. ‘It’s just I’m going to be working in there this morning, afternoon, I mean.’
‘Right you are, pet,’ says Pippa.
She gathers up the cleaning materials in one grab, accommodating a seemingly impossible amount in each hand. Xavier makes a sort of grateful shrug and retreats finally to the bathroom where a lot of now hot water, he realizes guiltily, has sloshed away.
Standing in the shower, Xavier is relieved that he asked her to start in the study: he can shut himself in there and write the review of the Romanian film, and not become the audience for what may be a two-hour stream of consciousness. Or will it be even longer than that? He can’t remember if they arranged a specific duration for Pippa’s visit, he assumes she just keeps going until everything’s done, but then, how long will that be? It occurs to him, although it’s unlikely, of course, that the woman could actually be mad: he’s only got her word for it that she’s a cleaner. What if she goes around doing this wherever someone is rash enough to let her in? There are many unhinged people out there. Don’t be so stupid, Xavier tells himself, she’s got just as much reason to think you are insane. Look at the state of your kitchen.
When Xavier returns to his study, it has been swiftly and uncompromisingly cleaned, scattered books returned to shelves or neatly piled in corners, the laptop set up on the desk for work instead of languishing on the floor – and, he realizes after a few moments’ disorientation, surfaces dusted properly for the first time in his tenure. Pippa has pulled back the curtains, revealing a hazy, pleasant early afternoon. Jamie is riding a toy fire engine in the garden, noisily impersonating a siren.
‘This looks great!’ he almost calls to the kitchen, where Pippa has commenced a more serious battle; but he changes his mind – it would seem patronizing, and besides, he might be inviting another of her verbose replies. He puts the computer on and tries to start the review of The Non-existent Man.
Over the next couple of hours Xavier makes little progress: his memories of the film are tainted by his date’s off-putting restlessness, and it’s odd trying to work with someone else in the house. Pippa can be heard pummelling implements with brushes and cloths, spraying air fresheners like a policeman with tear gas. When she goes into the bedroom he experiences a renewed series of qualms, picturing her attacking his saggy pillows, folding and tidying and arranging, either sidestepping his stray underwear or (more likely, he thinks) manhandling it into the laundry basket. Once or twice he quietly inspects a room while Pippa is working on another, and the results are astonishing. The kitchen boasts an almost pained sheen as if it were a patient still weak from an operation: the surfaces look, superficially at least, like the untouched worktops seen on display in IKEA. The bathroom too is like a scruffy boy scrubbed up for a school photograph, grimacing sheepishly in new clothes. The overall atmosphere in the flat is healthy, glossy, but there is a sense of exhaustion, as if the inanimate objects are in a kind of shock at their treatment.
Pippa seems as energetic as ever when he offers her a cup of tea towards the end of her two and a half hours. She is in a long, faded black T-shirt commemorating a youth athletics event.
‘This is great,’ says Xavier awkwardly, as Pippa, squatting on strong haunches, scrapes away at some tiny blemish on the skirting board.
‘I’ve just done the basics,’ she says. ‘I’ll do more of a job next week.’
So there’s a next week, thinks Xavier, who – if he considered it at all – thought he was making a one-off arrangement with her.
‘Have you got a Hoover, pet?’
‘Yes – well, no. The lady downstairs has got one. I normally borrow hers.’ The sentence exaggerates his familiarity with Mel’s vacuum cleaner: it’s probably a year since he last borrowed it.
‘I met her before, shall I pop down and get it?’
It’s at this moment Xavier realizes he has no cash in the house.
‘I’ll go and get it,’ he says, ‘but also I’m going to have to go and, er, get some money out for you, so I can pay you. I can’t remember how much . . .’
‘Well, I charge twelve pound an hour. So, two and a half hours, say thirty? Is that all right?’
‘Yes, of course, of course it’s all right,’ says Xavier, ill at ease with the whole subject, with the reminder he is paying someone to do his household chores. ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ The corner shop has a cash machine, which charges £1.75 per withdrawal, the sort of modern impertinence callers bemoan on the radio show.
‘Right you are,’ says Pippa, rising to her feet. She’s tall, only a few inches shorter than Xavier. She dries her hands on her T-shirt. ‘Only some people, you know, when it comes to actually paying, they get very funny and start saying things like, “Well, I never agreed to that!” Or they just look at you like you’re being greedy or something or taking the piss by asking for money at all. There’s this woman I clean for in Hammersmith, right, so it takes me an hour and a quarter to get there for starters, and this woman is a bloody Pilates teacher, right, which means . . .’
Xavier hears Mel bringing Jamie in from his stint as a fireman, and senses an escape route.
‘Hey, listen,’ he says, ‘that’s Mel coming in now, so I’ll . . . I’ll just go and ask about the Hoover.’
‘Grand.’ Pippa is still tinkering, dusting the rim of the fruit bowl which houses a solitary orange. ‘Don’t mind me, pet. I’m terrible for talking.’
Again, Xavier has to remind himself that she is only his own age, she could be even younger, this eccentric, powerful, garrulous visitor who talks a little like a pensioner. He makes another vaguely apologetic gesture and slips out of the door.
As he listens to the whirr of the cash machine’s innards preparing to spew his cash, Xavier feels rather drained. But the flat, he remembers, looks wondrous. His spirits rise at the thought of going back and having the whole day to himself in his rejuvenated home. Maybe it would be a good idea, after all, to have Pippa round once a week – if, indeed, he has any choice in the matter. But next time, thinks Xavier as he rounds the corner back onto Bayham Road, perhaps I’ll make sure I’m out.
III
They confirm the next appointment in a brief phone conversation, during which Pippa finds time for remarks on the new American President, her sister’s operation, and an account of a conversation she overheard this week: Woman one – you’re sure this will go no further? Woman two – relax, there’s no one here but the cleaner. Woman one – what if she turns out to be a well-connected cleaner? Then, sniggering.
‘And what were they talking about?’ Xavier asks, reluctantly interested, as with her story about the rock band.
‘I didn’t listen. Fuck them, excuse my language. I’m not giving them the satisfaction of being eavesdropped on by someone they don’t think is capable of understanding them.’ After a pause she adds, ‘I did find out one of the women has eczema, though. Anyway, I’m rattling on, but see you at the weekend, love.’
‘Look forward to it,’ says Xavier vaguely.
He has a Scrabble tournament that Saturday, and will have to leave keys for Pippa to let herself in, but explaining this over the phone might open the door to another ten minutes of conversation, which is a tiring prospect. He decides to text her with the news nearer the time.
On Monday morning, Xavier is woken early by Jamie running up and down the stairs shouting something about bears. Xavier decides to go for a walk, feeling fresh though he’s had barely four hours of sleep: it could be his imagination but the bed feels more comfortable since its encounter with Pippa. He comes downstairs to find Mel apprehending her son, and outside her flat the two of them conduct thei
r traditional exchange of abashed smiles. Xavier wonders what she thinks of his having a cleaner. Mel wonders if he noticed what a bad condition the Hoover was in; she can’t really afford a new one. Xavier thinks she might have heard him having sex with Gemma last week; Mel feels bad, as usual, about his being woken up by Jamie.
‘How are things?’
Mel turns a grimace into an unconvincing smile.
‘He’s being a little terror. The car’s broken down, and he wanted to go to . . . anyway. Fine. How are you?’
‘Not bad at all . . .’
The phone in Mel’s flat begins to ring, offering them a reprieve from further efforts to muddle through a conversation. Seeing the look that the sound brings to her face, the look of someone eternally tackling one more chore than they can manage, he is struck by a fleeting desire to go into her flat, pick up the phone and relieve her of one tiny problem by taking a message. Perhaps there would be other things he could help with, while he was there. The idea immediately seems presumptuous and silly. This isn’t the radio show; his mandate to help people doesn’t extend to poking his nose into his neighbours’ lives. He doesn’t know anything about her. Almost certainly it would seem very patronizing, and he could easily end up doing more harm than good.
Just as Mel makes as if to go and answer the phone, a door slams two floors up and footsteps thump above their heads. Mel and Xavier follow the sounds with their eyes. A man comes into view, thundering down the stairs so quickly Xavier worries he will trip over. It’s Tamara’s boyfriend, a short man, a regular visitor to 11 Bayham Road, and someone they are both on small-talking terms with. Today, there is no speaking at all. He forces himself through the space between Mel and Xavier, almost walking straight into Jamie, without acknowledging any of the three of them. He shuts the front door behind him so hard that it bounces open again, and Mel hastens to shut it before Jamie can seize his chance to run outside.
‘Gosh!’ says Xavier.
‘Bit of a fight, I suppose,’ ventures Mel.
And it probably was just that, but there was something in the urgency with which the man left, and the menace in his eyes as he glanced at them, which makes both of them uneasy as they part.
For the rest of the week Xavier sees nothing of Tamara, though he hears, as ever, her to-the-minute showering routine and clip-clopping out of the door. But he more or less forgets the incident, distracted by another puzzle: Murray’s unusually downbeat demeanour.
In the years they’ve worked together, the spectrum of Murray’s moods as witnessed by Xavier has been a fairly narrow one, stretching from euphoric (fairly often) to bubbly (his default position) and only down as far as what most people might call ‘pensive’. In the course of the large amount of time they’ve spent in the studio and away from it, Xavier has seen Murray contend with difficult events – the death of his mother a couple of years ago, for example – without seeming to suffer any lingering upset. It could even be said that Murray’s cheerfulness is his greatest talent: his ever-ready guffaws have got Xavier through some long stints on the radio, even if Xavier’s fans mostly regard him as an unwelcome distraction.
But all this week Murray is noticeably quiet, on the drive to and from the studio, and in the shows themselves. On the Monday, when Murray normally overcompensates for the listeners’ start-of-week gloom with a particular outpouring of good humour, he barely musters a single remark. Tuesday isn’t much better, and Xavier begins to feel something is preying on his friend’s mind. The stammer, always a yardstick of inner unrest, flares up again and again: while they are chatting during the 2 a.m. news break, it takes Murray nearly half a minute to get through the phrase ‘completely changed my mind’. This in turn discourages him from chipping in on air, and Tuesday’s show is so lacklustre that Xavier is almost embarrassed to think of people listening to it.
On the way home on that night, Xavier tentatively asks, as they glide down the hill to 11 Bayham Road, ‘Everything all right, Murray?’
‘Of course. Wer, wer, what wouldn’t be all right?’
Xavier considers inviting him in for a nightcap, but doesn’t quite go through with it, in the same way that he didn’t quite go through with answering Mel’s phone earlier in the week.
It isn’t until Thursday afternoon that Xavier thinks back to this exchange and ponders the apparently throwaway question, ‘What wouldn’t be all right?’ Really, there are so many things, in anyone’s life at any given time, that might not be all right. That’s one of the reasons Xavier feels at home on the radio show, where he can sample people’s problems for five minutes, like a speed-dater of the counselling world, and then send them on their way with his best wishes. Outside the five-minute format, problems are far less tractable, turn out to have clauses and caveats, change shape like ink in water. It’s better not to get involved at all, he thinks, than to dabble, to prod a sleeping dog into life if you don’t know how to handle it once it’s awake. Of course, this could be just another excuse Xavier uses to justify the number of good turns he seems not to do these days.
That night they take another call from the maths teacher with three failed marriages: that’s his phrase, though Xavier tries to argue him away from it, in the process sounding – even to himself – uncomfortably close to a clinical therapist, rather than the persuasive amateur he prefers to be.
‘I reckon it’s quite damaging to talk of these three marriages as failures, Clive.’ They’re on first-name terms now; Clive has become a regular caller. ‘I mean, if you look at it like that, you’re not far from dismissing twenty or thirty years of your life as a failure.’
‘Well, perhaps they were.’
Murray is about to say something, but Xavier, not trusting his sidekick’s navigation of these dangerous waters, gets in first.
‘I don’t think you can ever say that, Clive. I’ve definitely felt like that myself before, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.’
In the next commercial break, Murray, toying with the corner of a sheet of paper, says quietly, ‘A mate of mine saw you with a girl, the other night.’
‘A girl?’
‘You were on a date.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Aussie girl. I took her to a film. It didn’t go too well.’
‘Did you . . . der, der, did you . . .’
‘Did we sleep together? Well, we had sex. It didn’t get as far as sleeping. She left in the middle of the night. As I say, not a success.’
‘Wer, was it someone you knew from before? From Australia?’
Xavier grins.
‘No. Tiny as Australia is, we somehow hadn’t run into each other before.’
But Murray, quite uncharacteristically, seems put out by the joke. ‘Well, I don’t know who you knew in Australia, do I? You never tell me anything about wer, what happened before you came here. You cher, change the subject every time.’
Xavier puts down the BIG CHEESE mug and looks at his friend. An oversized pair of headphones sits lopsided on Murray’s head, the right one lower than the left.
‘Are you all right, mate? What’s on your mind?’
Murray rubs the edge of the paper between his fingers.
‘You ter, told me no one got in touch. From the speed dating.’
‘Well, no one had at that point.’
‘I’m just surprised you wer, wer, wer, wer, went on a date and didn’t mention it.’
Xavier is taken aback to be on the defensive like this; again, this is all very unlike Murray, this sort of polite reproachfulness, and the stammer’s little outbursts suggest that Murray is conscious of this himself.
‘I’m sorry, mate. It kind of slipped my mind. Like I say, it was over pretty quickly. We’re not going to see each other again or anything.’
‘No apology ner, necessary. I’m just not quite my usual . . . oh, back in twenty secs.’
And before he can elaborate – if he was going to – they are back on air.
On the way home Murray chats about the blossoming career of the tennis player
Andy Murray – his sort-of-namesake – and about a new scheme to fill London with electric cars, and seems, all in all, just like his normal self.
Having left keys in a flowerpot and money in the flat, and informed Pippa by text, Xavier leaves on Saturday morning for the Scrabble tournament. These events, a monthly fixture in Xavier’s life since his first week in London, are held in a church hall in Islington, rented out by the churchwardens who need £40,000 to repair a roof which shelters a steadily diminishing number of worshippers. The Scrabble tournaments are open to the general public, in theory, but it’s the same twenty or so people who always show up, and the winner (who gets £150 in cash) is almost always a Sri Lankan gentleman named Vijay. The runner-up is almost always Xavier.
At least half of the players have no chance of ever winning the competition, but enjoy taking part just the same. The players are quite a disparate bunch. One is an accountant who plays to avoid spending Saturday with her husband, one is a professor, one a plastic surgeon. There is an attractive young couple whose other interests include kayaking (Xavier knows this because the man once played the word KAYAK against him, for 16 points; it was a bad move, but the man’s fondness for the word overcame his tactical sense). There is also a formerly well-known pop singer who had a big hit in 1987, and who now ekes out a living making appearances in clubs specializing in kitsch. Nobody ever alludes to this, or to any professional matters: one of the functions of the Scrabble group is to provide an escape from Monday-to-Friday business.
Only an A4 sheet on the door of the church hall announces the Scrabble competition: it’s not the sort of event that exerts itself to attract new customers. Xavier shakes hands with Vijay, and the kayakers and the entirely bald man who organizes these tournaments. He pays his admission money: the bald man puts it into a Tupperware container. Pretty soon Xavier is only thinking about Scrabble.
There are two main ways to play Scrabble.
