As far as Edith could tell, you had no control over your character or his or her whereabouts. Consequently, she couldn’t give two hoots about Professor Plum and felt much more attached to the fates of Reverend Green and Miss Scarlett. They were innocent parties, she knew, because she held their cards in her hands, but they were still liable to be accused at any moment. What if she were to slip the cards between her knees? Would that save them or damn them? What if she were simply to lie when Thomas or Gemma demanded to know if she was clutching the revolver?
It was her turn. She nipped into the conservatory. ‘Mrs Peacock in the conservatory with the dagger,’ she suggested, hopefully.
Thomas and Gemma let out a simultaneous groan. Gemma put her cards face down on the table and dropped her head into her hands. ‘Mum!’
‘What?’
‘You must know that it can’t be the conservatory because you showed me that about half an hour ago and you’ve been on and on about the dagger, which I eliminated straight away because Dad’s got it and I’m sure he’s shown it to you by now and you’re not being logical.’
‘Gemma . . .’ said Thomas.
‘But she’s not, Dad. What’s the point of playing with someone who doesn’t get it? It spoils the whole point of having three people.’
‘I know,’ said Thomas, ‘but you’ve just spoiled it by giving away all that information. I didn’t know your mother had the conservatory.’
‘Well, she’s spoiled it already.’
Edith saw that Gemma was close to tears. It sometimes happened when the games went on too long. She was still young to be sitting up late.
Thomas had noticed too. He put his hand on top of Gemma’s and leant towards her. ‘I know, but you must remember that your mother doesn’t really understand this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter. We can still play.’
‘I may not be very logical,’ Edith said stiffly, raising her voice to get their attention, ‘but I would say I do have some common sense, and this game has no sense to it at all as far as I can see.’
They both looked at her.
‘Common sense,’ Gemma muttered angrily.
Edith was about to reprimand her when Thomas jumped in. ‘Common sense didn’t help Dr Black much, did it, eh, Gemma?’ He nudged her with his elbow, trying to chivvy her back to her normal cheerful mood. ‘I’d say he was a pretty sensible sort of person, being a doctor and so on. Just look what happened to him.’
Gemma scraped at the side of her nose with a forefinger, a habit which she knew annoyed her mother. ‘No,’ she chortled. ‘He still ended up at the bottom of the stairs with his head caved in or whatever. Common sense is no good to him now.’
She and Thomas grinned and shrugged, like a pair of conspiratorial monkeys.
Gemma picked her cards up and said, ‘It’s my go now. We’ll skip Mum.’ She was happy again.
Edith lowered her gaze back to her cards but she no longer focused on them. She was indeed superfluous as far as Thomas and Gemma’s games were concerned. Perhaps the least she could do was not make a fool of herself.
She thought, my daughter is cruel. Gemma had acquired the casual unkindness of the older child, the blithe assumption that because mothers are always there and always providing, they need never be pleased or taken into account. How old would Gemma be when she realised that Edith would not always be there? Twenty? Thirty? Maybe it would not dawn on her until she had children of her own.
Edith thought, I might die before Gemma realises how precious and unique I am. She might never realise that I know how much she loves me.
I am not clever, she thought, not like Thomas or Gemma. I will never write a poem like the ones in those books that Gemma has started reading all the time – but I have done something else. I have given birth to a daughter, and she is a greater poem than anything you could find between the covers of a book. Her hair is shiny. Her limbs are long. She is strong, strong flesh and blood – and I did it. I made her.
All at once, she was filled with a desire to stand up and seize Gemma, to shake her out of sheer joy. I made you, she wanted to shout. My life has not been wasted. Just look what I have done.
Thomas was showing Gemma a card, winking at his daughter knowledgeably. Neither of them looked at Edith. They never do, she thought.
Murder was not something to be afraid of in Rutland, unlike the rest of the country where it seemed as contagious as chicken pox. Thomas took the newspaper to work with him each morning but Edith often had a chance to glance through it when she came down to put the kettle on. She would pick it up from where it had flopped and fluttered onto the mat, then scan the headlines as she walked into the kitchen. If there was anything interesting to read, she would lie it flat on the countertop and look at it as she lifted the caddy and teapot from the shelf.
The stranger in the alleyway – those stories were always irresistible. What did the victims think as they went under? If only. If only they hadn’t gone out that night to post the letter, visit the pub, meet a friend. If only their aunt hadn’t telephoned just before they left – they would have been safely through the alleyway before the stranger had arrived there. If only they hadn’t decided to take the short cut because they were late.
What were the chances of something like that happening? A million to one? Was it less likely than winning the lottery?
There were no alleyways in Nether Bowston. Thomas was keen on security, all the same. He became even more keen after he was made redundant. That was a bad time for all of them. It took Edith some months to realise just how bad. He seemed so cheerful and resolute at first, buying a fax machine and getting some headed paper printed. He never explained later why his ideas for starting a business didn’t bear fruit. All he said was ‘People don’t appreciate good managerial skills these days.’
Instead, he managed the house. He fitted window locks. He took over the housekeeping. He told her in which areas they would have to economise.
The one thing he was not prepared to economise on was Gemma’s schooling. That, at least, was sacrosanct.
When Edith saw how poor Gemma’s exam results were, she went upstairs to the bathroom and locked the door, hiding herself away from all the pain and silence which she knew would be washing around downstairs. It was as if the house was being flooded. The disappointment would be knee-high already.
The worst of it was, she had known all along. She had accompanied Thomas to parents’ evenings at the school and sat in silence while he grilled the teachers about Gemma’s prospects. While he talked, lectured them, she had watched the teachers’ faces, seen how they had acquired the stiff, careful expressions of diplomats. Gemma had never been top of the class, although she had always done well in English. Thomas seemed to think that if they pushed facts into her it would fill her up with knowledge, as a postman’s van was filled with sacks of letters which could be simply poured out when they were required. With each revision session Thomas subjected Gemma to, Edith watched her daughter’s academic prospects recede. In the run-up to Gemma’s exams she had walked around the house thinking, let me be wrong, for once, let me be wrong.
She sat on the edge of the bath and rested her hands on both knees, leaning her weight forward and rocking slightly. She watched the marbled pattern of the lino and thought, I will never be as helpless as I am now.
Gemma seemed to take things quite well, all things considered. She stayed in her room a lot, reading. On several occasions, Edith wondered whether she should go up there and sit on the end of her bed and talk to her, the way she used to when Gemma had the ’flu, but she didn’t know how to begin talking about Gemma’s future. Thomas would come up with something.
They decided that there was no point in Gemma going back to that school. At one point, Thomas said he was seriously considering suing them for all the money they had taken over the years. Gemma would have been better off at home, he said. He could have done a better job than that lot.
Edith had to admit that it was nice having her dau
ghter around during the day, being able to care for her in the way they had done when she was a toddler. She could make sure she got a proper lunch, for one thing.
Quite often, Gemma seemed tired and listless in the afternoons, slumped in an easy chair with her feet over one arm, turning the pages of one of her books slowly. Edith would sit in an opposite chair reading a magazine and say gently, across the room, ‘Why don’t you just fall asleep, dear? Take a little nap.’ As the winter advanced, the house became hotter. Their central heating was always too hot or too cold. It was freezing in the evenings, so they usually went to bed early, but in the afternoons it could be baking. What could be nicer, after a warm bowl of soup at lunchtime, than to fall asleep in an easy chair?
It wasn’t until January that Edith began to worry about Gemma’s future. The arrival of the New Year seemed to imply a fresh start. On the morning of January 1st, Thomas went round the breakfast table asking them both what their resolutions were. Edith said what she said every year: to lose some weight, take more exercise and learn a foreign language. Thomas said he was going to re-do the guttering, and enjoy himself more, now he didn’t have so many responsibilities. Gemma said she couldn’t think of anything.
As she bowed her head back down over her cereal, Edith met Thomas’s gaze. The look on his face was one of weary puzzlement. Edith gave a small shrug. Thomas looked back at his daughter with a half-smile of sadness and indulgence.
He is a kind man, Edith thought, for all his silly insistences and the way he gets worried about money all the time. He wants the best for our daughter and has done everything within his power to make sure she gets it. I could have done a lot worse than Thomas Cowper.
They took the local paper every Friday. It was in March that Thomas came through to the kitchen one morning waving it and saying. ‘Good job I fitted those window locks. Look at this.’
The front-page story was headed BURGLARY EPIDEMIC – NO HOME IS SAFE. It was written by their Chief Reporter. Edith leant over, clutching a box of Weetabix, and glanced through the story. ‘Seems to be mostly in Oakham,’ she said.
Thomas shook his head vigorously, ‘No no no, in here, inside, they’ve done a special report. They’ve got someone from nearly every village talking about something that’s happened recently.’
He laid the paper flat on the counter top.
The Record had done a centre-fold which showed a map of Rutland with the villages and main roads marked. Each village had a line attached which drew the eye to a small boxed paragraph at the side. Inside the box, recent crimes were listed. Nether Bowston’s box said:
26th Feb – attempted break-in Parson’s Lane
2nd March – bicycle stolen in High Road
14th March – village postbox vandalised
‘How do you vandalise a postbox?’ Edith murmured sceptically.
‘Edith,’ Thomas said sternly, ‘this is no joking matter, you know. Think about Gemma.’
‘Well, I am,’ Edith replied. ‘But I don’t think it’s right them doing that. It might frighten the old people.’
‘Maybe they’ve got a reason to be frightened.’
Thomas scooped up the paper and left the room.
An hour later, Gemma came into the kitchen and said, ‘Mum, what’s Dad doing?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Edith. She was wringing out a J-cloth. ‘What is he doing?’
‘He just came into my room and checked the window and took the key. He didn’t knock or anything.’
Thomas bustled in. He was carrying a small biscuit tin which clattered metallically. He brushed past them to the window and leant to reach the ledge, where the keys were hidden under a flower pot. He extracted them, prised open the tin’s lid and dropped them in. Then he bustled out again.
‘But how am I going to open my window when it’s hot?’ asked Gemma, her voice a childish wail.
Edith sighed. ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll put them all somewhere.’ She turned back to the sink.
The man in the shop knew all about the bicycle theft. He told Edith about it a fortnight or so after the Record’s special report.
‘Easy pickings,’ he said.
She had hurried down to get there just before it closed at six o’clock. She had flung a coat on but it had proved a mistake. The weather had become suddenly warm and she felt a flush of sweat as she pushed the shop door open.
The shop had changed hands the previous year and Edith did not know what The Man in the Shop was called, although they conversed every time she went in. Her ignorance embarrassed her.
She was handing him a sliced loaf and a see-through bag of small, rock-hard tomatoes which she had picked from his tiny selection of fresh fruit ’n’ veg.
‘Round here,’ The Man in the Shop said congenially as he weighed the tomatoes, ‘there’s old folk who still don’t lock their doors and they know it, you know. That’s why they come out from Leicester. And Birmingham. They come all the way from Birmingham. The Indians don’t come – they’d stick out like a sore thumb. But the others do.’
‘We used to live in Leicester,’ said Edith, conversationally.
The direction of his speech did not bend to her remark. ‘They come out in the afternoons. I’ve seen them. They think people will be at work. If they can’t get in anywhere they just smash things, just for the hell of it. I had this bloke came in last month for two pints of milk. He had one of those yellow helmets on and things on his elbows and knees. He was on holiday. Tall, skinny and a beard. He went outside and was back in two ticks saying, my bike’s gone. He’d just propped it outside for two ticks thinking, village like this, no one around. I told him, you can’t do that round here. You never know when they’re going to crawl out of the woodwork. Easy pickings.’
Edith left the shop with the bread and tomatoes in a skinny blue bag. As she walked home she glanced at the surrounding bushes, half expecting to see the feathered and painted face of a Red Indian lurking, even though they weren’t called Red Indians any more.
It was true. The village was always deserted.
She had been to a Bring and Buy at the Village Hall last year and had seen a display on a stall run by local Brownies. It was called Victorian Nether Bowston. Enlarged copies of sepia photos were pinned to the stall showing the village as it was ‘In Olden Times’. The Brownies were all dressed up as mini housemaids, apart from one who wore cut-off raggedy trousers and had a dirty face. ‘I’m a sweep,’ she was announcing to anyone who passed the stall. ‘They send me up chimneys.’
Edith had paused to look at the photos. The tiny High Road was virtually unchanged, curving round the green, lined by the squat little cottages with their small square windows and squat little doors.
What surprised her was the people. The street was full of people. There were three shops, including an open-fronted one which might have been a blacksmith’s. A group of four women stood in front of it, a horse and cart beside them. Two men were sitting on a stone step nearby. Another woman with three children was approaching them. It was a busy village street.
Edith thought about that picture sometimes, on her quiet walks back from the shop. A solitary car might sweep huskily past, but there was never anyone else on foot. Her feet would clatter on the path, the sound large and echoey in the still air. The windows of most of the cottages were so small that she never saw anyone moving inside them. The whole of Nether Bowston might be deserted.
It seemed odd to think that a village as silent as theirs could ever have bustled in the way that old photo had implied. Nobody worked in the villages any more, they all went elsewhere in cars, but there were other people around; old people, women with young children. Why did nobody come out any more? Why did everybody stay inside?
There was the cat. Edith didn’t know who it belonged to but it often lazed or slunk about the village green. It was a furry ginger tom, its long hair scruffy with fluffballs and bits of undergrowth. Sometimes it would sit on the verge and watch her as she passed. When it miaowed, its face
scrunched up and its pointed yellow teeth were exposed. Most cats miaowed vowel sounds, but this one made a harsh, tiny consonant, an ich. She thought of it as the Nazi cat.
She saw it that evening. It was sitting on the path in front of her as she rounded the corner into their lane. It didn’t move as she approached. It was facing her, its gaze lifted, unimpressed.
She didn’t like to step over it, it was such a mangy thing, so she moved out into the road and walked round it.
At her gateway, she hesitated, looking towards their house. It, too, looked empty from the outside. How strange.
She closed the five-barred gate behind her. Now it was hot again, the creosoted surface of the gate felt slighty sticky. Her feet swooshed on the stones as she turned. They had put the gravel down when Gemma was small, so that she wouldn’t be able to whizz down the drive on her tricycle and out into the road. Thomas had talked of replacing it with tarmac one day, but then he had pointed out that it was actually a good security device. From inside the house, you could hear the crunch of anyone approaching the front door.
Edith crunched up the drive, her shoes digging and scuffing. Halfway up, she stopped, put down the plastic bag and removed her coat, slinging it over one arm. It was so sticky and unpleasant that she couldn’t even bear to wait until she reached her own front door. It was ludicrously hot for April, particularly when it wasn’t even sunny. It wasn’t natural.
She thought this thought, unnatural, as she lifted her key. Then, momentarily, all thought was stopped.
The door swung open. She took half a step forward, before being arrested by the sight of her daughter. Gradually, and instantly, Edith Cowper’s gaze gathered together what she could see.
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