The florist raised a fist towards her mouth to emphasise a prefatory cough. ‘I think there’s still…’
‘We don’t need to wait unless everyone wants to,’ said Oswald. ‘I didn’t mean this to be anything formal. I just thought it would be useful for us all to meet and talk.’
‘About anything special?’ Dave Goudge said, seating himself at one end of the sofa and pulling his shirt-sleeves over his wrists while his wife performed much the same actions at the other.
‘Security occurred to me. I haven’t lured you here for a presentation,’ Oswald assured the party, several of whom had begun to look wary or tricked. ‘I think a building is never as secure as it can be until the people in it have discussed how.’
‘You’ll have some notions, I imagine,’ said Ralph Shrift, swinging one of Beth’s chairs away from the wall so as to sit astride it and rest his elbows on the back.
‘Leonard.’ Lin patted the arm of her chair to summon her husband away from Amy’s videocassettes, which he was tidying under the pretence of examining the handwritten titles. ‘There was something we wanted to bring up, wasn’t there?’
‘There was.’
‘The tree outside,’ Lin said to the magistrate. ‘We were wondering what the position was.’
‘More or less upright, I should say,’ Teresa Blake responded, which by now was also a description of herself.
‘The legal position,’ Leonard said, with one syllable doing extra duty as a laugh. ‘We thought you’d know whether it can be cut down.’
‘Pardon me, but who’d want to?’ said Beth. ‘It’s part of the character.’
‘I’ve known some of those I could do without,’ Peter Sheen remarked, extending and retracting the tip of his ballpoint with the hand that wasn’t delivering frequent sips of Muscadet to his mouth.
Max Greenberg’s eyes swam to find him in the twin bowls of the lenses. ‘You’re speaking of people, are you, or places?’
‘I’ve come across plenty of bad examples of both.’
‘Each makes the other.’
‘Which brings us back to the tree, I believe,’ Leonard said.
‘Bad’s a bad word, maybe,’ said his wife, and gave him back the subject with a reproachful blink.
‘Fair enough then, dangerous. We think it’s seen better days and ought to be dealt with before it keels over. If it does it’ll come straight for this side of the house.’
‘It scratches at the window as it is whenever there’s much of a breeze,’ said Lin. ‘Last night it kept our Pamelah awake.’
‘I don’t see how she could hear it through the double glazing,’ Paul Kenilworth said with a kind of perverse satisfaction, ‘if nobody can hear me sawing away on the fiddle.’
‘Perhaps it’s just young girls, how they get, you understand,’ Leonard said to the party at large. ‘I wasn’t meaning there were any in the tree, but now I think about it, that’s another danger.’
‘We don’t want children trying to climb it and breaking their necks,’ Lin clarified.
‘Nor adults either. It’s up to them if they want to break their necks, but my point is that tree could be an invitation to a burglar.’
‘Handwritten in gold and tied up in a bow.’
Lin’s image brought the Stoddards to a halt, and Alistair Doughty looked up from inspecting his fingernails, presumably for traces of ink. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said, though not to Lin. ‘Just the other night I had someone peering in my window.’
Donna Goudge sat forward, unsheathing yet another inch of her black-nyloned thighs. ‘Aren’t you on the same floor as us?’
‘That I am. Middle,’ he explained for the benefit of anyone who mightn’t know. ‘There I was, nodding off in front of the evening’s tripe on the box, and this, I’ll call them a bee in front of the ladies, this bee sticks their face right up against the glass.’
‘Not a window-cleaner?’ Dave Goudge said.
‘Not at getting on for midnight, and not with a face like that either. I’d cross the street if I saw it in daylight, and let me tell you I’ve been on the lookout for it ever since.’
‘Male or female?’ Teresa Blake enquired, lowering herself onto a straight chair as carefully as she was balancing her brimful wine-cup.
‘God knows, and maybe not even its mother. Swinging about, it was. You’d have thought it lived up there. Sticking its tongue out at me, and then it was off before I could get to the window.’
‘We can certainly look into deterring trespassers,’ the magistrate said, having rendered the wine in her cup more manageable. ‘I don’t mind talking to our friends at Housall, since my sitting on the bench seemed to impress them. Shall I tell them they might want to put some gates up?’
‘Anything that keeps us private,’ Dave Goudge said with another tug at his cuffs.
The general murmur suggested that his listeners thought agreement was too obvious to need putting into words, except for Beth. ‘Won’t there be a right of way by now?’ she said.
‘There ought not to be,’ Teresa said as though addressing a contentious lawyer, then softened her tone. ‘The land hasn’t been public since it was railed off and this place built.’
‘As what, do you know?’ Oswald said.
‘I don’t need to.’
‘That’s settled, then,’ Ralph Shrift declared, placing his cup on the seat between his legs and clamping the sides of his face with his hands to direct it at Oswald. ‘You were going to tell us your plans for us.’
‘I thought we could take a few minutes to discuss organising ourselves,’ Oswald said, a proposition which the door seemed to greet with a derisive buzz. ‘I’ll just…’ he said, and tramped out, expecting to find Amy without her keys. But the newcomer was a man with a round startled face, his eyes almost as pale as his shock of blond hair. ‘Sorry for the lateness. It was my father,’ he said, and delivered a handshake whose firmness might have been intended to counteract the indirectness of his words.
‘I’ve seen you,’ Oswald said, feeling apologetic himself. ‘You’re making something of the grounds. I hadn’t realised you were one of us.’
‘Down on the ground,’ his new guest said, which it took Oswald more than a moment to interpret as referring to the floor on which the other lived. ‘You won’t know the place when I’ve done with it. George Roscommon, by the way. No garden too large or too small.’
Oswald thought that a somewhat extravagant claim, but kept his feelings to himself as he closed the door and followed the gardener in time to hear him own up to his name. ‘Oh, hello,’ George Roscommon then said.
‘Oh, hello,’ said Ursula Braine, echoing his casualness so exactly that it was clear how well they knew each other. There was an embarrassed silence until Dominic Metcalf told the gardener ‘You’re my fellow denizen of the unpopular floor.’
‘That was something I thought was worth discussion,’ Oswald said. ‘Four apartments on these gentlemen’s floor and one on the first. I’m sure we all want to see them occupied, but I wonder if we might like to vet prospective tenants.’
‘I’m all for keeping out undesirables,’ said Teresa Blake. ‘That’s another word I can have with Housall, a vetting committee. I take it that will include any adults who aren’t able to be here.’
‘It would have to,’ George Roscommon admitted, and as though further to confirm that, the phone rang in the hall.
‘We’ve been thinking up safety measures,’ Oswald said as a cue to someone to develop the theme while he took the call. As soon as he lifted the receiver from its white slab on the wall a cracked voice demanded ‘Is George there? George?’
‘He’s just arrived. This is…’
‘I’m his father,’ the voice complained, which at least made its gender clear. ‘Who else were you expecting?’
‘I can’t say I was expecting anyone.’
‘Can’t or won’t, Mr…?’
‘Priestley. Would you like a word with your son?’
‘I’l
l have that when he comes down. Just tell him I’d appreciate it if he wouldn’t dally on the way.’
‘Well, I really think that’s up to—’ When Oswald found himself talking to an electronic drone he hooked the receiver into the slab. He hadn’t succeeded in wording a message for the gardener by the time he felt compelled to go back into the room. ‘My father,’ George Roscommon said at once. ‘Sorry. I know.’
‘You wouldn’t like him to join us.’
‘Hardly possible with all the stairs.’
Metcalf panted in agreement, and Oswald felt bound to ask ‘Is he by himself?’
‘That’s how he was left. More than likely he won’t say he was when I get back.’
Only the florist looked as though she wanted to respond to that, and when she didn’t speak, Oswald did. ‘You could tell him the security is in hand if that would help. Now that we’ll all be able to recognise one another I’d like to propose some kind of watch scheme, nothing formal, just keeping an eye on who’s in the building and what they’re up to if that should seem called for.’
‘No quarrels with that,’ Dave Goudge said at once.
‘None at all,’ Donna said.
‘I think that about exhausts my ideas, but not my catering. Would anyone care to fall on some more of this food?’
The Goudges and Paul Kenilworth took this as an excuse to leave, pleading previous dinners, and Oswald might have lost faith in his cuisine if Ralph Shrift hadn’t backed off his chair and refilled his plate, declaring ‘Better tuck than I serve at my private views.’ He inspired Dominic Metcalf both to return to the spread and to propose taking a photograph of all the occupants of Nazarill once it was fully peopled. ‘Shouldn’t you snap us before the tree goes, if it’s going?’ Beth said, which both the printer and the watchmaker attempted to explain to George Roscommon before the florist claimed the subject as a pretext to speak to him. By now Peter Sheen was replenishing his plate enthusiastically as any journalist at a junket, and even the magistrate was nibbling a snack to go with her drinks, too late to hinder their effects. ‘I must be going soon,’ she said more than once, and eventually ‘Before the prisoner gets too restless.’
‘Who’s that?’ Max Greenberg demanded.
‘My companion. If she thinks she’s been left by herself too long she’s liable to start clawing the walls.’
Even once her listeners gathered she was referring to her cat, her words caused an odd awkwardness which she relieved by draining her cup and making her determinedly stable way along the hall. Some or all of that was the cue for the party to break up. The Stoddards were the last to leave. Oswald watched them along the corridor, and had finished throwing plates and cups into the kitchen bin before he heard the key in the lock. ‘Did you make a new friend?’ he said.
‘Maybe.’
‘What was she like?’
‘All right.’
Amy’s replies would become resentful and even less informative if he pursued the subject, and he opened his hands towards her to signify he was resigned to having nothing to hold onto. As he headed for the main room she said ‘Do you want any help?’
‘Please.’ He remembered what he’d asked her several times, and reached into her room to switch the light on. ‘First, if you could finally—’
The room lurched out of its dimness, and he saw a spider as big as his hand flexing its legs on the bed, its web stretching from the pillow to the floor and laden with shrivelled insects. ‘You filthy—’ he gasped, then saw there wasn’t a cobweb, only a patterned black silk scarf. But there was a spider, clinging to the light-bulb for an instant before it withered into a wisp of smoke which Oswald had the appalled impression he could smell. The room appeared to shrink and darken, and then, as he stumbled backwards, it regained its habitual size. ‘I can’t get anything while you’re in the way,’ Amy said, and saw his face. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Just a, a bit of a dizzy spell. One sip too many. Nothing to do with you.’ Oswald retreated hastily into the main room, although the sight of food made him feel rather sick. ‘Just make sure in future you keep your room clean,’ he said in a voice so fierce he hardly recognised himself.
3 - Down from the height
‘Well, it’s back to the books for me,’ Max Greenberg said.
George watched Ursula murmur a parting remark to Ralph Shrift at the far end of the frustratingly dim corridor. The art dealer threw back his head as if to catch the laugh he then let fly as he admitted himself to his apartment, which brightened the corridor only to renew if not intensify the dimness. ‘Ah,’ George said, and feeling that was impolitely unenthusiastic ‘Oh yes?’
‘A good few hours before this will be hitting the pillow’ The watchmaker raised his bottled eyes to emphasise how he was pointing a manicured finger at his scalp, but George was seeing Ursula begin to descend the stairs, her loose dark green dress hinting at the swaying of her hips, the glossy black pennant of her hair at rest now, walled off from the wind across the moors. ‘So long as you don’t strain your—’ George responded, and in a breakneck attempt to head off the imminent word, ‘though I’m sure it’s worth doing, the reading is, of course.’
‘It comes with the calling.’
‘I see.’ By now they were at the stairs, but Ursula was no more than a whisper of footsteps beyond the bend in the staircase and a lingering trace of perfume, which made George feel tethered by the conversation. ‘In the sense of quite seeing that it would,’ he said, and when descending in silence proved unbearable, ‘With me, now, I’m afraid it’s rather fallen by the wayside.’
Max Greenberg waited until the bend to turn on George a look of magnified surprise not far short of a rebuke. ‘Don’t you think you could be storing up trouble for yourself?’
‘Perhaps as I get older I’ll find my way back to the, how shall we put it, the way.’ It struck George that if he’d been less intent on Ursula he wouldn’t have allowed the chat to round on him. ‘Do you study every night?’ he said, and stepped down far enough to see her in the process of opening her handbag outside her door halfway along the corridor. ‘My grandfather did, a chapter without fail before he went to bed, except of course, well, not of course, but with him it was the Bible rather than the, the one you have. Not that I’m suggesting there’s any difference,’ he went on, his words stumbling helplessly downhill, ‘obviously neither’s better than the other, assuming you want my opinion.’
All this had brought him to the middle floor, where he became aware that the watchmaker was gazing at him with some bemusement. ‘We aren’t still talking about my books,’ Max Greenberg said or asked.
‘Well, I thought I… if I’m not…’
‘The books I’ll be preparing for my accountant.’
‘Ah. Yes. I should have…’ George managed to swallow any further comment, though that meant he had no obvious excuse to linger on this floor, and more reason than ever to feel embarrassed. He watched Greenberg unlock his door as Ursula reached in her bag for her keys, and then Max said ‘What time have you?’
It wasn’t clear from his tone whether this was a farewell or a sales pitch. ‘Twenty past ten,’ George said, having peered at the dim grey face of his digital watch.
Ursula used raising a tiny round dial to her face as a pretext for leaving her keys in her handbag. ‘Almost nineteen minutes past.’
Max exposed his wrist with a good deal of ceremony, displaying the various hands and dials of his Rolex. ‘Nineteen minutes and thirteen seconds,’ he said in the accent of a gentle warning, and with a nod that acknowledged his listeners as the couple they were trying to appear not to be, trotted into his hall.
Ursula dredged her keys out of her bag and having pushed her door open, gazed at George. ‘Here he is,’ he said. ‘No mistaking him. Can’t tell the difference between accounts and the Talmud.’
She propped the door open with the bag and walked almost soundlessly towards him. ‘George…’
‘Can’t even come up with the name w
hen he needs it, or much else either.’
She halted two paces short of him, unlike her perfume. ‘Are you coming in for a quick mug?’
Some perverse enjoyment was to be had from pitying himself at a distance, and he found it hard to relinquish. ‘What are you offering?’
‘Whatever you’d like to put in your mouth. You can have a nip if you’re good.’
‘That might just do it. Better not, though, in case he starts getting how he gets. We don’t want him pestering the Priestleys.’
Ursula seemed unaware of stretching her right hand out to him, flexing its fingers so slightly they couldn’t be convicted of beckoning. He knew how soft and firm her hand would be, and her arm, and her breasts with their nipples tilted up to greet him… She was glancing back at her ajar door. ‘Say you aren’t feeling abandoned,’ he said. ‘By me, I mean.’
‘Just making sure nothing goes in my flat I don’t want in there.’
‘What would?’
‘Nothing really, I suppose. I just thought I saw something little running up the stairs tonight when I came home. Maybe it was Miss Blake’s moggy. I don’t mind having that come to visit.’ She peered about the corridor before turning her attention fully to him. ‘What were you saying again?’
‘Only that the old man’s in a mood to start ringing around if he thinks he’s been left too long.’
‘I’ll just have to water my plants and take Inspector Wexford to bed with me, then.’ She relented at once, finding one of George’s hands to squeeze and relinquishing it before their contact would have become irresistible. ‘Don’t listen to me, you’ve enough on your shoulders, not that you have to put up with it all by yourself. Isn’t it time you introduced us?’
‘Maybe soon.’
Ursula tossed her head, netting the dimness with her hair. ‘I’d better let you go. Unless…’
Her pause seemed to take hold of his groin. ‘Unless, yes?’ he said with some urgency.
‘I only thought you might dash down if you felt like it and see if he’s asleep so you could wander back up.’
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 5
