Most boys preferred the light airy refectory in the new wing. Justin would sit alone at one of the slate-grey Formica-topped tables, out of sight of the door, to write his letters, watched over by Sir Stephen Lockett.
He kept still in the Geography aisle, knowing he could no longer seek refuge here now that his tormentor had found it.
Daylight was fading. Only the insidious groan of the wind off the sea broke the enforced silence. Any minute Simon would discover him. The copy of The Boyhood of Raleigh by John Everett Millais glinted in its gesso-gilt frame. A barefoot man seen from behind sat on a log dressed in crimson pantaloons pointing to the sea across a stone wall. The gypsy – Justin supposed this because of the earring – had the rapt attention of two boys. Justin believed the boy hugging his stockinged legs was Simon and the other sprawling on his tummy was himself; good friends, the boys listened to stories of the old man’s adventures on the high seas. The picture gave him hope that Simon would one day like him.
Even before the house became a school it had rivalled the Brighton Pavilion’s thirty lavatories with twenty-five: a high number of flush lavatories for a dwelling of its size. Sir Stephen Lockett had installed three in the library alone.
Simon was waiting for him outside one of these. Justin shrank back against a door marked ‘Private’ set at the end of the bookcases. When the librarian fetched him books from the Lockett catalogue stored in the cellars he had noted that she did not need a key. He leaned on the door; it opened.
Luckily someone was in the toilet; of course Simon supposed it was him and he would wait patiently outside, like a spider before sucking the life out of the fly. He was twirling a pencil, his stub finger as nimble as the rest, the pencil danced along his knuckles. Fact: Simon knew nothing about spiders.
Justin heard whoever was inside the toilet pull the chain and under cover of the lavatory’s thunderous flush, he stepped through the door by the bookcase and closed it behind him.
A bulb in a bracket cast tremulous light on uneven stone steps. Gingerly Justin descended and at the bottom found a switch and extinguished the bulb on the stairs in favour of a brighter light in the room. He listened for footsteps above but heard only the hissing of the cistern filling and wastewater sluicing along the soil pipe.
The cellar room used to be a scullery; it was now the librarian’s lair, full of broken-spined books and dusty stationery. Cobwebs furred with dust hung from the joists like miniature hammocks and in front of a mean grate were a chair and table. Sheets of paper backed with cellophane, scissors, a scalpel and a pot of rubber solution glue were arranged on the Formica surface.
Justin would enjoy helping the librarian cover and mend books, he imagined. Across the table was a metal yardstick. He looked at the book being repaired: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. Most people liked Lucy best. Justin preferred Edmund and given the chance would betray Simon to the White Witch for a lump of Turkish Delight.
He was being observed by a man with a flowing mane of hair and a thick beard. Stephen Lockett’s marble bust had been banished to the cellars to make room for a colour photocopier. Justin stroked his cheek, disappointed to find it chill and unyielding.
Justin had gambled on there being another exit and behind a wooden screen of Chinese silk much nibbled by moths he found an archway to a tiled passage. Piling three hefty volumes on the table he climbed up, teetering, to unscrew the ceiling bulb and everything went dark. He managed to jump off the table and land on the floor without hurting himself. Simon had triggered events early.
After some minutes he began to fear he had overestimated him: Simon had not found the cellar door and had left the library, presuming Justin had given him the slip. Justin was disappointed because he was ready for Simon.
A slant of light lit the steps. Justin ducked behind the screen. The elongated shadow of an old man projected on to the bricks, shoulders bowed, head bent, his feet faltering at each step. It was the ghost of Sir Stephen. Justin was not frightened; he longed to meet him.
The figure turned and became Simon.
Justin drew out the blind cord and pulled it taut in readiness, letting it slacken and then tightening it. It was the ideal weapon and he handled it expertly.
10
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Stella emerged out of Shepherd’s Bush Tube station rush hour into sunshine. Dew sparkled on the green. Red buses, blue cars, white vans and yellow salt bins cheered the soulless roundabout and the wipe-clean walls of the new nation-size shopping centre. At this time of the morning – just before seven – the rhythm of the neighbourhood was apparent. In the dry cleaner’s the owner, a woman in her fifties, dressed as if going somewhere special in pressed trouser suits with razor-sharp lapels, waved to Stella, a ticket between her teeth as she heaved clothes on hangers along racks. Stella stepped aside for a gangly young man arranging goods on the pavement outside the Pound and Penny shop. Already towers of storage boxes, swing bins and washing baskets dwarfed stacking stools and brushes stuffed handle-first into a tub. A list of wares was stuck crookedly on to the window, a crease in the laminate obliterating letters: ‘Garde ware ,gift, partywar, pet upplies snaks statnery swets, toilries’, which every morning irritated Stella.
The Polish mini-mart below Clean Slate’s office had been open an hour already; two men were erecting the sloping display using crates draped with fake grass, while another unloaded fruit and vegetables from a ten-year-old van. Stella noted the number plate. As a rule she did not trust the owner of a commercial vehicle over five years old. She threaded past the men into the shop and from the back of the chiller cabinet extracted a litre of semi-skimmed milk with the most recent sell-by date. Dariusz Adomek was on the till behind a high counter further shielded from muggers by chewing gum display stands and a Lotto machine. Stella handed up a five-pound note.
‘How’s business. Good?’ He ran the sensor over the barcode and passed back the milk.
‘Good, yes. You?’
‘Mustn’t grumble.’ In a Polish accent the cliché gained new life.
Dariusz Adomek had taken on a lease with the same landlord, and this slender commonality was grounds enough for mutual co-operation. He swiped change out of the drawer and poured the coins into Stella’s palm.
They had the same interchange every morning, developing on it only when Stella was looking for cleaners or Adomek had heard of a new client. No one he recommended – a relative or contact recently arrived from Poland – had let Stella down, the staff turning up for work and the clients paying invoices on time. In return Clean Slate cleaned the mini-market at a discount and Stella helped Adomek with Inland Revenue forms and had Jackie compose and type letters.
Clean Slate occupied two clumsily converted rooms over the mini-mart and a mobile phone shop. Facing south across the green, the late Victorian building was prone to damp, with cracks in ceilings and mould behind filing cabinets. It was hard to heat in the winter, keep cool in the summer and keep clean all the year round.
Stella tucked the milk carton under an arm to fit the mortice in the ground-floor door before seeing that the door was on the latch. It was well before nine. The insurance brokerage on the top floor – which employed a rival cleaning company – had ignored her latest memo.
She headed up the dingy stairs, trying, as she did every day, to ignore the brown linoleum that sent a discouraging message to prospective clients. The landlord refused to decorate the common parts. The tawdry sixties-meets-seventies décor accounted for the low rent for premises in what had become a prime location. Clean Slate had the turnover to afford plush offices with straight walls and air conditioning but an office move would interrupt the hectic routine. Each year, ignoring her accountant’s advice, Stella, nervous of over-stretching her business, put it off. Each day, as she avoided the dirt-engrained banister, she worked her way through the same train of thought and by the time she was at her desk other issues had taken priority, which today was how she could retrieve his key
s from her dead father’s house without breaking a window, smashing a lock or Jackie finding out.
A man was outside peering around the sign on her office door.
‘What are you doing?’
He came towards her, a looming bulk in the cramped passage. Stella grasped the milk, fleetingly aware that dashing a Tetra Pak in his face would not save her.
She had forgotten Paul.
‘Come on, Stella. We can work this out and make a go of it.’ He backed off when Stella, head down, whipped both her hands up to avoid his touch. ‘I’ve been calling and texting you,’ he added plaintively.
‘How did you get in here?’
‘The door was unlocked. You want to watch that, anyone could wander in.’
Anyone had.
‘You’re seeing someone.’ Paul was blocking the doorway. ‘Who is it? That fuckwit Pole you were talking to?’
‘No, it isn’t.’ Stella regretted taking the bait and giving him a toehold. ‘It’s none of your business who I see. Are you spying on me? You left that message last night when I was at Terry’s.’
‘It is my business if you’re messing me about.’ He rubbed under his chin with the back of his hand, a gesture that had once attracted Stella. ‘I have the right to come to your flat. Terry who? Was that the bloke with the flash Beemer? Don’t lie.’
‘So you weren’t outside when… Oh never mind. Look, I said it’s over, end of.’ Stella tried to step around Paul but he remained in the way.
‘This place is all you care about.’ He thumped the wire-reinforced glass.
‘My father is dead.’ Stella unwittingly jettisoned the standard splitting-up script for a different kind of drama.
‘What do you mean? Your dad’s died?’ Paul put out a hand and tentatively brushed her sleeve and when she did not react, read it as a good sign and slid his fingers down to her hand.
‘Yes he has. Not that you asked,’ Stella retorted, aware of the flagrant illogicality. She shoved past Paul and scratched her key in the lock. ‘I don’t want a scene, please, Paul?’ She tripped the alarm and had ten seconds to deactivate it. Once inside, her tone softened: ‘This is hard enough without you making it worse.’
‘I’ll call later, yeah?’ Paul drifted along the landing, obviously cowed by the immensity of Stella’s loss. ‘You’ll get through this. I’m there for you. My dad died too. I am beside you on this.’ He retreated downstairs.
Stella punched in the alarm code, relieved that Jackie had not been there because she would feel sorry for him. Jackie believed that what Stella needed was the love of a good man; Paul, with his pleasant if unremarkable looks and kind nature drenched in Boss aftershave, was her latest vision of Stella’s Mr Right.
Forcing Paul from her mind, Stella thought how a locksmith would be expensive and attract attention but the probate papers were in her old bedroom; she should tackle them soon.
She had an hour and a half before Jackie would prop the door back and flip the ‘Open’ sign around, and the administrative assistant, an eager woman of twenty-two, would set to making coffee for the three of them. This was Stella’s favourite part of the day; the world was clean and tidy and there was all to play for. But this morning, despite the sunshine, she was in an unfamiliar landscape stalked by the demons of Terry and Paul.
If a potential customer faltered on the lino-covered staircase, their mood would lift on entering the bright, immaculate office, with shelves of storage boxes and catalogues. A bank of filing cabinets with primary colour-coded drawers would reassure them that this was a place where promises were kept, contracts adhered to and even the most complex of tasks expedited. The laminated pages of the Staff Handbook – beside the water cooler for continual reference – counselled: Avoid clutter: nothing without legs, apart from waste bins and filing cabinets, must touch the floor. Keep equipment on shelves and cupboards and box in cables and wiring.
Computers in black casings were in standby mode, the Clean Slate logo floating about the screens like a fish in a tank, the ‘L’s in each word expressed by two sweeping brushes. Against the wall was a trestle table on which was a drinks fridge with a see-through door and a tray of white cups, saucers and plates. Three plastic storage jars from the Pound and Penny shop displayed tea bags, instant coffee and sugar. A silver jug kettle reflected the room in concave.
There was a stain on the carpet. Stella bent down and it disappeared: it was the shadow of a hole-punch by the photocopier.
While she was at ground level, she could not resist checking the floor: no bits, no fluff. She spied two paper clips and an elastic band beneath the radiator, and with her nose inches from the pile she could see no grooves made by the vacuum brush. She sniffed and was mollified by an uplifting aroma of lemon. Six out of ten. New cleaners did the ‘home shift’ before she let them loose on clients. This one had answered a perpetual advert on the website, had not come recommended by Adomek and offered only lukewarm references.
She was about to turn on the photocopier – it took ten minutes to warm up – but this was the assistant’s task and Jackie was insistent she would forget her routine if Stella kept doing her job. Stella switched it on.
Two wood-veneer-topped desks, striped with bars of winter sunlight through Venetian blinds, were pushed together by the window. Creating symmetry were three-decker filing trays on each desk, marked ‘in’, ‘out’ and ‘pending’. Stella’s door was propped open with a foot-high cement lion Jackie had presented to Stella on her forty-fourth birthday last August. If she had minded that Stella had not taken it home, she had not said. Perhaps she understood that Stella’s home was the office. She only closed her door for client meetings, which were rare; decisions were made by telephone or at what Jackie persisted in calling the ‘scene of grime’.
Stella’s room was a third of the main office, partitioned by a clumsy stud wall that abutted the window frame and vibrated whenever a Tube train rumbled below, causing framed certificates and awards for best cleaning company to slide askew on their strings. Stella straightened them before placing her rucksack on the visitor’s chair and pulling her laptop and Filofax from it.
She had painted the walls white herself. The only colour was Clean Slate’s new green and light blue logo emblazoned on blocks of sticky notes, box files, company literature and the printers’ complimentary mouse mat. A spray of Clean Slate branded roller-ball pens were arranged in a papier maché pen pot, the blue and red William Morris design a gift from a client who did occasionally visit the office. Stella judged the pattern fussy, should the contract end, the pen pot would go.
She consulted her calendar – a replica of the one in Terry’s study – and was relieved that she had only one appointment: a cinema in Richmond. She switched on her computer and angled the slats in the blinds to allow in a soft light.
The calendar reminded Stella about the door keys. She toyed with the notion of abandoning the house; so what if everything was stolen? If only when people died everything to do with them vanished too. If only when relationships ended the other person just went away.
A bus with Marble Arch on its destination panel inched past the window, giving the room a temporary rosy glow.
Whatever he said, Paul must have trailed her last night and, not realising that the house belonged to Terry, assumed as he always did that she was having an affair. She wished she had thought of this while he was there; it would have calmed him down. Briskly she returned to the main office where the answer machine signalled messages with subdued pips. About to press ‘play’, she decided to get a coffee first. There was no kitchen so she ran up to the toilets on the next floor to fill the kettle.
She could deal with Paul.
The toilets were shared with the insurance broker and with both genders which meant that the seat was generally up. The landlord cleaned the room to keep overheads down and this meant that paper dispensers were rarely filled and the roller towel, grey with overuse, spooled on to the vinyl flooring of pallid lemon-coloured flowers. There
were gaps under the doors so Stella only used the toilet if she was alone. She left the kettle on the sink and went into the nearest cubicle and, loath to touch it, tipped the seat with one finger. It fell on to the porcelain with a crash. This action was unnecessary for she never sat on a public lavatory, but hovered inches above.
She sipped her coffee as the answer machine clicked into gear. Transcribing calls was the assistant’s job, but Stella prepared to scribble details in the daybook in writing that no one could read.
‘I would like to speak with Miss Stella Darnell.’ Stella knew the type; a client who would find fault before the cleaning had begun. The woman paused after each sentence as if she intended Stella to respond. ‘This is Gina Cross, Isabel Ramsay’s daughter. You were her cleaner.’ Stella jabbed at the page with her pen. Ye-es, so? She drew a box around the name, and made it three-dimensional.
‘I want you to clear out my mother’s house once we have removed valuables. My number is…’ Stella was not good with numerals and had to replay the voicemail to note them in the right order.
The next three callers were a supplier and Wendy, the first cleaner to join Clean Slate, calling in sick for the first time, compounding the staffing issue. The final message was a client wanting an extra session. She left the machine off; she would answer any calls: people never tried again if they got a voice message. Clean Slate was open for business.
She copied Gina Cross’s details on a sticky note and, armed with her coffee, went to her room. Mrs Ramsay always gave the impression that Gina, Lucian and Eleanor lived with her.
Unlike many of Stella’s clients, Mrs Ramsay never boasted about her children’s careers. She tssk-tssked while she stirred clutter on her kitchen table in search of her paper knife with which she opened her junk mail as if it were eagerly awaited correspondence. If she couldn’t find the knife, she complained that one of her kids had it. Perusing each catalogue or leaflet, concocting her first drink at a few minutes past eleven each morning, splashing gin into her glass, tossing in ice cubes and dribbling in tonic, Mrs Ramsay would rail that it was her three monsters who wrecked the house, causing her to mislay things and then accusing her of absent-mindedness or senility. Her children and their friends played hide and seek all over the house day and night, creeping up and down the stairs. Stirring the liquid with the handle of a spoon, Mrs Ramsay would make Stella promise not to tell Gina, of whose disapproval she appeared afraid. Hearing Gina Cross demand that she call her ‘ASAP’, Stella understood why.
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