It was a relief to reach his destination, a tall, nondescript office tower opposite the former Army and Navy department store. Glancing at his watch which read five past nine, Hamish gave his name to a security guard who phoned upstairs to check that his was a bona fide appointment. He was ushered towards the lifts and whisked, at a speed that would have done credit to a fair-ground ride, up one side of the central atrium. Just as well, he thought, as he got out on the twelfth floor, that he didn’t suffer from phobias about heights or glass-bottomed lifts. He was greeted by a PA dressed in the feminine version of a power suit and after a short wait was shown in to the office of a young, fashionably-suited man who looked every part the successful London lawyer. Charles Fletcher, Miss Kendal’s lawyer, was not the elderly bespectacled gentleman that Hamish had somehow expected from his conversation with the old woman.
“I’m glad you could make it.” Charles said politely, rising from a plush executive chair and coming around the desk to shake Hamish’s hand in greeting. He waved Hamish towards one of two comfortable armchairs grouped around a coffee table in the corner of the room, taking the other himself.
Hamish wondered how this could be the lawyer who had handled Miss Kendal’s affairs since her brother’s death. “You are younger than I imagined.”
“My father was Miss Kendal’s lawyer until his retirement last year,” Charles explained, “and I’ve more or less inherited his client list, but I’m still a rather junior partner in the firm, despite the name. I’ve, …um, been instructed, commanded -one might say, by Miss Kendal to give you the keys to the house once you have provided me with adequate references.” he smiled, revealing perfectly white teeth. “She has left it up to me to decide exactly what ‘adequate’ is. It would seem that she has already made her decision about you and the rest is purely a formality of sorts. I realise from what you said on the phone earlier that you haven’t made up your mind whether to take her offer yet. You do realise that she has put a time limit of the end of this week?” he waited a moment, watching as Hamish nodded his understanding before continuing, “Perhaps it might help you to make your decision if you knew that Miss Kendal has also instructed me to prepare documentation to the effect that anything you spend on the property in the first three months of your ‘tenancy’ should be reimbursed, up to a limit of five thousand pounds. I realise that that sum will barely get you started, and you would, of course, have to keep a record of everything you spent and send the receipts on to this office. She is willing to make this provision so that if you choose to leave at the end of that time you would effectively lose nothing.” Seeing Hamish’s surprised look, he continued, “She gave me the impression that your timely arrival had taken a load off her mind, ...she is very keen that you take up her offer.” he handed Hamish a sheaf of papers that he had been holding and pointed out where signatures were required, the pages tagged with bright yellow post-its.
They talked for a short while longer. Hamish had his list of questions, but Charles was unable to answer the majority of them. After fifteen minutes the receptionist knocked quietly and announced that his next appointment was waiting. The lawyer saw Hamish to the door with a parting comment, “Well, I expect I’ll hear from you by six o’clock, Friday evening. As long as you get the signed agreement and two references here by then, the place is yours. I’m sorry I haven’t been of more help, but if there’s anything else that you think of, please don’t hesitate to phone.”
Unwilling to take to the Tube again, Hamish elected to walk. Alighting from the lift and once more at street level, he found that the temperature had dropped by several degrees, and the morning’s light mist had rapidly developed into a thick fog, which had descended on the city. He walked briskly, choosing his route more for interesting streets than for directness, and quite enjoying the muffling effect that the fog was having over the city. But by the time he had reached Brompton Road at South Kensington, he could feel the back of his throat start to tighten. Realising that he was probably doing himself more harm than good by walking, he elected to hail a ride. Seeing a black cab passing with its light on, he stuck his hand in the air and signalled the driver. As he climbed in the back of the shiny black vehicle, the driver, who sported an argyle cardigan and a handlebar moustache, chattily said, “You don’t want to be out in that stuff ...it might not look as bad as the old London smog of the fifties and sixties, but its every bit as lethal. A right pea-souper it is. There’s a warning out over the radio, telling folks to stay indoors and not venture out, and ‘specially if they’re troubled by lung complaints”.
Once home, Hamish tried to stay inside, but by mid-afternoon he had to get away from the noise of the drill, which was pounding away at irregular intervals and making concentration virtually impossible. A shame, he thought, looking down on the street from the upstairs window as he cleaned a palette knife with an old rag, that the contractors didn’t heed the pollution warning and call it a day themselves. Though, having seen several of them smoking at their lunch break he supposed that concern for the state of their lungs was not a high priority. Despite the health warnings he decided that it would do him as much harm to stay indoors as to go out and retrieve his car, which he had not moved since driving home on Sunday night. He fossicked in the back of the wardrobe for his bike mask, putting it over his mouth and nose in an effort to minimise breathing in the polluted air while he walked to where he had left the car. ‘A good thing too’, he thought, when he got there. There was a council notification stuck to the front window informing him that ‘Due to impending council works to be carried out on the roadway, any vehicles still left parked on this street by 8 a.m. Thursday, tomorrow, would be forcibly removed and impounded.’ As he unlocked his car he looked along the row of vehicles still parked on the street, all displaying similar notices and wondered how many of them would still be here on Thursday morning, falling prey to the council’s parking police. Then he noticed that more than one had flat tyres and a late-model Porsche, parked two spaces along from his own had been keyed, with a long gouge scratched deeply into the paintwork. Shaking his head, he closed the door again and walked around his own car, fully expecting to see some kind of damage, but was relieved to find that all four tyres were still fully inflated and the paintwork was untouched. He breathed a sigh of relief ...he’d been let off this time. He manoeuvred out of the tight parking space and drove back to the studio, carefully negotiating the planks to the relative safety of his garage.
Car out of harm's way and locked in the garage, he retreated to the Minstrel for coffee taking a small sketch pad, pencils and pens with him for some drawing practice. It seemed pointless to go back to the studio, just to listen to the din of the drill for the rest of the afternoon. Two hours, numerous small sketches of the café’s patrons and too much caffeine later, he headed back home. As he approached his front door, he spied Caitlin Evans, one of his neighbours, walking in the opposite direction with her baby son Sean strapped into his pushchair. The little boy was crying lustily, his tearful face peering unhappily out through the clear plastic rain cover. Caitlin was Irish, married to a Londoner, but not so long out of Ireland that she’d lost her beautiful Irish lilt, as well as a wickedly impish sense of humour.
She paused briefly as they passed, enquiring loudly enough to be heard over the crying infant, “How are you Hamish?” not waiting for a reply, she continued in the same breath, “I wouldn’t be out and about in this horrible filthy weather but Sean’s developed an ear ache and needs to be taken to the doctor.”
Hamish was sympathetic, remembering similar babyhood traumas with Lucy but before he could open his mouth to express his understanding or offer to drive her to the surgery she continued. “It’s just round the corner and so close that it’s hardly worth the effort of hailing a cab.” The volume from the pushchair increased as she added, louder this time and speaking over her shoulder as she hurried on her way, “Sorry I can’t stop longer, but a word of warning Hamish …you might want to be watching out for Evil
and Niggly ...your burglar alarm went off about an hour ago and I’d bet next week’s pay they’ll be lying in wait for you coming back to launch their usual complaints.”
Short of going right around the block and approaching the studio from the opposite direction, Hamish knew he had to pass by the street windows that let onto Eva and Nigel’s flat to get to his own door. It was almost worth the effort, he thought, but he opted instead for the direct approach, although he did momentarily consider the possibility that the extra dose of pollution he’d incur with the longer walk could do him less harm than his whinging neighbours. Sure enough, the saw the net curtain in the front window twitch as he approached his front door. He barely had time to open the door, deactivate the reset alarm and read the short message left by the security company that monitored his alarm system before the telephone rang. He picked the receiver up and held it at some distance away from his ear as the shrill tones of Eva informed him of his shortcomings as a neighbour. His attempts to politely apologise for the noise and tell her that the note he had been left said that the alarm had most likely been set off by a cat coming in an upstairs window, which since he didn’t own a cat, he hadn’t foreseen, met with a barrage of invective and threats to contact the council before the telephone was slammed down in his ear.
Rubbing at his abused ear lobe Hamish sighed, and went upstairs to look at the offending window. It was now tightly shut, presumably by the person from the security company. Sure enough, there were dirty paw prints all around the window ledge where the animal had climbed in, though how it had managed that feat was more than Hamish could work out. It was a sheer drop of several metres down to the courtyard, and the window had only been left open a few centimetres. The cat must have inched along the garden wall, and jumped the gap between the wall and the ledge. It gave the term ‘cat-burglar’ a whole new meaning, he thought, with wry amusement. Still, the poor puss must have got a horrible fright when the alarm had gone off, if the scrabble of paw prints where it had turned around and fled the scene were anything to go by.
Noisy alarms aside, it took very little to irritate Evil and Niggly ...Hamish remonstrated himself, -he really shouldn’t think of them by those names- there would be hell to pay one of these days if he should ever slip up and accidentally call either of them that to their faces. Caitlin had bestowed the nicknames shortly after Sean had been born. Having a new baby in the flat above Eva and Nigel had elicited a veritable flood of grievances, and the new names had seemed to fit their personalities so aptly that they had stuck. Since Caitlin lived directly above the pair, she bore the brunt of their ire and regularly had to put up with complaints ranging from abusive phone calls to nasty little notes shoved through her letter box. There were regular intimidating threats about contacting the council if she and her husband didn’t keep their baby son quiet, but the complaining pair seldom had the fortitude to follow up on their bullying so the other neighbours, who were also frequently abused and threatened with legal actions if Eva and Nigel felt that their precious peace and quiet was being compromised did their best to ignore the grumbling couple. Hamish wasn’t particularly unhappy with the thought that, with their flat at ground level they’d be getting the worst of the dust and noise from the road crew.
After a solitary dinner of microwaved roast dinner, Hamish took out the papers that Charles Fletcher had given him that morning. He read through the fine print, spreading the sheets of paper out on the low table in front of him. Sitting staring at the documents he mused that all week and particularly today, the city had seemed to have gone out of its way to show him some of its more offensive aspects: crowding, pollution –both noise and air, vandalism and annoying neighbours among them. And those weren’t the worst that could happen, by any means ...the central business district was still reeling from the wholesale devastation of a terrorist bomb that had damaged much of the commercial area, and it hadn’t been that many years since Brit Rail stations around the city had been regularly targeted with bombs. Post 9/11, no one living in a large city was naïve enough to assume that they were safe from terrorists.
Hamish sat silently for a moment, then spoke to the empty room, “Elaine, my sweetheart, I know you loved the place and I wish that I could stay …but it’s killing me. I’ve got to go.” He picked up the pen he had tossed beside the papers, quickly signing all the copies before he could change his mind and went to bed, to sleep the first night’s unbroken sleep he’d had in months, free from his recurring nightmares.
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
William Wordsworth
Liana
Where the cold had affected her from without, now, a deep-seated hunger was gnawing at her insides and her dreams became imbued with images of a sumptuous banquet that she was missing. Like the cold, this was a sensation that had never previously been in her experience, but still she resisted the urge to wake and slept on.
***
The vine had grown rampantly, twisting and knitting itself together in a tangled web of green, coaxing the bones back into a whole. Not yet fully fashioned but taking on the unmistakable semblance of human form. Internal organs and a heart of sorts were moulded, still not functional but closer to life than they had been in the hundreds of years since their demise.
The Garden was aware of the happenings in the cave but in its current state could do little to intercede. Without Liana the balance was askew and tipping towards the dark …and that was never a good place.
Anyone who knows anything of Nature knows that Nature unbalanced is the stuff of nightmares and only taken lightly by those too foolish, arrogant or greedy to know better.
To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven.
John Keats
Chapter Five
Hamish
It was already late in the afternoon as Hamish strode towards the cottage. The dying sun, caught in its last moments before disappearing beyond the woods, cast weirdly elongated shadows along the curves of the box hedging that fringed the path, and his own shadow took on a life peculiar, leaping alongside him in a grotesque dance that reminded Hamish of some crazier version of Peter Pan’s shadow, gone insane. If there was a slight urgency to his step it was due to the knowledge that the removal firm’s truck was due any minute now ...and he still had to clear a passage into the cottage for the removalists. He looked up at the deepening gloom of the sky. The light would fade to nothing shortly, and they’d all be carrying boxes and furniture in the dark if that truck didn’t arrive soon. It had taken longer than they’d estimated to empty the studio, and then the journey out of London had been agonisingly slow. He’d driven down separately, after giving the truck driver detailed directions, hoping to arrive with enough time to spare to open the cottage and clean sufficient space to dump his belongings, but now with the hold-ups, any clean-up would have to wait. First priority, he knew, was to find the side-door and get it open, and now, with a motley collection of unnamed keys clutched in one hand and a pair of sharp secateurs in the other, ready to do battle with the creeper, he was looking for the west entrance into the cottage. He had, according to Miss Kendal, missed it that day when he had first explored. She had expressed surprise that he shouldn’t have found this, as it had been part of a substantial addition to the cottage that her brother had had constructed not long before the outbreak of the Second World War.
As Hamish rounded the end of the hedge he saw what she had meant.
Jutting from the western wall of the cottage was the curved glass roof of a sizable conservatory. At the height of summer it would have been covered in the same form-hugging envelope of Virginia creeper as the rest of the cottage, but there were gaps, here and there, where the creeper must have had difficulty adhering to the glass, and now, so late in the year, many of the leaves had fallen to lie in untidy heaps around the outer walls. This still
left myriad strands of the creeper’s shoots and tendrils which engulfed the structure, blurring its elegant lines. The lack of foliage made it possible, at least, to find the doors, a set of double French doors facing what would have been a sunny courtyard, Hamish imagined, in times past, before the trees and shrubs to the south had grown so thick and tall. He kicked away piles of old fallen leaves and debris that had banked up against the doors, hacked enough of the vine from around the entrance to expose the doorway, then on the third attempt, succeeded in finding a key to fit the lock. Unlocked, it still wouldn’t budge, so, bracing a foot against one door, he forced the other open on hinges that noisily protested years of disuse and went inside to look around.
Flowers in the Morning Page 10
