One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  “Going to take one of those dolls home for my little grand-niece,” the dying grocer said as they surveyed the rows of stalls. It was beginning to snow again, big wet flakes of early snow that melted on contact with tarmac and skin. It had snowed the day before, and now the streets were grim with gray slush. The air was hostile with a damp kind of cold, and the grocer decided to buy a fur hat with earflaps, haggling with the stallholder over the price. Martin wondered what the point of bargaining was when you were so near to death. He was beginning to wonder if the grocer really was dying or if he had simply made the claim in order to get attention.

  Martin managed to give him the slip while he was entrenched in the negotiations over his hat. The man was ruining the Magic of Russia for Martin, that very morning he had trailed on Martin’s heels through the Hermitage, complaining all the way about the excesses of the decor (but surely that was the point) and imag-ining what “god-awful pig swill” they would be served up for supper. Even the Rembrandts didn’t shut him up. “Miserable old bugger, wasn’t he?” he said, contemplating a self-portrait of the artist. Martin knew it could be only a temporary respite, no doubt the minute he had his new hat on his head, the grocer would ferret him out from among the souvenir stalls and spend the rest of the afternoon complaining about being taken to the cleaners by the hat seller, a scrawny man who looked as if he were going to beat the grocer in the race to scramble through the door to the next world.

  Martin intended to buy a set of dolls for his mother, he knew they would sit, dusted but neglected, on a shelf among her other cheap knickknacks, the porcelain “figurines,” the dolls in national costume, the little cross-stitched pictures. She took no pleasure in anything he bought her, but if he didn’t buy her something she would complain that he never thought about her (her logic was indefatigable). If someone had given Martin a piece of rock wrapped in paper, he would have been grateful because they had gone to the trouble of finding the rock and wrapping it in the paper, just for him.

  He would buy her something ordinary, he decided, because she deserved nothing better than ordinary—a little peasant set, aprons and head scarves, he was holding one in his hand, feeling its smoothness, its fertility-symbol shape, thinking about his mother, when the girl at the stall said, “Is very nice.”

  “Yes,” he said. He didn’t think it was nice at all. He tried not to look at the girl because she was so pretty. She was wearing finger-less woolen gloves and a scarf wrapped around her blond hair. She came out from behind the stall and started picking up different dolls, opening them up, cracking them like eggs, setting them out. “This one beautiful, this one also. Here this doll special, very good artist. Scenes from Pushkin, Pushkin famous Russian writer. You know him?” It was such a soft sell that it would have seemed discourteous to resist, and in the end, after perhaps more contemplation than either the task or the dolls merited, he bought an expensive fifteen-doll set. They were attractive things, their fat-bellied stomachs painted with “winter scenes” from Pushkin. Works of art, really, too good for his mother, and he decided he would keep them for himself.

  “Very beautiful,” he said to the girl.

  “No dollars?” she queried sadly when he handed over his fist-fuls of rubles.

  She was wearing ankle boots with a high heel and an old-fashioned, serviceable kind of coat. All the girls in St. Petersburg wore high-heeled boots, picking their way dexterously through the icy slush while Martin found himself slipping and sliding like a slapstick comedian.

  “You want coffee?” she asked unexpectedly, confounding him with the question. He thought she was going to produce a flask from somewhere, but she shouted something harsh at the man selling old Red Army insignia at the next stall, and he shouted something equally harsh back, and then she picked up her hand-bag and set off, swinging her bag and beckoning to Martin as if he were a child.

  They didn’t have coffee. They had a bowl of borscht, followed by hot chocolate, thick and sweet, served in tall mugs, alongside some kind of custard pastry. She ordered it and wouldn’t let him pay, waving her hand at the thin plastic carrier bag that contained his newspaper-wrapped dolls, snugly inside of one another now, so he wondered if this was his reward for having forked out way over the odds for his purchase. Maybe this was how business was transacted in Russia, maybe if you gave someone enough money to live off for a week they took you into warm, steamy cafés and blew their cigarette smoke all over you. On holiday in Crete once (“Discover the Ancient Wonders of”), he found that every time he bought something in a shop, the shopkeeper insisted on giving him something else for free, as if they wanted to soften the harsh edges of capitalism. These gifts usually took the form of a crocheted doily so that Martin had quite a pile of them in his suit-case by the time he returned home. He gave them to an Oxfam shop.

  “Irina,” she said, sticking out her hand and shaking his. When she unwrapped her scarf, her hair fell down her back.

  “Martin,” Martin said.

  “Marty,” she said, smiling at him. He didn’t correct her mistake. No one had ever called him “Marty” before. He liked the way “Marty” seemed a more entertaining man than he knew himself to be.

  He tried to explain to Irina that he was a writer, but he couldn’t tell whether she understood him or not. “Dostoyevsky,” he said, “Pushkin.”

  “Idyot!” she exclaimed, her pretty doll face suddenly animated. “Here is Idyot.” It was only later that he realized the café they were in was called the Idiot.

  He wanted to impress her a little with his success. He never talked about his professional good fortune with anyone. Melanie, his agent, thought it was never good enough and he could do better, the few friends he had weren’t in the least successful and he didn’t want them to think he was boasting in any way, his mother was indifferent and his brother was jealous, so he had found it best to keep his small triumphs to himself. But he would have liked Irina to know that he was a person of a little consequence in his native country (“His sales build with every book”), but she just smiled and licked the crumbs of pastry from her fingers. “Sure,” she said.

  When she had finished eating, she stood up suddenly and, without looking at her watch, said, “I go.” She drained her cup while shrugging into her coat, there was a kind of greed in the gesture that Martin admired.

  “Tonight?” she said, as if they had already made an arrange-ment. “Caviar Bar in Grand Hotel, seven o’clock. Okay, Marty?”

  “Yes, okay,” Martin said hastily because she was already dashing for the door, raising her hand in farewell without looking back.

  When he left the café he found it was snowing thickly. It seemed very romantic, the snow, the girl with blond hair wrapped in a scarf, like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago.

  He stared at his reflection in the slightly foxed mirror of the Four Clans’ bathroom. Maybe he felt so nauseous because he was starving, he couldn’t remember when he last had anything proper to eat. A shiver went through his body, and the next moment he was on his knees, holding on to the toilet bowl, being violently sick. He flushed the toilet, and as he stared into the vortex of vomit swirling with some nasty blue chemical that must be in the cistern, he was hit by a sudden thought:

  Robbed? Of course!

  He hurried out of the bathroom and searched for his wallet in his jacket pocket. Gone. He sighed heavily at the thought of all those tedious phone calls he was going to have to make to his bank and credit card companies. His driver’s license and a hundred pounds in cash had also been in the wallet, and then—nightmare—he remembered the little lilac Memory Stick, the sliver of plastic that contained Death on the Black Isle. Gone. A cold wave of panic passed through his body, followed by a hot one of relief— the novel was backed up on a CD in his “office.” Martin had saved Paul Bradley’s life, and in return he had stolen from him. Martin was so hurt by this betrayal that he actually felt tears pricking his eyes.

  In the fug of bacon and tartan in the reception area, there was a se
nse of Marie Celeste-like abandonment. He rang the brass bell, and after a long wait, a youth dressed in a kitchen-staff uni-form appeared. With fantastic sluggishness he ran his finger down the register and confirmed that Paul Bradley had checked out.

  “Nothing to pay,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “You’re free to go,” he said as if he were letting Martin out of jail.

  Martin didn’t mention to the boy that he had been robbed, he didn’t seem like someone who would care. And why should he? Martin couldn’t help feeling that somehow he had got what he deserved.

  22

  Gloria woke early and padded quietly downstairs as if there were someone else in the house whom she might wake, although she was wonderfully alone. When Graham was here the house crashed and boomed with noise, even when he was still asleep in bed. Without him, the day fell into its own quiet pattern, soft col-ors and slants of light that Gloria never saw otherwise.

  She felt the lamblike nub of the oatmealy Berber stair-carpet between her bare toes and the smooth glide of the red Oregon pine of the banister beneath her palm. She spared a thought for the hundred and fifty years or so of polishing that had gone into creating this satin, some by her own hand, not with Mr. Sheen but with a hard block of beeswax. Gloria had schooled herself to appreciate small joys, of which there were many in the house, a house that would be standing long after Gloria herself was in the ground.

  Every day was a gift, she told herself, that was why it was called “the present.” They were going to lose this house. It would be dragged into the whole sorry mess Graham had created, it would come under the Proceeds of Crime Act (she had been reading up about it online) and be taken and sold to make some reparation for all Graham had done over the years. A house of cards, that’s what he had created, an illusion. His death or the Fraud Unit, whichever came soonest, would reveal everything, throw open the curtains and the shutters and let the light in on every filthy corner.

  Gloria opened the French windows in the living room and stood for a few minutes, breathing in the early morning air, watching a sparrow hopping delicately along the fence. An ounce of brown feather and black bib. It would be nice to think that God’s eye was on it, but failing that, both Gloria and the CCTV cameras would notice its fall. A magpie came swooping and chattering, and Gloria chased it off.

  The house in the Grange (“Providence,” named long before Gloria and Graham took ownership of it) had nothing in common with the jerry-built, overpriced rubbish that had made Graham rich. The houses Graham built had badly hung cabinet doors, imitation-stone cement fireplaces, and cheap contract carpeting. They were houses that smelled as if they were made from plastics and chemicals. Last year, Graham had talked about moving from their house in the Grange, he said they were “too rich” for it and he “had an eye” on an estate up north, acres of land where he could fish for trout and surprise unsuspecting birds by shooting them from the sky. Over the years, the Grange house had molded itself comfortably around Gloria, and it seemed cruel suddenly to shuck it off in favor of some cavernous pile in the middle of nowhere.

  Gloria said she didn’t see how you could be too rich. If you were too rich, you could just give some of your money away until you were just rich. Or give it all away and be poor. And they weren’t really rich anyway, it had all been just smoke and mirrors, their lives predicated on dirty money.

  She moved into the kitchen and made the first pot of coffee of the day, inhaling the aroma of the beans before putting them in the grinder. The Italian marble tiles on the kitchen floor were cold and inert, it was like walking on tombstones. They were incredi-bly expensive, but Graham had acquired them incredibly cheaply (naturally). Last year the house had been renovated, using the more qualified members of Graham’s workforce. Among other things, they had knocked through and installed a vast American kitchen. “Nothing’s too good for my wife,” Graham said expan-sively to his architect. “How about it, Gloria—a larder fridge, a Gaggenau hob, one of the ones with an integral deep-fat fryer?” So she said she would like a pink sink because she’d seen one on a home show program on television, and Graham said, “Pink sink? Over my dead body.” So there you go.

  Gloria liked to visit any new Hatter Homes development. The farther afield the estates, the more of an outing these visits were, she might pack a picnic or find out where the local tearooms were. She liked to look round the show home, listen to the selling shtick (“This is a lovely room, a real family room”). Graham never knew about these little excursions.

  Occasionally, Gloria posed as a prospective buyer—a wild-eyed di-vorcée or a recently bereaved widow who was “downsizing” into a husband-free apartment. On other occasions, she was looking at “family homes” on behalf of her daughter or a “starter home” for a son working abroad. It was harmless and it gave her the opportunity to open and close the cupboards and peer into the tiny en suites, only big enough for a malnourished person. Everything was built to the tightest specifications, as little garden as possible, the smallest bath-room—it was as if a very mean person had decided to build houses.

  Before Easter, she had driven over to a development of houses in Fife. The builders had finally moved out, and the last of the res-idents were moving in, although there was still a show home and a sales-office Portakabin on site, and the flag still flew above their heads, emblazoned with HATTER HOMES—REAL HOMES FOR REAL PEOPLE. A flag of convenience.

  She had felt particularly bad for the new householders because the estate was built on a landfill dump, and the gardens had been created out of a few inches of topsoil.

  (“But surely that’s not legal?” she said to Graham.

  “Caveat emptor, Gloria,” Graham said. “It’s the only Latin I’ve ever needed to know.”)

  Maggie Louden had been in the sales Portakabin and had regarded her with alarm. “Mrs. Hatter? Can I help you?” She looked different out of her cocktail clothes, more frumpish and decidedly less festive.

  “Just looking,” Gloria replied, feigning nonchalance. “I like to keep an eye on things.” But her little day out was spoiled. She had been intending to pose as the mistress of a rich man who was planning to set her up in a house. The irony of the situation was not lost on her now.

  Gloria had gone back secretly, at night, like a terrorist, and left a nice pot plant on every doorstep. It hardly made up for a gar-den, but it was something.

  Gloria sometimes wondered if Graham was building homes for families because he found his own family so unsatisfactory. They had been to see a production of The Master Builder at the Lyceum—Hatter Homes was some kind of sponsor—and Gloria couldn’t help but make comparisons. She had wondered then if Graham would fall from a spire one day, metaphorically or other-wise. And he had. So there you go.

  The coffeemaker hissed and spat and finally came to its usual fu-rious climax. Gloria poured her coffee and carried it through to the peach-themed living room and settled herself on the couch. She breakfasted on the remains of a packet of chocolate digestives. When Graham was here, they always ate at the kitchen table, he liked something cooked—scrambled eggs, an Arbroath smokie, bacon, sausages, even kidneys. While they ate they listened to Good Morning, Scotland on the radio, ceaseless disembodied chatter about politics and disasters that Graham considered important and necessary, yet it made no difference in their lives whatsoever. There was more to be gained from watching a pair of blue tits pecking away at a bird feeder full of peanuts than from cursing the Scottish Parliament over your porridge.

  She turned the dial on the radio to Terry Wogan. Wogan was a Good Thing. The phone rang. The phone had been ringing at reg-ular intervals since Gloria had woken at five. She had already phoned the hospital to ascertain Graham’s unchanged condition, and she really wasn’t interested in speaking to all the people who wanted to know why Graham had disappeared off the face of the planet in the middle of the working day and wasn’t answering his mobile. She let them talk to the answering machine, it was less taxing than lying.


  While she stood in the hallway, listening to the latest message (“Graham, you old bugger, where are you? I thought we were playing golf today”), the morning newspapers clattered through the letter box.

  What kind of person bites the head off a kitten? What kind of person walks into the back garden of a complete stranger, picks up a three-week-old kitten, and bites its head off ? And doesn’t get pros-ecuted! Gloria dropped the newspaper to the floor in disgust.

  What would be the correct punishment for a person (a man, naturally) who bites the head off a three-week-old kitten? Death, obviously, but surely not a swift and painless one? That would be like an undeserved gift. Gloria believed in the punishment fitting the crime, eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. Heads for heads. How would you go about biting a person’s head off? Unless you could somehow employ a shark or a crocodile to do the job for you, Gloria supposed, you would have to settle for simple decapitation.

  The man who bit the head off the kitten was, according to the newspaper, high on drugs. That was not an excuse! Gloria had once smoked a joint during her brief period at university (but more from politeness than anything) and had imbibed a consider-able quantity of alcohol in her time, but she was sure that she could have consumed any amount of illegal substances and not felt the urge to bite the head off an innocent household pet. A little basket of kittens—Gloria imagined long-haired tabbies with ribbons round their necks, like something you would find on an old-fashioned chocolate box. Tiny, helpless. Innocent. Did chocolate boxes still have those pictures? She had bought a lovely painting on eBay, two kittens, basket, balls of wool, ribbons—the works— but she still hadn’t found the right place to hang it. And, of course, Graham said it was “twee,” being more of an about-to-be-murdered-stag connoisseur himself.