A City of Strangers (6 page)

When Adrian was in the house Rosamund Eastlake usually left her room only go to the bathroom or lavatory. When he was away at work she quite often took it into her head to wander round the house. There was nothing secretive or furtive about this: She often left a little something—one of her tiny handkerchiefs, a pair of reading glasses—somewhere around to tell him she had been downstairs. He knew that when the house was empty she would go around it, remembering. Today, as she walked carefully downstairs, hands gripping the banisters, the memories lapped around in her mind.

She had come here as a young bride in 1947. She remembered how cold the winter had been, and how happy they both were. He had been wonderfully handsome, her Desmond. He was her second cousin, and she had fallen in love with his framed photograph, in army uniform, on her great-aunt Maud's sideboard. Everyone commented on what a good-looking couple they were—it was quite a joke between them, though Rosamund secretly took it seriously too, for she valued good looks. Sometimes she had looked at Desmond, maybe over the breakfast table or planting those three rose bushes in the front garden that had been so difficult to get hold of just after the war, and she had been unable to believe her luck. He had never let her guess that the wound he had received at Arnhem was not completely healed, and that it would in fact rob her of him after only nine years of marriage.

It was a sadness to her, then and now, that Adrian had not inherited the good looks of either of them. Perhaps if he had, and if he had been more outgoing, more involved in the big world, she would have . . . made more effort. Tried to get over what had happened to her. But he was a dear boy. She would not have him any other than he was. She felt keenly that there
was no way she could repay his wonderful devotion in all those years since . . . since she had retreated from life.

She poured water from the kettle into her cup. Instant coffee, Rosamund thought, was a plebeian drink, but it was convenient. She would hardly want to get the percolator out just for herself. She opened the biscuit tin with the silver wedding picture of the Queen and Duke on the lid, and got out three orange creams. They felt a little soft. On the slate by the door into the scullery she wrote “sweet biscuits.” There—that would tell Adrian she had been up and about. Cup and saucer in one hand, plate in the other, she started back upstairs.

At the turn of the stairs she paused. There was a little girl at the gate of The Hollies. Well, not such a
little
girl, and a decidedly dirty one. Obviously a child from the Estate. The Hollies being empty, except for the woman in the basement flat, one had to be careful. If the local children found a way in they would infest the place, ruin the fittings, and break the windows. She had never greatly liked Dr. Pickering, who had been brusque, almost dismissive, about her condition, but until it was sold it was his, and should be protected. Rosamund was very strong on property. Once back in her room she took a sip of her coffee, a bite of biscuit, then glided over the landing and into Adrian's bedroom, from where she could see the front garden of The Hollies.

She was invading no privacy by coming into this room. It had no impression of Adrian at all. It was the sitting room that bore—faintly—that: the collection of records, the books on Mahler and Strauss, the small collection of favorite poetry, the memoirs of cricketers.

She stood at the window, looking down. The garden of The Hollies she could see, and the lintel over the front door. The child was standing at the door—she could see the horrible purple skirt she had been wearing. Suddenly the skirt disappeared. Rosamund would have liked to go back to her coffee, but something impelled her to watch on. Had the child gone
into
the house? What should she do if so? What was she doing there anyway? Shouldn't she have been in school?

A minute or two later she was rewarded by a sight of that horrible skirt and then the child herself, who came out from under the porch and then ran down the path, emitting a raucous shout. She was gesturing to someone down the road. Rosamund turned her head, and coming along Wynton Lane she saw a little squad of people: a heavy, dirty man who looked as if he had slept in his clothes for the past week; a slatternly woman pushing a push-chair and shoving forward the toddler who belonged in it, but who was instead walking beside her; a teenage girl, deplorably dressed, making a precocious attempt at sexiness; and lastly a smaller girl, maybe just of school age, but still uncertain on her feet. . . . What a gang!

Suddenly it came to her. The Phelans! This must be the Phelans. With
feelings of dread mixed with excitement she watched their progress down the road. Periodically the man bellowed something or other to one of his children. Closer to, she saw that he was unshaven, and when he got to the gate she saw—her heart seemed to jump into her mouth—that he had a key in his hands. Fascinated, she watched as the family, shouting and laughing, came into the garden. Feeling greatly daring she pushed open the window a fraction. The male Phelan led the way, and as they all disappeared from view she heard, unmistakably, the sound of a key being inserted into a lock, of a door opening.

Rosamund Eastlake was appalled—appalled, and yet still oddly excited, which was something she could not account for. She went back to her room and sank down into her chair feeling quite exhausted. As she sipped her cooling coffee she wondered what she should do. The Phelans were
viewing
the house, viewing The Hollies. She could phone Adrian at work, but she knew (without his ever having been so brutal as to have said so), that he hated her to do that. He was regarded at the Social Security Office as something of a mother's boy, a muff, and her ringing only confirmed that. And, of course, he would be
very
upset, and perhaps needlessly.

It came suddenly into her mind that for once she was being faced with the need to do something—not do something to pass the time, but do something in response to an outside stimulus. It was almost . . . pleasant. A nice change.

If she couldn't ring Adrian, whom could she ring? Someone else from the houses on Wynton Lane. She had an extension phone in her bedroom—for emergencies, for if she was taken ill, though she never
was
ill, not like that. The newer people she knew nothing of, having at most seen them from the window. Only Daphne Bridewell and Algy Cartwright had been there in the days before she . . . withdrew from life. Daphne she could not ring: They had been friends in the old days, and after all this time it would be impossible to talk to her naturally. But Algy Cartwright she had never been close to, though she and Desmond had always been on perfectly good terms with him and his wife. Hadn't Adrian told her that his wife had died recently? Or maybe six months or so ago? Should she begin by offering her condolences, she wondered? No—it would look odd, after all this time. And the situation called for no nonsense, no dallyings and explanations; it demanded immediate action. She pulled the telephone directory toward her, found his number, and dialed.

“Sleate 768259.”

“Mr. Cartwright? This is Rosamund Eastlake.”

“Good Lord! . . . Sorry, Mrs. Eastlake. I didn't mean to sound rude. You took me by surprise.”

Algy's tone had not been so much surprise as bordering on stupefaction, as
if he had been rung up by a figure from a fairy tale, or by some television personality.

“Oh, I quite understand. I haven't been very . . . sociable these last few years. Mr. Cartwright, have you seen who has just gone into The Hollies?”

“No, I haven't been . . . well, to tell the truth, I've been watching the telly.”

“It's—I'm sure of it—that terrible family from the Estate. The Phelans. The family everyone's afraid of.”

“Do you mean they're in the garden? Or breaking in?”

“No. That's what I thought at first, but it's worse than that. There was a young girl came first: She went to the front door, then disappeared for a bit, and I thought she must have got in somehow. But then all the others came along, and the man had a key! He let them all in!”

“Good Lord!” said Mr. Cartwright again. “You mean they've been to the Estate Agents and . . . Oh!”

“What?”

“I've just remembered something. I was in the Belfield Arms the other night . . . it's somewhere to go of an evening . . . and some chaps at the next table were laughing about Jack Phelan. They said he'd bought drinks all round the other night at the Railway King. Reckoned he'd had a win on the pools.”

“Oh, my God! Then it's not just some cruel prank. I was clinging to the idea that it might be. I'm just thinking of what Adrian will feel—how awful it will be for
him.”

“For all of us, if what I hear about the Phelans is true.”

“Then
do
something, Mr. Cartwright. I'm just a poor invalid—there's nothing much I can do, confined to my room here. I'm going to leave it in your hands.”

“But what—?”

“
Do
something, Algy!”

When Algy Cartwright put down the phone he felt a little spurt of excitement not unlike that experienced earlier by Mrs. Eastlake. He felt no animus against people on the Estate. In his time he had chased children from there out of his garden, cuffed ones he'd caught stealing apples from his trees. He had a typical Yorkshire bluntness, and it could shade off (as with most Yorkshiremen) into thoughtless cruelty. But there was little real harm in him, and little snobbery. The Phelans, he knew, were something different. He had
seen them as he walked through the Estate to get his paper, and, of course, there had never been any lack of talk about them. From all he'd heard they were quite terrible. And then again, this was something to do: an activity, a purpose.

He heard a noise from the back, and went through his kitchen to open cautiously the back door. Yes, they were there! There were children next door, running and shouting in the back garden of The Hollies. To provide a pretext he took the key to his garden shed from its hook by the door and pottered down the path.

“Oy, oy! The natives are taking notice!”

It was said softly, but it was the softness of someone who was mainly used to talking at the top of his voice. So Jack Phelan was out there and had seen through his pretext. Algy Cartwright was quite short, and could not see over the hedge. Well, there was no going back now. Proudly he fetched a bag of potting compost from his shed and retreated to his kitchen.

He left the back door open, though, and fragments of talk wafted through to him as he stood there feeling—an odd combination—both important yet ridiculous. “Garage, see,” he heard Phelan say. “Stabling for the Merc.” The children were obviously taken with the trees and began to climb them. “Come down, you little buggers,” shouted their father. “They're not ours yet.”

When the voices faded and he heard the sound of a door banging, Algy Cartwright retreated into his house. Like Rosamund Eastlake, he considered where would be best to observe the front from. He went upstairs to the cold bedroom which once they had called the guest bedroom—mainly used by Marjorie's mother on her annual and unwelcome visits in days long gone by. He stood there by the window, shivering slightly, and looking through the lace curtains. There were no passersby in Wynton Lane, but up in the Estate there were the usual comings and goings: women with shopping bags, the odd unemployed man or shift-worker returning from the newsagent's with the
Sun
or the
Mirror.
No sound from The Hollies. Then suddenly the front door opened and out they came.

This was the first time he had seen them. First there was a girl in her teens, heavily made up, in unsuitably high-heeled shoes and a light dress of shoddy material that seemed to be the only thing she had on. “Nymphet,” said Algy Cartwright to himself—it was a word he had only learned in late middle-age, but he had found it very useful since then. Then came a pushchair with a child in it, maneuvered down the steps by the mother without help from either daughter or husband. Algy thought at first she was pregnant again, but he decided on getting a better view that she was merely overweight—a heavy, slatternly woman with straight, unwashed hair and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. Behind her two girls, one about thirteen, the
other about five, both of them darting here and there round the front garden, giggling and shouting, breaking branches off the shrubs and trampling late-flowering plants. Bringing up the rear was father. Algy knew him all too well, had often seen him around in the area—always dirty, often shouting, usually with an expanse of belly showing through missing shirt-buttons.

As they got to the front gate and made their raucous, disorganized way through it, Jack Phelan, in a lazy, derisive gesture, turned in the direction of Algy Cartwright's house and made an unmistakable V-sign. Algy retreated hurriedly from the window.