Hartsend (13 page)

You could have insisted on seeing her home at New Year.

He'd been willing but Dr MacKinnon had overruled.

You could have insisted on taking back the boots.

True.

Have you ever asked her how she is? Have you offered her anything?

She knew he was concerned. She knew where he lived. And she was a private person.

When someone knocked loudly at the back door, he wondered wildly whether it might be her. He didn't feel like answering, but Mother never went to the door at this hour, despite the fact that the security light illuminated everything with a blaze worthy of a concentration camp.

Close to, the Flaherty boy was taller than Duncan remembered, able to look him straight in the eye, which he now did, with a look entirely devoid of … of what, exactly? Deference was hardly the right word. Respect? He was wearing a knitted hat pulled low, almost down to his eyebrows. His eyes were so intensely blue it crossed Duncan's mind he might be wearing coloured contact lenses. The young did such things.

‘‘Mum's no' well. But if she's better by Friday, she says she'll come then. If you want her.''

‘‘Mrs Flaherty.''

The boy nodded.

‘‘Wait here a moment.'' Duncan indicated the general area of the porch. He closed the door into the kitchen proper, dismissing the impulse to slide the sneck over as uncharitable.

There was nothing on the calendar, so he assumed that the Friday morning would be suitable as usual. Friday was a big day. Sheet washing and ironing. Mrs Flaherty was of course restricted to the downstairs of the house. Mother managed her own bed linen but he stripped his bed and carried everything down to the utility room.

When he came back to the porch, the boy was pressing the scented geranium leaves and sniffing his fingers.

‘‘Friday would be suitable,'' Duncan said. ‘‘Please give Mrs Flaherty our best wishes for a quick recovery.''

The boy stuck his hands in his coat pockets and sauntered off. Not kicking at the gravel, thankfully. Duncan watched him all the way to the side gate and out into the street. He looked at the geranium leaves. An odd gesture for a barbarian, he thought.

Better.
He tried the word aloud, the way the boy had said it, with the hideous glottal stop. It was hard to imagine him as an artistic soul. Lacking any academic qualifications, he was nevertheless, according to Mrs Flaherty, so talented that he'd been accepted into the School of Art on the strength of his portfolio alone.

The last inch of the latté was cold. Duncan picked up the Herald, begun that morning at breakfast, and tried to summon some interest in the Blogs. He wondered whether the boy could even write in proper sentences.

He glanced at the mantel clock. Lesley would be asleep. She would be having a late meal. She would be … any number of things, and possibly more than one at once, but whatever these might be, he knew for a certainty that, following her custom of the last several days, she would not pick up the phone.

Leave a message. Ask her to phone back.

Mrs Fleming was right. She was shaking her head at him, the bald baby on her lap, both laughing at him from the chair opposite.

Why do you want to phone her, Duncan?

I'm worried about her.

That's good. Nothing wrong with that.

And Mrs Flaherty, of course. I'm not indifferent to her problems.

Then what's stopping you? For all you know, Lesley could be sitting there in that big empty house, looking out at the unkempt garden and the bare branches of her willow trees, wishing somebody would phone her. Besides, you can ask if she got the boots. Your mother would appreciate you asking.

There was that. And he might mention the gentleman friend.

The bald baby frowned and Mrs Fleming shook her head.

He was stunned when Lesley's live voice answered.

‘‘Yes, ah … Duncan here,'' he said.

‘‘Hello, Duncan. Is something wrong?''

‘‘No. Well, not exactly. I was thinking … Mrs Flaherty.''

‘‘Yes?''

‘‘Her son … came by just now. Apparently she's … ill.''

‘‘What happened?''

‘‘Well, I don't think anything happened exactly. He said she's not well. I thought it was perhaps a cold. Bad time of year for colds.'' He picked up his pencil and began doodling in the newspaper margin. ‘‘Just that you mentioned her earlier. Decent person, Mrs Flaherty. Wouldn't like to think she was neglecting herself. Needing the doctor in and not calling him, that sort of thing.''

‘‘Well, she has two daughters,'' Lesley said, ‘‘They both live locally. I expect they're looking in on her.''

‘‘Right. Anyway. Just in case you hadn't heard. Sorry to bother you at this hour.''

‘‘No, it's all right. I'm glad you phoned. You know he's called Ryan, don't you? Not Darien.''

‘‘Of course. Well. You know where I am. Anytime.''

‘‘Thank you, Duncan. I appreciate that very much.''

‘‘Right.''

He put the phone down and sat back in the chair. There was no sound from upstairs. Of course Mrs Flaherty had daughters. They'd be doing all that was necessary. Damn, he thought, he'd forgotten to mention the boots. She was glad he'd phoned. He allowed himself a smile. He was glad too. No harm had been done. She'd appreciated his offer of help. He turned to see if Mrs Fleming and the baby approved, but they had gone.

Lesley rose early, meaning to begin sorting clothes from her mother's drawers. Some would go to Oxfam, and some into the recycle bins behind the Co-operative store. She took a roll of black bin liners into the front bedroom and emptied the contents of the bottom drawer onto the bed.

Two neatly folded pink bed jackets wrapped in tissue paper. Scarves in their original cellophane packets, never worn, Fair Isle gloves ditto. Two knitted tea pot cosies with felt flowers on the sides, red with green, and green with red. A box of gents' tartan handkerchiefs. The next drawer up was full of tights and socks. Long winter socks, grey and darned at the heels in a lighter shade, folded in pairs.

She had a vague memory of these from her childhood, on her mother's feet, worn inside rubber boots when she brought in coal from the bunker or scraped snow from the steps. Everyone had identical rubber boots then. And every winter brought snow. It occurred to her for the first time that these socks might originally have been her late father's.

It was barely seven o'clock. Outside the sky was dark blue, just beginning to grow paler where the sun would eventually rise above the hills.

At the back gate she turned to look at the house. She'd left some lights on to fool the burglars. Anyone passing might assume that a cheerful breakfast was going on behind the partly drawn curtains. Next door, the Robertson's house was in darkness. She stared at the windows upstairs, but there was no sign of Mrs Robertson, no twitch of a curtain.

For the first several minutes she felt good. She had acted on impulse, made an instant decision, and done just what she felt like doing, with no one to stop her. Cars were moving on the motorway, but there were few people about. A handful waiting in the bus shelter. A few walking their dogs. But by the time she reached the War Memorial, she was beginning to feel conspicuous, walking with no purpose, and no direction. Blessed are the early morning dog walkers, for they do not look ridiculous. Not that she was fond of dogs. A cat would be easier, but she actively disliked cats: their unreasonable behaviour, their torturing of small mammals and birds, their indolence. Besides, the spinster with the cat was such a cliché.

She passed the wooden hut where once upon a time she had been a cheerful Brownie. All those happy hours ironing a yellow scarf, polishing a leather belt and purse. And the games, the singing, the making of scrapbooks under the benevolent smile of Brown Owl, whose black hair was so shiny, whose pink-tipped fingers had curved elegantly like some oriental dancer's. How full of good intentions she had been; a small, round Gnome in plaits with brown ribbons, fully determined, as their particular rhyme put it, to help mother in the home. And how wonderfully helpful she had continued to be, through High School, and college, on and on and on …

Enough. She made a right turn into a well-lit street that would take her back in the direction of home. Duncan clearly thought she should still be doing helpful things. She was surprised by his concern for Mrs Flaherty. To be completely honest, she was a little surprised that Mrs Flaherty had confided in him. Although of course Duncan was the kind of person in whom one might confidently confide. Straight as a ramrod, always the perfect gentleman. Just as well Mrs Flaherty wasn't the sort of woman to take advantage of him. Dear Duncan. She had known him all her life, but she hardly knew him at all. She had exchanged more words with him in the last two weeks than in the last ten years.

‘‘Thank you so much for coming, Harriet,'' Mrs Robertson said, ‘‘June had such a sore throat on Monday I just knew she wouldn't be well enough to come this morning, and Letty's still at her Auntie's …''

Harriet smiled back. She hadn't wanted to come, but it was better than having to start revising for prelims.

‘‘… going to send a manager over, but I just thought, with it still being the holidays, we could open up if you could be here for a couple of hours …''

Mrs Robertson's eyes, enormous behind her glasses, were deeply disturbing. They reminded Harriet of a picture of the Cheshire Cat in
Alice In Wonderland
. Her hair was just as worrying. She had a girlish deep fringe, and her back hair was combed in a straight line from crown to nape where it turned under abruptly, as if she'd set it on tight curlers.

‘‘What would you like me to do first, Mrs Robertson?''

‘‘Would you like to refresh the window, dear? I feel I must vacuum this awful carpet before I do anything else. And of course we should take the decorations down.''

The beige carpet, 100 percent nylon and resistant to the removal of stains, was the bane of Mrs Robertson's life, but no-one else was allowed to do battle with it. Refreshing the window was less prestigious, but still a mark of approval. Letty, eager to please but ‘‘not quite all there'', was never allowed to ‘‘refresh'' the window, which involved taking everything off the three glass shelves, wiping them and choosing some new arrangement of delicate objects. These generally included various china vases with floral designs, ashtrays, jam dishes, condiment sets and crystal milk and sugars. On the top shelf, at eye height for anyone passing by, stood three very large coffee pots. They were in perfect condition, but bore no famous maker's mark on their bottoms. As June said, they were too large to be useful. No-one made coffee in china pots for eight people any more. She had tried putting flowers in them, but they remained obstinately pot-like, and unsold.

Nevertheless like everything else in the shop, they had to be kept clean. ‘‘We're not a second-hand shop,'' June regularly reminded them. ‘‘We are a Charity Shop.''

It was an important distinction. And to support it, there were always brand new goods for sale, such as handbags in imitation leather, and fridge magnets in the shape of bright coloured abstract cats or dogs; new bracelets for £4.99 each; ‘‘magic'' gloves, where one size fitted all; Scottie dog key rings made in China.

In the back room, Harriet dug out the box for the Christmas decorations. The three sided mesh cage against the back wall was piled high with bulging black plastic bags, waiting to be emptied out onto the table. This task made everyone nervous. No-one liked opening bags if there was no label to say who had donated them. ‘‘Do we look like the kind of shop that would take stained goods?'' was the regular pained cry on discovering an offending object.

‘‘Mmm. The Dust Heaps. Very Dickensian,'' her father had commented, when she'd described her first day.

‘‘Meaning?''

‘‘People sometimes throw out valuable things by mistake.''

‘‘Not very often,'' Harriet said. All the antique programmes on TV had made people much more aware, according to June. Now and again something would be found, like a Delft vase, or a piece of gold jewellery, or brooches that turned out to have real stones, but all such things went to auction. The brooch Ryan Flaherty had stolen was pretty, but not real silver. Which didn't mean it wasn't theft.

She began to clear the shelves, disentangling the gold tinsel and fairy lights from the vases. Behind her the vacuum cleaner roared. June made cups of tea first, but Mrs Robertson had to clean. How old was she? Her trousers, always navy or dark grey, came just short of her ankles. She wore pale flesh-coloured nylons. Her shoes, (Harriet had described them to her mother as ‘‘old lady shoes'') had low heels, navy when she wore navy trousers, black for the grey ones.

Christmas was long gone. The prelims would begin a few days after school began. Tonight she'd make a timetable. Making a timetable was a good start. She carried the cardboard box into the backroom and half filled the red bucket with hot water.

The electronic door alarm did its loud ‘‘Peep poop'' noise as a customer came in. It was the man they'd given a lift to, the thin tall man with the sad eyes. ‘‘Poor Duncan,'' her father called him. He had two large plastic bags in his hands, which he put down carefully on the counter before removing his cap. Mrs Robertson switched off the vacuum cleaner and went over.

‘‘Just some oddments,'' he said in a gruff voice. ‘‘And some gloves. Leather. Hardly used.''

Harriet picket up the bucket and cleaning rags and went through.

Mrs Robertson trilled, ‘‘Oh, thank you so much. We're always in need of new items after Christmas.''

‘‘Why ‘Poor'?'' she'd asked her father.

‘‘Not financially poor. He lives with his mother in that huge house near the woods, the one with the turrets. I called in not long after we came. He made me a cup of very decent coffee, and we sat out on the terrace. Very pleasant it was, watching woodpeckers on the feeders. He's terribly keen on birds. Then his mother appeared and he shrank into his chair,'' her father mimicked the action, drawing his shoulders together. ‘‘It made me think of those plastic things you and Kerr used to put in the oven.''