Pleasure and a Calling (9 page)

We went inside for tea and sandwiches. There was a small gateau from the bakery and she had put out napkins and silver cutlery. Over my teacup I glanced at the windows of the house across the street where the Damatos used to live, and I remembered the kitchen there with its cakes cooling on the wire rack. Aunt Lillian eyed me, and I said she looked well and complimented her on the new wallpaper. She went along with my new-learned charm but her wariness spoke sharply when I asked after cousin Isobel, of whom she said nothing more than that she had married an army officer and was living abroad. She wiped a smear of cream from the corner of her mouth, laid her fork on the plate and reached for her cigarettes. The fork sat gleaming in the soft light. I looked from it to Aunt Lillian. Inevitably it called to mind that dramatic finale at school, Marrineau roaring with shock, staggering backwards, my breakfast fork embedded in his cheek, blood dripping from the handle. It was a breathtaking sight. Yes, a pity it had to happen, of course. But what else could
I do? What else must a boy so unexpectedly cornered do if not
fight
his corner?

I felt my aunt seeing into my thoughts. When I went upstairs to the bathroom, she followed and pretended to be busying herself on the landing. I admit I would have liked to have a look around. I had wondered what had become of my school chest. Was it still in the loft, filled with my treasures – the letters and cards sent to my schoolmates, my jaundiced scribblings, Mr Stamp’s rubber-band ball, the willow-pattern spoon? There was still an hour to kill before the taxi arrived to take me back to the station (my aunt was taking no chances), but my mind, as ever, idled with thoughts of opportunity. Perhaps she would have a heart attack, or be called away to a local emergency. Or I could pretend to take a train, book in at a B&B and (somehow) steal back into the house the next day while she was at a meeting of her neighbourhood widows’ coven, or – what the hell – just beat her to death right now with the barometer at the bottom of the stairs, which once hung in an alcove of my mother and father’s front room before all this started. I did nothing of the kind, of course. The fact was I had bigger fish to fry now. If anything, I wanted my aunt to see that she was right – that I
was
my own man, and had shed what traces of juvenile madness she might think me still capable of.

And yet, of course, the past was all that remained between us. Back at the table, she steered the conversation to my mother. The day she died, my aunt said, they’d had to physically drag me out from under the Victorian day bed in Grandma Browne’s parlour. I wasn’t crying. Just mute and defiant. My aunt paused with a frown, as if inviting me to explain my behaviour all those years ago. But no; it seemed she wanted to clear up whatever ‘misunderstandings’ I might have.

‘Misunderstandings?’

‘Your father and me.’

I took a sip of tea and said grandly that that wouldn’t be necessary.

She gave me a vexed look, and said my mother (her dear sister, as she reminded me) had been ill for some years. Since I’d been born, in fact.

‘Do you remember Riley?’ she asked.

‘The cat?’

She opened her bag and handed me a photograph she had clearly unearthed for this occasion. It was a picture of my mother as a surprisingly young woman holding a cat. It was a close-up but you could see signs of a falling coastal path and the sea below. I had seen the picture before, but now it reminded me of how little I remembered my mother’s face – that it was her closeness I always sought to bring back when I visited her memory. More shocking, though, was that the person in the photograph resembled, more than anything, a slightly finer version of myself in a wig and make-up.

‘The resemblance is so exact. You can see it now. Do you understand? Afterwards your father could barely look at you.’

Taken aback at first, now I almost laughed. What – because I reminded him of his dear dead wife? Because I was somehow the cause of my mother’s illness (I loved the way she slipped
that
in). How foolish I had been all these years, thinking that the reason he couldn’t look at me was that he was too busy looking at Aunt Lillian! Ha. I should have seen that coming.

I wondered afterwards whether my aunt had some sort of illness herself; that this attempt to get my father off the hook, and thereby herself, was part of some final spiritual cleansing. She would get no shrift from me; not because I didn’t accept her
version of events but because in fact I
had
thrown off the adolescent burden of wondering why some things happened to you and others you could make happen yourself.

She continued. I had to understand, she said, how difficult –
delicate
– the situation was. Things were not always what they seemed. She had always been on call to help, had always been there for us, meaning my father and me, sometimes at the expense of her own child. And worse, in those last months my father had suffered from mental exhaustion. What else could she do?

‘Of course,’ I said brightly. ‘You fell in love. While I was out at the football with Uncle Richard.’

‘Your uncle was not a victim in this,’ she snapped.

‘And me? Wasn’t I a victim?’

She lit another cigarette. Her hand was shaking. Her fingers had always been stained with nicotine. ‘You know what you did,’ she said, smoke hanging between us over the table. ‘Perhaps you’d best just take the money.’

I never saw Aunt Lillian again. I came back for her funeral the following year (coincidence, I think, rather than the power of wishes), travelling alongside Mr Mower in his car under the wide skies of wind-flattened Suffolk and Norfolk. He was, I remembered, a friend of the family, though I didn’t know how (and, come to think of it, still don’t). Cousin Isobel spoke to him at length but greeted me without warmth. We didn’t go back to the house afterwards. Isobel’s husband, a man in uniform, looked hard at me. I can’t imagine what she might have told him.

M
ORE THAN ONCE DURING
the afternoon Zoe caught me staring over my coffee cup into the street and asked to the point of solicitousness if she could help with something. Zoe in her most helpful mood can be trying on a slow day. It was quiet. Katya was out seeing clients. I set Zoe to work supervising young Josh in our long-term project of embedding our web pages with video of neighbourhood facilities and street-view links.

The man’s name, I had discovered from the electoral roll, was Douglas Sharp, and he lived with a Judith Sharp – presumably his wife, the Judith Bridgens who had bought the house on Boselle Avenue some years before. On successive days I found myself wandering down Boselle at around the same time in the morning I had seen him that first morning. Most dog-walkers fall into a routine, but I didn’t spot him. I could have watched the house (I am an extremely patient watcher) or I could have taken my key and gone back in. I
was
interested in him, and now I was interested in his wife, whom I must have met at least once before, when she bought the place. I wondered at the circumstances of their marriage. Perhaps some women were just
attracted by rude oafs, I thought. Or maybe he was a powerful and charismatic rude oaf who was good in bed and had bags of money. But then wasn’t she the one who owned the property? They seemed to offer all the ingredients for a short project.

My curiosity would no doubt have eventually got the better of me, but a week later I almost physically bumped into the man, coming through the swing doors of the library as I was going in. In his hurry he didn’t look at me – just edged his angular frame past with no word in response to my muttered apology, and strode towards the centre of town. I won’t say I wasn’t caught in two minds. I love the library. I had long been in the habit of taking refuge there from time to time. Understandably I made use of its research facilities – for one thing, the local paper is archived there – but I was drawn too by its homely warmth, its shady isolated corners, its soothing, dim corridors of books where a man might browse and pick up the murmurings of the two or three librarians who pottered around: Margaret, who had been there as long as I could remember, and her interchangeable younger colleagues who came and went, I learned, from a librarianship college course in Cambridge. I knew by heart (from patient watching) the pin number that granted access to the librarians’ secret room marked ‘Private’ beside the front desk where I assumed they made coffee and hung their coats and bags.

Today, though, I turned instead to follow Sharp. He was some way ahead, ducking into the ground floor of the multi-storey. If he had a car, I was wasting my time, but he was just taking a short cut, and continued past the rows of parked vehicles, exiting at the other side. Now he crossed the road, and was heading for the Common, where he had walked his dog the week before. He wasn’t out for a stroll today, though he still seemed to be a man impatient to be somewhere else. Tall, in a suede jacket and
casual trousers, his longish, thinning hair flapping in the wind, he might have just stepped out of some workplace, perhaps to run an urgent errand or grab a sandwich. It wasn’t far off lunchtime, though he was nowhere near the shops now. There was a firm of self-important architects near the library. Maybe he worked there. Or at the council offices. But where was he going now? He followed the river path as he had done last time, hurrying but also furtive, trying to keep out of the puddles. I kept my distance, but after one of the bends in the river he disappeared – presumably, I realized, up a steep set of stone steps that led to a section of Raistrick Road, one of the main routes circling the town. By the time I reached the top of the steps he was nowhere in sight.

He hadn’t had time to get very far. Facing the wall and the steps down to the river was a terrace of substantial Victorian houses – four or five bedrooms with serviceable attics and cellars – flanked at one end by a used-car showroom. The stretch of houses ran half a mile to the Fount Hill crossroads with its bakery and newsagent and other shops. I’d once had a key to the house adjacent to the showroom, but the buyer, to my dismay, had immediately converted the property to bedsits. I knew nothing about the other houses, except that Sharp – unless he had jumped on to one of the buses that passed here – must now be in one of them.

I kept my head down and walked slowly along. Judging by the array of doorbells on the top step of each address, it was evident that the entire stretch had been converted – probably, I now surmised, for student lets, this being on the bus route to both the art school and the teacher-training college, twenty minutes away in East Wickley. Only one house, the one with the blue door – number 84 – towards the end of the row, was intact, though it had seen better days: the marble steps were chipped, with weeds
coming through, the fanlight was broken, the sills were peeling and the sash frames were probably rotten. As I passed, my eye was drawn by the movement upstairs of someone drawing the curtains.

I walked along as far as the used-car showroom and stopped to inspect the vehicles on the forecourt. The proprietor appeared in the doorway and asked if I was looking for anything in particular.

‘Just browsing,’ I said.

‘Go ahead, sir. If you need anything, give me a shout.’

I walked up and down for ten minutes, then called the man back out. I had him explain the merits of one car versus another, keeping one eye on the house as we talked, until eventually I’d run out of questions and he’d run out of answers.

‘It’s actually for my wife,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should fetch her down to see for herself. She’ll probably go for the lime-green one,’ I joked.

‘Ah, quite so, sir,’ he said, laughing.

Now, as I retraced my steps back towards the crossroads, I saw a figure surfacing at the top of the riverside steps. I carried on walking. It was a girl – a young woman, rather – in a red cagoule and boots, pushing a bicycle. We were approaching each other now. She seemed breathless, having hauled her bike up the steps, but a smile hovered in her expression like that of a child fresh from the playground. She didn’t look at me as we passed each other, not even when I turned and saw her chaining the bike to the railings outside the house with the blue door. She still wore the innocent smile as she skipped up the steps and let herself in.

Do you believe in fate? I can’t explain it, but I felt caught up in hers. It was like opening a door on a bursting torrent. My heart flew to her – this lovely Red Riding Hood to Sharp’s wolf, no doubt
already lying in wait, under the covers, his eyes ready to devour her. Ignoring my own cast-iron rules of discretion and hazard, I loitered an hour or more in the immediate vicinity (no one has referred more often to an estate agent’s sales précis in the street or inspected the small ads in a newsagent’s window more thoroughly), but neither of them emerged. I was exhilarated but also disoriented. And almost sickened. From a distance, I have loved couples, even illicit ones, in their joy and insularity. They say something about a town and its life. But here was something profoundly wrong. And this girl’s cares were instantly mine. She was devotion and duty in one.