Raking the Ashes (21 page)

I wanted to make Geoffrey pay. And pay with interest.

Fascinating, the way the problem of Geoffrey could best be solved by mirroring his habits. Up until then, I’d lied only about the big things: exactly where I was, and who I was sleeping with. That was as easy as blinking compared with keeping petty day-to-day secrets under a shared roof. Having to keep that up really sharpens the wits and stretches the memory. There was a lot to think about and a lot to get done. And all the while, I kept up the steady drip, drip, drip, of pretending that nothing had changed. I fussed about the new rotas. I grumbled endlessly about the one-day safety reviews. I moaned about last-minute crew changes. Nobody listening would ever have thought for a moment I might have been paying sufficient attention over the weeks to work out that the one day Geoff would definitely be away was Harry’s graduation.

‘Such a pity that each of them is only allowed two guests,’ he said for the twentieth time as he polished his shoes again. I could have said that, as the one who’d sat with Harry through a thousand homework sessions, bribing him with cake, I had more claim than Tara to the second ticket. But I sat tight. Nor did I bother to remind him that all those concerts at the primary school, those plays in secondary, and those perennial parent–teacher discussions had had no limits on the numbers at all, and no one had ever expressed the slightest regret about not inviting me to those. I only nodded at the clock. ‘Hadn’t you better get going? It’s a long drive.’ To speed him on his way, I added one more lie direct to his face. ‘Tara said she and Harry would be there by noon.’

‘Really? As early as that?’ He reached for his jacket. ‘Right. I’m off.’

‘What time will you be home?’ I asked, as if I actually cared.

He shrugged. ‘The ceremony starts at three. How long do these things last?’ He made a guess. ‘Sixish? Unless the three of us go for a cup of tea after, in which case I suppose it might be seven. Or even a little later.’

‘Take all the time you want.’ Maybe I even pulled my dressing gown closer around me and yawned, as if to make it clear that today the pressure of time meant nothing. The moment he was out of the house, I threw
on
my clothes and started dragging the cardboard boxes out from where I’d been storing them flat, hidden away in the garage, sandwiched between the ladders along the back wall and the huge metal safety sign I’d smuggled out of the company’s on-shore store and into the back of my car, draped with tarpaulin. I didn’t hang about. I went round the house like a tornado, hurling every last thing that belonged to either Geoffrey or his children into the boxes.

Less than an hour later, the first of the vans I’d ordered drew up outside, but I was ready. Checking my way along the pegs in the hall for any last jackets or scarves I’d overlooked that belonged to the Andersons, I said to the driver, ‘You’re sure you’ve completely understood? Pack all these boxes in the van. Lock them up safely, and you’re free to do what you want so long as you’re back here by five. And when the owner of this stuff finally shows up, tell him the deal.’

He reeled it off, parrot-fashion. ‘Van fully prepaid for three days, including the cost of delivery to the address of his choice.’ He added off his own bat, ‘Even if it’s Cornwall?’

‘It might very well be Cornwall,’ I warned.

‘Or John O’Groats?’

‘Less likely,’ I admitted, and went back into the house to get on with the next load of packing.

The second, larger, van arrived an hour later.

‘Everything?’

‘Everything except carpets and curtains, the ladders in the garage, the washer, drier …’ I read them off the list, then handed it over as an aide-memoire. As we walked through the house, I glanced across at the old rocking horse I’d bought for the children. By rights I really should have taken it, if only to remind me of how hard I was trying, at the start, to welcome this family under my roof and to become a living part of it. But in the end I decided it would probably only go on reminding me strongly of Bill. ‘And that can stay. But everything else is going, and it must all be out by four o’clock.’

‘No problem.’

And there wasn’t, even with the locksmith getting under everyone’s feet as he changed all the door locks. I’d learned the knack over the weeks of sorting things in piles then simply draping one large garment over them to make them look more casual: less a house on the move than something I was sorting out and putting somewhere else.

The removal men swarmed everywhere. ‘And the food in these cupboards?’

‘That’s all to be cleared out. There’s someone moving in at five o’clock.’

The one in charge raised an eyebrow. ‘Today? Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t we?’

‘Not if you keep it up at this rate.’

And they did. As fast as they cleared each cupboard, I was there with my cloth, sweeping stray lentils and bits of dried-up pasta out onto the counters below or onto the floor, then wiping and mopping. I don’t believe I’ve ever worked so hard in my whole life or been so glad to hear the words: ‘That’s it, I reckon.’

The boss and I walked through the house together and checked the garage. ‘Pretty good,’ I said.

‘So we’ll be off.’ He glanced down at his paperwork to check one last time. ‘And it’s indefinite storage for the whole lot.’ I watched his eyes fall on the four huge black bags I’d filled with perfectly good tins and cereals, sauces and pastas and herbs, and the piles of ready meals from the freezer. ‘Want us to do you a favour and drop all this stuff at the dump?’ he asked me hopefully.

‘Yes, please,’ I said, peeling out notes to lay on their outstretched paws. And then, because I have a special responsibility for safety at work, I couldn’t help blowing his dignified little deception by saying sternly to all of them, ‘Now, remember you must never re-freeze meat or fish. So use those up today or tomorrow, or not at all.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ they chorused with that obedient eyes-down look men use when they have other plans. I couldn’t bring myself to care. Let the whole pack of
them
poison themselves, their wives and their children. I simply waved them off down the street, then went back to pick up both new sets of shiny keys. I locked the doors behind me, sat on the step and waited. None of my neighbours was around. No one was watching. No one walked past to say goodbye. It is a dreary area, actually, and I’m not sorry to be done with it.

I didn’t have to sit long. Shortly before five, a huge removal van from Newcastle pulled round the corner. I went over to greet it. ‘Here are the keys.’

The driver reached down to take them from me. ‘Is it your house?’

‘No,’ I said, presuming that my solicitor had done her job, and by now this was true. ‘I’m just a neighbour. I don’t know anything at all except that these are the keys.’

The driver transferred his worried look from me to the house. ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘The new people aren’t far behind. I suppose till they get here we can just use our common sense and guess where they’ll want things to go.’

He looked as if it was by no means the first time he’d faced this problem. And, after all, how far wrong can you go, arranging furniture in a small semidetached house on a small boring street?

* * *

I won’t say where I went. Some day I might want to go back again, and not be found. Ever. But it was a quiet week. I needed time to think. Sometimes I walked along the coastal paths. It seemed to me the waves were speaking and the moon sent messages. I don’t mean I went bats. I mean that all that dark and peace and moonlight seemed to be gathering together to make the decision I made one of significance. I heard it in the rhythm of the waves. Just
do
it, they seemed to be saying as they crashed on the rocks. Just
do
it.
Do
it. All of the reasons not to are puny and unconvincing. Almost absurd.

But it took thought and care. I had to get things right. Finally I made one phone call from outside the pub in this village in the middle of nowhere.

‘Tilly! For Christ’s sake! Your bloody man’s been mooning around outside the gates all week. Security are sick of him. And where the hell are you? You were supposed to be here early this morning, remember?’

‘I’m not coming back, Donald.’

‘Not coming back?’

‘Yup. Finished with the whole boiling.’ I carried on into the incredulous silence. ‘I’m going to start a brand-new life somewhere abroad,’ I lied. ‘I’m sorry not to have warned you earlier. It’s just that I knew Geoff would be there to look for me this morning. And this way I get a bit of a head start.’

He wasn’t pleased. ‘So where the fuck are
you
?’

‘Gatwick.’

There was a moment’s pause in which birds sang in branches above my head and, as if to make my perfidy even more obvious, a duck quacked loudly.

‘It doesn’t
sound
like Gatwick.’

I gazed across the street to the village green. On a pretty roofed noticeboard there was an exhortation to the local citizenry to come to the meeting about the plan to clean out the old pond. ‘That’s because I’m in the airport’s new Meditation Centre. They run a tape of soothing country sounds.’

Someone walked past me, saying, ‘Admiring the ducks on our filthy old pond?’

‘And a rather fine mural of wild birds,’ I added.

I could tell Donald didn’t believe a word of it. I waited while he drew in breath and had a little think. Then he changed tack. ‘Look, sweetheart, I do see that having a bit of a stalker must be rather tiresome, even if it is your old man.’

‘He’s not my old man, Donald. Geoff and I have never married.’

‘Keep your hair on, Til. What about getting that other bloke of yours – what’s-his-name?’

‘Sol.’

‘Yes. Can’t you make
him
talk to Geoff? Explain what’s what, and all that. Get him to tell Geoff his
time
’s up, and he’s to hand over his side of the bed with a little more grace.’

Amazing, isn’t it? They can’t imagine a woman might be set fair to get on with her life without a single one of them grasping her ankles. I didn’t bother to argue. After all, the more daft theories in the air when someone vanishes, the more successfully you cloud your exit. ‘It’s not that, Donald. It’s a whole lot bigger than that.’

‘What is it, then?
What?
’

‘I’m taking a new direction,’ I told him. (Choose to be anything. Fly!) Flippantly, I added, ‘Maybe I’ll go into wind farms. I reckon wind farms are the future. They must be crying out for people like me.’

‘Oh, fuck off, Tilly!’ he snapped. When he next spoke, he sounded miserable, as if he were the only one of the three who truly loved me. ‘Tilly, I’m going to do my level best to hold your job open for you. But if you don’t show up, it’s out of my hands and you know it. So you had better get your act together pretty quickly.’

I could have told him, ‘Don’t bother, Donald,’ but the line had gone dead.

Then it was back to work, studying the tide tables and the phases of the moon, and when they’d interlink. Meanwhile, I kept track of Geoffrey, secure in the
knowledge
he couldn’t keep track of me without Sol’s connivance.

‘Twelve, thirteen – fourteen bits of forwarded mail, Til. Most of it’s circulars and other crap. And Donald has sent down seven more letters from Geoffrey.’

‘Is he still down in Torbury Bay?’

‘No, no. It seems he’s worn out his welcome there.’

‘Is that what he says?’

‘Not exactly.’ I heard Sol rustling sheets of letter paper. ‘“Please, please write, Til,”’ he read out in an only slightly mocking imitation of how he thought Geoffrey might sound. ‘“But not to here, because it seems Elise has guests arriving unexpectedly from South Africa. Very old friends. She says she’s sorry but she needs the bed. And Tara and Harry say that though it was lovely having me before, now Tara has to get back to her course work, and it’s a thing about her, apparently, that she can’t concentrate if there is anyone staying in the house.”’

‘Well-diagnosed. Worn out his welcome there.’

Sol kept on reading through the next disaster. ‘“So since Vanguard Direct have as good as warned me they’ll have to let me go if I’m not back by Monday—”’

‘Vanguard Direct? I thought Geoff worked for Stationery Supplies?’

‘He did. Till he was fired for taking too much time off.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Tilly,’ Sol reproved me, ‘that bit of bad news was in the last batch sent on by the post office.’

‘Was it?’

‘You just don’t care a fig, do you?’

‘No, I don’t. Not any more.’

Sol made a great play of rustling letters at me down the phone. ‘At least
he’s
faithful. He’s not giving up.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I ever really thought he would.’

Sol sighed. ‘So what am I supposed to do with all this stuff?’

‘The same as last week and the week before. Bank any cheques and burn the crap.’

‘And all these billets-doux?’

‘Begging letters,’ I corrected. ‘If I were you, Sol, I’d just gather them up and burn them too. Because they’re crap as well.’

‘You’re a cow, Tilly. Do you know that?’

‘Yes. And I’ve strayed off the range for good.’

‘Where
are
you, anyway? Or are you still not telling?’

‘That’s right, Sol. Still not telling.’

In the end, Geoffrey rented a furnished room only a few streets from the house we’d left. ‘He claims it’s “quite nicely kitted out, considering”,’ Sol
disapproved
down the phone. ‘That means that, even though the man no longer has an income, he’s going to be paying quite unnecessary storage costs as well as a higher rent for the room.’

‘Be fair. He hasn’t any furniture of his own.’

‘You never took that
too
?’

‘It was all mine.’

‘Tilly, you’re such a
bitch
. If you don’t come and sleep with me soon, I’m going to begin to dislike you.’ Sol’s voice turned serious. ‘Actually, I mean it, Tilly. This time you’ve gone too far, and I can’t stand much more of reading these letters.’

‘You needn’t bother. I only need to know where he is. Just check the address at the top, then shove them in the bin.’