Staying Power (13 page)

‘Not that it's started yet,' Cope reminded them. ‘I'd like an up-date on your
Grass on your Neighbour
investigations. It should only take five minutes, if you've been doing your jobs. Afternoon, then, Gaffer.' He nodded at Graham and ushered his underlings out.

Kate decided to celebrate with one of her cough sweets. She repeated the dose several times in the course of the afternoon, so the whole room was pulsating with creosote fumes.

Despite that, it was well after five when she and Colin escaped.

‘Fancy that snifter?' Kate asked. She really ought to see Cassie again, just for a few minutes, and then there were her boxes. If she found the state of her home offensive, how would Patrick see it, with his judging, stranger's eyes? But she owed Colin. And yes, he was the closest she'd got in Birmingham to a friend.

‘You sure you've got time?'

The tone; the body language: there was something the matter.

‘Of course. We might as well let the rush hour thin out anyway.'

He nodded. They created spaces on their desks – the nearest they ever got to clearing them – as a gesture to the new week, and set off.

‘Don't forget,' Graham's voice stopped them as they headed for the stairs, ‘have a good weekend.'

With one accord they turned. ‘Thanks, Gaffer. And you.'

‘Not that there's much chance of it for him, poor bugger,' Colin muttered, as soon as they were out of earshot.

Kate shook her head, sighing. It would have been good to tell Colin all about Graham's tantrums, but she found she couldn't. What she did offer up was the picture on Graham's desk. ‘Like a bloody albatross, isn't it?' With Graham as the Ancient Mariner? Not a good comparison, all in all.

Colin said, ‘She's very attractive, isn't she? Lovely neck, and really nice little ears?'

She bit. ‘
Attractive?
'

‘They make a good-looking pair.' At last he relented: ‘Mind you, I don't fancy the expression on her face.'

‘I haven't actually looked at the photo, to be honest,' she said, loftily. ‘The circumstances haven't arisen … Hey, how did you manage to see it?' she added, succumbing to his grin.

‘Accidentally knocked it with a file.'

‘Accidentally on purpose, I suppose! What's the matter with her expression, anyway?'

‘I wouldn't want to prejudice your impressions.'

‘Bother you, then. I'll look at it myself, said the Little Red Hen. God, what's happened to the weather?'

They peered into a bank of fog.

‘Perhaps it means it might get a bit warmer,' Colin said doubtfully. ‘Come on: I can hear that half calling me.'

Except he didn't stick to halves. He embarked on pints with whisky chasers. Kate, on mineral water after a dry white wine, looked at him anxiously and then decided to risk it.

‘You'd better tell me,' she said, laying her hand gently on his. ‘There's something up, isn't there? Oh, come on: it's pretty obvious.' She nodded at his third pint, already half gone.

He shook his head. He looked horribly close to tears.

‘Tell me at home, then.' She gathered up her bag and coat. ‘I'll stand you a balti. You can't drive after that lot anyway.'

‘I'll be—'

‘Come on. It's easier to sink that stuff than it is to stop sinking it. Trust me. I've been there.'

‘You're not an alcoholic though. You stuck at the one glass.'

‘There but for the grace of God.'

‘Oh, don't bring Him in! OK. Stop looking like my mum with a headache. Let's go.'

‘Tell you what,' he said, ‘we'll clear – three? make it four? – boxes before we go and eat. And then we'll come back and finish the rest. And run the vac round. So at least your bloke can see the potential of the place.' He gestured expansively.

‘He's not my bloke.' She hung her coat up, passing him a hanger too. ‘Anyway, I'd rather hear about whatever it is that's getting you down.'

‘Look, it's no big deal. It's just that – OK, it is a big deal. I've been with Clive for nearly five years now. The house is in his name, but – you know, we're partners. And I get home Wednesday night to find him shagging his bollocks off with this kid from the Greek chippie. And when I make a token protest, he tells me I'm out. I thought he was joking. Well, we both over-reacted, maybe.'

‘So what's the present state of play?'

‘We'll just have to see.'

She couldn't press him. Not with his face wearing that expression. ‘My ears are here whenever you want them. And a waterproof shoulder. OK?'

‘OK. Thanks. In the meantime, I can see a hell of a lot of mess and – you know – my ears must be particularly alert tonight! – I can hear that balti calling me.'

‘Did you have a good day?' Patrick asked, as they fastened their taxi seat belts.

‘Excellent. My Boys' Brigade football team had a home win. One-nil, but the ref re-invented the off-side rule specially for the occasion. And I've at last unpacked the last of my goods and chattels from London. The carpet-layer will appear next Friday.' The young man who was going to lay her kitchen floor would do the downstairs carpets too. She hoped his record – and his boss's – would be immaculate. ‘And you?'

‘I did some Christmas shopping, played a round of golf and started to put the gearbox back together on that Triumph I was telling you about. Highly satisfactory, in other words.'

Golf. Gearboxes. Christmas shopping. She hoped their host went in for loud music because this evening didn't promise much conversationally. The Christmas shopping seemed the best conversational opening, but that meant exposing her own weakness here – hardly anyone to buy a present for, and, conversely, hardly any to receive. Which reminded her: she might as well volunteer for Christmas Day duty – it would free up people with families. Cassie could be morose with her fellow patients until Kate could make an evening appearance. She'd been morose when Kate had dropped in for half an hour after the match to pass the plastic information card as casually as she could to Rosie.

Patrick was waiting for her to pat the conversational ball back to him.

‘So how many shopping days is it to Christmas?' she asked.

‘It depends whether you count Sundays, I suppose. Which you have to, these days. Worse than weekdays – all those families with the biggest push-chairs in the western world … Then it'll be one day of gorging, and Boxing Day sales. Poor sods. And they won't be off to the piste as compensation. Where are you ski-ing this year?'

‘Not one of my things, Patrick, I'm afraid. I've been to the Cairngorms, but each time I've contrived to bring about a thaw.'

The house to which they were delivered was in an affluent looking road in Moseley, a suburb which embraced extremes of housing. Many of the huge Victorian piles had been converted, multi-occupation taking its toll, but this road's houses, slightly smaller but still imposing and mostly detached, seemed owner-occupied. Chantry Road.

‘They've closed off access from Salisbury Road at the bottom of Park Hill,' Patrick said. ‘Originally to stop kerb crawlers. It's had the effect of stopping through traffic. Much more pleasant now.'

Kate thought about her street. No doubt hands would be flung in horror if anyone suggested closing one end of that. True, there was no right turn from the High Street, but she had a strong suspicion that that was to prevent traffic jams, not protect the residents. And it was noticeable that the roads with speed-bumps were those lined not with terraced houses like her own but with comfortable semis, of various eras. What was it called, the Inverse Care Law? At least Chantry Road residents were suffering parking problems tonight – but the cars were of a different order from those crammed into her street.

The house they approached sported in its front garden a fir tree of some sort, already lit up with large fairy lights. No throbbing music, though – she'd have to find something to talk about then, with the owners of the loud, confident voices which gushed from the front door as it opened to admit other guests. This was not going to be an evening to remember, either.

‘Kate doesn't want to play with your trainset, darling,' her hostess, Daphne, was saying.

‘But she does!' Mark, her son, insisted. He'd be about eight, and although someone had imposed a white shirt and a bow tie on him, the tie was blessedly askew and the shirt several buttons adrift. ‘She's a friend of Tim's – you know, Tim—'

‘From the Baptist Church?' Daphne asked.

‘—and she knows all about them. Don't you, Kate?'

‘I can tell my GWR from my LNER,' she admitted. And after all this smiling and yelling platitudes at complete strangers a few minutes' quiet might not be a bad thing. Particularly as her furred up ear made it hard to work out their responses unless she could watch their mouths.

‘You wouldn't know a diesel from a steam train, would you, Isobel?' laughed one of the group Patrick had joined, a tall well-built man with a golfer's suntan.

Isobel, a woman in her later forties, shook her head in self-deprecation, as if she had shaken it that way many times before.

‘Actually, they're not trains, they're locomotives,' Mark said. ‘Aren't they, Kate?'

‘They are indeed,' she agreed. ‘And – if you'll all excuse me – I really would like to see Mark's layout. I want to be able to discuss it with Tim when I see him.'

‘And you'll come up too, won't you, Patrick? I need someone to fix a loose bogie, you see.'

Kate would have loved Isobel to observe that her husband thought bogies were things small boys picked from their noses, but she didn't. Neither did Kate.

‘And Dad's busy, you see,' Mark added. ‘With all these people. And you know about engineering, don't you? You've got all those wicked motorbikes.'

‘It ought to be Howard,' Patrick said, clearly not keen to leave the adult company. ‘He's the engineer really.'

Sod him
, she thought. ‘If you've got some tools, I'll see what I can do.' Meanwhile her brain was in gear.
Howard? Lots of Howards in Birmingham, Kate. But I ought to find out – You ought to help that kid. You've offered
.

‘Plenty upstairs,' Mark said.

‘Well,' she said slowly, but trying to think quickly, ‘if we can't rely on manpower, we'd better see what womanpower can do. Do you fancy helping, Isobel?'

‘Her! She can't change a light bulb without blowing all the fuses! You've asked the wrong lady there, dear.'

Kate smiled back an angry retort. Isobel smiled at her feet again. Mark put his hand out to tug Kate's skirt, but withdrew it.

Patrick gestured with his glass. ‘I'll be up in a minute. OK?'

Suit yourself
. ‘Fine.'

What sort of money did people have if they could furnish a child's play room like this? True, it was an attic room, but it was newly-decorated and had thick heavy curtains which msut have cost for one pair what Kate had paid for all of hers combined. And it was well-heated – as warm as a living room. She sat on a bed-settee with a cushion on her lap, a model engine – Evening Star – upside down on the cushion, and Mark sitting rather too close to her, ostensibly passing her tiny tools when she asked for them but actually putting his head between her eyes and her hands.

‘Tim has his trainset in his bedroom,' she said.

‘Daddy plays with this sometimes. Sometimes.'

‘Now, which man is your daddy? The man Patrick and I were talking to?'

She deserved the scorn in his voice. ‘Daddy was the one who let you in and gave you your wine. You were talking to Mummy and Howard-and-Isobel.'

‘So who are they?'

‘Howard-and-Isobel live in Oxford Road. They've got a smashing garden – big enough for cricket on the back lawn. And a tree house. It used to be for their son – that's Nigel, but he's grown up. Nearly. He used to play cricket with me. But his dad—'

‘That's Howard?'

‘Right – you won't make that too tight, will you?'

She pushed his head gently out of the way. ‘Not if you let me see what I'm doing! What about his dad?'

‘Sorry. Oh, he makes him do his homework.'

That seemed reasonable. ‘Have you got a tree house?'

‘No. Daddy says I've got to put up with my fort. Is that done, now? Let's try it!'

She thought, as she made her way down the thickly carpeted stairs, that maybe she could have pumped Mark more. But he was a child wanting his engine to work. A nice little boy, too. He'd promised she could come round whenever she wanted to play with him.

Pausing at a turn in the stairs, she looked down. No, she was too smart to be Cinderella – her little black dress had cost an arm and a leg even in the sales – and this wasn't a ball, but she felt uneasy. No sign of Prince Charming at the moment. She'd better insinuate herself through the mass to find him and a drink. Not necessarily in that order. And try to talk to Howard-and-Isobel again. She had the best excuse that they were the only guests she knew. Patrick, she suspected, might not like it if she did her usual thing – her usual pre-Robin thing – and swanned round talking to people he hadn't introduced her to.

Daphne saw her first. ‘Food and drink through there, darling!'

Kate nodded and followed the pointing finger.

This must be the breakfast room, rather Laura Ashley, perhaps, but bright without being a killer on a sunny morning. It was crowded with brightly yelling guests. And this the kitchen – mercifully almost empty. She would have died for this kitchen. Even though she was getting ready to love her own – floor permitting – this was magic, the sort that appeared in
Homes and Gardens
. At the far end, on a peninsula fitting, were the drinks. All the bottles, red or white, bore the same label.