The Four Last Things (18 page)

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, Miss – ah – come in.’

There was an infinitesimal pause. Then, to his relief, she smiled and came out of the rain. Angel was about his own height, which was five feet six. She had a long, fine-boned face, the skin flawless as a child’s. Thelma, pop-eyed with suspicion, escorted her upstairs to see the spare room. Eddie lurked in the hall, listening.

‘How lovely,’ he heard Angel say. ‘And, if I may say so, how tastefully decorated.’ Her voice was self-assured, the crisp enunciation hinting at a corresponding clarity of thought.

By the time they came downstairs again the two women were chatting almost like friends. To Eddie’s amazement, he heard his mother offering hospitality.

‘We generally have a glass of sherry at this time, Miss Wharton. Perhaps you’d care to join us?’

‘That would be lovely.’

Thelma stared at Eddie, who after an awkward hiatus leapt to his feet and went to the kitchen to search for the bottle of sweet sherry which his father had opened the Christmas before last. When he returned with three assorted glasses on a tray, the women were discussing how soon Angel could move in.

‘Subject to a month’s deposit and suitable references, of course.’

‘Naturally.’ Angel opened her handbag. ‘I have a reference here from Mrs Hawley-Minton. She’s the lady who runs the agency I work for.’

‘A nursing agency?’

‘Nursery nursing, actually. Essentially it’s an agency for nannies with nursing training.’

‘Eddie,’ Thelma prompted. ‘The sherry.’

He handed round the glasses. Angel passed an envelope to Thelma, who extracted a sheet of headed paper and settled her reading glasses on her nose. Eddie and Angel sipped their sherry.

‘I see that Mrs Hawley-Minton knew your parents,’ Thelma said, her stately manner firmly to the fore.

‘Oh, yes. That’s why she took me on. She’s very careful about that sort of thing.’

Thelma peered interrogatively over her reading glasses.

‘An agency like hers is a great responsibility,’ Angel explained. ‘Particularly as children are concerned. She believes one can’t be too careful.’

‘Quite,’ said Thelma; and after a pause she added, ‘I do so agree.’ She folded the letter and handed it back to Angel. ‘Well, Miss Wharton, that seems quite satisfactory. When would you like to move in?’

In those days, Angel was always Miss Wharton. Thelma took refuge in obsolete formality. Eddie avoided calling Angel anything to her face, but sometimes at night he whispered her Christian name, Angela, trying it for size in his mouth, where it felt awkward and alien.

By and large, Angel kept to her room. She was allowed the use of the bathroom, of course, and she had her own latchkey. For a time she had all the virtues, even negative ones.

‘I’m so glad she doesn’t smoke,’ said Thelma, who had converted her former pleasure into a vice. ‘It would make the whole house smell, not just her room. But I suppose she wouldn’t, being a nurse.’

Before Angel moved in, Thelma had worried a great deal about the telephone. She had visions of Angel making unauthorized calls to Australia, of the phone ringing endlessly (a woman who looked like that was bound to have an active social life), of long conversations with girlfriends and, even worse, boyfriends.

Angel soon calmed Thelma’s fears. She rarely used the phone herself, and when she did she kept a meticulous record of the cost. Nor did she receive many incoming phone calls. Most of them were to do with her work – usually from Mrs Hawley-Minton’s agency. As the weeks went by, Thelma developed a telephonic acquaintance with Mrs Hawley-Minton.

‘They value Miss Wharton very highly,’ she reported to Eddie. ‘Mrs Hawley-Minton tells me that her clients are always asking to have her back. One of them was a real prince. His father was a king. Bulgaria, was it? He was deposed a long time ago, of course, but even so.’

Eddie envied Angel her job. He thought a good deal about her children and what she might do with them. Sometimes he tried to imagine that he was she, that he was in her clothes, in her skin, behind her eyes.

‘She’s working in Belgrave Square this week,’ Thelma would say, telling Eddie for want of anyone better to talk to. ‘He’s a Peruvian millionaire, and she’s something to do with the embassy.’ And Eddie would see dark-haired children with solemn faces and huge eyes in an attic nursery with barred windows; he would see himself looking after them and playing with them, just as Angel did.

Thelma was curious about Angel’s antecedents, and about her apparently non-existent social life. ‘If you ask me, she’s been unlucky in love. Don’t tell me a girl like that hasn’t had plenty of opportunities. I bet she has men chasing after her with their tongues hanging out every time she walks down the street.’

Thelma’s coarseness surprised Eddie, even shocked him. She had never shown that side of herself when Stanley had been alive. He noticed that the hypothetical fiancé appealed greatly to her.

‘I wonder if she was engaged, and then he was killed, and since then she’s never looked at another man.’ Thelma also had a strong sentimental streak, buried deep but liable to surface unexpectedly. ‘Perhaps he was in the army. Miss Wharton’s father was, you know.’ It transpired that Mrs Hawley-Minton’s late husband had been a brigadier, and he and Angel’s father had served together in India during the war. ‘I think both parents must be dead,’ Thelma confided. ‘She seems quite alone in the world.’

Thelma’s curiosity about Angel extended to her possessions. Angel kept her room clean and made her own bed. But Thelma retained a key, and every now and then, when Angel was out, she would unlock the door of the back bedroom and cautiously investigate her lodger’s private life.

‘I’m not being nosy. But she’s my responsibility in a way. And I have to make sure she’s not burning holes in the bedspread or leaving the fire on when she goes out.’

Eddie watched his mother on one of these incursions. He stood in the doorway of the back bedroom – a landlady’s dream: clean, tidy, smelling faintly of polish and Angel’s perfume. Thelma moved slowly round the room in a clockwise direction. She opened doors and pulled out drawers. On top of the wardrobe was a large modern suitcase.

‘Locked,’ Thelma commented, curious but not annoyed.

In the cupboard by the bed was a japanned box, and that was locked, too. ‘Probably keeps family papers in there, mementoes of her parents and her fiancé. Funny she doesn’t have any photographs of them. There’s plenty of room on the dressing table.’

‘You haven’t got any pictures of Dad,’ Eddie pointed out.

‘That’s quite different,’ Thelma wheezed, her attention elsewhere. ‘She’s got an awful lot of books, hasn’t she? I wonder if she’s actually read them.’ She peered at the spines. ‘You wouldn’t have thought she was religious, would you?’ His mother spoke the word ‘religious’ in a tone in which incredulity, pity and curiosity were finely balanced. ‘You’d never have guessed.’

Eddie noticed a bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. He ran his eyes along the row of spines and other titles leapt out at him: G. K. Chesterton’s biography of Thomas Aquinas; the
Religio Medici
of Sir Thomas Browne;
The Christian Faith; The Four Last Things; A Dictionary of Christian Theology; The Shield of Faith; Man, God and Prayer.

‘She doesn’t go to church,’ Thelma said, her voice doubtful. ‘I’m sure we would have noticed.’ She drifted over to the dressing table, picked up a small bottle of perfume and sniffed it. ‘Very nice.’ She put down the perfume. ‘Mind you, it should be. That stuff isn’t cheap. You could feed a family of four on the amount she spends on dolling herself up.’

Insignificant though it was, the remark lodged in Eddie’s memory. It was the first sign of a rift developing between Thelma and Angel. His mother was by nature a critical person, always willing to find fault and never satisfied with anyone or anything for long. She pursued perfection all her life and would not have known what to do if she had caught up with it.

As a mild grey spring slipped into a mild grey summer, the carping gathered strength. Thelma fired criticisms like arrows – at first one or two, every now and then, but steadily increasing in number.

As with Stanley, so with Angel: Thelma did not try to get rid of her lodger any more than she had tried to get rid of her husband. Angel’s unwillingness to take remarks in the spirit they’d been uttered infuriated Thelma. But there was nothing she could do about it – Angel wore her placidity like a suit of armour.

On a sunny morning in the middle of summer, Eddie took a cup of coffee into the garden. His mother was out of the house for once – every four weeks she went by taxi to the health centre where she had her blood pressure checked and collected her monthly ration of pills and sprays – and he felt unusually relaxed. He wandered towards the trees at the far end.

The peaceful mood was shattered when he heard the back door opening behind him. He turned. Angel came towards him, picking her way between a weed-infested flowerbed and the long grass of the lawn. Her hair was loose, and she wore a short green dress and sandals. The sun was to her right and a little behind her, casting a golden glow over her hair and throwing her face into shadow.

‘I’m not disturbing you?’

‘No.’ He shrank back towards the fence.

‘It’s such a lovely day. I couldn’t resist coming outside.’

He sipped his coffee, scalding his tongue.

‘Do you know, I saw a fox the other day.’ Angel pointed down the garden towards Carver’s. ‘It went down there. Probably into the wasteland at the back.’

‘There’s a lot of wildlife there.’

‘Shame it’s such a mess.’ She stopped beside him, and he caught a suggestion of her perfume. Her eyes swung towards the council flats. ‘Still, better a jungle than something like that.’

Eddie nodded.

After a pause, Angel went on, ‘Have you noticed the woman with the binoculars? She’s often on the balcony with the geraniums.’

Only one balcony had geraniums. It stood out starkly from its neighbours partly because of this, and partly because of its tidiness, the fresh paint on the railing and the absence of a satellite dish. No one was standing there now.

‘I think she watches birds,’ Eddie said. ‘Her name’s Mrs Reynolds.’

‘She was there just now. I was looking out of my bedroom window, and for a moment I thought she was watching you.’

‘Are you sure? Why?’

‘She was probably looking at the house. Or at next door. Perhaps there’s a bird on the roof.’ She smiled at him. ‘In any case, even if she was looking at you, I wouldn’t take it personally.’

‘Oh no. Of course not.’

‘Old women do strange things.’ Angel glanced back at the house, and Eddie knew that Mrs Reynolds was not the only old woman she had in mind. ‘But it’s their problem, not ours.’

Over the summer, as Thelma’s criticisms multiplied, Eddie found himself warming towards Angel. The process was gradual and subtle. She would smile at him as they passed in the hall, or ask him what he thought the weather was going to do this morning and listen to his answer as if his opinion really counted. When Thelma was being more than usually absurd, Angel would occasionally glance at Eddie; and when their eyes met there was the delicious sense of a shared secret, of shared amusement.

Eddie was flattered and alarmed by these hints. Women had never shown any interest in him before, especially not beautiful women like Angel. Not that he liked her specifically as a woman, he told himself, but as a person. And there was no doubt that her beauty affected the way he responded to her: it added significance to everything she said and did.

Then came the first Sunday in September. It was a fine late summer day, and after breakfast Eddie decided to walk up to the Heath. (Since his father’s death he had lost his fear of going out.) He happened to glance back as he was walking up Haverstock Hill and noticed, some way behind him, Angel walking slowly in the same direction. Her presence irritated him. On his walks he liked to be among strangers. He quickened his pace and cut down the next side road. He looked back more than once but there was no sign of her. He thought that she had probably continued up Rosslyn Hill to Hampstead Village.

He spent a pleasant hour on the Heath. It was a place he avoided in the evenings because parts of it were rough and dangerous and, they said, haunted by men doing horrible things to each other. But in daytime at weekends and during the holidays the Heath was full of children, some with grown-ups, some without. Eventually he found a bench on Parliament Hill and watched irritable fathers flying kites for bored children. Below him stretched the city, brick and stone, glass and tarmac, blues and greys and greens, trembling like a live thing in the haze.

To Eddie’s delight, two girls of about eight began to do gymnastics near his bench. They were of an age when they were still unselfconscious about their bodies, when competition came naturally to them. One was wearing jeans, but the other – a girl with a pale, serious face spotted with freckles – wore a sweatshirt over a skimpy dress. Eddie watched her covertly. He tried to decide whether she was consciously teasing him, as Alison used to do in that far-off summer when she swung higher and higher, revealing more and more, and pretending that she didn’t know he was watching her. He stared at her, wondering how soft the skin would be above the bony knees.