The Houdini Effect (6 page)

‘
Let’s wait until we’re a
bit more settled before we invite any more people,’ she’d
said.

I had a sneaking suspicion that she hadn’t
been very keen on a barbeque that night, much less on having anyone
over. As I’ve already said, it was Dad who’d pushed for it even
though he didn’t often do something that Mum wasn’t keen on (except
for buying old houses, that is. A BIG exception).

Anyway, over the sausages, steak and hot

potato salad, Dad went on about his plans
for our

house. ‘Once it’s finished, the Historic
Places

people will be falling over themselves to
list it as a A-category building,’ he boasted. By that stage of the
evening he’d just finished his first glass of wine and one is all
it takes for him to start getting swimmy and talking silly.

‘
Really?’ Barry queried,
looking sceptically at the house. ‘It may have been an okay place
once, but now . . .’

‘
Take no notice of him,’
said Mum, meaning Dad and his exaggerations. ‘It’s nothing special,
just an ordinary twenties villa, but it will look a lot better when
it’s finished.’

The conversation about the
house went on in this vein for quite a while. Harry, I suspected,
was already bored out of his brain. Even I was getting fed up with
it when, during a conversational lull, May’s quiet, unassuming
voice surprised us all by saying, ‘They loved this
place.’

‘
They?’ quizzed
Dad.

‘
Iris and Laurie,’ May
said. ‘The couple who owned it before you.’

‘
Oh,’ said Dad. ‘Do we know
anything about them?’ he asked Mum.

‘
I don’t think so,’ she
shrugged. ‘You told me the owner lives up north, that’s all I
remember.’

‘
That’ll be their son,
Mitchell,’ Barry said. ‘He looked after Laurie’s affairs when the
old man went to live in a rest home near him. We don’t actually
know if the old bugger’s still alive, do we?’ He directed this
question at May but without really looking at her or giving her a
chance to answer. ‘Grumpy old sod. Never heard from him once he’d
gone. No loss really. Never got on well

with him.’

‘
He would rather have gone
to the rest home

nearby,’ said May. ‘Stately Havens.’

I knew the place although not as well as
Harry did. (‘The oldies were asleep most of the time,’ he had told
me. ‘Was that before or after you started doing your tricks for
them,’ I had riposted. Verbal fencing. How I love it. Jab, stab and
touché! Harry No-Chance, if I’m lucky, which isn’t that often.)

‘
But Mitchell wanted him
close,’ May finished.

‘
If they loved this place
so much why didn’t they look after it properly?’ said Harry sourly.
Hearing him ask a question when I thought he must have tuned out,
surprised me almost as much as having heard the soft but intensely
serious sound of May’s voice a few seconds earlier. I would not
have blamed Harry if he had fallen asleep standing up, like a
horse. Even for a writer, despite people dynamics being of no small
interest to me, the conversation up to now appeared to have taken a
tedious turn for the worse. I couldn’t have been more
wrong.

May’s muted voice
eventually sounded again, answering Harry, by the time the rest of
us had just about forgotten what his question had been. ‘Laurie
couldn’t do much anymore. He’d had bad arthritis for years. It
became a lot worse after Iris died. Before that, the house was very
well looked after.’

Harry shrugged. He didn’t really care.
Neither did Barry, it seemed. He said something to Dad about the
barbeque and then they were off discussing the latest makes and
models and how Dad had an idea for making a permanent place for the
new machine he was almost certain to buy in

the very near future. (First we’d heard of
it!)

Dad insisted that Barry follow him down
into

the garden so he could
show him the proposed spot. Harry, after muttering something about
having to practise his magic tricks, also sloped off, proving my
point about how good he is at certain kinds of escapology. (Even
before the talent quest Harry was always practicing. He claimed it
was one of the burdens of being a prestidigitator. Practise makes
perfect he always said. Actually, I understood and agreed. The same
thing goes for writing.)

Mum and I were left alone with May.

‘
Boys and their toys, eh?’
laughed Mum. May smiled back self-consciously. Then followed, as
the books say, an awkward silence. May didn’t seem the sort of
person who’d be interested in a lengthy discussion about
barbecues.

‘
How long ago did Iris
die?’ I asked for the sake of saying something.

‘
Quite a long time before
Lawrence went to live in the home,’ May answered after more long,
dreary moments of silence, during which I started to wonder if
she’d even heard my question. ‘It must already be more than fifteen
years ago. They were both in their late sixties then. She
got

cancer. It hit Laurie very badly when she
died. Then, on top of that, his arthritis became worse and worse
until in the end he found it very difficult to get around.’

Mum nodded glumly. ‘Even the late sixties
aren’t very old these days,’ she said.

Mum and Dad were both on
the wrong side of forty themselves so the combination of the words
‘old’ and ‘age’ did not appeal to them
at
all
. Hence

my warning to Harry about his ‘old’
Houdini.

Based on Mum’s comment, Houdini was
still

positively youthful when he died.

‘
You’re right,’ said May.
‘But there’s no such thing as a disease that stops to consider its
victim’s age.’ (Yes, I know. HEAVY stuff. Sorry about that. One of
the burdens of being a writer. It’s not all sweets and confetti.
I’ll try to keep my narrative as light as possible but I suggest
you skip whatever bits you feel you need to.)

That was the end of that particular
sentence, but the full stop was not the end of what May wanted to
say. So much for her earlier reticence. I had the sudden
premonition that she could become unstoppable. It was like a tap
washer had split. (We’d had our fair share of leaking taps since
we’d moved in so I know what I’m talking about.) The water didn’t
start to gush exactly, it just began to drip. Most steadily.

‘
Up until then Lawrence did
most of the maintenance on the house himself,’ May said. ‘Barry
felt . . . ’ she glanced furtively into the gathering gloom of the
garden, ‘. . . Barry felt that Laurie’s standards were far too
high. Because

Laurie judged him you see and found Barry
wanting.’

‘
Did he?’ said Mum (I’m not
sure who the ‘he’ referred to, Laurie or Barry. You
decide.)

In the pause that followed Mum and I looked
at each other as furtively as May had done. It was as if we could
read each other’s minds. We could both ‘see’ what May was getting
it. She was saying something (between the lines) about Barry. But
what? And how could we ask her what she

really meant unless May herself was prepared
to

say?

It didn’t seem as if she was.

‘
Well, Laurie would have
got on well with Jim,’ Mum said at last. (Jim = Dad)

‘
Like a barbecue on fire,’
I said, making an extremely feeble joke.

Another pause. What the
stories call a
pregnant
pause. And then came the birth contractions, each
one several seconds apart. (I don’t hold with medical metaphors but
you can’t always get away from them.)

‘
. . . Laurie and Iris were
always out working in the

garden once Laurie retired . . .’ May
said.

‘
. . . they had lovely
flowerbeds each year . . .’

‘
. . . and mountains of
vegetables . . .’

‘
. . . it was very sad
that they didn’t get to enjoy their retirement together for long .
. .’

‘
. . . Barry’s right and
wrong about Laurie,’ May said, just as Mum was about to make
another neutral sounding comment. ‘On the surface he wasn’t a very
nice man after Iris passed away . . .’

‘
No?’ said Mum.

‘
. . . but underneath he
was the same as he’d always been . . .’

‘
Yes?’

‘
. . . an old-styled
gentleman.’

Was I right in thinking that once again we
were supposed to read between the lines here?

(DEEP THOUGHT WARNING #4) Reading between
the lines, did this mean that even though Laurie hadn’t seemed so
nice anymore, underneath he still was. And was May therefore
hinting that

the opposite was true of Barry, that he
seemed

okay on the surface but, underneath, he
wasn’t

nice at all? Or was I inventing all this
simply to keep boredom at bay?)

May’s next contraction was
swifter than the others. She seemed suddenly a lot more alert
-
on edge
- than
she had been up till now. Her words surprised Mum and me with their
hint of ferocity.

‘
I don’t think leopards can
change their spots so quickly and completely, do you?’ she
said.

Leopard spots

Maybe Mum was on more confident ground here.
Perhaps her legal mind was able to analyze the possibilities and
work out, with greater certainty than I could, who and what May was
talking about. I could only guess. Was Laurie the leopard? Or was
Barry? Was the reference to leopards a significant metaphor or just
a cliché?

‘
I wouldn’t have thought
so,’ Mum replied, slipping her professional voice easily into the
conversation. Maybe she was already subconsciously starting to
think of May as a client rather than just a neighbour. To date, Mum
had deftly tackled a few acrimonious cases of separation and
divorce. Had she suddenly sensed another one on the
horizon?

Whoever the leopard was, I wasn’t so sure
about them not being able to change their spots. Some things did
trip people over the edge and change them completely. Good people
turning bad, bad people turning good.

There was a story in that. Probably lots
of

stories.

‘Laurie never accepted that Iris was dead,’
May suddenly said. ‘That always bothered me.’

‘
You don’t mean he thought
she was really still alive?’ I said, feeling a bit freaked out
myself at the idea of that. ‘Did he imagine she was talking to him
or something?’

I was reminded of Harry’s
botched séance and how, for a short while, the experience of it had
seemed so creepily real. How would I have dealt with a dead and
disembodied voice if it
had
spoken to me through a medium, especially a
medium called Harry?

‘
No,’ said May, ‘not
exactly. But . . .’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dad
and Barry sauntering back to the house. May must have spotted them
too.

‘
. . .
not long before Laurie left,’ she said, speeding up, ‘he let slip
to me that he was still waiting to hear from Iris and was really
aggrieved that she hadn’t been in touch with him. It seemed almost
as if . . . well, as if she’d broken some kind of promise to him.’
(Now it was definitely starting to sound like séance stuff. Later
on I wrote in my writing journal - something every serious writer
should have - that
May gave birth to a
notion that had never seen the light of day
before
. Totes melodramatic, I know, and
still in a medical vein but it seemed so accurate a description at
the

time.) ‘But perhaps Laurie was losing his
mind and that’s why his son Mitchell wanted him to go up north.
That’s what Barry believes, anyway. Gaga he called him.’

‘
Sounds as if it would have
been far better if he

had stayed around here,’ said Mum. ‘Gone to
Stately Havens like you said. Everything would

have been far more familiar to him.’

‘
Laurie certainly never
wanted to leave,’ May reiterated. ‘In fact, he always insisted he
wanted to die in this house, his home. But we don’t always get to
choose what we want in life, do we?’

May was well and truly winding down now,
just at the point when what she was saying was becoming more
interesting. Even Harry, had he stayed to listen, would have
pricked up his ears at that latest bit. (Imagine if Laurie had died
in this house. Yikes! Harry would have been more right than he
knew.) Dad and Barry were back from their barbeque sortie, their
loud voices already soaking up the sad atmosphere May’s story had
generated.

I surprised myself by asking May one last
question. I didn’t want her to have to feel that she had to cease
and desist just because the menfolk had returned. Barry
especially.

‘
When did Laurie leave?’ I
said.

‘
Late last year,’ May said
in a whisper, having to make a real effort now that Dad and Barry
were listening in, too. ‘Mitchell was trying to do his best,
encouraging his father to move north so they could be close to each
other. We shouldn’t blame him,’ she said. ‘Laurie lived alone here
until he turned eighty-one. It was obvious it couldn’t go on.
Something had to change. The house was starting to fall down around
him.’

‘
It’s not as bad as all
that,’ said Dad, typically focusing on the only thing that really
interested him, the bit about the house being close to collapse.
His ears were instinctively tuned to