Two Fridays in April (5 page)

It was to be another five years before Daphne met the man
she would marry, but she was introduced to her mother’s fiancé just a few weeks after Isobel’s revelation. Over the course of the lunch they shared she found Alex to be polite and well-spoken, and quite distant: before their coffees arrived she had come to the conclusion that he was as uninterested in her as she was in him, which didn’t upset her in the least.

Isobel’s second marriage took place, and she moved back to the city to live with Alex and his son, but apart from the fact that they now live closer to one another, relations have remained unaltered between her and Daphne.

Still the stiff little phone calls each week, still the less-frequent lunch dates. They discuss Isobel’s part-time job and Daphne’s full-time one, and Daphne enquires about Alex, and Isobel asks how Una is doing, and if Daphne has replaced the boiler yet.

They fill the time with talk, but there remains so much more unsaid between them.

After lunch her father drops her back to the office. Getting out of the car, she holds her jacket closed against the sharp-edged breeze that has begun to whip up. April can’t be trusted: yesterday she was opening windows when she got home from work, and shaking out rugs in the sunshine. She checks the sky and sees a bank of dark grey clouds advancing. Rain on the way, by the look of it.

In the office Joanna is shrugging on her coat. ‘I’ve got appointments all afternoon,’ she says, slinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘Have a good weekend, see you Monday.’

Mr Donnelly’s door is closed, which means he’s out of the
office. There’s no sign of William, who handles their out-of-town business, and who might be missing in action for days at a time. With Joanna’s departure, Daphne is left alone. She removes her jacket and sits at her desk, and watches the people passing by on the street outside.

She remembers how disconnected from everyone else she’d felt in the months after Finn’s death, how locked away with her pain that it seemed like she’d stepped off some kind of conveyor belt and left everyone else to carry on without her. Grief made an alien of her: she would overhear a burst of laughter and literally wonder what the sound was. She’d see someone smile and it would hold no significance, none at all. Was she ever to feel happiness again, or take pleasure in anything?

And during those first few dreadful months, she’d been useless at work. She’d gone through the motions, unable to summon up enthusiasm when showing properties, often forgetting to return calls or follow up on possible sales. On one occasion she’d actually burst into tears in the middle of a house-viewing with a newly-wed couple who were clearly mad about one another. Poor Mr Donnelly must surely have felt tempted for a while to pay her off, give her anything just to go away – but thankfully he’d stuck it out.

It will get easier, she’d told herself, and it has. Hasn’t it?

At half past three she closes her diary, switches off her computer, gives half a glass of water to the pink-leafed begonia George presented her with at Christmas. She checks her bag for a pen, and the glasses she’s begun to need for small print.

About to leave, she picks up the silver-framed photo of Finn that she’d taken a fortnight before he died. She holds it close to
her face, looks at the features she knew so well. Cheeks flushed and shining from what would turn out to be his last long bike ride. Pale brown hair pushed off his forehead a few seconds before, a gesture she had witnessed him making a thousand times.

The startling navy eyes, the first physical thing she noticed about him, despite her distress on the day they met. His father’s eyes, he told her, when she commented on them a few weeks later. Mo’s eyes are blue too, but much paler – the only facial feature she passed on to him was her longish nose.

Finn is smiling in the picture: bike rides did that to him. He wasn’t a natural driver, jerky and ill at ease behind the wheel of his cumbersome grey Volvo, happier by far when he was whizzing along on two wheels. Daphne worried about him when he drove, never envisaging the horrible irony of his losing his life on a bicycle.

After he died she got her father to take away the Volvo, unable to bear the sight of it in the driveway.
Do what you want with it
, she told him.
Just get it out of here
. Finn’s blue bicycle she left in the shop, together with all the new ones: unable to part with it, but too sad to contemplate seeing it without him.

Would it have made any difference if he’d cycled home on it that day? They’ll never know. The inquest report was ambiguous, the bin-lorry driver’s assertion that Finn had swerved into the path of his vehicle to avoid a cat unable to be corroborated or ruled out. Accidental death, the chairperson of the jury called it. Nobody wanting him dead, but he’d died all the same.

She sets down the photo and gathers her things together.
She locks up and walks down the alleyway to the yard where her red Beetle is parked and deposits her briefcase in the boot. Bridestone Avenue, according to her father – as good as Google Maps with all his driving – is located some two miles away, between the maternity hospital and the river.
You’d be better off leaving the car in Larkin Crescent, just off Bridestone
, he told her.
As far as I remember, Bridestone is pretty narrow; parking could be tricky
.

The streets are as busy as they were that morning, people already on the move for the weekend. Halfway to her destination Daphne realises she’s forgotten the first name of the man she’s going to meet. Something short, one syllable – Pat? Tim? John? As she turns onto Larkin Crescent,
Tom Wallace
pops abruptly into her head.

She drives slowly past neat houses, spots a small road off to the left. No cul-de-sac sign, but that must be it. She parks a little way beyond the turn and takes her briefcase from the back seat. Three minutes to four: she could hardly be more punctual.

She turns onto the narrow little road. Above her the sky is dark and heavy with cloud: rain on the way for sure. She remembers her umbrella, still presumably sitting in the boot of the car where she usually keeps it. She’s definitely not thinking straight today. No matter: the owner will be there to meet her. They always are.

He’s not there.

After her third press of the bell goes unanswered, she leans her briefcase against the door and walks up and down the short
cement path, rubbing her hands together. She should have worn her coat this morning. The wind is picking up; she can almost smell the rain. She debates going back to the car for her umbrella, and decides to chance it. He won’t be long.

The minutes tick on. By a quarter past four she’s had a good look around the outside. There’s no back garden to speak of, just a metre-wide paved pathway between the house and a beautiful shoulder-high old stone wall that runs along the rear of the property.

A fairly well-tended shrubbery sits off to the side of the house: a young budding clematis making its way up the wall, a pair of dwarf apple trees covered with blossom, a bay and a lavender and what looks like a fuchsia, hard to tell with no flower coming yet. One or two other plants she can’t identify, a few clutches of bluebells nestling under a graceful Japanese maple tree at the far end.

A small garage lies to the right of the property, a new-looking padlock on the door.

Twenty past four – where is he? At this rate it’ll be well after five by the time she finishes: all she needs today, to be up against the clock. She’ll ring him, tell him she’s in a rush. Should have done it sooner.

She scrolls through her phone contacts, but there’s no sign of him. No, that can’t be – she always adds new clients to her phone as soon as they come in, keeps them there for as long as she needs to. She scrolls again, but he’s definitely not there. Had she been so distracted by the anniversary that she’d forgotten to put him in?

Evidently she had – but surely she has the page Mr Donnelly
gave her with his number on it. She searches her bag but there’s no sign of it either: great.

She calls the office – maybe he’s rung to cancel.
One new message
, the answering machine tells her,
sent at three thirty-seven
. A few minutes after she left – must be him.

It is.
This is Tom Wallace for Daphne
, he says in the deep voice she remembers.
We have an appointment at four. I’m afraid I’ve been delayed, but I’ll be there as soon as I can
.

As soon as he can, whenever that’ll be. She’ll give him another few minutes and then she’ll go, drop into the office for his number after she’s been to the cemetery, make a new appointment. Not the end of the world.

To distract herself she has another walk around. The house is built on an oddly shaped plot, roughly a quarter-acre in size, the daisy-speckled lawn petering almost to a point at one end where the front garden wall meets a straggled hedge. There’s a tiny weather-beaten wooden shed tucked as far as possible into this narrow corner.

The shed door is unlocked but thoroughly stuck – anyone’s guess when it was opened last. Through the little cobwebby window she makes out a hedge clippers and a rusting watering can dangling from hooks, a jumble of battered paint tins and a dented wheelbarrow into which has been piled a ramshackle heap of dust-covered bottles. Stacks of newspapers lean against the end wall, next to tottering towers of plastic plant pots. Has he never heard of recycling?

She turns and regards the house again. The front of it is pebble-dashed, with what looks like a relatively new red-tiled roof and three big windows, two of them bay, all shielded with
heavily embossed net curtains that don’t allow a look inside. The wooden front door has been painted dark blue, with a quartet of stained-glass panes set into the top third.

Around the back the windows are similarly veiled in net, giving her no clue as to the rooms within. The rear door is white uPVC with frosted-glass insets; she can make out shadowy shapes beyond them but no more.

She walks to the little wooden gate and looks out. The cul-de-sac is quiet, no sign or sound of life from the dozen or so houses that make it up, the residents presumably out at work. A couple of cars are parked in driveways, a few others pulled up close to garden walls.

She feels a wet splotch on her cheek, and then another: just what she needs. She heads back to the house and presses up against the front wall, but it provides next to no shelter. The drops quickly turn into a proper shower. Her jacket becomes patched with damp, and within a minute water is dripping from the ends of her hair.

This is ridiculous: she’s waited long enough. She picks up her briefcase and is about to stride down the path when she hears a car turning into the cul-de-sac. Horrible timing – another half-minute and she would have been gone. Now she’ll be watching the clock to finish, but she can hardly tell him to get lost.

She watches the car approach, waits while it pulls in close to the garden wall. Let’s see what he has to say for himself.

‘Sorry, I’m so sorry.’ He scrambles out and slams the door. ‘I called your work but I only got a machine, I’m really sorry, something came up.’ He pushes open the gate and strides towards her, hand extended. ‘Tom Wallace, you must be Daphne.’

Dark hair, grey suit, half a foot taller than her. A not-unpleasant waft of something woody as he approaches. She summons as much of a smile as she can and shakes his hand: much warmer than hers. Of course it is – sitting in his heated car while she stood shivering on his doorstep.

‘God, you’re frozen.’ He stabs a key into the front-door lock. ‘Come inside – I’m afraid there’s no heat, but at least you’ll be out of the elements.’

No heat: this afternoon is getting better. She follows him over the threshold and into a short, narrow hallway that smells strongly of tobacco.

‘Hang on,’ he says, vanishing around a corner. She takes in the awful flock wallpaper, the wide old wooden floorboards, the pine doors leading off to her left and right. The air is frigid with cold, no sign of a radiator – who has a house without central heating these days?

She presses a light switch, but the bulb suspended above her within its dusty fringed shade doesn’t react. The tobacco smell is overpowering: he must smoke like a chimney. She’ll have to do something about that if prospective buyers aren’t to be put off right from the start.