‘Of course, it’s different if you’ve got family close by, like your mum had. Our two boys are both grown up and gorn away, long time ago now. When they have families of their own, you know, it’s hard because they get so busy and they know we’re alright, we’ve got each other, we can take care of ourselves, so we don’t really see them that much. Christmases, yes, and they came for her seventieth birthday last year, but that’s about it really. And it does make you wonder, don’t it, all this stuff in the paper about people being found dead and nobody taking care of them, it just makes you wonder about what might happen in the future.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Anyway, I mustn’t stand here gassing all day, she’ll wonder what’s happened to me. I’ll be on my way. Do you want that stuff back?’
This last bit was thrown casually over his shoulder, a parting question so innocuous, but he turned then and fixed me with a beady eye. Oh, so he’d not thrown it out, then? Effectively he’d come in here and stolen all my mum’s fresh food out of the fridge. I was surprised he’d left the eggs and butter behind.
‘No, of course not,’ I said.
‘Righto, I’ll be off. You know where we are if you need anything – give me a ring if you need us, yes? I’ll check on her post and stuff if you like. Righto, then. See you.’
I heard the front door slam. It hadn’t slammed when he’d come in. He must have shut the door quietly, crept through the hallway treading carefully on the bare wooden boards. I didn’t want him to check her post. I didn’t want him to have a key. I would call round and ask for it on the way out.
I looked back at the silent kitchen, everything in its place. Everything waiting to be used again, looking back at me expectantly. I had a sudden thought and opened the cupboard where she kept her dry goods – tea bags, cereals… right at the top was a commemorative tea caddy: the wedding of HRH Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, 1981. In here she kept her housekeeping money, the money she kept by from her pension to pay for groceries and other incidentals. I’d set up direct debits on her bank account to pay all the bills, and I checked them once every few months to make sure everything was covered and being paid. When I got her shopping, I would take the money from the tin and put the receipt behind in its place. I would round it up or down, never bothering with coins because it all evened itself out in the end anyway. When I’d been here last Sunday there had been eighty pounds in here in twenty pound notes. I’d taken out a twenty and replaced it with a ten pound note from my purse, because the shopping had come to a total of twelve pounds ninety eight. When I’d come yesterday, though, I’d been so tired after working late that I’d forgotten to do it; the receipt was still at the bottom of my bag.
In the jar was a grand total of twenty pounds. A single twenty-pound note. Fifty pounds had gone since the last time I looked – a few days ago. For a moment I stood there looking at the single note, wondering if I was mistaken. Wondering what she might have spent it on.
After that I went to the bureau in the dining room, the bottom drawer of which contained all the important stuff: her passport, bank books, birth certificate. I rifled through it briefly but even at a glance I could see that it was all still there. That was a relief; so maybe I had imagined it? Perhaps there had been less in there when I’d seen it, or I was getting confused with another day? Or maybe she’d had the window cleaner round, or put some money in a charity envelope?
Fifty pounds, though?
I looked around the rest of the house, not really sure what I was looking for. Her bedroom had that quiet silence about it that suggested nobody had been in here in some time. The clothes that hung in the wardrobe were old, no longer in regular use: a sparkly cocktail top, heavy with silver beading. A long black skirt. She’d worn this outfit to my twenty-first birthday meal. Why had she even kept it? There was no way she would have worn this again. And other clothes that I remembered her wearing – a blazer that she used to wear to work sometimes, before she retired. Shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe for the woman who never went out of her front door.
The spare room was full of boxes that she’d never bothered to unpack when she moved here all those years ago. ‘One day,’ she’d say, as though she was waiting for all the social engagements and frivolities to die down before she could properly settle in. It all looked undisturbed.
Well. There was no delaying it – as much as I hated confrontations of any sort, this was one I could not put off any longer.
He looked surprised to see me when he opened the door. ‘Everything alright?’ He was chewing on something, and I wondered if it was a sandwich made with Mum’s bread.
‘Hello again. I just remembered, I need to get the key back from you. After all, there’s no need for you to trouble with the house now Mum’s gone, is there?’
‘D’you not want me to check the post? Save you coming up here all the time?’
‘It’s fine, really. I’m not that far away.’
‘What if there’s an emergency?’
‘If there’s an emergency,’ I said, firmly, wondering what on earth such an emergency could be now that Mum was dead, ‘you can ring me, can’t you?’
He looked suddenly crestfallen. ‘Oh. I see. Righto, then. Hold on.’
He left the door ajar and went back into the hallway, leaving me on the step. A cooking smell, not a pleasant one, came through to me on a gust of warm air. The hallway was newly decorated, the wallpaper of that curious furry embossed type – what was it called? A weird name. Ana-something…
‘Here you go, then,’ he said, coming back up the hallway. He was unthreading a Yale door key from a key ring containing several others. I wondered if it was his normal key ring, or whether he just collected the keys to other people’s houses.
I held out my hand and he pressed the key into the palm, hard enough for it to hurt.
‘There’s one other thing, Len,’ I said, dreading this bit but knowing I had to ask. ‘Do you know if the window cleaner came round this week? Or anyone else Mum might have given money to?’
‘No, Ted comes round first week of the month usually. Why?’
Well, he did ask, I thought. ‘Mum had some money in a tin, and most of it’s gone. It was there when I visited her last. Any ideas?’
I said it casually and, as much as he was trying to pull off the ‘kindly old gent next door’ thing, he was eyeing me with bright, suspicious eyes.
‘We did some shopping for her Monday,’ he said. ‘We told her we were going into town and she said she wanted some bits and pieces. She gave me cash and I gave her the receipt. Did you not find it?’
‘What things?’
‘Hmm. Well, let me think. She wanted a steak from the butcher. And batteries for the wireless… oh, and three books of first class stamps. There was some other stuff… I can’t remember it all.’
I looked at the key in my hand and wondered if this was an argument I really needed to be having. It was only fifty quid, after all. ‘Thanks, Len,’ I said. ‘I know she really appreciated everything you did for her.’
‘S’alright,’ he said. ‘You know we were always happy to help. Any time, love. You sure you don’t want us to keep an eye on things next door?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get the post redirected anyway.’ I wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible when a person was deceased, but I didn’t want him looking for an excuse to get back inside the house.
‘You sure you want to do that? I mean, we can always…’
‘No, Len. Honestly, you’ve done enough. Thanks.’
I turned and started to head down the path, back to the car. It was dark, and cold, and I wanted to get home now, shut the door and be on my own where nobody could see me.
Work today was distracting, and monumentally dull. I feel as though I am beyond all this now, as though I have a more entrancing destiny before me than dealing with council finances.
Patience is one of my strongest virtues, I’ve always thought. In the year following my father’s death, I found it difficult to engage at school. It all felt so hideously pointless. I got into trouble regularly, although I was never disruptive. If the subject failed to interest me, I sat in the class and stared straight ahead, relentlessly patient and tirelessly disconsolate, regardless of what the rest of the class was tasked with doing.
‘Friedland,’ the master would say, ‘are you not going to make an attempt?’
‘No,’ I’d say, if I replied at all.
‘No,
sir
.’
I would stare back with what they must have thought of as insolence. To me it was indifference.
‘That’s it, I’ve had enough. You shall go to the headmaster’s office.’
This happened on an almost daily basis. I was caned. These were the days when caning was not only allowed but, in the British public school system, a tradition. I didn’t even feel the pain, not in any way that mattered. I didn’t feel the humiliation. The punishments had no effect on me at all. The headmaster knew I wasn’t stupid. At first, he was even sympathetic – having lost his own father at a young age – but his patience only lasted for a short while.
Stiff upper lip, that was the ticket. Putting the needs of your
compadres
ahead of yourself. Playing the game.
And I wasn’t playing.
In the end he almost expected me; if I wasn’t in his office before lunch he started to wonder where I was. My mother was called in. It was suggested that I might like to transfer to a different school, that I might be better suited elsewhere. A fresh start. My mother stared vacantly ahead, numbed by whichever benzodiazepine they were trying her on this month, while I stood behind her in the headmaster’s office, hands sullenly in my pockets even though I’d been caned for just such insouciance the day before.
‘She doesn’t care,’ I said.
‘Friedland,’ the headmaster said, ‘you are present only at your mother’s request. You are expected to hold your silence here.’
‘I do care,’ she said, though the tone of her voice suggested otherwise. ‘I just don’t know what to do about it.’
The money to send me to the school had been my father’s. She had his pension, and a payout, but she was not used to having to deal with matters such as this. She had never worked, never had to pay a bill, never had to speak to anybody about anything more taxing than what to have for dinner and where to go on holiday.
The headmaster dismissed us both shortly afterwards, recognising another brick wall behind all the others I’d constructed in the past few weeks.
In the end, I made everything much easier for him. Two days after the meeting with Mother, a sixth form boy passed some comment on my father and my behaviour as our paths crossed in the corridor. Later in the evening I found him alone, took him into one of the empty classrooms and punched him until he was unconscious and bleeding.
The effort of finding another school willing to take me was beyond my mother. Additionally, as she told me on more than one occasion, since she had no intention of getting a job, she needed to save what was left of Father’s life insurance payout for her living expenses.
And so I was enrolled into the nearest comprehensive for the remainder of my school years.
At lunchtime Vaughn called to invite me to the Red Lion. It was the first time we’ve been in contact since the dinner party, although I did send him a text thanking him for a super evening. Maybe he interpreted it as sarcastic.
We sat with our pints in front of us. The television bolted precariously over the corner of the bar was showing Sky Sports News, an endless jumble of primary colours and a man in a suit mouthing no doubt vital bits of information about teams I have no interest in.
‘How’s Audrey?’ I asked at last.
‘Alright, I think,’ he said.
I drank some bitter, grimacing and thinking it would taste a whole lot better with a cheese and pickle baguette to soak it up. I looked hopefully towards the bar, but the barmaid, an appropriately barrel-shaped woman who was wearing red tights and calf-length black boots that looked alarming on one so short, was nowhere to be seen.
‘It was a good meal,’ I said. ‘And nice to see your house.’
People say things like this. Compliment each other, comment on the decor in their respective houses, even when they think it’s hideous. As I do.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘she’s not really alright. She’s gone a bit funny.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘She’s a bit – well, distant. After the other night.’
‘Oh,’ I said, because I couldn’t think of any more appropriate response.
‘I’ve telephoned her a couple of times. She answered once, and she was terribly vague. When I went round to her flat she wasn’t there.’
‘Maybe she was just out,’ I said helpfully. ‘Or busy doing something else.’
Vaughn snorted. ‘I can’t imagine what.’
‘Do you still think she’s having an affair?’
He looked up from his pint, startled. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, you were asking me about it just the other day. You were talking about taking her to Weston-super-Mare in the caravan. Do you remember?’
‘Oh. Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Really Vaughn,’ I said. ‘Your memory is going.’
‘I’ve been a bit distracted,’ he said, and to my surprise he put his head in his hands on the table and his shoulders started shaking. I stared at him with curiosity. In the Red Lion, of all places.
‘Vaughn,’ I said. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’
He sniffed and retrieved a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, dabbed viciously at his eyes and expectorated loudly into it. I shuddered at this display but it seemed to do the trick and he composed himself once again.
‘I’m really very fond of Audrey,’ he said at last.
‘I know that,’ I said, although what goes on between Vaughn’s ears is as much a mystery to me as the thoughts of any other person. ‘She’s a lovely lady.’
‘I think we’re growing apart. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Maybe you should take things to the next level,’ I said, borrowing unfamiliar vocabulary from one of the appalling television shows I happen to find myself watching on occasion. ‘Maybe you should ask her to marry you, or something?’