‘I’m so sorry’ is what people mainly said, or sometimes ‘I am sorry for your loss.’ The Indian newsagent, whom Mary was surprised and pleased to see, said that; so did the man down the street whose name she didn’t know, who’d been smiley and friendly; so did the two of Albert’s old colleagues who came. Greatly to Mary’s surprise, so did the Polish builder who had come to the house to give a quote for the renovations. It must be a Polish thing, she thought. Maybe they liked funerals. She would have to make up her mind what to do about the house, and she was strongly minded to take the Pole’s quote, renovate, and then sell; the house would be worth, what, two million pounds? It was ridiculous, but it was also what it was. She caught herself having these thoughts and felt ashamed. ‘With her mother not cold in the ground’ – but in fact her mother had already gone into the flames.
Graham, looking very smart in a suit, was standing close by as if he was keeping an eye on her. He was also looking, as he often did, faintly knowing and ironic. Her son looked as if he thought he could tell what you were thinking. Well, what I’m thinking is, My mum’s dead, and I’m rich.
I
t took two weeks for Mary to decide what to do with 42 Pepys Road. After the funeral, she had a small collapse. Nothing dramatic, just that she felt tired all the time, and found it impossible to make even the smallest decisions. Every choice that she could delegate to Alan, she did. When she couldn’t, she boiled with indecision. One symptom was that she found she was unable to decide what to cook. She’d been looking forward to getting back to cooking, and because she had lived on ready meals while her mother was dying, being back in her own kitchen making proper food felt like a good thing to do. There was also the fact that Ben, though he obviously would not say so, because that would involve communicating in something other than a grunt, liked her cooking and greatly preferred it to his father’s non-cooking.
Perhaps for that very reason, she couldn’t muster the mental or physical energy to cook properly. The need to decide what to make for supper would leave her standing in front of the fridge for ten minutes, not feeling depressed or frustrated or angry or resentful about having to make the meal, not consciously feeling anything, just unable to choose between pasta and a ready-meal shepherd’s pie. She could see her cookbooks on the shelf, Nigella and Nigel and Delia and Jamie, the unopened books standing there as if reproachfully, their arms folded. At Sainsbury’s in Maldon she would stand in front of the frozen food cabinet, unable to discriminate between the Bird’s Eye fish fingers,
twenty-four for £4.98, and the Sainsbury’s own-brand fish fingers, same-size box, in all probability made by the same people, for £4.49. But what if they weren’t the same? But what if they were? She took to calling Alan at work and asking him what he wanted, so she didn’t have to make up her mind. It was the same with watching TV, with deciding which radio station to have on in the background, with choosing what clothes to wear. Everything just seemed like a huge effort. Actual grief would hit her too, completely unpredictably, catching her as she heard ‘Love Me Do’ on an oldies station or as she was standing in a queue at the bank and saw a woman of about her mother’s age, hunched over to fish something out of her handbag in exactly the way her mother had used to do – grief would come and lift her off her feet, like a wave; but the fatigue and demoralisation she felt were different from that. They were there all the time, like the weather.
There was no miracle, she didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly feel different, but there were at first moments, then hours when the feeling lifted. The waves of grief still came but she didn’t feel knackered and indecisive all the time. She made Jamie’s guinea fowl with fresh oranges. It was revolting – the recipe didn’t work, it was one of Jamie’s duff ones – in fact it was an obviously stupid idea, chicken with oranges? – but she felt so much better because she had found the energy to make it. Gradually she found she could make small decisions, then bigger ones, then one evening she found she wasn’t just ready to think about what to do about the house: she found that she had already decided. The Polish builder didn’t have experience running a job quite this size; but he had done all the constituent parts, he had experienced contacts who could help, he had offered the lowest quote (by 30 per cent) and he had come to her mother’s funeral.
She talked it through with Alan. ‘I’m all in favour of buying British,’ he said, ‘but a third cheaper is a third cheaper.’ Then she called the Pole on his mobile. He sounded pleased and surprised and a week later began work on number 42, starting by stripping down and redecorating the rooms at the top of the house. And now he was living there too, after a conversation he’d had with Mary when she came down to check on progress with the house – something they’d agreed she would do
once every two to four weeks. Not minding about being checked up on was one of Zbigniew’s ways of being different from English builders.
‘I don’t like it being unoccupied,’ Mary said. She disliked the thought of this house, which had in her memory never not had her mother in it, now lying empty. The sense of someone missing was too big; it left too big a gap in the world.
‘This is easy to fix,’ said Zbigniew. ‘I can stay here. Mattress on floor. I don’t mind. That way, there’s always someone in the building. It’s more secure, it makes your insurance cheaper because the house is occupied’ – Mary hadn’t thought of that – ‘and I can get to work earlier and finish later so the job is done more quickly.’
‘Well, let me talk it over with my husband, but it seems like a good thought,’ said Mary. And then two days later she had called back and said yes.
That was how Zbigniew came to be doing up, and living in, 42 Pepys Road. The work question was a little awkward for Zbigniew, because some of the work would require Piotr’s crew, and he and Piotr’s relationship had never fully recovered from Davina. But they agreed a schedule. It was good of Piotr, who did not take a cut, and in effect by doing this was taking the decisive step in letting Zbigniew set up on his own – in other words, they were getting ready to let their work go in separate directions. So be it. The crew weren’t free until later, so Zbigniew would do the single-man jobs, the fiddly redecorating, at the start, and the manpower and specialist jobs in a couple of months’ time.
There was a loft, but Mary and Alan had decided that they wouldn’t fix that up themselves – which was good news for Zbigniew, because although he had worked on lofts, he wasn’t sure he could have run a conversion project as the man in charge. Ditto the basement: Zbigniew had done basements, had had the experience of sweating London clay out of his pores for weeks, and he wasn’t at all sorry not to be doing it here. In both cases (though he didn’t know this) the reason was that the inheritance tax bill after Petunia’s death had been so big that they had no capital left to do up the house before selling it. Alan could have borrowed the money, but they both felt there was something surreal
about inheriting a lot of cash and immediately going into debt as a result. Alan and Mary were old-fashioned like that. So Zbigniew was working on his own, beginning with the small rooms at the top of the house, stripping the wallpaper, taking out a strange plasterboard partition that had been there since Mary’s childhood and that made one of the small bedrooms into two even smaller rooms, ripping out the wiring, and painting the walls with test colours for Mary to vet on her next visit to Pepys Road. Zbigniew’s target was to finish the work in about four months.
For the first few days Zbigniew worked on number 42 Pepys Road, he was tense, without being able to understand why; and then it occurred to him that it was about Davina. As if he expected at any moment to hear the doorbell ring and find her on the step outside, or waiting for him when he got back to the flat. When his mobile rang, he thought it was her; when he saw a woman of the right age with the same hair colour, he had a flash of what he thought was recognition, until he had a better look and realised the truth. His nerves were juddering with the expected confrontation. This time, he had decided, he would not be calm and moderate. If she had another go at unbreaking up, he would be angry and rude. That should work.
He liked working alone, but it was strange to be on his own in an empty house all day. It was not precise or difficult work, and it was physically tiring in exactly the manner he found welcome. Most of the house had not been touched in a long time; the wallpaper must be close to fifty years old – Mary had said she never remembered a time before it. At points it crumbled in his hands as he tried to strip it off, sending a fine powder over him, the dry-damp smell of paper and old glue. The wiring was as old as any he had ever seen; again, half a century at least. It too brought smells with it, the ancient dust and brick residue from inside the walls. Coils of wiring, stacks of wallpaper were now mounded on the floor. Mary had ordered a skip and arranged three months’ permission to park it outside the house; the skip was easy to arrange, the permission, from the council, was inevitably slower, so for now Zbigniew was on his own in the house with the rubble and rubbish. He took to playing the radio loudly for the sensation of company;
because the wiring on his floor was out, he set the radio up on the downstairs landing, just outside the bedroom where Petunia had died. Every time he went past that doorway, he had a flash of memory of the old woman, dying in bed; an image of the irreversibility of life and time passing; of the truth that not everything we do can be undone.
He was back on speaking terms with Piotr, but their relationship hadn’t really been repaired. His old friend seemed the same, looked the same, and sounded the same; but something in the balance of forces between them had shifted, and talking to him was not the same. When he allowed himself to think about it – which he did briefly and with reluctance, and out of the side of his mind, as if out of the side of his eye – he could feel his irritation with Piotr, still there from the night in the Polish club. It wasn’t that Piotr had been wrong about him and Davina; it was the fact that his friend had obviously been nursing these angry feelings about him for some time. So although they had now made up, the idea lingered with him that the angry, judgemental Piotr was the real Piotr. He didn’t want to be friends with that person. Perhaps, when they were back in Poland and all this was in the past – when the London interludes of their lives were over and they were back in their real Polish lives – they would be true friends again. Perhaps. But in the meantime he could not talk to Piotr about the Davina he saw hiding behind every wheelie bin, waiting to jump out at him.
And then something did jump out at him, a big surprise, but it wasn’t the one for which Zbigniew had been bracing himself. There was a room at the top of the house which had obviously been unused for many years and which had once been a study or office. It contained a large old desk, well dusted but neglected, and both older and of better quality than it seemed at first glance; in fact, that desk might really be worth something. A set of shelves held old crime paperbacks whose spines had cracked and faded. There was a filing cabinet full of utility and council bills and not much else. The wallpaper in this room was in worse condition than anywhere else in the house, another sign that it hadn’t been used much. Zbigniew decided to move the cabinet out of the room and strip the wallpaper and check the wiring.
As he ran his fingers around the loose edges where the paper was
coming unstuck he noticed that there was something not quite right about the feel of the wall. He tested by tapping, and found that his first impression had been correct: at one point the wall made a hollow noise. Zbigniew tapped around the wall and found that there seemed to be a hollow space, about the size of a wardrobe, on one of the walls. Starting at that point, he tore the wallpaper off and saw that there was a thin film of a different type of plaster covering a hole in the brickwork. Zbigniew paused and thought for a moment. He could leave things as they were and cover the wall with paper and no one would ever know, or … Even as he asked himself the question, he knew what he was going to do. Zbigniew went downstairs to pick up his goggles and his sledgehammer. Then he planted his feet and swung at the wall.
The plastering had not been well done: it was dry, and the whole covering exploded into fragments. A battered suitcase, which had been flat against the hole in the brick, fell out onto the floor. Zbigniew puffed his cheeks and put down the hammer and sat down beside the suitcase. It had a small built-in lock and no evident key, but by now he was not in the mood to be slowed down or deterred. Zbigniew took a pick out of his tool kit and went at the lock, which was not a complex piece of work, a standard tumbler model. It took about five minutes to undo the lock and open the suitcase.
It was full of banknotes. More banknotes than Zbigniew had ever seen gathered together in one place. The notes were all worth £10 and Zbigniew, his mind zooming all over the place, found that he could make no sensible estimate of how much cash was in the case. Only one thing to do, count it. Best time to count it? Now. He sat down on the floor beside the suitcase and got started. The counting was much harder work than it might have been, because although the money had once been clamped together by rubber bands, there were two problems. For one thing, many of the bands had eroded, and the money was now loose. For another, the clumps of cash were irregular in size. They hadn’t been counted and then put in bundles; the bundles were random. So there was no alternative except to flick through the dusty, chalky notes one by one and make a tally after every ten – after every hundred pounds. In this way Zbigniew found out that the suitcase
contained £500,000. He also found out, because he emptied the case to count out the money, whom it had belonged to. On the bottom of the case there was a label saying it was the property of an Albert Howe, Esquire. The label and the handwriting looked old but not antique. Mrs Leatherby’s mother had been, in Zbigniew’s estimate, in her eighties when she died; so his best guess was that the suitcase and the money belonged to her husband, Mrs Leatherby’s father.