Quiet Neighbors (19 page)

“Such a wonderful evening,” he said. “Two of the lads—Tom and … Golly, I wish I could remember … But they brought a little table-top cooker and set it up under the bin store. We made a feast on those two rings you wouldn't believe. Well, Miranda did. Beef en daube and a—”

“Mum never ate beef!” Eddy said.

“Look at her plate!” said Lowell, pointing.

And even Jude could see that there were bones pushed to the side of the plate in front of Miranda. She was tapping ash into a small pool of something dark—sauce or gravy—and smiling broadly at whoever was behind the camera. Her hair was a cloud of absolute black around her head and her eyes were just as dark, the way the camera had caught her, only a pinpoint of light in each. Her mouth was wide open in laughter. Jude couldn't see the cherry-red lips Maureen had mentioned, but inside the wide mouth more points of light glittered. The phrase that sprang to Jude's mind was
she-devil
.

“One of the best nights of my life,” Lowell was saying. “Which probably says quite a lot about my life, dear me, yes. But looking at their faces, perhaps it wasn't just me.”

Jude looked closely then. And he was right; they were shining with more than heat or alcohol. Bathed in the soft light of the lanterns, they looked even younger than they had on the beach. Even Lowell looked young, his teeth lighter and his hair darker. And he had only a shirt on, missing the top layers of cardigan and jacket Jude had never seen him without.

“The wonder of it was that I knew it at the time,” Lowell said. “I knew that very evening it was one of the special moments. Well, actually, I thought it was the start of something, but I knew how special
that
was. Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.”

“Bullshit,” said Eddy. “What about what you don't know can't hurt you?”

“What are the names of them all?” Jude said. “Tom, I recognise. And John … ”

“Talport!” said Lowell. “Johnny Talport. And Miranda looking marvellous there. Inez behind the camera, as usual. And that's a couple who cycled down from Edinburgh.”

“Ouch,” Eddy said.

“Calum and Sandra? Sarah? And those two were from Dumfries. Inez and Miranda met them when they went on a bus trip one day to see the Ruthwell cross. I have no idea what their names are.”

“Another couple, were they?” Eddy said, peering closely. Jude knew what she was wondering—whether the man might have hooked up with Miranda—but Lowell squirmed.

“It might seem tawdry now, but it truly was not, dear child. It was a wonderful summer. Sunny and hot day after day. Inez hasn't really done it justice, interleaving all the photographs of autumn when the rains came. There wasn't a shower from June to September.”

“Tawdry?” said Eddy. “Like an orgy, you mean?”

“It was an innocent time,” Lowell said. “Love was in the air. We were happy and the sun shone and young people came and went, sang and swam.”

Eddy was almost at the end of the album now. There were more pages of the beach and the sky and the mud flats, then two double-page spreads of what looked like a village show: two young men shearing sheep while a ring of onlookers watched them; children jumping over lumpy grass in hessian sacks with their hair flying up; a beer-tent table covered in empty glasses with a wasp floating in the dregs of a pint; and a long trestle table with vegetables laid out
in formation and a rosette in the foreground, bright yellow with the light catching its gold script:
Five potatoes of any kind, Commended
.

“She was a wonderful photographer, wasn't she?” Jude said.

“Best dead wasp I've seen today,” said Eddy. “
Here's
one of Mum. About bloody time!”

“I took that,” Lowell said.

And Jude could tell the difference. The background was half wall and half window, so that one of the women was silhouetted and one
was not. Miranda stood against the white wall, grinning again, her red lips obvious this time. The woman she had her arms around showed up mostly as a nimbus of brilliant hair, almost pink in the light. She was tiny and Miranda's tanned arms, bare under a rainbow-coloured vest top, engulfed her.

“She looks so very alive,” Lowell said.

Jude gave him a glance. To her the little pink and gold woman looked like a ghost, or an angel. But of course he was talking about Miranda.

“Yeah, that's the best one,” said Eddy. “Can I copy it?”

“I wish I had made more of an effort,” Lowell said. “I despise most modern ways, but it is rather marvellous to know whether one's pictures have failed before it's too late to try again.”

“I miss going to Boots in the rain and getting the packet back though,” Jude said. “Sitting in the car remembering what sunshine felt like.”

“I miss the Christmas Day film,” Lowell said. “The whole family—the whole country—all sitting down to watch something no one had ever seen before. Box of chocolates to pass around. Everyone dashing for the lavatory during the adverts, loath to miss anything.”

“And all for sixpence if you showed your ration book,” said Eddy, making Jude and Lowell laugh.

“Right then, Lowell,” said Jude. “Let's shake these names out of your memory. They'll be in there somewhere.”

“Why?” said Lowell.

“Because young Eddy here has had a wonderful idea,” Jude said, ignoring Eddy's face going still. “She's going to try to get in touch with everyone who knew her mother throughout her life. Most of them will be in Ireland, of course, but some of them will be elsewhere, including some in Scotland from that summer. So.”

“Tom, Johnny Talport, Inez and Miranda, Gary and Paula—good heavens. You could be a sergeant major, my dear. Your wish seems to be my command. Dear me, yes. Those I'm sure of, but as to the rest … ” He shrugged.

“What was Gary's
other
name?” said Eddy. “Just for practice,” she added, at Lowell's look.

“I've got a better practice for you,” Jude said. “Complete this list: Etta Bell, Archie Patterstone, Lorna McLennan, and … ”

“Wait!” said Eddy. She grabbed Lowell's crossword pen from the middle of the table and started scribbling on the border of the
Telegraph
. Jude ignored her.

“What on earth?” Lowell said. “Those aren't my summer guests. Those are Wigtown worthies from days of yore.”

Eddy threw the pen down again.

“Gravestone names?” she said. “Jude, I told you to go to Glas—”

“Tom Treserrick!” said Lowell, suddenly. “And I've just remembered that they put up a little talent show too. Inez made playbills. I must still have one, and there will be surnames there, certainly.”

Eddy was on her feet before he had finished talking, and they left together. Jude heard them in the drawing room, drawers opening and shutting. She stood and crossed to peer in the fridge, see if she could scrape together something better for dinner than bacon sandwiches.

The fog was even thicker when she set off home. Deadening and clammy, it settled on her clothes and condensed on her face so she had to wipe it away.
The three of us could be happy
. Could they? Could a life made up of nothing more than nights like this one be a whole life? She thought so. Lowell would even have got the Volvo out and trundled her home, but he was over the limit after wine and whisky, and walking was safer when it was this bad.

Within minutes, she began to wonder. She had borrowed a torch but that only made it worse, a thick pale cone ahead of her like a candy floss and the dark even darker, so she switched it off and went into the middle of the road to walk the white line. It appeared out of the emptiness two paces ahead and disappeared under her feet while she fell forward. And although she knew there were houses on either side, the silence was so total and the hazy blobs of window light so faint that she began to feel like the only person here. The only person alive. She quickened her pace. Surely someone would be walking a dog or coming home from the pub, dragging a wheeliebin up or down a drive.

As she approached the turn-off to the cemetery she slowed down and moved to the edge again, waiting for the kerb to curve away at the mouth of the lane. It was further than she thought. She kept walking and then all of a sudden she found the road bending to the left and a lowered kerb with yellow painted studs to help wheelchairs.

She stopped dead. This wasn't it. She had taken a wrong turning somewhere.

She tried to laugh to herself. “Walk around London no problem and lost in Wigtown!” she said. But the muffled sound of her voice unnerved her, and when she turned around and retraced her steps she knew her heart was racing.

For twenty minutes she walked slowly and calmly. If she got back to the main street before eleven, she told herself, she would go into the pub and ask someone. But that was crazy! What would she ask? And anyway she couldn't
find
the main street. She had lost track of her twists and turns now. For all she knew she was out of the town completely and heading up the country road towards Newton Stewart, a sitting duck if anyone was driving the other way. She walked to the edge, saw the pavement and a glimpse of a garden gate, and knew at least that she was still in the town somewhere.

Just once she heard footsteps ahead of her.

“Terrible night,” she called out. It was how the Scots greeted each other in bad weather and she was learning. No one answered, though. The footsteps only quickened as whoever it was hurried away.

“I don't suppose you could—” she called louder and could have sworn the footsteps grew quicker again, the stranger running.

“Charming!” she said, trying to feel annoyed and failing. She was properly frightened now. A third time, she shifted to the side of the road, planning to march up the nearest path and knock on someone's door and, just like that, she saw the familiar manhole cover on the broad corner where the pavement turned and the telegraph pole with the rusted warning sign nailed to it and knew at last she was at the cemetery road.

Here the painted markings stopped but there were soft verges to either side, high with bracken, and she would feel the ground change underfoot if she veered off, so she strode along to the gates and slipped through them, feeling instantly safer to be inside the cemetery walls. She didn't know if she could really see the dark shape of the church looming ahead of her or if she only imagined it because she knew it was there, but she smiled anyway.

Jackie had forgotten something; all of them forgot something when they teased her or asked her, worried, if she was frightened to be there alone. This place was a sanctuary. It was out amongst the living that people could hurt you. Here, where all were at rest, passion spent, troubles ended, she was safe.

She hurried around the path to her cottage. “Evening, Todd,” she said. “Evening, Archie. Evening, Etta, wherever you are. I'll find you tomorrow if it's a nice day.” She would buy some flowers, she thought. If she was going to live here permanently, she would learn everyone's birthday from their tombstone and make sure they had some flowers on the right day. There was nothing morbid about that. Then she remembered Lowell saying that the dead should be gone and the living present.

So perhaps she should forget Todd and Archie and them. Perhaps she should invite some living people round for a party, make some noise and mess. Did she know enough people to make what you would call a party?

She opened the porch door, clicking the light on and slipping through quickly, before too much of the chilly damp swirled in with her.

As she turned to lock up she saw a sheet of paper pushed part way through the letterbox.

See that? she told herself. One of your friends has been round while you were out. She plucked it free and opened it.

People say their blood freezes. Sometimes that their heart is in their mouth. Jude felt it differently. To her, it seemed that all her blood raced to her middle and pulled her heart, heavy and bulging, down into her gut. Every other inch of her except that hot weight was empty and tingling.

Nineteen

Let the dead rest.
—
Norma, Elsie, Archie, Etta, and Todd

The paper was roughly
torn from a pad, lined in blue with a red edge to the margin. The pen was a red biro, pressed in hard so that the words could be felt, like Braille, as well as seen. And there was a dark blob at the start, telling Jude this pen was not used every day, that it had been plucked from a cup or scrabbled out of a drawer.

Her first thought was a throwback to her life before. She turned to the phone to dial 999. Then she remembered she couldn't call the police. Not tonight, not ever again. She carried the note to the kitchen without shifting her grip, got a plastic sandwich bag from the rack—one-handed, thanking Todd for his nifty kitchen system—and dropped the note inside.

She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and climbed into bed. The nooks and shelves of Todd's ingenious headboard were filled with books now as well as the little stack moved from the attics at Jamaica House: the Douglas, the Allingham, the plane crash,
Rebecca
, and
Midnight's Children
.

There was everything from the new Ian Rankin (bought at Tesco's and hidden from Lowell) to another O. Douglas find—
Eliza for Common—
got online by Lowell for her and lied about, she was sure. She had
Danny: Champion of the World
for comfort and
Gravity's Rainbow
for a challenge. There was
The Brothers Karamazov
to cure insomnia and two Ian McEwans to remind her of home, although to be sure his London was not hers. There was an early Anne Tyler—
The Clock Winder
—that she had somehow managed never to read and the last PD James, which she would save as long as she could bear to.

But she didn't so much as glance at a single one of them. She sat up against her pillows with the covers drawn to her chin, staring out the window at the blackness, thinking.

It had to be Jackie.
Etta and Archie and them
, she'd said. Who else could it be? But why? What was going on?

She woke once in the night, starting awake after a dream. Her head had fallen sideways and her neck was stiff. She shuffled herself flat and turned the bedclothes away from her shoulders to cool off. She had been dreaming about the fog. Hearing footsteps and chasing after them only to realise that they were behind her and really she was running away.

She turned over on her side. The sky had cleared. Outside her bedroom window she could see two stars in the black and could hear the wind rattling the catch. She thought about getting up and stuffing it with paper, then thought about the note in its plastic bag, downstairs on the kitchen worktop.
Let the dead rest
. And the next time she opened her eyes it was morning, a glittering blue day.

She stood at his bedroom window and looked down. All the better to see what was laid out below. The tips of the grass were white with frost and all around, in a series of dots and loops, were footprints. Someone had walked on the grass in that drenching fog last night and the flattened blades had frozen in place.

God, for a phone to take a picture! Jude tried to memorise the placing of the footprints and then bundled herself into warm clothes and hurried downstairs and out.

She told herself the feet could have belonged to a relative who came in the afternoon on an innocent visit, or even to a graveyard enthusiast. They existed, she knew. And she told herself that of course a visitor—relative or cemetery buff—would want to read the legible gravestones and would ignore those whose words had worn away. But she didn't believe it. For one thing, there was no stopping and starting in the prints, no evidence of a search.

There was no denying it after two trips up to her bedroom to look down again. The footprints led from the path to Todd, to Archie, to the grave of a Norma Oughton, to Etta Bell, to another one full of an entire family of people called Day, and then back to the path again, closer to the cottage, to deliver the note.

Jude put the kettle on and went upstairs. She leaned her head against the window and looked down, watching the sun come up behind the distant trees and the frosted grass warm and darken until the footprints melted away.

Norma Oughton, she had learned from the gravestone, was ninety when she died in 1983, the widow of the late Frank, who was buried there too, along with a stillborn child from the spring of 1925. She was the beloved mother of Frances and Peter, and a grandmother, a great-grandmother, and “
blessed among women.
”

There were even more Days in their plot. Following the patriarch Hamish in 1947, there was a wife, two young children, an elderly son in 1973, and finally the son's widow, Elspeth Day née McLennan.

Bathed and redressed a little later, she sat down at the table with her coffee and made a few notes: Bell, Patterstone, Day, Oughton, Jolly. She wrote McLennan in brackets because although Auntie Lorna had no headstone and hadn't been listed in Jude's note last night, it hadn't escaped Jude's notice that Elsie Day was a McLennan by birth. She added the dates, starting with Norma Oughton in December 1983 and ending with Todd himself in May 1985.

Then she looked at her watch and stood up. She should get into work. She needed to ask Lowell about this, if she could work out how to do it casually.

In the meantime, though, was she really going to leave these scribbles lying around when someone had been snooping last night? Of course, the footprint-maker hadn't been inside, but these locks were decades old. There was no way of knowing how many duplicate keys had been cut over the years and kept in drawers and junk bowls all over this friendly little town.

She took her own scribblings and the plastic bag with the warning in it and carried them upstairs. She slipped them both into the most innocuous, the least enticing, of Todd's books: the middle volume of three in a series of collected essays. He had won the set in 1915 as a prize for Sunday school attendance. No one would look there.

“
Let the dead rest
,” she repeated to herself as she made her way to the middle of town, wondering again how she had managed to get lost last night. If the note hadn't been signed with those names she would have thought it meant her own dead. Except that she
was
letting them rest, wasn't she? She had kicked over their graves and run away, barely giving them another thought. Eddy was the one trying to bring the dead back to life, looking at photographs of Miranda and searching in her dark places for secrets. She remembered Lowell saying
although the prevailing view is
…
How did it go?

Then, without her willing it, her feet slowed down. There was something tickling at the edges of her brain. She almost had it as she turned onto the main street. Then, distracted by a cluster of people outside the Post Office, she let go of the thread and the whole idea was gone.

There were four of them; five, counting a baby in its pushchair. The baby's mother was at the centre of the group, beside her a retired man with a bag of morning rolls in one hand and a
Scotsman
under his arm. Slightly aside were two women, dressed in velour for walking, with water bottles.

“What's up?” Jude said, trotting across the road towards them. All four swung round at the sound of her voice. Even the baby leaned forward and craned around the hood of its pushchair.

“The Post Office is shut,” said the young woman. “Till they can get someone out to open it.”

“Is Jackie all right?” said Jude. Jackie had been there all day, every day that Jude had been in Wigtown.

The young woman narrowed her eyes and said nothing.

“It's okay,” said one of the velour women. “She's at Lowell's, working.” She turned to Jude. “Jackie's collapsed.”

“If you must know,” the young woman added, with puzzling belligerence.

“Collapsed? Inside?”

“Last night,” said the man. “She's in the hospital in Dumfries. Typical government outfit. No one here to take over. It's my pension day.”

“What time last night?” said Jude. She wasn't heartless, and she liked Jackie, but the fact remained that
someone
was out in that fog and they hurried away from her when she hailed them. And
someone
had been at her cottage with the note. And Jackie was one of the only three people who had heard her talking about the dead.
Archie and Etta and them
.

“Half six,” said the other velour woman. “Why?”

“Just that I was in the shop at six o'clock when she was closing.”

“And was she—?”

“She was fine.”

“Aye well, she barely made it home before she went down,” the
young woman said.

“Poor thing,” said Jude. “What ward is she in, do you know? For a card?”

They all unbent a little at that, her proving that she might be from London but she knew how to behave.

“HDU,” said the young woman. “Sedated.”

Jude nodded, shared a solemn look, and then carried on towards the bookshop, thinking.

Lowell was there already, seated at the computer, with a catalogue open and the phone crooked against his shoulder.

“Have you heard the news?” Jude said. Lowell put the phone on speaker, unleashing call-centre music, and set it down. “Jackie at the Post Office has been rushed into hospital. HDU. High dependency unit,” she added, as he blinked at her. “One down from Intensive Care. That's not good.”

“And so it begins,” Lowell said. “We're all the same age. When one's peers begin to drop from their perches … ”

Jude ignored him. “Where does she live?”

“Hm? Oh, right here in Wigtown. Seaview, off Harbour Road.” It was the southeastern tip of the town.

“And she doesn't drive, does she?” Jude said. “She walks in and out?”

“We're always hearing about the benefits of exercise. But a woman in her sixties working hard all day and walking home in that nasty fog … ”

Jude had stopped listening. There was no way Jackie could have made it up to Kirk Cottage and back to Harbour Road between six and half past. Not even on a mild summer evening when she could stride out with a following wind, and certainly not on a night like last night, where you had to feel your way. It couldn't have been her who put the warning letter through Jude's door. That left …

“Eddy,” Lowell was saying.

“What?”

“I was worried about her last night. She locked herself away and wouldn't talk to me. Not even to assure me she was well.”

“She probably had her earphones on,” said Jude. “She probably didn't hear you.”

“She heard me,” Lowell said, rather grimly for him. “When I threatened to break the door down she finally relented. I've no idea what she was doing in there.”

Jude nodded absently and then let his words in. “In where?” she said. None of the attic rooms had locks. It had worried her at first until she'd taken a long hard look at Lowell, blinking mildly behind his spectacles and apologising for passing her on the stairs.

“She was in the carsy,” said Lowell. “I told you. Locked in the bathroom with the water running.”

“For God's sake, Lowell!” said Jude. “She was having a bath. Of course she didn't want to talk to you through the door.”

“The
downstairs
carsy,” Lowell said. “Are you listening? There
is
no bath. And yet she used every scrap of hot water. I could hear the tank belching and glugging—absolutely empty. I worried for the boiler.”

Jude thought about it for a minute. If Eddy wore a silicone belly next to her skin all day and maybe at night, she would have to wash it sometimes. But why she didn't pick a time when Lowell was out was a mystery. Then again, she might not have foreseen him banging on a locked bathroom door and demanding to be let in. She had a dismissive remark upon her lips when she thought the better of it.

“What time was this?” she said.

“Once you'd gone,” said Lowell. “About half an hour after you went home. Why?”

Because, thought Jude, if she had gone home without getting lost, she would have been safely inside by then and, if Eddy had climbed out the bathroom window and come to leave a note, Jude would have found it this morning.

But why would Eddy care about Todd and the rest—
Etta and Archie and them
. The
them
she now knew was Norma Oughton and Elspeth Day. How would she even know their names to write on the note?

“No reason,” she said. “And as to what she was up to, do you really want to know? She could have been waxing her legs, waxing anything really. Pore strips?”

“What are—?” said Lowell. Then he held up a hand. “Don't tell me. Well well, yes, I see. Dear me. I should probably apologise to her then for scolding her.”

“Or just leave it,” Jude said. “Least said soonest mended?”

“Indeed,” Lowell said. “Let peace descend.”

Jude smiled, offered to make coffee, and was half turned away before his words hit her.

“
Let there be light
,” she said, turning back.

Lowell pushed his glasses up his head and looked at her from under a wrinkled brow. “One would never argue with that sentiment, my dear,” he said, “but I'm not sure I quite understand the force of it here and now.”

“What
is
that?” said Jude. “It's not a … I mean, you're not saying,
Oh go on, let there be light, will you, just this once?
”