It was none of her business, Rowan thought, feeling vulnerable and responsible for him. “You’re here with your father, are you?” she said.
The girl drew herself up stiffly and stared straight into the sun, her shadow falling across Rowan as if her sudden gloom had been made visible. “I don’t know where he is.”
Rowan would have sympathised, except that she sensed more emotion brooding under the words than she might be able to cope with. The fat lady was being tugged away along the beach by two children, a girl whose mouth was green with lollipop and a boy wearing only a cowboy hat. “With your mum, then?” Rowan suggested. “Is that her?”
“The woman with the filthy children? I trust you’re joking.”
It sounded like a threat, even though the girl was still gazing into the sun. “Where do you go to school?” Rowan asked without especially wanting to know.
“I don’t need to. There’s not a teacher in the world who couldn’t learn from my father.”
Rowan sensed that scoffing might be dangerous. “I’ve got to go now. My granddad said I had to stay where he could see me.”
The girl turned and gazed at her. Her eyes seemed bright and colourless as the sun she had been staring at. “You needn’t go yet. Stay with me.”
“No, I can’t.” Rowan put her hands on the hot rough concrete and tried to push herself to her feet, but the unblinking brightness of the girl’s eyes made her feel dim and limp. The gleam of a gold chain that hung around the girl’s neck and down inside her dress pricked the edge of Rowan’s vision, and she managed to look away. She struggled to her feet and almost sprawled on the concrete. Her head felt fragile as a bubble, her legs were wavering, the dunes were shrinking away from the lighthouse. It was only the heat, she told herself, and granddad would know what to do to make her feel better. She heaved one foot forward to keep herself up.
“Very well, if you must,” the girl said as Rowan reached out a hand to support herself on the giant neon tube of the lighthouse, which appeared to be yards away. Her palm pressed against the flaking whitewash, and the world seemed to fall together around her; the dunes came back. She made her way carefully down the concrete, and realised that the girl was watching her with an emotion Rowan couldn’t identify: surprise, perhaps, but not only surprise. “Will you be my friend when we get home?” the girl said.
An impression of loneliness passed over Rowan like a lingering shadow. “If I see you,” she said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll see you. I’ll bring something I think you’ll like.”
Rowan stepped off the concrete onto the soft sand. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Vicky,” the girl said absently, staring past her at the dunes where Rowan’s grandfather lay. Rowan looked to see if he was beckoning, but he was still on his back. He blinked himself awake as she went towards him. “That’s right, stay where I can see you,” he mumbled, and dozed off. Rowan set about searching for pebbles she could use to decorate her patch in Waterloo once he had landscaped the garden. She hadn’t noticed when Vicky had moved away, but presumably the girl had taken off her dress: there was nobody in white along the miles of beach.
The next time granddad wakened, he said they should be heading back for lunch. At the cottage Rowan learned that daddy had to fix someone’s electricity and wouldn’t be coming to collect her until early evening. After lunch she read the books her grandparents had bought her, and had time for a sandwich tea before the car came.
Daddy picked her up and hugged her and then shook hands with the grown-ups. “Has she behaved herself? You can keep her if you like, Hermione,” he teased, then seemed to feel he’d been thoughtless. Rowan gathered her suitcase and her bag of pebbles, and they went out to the car.
Once he was driving he didn’t say much. She liked just being with him, gazing out at the russet houses and the trees that glowed like the sky before a sunset. All the same, the thought of never again being with him while he worked made her feel sad. She’d brought him tools and bits of wire sometimes, but the idea that he might have been locked up because of her made her almost afraid to look at him.
The car sped onto the motorway as the sun slipped behind the hills. Cars flashed their headlamps at dark cars in the dusk. In the night at the end of the motorway the Mersey Tunnel was lit like a hospital corridor. Halfway through she imagined ships sailing over her head. In Liverpool the van turned along the dock road, where the warehouses were long as side streets and full of tiny unlit windows, and daddy muttered at potholes in the road. Rowan loved being out so late: it made even familiar streets seem new, mysterious. She was looking forward to arriving at the house, because now that she’d been away she knew what it felt like: home. But when she saw the sign outside the house her mind felt suddenly cold and dark. The house was for sale.
Chapter Six
“Derek and Alison Faraday aren’t here just now. If you’ll leave your name and number and reason for calling, one of us will get back to you…” When they returned from the funeral, several messages were waiting. The estate agent for whom Derek had rewired some properties wanted Derek to call him, and Robin Ormond, Derek’s accountant, was on the tape too. “I’m taking it you’ve had time to bring your books up to date, and I’ll call round early Saturday unless I hear from you.”
“He didn’t know about the funeral and everything,” Alison said.
“He’s like a bloody robot, him, nothing in his head but numbers,” Derek declared, his voice echoing in the wide shabby hall. “I’ll do the books if I have time and if I haven’t the bugger can wait. We ought to get started upstairs while we can see what we’re doing.”
“You make a start while I see to dinner.” She held his face in her cool hands to detain him. “Don’t go worrying yourself about our finances. We’re past the worst, I’m sure we are.”
He slipped one hand under her hair and clasped her long neck while he kissed her, the tips of their tongues barely touching. “I’ll see you upstairs,” he said with a wink.
For the first time since they’d moved in, he didn’t feel inhibited. The place was just an old house in need of renovation, too big but not unwelcoming. It was such a relief not to feel as if he had no right to be there that he strolled through the downstairs rooms, opening windows to let out the stale lifeless smell. He touched the chandelier to make it chime and walked his fingers over a few keys of the piano, and then he went upstairs.
The top floor smelled mustier than ever. It smelled, he thought, dark. He opened doors, hoping to lighten the gloom, but most of the grimy windows were draped as heavily as the shapes that stood about the rooms. There should be a skylight over the stairs, anything to let in more light. He groped his way to the front of the house and pushed open Queenie’s door.
The smell of old books met him, a smell so thick it seemed to dull the evening light. At least the smell of disinfectant hadn’t lingered. He gazed at the stripped mattress that retained a depression like a pinched coffin, until he realised he was behaving as if he weren’t allowed in the room. He stalked in and shoved up the sash of the large window, and took deep salty breaths while he gazed across the bay at Wales. Thinking of Rowan, he turned to the books.
He didn’t read much himself. Trade literature was about his limit, except for a morning paper to read during his coffee breaks. He knew the kinds of books Rowan liked: he often watched her reading, her eyes scanning the pages as if she wanted to devour all the books in the world. He was proud of her for reading so much, and now he wanted to find the books Queenie would have meant her to have. He went from pile to staggering pile, hoping that he wouldn’t have to pull out books from low down on the stacks that were all taller than he was. His shadow drifted over them as if the coaly furniture were leaking. He found the children’s books heaped by the bed.
You didn’t see books like these in the shops, thick spines embossed with gilded letters and sometimes with pictures. He put one hand on top of the pile and the other halfway down, and lifted the books. He was turning towards the door when the pages squeezed out of the books at either end of the armful, flew out of the bindings like pulp out of rotten fruit, and the pile of books sprawled across the bed.
He picked up one book gingerly, a book with a saint on the cover. When he tried to part the wadded pages, they tore like wet bread. All the books were like that, the children’s books and those in the other piles he examined, books about faith and will. She’d often talked about that couple, and the first time he’d heard her he’d thought they were friends of hers. There were books in French and German too, and languages he didn’t even recognise. “Look at the state of these,” he said when Alison came up. “She must have been something special if she could read them.”
“They aren’t all like that.” She opened the top book on a pile near the bed, and then she stared at it. “I don’t understand. She was reading this the night she died.”
The print was seeping unreadably through the pages, fragments of which stuck like mould to the opposite wad. “Maybe it was a different book,” Derek said, raising his voice to jar her out of her dismay. “They don’t look worth keeping, anyway. Let’s get the tea chests.”
They’d kept the chests when they moved from Liverpool. At first Alison examined each book, but after a dozen or so had proved to be rotten she began to throw them in by the handful. “I’ll see to chucking them if you like while you sort out her clothes,” Derek said.
She wrinkled her nose as she pulled out the first drawer, which was full of underclothes, yellowed and cobwebbed as if they hadn’t been touched for years. Two more drawers contained clothes sown with spiders’ eggs; the rest were stuffed with books, the pages mashed together. “It’s as though the soul’s gone out of the room,” Alison murmured as she upended a drawer. She opened a black wardrobe so determinedly that it lurched forward. A long white dress billowed at her, and Derek saw it come apart, torn pieces swarming toward her face. They were moths, which fluttered out of the window into the dusk. “I’ll leave this until daylight, I think,” she said.
When they’d loaded all the books into the chests the darker patches revealed on the walls looked like stains, spreading as dusk deepened. The sense of so much still to be done depressed him. “What this place needs is bloody gutting,” he muttered.
“I know what it needs.” Alison took his hand and ran her thumb lingeringly over his palm, and led him downstairs to their bedroom. They sat on the bed and undressed each other, traced each other’s bodies with their hands and mouths. Alison closed her long soft warm legs about his hips as he slipped snugly into her. The waves of her sucked him deeper, until he swelled and then erupted, so powerfully that they were left gasping. As he came he felt Queenie’s floor hovering over them, a huge dark blotch.
After dinner he pored over his accounts. At least Ken, the builder for whom he’d rewired a block of houses that were being turned into flats, had paid him almost three thousand pounds, though the cheque was dated next week. He was still making entries in the ledgers after midnight, writing small to stay between the lines. He felt dwarfed by debts and all the empty rooms.
In the morning Tony from the estate agent’s called round unexpectedly to price the house. “And they’re talking of rewiring your kiddie’s school, so you should let them know who you are,” Tony said as Derek followed him through the rooms. The house shouldn’t fetch much less than ten thousand, Derek thought, dreading to hear. Tony marched through, jingling his pocketfuls of change, and peered at ceilings, knocked on walls that crunched under his knuckles, scratched his broad stubbly pate. He hummed tunelessly to himself and said not a word until they and Alison were on the overgrown path, by which time Derek’s forehead felt stretched almost to splitting. “I’d ask for more than we expect to get and be prepared to accept offers,” Tony said. “Assuming you don’t anticipate any queries on the will, I can put it in the window at an asking price of twenty-three thou.”
That could mean twenty thousand. Twenty thousand would end all their worries, would let them have a holiday for the first time in years and secure them the kind of house they wanted without saddling them with more of a mortgage than they might be able to cope with. Derek shook hands with Tony, hugged Alison and beamed at her as Tony left, promising to send someone who would price the furniture. Derek even beamed at the sight of Robin Ormond’s Mini nudging the kerb outside the gate.
The accountant wasn’t quite as tall as Alison, but much broader. He wore a pale blue summer suit, and glanced suspiciously at the chair Derek gave him at the dinner table. “You want to get the little woman busy with the duster before anyone comes to look at the house,” he suggested, and put on his rimless spectacles that seemed constantly in danger of slipping down his wide flat face. “These are the accounts, I take it. Well, let’s see what can be made of them.”
He turned the pages of the ledgers slowly, rubbing the corners between finger and thumb. “Dear me. Pah, I don’t think so. Oh, really,” he mused, then grew impatient. “Have you no receipt for this? I can’t make out this word at all. My dear fellow, that isn’t how you spell ‘calculate’.” At the last page he threw up his hands. “Never accept a postdated cheque.”
“I’ve his word he’ll honour it. At least it means I’ve got a date for payment.”
The accountant closed his eyes and shook his head. “You should have taken him to court, or threatened to. Better still, don’t work for such people at all.”
“If I didn’t I wouldn’t have enough big jobs.”