Dark Corners: A Novel Read online

  The kind of people who made trouble on buses were not to be found in Hampstead. The Hampstead sort all had valid passes, plenty of silver coins should the pass mysteriously have become obsolete, and a driving licence for ID. Tom had all this, and the bus he was getting on was the prestigious 24 that plied between Hampstead Heath and Victoria, taking in Camden Town and Westminster on its way.

  He got on and sat in a small single seat tucked away behind the driver’s cab. The girl who followed him, instead of touching her pass to the reader as he had done, turned away and got on halfway down, after Tom’s daughter’s fashion. He waited for her to go up to the driver and either present her pass or put down the requisite two pounds forty. Neither happened. Should he approach the driver himself and tell him? Or hand the girl the coins, which he happened to have? But she was on her phone, talking to someone with whom she appeared on intimate terms.

  Tom felt indignant. How dare she impose on what the government called ‘the hard-working taxpayer’ and have a free ride? Walking up the bus, he said, ‘Excuse me’ into the driver’s window. The entire lower floor of the bus had stopped talking and was paying him close attention. He dropped his voice to a whisper. The driver said the girl probably hadn’t got a pass or any spare money. He seemed displeased, not grateful and friendly as Tom felt he should have been. Wondering if this would produce a warmer response, Tom laid down the two-pound coin and the two twenties.

  ‘What’s that for?’ said the driver. ‘Her? Cash payments stopped last month. By law.’

  The girl was still on her mobile, talking in a rather indignant way, and when the driver pulled the bus in to the kerb and stopped, Tom began to feel nervous. Whatever happened next, he would be drawn into it. Standing up, he watched the doors at the front of the bus come open, muttered, ‘Got to get off,’ and jumped out on to the pavement. He looked back over his shoulder. The driver and the girl appeared to be in a fierce argument as he walked away down the hill.

  Tom wasn’t sure what to do. It was a long walk from here to Willesden, and bad enough to the number 6 route. He didn’t even know which way the number 6 went between Clifton Road and Willesden Green. Perhaps he should make for the Beatles’ place in what-was-it, Abbey Road. The bus he had got off passed him, sending spray up from the water in the gutter. It wasn’t exactly dark yet, but getting that way.

  He was almost at the next bus stop by now. The best thing would be to wait there, as by now he had no idea where he was. People were waiting for the next 24: two young men, no more than boys. One of them said to him, ‘Got a ciggie, Grandad?’

  Tom wanted to ask him how he dared call him that, but he was frightened. ‘I don’t smoke,’ he muttered.

  The other one said, ‘Don’t you lie to me,’ and grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him.

  Tom made a whimpering sound. He was released so violently that he staggered. The one who had asked him for a cigarette pushed himself in front of him and punched him hard in the stomach, a blow powerful enough to knock him over. He fell to the ground, doubled up. The two men kicked him on to a patch of grass under a tree and, as the 24 bus came, ran away.

  In Falcon Mews, something crashed on to the floor from the flat above. It must have been heavy, a saucepan or a bucket. The sound it made reverberated through the house, followed by footsteps running down the stairs and the front door slamming.

  The noise went on like this every day, only stopping when Dermot went to work. Carl knew it must be deliberate, intended to annoy him. It had started about the time the August rent was due but of course never came. The noise varied: a crash made by something dropped, doors slamming, the piercing growl of an electric drill, the hammering of a nail into the wall, the TV on full, the radio playing hymns and all the doors up there wide open.

  The houses in Falcon Mews were Victorian jerry-built with thin walls and not very substantial floors, so that every sound echoed and trembled. When the noise first began, Carl had been irritated by it. Now it had started to frighten him. Could the neighbours hear it, the Pembrokes on the left side, Elinor Jackson on the right? They hadn’t complained to him, but then he hadn’t complained to Dermot either. He and Dermot barely spoke to each other any more. Dermot no longer knocked on one of the doors in his part of the house to make some fatuous remark. Instead he ran faster than ever down the stairs and burst out into the street, banging the front door behind him.

  While Nicola was at home, the noise stopped altogether. This behaviour on Dermot’s part was so transparent, so obvious, that Carl found it almost incredible. Now, if he told her his tenant made a deliberate racket simply to annoy him, she wouldn’t believe it. He had told her, though, and she had begun to treat him as if he was imagining the bangs and crashes and might be hearing things as a result of the nervous state he had worked himself up into.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of weeks’ holiday owing to me,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t we go away somewhere? It would be good for you.’

  ‘I can’t afford it. Well, I can now, but I soon won’t be able to if I don’t get any rent.’

  That only led to her giving him the advice she always gave him. ‘Tell him you must have the rent and let him … well, do his worst. No one can charge you with anything. You won’t go to prison. Tell him to go ahead and talk to these people and the newspapers, and once you’ve done it you’ll feel a great relief and we’ll go to Cornwall or Guernsey or somewhere.’

  Dermot was out. The house was silent. It was Sunday, so he was probably in church, but he would soon be back and the noise would start again.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I mean that literally. I can’t do it. I can’t allow him to shame me. And yet it’s such a little thing, isn’t it? Sometimes I dream he’s dead, and when I wake up and he’s not … I lie there and hear him drop something, or his telly comes on, and I know he’s alive and there’s nothing I can do.’

  Nicola was looking at him in horror. ‘Oh, Carl, sweetheart.’

  The front door opened and closed softly and Dermot’s footsteps tiptoed up the stairs. Carl put his head in his hands.

  ‘Let’s hope this has taught you that riding around to dodgy places on buses isn’t a good idea,’ said Dot Milsom.

  ‘Oh, Mum, Hampstead’s not a dodgy place.’ Lizzie was more shocked by this description of London’s loveliest suburb than by her father’s experience.

  ‘On your own, too,’ said Dot. ‘I did offer to come with you, you’ll remember.’

  ‘You’re not old enough.’ Tom laughed at his own wit. ‘It’s not the kind of thing that happens more than once, anyway. It looks to me like the girl I reported to the bus driver phoned her boyfriend, and it was him waiting to clobber me.’

  A passer-by had found him struggling to get up and called an ambulance, which took him to St Mary’s Hospital, where he was treated for various cuts and bruises. It was discovered that no ribs were broken, but he was kept in overnight and allowed home next morning. For now he could just about walk with someone holding his arm.

  Lizzie had come with her mother to see him in hospital and had told her parents in great detail about what she called her new job, looking after her friend Stacey’s state-of-the-art apartment in Primrose Hill. Tom again thought about his daughter’s flat in Kilburn. But his thoughts were mostly on his recent ordeal. The breezy attitude he adopted as he recounted his encounter with the two young men, and that he continued with the police officer who called to ask him what had happened, was a show of bravado and not what he really felt.

  Of course, some would say it was his own fault, provoking that girl by shopping her to the driver. But wasn’t that the duty of a good citizen? I wouldn’t do it again, though, he thought. I’d lie low. But even making this resolve failed to give him confidence. He postponed the idea of getting on the number 82 bus, which had been his next project. Instead, now that his bruises were getting better, his headache from hitting his head when they kicked him over gone, he planned to take himself up to Edgware or Harrow at the end of the
week.

  But when Thursday came – Friday was the day planned for this excursion – he went to bed dreading the next morning and found it impossible to sleep. He lay awake tossing and turning and only fell asleep at five a.m., to be jerked awake by a dream, not about an assault in Haverstock Hill but a car crash in Willesden Lane.

  At breakfast, he told Dorothy he wouldn’t be taking a bus ride that day. ‘Very wise,’ she said. ‘You can come with me to have a look at Lizzie’s lovely apartment.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ELIZABETH HOLBROOK HAD divorced her husband after fifteen months of marriage and was now living in her mother’s house.

  ‘I suppose you’ll revert to your maiden name,’ said Yvonne Weatherspoon.

  ‘How ridiculous is that? Maiden name indeed. Anyway, I won’t. I always hated being called Weatherspoon. I more or less got married to get Leo’s name.’

  ‘It’s nice to have you back,’ said her mother insincerely. ‘You’re not thinking of moving into a place of your own?’

  ‘If that was what you wanted, you might have given Stacey’s flat to me instead of Gervaise.’

  In fact, Elizabeth had no real quarrel with the way things had turned out. Her mother had five bedrooms, a self-contained flat in the basement, a cleaner every morning and two cars. The only drawback to the house in Swiss Cottage was that cat. Elizabeth had attempted in the past to show Sophie who was boss, but never stood a chance. Their first – and almost their last – encounter had been when Elizabeth had roughly removed her from the seat of an armchair, and Sophie had turned on her, teeth bared, claws out, and inflicted some nasty wounds before returning to her favourite spot. These days they gave each other a wide berth.

  Days passed and no rent had appeared. Carl hadn’t expected it, but he was still angry and miserable. He also knew that Dermot was playing some sort of complicated game, for after a week or two, the noise had stopped. Even the front door was closed silently. It was so quiet that there might have been no tenant on the top floor if he had not occasionally seen Dermot walking down Falcon Mews, on his way to or from work or leaving for church. Then, in the middle of the next week, something made of metal – a watering can, perhaps – was dropped, and crashed resoundingly, bouncing across the floor above. Because he was no longer used to it and had believed the noise had come to an end, Carl shivered and actually cried out.

  There was no more noise that day, but it left him trembling. Nicola was due home at six thirty, but he couldn’t bear to wait that long, not so much because he wanted her company as out of terror that the dropping of things was due to start again.

  When he phoned her, she said she had the afternoon off and would come home in an hour’s time. Having her here would be wonderful, were it not for the fact that she would constantly urge him to stand up to Dermot and demand the rent. But he had to have her here for this coming weekend. He couldn’t live without her. He had done no work for weeks now. The book was a dead loss, not a book at all in fact, for he had destroyed all of it, even the plan and the notes he had made before he started. He had never wanted a real job, but now he wished he had one. It would get him out of the house. He read in the paper and saw on the television that jobs were very hard to get. It was hopeless for him even to look for employment.

  On Friday afternoon, on his way back to work, Dermot knocked on Carl’s living room door. Carl was asleep. He got off the sofa and opened the door.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Just to ask you if it’d be all right to use the garden sometimes, sit out there, I mean. I’ve got a couple of deckchairs.’

  Carl said, ‘That would mean coming through my kitchen.’

  ‘That’s right. OK with you?’ Implicit in the enquiry was it had better be. ‘“A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot”,’ said Dermot.

  Carl shrugged, nodded, shut the door. He wondered why he ever spoke politely to Dermot. Why even answer him? Silence would be best, but he knew he wouldn’t keep silent. Was it because he clung to some hopeless hope that Dermot would relent, that he would say he hadn’t meant it, it was a try-on, and now, soon, he would pay the rent as he had always known he must?

  When Nicola came in from work, Carl was waiting for her, sitting on the front step, maybe just to escape from breathing the same air as Dermot. Money was short. The lack of it was beginning to make itself felt in a serious way, and this was something Carl couldn’t admit to Nicola. Even though he had grown up in a world where women were becoming increasingly equal to men, where equality was the subject of almost daily TV programmes and constant newspaper features, he had still absorbed enough of a male supremacy culture to believe that, if he were to mention his financial crisis, Nicola would think he was asking her for a loan or even a gift. And she would press him again to confront his tenant.

  On Sunday, they watched from a window as Dermot went to church. Like churchgoers in times gone by, he carried a prayer book. They had talked about Dermot for half the night, what he would do if crossed, and what the consequences would be. They did make love, at just before three, and afterwards fell into a heavy sleep until nearly ten. Saturday’s rain had stopped during the night. The sun was out, the wind had dropped and Mr Kaleejah was taking his dog for its morning walk. It always walked along in a docile way, pausing sometimes to look up at Mr Kaleejah and wag its tail. Carl had never heard it bark.

  ‘He’ll bring his deckchairs through the kitchen to the back door,’ said Carl. ‘Why deckchairs? One for him, and who’s the other for? Perhaps he’s got friends, but I’ve never seen them. The next thing will be he’ll want to take over one of my rooms. He’s got a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom. Maybe he wants another bedroom? He could take over my second bedroom. Why not? I can’t stop him.’

  ‘Yes, you can, Carl. He can tell his story to anyone he likes. How do you know they’ll even care? They’ll probably say, so what? If they’re even interested, they’ll google it and see that what you did wasn’t against the law. Tell him you want the rent and if he says no you’ll evict him. That’s what anyone else would do.’

  She made it sound so simple, Carl thought. He watched Dermot turn the corner into Castellain Road and disappear. He put his head in his hands, a frequent gesture with him these days.

  The day continued fine, becoming sunnier and warmer. ‘Let’s go out for lunch,’ said Nicola in a cheerful tone, though she felt anything but cheerful.

  ‘I can’t afford it.’

  ‘Well, I can. You’ll have to face up to that, Carl. When you do what I suggest, you’ll have some money and you’ll feel much better because things won’t be as bad as you think. Probably they won’t be bad at all. Come on, we’ll go out, and we won’t be here to see Dermot come back.’

  So they went round to the Café Rouge, ate fishcakes and chips and lemon tart and drank a lot of red wine. ‘You’ll think I’m crazy,’ said Carl, ‘but I don’t want to go back there. I can’t bear to be under the same roof as him.’

  ‘I live there too, you know. When you tell him to do his worst, I’ll be with you. We’ll confront him together.’

  The sun was very hot and the house warm and stuffy when they got home. Nicola went upstairs and looked out of the bedroom window. She called Carl. ‘You’re not going to like this, but you’d better see it.’

  No one had attended to the garden since Carl’s father had died; in fact since long before that. Where the lawn had been, the grass had grown tall and turned to hay, and the flower beds were dense with stinging nettles three feet tall. Two deckchairs covered in red-and-blue-striped canvas had been put up among the hay, and in them sat Dermot and a rather large young woman with shaggy dark hair wearing a dirndl skirt and peasant blouse. Carl made a sound like a howl of agony.

  ‘Who’s that woman?’

  ‘His girlfriend, I should think.’

  ‘He hasn’t got a girlfriend.’

  ‘Well, he has now.’

  A visit from her parents was not to be welcomed by Lizzie. U
sually, that was. Now, however, in possession of Stacey’s beautiful flat, she felt very different. Not just on account of the decor and furnishings, but because quite a lot of exotic drink still remained from Stacey’s store, as well as tins of the sort of biscuits and snacks that went well with drink.

  Tom and Dot had been in the flat no more than ten minutes, had examined the large refrigerator, the freezer and the washing machine and drier as well as the living room and bedroom furnishings and the two flat-screen televisions, when they were plied with dry Oloroso and Tequila Sunrises. Conversation concentrated on Tom’s recovery from his assault on Haverstock Hill. Lizzie, who didn’t take admonition well herself, told him how careful he must be in future, and to be sure to take his mobile with him and phone her or her mother at the least sign of danger. Dot agreed, but added that it was useless to say anything as Tom never did what he was told.

  Advice, in any case, was unnecessary. They both thought privately that Tom had given up his exploration of London on buses. It had, in their opinion, been ridiculous, and fortunately, and without too much harm being done, had been ended by the Haverstock Hill attack. Both Dot and Lizzie were now putting their minds to some alternative hobby for him and already had ideas: golf, for instance, though Willesden was a long way from a golf course; the Willesden cycling club, though Tom didn’t possess a bicycle, and anyway, look how many cyclists got knocked down by lorries; dog-walking, which considering they had no dog was never taken seriously. None of these options was mentioned to Tom.