One Across, Two Down Page 9

  When they were out of sight, he went upstairs and from the bedroom that had been Maud’s, scanned the surrounding gardens. Everywhere washing waved and bellied and streamed in the wind. The linen was brilliant white, whiter and tidier than the ragged clouds which tossed above the tossing lines, and all this eddying whiteness had an almost hypnotic effect on Stanley so that he felt he could stand there forever, staring himself to sleep. His limbs seemed weighted down by a great reluctance for the task ahead of him. So far everything had been done secretly and covertly. Now he must do something in the open air, publicly (although he couldn’t see a soul in all those gardens who might observe him), and perhaps what he was about to do was the first truly illegal and punishable thing. But it must be done, and now before Mrs. Macdonald returned from shopping.

  Both his neighbours’ houses were empty. Stanley was sure of that. The Blackmores had no children and the Macdonalds’ two teenagers were at school. It was unnerving, though, to have to start work with that blank bedroom window of the Macdonalds’ staring down at him. Who did those Macdonalds think they were, anyway, having an extension built on the back of their house, jutting right out and overlooking his garden? He’d have had the law on them for that, infringing his right to ancient lights or whatever it was, only he’d never been able to afford a solicitor…. Damn that sightless, closed, uncurtained window! There’s no one at home, no one at home, he assured himself as he unlocked the shed and scraped away peat with his hands.

  The wind blew the light feathery stuff about, powdering Stanley’s clothes and hands with brown dust. He lugged the suitcases out first and, having peeped out cautiously to make sure he was still unobserved, dragged them towards the trench and lowered them in. They took up more room than he had bargained for, leaving only about a foot to accommodate the sack which contained Maud’s body.

  Maud’s body … Up till then Stanley had felt a little weary, a little mesmerized and considerably apprehensive, but he hadn’t felt sick. Now a lump of nausea came up into his throat. He kicked some peat over the suitcases and breathed deeply. The nausea receded slightly.

  Screwing himself to a pitch of determination, Stanley went back into the shed and grasped the neck of the sack. His fingers, slippery now with sweat, slid about on the thick green plastic. No one watching him would imagine that sack contained anything as soft and amorphous as peat. But no one was watching him. He was observed only by a bird which sat on the spiraea branch and by the black, pupilless eye of Macdonalds’ window.

  If only it was quiet … The thrashing linen made slapping, cracking sounds as it filled with air and the wind drove the air out of it. Stanley was surrounded by a chorus of busy disembodied noise, but the linen didn’t seem disembodied to him. Rather it was as if he was attended and observed by a crowd of crackling idiots, white watchers that cackled and sniggered at each fresh move he made.

  Cocooned in gleaming slippery green, Maud’s body slithered and bumped over the concrete. Stanley had to drag it, for it was too heavy for him to lift. A dead weight, he thought, a dead weight…. He mustn’t be sick.

  Pushing the body into the cavity above the cases was the worst part of all. He had thought he would be able to avoid actually touching Maud, but now he couldn’t. Her dead flesh felt icy and stiff through the cold damp folds of plastic. Stanley heard himself give a sob of horror. The top of the sack lay almost level with the surrounding earth. Stanley crouched over it, pressing at it with his hands. He didn’t think he had the strength to get up, but he managed it at last, staggering. With heavy hands from which the sweat streamed just as if they had been dipped in water, he got his shovel and filled bucket after bucket with peat.

  When the operation was completed, the resulting heap looked just what it was—a grave. He began levelling the soil which abutted on to it, pulling heather fronds and flowers above the dusty brown mass, until finally the sickness overcame him. He lay spreadeagled, face downwards on the ground and retched.

  “Whatever’s the matter, Mr. Manning? Are you all right?”

  It sounded to Stanley as if Mrs. Macdonald must be standing right behind him. He jerked up, half-rolling on to the peat heap. She was ten yards away, staring curiously at him from the other side of her fence, the washing on her whirl line streaming out and crackling as the metal shaft squeaked. Ghosts on a crazy roundabout, Stanley thought wildly.

  “I came back from shopping and I saw you lying on the ground. Whatever came over you?”

  He muttered, “Something disagreed with me….” And then, his face and hands streaked with peat dust, he lurched unsteadily to his feet and staggered into the house.

  When Vera came away from Mrs. Paterson’s, she felt as if a load had been lifted from her shoulders. But her relief was mixed with annoyance. How could Auntie Ethel be so inconsiderate? To write to Maud promising to come for the weekend, even to fix a definite time of arrival, and then just not turn up; worse even, to take Mrs. Paterson’s room only to throw her over for someone else. Well, she was very lucky, Vera thought, in encountering someone as tolerant and easy-going as Mrs. Paterson. Not many landladies would take that sort of treatment and be content with a mere five pounds as recompense. It was a pity, though, that she hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask this Mr. Smith for his address.

  Still, if Ethel was going to behave in this cavalier way, they were well rid of her. Let her make a fuss because no one told her Maud was dead or asked her to the funeral. How was anyone supposed to get in touch with her when she hid herself in this stupid mysterious way?

  As Vera was unlatching her front gate, Mrs. Macdonald came out.

  “Has your husband got over his bad turn?”

  “Bad turn?”

  “Oh, haven’t you seen him yet? I never meant to upset you, really I didn’t.”

  “Just tell me what’s happened, Mrs. Macdonald.”

  “Well, nothing really. Only when I got in from the shops this morning there was poor Mr. Manning laying, actually laying, on the ground out among those heather plants of his. Been sick, he had.”

  “But what was it?”

  “Something that disagreed with him, he said. My boy Michael was home from school with a sore throat and he said he’d been watching Mr. Manning at his gardening, watching him through the back bedroom window, and he saw him collapse.”

  Vera hurried indoors, expecting to see Stanley prone on the sofa, but he was sitting in a chair, intent on his crossword annual, and he had his usual healthy, though sallow, colour. Better say nothing of what she had seen. Stanley hated being spied on by the neighbours. Instead she told him of her interview with Mrs. Paterson.

  “I said it’d be all right,” said Stanley.

  “I know, dear. I’ve been very silly. The best thing will be to forget all about Auntie Ethel and her nonsense. Could you eat a bit of steak?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Stanley, taking no further notice of her. Vera sighed. Of course he’d been under a strain, what with Mother dying like that before his eyes, but if only he would sometimes, just sometimes, speak nicely to her or thank her for what she did for him or show by a glance or a smile that he still loved her. Perhaps you couldn’t expect it after twenty years. Vera ate her meal in silence. There was a lot she would have liked to discuss with her husband but you cannot have much of a conversation with a man whose face is concealed behind a large book. She cleared the table, Stanley moving impatiently but not looking up while she removed his plate, and then she went up to the room that had been Maud’s.

  She sat down in front of the dressing table, but before she opened the drawer where Maud had kept her papers she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass and sighed afresh at her reflection. It wasn’t only lack of money but lack of time…. She wondered apprehensively what Stanley would say if she spoke to him of giving up her job. Then, averting her eyes, she opened the middle drawer and lifted its contents out on to the bed.

  On top was a bundle of letters from Ethel Carpenter. Beneath these Maud’s cheque book, her bir
th certificate, her marriage lines, Vera’s own certificate of baptism. How painful it all was, a job that had to be done and as quickly as possible. The light was fading fast now and the room growing dim, but the papers in her hands still showed white with the last brilliant whiteness that comes before dark.

  Here was a letter from a firm of solicitors: Finbow and Craig, of High street, Croughton. “Dear Madam, An appointment has been made for you with our Mr. Finbow to discuss the question of your testamentory dispositions….” After the funeral, Vera decided, she too would make an appointment with Mr. Finbow.

  Next, sandwiched among the papers, she found a flat jewel box full of little brooches and chains and souvenir trinkets. There was nothing she really fancied for herself—perhaps she might keep that cameo pendant with the picture of Mother and Dad inside it, and most of it could be given away to the relatives coming on Thursday.

  Vera came next to Maud’s red leather photograph album. On the first page was her parents’ wedding picture. George tall and awkward in his hired morning coat, Maud in a knee-length dress of white crepe-de-chine, clutching his arm determinedly. Then there were photographs of herself as a baby. Maud had put captions to them all in careful copperplate: Vera aged one; Vera takes her first steps; then, when she was older, a child of five or six: Vera gets to know her auntie Ethel; Vera on the sands at Brayminster-on-Sea.

  Dear old Bray! That was the heading written across the next double page. Maud had always called the seaside resort that, loving it and making it her own. Dear old Bray! On a postcard photograph, taken by a beach photographer, Ethel Carpenter in 1938 hat and Macclesfield silk dress walked along the sands, holding the hand of ten-year-old Vera. Maud wore sunglasses in the next snapshot and George had a handkerchief with knots in its four corners stuck on his balding head to protect it from the sun.

  More and more snaps of Bray … 1946 and the war over. Vera grown up now, a pretty eighteen with long curls and a crimson mouth that looked black and shiny in the snap.

  Two years later the New Look. Little cotton jacket with a peplum, long skirt with a flare at the hem. Had she really worn shoes with ankle straps and heels four inches high? James Horton holding her hand, whispering something to her in the sunshine, the bright sea behind them. James Horton. Suppose it had been he downstairs, he her husband who had been ill and on whom she had tended, would he have smiled and thanked her and held up his face for a kiss?

  There were no pictures of Stanley in the album, not even a wedding photograph. Vera closed it because it was too dark now to see any more. She bent her head and wept softly, the tears falling on to the old red leather binding.

  “What are you doing up here in the dark?”

  She turned as Stanley came into the room, and thinking she heard in his voice a tiny hint of tenderness or concern, she reached for his hand and held it against her cheek.

  11

  Standing with bowed head between George Kinaway’s brother Walter and Maud’s sister Louisa, Stanley watched the coffin slowly drawn away from behind the gilt screen towards the waiting fire. The vicar exhorted them to pray for the last time and while Vera wept quietly, Stanley looked down even further, studying his shoes.

  “Nothing from Ethel Carpenter, I see,” said Aunt Louisa when they were outside the paved courtyard looking at the flowers. “I must say I expected to see her here. These are from Uncle Tom and me, Stanley. Wreaths are so dear these days and they all go to waste, don’t they? So we thought a sheath would be nice.”

  “Sheaf,” said Stanley coldly. It was just like those Macdonalds to send an enormous great cross of lilies. Done on purpose to make the relatives’ flowers look mean, he had no doubt.

  They got into the hired cars and went back to Lanchester Road. It was all Stanley could do to keep his temper at the sight of Mrs. Blackmore getting stuck into the sherry and the ham sandwiches. They hadn’t even had the decency to send flowers either. With a long pious face he brushed off Mrs. Blackmore’s attempts to find out how much Maud had left but as soon as they had all gone he telephoned Finbow and Craig.

  “It seems a bit soon,” said Vera when he told her an appointment had been made for the following day.

  “Tomorrow or next week, what’s the odds?”

  “I’ll be glad to get it over. It was a nice funeral.”

  “Lovely,” said Stanley with sincerity. He couldn’t, in fact, recall any clan gathering he had ever enjoyed so much. If only he hadn’t got to solve the problem of collecting that trunk …

  “You know, love,” Vera said, “it’s years since we had a holiday. When we’ve got everything settled, why don’t we go down to dear old Bray for a week?”

  “You go,” said Stanley. “I’ve got business to see to.”

  “You mean you’ve got a job?”

  “Something in the offing.”

  Stanley looked away coldly. He didn’t care for that wistful encouraging look Vera had given him. A job indeed. She couldn’t think big, that was her trouble. He poured himself the dregs of the sherry and began to think about Pilbeam.

  In telling his wife he had a job in the offing Stanley hadn’t been strictly truthful. It was not in the offing, it was in the bag but it was also nothing to be proud of. He had only taken it because it allowed him more or less unrestricted use of a van.

  A florist in Croughton Old Village wanted a driver and delivery man and on the day before the funeral Stanley had walked down to the old village, the vestigial remains of a hamlet that had been there before London spread across the green fields, applied for the job and was told to start on the following Monday.

  Delighted with the way things were working out for him, he wandered across the village green and, sitting down on the steps of the war memorial (Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori), lit a cigarette.

  There is perhaps no more pleasant occupation for a man whose expectations have almost come to fruition as that of speculating what he will do with the money when he gets it. His thoughts toyed happily with visions of cars, clothes, abundant liquor and the general appurtenances of making a splash, but Stanley was under no illusion that he could live for the rest of his life on twenty thousand pounds. He was too big a man now to consider working for anyone else, unless it was as a setter of crossword puzzles. That might come later as a sideline. First, he thought, he would rather like to go into business and what he saw before him as he crossed the road and stepped on to the pavement gave him the idea that it might be profitable and consistent with his new dignity as a man of private means to keep a shop. After all, dreary old George Kinaway had made a good thing out of it, a very good thing, and what George Kinaway could do he could do standing on his head.

  In front of him was a row of shops with crazily sagging Tudor gables above them and a row of aged trees to give them an old-world expensive look. There was a chi-chi-looking art place with abstract paintings in its window, a dolly girl’s boutique, a treasure house of Indian jewellery and between this and a place selling old books a vacant shop, its door boarded up and a notice over its window: These desirable premises to let.

  Standing with his nose pressed against the dirty fingermarked glass of the shop window was a short stout man. Still whistling, Stanley too stopped and stared inside at a dim dusty interior cluttered with cardboard boxes. The other man gave a heavy sigh.

  “Lovely day,” said Stanley cheerfully.

  “Is it?” His companion turned to face him and Stanley saw a snub-nosed baby face topped by sparse colourless hair. He was smoking a cigarette he had obviously rolled himself and as he raised his hand to his mouth Stanley noticed that the top of the forefinger was missing and this finger ended in a blob of calloused flesh instead of a nail. It reminded him of a chipolata sausage. “All right for some, I daresay.” Stanley grinned. “What’s with you, friend? Won the pools, have you?”

  “As good as,” said Stanley modestly.

  The other man was silent for a moment. Then he said somewhat less lugubriously, “I’m a joiner by trade,
a joiner and cabinet-maker. Thirty years I’ve been in the trade and then the firm goes bust.”

  “Hard cheese.”

  “This place …” He banged on the glass. “This place could be a little gold-mine in the right hands.”

  “What sort of a gold-mine?” Stanley asked cautiously.

  “Antiques.” The other man bit off the dental with a short sharp explosion and a spot of saliva struck Stanley’s cheek. “What I don’t know about the antique …” Spit, splutter, bite … “business you could write down on a postage stamp.” He backed away from Stanley slightly and assumed the attitude of an orator. “It’s like this,” he said. “You buy up a couple of chairs, genuine Hepplewhite, say, and make—or I make—a dozen more, incorporating bits of the genuine two in each chair. D’you get the picture? Then you can sell the lot as Hepplewhite. Who’s to know? It’d take a top expert, I can tell you. Or a table. An inlaid table top, circa eighteen ten—put legs on it, Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Where d’you get the table top?”

  “Knocking. Going on the knock. Up Barnet way and further out, Much Hadham and the villages. Some of those old girls have got treasure trove hidden away in their lofts.”

  “Who’d buy it?”

  “You’re joking. There’s not an antique shop in Croughton as yet, but there’s folks with so much lolly they don’t know what to do with it. Antiques are the thing. Didn’t you know? All you need is capital.”

  “I might be able to lay my hands on some capital,” said Stanley carefully.

  The snub nose wrinkled. “Come and have a drink, my old love. Name of Pilbeam, Harry Pilbeam.”

  “Stanley Manning.”

  Pilbeam bought the first round and they discussed it. When it came to Stanley’s turn he excused himself, saying he had to see a man, but they arranged to meet on the following Wednesday when Stanley said he would have more idea of how the land lay.

  He didn’t want to waste his money on Pilbeam yet, and whisky was a diabolical price these days. Of course, he’d still got most of the money he’d taken from Ethel Carpenter’s handbag but he was reluctant to break into that.