Dark Corners: A Novel (10 page)

The bathroom was still crowded with make-up and perfume, most of it barely used. She would have all that. The Roberts radio wouldn’t be missed, she thought, and nor would the nearly-new camera. Was there anything in the flat she could sell? Maybe what her mother quaintly called cutlery? But no. She had never stooped to stealing and she mustn’t start now.

After another swig of tequila, she went downstairs to tell the concierge that she was looking after the flat for the next – how long? She didn’t know; say, eight weeks? But Gervaise had already given him the news, and it seemed not to have gone down well. The man scowled behind the black-framed sunglasses he wore, which seemed a strange choice as it had come on to rain and the sky was very dark.

IT WAS A
little late in the day to take a bus to Hampstead Heath, Tom Milsom thought, but now that it was light for sixteen hours of the day, he hadn’t really noticed it was nearly five when he left home. Still, his favourite bus, the number 6, had taken him to the stop outside the Tesco in Clifton Road and the flower shop, and there he got on the single-decker 46, which took him to Fitzjohn’s Avenue.

The houses up here were huge four-storey places, most of them sheltered and veiled by tall creeper-hung trees. Tom wondered if just one family or even a couple lived in them, or were they divided into flats? ‘Flats’ wasn’t a suitable word. You would have to call them ‘apartments’ and the houses ‘mansions’. Although quite heavy traffic filled the road, the whole area was oddly silent. Few people were about, and no young ones. Tom saw a youngish woman in very high heels taking a dog out for its walk, a dog you couldn’t mistake for a mongrel or a cross-breed, it was so unmistakably pedigree, with its slender, elegant shape, sleek cream-coloured fur and legs rather like its owner’s. The collar it wore was black leather studded with green and blue jewels.

This was a safe, quiet bus, his fellow passengers mostly middle-aged and elderly women, all middle class and with shopping bags. Working women would have shrieked, or at any rate gasped, when the bus driver had to stamp on his brakes and judder to a stop as a teenager in a long scarlet sports car charged across Nutley Terrace right in front of him, yet these women barely reacted. Tom got out by Hampstead station, which he remembered was the deepest below ground in the London Underground system – or was that Highgate? Hampstead was very pretty. That was a word a man should never use, he thought as he walked down Rosslyn Hill, except perhaps about a girl. A thin drizzle was falling.

Should he try and find the house where Keats had lived? There seemed very little point when all he knew about Keats was a poem about a knight-at-arms and a woman who had no mercy that he had had to learn at school. Anyway, he didn’t know whether the house was in Downshire Hill or in Keats Grove, where it ought to be, and he didn’t want to show his ignorance by asking. He could have some tea instead. Perhaps he ought to buy something, a little present for Dorothy, and what better place than Hampstead? It was a bit ridiculous, for he was hardly on holiday, but he bought it just the same, a book of notelets, one for every day of the year, with ‘Hampstead Queen of the Hills’ printed on it in Gothic lettering. He had a cup of tea and a millionaire’s macaroon before going off to find the bus home.

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.’

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.