Laying the Ghost (16 page)

Mimi, slyly, had also done some homework. ‘I wonder if it’s still true that on Brunel’s birthday you can see the sun shining right through the tunnel? I mean, it might not be true now, seeing as time and the earth and everything must have shifted a bit since Brunel built it, but it’s a lovely thought, isn’t it?’ She looked out of the window at the passing tunnel darkness, and felt Joel’s arm slide round her shoulders. She turned back to look at him and he gently kissed the edge of her mouth as they emerged into the brilliant daylight.

At last, she thought.

9

Change The Locks

(Lucinda Williams)

FROM INSIDE THE
studio, across the garden, Nell could hear the sound of the drill. Steve had been insistent that, as a man-free household, she and Mimi should have a full complement of domestic-safety devices, and he had turned up just after lunch with a stout chain for the front door and a new lock and bolt for the back one. ‘One kick and any scumbag would be in, the rubbish you’ve got on here,’ he told her, sneering at her back-door security arrangements. ‘You’ve got to make more barriers. Burglars are idle bastards: if they weren’t, they’d have proper jobs. If they have to work to get in somewhere, chances are they won’t bother.’

She couldn’t fault his logic, gave him a cup of tea and the last of the HobNobs, then left him to it while she went
into
the studio (surely only a matter of time before he came to sort that door out as well) to deal with her emails and do some more work on painting doomed vegetables. If the noise stopped, though, she would go back to the house and investigate. She didn’t want Steve wandering into her bedroom to check whether she was keeping an axe under the pillow. (‘Very bad idea,’ she could hear him saying, as he stood by the bed wielding the thing. ‘You’re just providing a weapon they can use against you.’)

Alex had sent four emails, each about ten minutes apart as if he’d done the first one quickly, decided to move on to more pressing business and then kept thinking, ‘oh yes … and …’ He’d now reminded Nell to forward his mail, to cut up his spare American Express card, see if she could find his old passport (why would anyone want that?) and to find out if the BMW dealer had sold his car and if so, why hadn’t the money appeared in the bank yet? So this was now her role, obviously. Once a wife, always a PA.

‘
Hello, Nell – how are you doing, ex-darling, ex-love-of-my-life? Are you well/lonely/ecstatically entertaining a string of new admirers who must be queuing round the block, seeing as you’re in peak condition and as gorgeous as you’ll ever be. Not?
’ Nell muttered the words she considered were missing as she sat at her desk in the garden studio and scribbled down the list of Alex’s demands. He had never been over-profuse when writing, but surely he could have been a bit
more
friendly? What was to lose, at this stage? He hadn’t even asked how Seb and Mimi were – though she did know he was communicating with them separately. Not only were there a safe three thousand miles between them, but it wasn’t as if she was going to interpret any contact as a sign that he was desperate for the two of them to get back together. No – the ‘it’s over’ aspect had been amicably mutual, really, all things considered. He just wasn’t a wordy, or particularly thoughtful, sort. She thought about the cards and presents she’d had from him over the years – none of them had said anything more than an understated ‘Love, Alex’, and for the last two Christmases and birthdays had, unsurprisingly, been reduced to just ‘Alex’.

Sebastian, now he was different. She’d just read an email from him that contained an unusually detailed account of a party in Truro at which the police had arrested two of his housemates for walking across car roofs and another for making obscene gestures at his own reflection in a shop window. Then he’d gone on to describe how nauseous he’d felt in the morning as, agonized with hell’s hangover, he lay on his bed with the whirling-pit sensation, staring up at the nipple-pink ceiling on which someone who desperately needed a more satisfying artistic outlet than home decorating had made free-form swirls of Artex. Luckily he’d stopped short of regaling her with any intimate girl-action details (if
there’d
been any girl action, the state he was in). If he started on that she’d have to remind him there was such a thing as too much information and tell him that there were times she’d prefer the too-cool-for-contact one-liners that he sent to Mimi. Funny, at home he’d been quite a silent, grumpy sort, quite self-contained. This must be his way of being sensitive – thinking she might need some jolly cheering up now she was husbandless. That level of consideration was definitely a gene he hadn’t got from Alex.

Nell got up and went to the bookshelf to fetch her selection of vegetable reference books, ready to start work. On the way, she idly flicked the handles of the football table and scored some goals, very fairly, three at each end. The table had been a quirky present from Alex, five years before when the two of them had been more or less ticking over in mildly stale contentment (or at least she thought they had been: she later discovered that must have been the time of the girl in Germany …). Nell and Alex had spent a month having daily football tournaments, best of five games: she’d been Manchester United, he was Chelsea. Mimi insisted on being Millwall and Seb’s preference was Accrington Stanley.

Nell usually won, but when she’d attributed her skill to hours of playing the game in the Oxford Poly canteen, Alex had turned sulky and refused to play again, kicking the table viciously and saying, ‘Even this! You just had to
bring
him
into it, didn’t you?’ As if she wasn’t only supposed to have deleted Patrick from her life, but all her college years as well. She hadn’t even mentioned Patrick, she’d pointed out, and it had been a girl called Janine who’d been her footie partner, but it was too late and the games between the two of them were over. The table took up too much room in the studio and now often ended up piled with books or housing boxes of paint tubes. She decided, as she switched on the radio and prepared to paint, that she should sell it. Maybe she’d get Mimi to put it on eBay, though that was risky as Mimi might, once she knew it was on its way out, kick up a fuss about getting rid of things that were part of her father.

The radio was tuned very loudly to a vintage music station and the Stones were playing ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. Patrick had been a sixties music fanatic and he claimed to have been born in the wrong decade. He had been very fond of his smelly old Afghan coat that was a genuine sixties relic – Nell had a photograph of him wearing it in a snowstorm on Magdalen bridge. ‘I’d have made a perfect hippie,’ he’d told her wistfully as they watched
Woodstock
at the Moulin Rouge cinema in Headington. He so wished he’d been older than primary-school age when Jimi Hendrix was playing small London clubs and – the ultimate wish-gig for him – he’d love to have caught some of the Pink Floyd gigs before Syd Barrett left.

What was she going to say to him in her letter? She
obviously
had
to contact him now – otherwise what was the point of finding him, tracking him down to where he lived? She felt a bit guilty about that. She wouldn’t exactly be thrilled if she discovered he’d crept up on her like that. Or maybe he already had – it wasn’t as if she’d know.

Maybe he too had spent half an hour in his car, perhaps years ago, parked outside no. 14, under Isabelle’s overhanging willow, staring at her windows (no net curtains there either) and wondering how she lived and who she lived with and what she now looked like. Perhaps … it was possible, remotely, if he had any curiosity, perhaps he
had
seen her. She felt cold at the thought – suppose he’d taken one look, thought, oh Lord, she’s put on at least twenty pounds and is wearing a spotty pink frock from Hobbs, and raced back to the safety of the Oxfordshire hills, shuddering at the narrow escape he’d had all those years ago. Maybe he’d despised the colour of her front door (Farrow & Ball’s Pitch Blue) or the brazen nasturtiums mixed with out-of-control cornflowers that in summer tangled their garish way up the sides of the path.

But either way, did it still count as intrusive, if he never found out about her recent recce? Kate would say it didn’t. She would say it was just human nature, perfectly forgivable; but what, for example, would Mimi say? Teenagers had a very straightforward take on some kinds of morality, real extreme black/white, right/wrong stuff. Not, obviously, that she’d be telling Mimi any of this;
which,
Nell realized, rather answered her own question.

Work. That was still waiting to be done. She’d deal with the Patrick dilemma later. Much later. Maybe she’d keep him till after a good day of work and an early supper with Mimi. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plenty of evening time in which to think through what to say. And the social calendar for the coming weekend wasn’t exactly hectic either, featuring a massive stack of laundry to be dealt with and – such a highlight – a silly, boozy Sunday evening at Evie Mitchell’s. This was to be an all-women gathering to which they’d been asked to bring ‘mistakes’: clothes, bags, shoes they’d bought in a spirit of either daring, sale-induced madness or that ever-optimistic it’ll-fit-when-I’m-down-to-size-ten moment. The idea was to see if anyone else would fall on them in delight and claim they’d always wanted a lilac net micro-skirt or scarlet sequinned shoes. Evie proudly called it recycling. For a woman whose garden electricity would, on its own, run a small town, she had a funny notion of the term ‘green’, but it promised to be a fun way to spend an evening.

Nell opened her copy of Dr Hessayon’s
Vegetable and Herb Expert
and turned to the section on tomatoes and their ailments. Blossom End Rot, she read first. It sounded almost gynaecological: some unpleasant ailment resulting from sexual neglect, perhaps. Nell found several photos of the results of this affliction and it didn’t look appealing: the ends of the fruit were wizened and leathery.
It
was, she read (and possibly returning to the sexual neglect theme here), a result of over-dry conditions, as opposed to a condition called Blotchy Ripening, for which one of the causes was too much heat. No chance of that, she thought, as she started sketching a large, bushy tomato plant on which she must demonstrate foot rot, stem rot, eel worm, leaf mould, blight, wilt and a form of hormone damage which no amount of HRT would cure.

It was no good. While the computer sat there alongside her, inviting Nell to play with it, she couldn’t concentrate on the right colour to choose to depict Buckeye Rot (raised brown markings in a pattern that resembled crop circles). She pushed the layout pad aside and tentatively began typing a draft letter to Patrick, coming up with what seemed like a reasonable introductory sentence (
Patrick – is this a huge surprise?)
, then immediately deleting it. She had another go:
Patrick – I know it’s been a long, long time
, then deleted that too on the grounds of feeling she didn’t need to state the obvious. He would only sneer at her. This was harder than she’d thought.

In the end, she wrote a brief note about having come across his address by chance, through a friend (well, Steve had been the one who actually found it, and Kate had been a helpful navigator), and that now being so much older, she felt that it was time to catch up with friends who had been important. She read it over again. It sounded spontaneous and friendly and yet … did
it
sound as if she’d got something terminal and was calling up people to say goodbye? Suppose he came rushing to see her, thinking she was about to drop dead, and then felt cheated because there she was, alive and well, simply having a nostalgia-fest and indulging a whim and too much curiosity? Not that he’d be delighted to think she
was
about to go into that tunnel at the end of the light … not even Patrick would be so bitter. Not after so long.

Eventually she made a tentative suggestion about maybe meeting up once more, rather than waiting till the time came to meet on the ledge. He’d get this reference to a Fairport Convention song that he’d remember from his brief folkie phase. It was a track he’d played over and over till he’d become haunted by thoughts of his own mortality. Bored by his mood, she’d reminded him that at a healthy twenty-two, his death shouldn’t be any time soon. He’d given her a cold look and simply said, ‘No, it shouldn’t.’ And she’d wished she hadn’t said anything. Reminders of too-early death brought him down for days.

She printed out the letter, then decided it looked too formal as typescript and copied it out by hand. It was better like that, more personal, but it also made her feel more vulnerable, somehow. She hoped he’d be happy to hear from her – it could go either way. She kissed the page for luck, sealed it into an envelope and stamped it, then left it on top of the closed laptop while she drew the outline for the tomato plant. She would, she decided,
give
it a couple of hours before she posted it, just in case.

‘Your neighbour’s taking a very keen interest in what I’m up to.’ Steve’s head appeared round the studio door, some time later. ‘He’s asked me if I’m a friend of yours.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ Nell asked. ‘Aren’t you a keen supporter of Neighbourhood Watch schemes?’

‘On the whole, yes.’ Steve grinned. He caught sight of the football table and started casually twisting the handles, positioning the players. ‘Has he got the hots for you then, that bloke?’

‘Who?
Charles?
’ Nell laughed. ‘No! He’s close to seventy and what used to be called, in polite circles, a confirmed bachelor!’

‘Seventy? No, this one wasn’t. He was definitely younger than that. Early to mid fifties? Looked a bit old-hippie-ish, very peace, love and lentils.’

‘Ah, that’ll be Ed, his brother. Much younger. He only lives there part-time. Their mother owned the house and Charles lived with her. Ed’s got his own place in Dorset but lives up here in the week. He teaches at the sixth-form college.’