Pleasure and a Calling (12 page)

Feeling the chill spring breeze now, I realized I’d left my
scarf in the library and I retraced my steps. I could see it still hanging on the chair, the book open on the table. Why the car, I wondered? Perhaps he was taking her out somewhere. But at least I had found her.

I pushed through the revolving door of the library. As I passed the front desk, I saw her lanyard with its laminated name-tag coiled on the counter where she’d left it in her eagerness to leave. Margaret was busy in the aisles. I retrieved my scarf, and on the way out again scooped the lanyard into my pocket. I didn’t look back, just kept walking. I reached the corner that would take me into the town square and the office. I felt the cord and the plastic card. My step quickened. I was impatient to know her name, but I also wanted to savour the moment.

But when I walked into the office I was immediately beset by Zoe and Katya, both of whom had been trying to reach me.

‘Ah, apologies,’ I said, checking my phone. ‘I turned it off while I was with the Curries.’

‘But it was the Curries who just called, wanting to speak to you.’

‘Did I say Curries?’ I shook my head. ‘Cooksons. I meant the Cooksons.’

Katya looked even more puzzled. ‘You’ve been to see the Cooksons? Are they back on track? What did they say?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual. I think they said they had plans for a spring break.’

‘I told you that yesterday.’

‘Indeed. And you were right.’ I beamed at her. ‘I suggested your idea of lining up some buyers while they’re away in …’

‘The Seychelles.’

‘Indeed. They seemed, well … cordial.’

‘Cordial? Does that mean they’ll let us in?’

I was saved from Katya by a call from the Curries, which took some time to deal with. After that, Zoe ambushed me with her own anxieties, not least of which was the tale of a tenant from one of our riverside studios who had disappeared owing a month’s rent.

‘That’s one of the Damato flats?’

She nodded.

‘Just arrange to have it cleaned. I’ll deal with it.’

At last, in the privacy of the small back office, I took out the lanyard, its orange cord wrapped around the white laminated ID. I flipped the card. Her name was Abigail. Abigail Rice. I sounded the name under my breath.

And then it clicked.
Rice
. I almost laughed out loud. The house wasn’t Sharp’s at all. It was hers.

A
BIGAIL, OH,
A
BIGAIL
. I waited and watched her now in the mornings on her early run, huffing down the steps to the river path, crossing the bridge and on to the Common and making a circuit of the town centre – alternating her choice of streets, as if to keep me on my toes – before coming back up via the newsagent and bakery at the top of Fount Hill. By now she was pink-cheeked, sipping from her water bottle, her lovely wiry hair held back in a red elastic hairband. The air had cleared, the clouds swept from my mind. It seemed more likely than not that she had been alone the night I watched the pizza delivery man arrive. And the Friday I’d bumped into Sharp coming out of the library? He hadn’t been returning books at all but picking up the key to her house.
Her
house.

What wouldn’t I have given for that key now.

But I hadn’t been idle. It had taken a while to find her mother’s name in the Death notices of a year-old copy of the
Sentinel
in the library (Abigail herself was only feet away when I uttered a silent ‘Eureka!’), confirming that she was an orphan like myself. Still in mourning, what a vulnerable lamb she
would have presented to a sly fox like Sharp, a performer with a microphone, plausible and charming, wheedling his way into her life as he had with his wife, Judith. He couldn’t love Abigail. Not as I could (my scurrying, worrying heart told me that much).

I visited the house, approaching it methodically as I distributed a handful of our leaflets along that stretch of Raistrick Road. It was a big house. Too big for her mother (who, according to the notice, had died after a short illness), and now too big for Abigail. She must surely sell it in favour of a cosier place (I could picture her in one of the Victorian cottages on the hill opposite St Theobald’s, stooping in the small back garden among rows of peas or snipping at some unruly floral abundance that matched her hair in its beauty and abandon). Pushing a leaflet through the letterbox of her blue door in the afternoon chill, I allowed my fingertips to linger in the warm interior – a taste of things to come.

I loitered then, hoping to catch a neighbour who might tell me something about Abigail or her mother, but saw no one. And then I reached – of course! – the newsagent’s. I made a show of bumbling amid the stationery until I had the attentions of the owner and his wife, to whom I found myself explaining how I had foolishly fled the office without so much as a pen, and with clients to see! After some deliberation I chose the most expensive brand they had, alongside good envelopes and a book of standard sales forms. ‘Ready for business!’ I laughed.

‘Business is important,’ grinned the man with a faint bow of the head. ‘We must
all
do business. Otherwise … poof!’

‘Precisely,’ I said, taking this opportunity to stress the importance of quality service and the building of trust if local business people are to retain the continuing confidence of the community.

The couple agreed wholeheartedly. ‘We too must do this,’ said the man. ‘Every day we work. It is hard, but …’ He smiled.

‘But we must show people that we are always here, ready to serve? Everyone needs us sometimes. If not today, then tomorrow. Or, in my business, sometimes even the following year. But it becomes personal, don’t you think? Each customer is important.’

They both smiled, though less certain of my meaning this time. The man once again gave a slight bow. ‘Thirty-two years we are here now.’

‘And that tells its own story. I mean, especially in your line of business, you know your customers. You take a pride in knowing what they want.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the woman. ‘We know, we know.’

‘For me, for example, in my replacement-window business, I have a note in my diary to see a certain customer. A courtesy call, you understand. But there is no answer. I come twice, still no answer. Should I call again? I don’t know. Perhaps I should cross this lady off my list. But perhaps she is ill?’

The woman looked worried. ‘She is your customer?’

‘Not exactly. I spoke to her last year. Mrs Rice, at number eighty-four? Perhaps you know her.
Please
come back in the spring, she said. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but her windows are in a worse condition than ever.’

The woman looked grave. ‘The lady at number eighty-four?’ She conferred briefly with her husband in another language.

‘The lady passed away,’ said the man, shaking his head. ‘Many months ago. Her daughter, she came home to look after her, but the lady passed away. And now she lives here. We see her.’

‘Her daughter?’

‘A lovely girl,’ said the woman. ‘She came from London. At first she cancelled the papers, but now every day she comes and buys!’

I added a chocolate bar and a drink to my purchases. ‘Keep my strength up,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ said the man.

The doorbell tinged, heralding two new customers and bringing an end to our friendly babble. The couple wished me a good day.

It was a common enough story. The child who moves away – to university, to work, to establish herself in a new place – and then has to return to her home town to nurse an ailing parent. Would Abigail stay now? She had a job. Perhaps she had hopes of Sharp.

My heart sank at the thought. Was it possible to drive them apart without driving her away again? What else would keep her here in this town? The leaflet I posted would remind her of her choices – the opportunity to cash in her inheritance and return to her life in London. She’d be able to buy a smart flat in a good area. It was likely that she already had a flat in London she was renting out. And yet my hope had to be that she might sell. That her key would one day fall into my hands. There seemed no other way. Though of course there was, and always had been.

A
S
I
SAID
, I
FEEL LUCKY
at this moment just to hear myself breathe. The air is thin, and I ally myself once again with the spirit of those who dare themselves into hazard, who scale those heights where oxygen is shortest in supply – though this story would be best told from a higher prospect still. I’m never quite far enough up the hill to discern a safe ending. I see the broadness and detail below, but what lies in the misty above? Perhaps oblivion. One slip! It seems there’s always one more twisting path, narrowing upwards and slippery underfoot, with some horned beast barring the way, giving me the eye. It’s always the story so far.

Hearing this, you might assume my worst dreams are about falling. In fact they are about disclosure and pursuit and swift extermination. A less attractive metaphor altogether. They are about having my roof ripped off. And in this hour before dawn, that fate has never felt more real and threatening. I feel my pursuers upon me. I lie in dread awaiting their loud cries and horrified triumph. Here! Here! The pest beneath the floorboards!

It was probably true what Aunt Lillian said about the day my mother died. I do love an enclosed space. A small stairs cupboard
is ideal. Surrounded on all sides. The muffled quietness. In my aunt’s barely used back room I made a den under the oak dining table, draped in the big Christmas tablecloth out of the drawer and heaped inside with cushions. It was here, in the green shade, that cousin Isobel once discovered me with the fashion dolls she no longer played with – Sindy, plus Sindy’s boyfriend Paul, plus two larger pink babies in nappies. I had swapped their clothes round so that Paul was wearing Sindy’s short gingham nightie and carrying water skis, while Sindy wore Paul’s sheepskin coat, her white nurse’s mask and nothing else. Together they took care of the children, though of course really it was me who decided who was punished and who had jelly and ice-cream. It was a game I could have played all day, had Isobel not arrived, screaming and punching and bringing the adults running.

‘You’re too sensitive,’ Aunt Lillian said to Isobel at tea.