Quiet Neighbors (17 page)

“Yes, Dad, actually you have,” Eddy said. “Jude's shitbag husband knocked up some bint and that's why he left her.”

“Oh my dear!”

Jude managed a stiff smile. It was so much more complicated than that. She stared at both of them, trying to catch the thought and examine it. The living tell the tales and the tales of the dead die with them. Unless, like Todd, they write them down and leave them behind. But that wasn't it either.

“We shall leave you in peace to continue your … ” Lowell stopped talking and stared her. “What did you say when I arrived?” he asked. “Communing with the spirits of the dead?”

“Interleaved ephemera,” Jude began. They were words to make ninety-nine out of a hundred listeners glaze over—Eddy snorted like a hog with hay fever—but Lowell was the hundredth, and his eyes lit up.

“Such a change of view in that quarter even in my lifetime!” he said. “Although, dear me, I'm getting rather old to use my lifetime as unit of short measure, I daresay. Forgive me.”

“What for?” said Eddy.

“People do PhDs on it now,” Jude agreed. “And not just Dickens' Shakespeare or Joyce's Dickens.”

“I shouldn't have thought Joyce was a Dickens man.”

“You just keep saying the same words over and over,” said Eddy.

“Ephemera,” Jude began, “is when—”

“I don't care,” said Eddy.

“Well, anyway as I was saying, Lowell, I'm reading the book club notes of this lot's first owner and … it's hard to explain.”

“Not to me, my dear,” Lowell said. “Although the prevailing view is that the dead should go and one should commune with the living. ”

Jude looked uncertainly out of her window. It was a black square. Night had fallen like the snow in a fairytale and blanketed everything.

“I'm certainly better off for the dead than the living in this place,” she said.

“Creeporama,” said Eddy. Then she stood up very suddenly, from where she had been leaning against the sink. “Oh!”

“What is it?” said Lowell, leaping to his feet. “Pain? Contractions?”

“I just had a brilliant idea,” Eddy said. “Dad, can you wait outside while I tell Jude something privately?”

He hurried out, falling over himself to do her bidding.

“Brainwave,” she said when he was gone. “Jesus, I can't believe you never thought of it, living in a bloody graveyard surrounded by nothing but headstones!” She waited for Jude to catch on and then rolled her eyes. “Lowell doesn't know your second name, right? And Jude could be a nickname, right? And you want to start again, yeah? Well, look around.” Jude glanced to either side. “Not the kitchen, Einstein! Outside. You need a name and fresh start. Well the ground is full of people who don't need their names anymore, isn't it? Knock yourself out —you could be anyone!”

Seventeen

Jude woke the next
morning to a strong sense that she'd been dreaming of someone, but she couldn't remember who.

She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, groping for it, knowing it was gone.

“Todd Jolly, Archie Patterstone, Etta Bell,” she said to herself. The bathroom threw her voice back at her, cold and hollow. There was nothing in here to stop the sound bouncing around, just the painted floorboards, shiny-tiled walls, and bare window.

She knew it wasn't any of them she'd dreamed of. There was a face to go with the name. “Eddy, Lowell, Maureen, Jackie,” she said, turning the taps on. The water thundered out and steam began to soften the air. Then there was Jen at the tarot and Ela in the knitting shop. She smiled as she dropped her dressing gown and lowered herself into the water. She was making friends.

And what of Eddy's brainwave? Could she really go to a big cemetery in Glasgow and look around for a Judith or Jennifer or even a Jane, born in the mid-seventies and soon after dead again? She had told Lowell that her name was Jemimah, but he might not remember. And she hadn't breathed her last name to anyone.

She felt her smile fade. Did they count as friends if they didn't know her last name or she theirs? Yes, she decided. First names all round was just part of the friendly Wigtown way. Except for Mrs. Hewston. No one ever called her anything else. Despite the hot water, Jude shivered suddenly.

She meant to ask Lowell about it as soon as he got in that morning. She was in Home Crafts, looking in the pitiful collection of interior design books for ways to warm up her bathroom and finding nothing, when he came slowly up the stairs sounding like a tired old man. He appeared in the doorway, like Eddy the day before, with two cups of coffee and two chocolate biscuits.

“Like father like daughter,” Jude said.

He pushed one of the cups onto a shelf full of gardening books. Jude, proprietorial about the volumes she had sorted and wiped, couldn't help glancing at the single splash of milky Nescafé rolling down the spine of
The
River Cottage Year
, a pest of a book you couldn't properly shelve in either Cooking or Gardening because it was exactly half of each.

“Ha!” she said.

Lowell, startled, slopped a good glug of the cup he was still holding, tutted, and rubbed it halfheartedly into the floor with his toe.

“I've just remembered what I dreamt about last night,” she said. “Mrs. Hewston in the asparagus bed.”

“With a scythe.”

“Right. She … I don't even want to tell you what she said about it to me. But is she totally off her nut or is it true that one end's better than the other?”

“All true,” said Lowell. “Dear me, yes, it's been an asparagus bed of two halves ever since we dug it. Well, I say
we
, but it was Miranda.”

“And where would Mrs. Hewston have got the idea that she was out there in the dead of night burying … things?”

“Oh, no doubt she was,” said Lowell. “She believed greatly in planting at the full moon and putting roadkill under the rhubarb. Oh yes, absolutely. She was tireless in the garden. Quite tireless. Shoveled barrowfuls of ordure, laid paths, moved enormous shrubs six inches to frame a view. Fan-trained all the fruit trees against the south wall. That was Miranda. I've only had to go over them with a pair of clippers to keep them trim—she was a marvel.” He took a bite of his wagon wheel, looking disconsolately at the shelves closest by.

“She must have liked it here,” Jude said.

“She loved it. I thought it was the crowd. That summer, you know. Inez and Gary and Tom Tres—Goodness, I've forgotten his name! Tom Tres-something. Cornish, you know. But it wasn't that, because, after they all left, after the end of that summer, she stayed on. I hadn't dreamed she harboured feelings and … Well, she went in the end, of course, and only visited once.”

“What?” said Jude. “I thought you said when she was gone she was gone for good?”

“No, she'd been off on her travels for a while before her last visit. That last fateful visit.” He raised his eyebrows.

“I see,” Jude said. “Well, thank heavens for that. Otherwise, no Eddy.” She knew Lowell was far from shrewd, but it was unbelievable that he had no doubts at all about this tale. Miranda had taken off, returned for one night only and then twenty years later her daughter turned up and claimed him. “Do you have pictures of your mother?” she said.

“Miranda?” said Lowell. He had misheard her. “Yes, I've a lot of snaps of … ”

“Of the summer of love?”

Lowell gave his bark of laughter. “It really was,” he told her. “My father was dead and I filled the house with laughter at last. There was one particular week in July where every room was full and we had bunks in the drawing room too. The weather was beautiful and we sat outside every night until the small hours in the scent of the Lonicera.

“Of course I know they were humouring me. I know that
now
. Dear me, yes, I'm quite reconciled to that these days. They were all a good deal younger than me and from very different walks of life. But I had the house and I bought all the wine—filthy wine one drank in the country then, wouldn't clean brass with it. I shall indeed have a rummage for some photographs. Eddy would like to see them, I'm sure.”

They sat companionably finishing their tea and then he stood, clamping one of his large hands on each knee and levering himself to his feet.

“I like the reading corner, by the way, my dear,” he said, with a smile.

Jude peered at him. “You look different,” she said.

Lowell snorted and then bared his teeth at her. They were gleaming like pearls. Like enormous mismatched magnolia pearls. “She ordered a preparation from the dreaded Internet and made me sleep with a mouthful of it. Like little strips of gaffer tape. It was most disconcerting.”

“It's incredible,” Jude said. “Is it safe?”

“The instructions weren't in English,” Lowell said, “so I very much fear not. Anyway, if you come round for supper tonight you can help me resist another application, and I'll dig out my photograph albums. Toddle down memory lane, eh?” Then, when he was almost out of the room, he stopped. “Idiot. I forgot to give you what I came up for.”

“You gave me tea and biscuits.”

Lowell fished in the inside pocket of his jacket and drew out a small book. He was beaming.

“Oh!” said Jude. “Where did you get it? You haven't been to a sale.” She wiped her hands on her jeans, and reached out, only faltering when it was in her hands.

“I—I thought it was a Douglas,” she said. “I mean, thank you.”

In fact, it was a field guide to British seabirds, a pocket edition from the middle of the last century. Jude supposed migration patterns wouldn't have changed much, unless global warming had knocked them off kilter, and here she was right at the coast in a wild place where miles of empty headland met miles of mudflats and estuary. It must seem silly to Lowell that she wasn't making the most of it.

He was laughing. “My dear, what do you take me for? I wouldn't give you a thing simply because
I
happened to like it. I had an uncle who collected coins and he gave me coins for every birthday between the ages of eight and eighteen. Postal orders at Christmas thankfully, but still. Ten dreary birthdays until finally I got a bottle of malt.” He nodded at the book. “Look inside.”

Jude opened it and smiled.
T. Jolly.

“It's a sad tale, actually,” Lowell said. “When he was getting very frail indeed, no longer going out and about, he began to cull the library somewhat. He did away with his natural history collection—too painful, one supposes, when he knew his days of spotting things were over. Or perhaps he needed the space. One hundred books to read before et cetera. Well, dear me, many of them are gone, but I found this for you.”

Jude flipped to the back, but there was nothing there. As the pages turned, though, a piece of card fell out and landed at Lowell's feet. He stooped with another grunt and swiped it up.

“Sighting list?” he said, but he handed it over without looking. “Interleaved ephemera, anyway,” he went on. “And therefore yours, my dear. And I shall keep shaking my remaining brain cells for memories of more.” He turned away and then turned halfway back. “He was an interesting man, Todd Jolly. I'm very happy that you're … honouring him, I suppose. I don't suppose … ”

“What?” said Jude.

“I know all this”—he waved a hand at the disorder in the room, at the piles of books and the unpacked boxes of stock jammed onto what should be a display table—“will come to an end, and it's not exactly stretching you even at that. I don't suppose you'd consider just staying on, would you? No, of course not. Why would you? This backwater. Dusty old relic like Lowland Glen.”

Jude honestly had no idea whether he meant the bookshop or the man.

“Only, heavens above, you make her laugh. You and she seem to be quite … in cahoots already.”

“You don't need me to sweeten the pill, Lowell,” Jude said. “She loves you. And you're all she's got.”

Lowell couldn't hide his pleasure, but when he let in the whole of what she'd said, he shook his head. “I didn't mean that exactly,” he told her. “I didn't mean that you should function as some sort of … Dear me, no. I simply thought perhaps the three of us could be happy.”

Lowell was no less surprised than Jude herself when she stepped over and hugged him tight. He had the mugs in one hand but he pressed the other against the middle of her back and said, “Well, well,” before he left.

She had never been the emotional type. She knew it had unnerved people at the funeral. They had come ready to find her broken, or even to witness her breaking, and they went away disappointed and disapproving. But just because her grief didn't come out as tears in the crematorium, that didn't mean it wasn't there. It had to be at the bottom of what came after. If she could have gone to work she might have been all right. Well, not to work exactly. But to the bindery.

She tried to ration herself to a couple of visits there a month, because of the glue fumes and the suspicious gossipy nature of the three bindery workers, who didn't know why she came. Why
did
she go? Because it was mesmerising: the bindery inbox filled up during the day with the grubby, slackened, bacon-greased books from all over the system, then at night Stella and her girls stripped their baggy plastic, bleached the stains, stitched the slackness tight and glued feather-light tape on the tears. They put the books in clamps and buffed the edges of the pages with a sanding block until they were white again.

After Max left her—after he made her leave him—she wished they would turn their talents her way. Strip her, bleach her, clamp her, buff her smooth and pale with finer and finer grades of sandpaper until the last stroked her like silk and left her gleaming

Anyway, she couldn't go and sit in the bindery in the middle of her bereavement leave. And so what came after happened instead. She wasn't in control. She was reverberating like Wile E. Coyote when he made for the painted tunnel and met the rock face. That would be the basis of her defence if it came to that. Reeling from the double funeral of her parents, her only family, poor orphan child.

If it came to that. But between a new name from a Glasgow cemetery and a change of hair colour too, maybe it never would. Maybe the three of them
could
be happy. Eddy, the cuckoo in Lowell's nest with her secrets and lies. Jude on the run, looking over one shoulder for the rest of her life, careful never to get her face on a screen or her name on the news. And kind, honest, open Lowell, saving the world from tame Victorian porn, suspecting but not caring that once again it was his house and his money and this haven of a town that were the real draw.

Finally, she glanced at the card he had handed her. It was one of those rectangles, shiny on one side and rough on the other, familiar once upon a time to anyone who worked in a public library. Youngsters finding them now would be mystified most likely. But Jude was just old enough to remember when pairs of tights came with one leg stretched precariously around them to show what “American Tan” or “Ecru” would look like on a leg of pure snowy white.

These were birding notes, as Lowell had suspected. On a single day in November 1984, Todd had recorded a robin, ten sparrows, four herring gulls, something called a dooker that Jude had never heard of and three oystercatchers. Oystercatchers? She was intrigued despite herself, charmed by the thought of something so exotic-sounding in Scotland in November. If she went down to the shore one of these days, if it ever stopped raining, would she see oystercatchers too?

She was just about to look in the index for a picture when the last few lines caught her eye.

a. patterstone
e. bell?
l. mclennan—next?

“
Archie Patterstone is dead
,” she said. “
Etta Bell is fading fast
.”

She dropped the card back into the book and rubbed her hands on her jeans but could feel the echo of its glossy surface like a taint on the pad of her finger and thumb for the rest of the day, even after hours of shelf-washing, hours of dunking her hand over and over again in a bucket of lemon-scented water.

She tried to talk herself round. She already knew he was near
the end by late 1984, housebound, mourning his wife, losing his friends. If he was a lifelong note-taker he might well jot all kinds of things down. And when two of his friends died, he might well wonder who was next. She only wished she could get the other sentence out of her mind.
I will tell Dr. Glen enough is enough
.