The New Neighbours (6 page)

“Sorry, Mum.” Jill was laughing. “Sylvia was talking about your chocolate cake all the way here.”

Nancy laughed too. “Well,” she said, “there is one, so we'd better go and find it.”

Once the children had been given small pieces of cake with the promise of more after lunch, Nancy poured drinks for herself and her daughter and they carried them out on to the terrace and watched the children playing in the sandpit Nancy had had built for them in the garden. For a while they watched, amused by the antics of the children, and then even as Jill was wondering exactly how to introduce the subject of the job, her mother said, “Well, now that we're comfortable, tell me what's wrong.”

“Wrong?” Jill looked startled. “What makes you think anything's wrong?”

Nancy laughed. “You're my daughter, darling,” was her only explanation.

“I'm bored,” Jill answered. Now the initiative no longer rested with her she might as well be direct. “I'm bored and I want to go back to teaching part-time.”

“But darling, you can't possibly,” Nancy began.

“Why not?” broke in Jill. “Other mothers do. Lots of them have to.”

“But you don't,” replied Nancy. “You're lucky enough not to have to work. You don't have to give your children to a child-minder, and miss out each time they learn something new. Think of the children. Thomas is only two. They're young for such a short time.” She looked fondly at her grandson as he filled a plastic bucket with sand, his tongue stuck out between his lips in concentration. “And Sylvia is only at school in the mornings, she needs you there to come home to, to spend the afternoons and evenings with.”

“But I would be there in the afternoons,” Jill explained. “I'd get a morning job somewhere and be finished at twelve. Isabelle can have Thomas for the mornings, and I'll be there for them both in the afternoons.”

“What does Anthony think?” asked Nancy, trying a different tack. Her instinctive reaction to Jill's suggestion was to be against it. She believed very strongly that before children went to school full-time, their mothers should be at home with them.

“I haven't discussed it with him lately,” Jill admitted. “He's so busy we hardly have time to talk anymore.” She sighed. “But I know he won't like it much. You know he's never wanted me to work even before the children.”

Nancy did know. She had backed Jill in her stand to continue teaching until they started a family.

“I want to provide for you,” Anthony had kept saying. “I want you to have time to enjoy your life.”

“I do enjoy my life,” Jill had protested. “I love teaching and I would hate to be at home all day.”

Anthony had appealed to Nancy privately, telling her it was his place to provide for his wife. Nancy was sympathetic. She knew he felt so strongly about it because his own father had done a flit when Anthony was only two, and he had watched his mother struggle on her own to bring up her three children, whilst working full-time. He had never forgiven his father, and was determined that his own wife should lack nothing that he could provide.

“It is very commendable that you feel like that,” she had told him, “but really it would be better for both of you if Jill went on working. She does enjoy her teaching, you know, and finds it both rewarding and fulfilling. When you start a family, she'll find that equally rewarding and fulfilling, but she needs to teach in the meantime.” Nancy held firmly to this belief and Anthony, with reluctance had agreed.

Now Nancy was equally firm with Jill. “Your place is with your children,” she said. “Your first duty is to your family. I think you should rule out any notion of going back to teaching out of your head until Thomas is at school full-time. Then maybe you could consider a little part-time work.”

“My duty?” Jill echoed.

“Yes, your duty. It's a much maligned and underrated word in this day and age. Most young women of your age would give their eye-teeth for what you've got, Jill. A loving husband, two beautiful, healthy children, a nice home and enough money not to have to worry about the bills. You have an au pair to help with the chores and to give you some time to yourself, a car of your own, you lack for nothing and if it means you can't go back into the classroom for a few years, so be it.”

It was a long time since her mother had laid down the law and Jill greeted her words with a moment's mutinous silence before she muttered, “Well thanks for the vote of support, Mum.”

“Now, darling, don't get in a mood. You asked what I thought and I told you.”

“I didn't actually.” Jill was still angry. “I just wanted to talk things over, not be given a lecture. I'm not beginning to suggest that I work full-time, anyone would think I'd suggested that I went and ran ICI or something. I just want an interest outside the house. Didn't it drive you mad when you had to stay at home all day to look after us?”

“Sometimes,” admitted Nancy, “but I had no help in the house, and with four of you I was kept pretty busy. If I'd tried to hold down a job as well, I think I'd have died of exhaustion. But in fact, I wouldn't have missed the day-to-day changes as you all grew up, for the world.” She looked across at her daughter. “I think you and Anthony need a holiday. “Why don't you have a couple of weeks away, just the two of you so you can find each other again? I can have the children, they'll be no trouble, especially if Isabelle comes to help.”

“I don't suppose Anthony can get the time,” Jill muttered, still annoyed.

Nancy smiled sweetly. “Why don't you ask him?” she said.

Anthony finished his meeting earlier than he had expected, and was already in the train on the way home when he thought he would give Jill a call at her mother's and suggest that they go out for dinner. Then he remembered that he had lost his mobile phone. He racked his brains as to where he could have left it, and then it came to him. Yesterday he had grabbed a quick cup of coffee as he waited for the morning train. Someone had rung him as he sat in the cafeteria and he had answered the phone sitting at the table. He'd had to get some papers out of his briefcase to answer a question, and he must have left the phone on the table, or maybe it had fallen on to the floor as he re-packed his briefcase. He would ask when he got to the station, you never knew, someone might have handed it in.

When he reached the station he hurried into the cafeteria and asked at the cash desk if anyone had found a mobile phone. The cashier shook her head “Nothing handed into me, dear,” she said. “Well, they wouldn't, would they? Not these days. Finders keepers these days. You could try the lost property I suppose.”

Anthony thanked her and turned away annoyed. He certainly hadn't used the phone after the time in the cafeteria, so he must have left it and someone must have picked it up. As he went out to the car park he remembered a story he had heard about someone who kept having his phone stolen from his car, and an idea came to him, an idea which made him laugh. It probably wouldn't work, but it was worth a try.

As soon as he got in he made himself a cup of tea and sat down in the kitchen to write himself a script, then when he had read it aloud several times he decided he was ready. Picking up the telephone, he dialled the number of his mobile phone. The number rang, and after a moment or two it was answered.

“Yes?” The answer was male and gruff.

“Oh, good afternoon,” Anthony said cheerfully. “I'm ringing on behalf of Radio Belcaster. You've been chosen by our computer in a random selection to win a TV and VCR set or £350 in cash if you can answer a simple question.”

“What question?” The voice sounded slightly less gruff, younger than before.

“Can you tell me the name of the Honda garage in Pottage Street?”

“Just tell you name of a garage?” The voice sounded suspicious.

“Yes, that's all. It's part of an advertising campaign for Honda.”

“Windridge Motors,” said the voice.

“Congratulations, sir,” Anthony enthused, beginning to enjoy himself. “That answer makes you a winner. Now if you would like to choose whether you'll take cash or the TV and Video…?”

“I'll take the cash,” said the voice.

“Certainly. Now if I might just make sure we have your name and address correct. It would be a pity if your money went astray…?” He ended his comment as a question and then held his breath to see if he would get a reply.

“Scott Manders. I live at Flat C, 19 Elmbank Close, Belcaster.”

Anthony repeated the name and address and then said, “Thank you, Mr Manders, you'll hear from us in the next couple of days.” He rang off and with a delighted laugh he phoned the police.

The officer who answered his call was less than grateful for the information Anthony gave him, it was after all very small potatoes, but said he would look into the matter and they would be in touch.

When Jill and the children arrived home for bath time, Anthony was sitting in the garden reading the paper. He greeted them with smiles and kisses and Jill remembered all of a sudden the man she had loved and married and she held him tightly in her arms.

“Mum says she'll have the children for a couple of weeks so we can get away on our own,” she said. “Can you get the time off so we can have a real break?”

Anthony looked down into her face. “Definitely,” he said and kissed her.

Nicholas Richmond turned into Dartmouth Circle and pulled up outside number seven. His daughter Madeleine, who was in the back of the jag, pointed to the house excitedly.

“Look, Mum. That's it. Number seven.”

Clare Richmond looked at the peeling paint and the cracked panes of the front door. Her eye ran over the frontage, taking in the general state of neglect and decay. She didn't know quite what she'd been expecting after the paroxysms of delight from Madeleine and the cautious admissions from Nick that “the place needs a lot spending on it, but has possibilities”, but whatever it was, it was not the reality of number seven.

“So it is,” she said noncommittally.

“What do you think, Mum?” Madeleine was scrambling out of the car. “Won't it be great?”

“Well,” said her mother, opening the car door, “let me see it all properly, before I say any more.” She paused on the pavement and glanced round the circle of the close. The houses had been built in the garden of a large old house, now demolished, and were grouped round an area of communal garden in the middle. It was a pleasant round of garden with flowering shrubs, two wooden seats set to catch the sun, and a tiny play area with a two swings and a small slide. The whole was fenced off with a low white fence, not to keep people out, but rather to delineate it from the grass verge that surrounded it. There was no one in the garden now, and it looked very peaceful in the May sunshine.

“It looks a nice quiet area,” she remarked, and Nicholas gave a shout of laughter.

“It won't be when Maddo and her crowd have moved in,” he cried. “They won't know what's hit them.” He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and walked to the front door. Clare followed, and as she did so her attention was caught by a movement in the window of the adjacent house. She could see no one, but the twitching of the curtain told her that their arrival had been observed by the next door neighbour, anxious to see who was going to be living on the other side of the party wall. Clare paused again, glancing round the close to see if she could see any other surreptitious curtain-twitching, but the other houses stood quiet and still in the morning sunshine, their windows unoccupied and their curtains still. She turned back to number seven and glanced sharply up at the first-floor windows of number six. No one was there, the net curtains were now undisturbed, and the sun reflected brightly their innocence.

I suppose it's only natural to want to see who your new neighbours are, thought Clare as she followed her husband and daughter into the house.

As she crossed the threshold, all thoughts of inquisitive neighbours and twitching curtains vanished as she inhaled the smell of damp and mould and cats. Maddo was standing at the bottom of the stairs, hopping from one foot to the other, for all the world more like a ten year old than a young woman of twice that age.

“Come on, Mum, come and look.” She started up the stairs.

Nicholas emerged from a door down the hall and said, “Let's start at the bottom and work up. Then you can explain to Mum what we thought we could do.”

“Yeah, great.” Madeleine led her mother into the room where he father stood. “This is going to be Ben's room,” she said. The room had obviously been a study as there was still an old desk in it. It had a glass door to the garden. Though garden, Clare reflected, was hardly the term she'd give to the rubbish dump beyond the window.

“Have the others been here yet?” Clare asked. “Or did you decide who was going to have which room?”

“Oh, they've been here all right,” Madeleine said. “Mr Short let us come down straightaway. He moved out as soon as the contract was signed.” She waved her hand round the room. “Ben wanted to be on the ground floor, and the others didn't mind, so it was an easy decision. Dean's going to be in the new room… I'll show you in a minute… and us girls are going to be on the top floor.”

They made their way up through the house, Clare inspecting the big living room on the first floor, identical no doubt to that of the curtain-twitcher next door, the diminutive kitchen, up another flight of stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor.

“This one will be mine,” Madeleine enthused, pulling Clare into the largest, which had a view out over the gardens. “I'm going to paint it yellow and have bright curtains and a duvet cover to match.”

Clare smiled at her daughter's enthusiasm, and finding it catching, suggested colour schemes for the other two upstairs bedrooms. These were smaller rooms, looking out over the close, but each could be made very comfortable.