The North of England Home Service (23 page)

A wool shop on Stephenson Street back in the old
neighbourhood
had proved to be the answer – a cosy cave with a tinkling bell on the door and a two-bar overhead heater, packed full of knitting wools, patterns, stuffed knitted toys, baby clothes, satin ribbons, ‘layettes’ (Ray never found out what these were) and a constant through-traffic of pregnant women, women with babies, women with school-age children whom it became Betty’s
pleasure
to see grow up and return in time as customers with babies and children of their own.

She lived in a two-room flat above the shop, which was next door to the double-fronted draper’s where Ray had spent so many hours in the winter when he was three staring at the unflinching family of mannequin models in the rain hats and the raincoats with the mysterious mechanical rain drizzling steadily
down on them. By the time she retired, that shop had become a Slots o’ Fun with prizes of crystal rose bowls and decanters and reproduction revolving bookstands and trivet tables in the
window.
The shop on the other side had gone through many changes of use, from Wilson’s pork shop, to greasy-spoon, to laundryette, to betting shop, finishing up as a Booze Buster off-licence. The whole row had narrowly escaped being demolished in a
road-widening
scheme in the late sixties, when there was a lot of money sloshing about for projects of that kind and local
politicians
were well known to be as bent as corkscrews, getting rich on the skimmings of the municipal-construction game. (It was in those years that Ronnie Cornish, as the main manufacturer of bricks in the area and with a number of key place men on the Council, had begun the business of building up his considerable fortune.) Betty’s row had survived until 1985, the last small black stain on a clean field of popular modern redevelopment.

The wool shop established Betty as a figure in the community. As well as providing continuity, she was one of the few people in the area who had a telephone in the early days, and she was happy to take messages and let people use the phone in the shop to make calls. A friend of Betty’s called Mrs Sudgeon also started to sit in the shop and tell fortunes. Hannah Sudgeon was blind; the sockets of both her eyes were empty and sealed with stitches, which
frightened
some of the children. But she claimed to be able to foretell the future by the sound of a person’s voice and by the message she received from a point on the arm just below the elbow. She could be found at the shop most days, often with her hands at the level of her low chest and a skein of wool stretched between them and Ray’s mother industriously rolling the wool into balls. The two of them would sit together knitting baby clothes, romper suits, bonnets, tiny cardigans, the needles monotonously clicking, and Mrs Sudgeon would repeat her frequently stated, truly
frightening
belief that death was a force of loneliness only hinted at by the
most ravening loneliness we know in life: the soul does not leave the body but lingers with it through every stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat and cold and the long nights.

Since her death, whenever Ray thought of his mother, he thought of her in the shop, with the brown shelves with the chipped underpainting, the cave-like atmosphere, the invitation to ‘Join Our Christmas Club’, the soft wool toys with their economic three-stitch noses and glass button eyes; the plaster Venus de Milo which stood for years on one of the shelves with a telephone number scribbled hastily in pencil along the back of the relaxed right leg.

An elderly man called Sullivan would come in to Teresa Beard House several days a week and sit at the piano and knock out some of the old songs. On a few occasions when Ray called Marzena at the home to ask after his mother he could hear the old people singing ‘Run, Rabbit’ or ‘When You’re Smiling’, the words miraculously returned through the addled haze of dementia, touching old cords, Sullivan thumping away. And now he heard the same songs as he was lying in bed some mornings, drifting up from the basement, the soundtrack of Tarnow market, one of those coincidences that are just part of the mysteriously connected random flow that constitutes life.

Over the years Jackie had accumulated a collection of floor plans for most of the chain hotels in the British Isles. On all of them he had marked up the structural walls in Biro or coloured pencil and made a list of the rooms that abutted a cement wall and were also away from the road, and away from the lift and the service lift. Ray was a fanatic about quiet, and it was one of Jackie’s responsibilities to see that he got it. Sometimes it meant exchanging rooms with Ray in the middle of the night. There’d be a knock at the door and Ray would be standing there without his wig, in his dressing-gown, looking beat and orphaned: ‘Would you change rooms with me?’

‘Let’s see‚’ Ray would invariably say, half an hour after they’d checked in somewhere. ‘You have the cement wall, but you’re close to the road … All these cars outside will be starting their engines to check out at 8 a.m. … Jesus! All those terrible hours that people get up! I know they’ll be waking me. Let’s see yours, Jackie.’

Ray was still a light sleeper. He had woken up several times during the night thinking he heard wind gusting through the trees – more noise, with, it seemed to him, an odd desolate note, than he had heard the stand of trees on the Moor ever make before. In fact it was the strips of police caution tape quarantining the trees, snapping and humming in a sustained, unearthly way in the wind.

There was still a wind now. He was aware of it rattling the
windows
, which were the original windows that had been put in when the house was built. The panes in the bedroom were still the original Victorian panes which, when light reflected on them, seemed still to be in the process of setting. The surface had a volatile look, as if it was sliding and bunching; it had the tallowy droop and inelasticity of ageing skin. When Ray lay in bed
watching
the light play on the windows sometimes they reminded him of his own skin. He examined the underside of his upper arms now to see if he could spot any sign of growing ‘bingo flaps’, as he had heard them called at work – a reference, he gathered, to the swaying underarms of the women who waved winning cards in the air at bingo halls to claim the ‘house’.

Moor Edge Terrace was built in the 1870s. One of the original owners of number 19 had been a painter and woodcarver called Ralph Hedley, and the house had stayed within the Hedley family for generations. It had come on to the market for the first time only in the 1990s, and as soon as he heard that the Hedley house (as nobody other than himself thought of it) was for sale, Ronnie Cornish had made a pre-emptive offer and scarfed it up.

Ronnie was an unlikely fine-art aficionado. But the peculiar fact was that he knew more about the life and work of Ralph Hedley than anybody living. Ronnie had a number of collections. He had a library of rare atlases by Blaeu, Mercator and Ortelius, and collected Early American natural-history renderings by Audubon, Catesbury and Wilson; John Gould’s birds; the
illustrations
of the voyages and explorations of Cook, Wilkes and La Perousse. He had amassed a strong collection of hand-coloured, sixteenth-century county maps of Cumberland and
Westmorland
, Durham and Northumberland, and the Border Country, made by Saxton, Speed, Norden and other seminal English
map-makers
. But Ronnie’s special collecting passion was for the oil paintings – especially the paintings showing the daily lives of working people in the North of England – of Ralph Hedley.

A cheap print of a painting of Hedley’s called
The
Brickfield,
originally issued as a promotional gimmick with the 1903 Christmas number of the
Weekly
Chronicle,
had hung in the
lean-to
building – part doss-house, part out-house – that Ronnie’s father called an office at the original family brickworks under the railway arches at Hetton. The print had faded over the years, and become dirt-ingrained and mildewed; it was chewed away at the corners and patched in a couple of places with tape. But when the old works closed, and the old workers and Kidda, the nag who had been used to haul wagons of clay through the factory, had been put out to pasture, Ronnie resolved that, whatever it took, he would buy Hedley’s original
Brickfield
painting
as soon as the profits that the new mechanized processes were supposed to generate started flowing in. As it turned out, it didn’t take a lot. He got a dealer he knew to put out feelers, and
The
Brickfield
was soon tracked down and acquired, along with some preparatory sketches and Hedley drawings in colour
pastels
. From then on, though, it stopped being so easy. Ronnie wanted more Hedleys – he wanted to be
the
Hedley collector; he
wanted the pleasure of absolute possession – but the supply had quickly dried up.

Paintings by Hedley rarely appeared on the art market. Most of his best work had stayed within his own family or the families of the local industrialists and others who had originally
commissioned
the paintings. Many of the owners were elderly people, and Ronnie was accused on more than one occasion of putting undue pressure on them to sell when they had made it clear they didn’t want to sell to him, and even of ambulance-chasing, and he didn’t deny it. He wasn’t ashamed; he was a collector, with all the
paranoid
, irrational, sociopathic, controlling tendencies that implied.

Meanwhile, starved of the paintings, Ronnie turned his
attention
to other areas of Hedley’s work. One of the ancillary Cornish businesses was a demolition contractors. And Ronnie, like his competitors in the architectural salvage trade, was not known for his scrupulous observance of listed buildings consequent
procedures
. If architraves, friezes, pediments, stone cornices, Georgian fireplaces, even doors were there for the taking, then they were taken, regardless of whether a building was in use or abandoned: cherrypicked with permission or without, legitimately or not.

Ralph Hedley had used his house, which was now Ray’s house, as a workshop and a showplace for his talents. It had been the place where he was able to refine the skills that were to earn him a reputation for being the most gifted architectural carver in his part of England.

Hedley was heavily in demand during Tyneside’s biggest boom in building in the 1880s. Building contractors ordered decorative carving in hotels, banks and shops, and the Hedley workshop provided mantelpieces and wooden moulds for
plasterwork
in new houses, as well as innumerable brackets, festoons, and balusters, and huge lengths of egg-and-dart moulding.

Excellent examples of his work in all these areas were to be found from cellar to attic at Moor Edge Terrace. For the dining
room he had produced a huge sideboard showing scenes from the Northumberland battle, the Chevy Chase. There were
decorative
balusters rising through the house, scalloped corner niches, and columnettes. He had installed fine wooden panels in the master bedroom, together with a frieze of cornucopias
overflowing
with fruit, with a ceiling rose of similar design. All of it now gone, stripped out between Ronnie Cornish acquiring the house and Ray and Marzena moving in.

From his bed Ray was able to see where the frieze and the
plaster
cornices had been removed. The room had been replastered and expertly skimmed, but the marks still showed. In certain lights he could see the scars around the perimeter of the ceiling and near the tops of the walls. Shadow indentations of how the room might have looked in its Victorian heyday were still there. The room itself had been transferred intact and in its entirety to Ronnie’s office, or one of his homes.

For the first year or thereabouts that he lived in the house Ray had been unaware of the Hedley connection until a neighbour, a lecturer at the University, conversationally pointed it out.

He didn’t suppose he minded the fact that, in effect, he was living in a denuded, scooped-out shell. And he was pragmatic enough to know that, even if he did, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. He was in hock to Ronnie. Ronnie advanced him the money to buy the house. (This was nominal, of course, as Ronnie owned the house.) Ronnie had put up the start money for Bobby’s, and Ronnie was swallowing the losses the club was incurring since foot-and-mouth. Ray was paid a salary, plus an incremental (so far notional) share of any profits earned.

Ray owned – he was paying the mortgage on – Jackie’s house. Jackie’s house was in Ray’s name. Jackie was seventy and might have expected to own something, but he owned nothing. Both Ray and Jackie had to jump when Ronnie said jump. They were dependent to an unhealthy degree on Ronnie’s whim. When light
washed the walls, throwing the scarring into relief, Ray, in his half-awake state, was often reminded of this truth.

He got up, ran the razor over his face and went for his run,
following
the bucking blue-and-white streamers and the boundary path around the Moor.

He saw the old man some mornings, leaning on the iron gate, mooning after his Daisy and Bessy and Flossie, his Bella and
Flora-dora
, his Minehaha and Jill. This morning, though, he wasn’t there.

Every Saturday when there was a home game Jackie came and collected Ray and delivered him to United’s ground. It was a short trip, in fact only around the corner, but the milling crowd and swelling stream of people made it simpler to get there by car.

He had an arrangement where he stood on his hind legs and read the team sheet out, introduced the manager and did a stint for the corporate crowd in one of the big, bright new clangorous executive entertainment suites on match days. And this was another thing Ray supposed he owed to Ronnie Cornish, Ronnie being a big-noise director.

It was early when they set off. It was a few minutes after twelve, and the game didn’t start until three. The programme vendors, ‘swag’ sellers and portable canteens were just setting up, and the carnival was just getting going. The first hint of onions frying was starting to drift on the air. When there was a game, Mighty put on a blue-gingham uniform and a
lace-trimmed
blue-gingham apron and waited on in one of the maze of upper-tier bars and restaurants at the ground that were part of the ‘hospitality experience’.