Angel Cake (32 page)

I was quite unprepared for Pearl’s reaction. She gasped, ‘Oh God!’ and clutched onto the door jamb, collapsing before my eyes like a deflated balloon.

‘Come in,’ I said hastily. ‘Come in, sit down.’

I led her into the kitchen and, even though I was going to be late for work yet again, I made us both a cup of tea. I told her briefly what had happened. She seemed terribly distressed. She took off her sunhat, as though respectfully uncovering herself, and sat there, shaking her head sorrowfully. Finally she said, ‘Well, at least she’s in peace now, poor soul.’

I nodded solemnly,

‘I suppose I should get on with the cleaning anyway,’ she added, ‘since no one’s told me to the contrary.’

As I got ready to leave for the museum, she asked me when the funeral would be.

I exclaimed tactlessly, ‘Gosh, will you be coming?’

Pearl looked me defiantly in the eye. ‘Can you give me one good reason why not?’ she asked. Then she relented. ‘She won’t have anyone else much, will she, poor dear?’

As I got my bits and pieces together in the hall, I could hear her sigh all the way from the scullery; a great gusty sigh which seemed to carry all the cares in her world.

All week, Mr Charles continued to cosset me. He didn’t give me anything the least bit taxing to do and turned a blind eye to my late arrivals and long lunch-hours, during one of
which I stupidly cycled over to Holland Park and rode twice past Rob’s house, looking casually up at his open study window. I wondered if Mr Charles suspected that it was more than Alicia’s death which was affecting me. He has never asked me anything about my private life of course – he wouldn’t dream of it – but I thought that now things were beginning to change between us, maybe he might. But, although he continued to be as solicitous as ever, he still didn’t ask me a thing.

Then, on Friday afternoon, I had to take time off for the funeral. As I was leaving the museum, Mr Charles stopped me in the corridor and said, ‘Off now, are you? Oh dear, never joyous occasions, I’m afraid.’ He seemed to have something else on his mind. He hesitated and drummed on a nearby radiator with his long fingers. Then, in a staccato rush, he added, ‘Please don’t take this amiss, my dear. I have no idea what your plans are for the weekend. Maybe my concern is quite misplaced. But I wondered if maybe you might like my home telephone number, just in case? Forgive me if I’m stepping out of line here. But I don’t want you sitting alone, feeling low, over the weekend.’

It wasn’t much of a funeral. I couldn’t help thinking how sniffy Alicia would have been if she had seen it. There were only four people there apart from the clergyman: Pearl, Miss Midgley and I, and the Indian shopkeeper, Mr Patel, to whom I had thought to mention it when I dropped in to buy my supper the previous evening. It was the people to whom Alicia must have been the nastiest, I thought, the new black faces in her neighbourhood, whom she regarded as cockroaches in her larder, who had rallied round her in the end. We stood in a small silent row at the front of the empty crematorium chapel and, when the short service was over, we all shook hands as though to congratulate one another on having done our duty. Then Miss Midgley gave us a lift back to Shepherd’s Bush tube in her Mini, which smelt of dog.

Over the weekend, inevitably, a few regrets began to surface. It wasn’t much fun sitting alone in Alicia’s house, listening to the noises in the roof. I had an especially low moment when I went over to Rob’s flat to start packing up my possessions. There were too many to move in one go,
so we had agreed I would only take with me what I wanted immediately and Rob would bring over everything else in the Jagannath during the week. As I went through the silent rooms, separating what was mine from what was his, I wondered whether he really was with Sarah Anderson, or whether he had just suggested her to provoke me into changing my mind. I tried to imagine what she might be like. Bitterly, and I am sure quite unjustly, considering Rob had said something about her work telephone number, I suddenly thought, ‘I bet she’s unemployed. I bet Rob’s taken up with her to get good background material for his play.’ I remembered reading the first satirical section of
Print-Out
, in which clerks with scratchy quill pens labour over ledgers in a Dickensian counting-house. I remembered recognizing one or two of my own quirks in one of the characters and worrying that maybe that was all Rob had originally wanted me for; as a study of an old-fashioned personality. It was a pretty silly line of thought, but it got me angry enough to leave the flat on a wave of righteous indignation, turning the Chubb smartly behind me and thinking, ‘I’m well rid of him.’

Once or twice, towards the end of Sunday, I was very tempted to take up Mr Charles’s offer and telephone him at home. But I resisted the temptation; I didn’t want him to think I was too keen at the beginning.

It was wonderful to get back to my cubby-hole on Monday morning. I wore the blue and white dress which I had finished sewing on Sunday afternoon. I must say, I was a little disappointed that Mr Charles didn’t pay me any compliment on it because I thought it looked particularly pretty. As I walked in through the hall, Milton wolf-whistled and called out to me, ‘Hey-hey, who’s the lucky fella, Alison?’ Mr Charles never has made any comments about my appearance, come to think of it, but now I somehow expected that he would.

I whiled away the first part of the morning, until coffee-time, doing little odds and ends in my room. Reluctantly, I threw away the wilted flowers from my desk and wondered when I might receive some more.

It was still just as hot and, as the day wore on, I found myself more than once drifting off into a trance. Mr Charles
was busy next door, entertaining a visitor from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. As I lolled at my desk, I could hear his voice intermittently in the distance, grave and authoritative like a BBC announcer. I knew the visitor from Vienna was inviting Mr Charles to a conference next spring and I indulged in a sleepy fantasy in which Mr Charles invited me to come with him. I imagined the two of us sitting in a Viennese café, eating chocolate cake; me in my blue and white dress, and Mr Charles, the picture of an upper-class Englishman on holiday, in a striped blazer and a straw hat. I even imagined, the height of
schmaltz
, a background of gypsy violins.

Mr Charles took his Viennese visitor out to lunch and they were gone for a long time. I whiled away my lunch-hour reading in the sun in the museum garden and inside afterwards I found it almost impossible to keep my eyes open. The noise of the tea-trolley in the corridor brought me to with a jolt. Why, the afternoon was nearly over and Mr Charles hadn’t been in to see me all day. I smarted as I realized from the silence next door that the Austrian gentleman must have left, without Mr Charles even bringing him in to introduce us. Suddenly, a snaky doubt wriggled through my trance. What if I had got it all wrong? What if, now that the worst of my upset was over, Mr Charles was just going to return to the way things had always been between us before? I thought over the years that he and I had worked together and how slight the signs were on which I had started to build our future. I worried that Mr Charles might really be rather a chilly repressed person.

For the last ten years Helen Harris has lived in London, writing short stories and working first as a translator and a tourist information officer, and then as a freelance magazine researcher. She has travelled very widely, including India and the Middle East.

Playing
Fields
in
Winter,
her first novel, won the Author’s Club First Novel award and was short-listed for the Betty Trask Award. Her short stories have appeared in a great many magazines and anthologies, including
Punch
and the Penguin
Fire
bird
collection.

PLAYING FIELDS IN WINTER