Beyond Black: A Novel (33 page)

Sometimes, when Alison came into a room, she thought the furniture had shifted slightly; but no doubt that was Colette, pushing it around as she cleaned. Her own boundaries seemed invisible, uncertain. Her core temperature tended to fluctuate, but there was nothing new in that. Her extremities drifted, in time and space. Sometimes she thought an hour, an afternoon, a day had gone missing. Less and less did she want to go out; her clients e-mailed her, the phone rang less often; Colette, who was restless, could always be persuaded to shop for them. It was the house’s silence that entranced her, lulled her. Her daydreams and night dreams ran together. She thought she saw two cars—trucks, really—parked outside the Collingwood; it was dark, Colette was in bed, she pulled her coat around her shoulders and went outside.

The carriage lamp flared into life, and the thump of a hi-fi came from a Hawkyns. There was no one around. She looked into the cab of one truck and it was empty. The cab of the other was empty too, but in the back there was a grey blanket tied with twine, covering something irregular and lumpy.

She shivered, and went back inside. When she woke the next morning the trucks had gone.

She wondered about them; whose were they? Had they not looked a bit old-fashioned? She wasn’t good on makes of cars, but there was something about their lines that suggested her childhood. “Colette,” she said, “when you’re at Sainsbury’s, you wouldn’t pick up a car magazine? One of those with lots and lots of pictures of every car anyone might want?” She thought, at least I could exclude all modern makes.

Colette said, “Are you winding me up?”

“What?” she said.

“Gavin!”

“There you are! I told you that you’re always talking about him.”

Later, she was sorry for upsetting Colette. I meant no harm, she said to herself, I just didn’t think. As for the trucks, they were spirit vehicles, probably, but whose? Sometimes she rose in the night to look down from the landing porthole over Admiral Drive. Around the children’s playground, warning lamps shone from deep holes in the ground. Great pipes, like troglodyte dwellings, lay gaping at the landscape; the moon’s single eye stared down at them.

Colette would find her, standing by the porthole, tense and cold. She would find her and draw her back to bed; her touch was like a spirit touch, her face hollow, her feet noiseless. By day or night, Colette’s aura remained patchy, wispy. When she was out and Alison found traces of her about the house—a discarded shoe, a bangle, one of her elastic hairbands—she thought, who ever is she, and how did she get here? Did I invite her? If so, why did I do that? She thought about Gloria and Mrs. McGibbet. She wondered if Colette might disappear one day, just as suddenly as they did, fading into nothingness and leaving behind only snatches of conversation, a faint heat trace on the air.

They had been given a breathing space. Time to reconsider. To pause. To reevaluate. They could see middle age ahead of them. Forty is the new thirty, Colette said. Fifty is the new forty. Senescence is the new juvenility, Alzheimer’s is the new acne. Sometimes they would sit over a bottle of wine and talk about their future. But it was difficult for them to plan in the way other people did. Colette felt that maybe Al was withholding information, information about the future that she could very well part with. Her questions about this life and the next were by no means resolved in a way that satisfied her; and she was always thinking of new ones. But what can you do? You have to make an accommodation. You have to accept certain givens. You can’t waste time every day worrying about the theory of your life, you have to get on with the practice. Maybe I’ll get into Kaballah, Al said. That seems to be the thing now. Colette said, maybe I’ll get into gardening. We could have some shrubs, now Morris isn’t here to hide behind them. Michelle and Evan keep hinting we should do something at the back. Get some flags laid, at least.

“They keep talking to me about the weather,” Al said. “I don’t know why.”

“Just being English, I suppose,” Colette said innocently. She sat brooding over the Yellow Pages. “I might ring up a gardening service. But not the one that sent that idiot last time, the one who couldn’t start the mower.”

“Do the next-doors still think we’re lesbians?”

“I expect so.” Colette added, “I hope it spoils their enjoyment of their property.”

She rang up the gardening service. A few flagstones, so less grass to mow, she thought. Her imagination didn’t stretch beyond an alleviation of her weekly routine. She made sure it didn’t. If she allowed herself to think about her life as a whole she felt an emptiness, an insufficiency: as if her plate had been taken away before she’d finished eating.

Meanwhile Evan leaned on the fence, watching her mow. She wondered if he was wearing an expression of lechery, but when she turned, it was actually an expression of sympathy. “I sometimes think, Astroturf,” he said. “Don’t you? They’re bringing in an auto-mower, one you preprogramme. But I suppose it’ll be a while before they hit the shops.”

His own plot was scuffed up and worn bald by the skirmishing of his two older brats. Colette was amazed at the speed with which they had grown. She remembered Michelle jiggling them on a hip; now they were out at all hours, scavenging and savaging, leaving scorched earth behind them, like child soldiers in an African war. Inside the house, Michelle was training up another one; when they had the French windows open, you could hear its stifled wails and roars.

“What you need there is a shed,” Evan said. “Stop you needing to get your mower out of the garage and walk it round the side.”

“I’m going to hire a man,” Colette said. “It didn’t work out before, but I’m trying somebody different. Going to do some planting.”

“There it is,” Evan said. “You need a man for some things, you see.”

Colette banged into the house. “Evan says we need a man.”

“Oh, surely not,” Alison said. “Or not any man we know.”

“He also says we need a shed.”

Alison looked surprised, a little hesitant. She frowned. “A shed? I suppose that’ll be all right,” she said.

On Sunday they went down the A322 to a shed supplier. Alison wandered around looking at the different kinds. There were some like Regency arbours, and some like miniaturized Tudor houses, and some with cupolas and arabesque cornices. There was one that reminded her of a Shinto shrine; Cara would probably go for that, she thought. Mandy would want the one with the onion dome. She liked the Swiss chalets, with little porches. She imagined hanging gingham curtains. I could go in there, she thought, shrunk (in thought form) to a small size. I could have a doll’s tea set and little cakes with pastel fondant icing and candied fruit on top.

Colette said, “We were hoping, my friend and I, to buy a shed.”

“Nowadays,” the man advised, “we call them garden buildings.”

“Okay, a garden building,” Al said. “Yes, that would be nice.”

“We only need something basic,” Colette said. “What sort of price are we looking at?”

“Oh,” said the man, “before we discuss price, let’s study your needs.”

Alison pointed to a sort of cricket pavilion. “What if our need were that one?”

“Yes, the Grace Road,” the man said. “An excellent choice where space is no object.” He thumbed his lists. “Let me tell you what that comes at.”

Colette peered over his shoulder. “Good God!” Colette said. “Don’t be silly, Al. We don’t want that.”

The man ushered them to a revolving summerhouse. “This is nice,” he said, “for a lady. You can envisage yourself, as the day closes, sitting with your face turned to the west, a cooling drink in hand.”

“Give over!” Colette said. “All we want is a place to keep the mower.”

“But what about your other essential equipment? What about your barbecue? And what about your winter storage? Tables, waterproof covers for tables, parasols, waterproof covers for parasols—”

“Garage,” said Colette.

“I see,” the man said. “So forcing you to park your car in the open, exposing it to the elements and the risk of theft?”

“We’ve got Neighbourhood Watch.”

“Yes,” Alison said. “We all watch each other, and report each other’s movements.” She thought of the spirit trucks, and the mound beneath the blanket: she imagined the nature of it.

“Neighbourhood Watch? I wish you joy of it! In my opinion, house-holders should be armed. We in the Bisley area are run ragged by opportunistic thieves and every type of intruder. Police Constable Delingbole gave us a lecture on home security.”

“Can we get on?” Colette said. “I’ve set aside this afternoon for buying a shed, and I want to get it sorted. We still have to do our food shopping.”

Alison saw her dreams of dolls’ teatime fading. Come to think of it, had she ever had a doll? She followed the salesman towards a small log cabin.

“We call this one ‘Old Smokey,’” he said. “It takes its inspiration, the designers claim, from railway buildings in the golden days of the Old West.”

“I’ll say this for you. You don’t give up easily.” Colette turned her back and stalked away in the direction of the honest working sheds.

Just as Alison was about to follow her, she thought she saw something move inside Old Smokey. For a second she saw a face, looking out at her. Bugger, she thought, a haunted shed. But it was nobody she knew. She trailed after Colette, thinking, we’re not going to get anything nice, we’re just going to get one of these tidgy sheds that anybody could have. What if I were to lie down on the ground and say, it’s my money, I want one of those cream-painted Shaker-style ones with a porch?

She caught up with them. Colette must be in an exceptionally nice mood today, because she hadn’t struck the salesman. “Pent or Apex?” he demanded.

Colette said, “It’s no good trying to blind me with science. The pent are the ones with a sloping roof, and the apex are the ones with pointy roofs. That’s obvious.”

“I can do you a Sissinghurst. Wooden garden workshop, twelve-by-ten, double door, and eight fixed-glass windows, delivery date normally one month but we could be flexible on that: 699.99 pounds, on-the-road price.”

“You’ve got a nerve,” Colette said.

Alison said, “Did you see somebody, Colette? Inside Old Smokey?”

The salesman said, “That will be a customer, madam.”

“He didn’t look like a customer.”

“Nor do I,” Colette said. “That’s obvious. Are you going to sell me something, or shall I drive up to Nottcutts on the A30?”

Al pitied the man; like her, he had his job to do, and part of his job was to stimulate the customer’s imagination. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we’ll have one from you. Honest. If you can just point us to the kind my friend wants.”

“I’ve lost my bearings here,” the man said. “I confess to a certain amount of total bafflement. Which of you ladies is the purchaser?”

“Oh, let’s not go through that again.” Colette groaned. “Al, you take over.” She walked away, giggling, between the ornamental wheelbarrow planters, the cast-iron conservatory frogs and the roughcast Buddhas. Her thin shoulders twitched.

“Will you sell one to me?” Al asked. She smiled her sweetest smile. “What about that one?”

“What, the Balmoral?” The man sneered. “Eight-by-ten pent with single-pitch roof? Well, that seems like a decision made, at last. Thank you, madam, it seems we’ve found something to suit you. The only problem is, as I could have told you if you’d let me get a word in edgewise, it’s the end of the range.”

“That’s okay,” Al said. “I’m not bothered about whether it’s in fashion.”

“No,” the man said, “what I’m saying to you is this, it would be futile, at this stage in the season, for me to ask the manufacturer to supply.”

“But what about this one? The one standing here?” Al tapped its walls. “You could send it right away, couldn’t you?”

The man turned away. He needed to struggle with his temper. His grand-dad had come through in spirit and was sitting on the Balmoral’s roof—its pent—ruminatively working his way through a bag of sweets. When the man spoke, granddad flapped his tongue out, with a melting humbug on the end of it.

“Excuse me madam—”

“Go ahead.”

“—are you asking me and my colleagues to dismantle that garden building and supervise its immediate transport, for a price of some four hundred pounds plus VAT plus our normal service charge? While the World Cup’s on?”

“Well, what else are you going to do with it?” Colette came up to rejoin them, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her jeans. “You planning to leave it there till it falls down by itself?” Her foot scuffed the ground, kicked out casually at a concrete otter with its concrete pup. “If you don’t sell it now, mate, you never will. So come on, look sharp. Whistle up your crew, and let’s get on with the job.”

“What about your hardstanding?” the man said. “I don’t suppose you’ve given a thought to your hardstanding. Have you?”

As they walked back to the car, Colette said, “You know, I really think, when men talk, it’s worse than when they don’t.”

Alison looked at her narrowly, sideways. She waited for more.

“Gavin never said much. He’d say nothing for such a long time that you wanted to lean over and poke your finger in him to see if he was dead. I used to say, tell me your thoughts, Gavin. You must have thoughts. You remember when we met him, in Farnham?”

Alison nodded. She had smelled, trailing after Gavin, the reek of a past life: an old tweed collar rancid with hair oil. His aura was oatmeal, grey, it was as tough as old rope.

“Well,” Colette said. She flicked her remote to open the car doors. “I wonder what he was doing in Farnham.”

“Having a run out?”

“He could shop in Twickenham.”

“Change of scene?”

“Or Richmond.” Colette chewed her pale lip. “I wonder what he wanted in Elphicks? Because when you think, he gets all he needs at car shops.”

“Perhaps he wanted a new shirt.”

“He has a wardrobe full of shirts. He has fifty shirts. He must have. I used to pay a woman to iron them. Why did 
I
 pay? He seemed to think, if I didn’t want to do it myself, I ought to pay. When I look back now, I can’t for one minute imagine what was going through my head when I agreed to that.”