Authors: Hilary Bailey
Connections
Hilary Bailey
One
Fleur Stockley stood barefoot on the balcony outside her front door on the first floor of Adelaide House, part of the Denbigh Estate in north-west London. She was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt with some half-obliterated lines of poetry on it. Holding a cup of tea in her hand, she stared glumly across to the other side of the street. It was ten o'clock and she had only just got up â she'd been unable to sleep the night before, as usual.
The Denbigh Estate was small, consisting of two acres of buildings bordered on each side by streets. There were three seven-storey blocks and four long four-storey ones, all set in grass lawns that were well tended and free from rubbish. The tenants of the Denbigh Estate were mostly people who had lived in the neighbourhood for several generations, often with shared histories going back to well before the estate was built in the seventies. Things did not, on the whole, go wrong on the Denbigh, as they did on the neighbouring Yarborough, infamous for its tower blocks, concrete walkways, smashed lighting, blocked rubbish chutes and uncertain lifts, where the nights were rent with the screams of arriving police cars and ambulances. Though only half a mile off through the small, quiet streets of Cray Hill, the Yarborough seemed as far away from the Denbigh Estate as the earth from the moon.
Fleur's concrete balcony in Adelaide House was guarded by red-painted railings which stretched the length of the row of eight flats on the first floor. Above were two other rows of flats with balconies. Below was a line of garages. Fleur's flat stood close to the concrete staircase down. Five of the doors on the landing were painted municipal green; the other three, Fleur's being one,
were different, signifying owner occupation rather than council tenancy.
Fleur stared across at the wine bar opposite where the élite went to drink wine and eat quiche and salad for lunch or push the boat out at night with bottled beers and tequila slammers. Across the windows was written the name of the bar, McCarthy's, in gold letters. The two upper floors had dirty windows behind which boxes labelled “Moët et Chandon”, “KP Peanuts” and “Chardonnay” were piled high.
On one side of McCarthy's was the launderette, empty inside but for a woman washing the floor tiles. On the other was a dusty-windowed old-fashioned upholsterer's; then came the baker's and a pub, the Findhorn Star, where the less élite met for a drink.
After the crossing, just out of Fleur's view, the road widened, became more important. There were banks, building societies, a Woolworths. North of all this lay the tube station, the Yarborough and the badlands up towards the railway, and the gas works.
Late September sunshine, a clear day, a quiet street in which little traffic passed and little was happening. A woman with her laundry loaded on to a stroller dragged a toddler into the launderette.
Fleur, her feet cold, went back into her flat. The kitchen lay to the left, the living-room to the right. She went to the kitchen and put on the kettle, looking with dislike at the kitchen tiles, which were a muddy brown with gold swirls on them. She switched the radio from channel to channel. Traffic hold-ups, unemployment statistics, Stock Exchange report, golden oldie coming to you Morag from Shaun and Annabel, Happy Birthday and we hear you're just about to announce your engagement to Ken, lucky fellow. Radio Four was going to examine faith in the new millennium. An Islamic leader, a Benedictine monk and the canon of St Paul's would all contribute. A new-age guru kicked off, assuring Fleur and all the other listeners that through their jobs, family and friends they all knew hundreds and hundreds of people, more than they could guess at. It was curious to think, he said, that if one person is given a letter by another, to be
delivered to a stranger to both of them, even if that stranger is in Japan then the second person has only to hand it to another whom they think can help with the delivery, and so on, and lo and behold â within six moves, only six, the letter will have been got to Mr Yashimoto in Tokyo. Which only proved, the guru asserted, that everyone had connections with everyone else in the world. Didn't, shouldn't, that mean something to all of us?
Before the speaker began to explain what that something was, he took the chance of mentioning to the listeners that no man was an island, but part of the main ⦠Fleur switched off.
Over six months, in a series of slow falls, interrupted only by sudden spasmodic crashes and drops, like a bobsleigh rider, she had lost her old life, old job, home, lover, friends. She felt she was not just an island but a desert island. She went back out on to the balcony and looked down at McCarthy's bar. A woman in an overcoat was sweeping the pavement outside.
Never mind Tokyo, Fleur thought, she couldn't be found by someone in the next street. She hadn't spoken to her mother for a month and her mother couldn't contact her â didn't even know where she was. She'd have to get in touch sooner or later. Somehow at the moment she couldn't face her mother's light bright tones, her good-woman face â lined, of course, but healthy, slightly tanned because of all the work she did in the garden. She couldn't face her stepfather either, coming in from his workshop, sleeves rolled up. She'd ring, she thought, when she'd scratched up the deposit for the phone. She must get a job. There was still the mortgage to pay.
She needed a job, any job. She didn't want to go anywhere near the film business any more â or anything like it. Something quiet and cash-in-hand was what she needed. The bank was after her because she'd co-signed the company cheques â the girl who signed everything that was put in front of her. She'd been proud of that cheque book, huge and decorative, “VERITY PRODUCTIONS” stamped across it. As far as she knew everyone owed money by the firm might be after her. She'd done a bunk, left behind a whole pile of dampening, dusty envelopes on the floor of the Soho office, a treat for the
new lessees to clear up, a grim warning of what could happen to them.
She stepped aside to allow her next-door neighbour â Mrs Simmons, was it? â to go past with her wheeled shopper. Mrs Simmons nodded coldly. She and her husband had popped out while Fleur and her disloyal friend Jess were moving in Fleur's possessions. Fleur's head was still spinning with the knowledge that the old life was gone with this move to the estate. There hadn't been time to be friendly, so she'd been short with the Simmonses, her neighbours to the left-hand side. As time went by she'd noted vaguely that the elderly Simmonses were friends with the same-age Morgans, a black couple who lived on her right.
Now she watched Mrs Simmons, a short, plump woman in her fifties, wearing the fawn raincoat of her tribe, wheeling her basket to the steps. She and Jess had snubbed her when she moved in. Now it was too late.
Fleur went inside. There were two rooms, a bedroom and what had been described as a reception room, though she wondered what kind of a reception she was supposed to hold in a twelve-by-ten-foot room with a window overlooking a concrete balcony and a row of shops opposite. Everything in the room looked wrong â the black leather couch against the white-painted bobble wallpaper, the over-large gilt-framed mirror still standing defeatedly on the beige carpet. In the bedroom, which looked out over a stretch of grass towards the Yarborough's tall blocks standing like sentinels, was an expensive brass bedstead with knobs. In that room it looked incongruous. Once it had been the only thing in a crooked room overlooking a crooked cobbled Soho alley â once she had lain on it with Ben, six great wax candles burning on the mantelpiece and windowsills â once â¦
“Oh,” Fleur groaned aloud. “Oh â God â what a mess.” There were unpacked boxes under the window of the flat but that wasn't what she was talking about. It was Ben, no longer with her. No longer, it seemed, even findable. Her mind drifted. She'd have to unpack those boxes. She'd have to get a carpet, shelves â¦
Fleur, she thought, get on with your life. She found herself sitting on the edge of her bed, close to tears. When the crisis came,
Ben had done a bunk to America. He'd said he was going over to wrest some royalties due from one of their documentaries from a network in Atlanta which owed them money. Funnily enough, though, he'd gone first to New York. What was funnier still was that she'd been left with the overdraft and the creditors.
“I'll pay it all back, darling,” he'd told her from his friend's flat in New York. However, he'd left there a day later, or so the friend said, and, so the friend also told her, he didn't know where Ben had gone.
She lay back, crying. “I'm having a breakdown,” she thought. She went to sleep.
And so the next miserable, agonising, dull ten days passed until it was nearly October.
Nothing goes on forever. Returning from signing on at the grim, Soviet-style building the 1950s council had erected for its dole queue â three men and a dog in those days, probably â and thinking about her bills, Fleur spotted a white notice in McCarthy's window.
Instead of turning to the concrete area where cars were parked and up the staircase to her flat, she drifted onwards, crossed the road and read the notice. “Part-time cook, waitress wanted.” She opened the door and went in.
A wooden bar stretched along one wall of the cream-painted room. On the walls were old metal signs for railway companies: the Great Western, the LNER, a sign advising passengers not to use the facilities while the train was standing at the station. There were posters, too, for resorts: Bournemouth, Blackpool and Brighton. Others showed steam trains and porters with trolleys laden with old-fashioned luggage. Tables with metal legs stood on a wooden floor. The intention was to give the impression of a station buffet of long ago and, inasmuch as the room was empty, the floor unswept and the air smelling slightly of stale alcohol, perhaps it succeeded better than it knew.
A woman in an overall came through the door at the back of the bar carrying a broom, a duster and a spray can.
Fleur said, “I've come about the job. Is anyone around?”
The woman said, “He's upstairs.” She went back through the door and called out, “Mr Housman! Mr Housman!”
There was a pause. She called again, more loudly, “Mr Housman!”
There was the sound of a man's voice calling back.
“It's about the job!” she shouted.
The voice called something out.
“He's coming down,” the woman told Fleur and started to sweep the floor by the bar.
Fleur waited until a thick-set man in his late thirties came downstairs and through the door. He wore a black overcoat and carried a black business case. He looked at Fleur distractedly.
“So,” he said, “the job. You're lucky to catch me. I'm only here an hour or two a day. I've got several other places.”
Fleur noticed his skin was pasty and his brown eyes tired. He did not give off the smell of success. She stood up straight, looked him in the eye and tried to convince him that he wanted to employ her.
Fleur was a tall, long-legged young woman, clear-skinned and hazel-eyed with long, dark brown hair. So far, stress, grief and shortage of money had not spoiled her looks. But neither her appearance nor her fairly successful impersonation of a strong, confident, energetic woman seemed to move Mr Housman.