Death in Summer (23 page)

A thing happens. You can’t change that. He looked up when the crane man shouted and then the crane man swung the bucket down, gentle as anything, getting it to the ground. He meant to tell them that, too. He had it ready, but in the end it got forgotten that the crane man had been gentle.

*

There is a quietness after Albert has gone, still there when the first wisps of twilight come. The room Thaddeus has always known, in which he searched beneath the sofa cushions for a ring that did not exist, is different now. There is
an echo in the room, and in the hall and on the stairs. ‘Everything is lovely here.’

His childhood past seems nothing much: the cruelty of love has damaged but not destroyed. To that Mrs Iveson might add that in her merciless minds eye she sees, this evening, neither a husband lost to kind confinement nor a daughters funeral. Her compassion faltered: shame creeps through guilt and feels like retribution.

The cups and saucers are gathered, the tea things stacked on Maidment’s tray. Georgina’s day is ending; she, too, is taken from the room. In time her curiosity will bring a mother back and offer misty images, like strangers vaguely present in a dream, of Eva Paczkowska and the husband who adored her. Again there will be dancing on the lawns, the hall door thrown open wide, music and voices on the cool night air. The laughter of Georgina’s friends is waiting for Georgina’s growing up, as the picture on the floor was waiting for her birth. The pets’ memorials are waiting too, the summer-house built to catch the autumn sun, the gardener who showed his bayonet wound, servants remembered in a journal kept.

The coats hang on the hallstand pegs. In her party dress the child comes smiling down the stairs. Her Sunday uncle looks up from a leaflet he has finished reading. He smiles in turn, and reaches out for her. Afterwards there’s Sunday tea.

Will there be offices built in the place? Thaddeus wonders. A supermarket? Will bright computer screens smudge away the nourishment of fantasy and delusion? Will checkout chatter silence the fearful whispering in grubby hideaways, the soft enticements? Has defilement left no trace?
Will no one know among the tins of soup and processed peas that death was a balm here when it came? There was a life that ended for his onetime mistress, in its heyday a jolly, bouncing life. And for his wife there was a childhood softened by affection, and contentment later on, her goodness an enriching. The walls of a house were smashed to fragments, a bundle in the rubble lifted away: no life there’d been.

As the warmth of blood might miraculously seep into a shadow, or anaesthesia be lifted by a jolt, feelings he has never before experienced invade Thaddeus’s solitude. The emotion stirred by the birth of his child was particular to that one event. His sadness was stony when he stood at the funeral of the wife he could not love. The flowers that Mrs Ferry so often longed for were sent when it was safe to send her flowers. Tonight he pities, and is angry.

The dusk is darkening when Mrs Iveson walks with Thaddeus in the garden, her stoic’s stamina defeated in the pain of that same pity. A light comes on in a window of the house, then in another, a curtain’s pulled across. High in the oak trees the rooks have settled on their branches. Below, among the shrubs and faded flowers, the single sound is Rosie’s rustling in the sodden undergrowth, sniffing the fresh scent of moisture. The two do not walk close yet cling together, at one in honouring the ghost that has come to haunt this garden and this house.

*

‘Albert.’

It is a whisper from what seems to be an empty doorway. He peers, and then a figure emerges, shaking off the dark, and it is Bev.

He speaks her name. He says he has been looking for her.

‘I been around.’

‘You OK, Bev?’

‘I done with all that stuff. You know.’

‘I wondered about you, Bev.’

‘Yeah.’ There is a silence, then Bev says: ‘I ain’t got nowhere to go nights.’

‘You got work daytime?’

Bev shakes her head. She says she has tried for work, day work, nights, anything.

‘You’d go for the Marmite factory? You’d go for anything like that?’

Bev says she would. The Marmite, the stocking place, up Chadwell, it doesn’t matter.

‘A woman told me they’ll maybe be taking on at the stocking place.’ Albert nods, lending emphasis to that. It would have been Tuesday he asked the woman, he remembers; it could be tomorrow they’ll be taking on. ‘Never does no harm to ask.’

They walk together, by the common, past the dairy yard. She isn’t a tearaway, you wouldn’t ever call Bev a tearaway and once she is taken on regular no way there’ll be a problem with the rent. That’s how he’ll put it. There’ll be reluctance at first, stands to reason there would be, but the rent will be the draw.

They cross Caspar Road. In the artificial light the blank shopfronts of Bride Street are tinged with orange. The KP Minimarket and Ishi Baba’s take-away are secure behind their night grilles. Outside the Soft Rock Café the cat that is Albert’s only enemy is rifling a dustbin.

‘Turn of luck running into you, Bev.’

She says it was. She’s tired. Albert can tell. She’s dragging her footsteps a bit, the sole of a shoe flapping. Except to say it isn’t far to Appian Terrace, he doesn’t bother her with talk.