Imaginative Experience (12 page)

Maurice Benson said, ‘Bugger,’ and went to get another beer. He drank it standing at the bar, thinking about Julia Piper. Now he had found her, he was unsure what he wanted to do.

Why not give her a bell? he thought. Perhaps not after all this beer; there was no hurry, better to wait.

D
REAMING, JULIA STRETCHED OUT
an arm and took the receiver off, then, turning over, snuggled back to sleep.

The noise came again and this time she was awake, remembering that Giles, dead, was unlikely to pester her with midnight calls. Lately he had made silent calls, barely breathing, an unnerving alternative to a previous method of threats and abuse. Had her mother been party to that last call? It must have been made from her house. Perhaps not; she was normally in bed by midnight. Giles would have sat up drinking, he was usually drunk when he made the calls. He had had a cold. Hearing him sniff, she had said, ‘Blow your nose.’ He had laughed. She was glad that his last communication had been a laugh. She had not dared hang up on him as she usually did, for Christy was with him. But that was all; Giles had laughed and hung up.

The noise came again. She jerked awake and lay propped on her elbow; it was repeated. She swung her legs off the bed, switched on the light and, reaching for Christy’s whistle, gripped it in her hand.

Wide awake now, she waited, heard a slight thump and a scratching sound; puzzled, she crossed to the door and opened it.

The dog came in quietly.

Stepping backwards, Julia sat down on the divan. The dog laid its head on her knee and she cupped the back of its skull in her hand.

Her clock said three in the morning. The street was quiet; the inhabitants of the other flats slept. She could hear her heart thump and, stroking the dog, feel his heart beating against thin ribs. Beginning to pant, the dog glanced up then looked away; she rose and filled a bowl of water. It drank thirstily. She said, ‘You are a stray. I should not feed you,’ but she gave it bread and milk, which it ate. Then she said, ‘It is too early to do anything about you,’ and got back into bed, pulling the duvet up to her chin. The animal stretched out beside the bed with a contented sigh. She said, ‘I will take you to the police or the Battersea Dogs’ Home.’ The dog thumped its tail on the floor. She said, ‘You came like a thief, you must belong to somebody,’ but it did not respond. She sniffed the palm of her hand for the faint smell of dog and longed for country smells. She said, ‘I don’t know how you got into the house, and if this is somebody’s idea of a joke I don’t find it funny. I will get you out of here before I go to work and be rid of you.’ But the dog had fallen asleep.

In the morning she overslept and hurried late to her first job in a block of flats near the river, where she cleaned for a woman journalist, took messages on her telephone and left a meal ready to be warmed up in the evening. She did not like the woman, who was sluttish, leaving dirty knickers and tights on the floor for her to wash but, conscious of being a nuisance, paid above the going rate.

She was late, there was no time to take the dog to the police; the police station was out of her way and so, too, was the Battersea Dogs’ Home. The dog ran cheerfully beside her through the streets. When she reached the block of flats where the journalist lived on the fifth floor she turned to the dog and, hardening her heart, said as harshly as she could, ‘Go home. You do not belong to me.’ The dog looked baffled.

In the lift going up she ground her teeth, resolutely refusing responsibility, and when she reached the flat brutally refrained from leaning out of the window to see whether the animal was waiting.

The woman journalist, though personally untidy, liked to find everything just so when she came in from her day. Picking up the woman’s clothes, hurling them with bath towels and bed sheets into the washing-machine, smacking clean sheets onto the bed, roughly shaking the duvet, washing the kitchen and bathroom floors, cleaning the bath and hoovering the carpet, venting her rage, Julia assured herself that it was stupid to be sentimental. Left in the street, the dog’s chance of survival was greater than if she had taken it to the police. It was a streetwise animal. It must belong to somebody. It would find its way home. Taken in by the police, it would be passed to the Dogs’ Home, where nobody would claim it. Had it been a claimable dog, it would have sported a collar; unclaimed it would be destroyed, it being a creature of mixed breed whom nobody would want. It was far better not to interfere. Julia cursed and swore out loud as she cleaned the journalist’s flat and allowed the telephone to peal unanswered, knowing that she should answer it. She could not trust herself to be polite or take messages and write them down.

Having finished her desperate cleaning she washed a lettuce, made a sauce for pasta and laid everything ready for an evening meal. Before pocketing the money the woman left ready for her, she took a sheet of writing paper and wrote a note in which she suggested the woman get herself an answerphone, that she was sorry but owing to unforeseen circumstances she would not in future be able to come and clean the flat. This done, she slammed out of the flat and, taking the lift to the ground floor, walked out into the street which she found mercifully free of dogs. But in the street she remembered her unpaid bills and the convenience of working for an employer she hardly ever saw who, though messy and untidy, paid regularly and without fuss. So she turned back and went up in the lift to re-enter the flat and tear up the note she had left on the kitchen table.

On her way back to the street she remembered the smell on the woman’s sheets when she had stripped the bed and conjectured that there must be a new lover; and because the smell nudged some part of her brain which had been inattentive as she worked, she worried until she had located the smell and, having found it, was amused. It was the aftershave advertised in the sachets stuck in the
Sunday Times
magazine which Mr Patel sedulously removed for his more discerning customers; and it was to one of these customer’s houses she was now on her way, her new invisible employer, Mr Wykes, who left her money ready and notes of polite thanks. And, she thought as she hurried along, there was the garden; there might be a reaction to her hopeful proposal.

A note was propped against an empty milk bottle on Sylvester Wykes’s kitchen table. Julia read:

1. Please, Mrs Piper, clean out the drawers of the desk in the sitting-room.

2. Apropos your suggestion re garden, have opened account with Garden Centre you advise. Please tell the man to spend within reason
—

Julia let out a sigh of pleasure. Then: ‘Within reason?’ she whispered. ‘Apropos? Man, what man?’ The note went on:

3. I shall be away in the US for a month as from Monday; please find cheque to tide you over until I get back plus money for the man.
The man again? She frowned and read on.

4. The answerphone is set, please do
not
answer the telephone. In case of trouble my office number is 071 100 2157.

5. No need to forward letters, but I will be grateful if you will chuck out junk mail.

The note was signed S. Wykes, with a cheque made out to Mrs Piper stapled to it. She fingered the cheque, puzzling over the amount, which exceeded her needs, then overleaf she noticed a postscript which said:
As I have not had time to get an extra key cut, could you let the man in with your key? Should this be inconvenient, perhaps you could leave your key with the corner-shop—they seem obliging—for him to collect there? Sorry about this. In haste. S. Wykes.

Out loud, Julia said, ‘What a trusting old fellow!’ and, ‘Of course they are obliging!’ Upstairs there were signs of departure: cupboards left open, the bed rumpled and unmade, a torn Pan Am label on the floor, damp towels in the bathroom and blobs of shaving cream in the basin. Gathering the sheets from the bed, Julia compared their smell favourably with those of the woman journalist before bundling them with the towels into the washing-machine. While the machine churned she cleaned the drawers of the writing desk with a damp cloth, leaving them ajar, then addressed herself to the rest of the house. It was only when all was in order that she allowed herself to step out through the french windows and view the garden.

She stood for a long time in the gathering dusk before setting off for home via the Corner Shop, where she bought herself a lettuce, some grapes and a steak.

‘A steak.’ Mr Patel raised his eyebrows. ‘Fillet?’

‘I am celebrating.’ She told him about Sylvester Wykes’s garden.

‘And I was thinking you had a new boyfriend. The Wykes gentleman asked me to keep the key perhaps. I said of course I would when he came to cancel the papers.’

‘He seems to be a very trusting sort of old man.’

‘Not so much trusting as not caring, I think.’

‘Oh?’

Mr Patel raised both hands, clutching the air. ‘A gentleman with nothing to hold,’ he said.

‘Poor old thing,’ Julia said. ‘May I see the children?’ She went through the bead curtains to the room beyond, leaving Mr Patel to serve a customer.

Mrs Patel made her tea, which she drank holding the little boy on her knee. He was surprisingly heavy, gripping the front of her shirt with a pudgy hand, wriggling his bottom into a comfortable position on her lap and gazing up with his father’s lollipop eyes. ‘He is so very like his father,’ she said.

‘Story!’ the child shouted. ‘Story!’

Shyly Mrs Patel said something to the effect that Christy, too, had been the spit of his father. Julia knew this was what she said for Mrs Patel had said it often before and Mr Patel had translated. ‘That was so,’ she agreed, ‘and I—but come on, story. Three Bears?’

The Three Bears told with squeaky noises and dangerous growls, she put the child down, kissed the sleeping baby and said she must go. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘I must,’ disentangling her legs from the little boy’s grip. ‘But I will come again and teach your mum English, it’s high time she learned.’

Mrs Patel, who understood perfectly, laughed.

As Julia left the shop, Mr Patel said, ‘There was a man asking—I thought new boyfriend perhaps a possibility? But then I thought, No,’ and he wagged his head, and since Julia was in a hurry and incurious he did not describe Maurice Benson.

Julia went light-footed along the street; she was hungry and looking forward to her steak, but most of all she cherished the prospect of working in Sylvester Wykes’s garden. Fifty yards from home, feeling in her bag for her key, her heart sank: the dog was waiting on the doorstep. Seeing her, it raised itself from its haunches, pricked its ears and wagged its tail.

Resolving to deny it, Julia came to a halt just as the Eddisons, coming out of the house, exclaimed, ‘Oh, it’s still there,’ as they slammed the door shut. ‘Shoo! Go away! Kick it or something, Peter.’

‘It’s a horrible stray,’ Angie Eddison addressed Julia. ‘The Fellowes say it’s been lurking all day. Perhaps one should call the police?’

Remembering occasions when Angie Eddison or perhaps Peter
had
called the police, Julia heard herself say as she inserted her key in the lock, ‘I don’t think this one will cause a domestic incident.’ To the dog she said, ‘Come on, then.’

Inside the house she found her knees were shaking and had to sit on the stairs where, as she hugged the dog, she heard Peter Eddison say, ‘How bloody rude!’ and Angie Eddison, ‘Stuck-up bitch, no wonder her husband left her.’

While Julia climbed the stairs to her flat with her new friend, Angie, crossing the street, said, ‘Gosh, that woman’s a weirdo! Did you see the way she looked at us? She slammed the door in our faces.’

Taking her elbow and hurrying to avoid an oncoming car Peter hazarded, ‘It’s a communal door.’

‘Of course it’s a communal door, darling. It’s a question of manners.
We
don’t slam it.’

Unwisely, and releasing his wife’s elbow, Peter said, ‘I wouldn’t call the way she shut the door a slam.’

‘Wouldn’t you?’ Angie questioned. ‘What would you call it?’ When Peter did not reply she went on, ‘Just when we are spared the shrieks and whistles of her noisy brat, she imports a dog!’

Optimistically Peter suggested, ‘It may not bark.’

Angie said, ‘Whoever heard of a dog which didn’t? I tell you, it will be worse than thumps and bumps and obscene shouts when her ex came visiting; at least he wasn’t there all the time.’

Peter said, ‘They are both dead.’

Angie replied, ‘And the dog is not.’ Then she said, ‘Do I sniff an accusation of insensitivity? Are you reproaching me?’

Peter said, ‘Certainly not,’ and Angie said, ‘Well, then!’

But later in the pub, as they sat at a table with Janet and Tim Fellowes and some friends of theirs just back from a holiday in Kerala and eager to relate its charms, she reverted to the subject of Julia Piper. ‘You should meet this woman in the flat above ours. We hardly know her but she is thick with the family who run our Corner Shop, they come from somewhere like Kerala—Indian sub-continent. The wife can’t speak a word of English;
she
was imported.
He’s
been here for years—’

‘An arranged marriage,’ Peter interjected.

‘I know, darling, but it works, not like some; the Piper woman’s, for instance. That’s our neighbour,’ she explained to the travellers from Kerala. ‘Anyway, what I was leading up to when Peter interrupted was that, although this Indian wife doesn’t speak any English, this peculiar woman in the flat above us is great friends with her and their children were, too, until her child was killed in a car crash. But that’s another story. What I am really getting at is that it’s possible to communicate without words, without knowing the language. I expect you found that in Kerala—’

‘They all spoke English in our hotel,’ said the husband of the travelled couple. ‘But you were saying, they are friends, these two. What has—?’

‘They made friends when she was pregnant with the Whistleblower. They went to the antenatal clinic together,’ Peter interrupted.

The wife of the couple who had been to Kerala asked, ‘Who is the Whistleblower?’