Mavis Belfrage (12 page)

“No more nights off for me,” he thought. “No more nights off for me.”

He also resolved to visit his grandparents again tomorrow, or on Sunday, or perhaps the following weekend. There came a fall of rain so slight that he hardly noticed it until he saw privet hedges round the Carntyne gardens glittering under the street lamps. He may not have felt exactly like Ulysses landing on the coast of Ithaca but while turning the key of his front door and quietly entering years seemed to have passed since he left for work that morning.

In the living-room his wife, who disliked going to bed alone, lay dozing on a sofa before the fire. Opening her eyes she smiled and said, “Hullo.”

He tried to smile back. She said, “Bad?”

“Bad.”

“Worse than last week?”

“Aye.”

“What went wrong?”

“The whole day went wrong. I'll tell you tomorrow. How's the lad?”

“Not a cheep from him.”

“Next week,” said the teacher watching himself in a mirror above the mantelpiece, “I'll be thirty-four.”

“You poor pathetic middle-aged soul,” said his wife standing up and laughing and leaning on his shoulder.

“Has that been worrying you?”

“A bit. Let's have a keek at him.”

They went quietly upstairs to a bedroom holding a child's cot and switched on a low light in one corner. The cot contained a not quite two-year-old child soundly sleeping. His snub-nosed head with mouth pouting like a bird's blunt beak was larger than a baby's head but still babyish. On the coverlet lay a plastic duck, his mother's hairbrush and a small red motor car. The teacher bent to kiss him but was restrained by his wife's hand. She switched the light out and they tiptoed to the room next door.

Sitting on the bed he unlaced and removed his shoes saying in a baffled voice, “You … and that wee boy in there … are the only worthwhile things I know.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“A man should have something more in life than his family. I used to think it would be my work but it isn't my work. I don't know what it is.”

“I'll help you look for it tomorrow,” said his wife gently rumpling his hair.

“No use, I'll never find it now,” he said, smiling at her in a way which showed he felt much better.

“Perhaps wee Jimmy will find it.”

“O yes,” he said yawning, “put it off for another generation.”

“You need your bed my lad,” she said.
They went to bed.

“Nobody over fifty can tell where or how they'll live a few months hence Mrs … Mrs?”

“Dewhurst.”

“Look at me, for instance. A year ago I was headmaster of a very good comprehensive school in Huddersfield. My wife made me take early retirement for the good of
her
health – not mine. She thought the warmer climate in the south would suit her so down to Berkshire we came. Fat lot of good
that
did. A fortnight after settling into the new house she died of a stroke. Since I do not intend to follow her example I will pause here for a few seconds Mrs … Mrs?”

“Dewhurst. Let me carry that,” she said, pausing at a bend in the staircase.

“No no!” he said putting a cumbersome suitcase down on a higher step without releasing the handle. “I was talking about losing my wife. Well my son has a garage with five men working under him in Bracknell. ‘Come and live with us, Dad,' says he, ‘we've tons of room.' Yes, they have. New house with half an acre of garden.
Huge open-plan living-room with dining alcove.
Five
bedrooms no less, one for marital couple, one each for my two grandchildren, one for guests and one for poor old grandad. But poor old grandad's bedroom is on the small side, hardly bigger than a cupboard and although I have retired from education I have not retired from public life. I am now ready to proceed – to
continue
proceeding – upward Mrs … Dewhurst.”

They continued proceeding upward.

“I edit the You See Monthly Bulletin, the newsletter of the Urban Conservation Fellowship and that requires both space and privacy. ‘Use the living-room!' says my son, ‘it's big enough. The kids are at school all day and if you work at the sun patio end Myra won't disturb you.' Myra did. How could I get a steady day's work done in a house where lunch arrived any time between twelve and one? I didn't complain but when I asked for a shelf in the fridge where I could keep my own food to make my own lunch she took it for a slight on her housekeeping. So
this
!” said Mr Goodchild putting the suitcase down, “is my fourth home since last September. I'm glad my things arrived.”

He stood beside Mrs Dewhurst in a high-ceilinged room that had been the master bedroom eighty years earlier when the mansion housed a family and six servants. An ostentatiously solid bed, wardrobe, dressing-table and set of chairs survived from that time. The gas heater in the hearth of a white marble fireplace was recent, also a Formica-topped table, Laura Ashley window curtains, wall-to-wall fitted carpet with jagged green and black pattern. The carpet was mostly covered
by twenty-three full cardboard boxes, a heap of metal struts and shelving, a heavy old typewriter, heavier Grundig tape player, a massive black slide and picture projector called an epidiascope which looked as clumsy as its name.

“I am monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute,” said Mr Goodchild. “Forgive me for stating the obvious Mrs Dewhurst, but you are NOT the pleasant young man who showed me this room two days ago and asked for – and received! – what struck me as an unnecessarily huge advance on the rent.”

He smiled at her to show this was a question. Without smiling back she told him the young man was an employee of the letting agency and she did not know his name because that sort come and go; she, however, lived in the basement with her husband who cleaned the hall and stairs and shared bathroom. He also looked after the garden. It was her job to collect the rent, change sheets, pillowcases and towels once a fortnight and also handle complaints.

“You will hear no complaints from me or about me, Mrs Dewhurst. A quiet, sensible, sober man I am, not given to throwing wild parties but tolerant of neighbours who may be younger and less settled. Who, exactly, are my neighbours on this floor?”

“A couple of young women share the room next door. They do something secretarial in the office of the biscuit factory.”

“Boyfriends?”

“I haven't bothered to ask, Mr Goodchild.”

“Admirable! Who's above and who's below?”

“The Wilsons are above and the Jhas are below: both
married couples.”

“My age or yours Mrs Dewhurst? For I take you to be a youthful thirty-five or so.”

A very slight softening in Mrs Dewhurst's manner confirmed Mr Goodchild's guess that she was nearly his own age. She told him that the Wilsons were young doctors and would soon be leaving for a bigger place because Mrs Wilson was pregnant; that Mr Jha had a grocery in a poorer part of town, his wife was much younger than him with a baby, a very quiet little thing, Mr Goodchild would hardly notice it.

“Jha,” said Mr Goodchild thoughtfully. “Indian? Pakistani? African?
West
Indian?”

“I don't know, Mr Goodchild.”

“Since I have no prejudice against any people or creed on God's earth their origin is immaterial. And now I will erect my possessions into some kind of order. Cheerio and off you go Mrs Dewhurst.”

Off she went and Mr Goodchild's air of mischievous good humour became one of gloomy determination.

He hung his coat and jacket in the wardrobe. He unpacked from his suitcase a clock and radio which he put on the mantelpiece, underwear he laid in dressing-table drawers, pyjamas he placed under the pillow of the bed. Carrying the still heavy suitcase into a kitchenette he took out bottles, packets, tins and placed them in a refrigerator and on shelves. This tiny windowless space had once been the master's dressing-room and had two doors, one locked with a putty-filled keyhole. This useless door had once opened into the bedroom of the mistress, a room now rented by the secretaries. Mr Goodchild laid an ear to it,
heard nothing and sighed. He had never lived alone before and sounds of occupancy would have soothed him.

In the main room he rolled up shirtsleeves, produced a Swiss army knife, opened the screwdriver attachment and by twenty minutes to six had efficiently erected four standing shelf units. Returning to the kitchenette he washed hands and put a chop under the grill. Faint voices from the next room showed it was occupied though the tone suggested a television play. He opened tins of soup, peas and baby potatoes and heated them in saucepans which he clattered slightly to let the secretaries know they too were no longer alone. Ten minutes later he ate a three-course dinner: first course, soup; second, meat with two vegetables; third, cold apple tart followed by three cups of tea. Meanwhile he listened to the six o'clock news on the BBC Home Service. Having washed, dried and put away the kitchenware he brooded long and hard over the positions of the rented furniture.

The Formica-topped table would be his main work surface so had better stand against the wall where the wardrobe now was with his shelf units on each side of it. He would shift the small bedside table to the hearthrug and dine on that. The dressing-table would go beside the bed and support the bedside lamp and his bedtime cup of cocoa. The wardrobe could then stand where the dressing-table had been. The boxes on the floor would make these shifts difficult so he piled as many as possible onto and under the bed. The hardest task was moving the wardrobe. It was eight feet high, four wide and
a yard deep. Mr Goodchild, though less than average height, was proud of his ability to make heavy furniture walk across a room by pivoting it on alternate corners. The top part of the wardrobe rested on a base with a deep drawer inside. He discovered these were separate when, pivoting the base, the top section began sliding off. He dropped the base with a floor-shuddering thump. The upper part teetered with a jangling of wire coathangers but did not topple. Mr Goodchild sat down to recover from the shock. There came a tap upon the door and a voice with a not quite English accent said, “Are you all right in there?”

“Yes yes. Yes yes.”

“That was one heck of a wallop.”

“Yes I'm … shifting things about a bit Mr … Jha?”

“Yes?”

“I've just moved in and I'm shifting things about. I'll be at it for another hour or two.”

“Exercise care please.”

Mr Goodchild returned to the wardrobe and wrestled with it more carefully.

Two hours and several heavy thumps later the furniture was where he wanted it and he unpacked his possessions, starting with a collection of taped music. After putting it on a shelf beside the Grundig he played Beethoven symphonies in order of composition while unpacking and arranging books and box files. Handling familiar things to familiar music made him feel so completely at home that he was surprised by rapping on his door and the hands of his clock pointing to midnight. He switched off the third movement of the
Pastoral
and opened the door saying quietly but emphatically, “I am very very very very –”

“Some people need sleep!” said a glaring young woman in dressing-gown and slippers.

“– very very sorry. I was so busy putting my things in order that I quite forgot the time and how sound can propagate through walls. Perhaps tomorrow – or some other day when you have a free moment – we can discover experimentally the greatest volume of sound I can produce without disturbing you, Miss … Miss?”

“Shutting your kitchen door will halve the din where we're concerned!” hissed the girl. “I'm surprised you haven't heard from the Jhas. He's up here complaining if we drop as much as a book on the floor.”

She hurried away.

With a rueful grimace Mr Goodchild closed the door, crossed the room, closed the kitchen door and pondered a moment. He was not sleepy. The encounter with the young woman had pleasantly excited him. Sitting at his newly arranged work table he wound paper into what he thought of as “my trusty Remington” and, starting with the boarding-house address and date in the top right-hand corner, typed this.