The Count of Eleven (28 page)

“We’ll all go walking soon. We can go up above Helsby.”

“Isn’t that quite a way if the van’s not too happy?”

“Not too far, and worth the journey. So I’ve been told by someone at work.”

He drove into the centre of Liverpool, where mid-morning deliveries all but blocked the streets, and dropped Julia at the doors of the Adelphi Hotel, opposite the stone penis of the statue on the front of Lewis’s department store. “All the luck in the world,” he said to Julia, dragging at the hand brake

“Let’s not get carried away, Jack. This computer firm is holding interviews up and down the country. They’re bound to be pretty competitive.”

“So are you.” He leaned over to give her a kiss for luck, and when her tongue met his, tasting faintly minty, he kissed her hard. Three black cabs drew up behind him on the road which separated the hotel steps from the front entrance, and he glimpsed them drawing together like a concertina in the driving mirror, but he didn’t let go of Julia until the foremost cab honked. “Don’t expect too much,” she told Jack, sliding her door open.

“Of you? I never could.”

As the van reached the end of the steps he turned to wave, but she had already passed beyond the revolving doors. A rectangle of sunlight shone like the entrance to a furnace, then the glass door pivoted away. Jack blinked and drove uphill, slowing as students crowded across the road outside the University. He wasn’t sure what time Julia would be called in for interview, but he wanted to have done by then if he could.

The road grew more like an obstacle course as he approached the industrial park. Cars darted out of side streets, lorries attended shops, flashing their hazard lights repetitively as flints which were failing to ignite wicks. Jack overtook one that was parked on the scribble of white paint trailing from a set of traffic lights. The lights climbed down from red to amber, and as the amber began to pulsate a man stepped onto the deserted crossing, straight into the path of the van. It was Gavin Edge.

He didn’t recognise Jack. He gave the van a disparaging glance and walked a little slower, balancing a polystyrene cup of coffee on top of a wad of sandwiches inside a plastic wedge. If the brakes didn’t work, Jack thought, neither would Gavin; he would be over his edge. He trod hard on the brake pedal and sounded the horn.

Perhaps Gavin had been ignoring the van so thoroughly he’d forgotten it was there. He flung out his hands to ward it off and staggered away from it, not towards the pavement but along the road. His cup and sandwiches described elegant arcs in the air. The cup struck the lights, and Jack thought he heard coffee sizzling on the sign of the walking man, who’d turned bright red. The van screeched to a halt, though not before driving over Gavin’s sandwiches. Jack heard and felt their shell crunch.

Gavin staggered onto the pavement and clung to a concrete lamp-standard with one hand while he thumped it several times with the side of the other. Jack stopped the van a few yards beyond him. As he rounded it he found Gavin storming towards him, gritting his teeth and thrusting out his large square jaw and looking almost blind with fury. “What the bloody devil…”

“It’s me, Gavin. I just meant to say hello.”

Gavin seemed momentarily incapable of hearing him, but then stopped short of him, more or less opening his fists. “Oh,” he said, and with an effort at generosity, “Oh, it’s you, Jack.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to Jack glanced past him at the dripping signal in an attempt to distract himself from his growing mirth. “I was trying to make you look at me.”

“Head somewhere else.” Gavin waggled several fingers at his cranium. “Mine was, I mean. Mad’s off home early, sick. She’s holding the fort while I went to bring back my lunch.”

“Let me restore it for you.”

“Thanks anyway. I need to lose some weight. Maybe you did me a favour. I take it you’re doing well for yourself if you were offering to buy me lunch.”

“I think I’ve identified my problems. And you’re prospering, I hope?”

“Doing my damnedest to keep the accountant happy. He has to see there’s always a risk of overestimating a new market. You and I did.” Gavin was glancing at passers-by as if he disliked thinking they had seen his comic turn. “Regards to the family, anyway,” he blurted and dashed back to the crossing as the green man started to bleep.

Gavin hadn’t struck Jack as needing to diet. He looked thinner and more haggard than the last time they had met. Jack watched him sprint across the road, then he moved the briefcase from the back of the van onto the passenger seat before driving off.

Five minutes later he was at the motorway. Beyond the starting line marked by traffic lights hitch-hikers held up placards naming towns. Jack stayed in the outer lane until he’d outdistanced the rest of the traffic. Whatever had been wrong with the van seemed to have righted itself, and he didn’t slow down until he reached the first exit to Warrington.

The gentle slope of the road curved gradually between field and solitary houses selling vegetables and eggs. At Great Sankey the houses started to cluster, and the road became a dual carriage way shaded by trees and divided by a wide strip like an elongated football field. Soon Jack had to brake for the centre of Warrington, a maze populated by shoppers and walled in by store-fronts. It didn’t faze him. Even when the road sprouted concrete roundabouts and split into lanes painted with destination numbers, he knew where he was bound: through the centre and out again towards the other motorway. Road signs shone green as traffic lights as they caught the sunlight, and in five minutes he was driving leisurely along the road he had located on the map.

Long blocks of thin-faced houses, packed with bay windows and interrupted only by narrow side streets, enclosed the road, which felt to Jack as much like a prolonged village as part of a town. A few minutes later it crossed a canal staked out by fishermen. He parked the van in a side street near a building society and a bank, and walked the last few blocks.

He had every reason to expect Enid Bellows’ shop to be in the side street to which he had addressed the letter, and a van marked BELLOWS FLORISTS was. The street, however, consisted of two terraces like reflections of each other; there was no sign of a shop. He turned back to the main road, and a scent of flowers reached him through the air that was heavy with heat and exhaust fumes. The shop was on the opposite corner of the junction, which seemed to be just about the busiest part of the road.

He made sure the briefcase was securely fastened as he crossed to the florist’s. Beyond a window banked with flowers he saw a man and a woman behind a counter at the back of the shop. The man was leafing through slips of paper, the woman was arranging a wreath. With all the flowers in the window Jack found it gratifyingly difficult to see into the shop.

Presumably the woman was Enid Bellows, but he needed her to be alone. He walked to the end of the block, past a greengrocer’s and a post office, and strolled back. Could he call the man out of the shop on some pretext? He supposed he could regard this visit as spying out the situation, except that doing so little felt like putting Julia at risk.

He pretended to examine the display outside the greengrocer’s while he tried to plan, and when nothing useful occurred to him he went in to buy a pound of Granny Smiths in case anyone had noticed him dawdling. Before leaving the shop he put the bag of apples in the briefcase, where they nestled against the blow lamp except for one apple into which he bit. The green sharpness seemed to blaze through his teeth into his skull as he stepped onto the pavement and saw the man who had been behind the florist’s counter emerging from the shop.

Jack walked to the post office next door to the florist’s and faced the advertising postcards in the window while he spied sidelong on the man. Whenever he remembered not to look conspicuous he bit into the fruit and glanced at the postcards, at least three of which advertised the value of his name: a house numbered 11, the digits of a post code two consecutive digits of a phone number. He had just located the third appearance of eleven when the florist’s van turned out of the side street and chugged towards the centre of Warrington, trailing smoke.

Jack took a last bite of the apple, crunching a seed between his teeth, and dropped the core on top of a newspaper in a waste-bin, obscuring whatever the headline said. Either the man was delivering flowers or he’d taken the van to be overhauled; in either case he ought to be gone for a while. Swinging his briefcase jauntily, Jack was at the florist’s in two strides.

Nobody was in the shop, not even the florist. There must be a back room, out of sight from the street. A bell pinged like a timer as Jack closed the door behind him. None of the passers-by so much as glanced at him as he pushed down the catch on the Yale lock and turned the placard outwards so that it said CLOSED to the world. “I’ll be with you now,” the woman called from the back room.

Jack had just counted eleven when she came to the counter. She was larger than she had appeared through the wreath, but otherwise nondescript: brownish hair which looked less natural than uncombable, a rotund face whose plumpness blurred its features. “How can I help?” she said.

“Help what?” Jack Awkward might have said or thought of saying, but he had to be quick and decisive; there was no telling how soon she might notice that the door was locked. He snapped the briefcase open. “I wrote to you.”

“Did you? That’s nice. I look forward to the postman’s knock.” She leaned her hands on the counter with two wooden thuds, the second of which sounded like an echo. “Don’t I know you?” she said.

Jack gazed into the depths of the briefcase. The nozzle of the blow lamp made him think of the snout of some creature holding itself still in its lair. “I do know you,” the florist said. “Give us a clue, come on.”

Jack gazed at her and reached into the briefcase. “I know that grin,” she said, and slapped her cheek lightly with her left hand, two fingers of which had knuckles wrapped in plaster. “It was at her wedding up the road. Weren’t those your little ones everyone remarked on?”

“Depends what they were saying about them.”

“They were a delight, that’s what everyone said.” She peered at him with a comical grimace that discovered dozens of wrinkles around her eyes, then her face relaxed. Tom, that’s your name.”

“And you’re Enid.”

That’s me all over,” she said, gesturing as though she was sketching a larger and more shapeless body for herself, and cocked her head on one side, rucking the flesh of her neck. “But I don’t remember you writing to me.”

“It was about luck.”

“Well, we can all use more of that,” she said, and glanced past him. “Let him in, will you?”

Jack turned his head without moving his body, and realised that by standing midway between the counter and the door he was blocking her view of the placard. A boy in his mid teens with a luminous green headband was shading his eyes and squinting through the glass. Sunlight on it seemed to be the problem, and Jack thought it unlikely that the boy could distinguish his face. He drew a breath which tasted of flowers and more faintly of gas, and as he did so the boy stepped back and ran across the road to flag down a bus. “Impatient customer,” Jack said, and found that Enid Bellows was gazing at him. “I’ve remembered,” she told him.

As his grip on the briefcase shifted, the blow lamp touched the back of his other hand. Perhaps because of the unexpectedness, the metal felt suddenly hot. “Remembered,” he said.

“What you must have sent me. The letter that’s supposed to bring good luck.”

“And did it?”

“I hope it will.”

Jack’s hand hesitated between the wad of letters and the blow lamp “What have you done with it?”

She raised her eyebrows as if she had already answered him. “Sent copies to the next thirteen customers who came in after I got it. You never know what may help, I always say, though the old man shouts at me if I so much as cross the road instead of walking under a ladder.”

“You never know where help may come from.”

Jack felt both relieved and robbed of impetus, and stood with his hand in the briefcase until she spoke again. “Was that all you wanted?”

Jack snapped the briefcase shut. “No, I’d like a bouquet for my wife.”

“They start at six pounds, or seven delivered.”

“Six will be fine,” Jack said, moving to the door. “I’ll just be popping in the post office while you make it up.”

As she turned towards the back room he reversed the placard and pushed up the catch on the lock, muffling the click with the heel of his hand. Having walked slowly to the end of the block, he returned to the florist’s. His surroundings seemed to have brightened and clarified, as though the sunlight was penetrating everything it touched. Enid Bellows looked up from wrapping the bouquet in cellophane, and he saw that her features were by no means unclear now that he was familiar with them. He experienced a surge of affection and well-being as she said “What’s her name?”

“Who?”

“Your lady love,” she said, tut ting at his forgetfulness.

“Julia.”

“Really? I thought She looked embarrassed; perhaps she thought she’d caused him to betray himself. “Take a card,” she said.

“Why, are you going to show me a trick?”

She emitted a sound as much like a groan as a laugh. “You’re too quick for me. I should have remembered from the wedding.”

Jack selected a card from the revolving stand, and she clipped it to the cellophane. “Remember me to your wife,” she said as he reached the door, ‘and, oh ‘

Jack halted with one hand on the latch. “You’ve remembered something else?”

“Remind her she was going to drop me in a recipe the next time she was passing.”

“Are you certain that was Julia? It doesn’t sound like her.”

“I keep thinking that wasn’t her name.” The florist lifted a flap of the counter and stumped over to open the door for him. “Maybe the old brains are addled. Maybe it was three other people.”

“Aren’t we all,” Jack said, and headed for the van, where he stood the bouquet on the passenger seat and held it upright with the briefcase. Soon the streets fell behind, and the road swooped between fields to the motorway. He wasn’t at all surprised to find he was joining it at junction 11, nor that the first junction after 12 was 14. Of course it was silly to imagine that the landscape had somehow been arranged as a sign to him, but he felt that the family’s bad luck might have disappeared as though, like junction 13, it had never been. Thank you, Enid Bellows,” he murmured as the scent of flowers filled the front of the van.