The Sunlight on the Garden (21 page)

‘Evelyn!' It is my wife calling to me to remove her tray and help her to the bath. ‘
Evelyn
!' The tone of her voice, plaintive, even desperate, is uncannily like that of Götz's wife summoning him back to their bedroom more than sixty years ago. It is only by thinking of Götz – now either long since dead or a man even more ancient than myself – that I can continue to perform for her the tasks that I have to perform.

‘Coming! I'm coming!'

M
ark and Howard were an upwardly mobile couple in increasingly obsessive search of an upwardly mobile neighbourhood.

At first Dalston appealed to them. There were all those ethnic shops, restaurants and cafés, and, yes, all those Turks, with the sort of bristly moustaches that made Mark gasp with delight, even if they also made Howard groan with horror. Prices could only go up. During their prospecting, they were particularly taken with a straggly street of semidetached Thirties houses. But then they noticed the black teenagers sprawled across a cracked rise of front-steps, while passing around a joint with indolent furtiveness. And, more serious, there was no underground to take Mark to the council office at which he worked or Howard to his dental surgery.

Acton? Acton was whizzing up. But there was something depressing about the quiet, even sombre streets, with so few people in them. Balham? A chum of theirs – well, more an acquaintance than a chum – had been mugged there when merely going out to buy some bananas in mid-afternoon. So, after a lot of discussion, they had decided, reluctantly, to rule Balham out.

Eventually, they opted for Stepney. It was a first view of Tredegar Square that clinched it. Oh, if only, if only! Mark, the older of the couple, who knew about such things, having once lived briefly and unhappily with a morose architect, was particularly enraptured. ‘I love those giant recessed columns,' he sighed.

‘Way beyond us.' Howard was always the practical one, apt to be tight when Mark was wanting to be generous.

‘Yes, I know, sweetie, I know, don't I know! But one day … That's what we're going to aim for.' Once again he gazed up at an elegant façade. ‘You bet all the people living here are
very
grand. No council tenants.' His elderly parents still lived in a high-rise, much vandalised council block.

What clinched the matter was their finding of an estate agent who at once, as Mark put it, came up with the goods. ‘Just call me Thelma – I hate formalities,' she told them at their first meeting. At that meeting she was already referring to them, flatteringly, as ‘You boys'. Black and buxom, with a wide space between her front teeth and extremely long red fingernails, she at once adopted them as her friends. They reciprocated.

‘I'm not sure how much this is going to appeal,' she told them at a second meeting after that first one had yielded ‘nothing quite right'. ‘It's just come in. You'll be the first people to view it.' It was a house unusually capacious for what, she had to admit, was still a neighbourhood largely occupied by Bangladeshis. Period. Well, Edwardian. The owner, an old lady, had had to go into a home, poor dear, after a stroke. The price was amazingly low for a property of that size, but that was because there were – ‘I have to come clean to you boys' – two drawbacks that might put people off. Firstly, the old lady had let the house become a perfect tip. Secondly, there was a sitting tenant.

‘A sitting tenant?' Mark pulled a face. He was good at faces.

‘I'm not sure that I'm encouraged by that,' Howard said.

‘Oh, he's a perfectly harmless old boy. A retired Army man – captain, major, I can't remember. I don't think you boys will have any trouble with him.'

‘Well, let's take a dekko.'

‘That's the spirit!' Thelma exclaimed, plunging downwards, arm outstretched, for her vast, red handbag and then lurching to her feet. ‘It's a terrific bargain. And I don't think that the old chap is going to last all that long. You've only to look at him to realise that. On his last legs.'

Thelma panted up the uncarpeted stairs ahead of them. ‘He has the attic area,' she explained superfluously between gasps. ‘I'm afraid the higher and higher you climb, the worse and worse it gets.'

Mark did the face, expressing revulsion, that involved wrinkling his nose and pulling his upper lip upward and to one side. ‘ There's a distinct pong,' he said.

As they reached the final landing, both Mark and Howard were dismayed to discover that the tenant's quarters were not self-contained. There was a door open on to a lavatory, its linoleum worn here and there to holes. An ancient washbasin reared up in a corner. One pane of the dusty, cobwebbed window had been clumsily patched with cardboard now coming adrift at the edges.

Thelma rapped on a closed door beyond the open one. Silence. She rapped again. ‘Major! Major Pomfrey.'

‘Yes, yes. Come in. Come in!' The voice was high-pitched and nasal.

The major was seated on the edge of a narrow, unmade bed, with a half-smoked cigarette held at a jaunty angle between a forefinger and a middle finger amber from kippering with nicotine over many years. He was in striped flannel pyjamas, his feet, with their talon-like toenails, bare. ‘Ah, Mrs Lucy. Good to see you. Forgive my dishabille. I overslept. A case of my alarm clock failing – not for the first time – to be alarming. Do sit.' There was one straight-backed chair, with a chamber pot, almost full to the brim, under it, and one armchair, over which some clothes were scattered.

The three intruders remained standing. ‘We don't want to take up your time,' Thelma said. ‘But, as I explained on the blower, these are the two possible purchasers of the house. They just wanted to say a hello to you.'

‘They'll be fools to buy this place. Falling down. Rising damp in the basement and ground floor. Cockroaches. Mice. Even rats.'

‘Now come on, major, it's not as bad as all that,' Thelma chided, not attempting to conceal her annoyance that he should at once start to run down a property that she had had every hope of selling. ‘Well, let me introduce …'

The major extended a shaky hand but did not get up. As Howard took the hand, he noticed, with distaste, the orange urine stain in the crotch of the major's pyjamas. He, not Mark, was the one who noticed such things.

‘Have you been here long?' Mark asked.

‘Thirty-two years. Moved here when I lost some money through a daft investment – and my wife died. Two disasters together. Within a month of each other.' He stared fixedly up at Mark with pale blue eyes that suddenly had a glitter of malevolence in them. ‘ Sitting tenant. Can't be put out. Controlled rent.'

‘Yes, we know that,' Howard said. ‘I don't see why that should be a difficulty'

‘The old girl tried to get me out. Many times. At one point even cut off the electricity. Never had any luck!' He laughed. ‘You won't either.'

After the brief meeting, Mark and Howard invited Thelma to a cup of coffee at the Starbucks opposite to her office.

‘I don't think he'll really pose any problem,' Thelma said.

‘I noticed that he didn't have a television set,' Howard said. ‘Or a hi-fi. So there'd be no arguments over noise.'

‘We hate noise,' Mark said. ‘ Unless we ourselves are making it,' he added with a laugh.

‘The house definitely has possibilities.' Howard raised his cup of
latte
and sipped daintily.

‘It's an absolute snip,' Mark said. ‘I can already see in my mind's eye what we could do with it.'

Thelma wondered whether to mention that, although the sitting tenant had his own lavatory and washbasin, he had no bathroom and was entitled, by a long-standing agreement, to use the downstairs one. She decided not to. After all, it didn't look as if the old boy took a bath all that often.

‘Well, you boys must have a good think. I don't want to rush you. But I must tell you, I'm showing round two other interested parties tomorrow.'

‘Then we'll have to get our skates on,' Howard said.

‘But don't let's rush things,' Mark warned. Howard was so impulsive.

Howard was often kept late at the surgery. Much of the decorating therefore fell to Mark, even though, as he was the first to acknowledge, he was not the practical one of the two and in any case had a bad back. There were, of course, things that even Howard could not do, and so, though constantly anxious about the rising costs of repairs on top of monthly payments on a substantial mortgage, the couple from time to time had to call in two jolly black builders recommended by Thelma, whose cousins they were.

From the start, the major was all too obviously fascinated by the work going on below him. Usually wearing nothing more than those striped, flannel pyjamas and slippers, he would slowly descend the creaking stairs, crab-wise, a hand clutching the banisters, and then position himself in a corner of whatever room in which work was in progress. Leaning against the wall, emaciated arms akimbo, he would stare fixedly for a long time before finally making some suggestion or criticism, more often the latter – ‘You've got some of that paint smeared on the wainscot', ‘That nail's not straight', ‘Here, here! Hold on! Hold on! You've forgotten that spot over there.' These interventions unnerved Mark and Howard, who then became even clumsier. They infuriated the builders, who eventually gave an ultimatum – ‘ That geezer's got to leave us alone or we quit.'

It was Howard, the more diplomatic of the two, to whom devolved the task of telling the major that work would proceed more smoothly if he did not interfere.

‘Oh, dear! Oh-dear-oh-dear! Well, now isn't that sad? So-o-o sad!' The high, pinched voice was sarcastic. ‘ I'd hate to put you off your stroke. What a sensitive couple you are, aren't you?'

‘It's the builders too.'

‘The
builders
? Oh, you mean the cowboys. Did I tell you that I saw one of them pinching a packet of your biscuits? Chocolate Bourbons. I glimpsed him opening the top drawer of that cupboard in your kitchen, when he didn't know I could see him from the hall.' He chuckled. ‘It's amazing how dark-skinned people are so often light-fingered.'

At first Mark and Howard, who were genuinely kind and tolerant, did their best to accommodate ‘ Pomme Frite' (as they had soon nicknamed Major Pomfrey). They told each other that, with his innumerable prejudices, he was a figure from the past; that, with his wife long since dead and his estranged daughter, the only child of the marriage, far away in New Zealand, the poor creature was desperately lonely; that one had to remember that he was suffering from a host of ailments, ranging from the bronchial cough that reverberated through the house at daybreak every morning with all the regularity of a rooster, to the diabetes for which he had to give himself a daily injection. One could not really be unfriendly, much less hostile, to someone so pathetic.

But over the ensuing months Pomme Frite's intrusions became less and less supportable. Soon after they had moved in, he had asked them whether – since his television set had broken down and he was ‘too old to go to all the bother and expense of getting another so late in the day' – they would mind if he watched the cricket on theirs when they were out at work. Reluctantly they had acceded. Entering the sitting-room that evening, after a day of hard work, they sniffed angrily at an unpleasant combination of cigarette smoke and urine, before one of them rushed to fling up the windows and the other frantically busied himself with emptying the overflowing ashtray.

Then something even more appalling happened. They were seated before the television set one evening, watching
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
?, when Pomme Frite's head appeared around the door. ‘Would you mind awfully if I joined you?' Without waiting for a response, he began to nudge a chair forward with a bony knee. Eventually, unable to stand the alien presence any longer, Mark exclaimed: ‘Oh, this is a bore!', jumped up and switched off the set. ‘Yes, we ought to be thinking about our supper,' Howard chimed in. But a few evenings later, Pomme Frite once again joined them, clutching a packet of cigarettes and a lighter against his narrow, bony chest, even though they had by then made it amply clear that they could not abide smoking.

Pomme Frite had a way of usurping the bathroom just when they themselves wished to use it before rushing out to work or a party. Eventually, exasperated beyond endurance by the sound of water constantly running at their expense with a counterpoint of coughing and violent expectoration, they suggested that it might be more convenient for all three of them if they agreed on fixed hours when the bathroom would be at his sole disposal. To that Pomme Frite responded: ‘Oh, lordy lordy! You two spend
hours
there, while yours truly waits around, sponge-bag and shaving kit at the ready. One might be living with two members of the fairer sex from the time that you take. No, no, I don't think it would be a good idea to fix definite times. I'll just go on slipping in whenever you give me the chance.'

Soon the intrusions extended to the kitchen. ‘I hope you won't take it amiss. I suddenly found that I had run out of bread and so, transgressing on your good natures, I helped myself to two of those ciabatta rolls that I found in your bread bin. Rather past their sell-by date, but any port in a storm.' Seeing the look of indignation on the two faces opposite, he replied huffily: ‘Of course I'll replace them. Though not perhaps with products quite so recherché.' He never did replace them. A short while later, when, having for once returned early from work, Howard went into the kitchen to make himself some coffee, he was exasperated to find a saucepan tilted sideways on the range, its sides clogged with a dark-grey deposit, so obstinate that he had to take a Brillo pad to it. He decided that it was the remains of a custard left over from the previous night. Pomme Frite must have succeeded in burning it while heating it up for his own consumption.