Tree of Hands (17 page)

They had been out to eat and were back in the house in Spring Close and Freda was packing her hand case.

‘I suppose I'd better pack,' he had said. He had never quite got used to taking and using things in this house as if they were his own. ‘Can I have one of the brown cases?'

She had smiled. Something was making her happy. ‘Lambkins, we had all that out last week. I'm going alone and you're going to stay here and look after the house for me. I know you think I like surprising you and I've fixed a few surprises in the past but not this time. I'm sorry, lambkins.'

‘Don't call me that.'

‘I'm sorry, Terence. A month ago I said I was going to Martinique and would you stay here and look after the house for me and you said you would. Did you really think I was playing games?'

‘You needn't look so bloody happy about it.'

‘I'm looking forward to the sun and the sea, Terence. I'm looking forward to seeing old friends. Why shouldn't I be happy?'

The prospect of staying here on his own, a sort of caretaker, depressed him already. When she came downstairs, he had another go at persuading her. She wouldn't listen. It was as if she had gone already. Her body might be here but her heart and soul were up there in that Boeing 747, heading west.

They slept in different rooms that night, he on the futon on the lower level of the first floor. The house was an architect's extravaganza of split levels, teak wood, slate floors, Italian ceramics, smoked glass. The windows had blinds instead of curtains, the carpets were shaggy black and the furniture purple leather and chrome. The two baths were the sunken kind, one in a marble grotto. A black marble woman with a hole instead of a head stood on the pillar at the foot of the stairs, and a man with one leg throwing a sort of plate was poised on the edge of the stone houseplant garden in the hall.

Five more houses, the work of the same architect, were set at angles to each other in this enclave off Christchurch Hill. The only pleasing thing about it as far as Terence (whose taste ran to eighteenth-century cottages) could see was the view from the penthouse ‘games room'. Much of Hampstead Village could be seen from there and all the East Heath, the ponds and the woods and the Vale of Peace.

In the view, Terence saw not its beauty nor the wonder that so many ancient buildings and so much open space had been preserved, but the affluence it evinced. He saw it as a ‘rich' view, possibly the richest in the British Isles. Looking down on it, he could tell himself not that he had arrived but that he was well on his way to going places. It was all a far cry from his mother's council flat in Brownswood Common Lane, his room in Holloway, the furnished frame house he had shared with four other guys in Rock-hampton working for the Queensland railways. It spoke of money, it was full of money.

‘You're salivating,' Freda had said to him not long ago.

‘What?'

‘You know what salivating means, lambkins. Your mouth waters. Whenever I talk about money, a little bead of saliva pops out of the corner of your mouth, Truly. I'm not kidding.'

Was that why she had refused to marry him? Because he couldn't conceal his fondness for money? He couldn't help it, he'd been deprived all his life. What did she know, a widow who had never had to work, whose husband had given her every little thing she wanted?

In the morning when she left for Heathrow, he had gone down into the street with her, as far as Heath Street actually, to get her a taxi. There was no point in quarrelling at this stage of the game. He had that horrible house to live in and he'd have to make the best of it. He even kissed her, not quite on the mouth though, because she had painted her lips very glossily a fuchsia colour to match her suit.

Just as last night, up till the last moment, he'd expected the presentation of that air ticket, so now, up till the last moment, he had awaited the wherewithal to carry him through till she came back. It couldn't be a power of attorney, he'd have had to sign something for that, gone with her to her bank maybe. But an open cheque or cash in notes . . .

‘Are you still on the dole, lambkins?'

‘Don't call me that, Freda. Dole's stopped. I get the SS. Twenty-three pounds fifty a week if you want to know.'

‘Really?' she said. ‘As much as that? Benefit for the unemployed is really wonderful in this country, isn't it? I don't think people appreciate it.'

He looked at her, at her puce-pink lips flapping. It was incredible, that sort of talk. It floored you.

‘I asked about the dole,' she said, ‘because I'm not going to give you any money. The rates are paid six months in advance, and the gas and electricity and phone I've fixed to get paid on a banker's order. Use the phone all you like, Terence, and don't be cold, will you?'

Empty-handed he made his way back to the house. He had made a mistake in taking it for granted she would
marry him just because he was twenty-two years younger. Hangdog about it because the prospect didn't thrill him though the money did, he had said something, when next year came under discussion, about supposing they would be married by then. She had given him such a strange, long look and he could have sworn he saw tears come into her eyes. He had expected her to throw herself into his arms. And when she didn't but slowly shook her head, he anticipated one of those wisecracks of hers he always found hard to take. But all she said was: ‘No, lambkins, I don't think so. I don't think that's ever going to be possible.'

He felt ditched. Landed like a foolish fish and left gasping. Stuck with the house but without the means to make anything of it. He couldn't even afford to have a party. She was punishing him, he was well aware of that, punishing him in that light, half-laughing way of hers for the way he had enjoyed it when people took her for his mother, for the times he had left her to give some girl the runaround, for his impatience when she couldn't stand the pace of staying up till three, for his raised eyebrows when she had a hot flush.

Alone in the house, he resolved to waste no time. Whatever she had left around in the house he was going to have, whatever money there might be and whatever objects were saleable. He began by making off across the black carpet – it was shiny and curly like the coat of a cocker spaniel – towards the bookshelves that filled the wall at the end of the upper level bit. Here a picture window gave on to a paved court with raised flowerbeds and urns round which the six houses were built. Terence twisted the acorn-shaped knob on the bottom of the blind cord, dimmed the room and made it impossible to see in.

Freda bought every new novel that made any sort of stir. Between
The Marriage Knot
by Benet Archdale and the latest Dick Francis was a Morris West in a striking cover. Terence knew that inside that cover was, in fact, a French dictionary with a cuboid hole cut out of the centre of its pages, roughly from
devoir
to
mille
. Freda kept it as a spare
cash store. Once when she didn't know he was watching her, he had seen her abstract a fifty-pound note. But now when he opened the book the cache was empty. He shook the pages in vain.

He went down the step and over the carpet and up the other side into the bit where there were red-painted girders in the peaked ceiling, three thin windows like the slits they shot arrows through in castles and an indoor flowerbed built up with red bricks and full of castor oil plants and maidenhair fern. Against the wall opposite the windows was Freda's writing desk.

It would be locked and the key hidden somewhere. He looked around for the key, inside shiny black rhomboid vases, in the earth round the castor oil plants, under the carpet where it stopped at the polished wood steps. For once in his life, while he was living with Freda's predecessor, rehearsing for Freda so to speak, he had possessed a credit card. It had probably expired by now. Freda wouldn't settle his accounts for him so it had never been renewed. He had kept it because he had read that you can make yourself a gadget for opening simple locks with a piece of credit card. Eventually it was an old one of Freda's he found in her bedroom.

He had a look through the wardrobe and dressing table and vanitory drawers before he went down again. There was no money and she had put her jewellery in safe deposit somewhere. Would he dare to sell those silver-and-tortoise-shell-backed brushes, the property no doubt of the late John Howard Phipps? That was something to be thought about after he had been through the writing desk.

It took some opening. Whatever you were supposed to do with the credit card, he couldn't do it. In the end he used a cold chisel and a hammer and banged away until he heard the lock split. The front of the writing desk flopped down with a rattle. From the first he was sure he wasn't going to find any money. He went through the four small drawers and the two pigeon-holes. All the cash he found was an envelope with coins in it, two American quarters
and a nickel, three-hundred-and-fifty lire and ten Swiss francs. Also in the drawer was a building society passbook which has once shown five thousand pounds in credit. The account had been closed a year before he met Freda and while her husband was still alive.

Underneath it lay a green cardboard National Savings Certificate book, the holder's name being that of Freda's late husband. There were two certificates of a hundred units inside, each purchased five years before for £500 and now worth, according to the small print on them, a total of £1400. The holder's name was on the back, along with the holder's card that bore his signature.

Terence had never in his life done anything really criminal. He wouldn't have had the nerve to try shop-lifting, for instance. Watching Carol Stratford nick that Pifco brush thing up at Brent Cross the other day, he had marvelled at her courage, her cool confidence. She had slipped it off the shelf and into her carrier and tripped jauntily out of the shop to the corridor where he had preceded her. He was tempted to put his hand on her shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me, madam, but . . .' only he hadn't the heart. He had always been fond of Carol and she was having her share of trouble anyway with that business of her kid Jason.

So they had only had a bit of a natter over a coffee because the pubs weren't due to open for an hour. He had written down his address for her, though he didn't think he'd be there much longer. That was when he still thought Freda would take him with her. Carol was quite cheerful. She said she had been down at first but now she had a feeling Jason was all right and would come back.

‘He'll turn up like a bad penny,' she said.

It was Carol who, two or three years before, had suggested the Golders Green beat to him. She was a widow herself, though only about twenty-five. Her husband had been killed in a road accident a few weeks before Terence had met her and had left her with two children.

Carol had done quite a lot of mildly criminal things. She
was a good shoplifter and had never been caught. At one point she had somehow managed to collect dole in her maiden name while having two jobs in her married one. She was always full of ideas for making money without working or for getting things on the fiddle and most of them were too fantastic to be taken seriously. But this one was different. She said she would do it herself, only she was the wrong sex.

What he was to do was hang around Golders Green Crematorium every day and keep an eye on the funeral parties that came in. It would be best to have a dark suit on and then no one would know he wasn't just another mourner. He was to look out for the widows until he spotted a likely one. She must be well-off – well-left, in fact – not too old, preferably childless. He would soon get the hang of it, Carol said, and she was right. Terence hung around ten funerals, all men's, and then he found his prey. Again Carol had been right when she had said all the younger ones that died would be men. He was a chance bystander at two women's funerals but in each case the woman had been over eighty.

Quite skilful by this time at diagnosing wealth and a measure of solitude, Terence latched on to Jessica Mason. She attended her husband's funeral in a sable coat. Terence introduced himself to her afterwards while they were admiring the floral tributes. He said her husband and his father had once been close friends. There were only four other people there, the late Roy Mason not having apparently been a popular man. Terence found out where Jessica lived, was impressed by the address and phoned her a week later. By the time Roy Mason had been dead a month Terence was living with her in her neo-Tudor detached house on the Cricklewood–Golders Green borders.

There was nothing wrong with Jessica. She was only forty-five. She had no children. She had even more money than he had guessed at – but she was the most possessive demanding person he had ever known. When she found out he was still sometimes seeing Carol, she threatened him
with a kitchen knife. She was going to kill him and then herself. Terence stopped seeing Carol and stayed on for a few months more, spending freely on the Barclaycard Jessica had got for him and practising forging her signature. He became expert at this but just the same never quite got up the courage to use it as a means, for instance, of drawing a cheque on Jessica's account.

One afternoon while she was out visiting a friend's mother in hospital, Terence left. He simply walked out, taking with him all the clothes she had bought him in one of her suitcases. On the doorstep he hesitated and thought of going back and helping himself to some pieces of her jewellery and a knick-knack or two. Again his nerve failed him. He wasn't very brave and he knew it. Whenever he did anything of that sort – such as the time he took Jessica's wallet out of her handbag and persuaded her that the loss had occurred in the crowds at Oxford Circus tube station – he was liable to feel deathly sick and wake in the night in a cold sweat. Terence knew all about the native hue of resolution being sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought. He left the jewellery and the knick-knacks behind and went off to his new home in Spring Close. By that time, as a result of further reconnaissance at Golders Green, he had met, ingratiated himself with, and already made love to, Freda Phipps.