Chapter 9

by Alan         

 

 

‘It certainly does, Mr Heath.’

            He bowed his head in reflection. The café was quiet. She turned to see a tableau of two uniformed staff and two women, somber, staring at them from the counter. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘My dad and I had bad news. It’s fine.‘ She saw all four put on their sympathetic faces. An indifferent wheeze from the coffee machine broke their spell and another woman with a buggy struggled in. Becky turned back to the desolate Heath. She guessed he had not registered she had called him dad.

            ‘May I borrow your handkerchief?’

            She took it from unresisting fingers. ‘Yes, very strange things,’ the old man continued. ‘We talk to objects sometimes, and sometimes we don’t answer when we should, and when we wake in the night we think it will never get light. We can be very frustrating,’ she said, catching her eyes for the first time. ‘The world is full of ghosts when you think about it.’ The two women were making a fuss of whatever was in the buggy in peals of delight, or fake delight, and the waitress was clearing the next table with brisk purpose. ‘We get on, day by day,’ he said.

            ‘We?’ she asked.

            ‘You and I, my darling. We get on.’ He sat back, withdrawing, and gazed towards the window with unresponsive eyes.

            She had drawn a deep breath, shaken out her hair, turned back her sleeves, checked her collar, adjusted a shoe strap, dried her eyes. She was as ready as needs be. She held out the handkerchief.

            ‘Thanks, Mr Heath. Your handkerchief.’ He looked at her in wonder. ‘Your handkerchief, Mr Heath. Your wife’s, I should say. Thank you.’

            ‘Oh, no.’ His voice was wind among reeds. ‘I can’t take your handkerchief, pet.’

            ‘No, Mr Heath. You left it in the shop. It has the initials C.R.’

            ‘My dear,’ he said. ‘I want you to have it.’ He laid his two hands on hers.

            She rose. Her chair rocked back. The café was watching again.

            ‘No, Mr Heath.’ She flung a glance around as for help and caught only a child on its mother’s lap that gazed at a lady who was acting like no lady before. Becky dashed for the door.

            She had taken two rights and a left and gone through the front of M&S and out the back before she had composed herself for the second time in an hour. Dear God! She looked down the street that curled like a frown into the Old Town. Her mobile sounded.

            Pip had texted. ‘Cant beleeve u not cumming. Will be amazing. Pip.

            ‘And screw you too, my darling,’ she thought as she dexterously deleted her. ‘Now I am completely alone in the world,’ she thought. ‘Apart from our Nan,’ she corrected herself.

            She squared up against the street. She tried to frame what she had wanted to say to Mr Heath. ‘I will close my eyes,’ she said to herself. ‘I will walk twelve paces. If I do not bump into anyone or anything or trip on something everything will be fine.’ She closed her eyes. She walked. She opened her eyes. A youth in a hoodie, the sort who got an erection in his trousers if you descended towards him in a skirt on an escalator, was watching in sullen bemusement.

            ‘Awwight, mate?’ he asked as he passed.

            ‘Perfectly,’ she answered.

            She was standing next to a newsagents which was perfect, for after the stress of the morning only chocolate would do. Her eye caught a headline: PARAOLYMPIC GOLD, it said above a picture of a cripple pitilessly smacking another out if his wheelchair in pursuit of a ball. ‘That’s the spirit,’ she thought. ‘No self-pity in those bastards, is there?’ The shop bell sounded an old-fashioned tinkle as she went in and before it had ended had rung in her head, and she knew what she had wanted to say. She had wanted to say: ‘Don’t throw your longing upon me.’ She picked up chocolate. ‘You’re not the first bereaved,’ she had wanted to say. ‘Nor the only.’ The chocolate was beeped. She had a plan. And Mr Heath’s handkerchief was still in her palm.

 

            The pot was warmed. The lumps were in the bowl. The tongs were in the lumps. Water was poured.

            ‘Lovely,’ said Nan. She addressed the tray like a general approving the disposition of troops. ‘I will be mother.’

            ‘Nan,’ Becky said, once Nan had had the comfort of the cup. ‘Can I ask you something?’ Nan looked at her from milky eyes. ‘It’s important.’

            ‘Now?’ asked Nan.

            ‘Why not now?’

            ‘Are you in trouble?’

            ‘No more than usual.’

            ‘Oh, dear.’

            ‘It won’t take long. I’ve got to get back to work in a minute.’

            ‘Oh, dear.’

            ‘Why, ’Oh dear?’ again?’

            ‘All this dashing about.’

            Becky put down her own cup with purpose. ‘It is my work.’ she said. ‘It’s a poor job, but it’s mine. Don’t fret.’

            No. Well, at least we can have another cup of tea.’

            There were five centuries of Britain in the way Nan poured the milk: it was Drake playing bowls, it was Emma the Box Hill while Wellington pounded Napoleon, it was Business As Usual on the bombed out shop in the Blitz. Nan should be Prime Minister. Questions in the house: ‘Since she took office unemployment has hit the high nineties, The Falklands have become the Malvinas, shares are minus fifty, England are twenty two for eight, a depression pandemic has hit the first born of every household and still the Prime Minister refuses to outline her strategy, if strategy she has.’ And Our Nan rises wearily to the despatch box, surveys the Right Honourables on all sides. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘we can always have another cup of tea.’ Pandemonium. Cheers.

            ‘What I wanted to say,’ Becky started, ‘was this.’ She summoned all the force of her personality, which amounted to little, but enough to deal with Nan. ‘I have a plan.’

            ‘Lovely.’

            ‘It’s not a big plan, it won’t shake the world, but it is a plan. My plan. And what I want to know is, how much is in Grandad’s Trust Fund?’

            Nan put down her cup.

            ‘I still have the Life Insurance from mum, and if Grandad left me what he said he would leave me, which was not much, I know, but still … All I need is a start.’

            ‘It’s not much, Becky, darling,’ Nan said at last. They regarded each other over the little drop leaf table. Becky took a lump with the tongs, raised it over the cup, waited. ‘But it is yours, ’ Nan concluded. Becky dropped a lump into the cup from a height. ‘You’ve splashed,’ Nan said. Becky shrugged.

 

            The street lamps went off as she put the key in the lock. A cold dawn crept as though afraid over the National Westminster and fingered the roofs.

            The stock was a mass of looming shadows in the gloom, like ghosts from the lives they had come from. She listened to her footsteps as she took in the familiar piles. She put her weight against the cupboard that for two years had been inches out of line with the wall, heaved, pushed. It straightened with a faint groan. She drew her hands over the line of clothes and pulled one at random from a rack, a simple sleeveless dress with a thin black belt. It was small. The madonna blue was black in the unlit space. Three pounds fifty: but some child had worn it, had pulled it over her head in a bedroom, let it drop over her vunerable virgin body and twisted herself in front of the mirror to gage how it looked from behind. A life left behind. She returned it and straightened the row which settled with a protesting sigh. She took a book from the shelves and in the light from the crack in the blind surveyed its title.

            Victorians Dreaming: Hope and Despair in The Novels of the Industrial Age.

            She opened it. Read: ‘A common weakness in the fiction of the period is the device of the unexpected inheritance for the purpose of plot resolution.’

            Fuck that, she thought, and dropped it in the wastebasket.

            She had to open the blinds. She took a handkerchief from her pocket instead and spread it carefully on the counter. It drew spare light into it, threw it back onto her face as she peered at it, then smoothed it, aware of the cold on her fingers. A car engine intruded with the note of the ordinary as she wrote in black biro on a card: ‘Lace handkerchief. Initialed. 50p.’ She lay it prominent on the counter top.

            We have to move on, Mr Heath. You gave it me.

            Some things said cannot be unsaid.

            Steps of a couple, one hard-heeled, the other dead, both regular, marked out time to two female voices. ‘I was, like, ‘Hello’,’ the one said, ‘and he was, like, ‘Hi’.’ The other laughed.

            Mother, she thought. Mother.

            The shop was quiet again like a held breath. Unexpected sunlight paled the blind and cut a clean line on the floor. She had a plan. She stepped to the blind as though about to throw off a cloth from a box in a magic show and jerked it down, then released it. It rattled upwards with the sound of a surprised beast and stopped with a clack, and the light came in.