Maria seemed to be paying little attention to Alec, dourly backsliding from his househunting obligations. She was only putting in encouraging titters, an occasional ‘Oh, surely…’ and an ‘I think you’ll find…’ and an ‘It’s really ever such a, er, er, supportive little community we’ve got here,’ this last bringing out a gale of laughter. Her attention moved from the attempt to find the keys to Apthorpe Avenue, which, she had started to confide, might very well be in her house, she having picked them up not on her way in but on her way home last night. She looked at the window where, between the tessellated placards of the houses for sale, a dark figure had coagulated out of the dark afternoon sleet.
‘There,’ she said, with finality. ‘That’s convenient. Here’s our Mr Calvin—I wonder if he’s in a great hurry to get anywhere. He can tell you so much more about that side of things in Hanmouth than I can.’
She jumped up. A desk-tidy with three pencils in it was sent flying. She poked her head outside the door, letting in a fierce blast of ozone-frozen air. After a brief exchange, she ushered the man in. His black coat and black astrakhan hat were mantled with sleet and snow. Like a magician performing a trick, he removed them in a single upwards gesture, placing them on the coat-rack, unpeeled his brown ostrich-skin gloves and placed them neatly aligned on Maria’s catastrophic desk. With a quick rub of his heavily polished shoes up the back of his pinstriped trousers, right and then left, he seemed never to have been outside at all. He was thin and upright, had clean mouse-like, beady-eyed, polished features, and a smoothed-down cap of white hair. His hands went up, unnecessarily, to smooth his hair down to right and left; they were strikingly large and flat hands, like flippers.
‘This is our Mr Calvin,’ Maria said. The man’s sleek smile went from Alec to Catherine, from Catherine to Alec, without registering any change at all. The sort of smile that dolphins have, built into their bones and into their faces, meaning nothing much, Catherine believed. She wondered what he was seeing: a woman with the anxious, motherly expression she had so often caught unawares in shop windows, and her bald, pugnacious husband, in the dim sort of beige anorak, padded, toggled and with multiple purposeful pockets that you could not believe you had ever bought with any intent to charm, beguile or seduce. If that was what you wanted an anorak to do for you.
‘Mr and Mrs Butterworth,’ Maria said. ‘They’re looking for a house to buy in Hanmouth. We’ve been at it quite some little time. The first houses we looked at’ —gesturing at the bleak midwinter outside— ‘we had to stop halfway and have a sit-down and an ice-cream, it was so hot. Can you—’ her shrill, sentence-punctuating laugh went up the scale, and cut abruptly off.
‘Top of the morning to you,’ Calvin said. ‘And a beautiful morning it be.’ Then he switched disconcertingly out of his stage comic Irishness into ordinary English. ‘You’ll love it here. I moved down from Liverpool ten years ago, never regretted it. The weather could be better for you today, I admit.’
Alec was perking up: it was the attention of an extrovert person with a ready smile. ‘We do like it,’ he said.
Maria dived in. ‘Mr Butterworth was wondering about how safe it was in Hanmouth,’ she said. ‘And then—there you were. As if sent along to answer all those questions. You couldn’t possibly spare us two minutes? Mr Calvin, he’s the person you really want to get on your side in Hanmouth. Came along, shook everybody up, took charge of Neighbourhood Watch, which was really a very sleepy sort of body before—’ Hee, hee, hee, she went; no wonder she had no, and seemed never to have had any, colleagues.
‘I don’t think they did anything but stick orange stickers on lamp-posts,’ Calvin said. ‘Which was about as much use as a chocolate teapot, as we say in Liverpool.’
‘We have Neighbourhood Watch round us,’ Catherine said. ‘But you would only know about it from those stickers. I don’t know who runs it, or where they meet, or when.’
‘Well, you’d know about it in Hanmouth,’ Calvin said. ‘To be sure, to be sure, to be sure. We identified some active members of the community to form a new committee. We carried out a survey on day one of the new committee, asking everyone in the town what they were most concerned about. One of the pubs that caused most trouble, the one at the near end of the Strand, we objected to the renewal of their licence— “Gaarn! Leave it ahht! You lookin’ at my bird! ’E ain’t wurf it, Keif!” —and had it closed down. Turned into a tea-room. Great success. The pub crawl the students go on, it’s really the Hanmouth Eleven now, though the students still talk about Doing the Twelve. Can’t count after eight pubs, ’tis said, so it is. All that was just in our first year, year one. Then we lobbied the police and demanded security cameras. CCTV. There’s not much of the centre of Hanmouth not covered by CCTV nowadays. And that has to be a good thing. The crime rate in Hanmouth is as low as it could be. So,’ Calvin slipping into mid-Atlantic telly interviewers’ fake-serious accent, ‘how can we justify the expense of these surveillance cameras, if there is no crime? The answer, my friend, is this. There is no crime because a criminal knows he cannot commit one. The crime is headed off at the pass, long before it is committed. Voilà.’ Calvin considered for a moment, then added, ‘Monsieur. We aren’t happy that there are still parts of Hanmouth which aren’t covered by CCTV. The Fore street cameras have been there five years, and the technology has moved on. We’re working on implementing some new cameras that are being trialled in Middlesbrough, with a loudspeaker and sound system attached. A police officer sees a youth up to no good in the street. Can flick a switch, say, “’Ello, ’ello, ’ello, what’s all this then? Move along, move along, commit not that there nuisance in this ’ere street.” And Johnny Mugger or Leeeee-roy the Burglar and his dusky friends with a jemmy and an ice-pick, they lift up their knees very sharply indeed, say, “Vat is well rank, man,” and off they head to burgle somewhere a little bit less well guarded and watched, a nice safe distance away, a place which you and I do not care a great deal about. That’s the general idea. We don’t see why we shouldn’t get the model with loudspeaker by this time next year. This—’ deep breath, sincere gaze ‘—is one of the very safest places in this country. Ask anyone.’
Maria the estate agent had been smiling from the beginning, and as Calvin went through one accent after another, she started to titter, then giggle, then chortle, then chuckle, then snigger, then hoot, then roar, then guffaw. By the end, and Calvin imitating a black youth cowering under a loudspeaker ordering him to go away and burgle some less forward-looking community, she gave every impression of coming out into the open about her desire to howl till she pissed herself.
But by the end of the afternoon, they had viewed and made an offer on a big modern flat, occupying the whole top floor of a small, neat, well-made block right on the estuary, with walnut panelling in the lobby, rosewood fittings and banisters, black marble flooring from top to bottom. It was really very stylish. The previous owner had lived and died there, and his or her belongings had been carried away long ago. The empty rooms were clean, well-sized and open. They hadn’t thought of a flat at all. The attractions of those fishermen’s cottages or almshouses were fading. In practice, they always came with so individual and overwhelming a set of objections. The weather had brightened up, and the view was of silver-shining mud and a slash of light-embodying water, a thunderous zinc-black sky livid with flashes of brightness. Opposite, at the peak of the hills beyond the estuary, the castle’s folly was washed in a well of sunlight as the clouds above passed on and separated. The flat’s empty spaces were filled with watery light. Above in the sky, just as they were standing there, four swans flew overhead. Their wings made the regular beat of a solemn and remote drum. It was a noise that might mark the progress of an exotic and half-understood ceremony. For the first time in several months, Catherine remembered and thought freshly that she wanted to live in this place, and not in a road in St Albans where the view from the window was of a house with the precise dimensions of the one you yourself were in. She didn’t really care