On the stairs, she met her brother Fred who asked, ‘Going to change out of your uniform?’
‘I have to look smart. It’s a gallery.’ Juliet wore either neat shirts and narrow trousers, or t-shirts and jeans, and had the kind of light, straight figure which inclined her to look disciplined or childlike accordingly. She considered Fred, whom she could not imagine in a pair of jeans: ‘Did you sleep in your shirt and tie?’
He nodded. ‘And my waistcoat.’
‘You used to do that when you were at school.’
‘Sleep in my uniform? It saved time.’
‘What for? You didn’t do anything then except sleep or work. Same now, really.’
Fred had a job in the City, something so new to his family that nobody understood what he did or asked him to explain. He dressed with elaborate formality so as to convince himself that he was in costume. To him, making money was a game; he enjoyed the rules but did not show much interest in the result. He understood money well enough to know that when it accumulated it insisted upon change, something Fred was not good at and resisted. He never spoke about how much he lost or made, just as he did not acknowledge that the house in Khyber Road was quite different to the flats his colleagues were buying near the common and the park.
Fred followed Juliet into her room where she turned on a small heater and began to select clothes from the neat stacks of black, white and grey on her metal shelves.
‘Shut the door if you’re staying,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing.’
Fred had been a child who acted the part of a grown-up. Now he was a grown-up acting the part of a grown-up. He was the same height as Juliet, but did not have her coherence. With his red-and-white looks, fizziness and wild hair, he might strike you as badly wired whereas Juliet was wire.
He hopped from side to side. ‘I meant to say, to tell you, to warn you, the thing is –’
‘Could you stop jiggling about while you speak? It’s very annoying.’ Juliet had taken off her trousers and jacket, and was climbing into woolly tights, jeans, a vest, flannel shirt and jersey.
‘The thing is Caroline, a girl from work, tonight.’
‘You invited someone here?’
‘Not as such. Someone’s birthday party. She asked me to be her escort. She’s picking me up at seven.’
‘If you’re her escort, you ought to be picking her up.’
‘Really?’ He flushed and looked so worried that Juliet assured him it didn’t matter, and they went downstairs to light a fire.
In winter, they moved around the house like this, in a huddle, rushing from one source of heat to the next. The house was volubly falling apart. The bare stairs sagged and creaked. Few of the windows opened and some didn’t shut; all rattled. Ill-fitting doors created odd drafts and pockets of mustiness. There was a spurting growth of mould in the bathroom and the walls had begun to shed their plaster.
‘So where is this birthday party?’ Juliet asked.
‘In a bar on Lavender Hill.’
‘And you’re going in your suit?’
‘It’s what I wear.’
‘Perhaps a t-shirt? Or at least not a tie. You ought to show that you can differentiate.’
There was a firm knock on the front door. Fred leapt up and rushed into the hall but then started backing away towards the stairs. ‘Please, I better, like you said, change, could you just …’ He was gone.
Juliet brought Caroline through to the living room and shut the door.
‘It’s a very interesting colour,’ the girl tried out, looking around. Her voice was airless and emphatic. She perched on the edge of the sofa, smiling and wincing and trying to avoid the broken springs asserting themselves beneath the worn cover.
‘The sofa? Our brother Carlo, he’s training to be a pathologist, says it’s the exact tone of an exsanguinated corpse. You can tell from the seams that it was once bright pink. In full health, so to speak. So yes, it is interesting.’
‘Exsanguinated?’
‘Bled to death.’
Caroline looked so sincerely horrified that Juliet briefly felt guilty. She watched the girl push back the padded velvet band that hovered over her flat hair. Her upholstered jacket creased across her stomach and rustled as she shifted from side to side. She’s like a badly wrapped present, thought Juliet, and leaned over to shovel more coal onto the fire.
‘I meant the room. This … brown.’ Caroline leant back, trying to relax, remembered the springs and lurched forward. Her skirt caught and there was a tear of perhaps half an inch on her left hip.
Juliet explained: ‘Allie, the speedfreak who lives in the attic, painted it this colour because he thought it would help him sleep. We hate it, but our lives are a lot easier.’
Caroline looked mildly thrilled. ‘In the attic?’
‘Not now. He’s in hospital.’
‘Oh dear, an overdose?’
‘No. Blood poisoning. He gashed his leg and then he encouraged it.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for him; they have central heating in hospital.’
There was a pause before Caroline hit on a new subject. ‘I knew someone who knew someone who slept in a room with a coal fire. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning.’
‘That old wives’ tale? Well, just to make sure, we’ve nailed polythene over the windows to keep out the cold, so the place is absolutely airless,’ snapped Juliet. Where was Fred?
Caroline rose. ‘I’m sorry to have imposed myself on you like this. You must be wanting to get on with your evening. I could wait for Fred outside –’
Juliet stood up to stop her going. She had to admit that Caroline was rather impressive after all. ‘It’s nice to meet you, and very kind of you to come and collect the boy and hugely impressive that you found us. Khyber Road isn’t in the A to Z, so we’re entirely off the map.’
Caroline looked as if she could find anyone anywhere. ‘I live nearby, actually.’ Not in the tower blocks, nor on the estate, but on the other side of Clapham Junction.
‘I live with people from work – Jane and Graham. We’re married.’
‘You’re married?’
‘Me? No, no, did I say me? No, no, I’m not married, they are. Graham and Jane. No. Them. Graham and Jane.’
Caroline’s face was scarlet, as if the fire she was staring into had suddenly produced some actual heat. Juliet watched her fiddle with the tear in her skirt, and wondered.
Fred appeared, wearing some old trousers and an untucked shirt, and they set off awkwardly into the night. Juliet wished them well but she was not hopeful. It must take a lot to make someone like Caroline blush, she thought, and she was right. Later, after Fred had walked Caroline home and Jane had taken her sleeping pill, Graham would creep into the box room they rented to Caroline for most of their mortgage payment, and it would be his finger that would find the hole in the tartan taffeta, and enlarge it.
When Barbara came back with a bottle of wine and saw Jacob sitting on the sofa as he always did, half kneeling and almost curled, she had to stop herself saying, ‘You look as if you never left’, or ‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ What pleased Jacob was knowing silence, so Barbara looked briefly struck and then got on with pouring them both a drink. Even though two people could have sat between them, she felt the shock of being close to him again. It had been three weeks since he moved out,