He turned from the window, suddenly hungry, and made himself some toast. He sat down at the table, buttered the toast and smeared it with marmalade. He took a thoughtful bite.
Until his marriage he’d had scarcely any idea how expensive it was to run a house. Before he took to bedsits he had lived with his father in an old rented terrace house in a seedy area of Westfleet, a small town twenty-five miles from Cannonbridge; he had been born and brought up in the house.
Derek was an only child. His mother had run off with a neighbour when he was six years old and there had never been any other woman in the life of the deserted father and son.
His father – now dead – had been a labourer in the yard of a builder’s merchant in Westfleet. He was out of doors in all seasons and as time went by he became afflicted with chronic bronchitis. ‘Don’t do what I’ve done,’ he warned Derek when the time came for him to leave school. ‘Get yourself a job that’ll shelter you from the weather, one that’ll keep your hands clean.’ And that much at least Derek had managed to do. Lowly as his status was at Cannonbridge Mail Order, it had always seemed an achievement to him – until his marriage.
The bronchitis finally carried his father off when Derek was nineteen. ‘I haven’t amounted to much,’ he said to Derek on the day before he died. ‘You’ve got your whole life before you. Watch out you don’t end up like me.’ His gaze wandered round the dismal bedroom. ‘I’ve left you everything.’ Everything amounted to forty-odd pounds in the post office, some tools, a cupboardful of cheap clothes and a few sticks of worthless furniture.
The landlady didn’t wait for the earth to settle over his grave before she marched round to the terrace house.
‘I want you out of here inside a fortnight,’ she informed Derek. ‘I’m going to do this place up and sell it.’
She knew her man; Derek moved out at once without protest, almost with apology, into the first of his bedsits.
Now he blinked away the memories with a jerk of his head. He finished his toast and went over to the dresser, pulled open a drawer and took out a handful of bills. He sat down at the table to study the figures although the amounts were accurately burned into his brain. He clenched a fist and dug it into his chin, frowning down at the papers, trying to think of some way out of his difficulties. At last he blew out a long breath and stood up. ‘Something’s got to be done,’ he said aloud.
In the meantime, in the big double bed upstairs, Lisa would be beginning to stir. He made a fresh pot of tea, found a clean linen cloth and smoothed it on to a tray. He poured a cup of tea and set it on the tray beside a small plate of biscuits and the peach-coloured rosebud in its glass of water. He carried the tray carefully upstairs to Lisa.
She woke and stretched like a cat and her long blonde hair fell back against the pillows. She smiled at him and held out her cheek for a kiss.
She drank some tea and nibbled at a biscuit, then she reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table.
‘I really think you ought to try to give them up,’ Derek said apologetically. ‘You know what the doctor said.’
She pulled a face. ‘The doctor’s an old woman.’ She took out a cigarette and he lit it for her; she inhaled deeply. ‘The doctor we had in Ellenborough smoked all the time.’ The Marshalls had lived in Ellenborough, a large town forty-five miles away, before they moved to the Hadleigh suburb of Cannonbridge.
Outside there was the sound of feet on gravel, the click of the letterbox. ‘That might be a letter from Janet,’ Lisa said. ‘Do go down and see.’ There was only one post a day now in Hadleigh. Lisa had written to Janet again last week, asking her to come over as soon as the school term ended on Friday, stay as long as she liked.
Derek went downstairs to the hall. Three envelopes lay in the wire cage at the back of the door. The first was postmarked Cannonbridge, addressed to Lisa in the bold handwriting of her friend Carole Gardiner. The second was an advertising circular, and the third – he drew a long breath and ripped it open, running his eye rapidly over the sheet, biting deep into his lip as he read, unaware of any sensation of pain. He stood frowning down at the letter and then went swiftly into the sitting room and knelt by the grate.
He pushed aside the tapestry firescreen that had been worked by Mrs Marshall, struck a match and set fire to the letter and its envelope. When they were both thoroughly consumed he ground the ashes into dust with the poker and replaced the screen. He got to his feet and went back upstairs.
‘Nothing from Janet,’ he said as he entered the bedroom. On his tongue he could taste the blood from his bitten lip. ‘But Carole Gardiner’s written to you.’
‘When are we going to have the phone put in?’ Lisa said impatiently as she took the letter he held out. ‘It’s such a nuisance, all this letter-writing.’
‘There’s a waiting-list for phones,’ he said. He had no idea if this was so; he had made no application for a phone. What he did know with bleak certainty was that he could afford neither the installation fee nor the quarterly expenses.
‘You couldn’t ring Janet even if we did have a phone,’ he reminded Lisa. There was no phone at Rose Cottage and Janet didn’t intend to have one put in.
Lisa’s full red mouth looked sulky. ‘What’s your letter?’ she asked after a moment’s silence.
He glanced down at the envelope in his hand. ‘It’s only a circular,’ he said. ‘Some central heating firm.’ As soon as the words left his lips he knew his mistake.
‘We’ll have to get some kind of central heating put in before next winter,’ Lisa said with energy. ‘We must have the house nice and warm for the baby.’
‘There are gas-fires in the bedrooms.’ He drew a little sighing breath. Even the gas-fires, small and old-fashioned, would be expensive enough to run. And Lisa wasn’t by nature given to economy, she seemed to think she had only to express a wish and the means to gratify it would float in on the summer breeze.
‘If we sold this house and moved to Cannonbridge,’ she said coaxingly, ‘we could buy a lovely new bungalow with central heating already laid on. We could buy one out at Leabarrow, near Carole.’ Leabarrow was a newish development on the opposite edge of Cannonbridge.
Derek gave her a despairing look. ‘Ivydene isn’t ours to sell. Half of it belongs to Janet.’ As Lisa well knew.
‘I’m positive you could do something about that if you tried, if you went to see a solicitor. Carole says people can always get round that sort of thing if they really want to.’ Her tone now held a strong suggestion of a whine and her delicate eyebrows came together in a frown. ‘It’s so boring being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere.’
‘There’s no question of selling the house if Janet’s against it,’ he said. ‘And you know she’s against it.’ Lisa had put forward the suggestion some weeks ago and Janet had abruptly dismissed the notion.
‘Carole says we can force a sale, whatever Janet says, and split the proceeds.’
‘I’m sure that can’t be right,’ he said sharply. ‘We’d have to reach agreement with Janet on any course of action.’ He closed his eyes; half the proceeds of the sale of Ivydene would be nowhere near enough to buy one of the Leabarrow bungalows and he was in no position to raise or finance a mortgage.
He opened his eyes and his expression was once more easy and amiable. ‘You haven’t read Carole’s letter,’ he reminded Lisa.
She gave a moody shrug. ‘It won’t be anything important, it’ll just be to say when she wants me to go over there.’ She ripped open the envelope and drew out a single sheet covered with a few lines of bold scrawl.
Carole Gardiner was the wife of a welder on an oil rig; they had two small children. The Gardiners had moved to Leabarrow twelve months ago from an industrial