‘I’m too soft for my own good,’ he murmured to himself. ‘That’s my trouble.’
Eddie sat on his bed, hands clasped over his plump stomach, as though trying to restrain the sour ache inside from bursting out. On the wall opposite him was a picture, a brightly coloured reproduction in a yellowing plastic frame. It showed a small girl in a frothy pink dress; she had a pink bow in her dark hair, a mouth like a puckered cherry and huge eyes fringed with dark lashes. The picture had been a Christmas present to Eddie’s mother in 1969.
The girl, now seen through water, blurred and buckled. Oh God. Why don’t you help me? Stop this. There was no God, Eddie knew: and therefore no chance of help. He thought briefly of Lucy’s parents, the policeman and the deacon. Let the woman’s God console them. That was his job. In any case, Eddie was not responsible for the Appleyards’ pain. It had been Angel’s decision to take Lucy. So it was her fault, really, her fault and Lucy’s. Eddie had been no more than the agent, the dupe, the victim.
Time passed. Eddie would have liked to go down to the kitchen and make himself a drink. Better not – there was no point in upsetting Angel any further. He heard cars passing up and down Rosington Road and snatches of conversation from the pavement. The house itself was silent. The basement was soundproofed and Angel had not switched on the intercom.
‘Lucy,’ he said softly. ‘Lucy Philippa Appleyard.’
Eddie stared at the picture of the girl and stroked his soft little beard. He had been five that Christmas. Had the artist been lucky enough to have a real model, someone like Lucy? He remembered how his mother slowly unwrapped the picture and stared at it; how she picked a shred of tobacco from her lips and flicked it into the ashtray; how she stared across the hearthrug at his father, who had given her the picture. What he could not remember was whether she had spoken her verdict aloud, or whether he had merely imagined it.
‘Very nice, Stanley. If you like that sort of thing.’
What had Eddie’s father liked? If you asked different people you received different answers: for example, making dolls’ houses, taking artistic photographs and helping others less fortunate than himself. All these answers were true.
Stanley Grace spent most of his life working at the head office of Paladin Assurance. The company no longer existed – it had been gobbled up by a larger rival in one of the hostile takeovers of the late 1980s. In the days of its independence, the Paladin had been a womb-like organization which catered for all aspects of its employees’ lives. Eddie remembered Paladin holidays, Paladin Christmas cards, Paladin pencils, Paladin competitions and the Paladin Annual Ball. Stanley Grace bought 29 Rosington Road in 1961 with a mortgage arranged through the Paladin, and promptly insured the house, its contents, himself and his wife with Paladin insurance policies.
Eddie never discovered what his father actually did at Paladin. The relationship between his parents was equally mysterious. ‘Relationship’ was in fact a misleading word since it implied give and take, a movement from one to the other, a way of being together. Stanley and Thelma did not live together: they coexisted in the wary manner of animals from different species obliged by circumstances beyond their control to use the same watering hole.
Eddie remembered asking his mother when he was very young whether he was human.
‘Of course you are.’
‘And are you human, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Daddy?’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. Of course he is. I wish you’d stop pestering me.’
Stanley was a large, lumbering man built like a bear. He towered over his wife. Thelma was skinny and small, less than five feet high, and she moved like a startled bird. She had a long and cylindrical skull to which features seemed to have been added as an afterthought. Her clothes were usually drab and a size or so too large for her; her cardigans and skirts were dappled with smudges of cigarette ash. (Until the last year of her life she smoked as heavily as her husband.) When, later in life, Eddie came across references to people wearing sackcloth, he thought of his mother.
She was nearly forty when Eddie was born, and Stanley was forty-seven. They seemed more like grandparents than parents. The boundaries of their lives were precisely defined and jealously guarded. Thelma had her headquarters in the kitchen, and her writ ran in the sitting room, the dining room and all the rooms upstairs. The basement was Stanley’s alone; he installed a five-lever lock on the door from the hall because, as he would say jocularly, if he left the basement door unlocked, the Little Woman would start dusting and tidying, and he wouldn’t be able to find anything. Stanley also had a controlling interest in the tiny paved area which separated the front of the house from the pavement, and in the wilderness at the back.
Gardening was not among Stanley’s hobbies and in his lifetime the back garden remained a rank and overgrown place, particularly at the far end, where an accidental plantation of elder, ash and buddleia had seeded itself many years before. Over the tops of the trees could be seen the upper storeys of a block of council flats, which Thelma said lowered the tone of the neighbourhood. At night the lighted windows of the flats reminded Eddie of the superstructure of a liner. He liked to imagine it forging its way across a dark ocean while the passengers ate, drank and danced.
As a child, Eddie had associated the tangle of trees with the sound of distant trains, changing in direction as the wind veered from Gospel Oak and Primrose Hill to Kentish Town and Camden Road. He heard their strange, half-animal noises more clearly than in the house or even in the street – the throbbing of metal on metal, the rush of air and sometimes a scream. When he was very young indeed, he half-convinced himself that the noises were made not by trains, but by dinosaurs who lay in wait for him among the trees or in the patch of wasteland on the other side of the fence.
Though Stanley had no time for gardening, he liked to stand outside on a summer evening while he smoked a cigarette. His head cocked, as if listening carefully to the rumble of the trains, he would gaze in the direction of the trees and sometimes his pale, sad face would look almost happy.
In those days, the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rosington Road was full of children. Most of the houses had been occupied by families, whereas nowadays many of them had been cut up into flats for single people and couples. There had been fewer cars, children played in the street as well as in the gardens, and everyone had known one another. Some of the houses had belonged to the same families since the street was built in the 1890s.
According to Thelma, the house had been Stanley’s choice. She would have preferred somewhere more modern in a nice leafy suburb with no blacks or council housing. But her husband felt that his leisure was too important to be frittered away on unnecessary travel and wanted to live closer to the City and the head office of the Paladin. The house was semi-detached, built of smoke-stained London brick, two storeys above a basement. The ground sloped down at the back, so the rear elevation was higher than the front. The other older houses in the road were also semi-detached, though the gaps between each pair and its neighbours were tiny. During the war the area had suffered from bomb damage. One bomb had fallen on the far end of the road and afterwards the council had cleared the ruins to make way for garages and an access road for blocks of flats, newly built homes for heroes, between Rosington Road and the railway line.
Adult visitors rarely came to the house. ‘I can’t abide having people here,’ said Thelma. ‘They make too much mess.’
When his mother went out, she would hurry along Rosington Road with her head averted from the windows, and her eyes trained on the kerb. When Eddie was young she would drag him along in her wake, her fingers digging into his arm. ‘We must get on,’ she would say with an edge of panic to her voice when he complained of a stitch. ‘There’s so much to do.’