It frightened him that the people at the swimming pool had seen past what was happening and through into his mind, to what might have happened, what he wanted to happen. He had given himself away. In future he would have to be very careful. The conclusion was obvious: if he wanted to play games it would be far better to do it in private, where there were no grown-ups around to spoil the fun.
Summer slid into autumn. Goaded by his parents, Eddie applied for two clerical jobs but was offered neither. He also told them he was on the books of a tutorial agency, which was a lie. He looked into the future, and all he foresaw was boredom and desolation. He felt the weight of his parents’ society pressing down on him like cold, dead earth. Yet he was afraid of going out in case he met people who knew him from Dale Grove or the Charleston Street swimming baths.
While the weather was warm, he would often leave Stanley and Thelma, encased in their old and evil-smelling carcasses, in front of the television and escape to the long, wild garden. He listened to the trains screaming and rattling on the line beyond Carver’s. Sometimes he glimpsed Mrs Reynolds among the geraniums on the balcony of the Reynoldses’ flat. Once he saw her talking earnestly with a large, fat woman who he guessed was Jenny Wren. The ugly duckling, Eddie told himself, had become an even uglier duck.
Over the years the tangle of trees and bushes at the far end of the Graces’ garden had expanded both vertically and horizontally. The fence separating the back gardens of 27 and 29 Rosington Road had been repaired long before. But there was still a hole in the fence at the back: too small for Eddie’s plump adult body, but obviously used by small animals – cats, perhaps, or even foxes.
Thelma said that Carver’s was an eyesore. According to Stanley, the site of the bombed engineering works had not been redeveloped because its ownership was in dispute – a case of Dickensian complexity involving a family trust, missing heirs and a protracted court case.
‘Someone’s sitting on a gold mine there,’ Stanley remarked on many occasions, for the older he became the more he repeated himself. ‘You mark my words. A bloody gold mine. But probably the lawyers will get the lot.’
Time had on the whole been kind to Carver’s, for creepers had softened the jagged brick walls and rusting corrugated iron; saplings had burst through the cracked concrete and grown into trees. Cow parsley, buddleia and rosebay willowherb brought splashes of white and purple and pink. It was a wonder, Eddie thought, that the ruins had not become a haven for crack-smoking delinquents from the council flats or Social Security parasites in search of somewhere to drink and sleep. Perhaps the ghosts kept them away. Not that it was easy to get into Carver’s, except from the back gardens of Rosington Road. To the north was the railway, to the east and west were high walls built when bricks and labour were cheap. Access by road was down a narrow lane beside the infants’ school which ended in high gates festooned with barbed wire and warning notices.
Eddie was safe from prying eyes at the bottom of the garden. He liked to kneel and stare through the hole into Carver’s. The shed was still there, smaller and nearer than in memory, with two saplings of ash poking through its roof. One evening in September, he levered out the plank beside the hole and, his heart thudding, wriggled through the enlarged opening. Once inside he stood up and looked around. Birds sang in the distance.
Eddie picked his way towards the shed, skirting a large clump of nettles and a bald tyre. The shed’s door had parted company with its hinges and fallen outwards. He edged inside. Much more of the roof had gone. Over half of the interior was now filled with the saplings and other vegetation. There were rags, two empty sherry bottles and a scattering of old cigarette ends on the floor; occasionally, it seemed, other people found their way into Carver’s. He looked slowly around, hoping to see the paint tin that he and Alison had used for the Peeing Game, hoping for some correspondence between past and present.
Everything had changed. A sob wrenched its way out of his throat. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. A tear rolled slowly down his left cheek. Here he was, he thought, a twenty-five-year-old failure. What had he been expecting to find? Alison with the pink ribbon in her hair, Alison twirling like a ballerina and smiling up at him?
Eddie stumbled outside. On his way back to the fence he looked up. To his horror, he saw through the branches of trees, high above the top of the wall, Mrs Reynolds on the balcony of her flat. Something flashed in her hands, a golden dazzle reflecting the setting sun. Eddie ran through the nettles to the fence and flung himself at the hole. A moment later he was back in the garden of 29 Rosington Road. His glasses had fallen off and he had torn a hole in his trousers.
When his breathing was calmer, Eddie forced himself to stroll to the house. At the door he glanced back. Mrs Reynolds was still on her balcony. She was staring over Carver’s through what looked like a pair of field glasses. At least she wasn’t looking at him. Not now. He shivered, and went inside.
Autumn became winter. After Christmas, Stanley caught a cold and the cold, as often happened with him, turned to bronchitis. No one noticed until it was too late that this time the bronchitis was pneumonia. He died early in February, aged seventy-two.
In recent years the trickle of LVs had died away. But until a few days before his death Stanley continued to visit the basement to work on the latest dolls’ house.
Since his retirement he had slowed down, and the quality of his work had also deteriorated. But the last model was nearly complete, a tall Victorian terraced house looking foolish without its fellows on either side. He had been sewing the curtains at the time of his death.
Stanley died in hospital in the early hours of the morning. The following afternoon Eddie found the miniature curtains bundled into the sitting-room wastepaper basket, together with Stanley’s needles and cottons. The discovery brought home to him the reality of his father’s death more than anything else before or later, even the funeral.
This was a secular event. The Graces had never been churchgoers. Eddie’s experience of religion had been limited to the services at school, flat and meaningless affairs.
‘He was an atheist,’ Thelma said firmly when the funeral director tentatively raised the subject of the deceased’s religious preferences. ‘You can keep the vicars out of it, all right? And we don’t want any of those humanists, either.’
His mother’s reaction to Stanley’s death took Eddie by surprise. She showed no outward sign of grief. She gave the impression that death was an irritation and an imposition because of the extra work it entailed. In many ways widowhood seemed to act as a tonic: she was brisker than she had been for years, both physically and mentally.
‘If we can clear out some of your father’s stuff,’ Thelma said as they ate fish and chips in the kitchen on the evening after the funeral, ‘perhaps we can find a lodger.’
Eddie put down his fork. ‘But you wouldn’t want a stranger in the house, would you?’
‘If we want to stay here, we’ve no choice.’
‘But the house is paid for. And haven’t you got a pension from the Paladin?’
‘Call it a pension? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve already talked to them about it. I’ll get a third of what your father got, and that wasn’t much to begin with. It makes me sick. He worked there for over forty years, and you’d think by the way they used to go on that they couldn’t do enough for their staff. They’re sharks. Just like everyone else.’
‘But surely we could manage?’
‘We can’t live on air.’ She stared at him, pursing her lips. ‘When you get another job, perhaps we can think again.’
When. The word hung between them. Eddie knew that his mother meant not when but if. Like his father, she had a low opinion of his capabilities. He thought that she could not have made the point more clearly if she had spoken the word if aloud.
‘So we’re agreed, then,’ Thelma announced.
‘I suppose so.’
She nodded at his plate, at half a portion of cod in greasy batter