Angel Cake (16 page)

Alicia looked at her primly. ‘We had mince-pies for tea,’ she said, ‘and I got a lovely brooch.’

‘My husband gave me a nightie,’ Pearl giggled. ‘And my youngest a box of beautiful chocolates.’

Alicia turned her back on Pearl and walked angrily out of the kitchen. She couldn’t think why she had given in to that ridiculous impulse to try and be kind to her.

In the days before Alison’s next visit, she tried to decide if it was wise to ask Alison to help her with the furniture. On Thursday, she decided it wasn’t; on Friday, she decided it was; on Saturday morning, she decided it wasn’t; but on Saturday night, climbing up the stairs, she had a funny turn and she decided once and for all that it was.

When Alison arrived on Sunday, she had it all worked out. They would drink their tea and have their chat and then lightly Alicia would say to her, ‘I wonder if you would mind doing me a little favour, dear?’

It threw everything out when Alison arrived in a great state because she had been knocked off her bicycle at the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout and, although not badly hurt, was understandably shaken. Alicia was glad to notice that the fur had survived unscathed. They were no sooner over that, and a painstaking examination of the cuts and bumps on Alison’s hands and knees, when she announced in great excitement that her boy-friend was going to be on television in three weeks’ time and Alicia must make sure to watch him. Apparently the programme, some discussion group, had been recorded a short while ago and they had been waiting on tenterhooks for the transmission date to be decided. Alison wrote it down carefully for Alicia on a piece of paper, with the time and the channel, and she said, ‘Promise me you won’t miss it? I’ll remind you nearer the time. I’d love to hear what you think of him.’

Alicia couldn’t stand discussion groups. They weren’t actors, they weren’t at home performing, and they usually did it so badly; twitching, jerking, upstaging one another, fluffing their lines. She couldn’t stand to see such raw amateurs making a spectacle of themselves on her screen. She was put out that Alison kept sticking her petty little concerns in the way of what Alicia wanted. Honestly, she thought, as if I didn’t have enough on my plate without having to minister to all her troubles too!

‘I’ll see if I’m free when the time comes round,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ve got such a lot to do these days, you know.’ She felt a little embarrassed when she saw Alison’s eyes widen at this obvious lie.

Before Alison could ask sceptically, ‘What?’ she rushed on, ‘I wonder if you would mind doing me a little favour, dear?’

‘What?’ Alison asked sulkily.

Oh, be like that! Alicia raged internally. Be like that. See if I care. She raised her chin and she said hastily, ‘Not if you don’t want to, dear, not if it puts you out. I should hate to put you to any trouble.’ Pointedly, she bent forward and offered Alison another biscuit. Each biscuit represented one hard-won step down the street to Mr Patel’s. Alison quite understandably, said, ‘No thank you.’

They sat for a moment in an awkward silence.

‘Well, why don’t you try telling me what it is?’ Alison asked impatiently. ‘Do you want some shopping done? That’s no trouble.’

‘No, it isn’t shopping,’ Alicia said irritably. ‘It doesn’t even require stepping outside the house.’

‘Well?’ Alison repeated, ‘what is it?’

Alicia wasn’t at all sure she wanted Alison upstairs amid her belongings now. She had shown such a streak of temper. Dubiously, she weighed her head from side to side. ‘It’s nothing urgent,’ she heard herself say. ‘It can perfectly well wait.’

‘Oh, Mrs Queripel!’ Alison exclaimed. ‘Please!’

So she gave in to the girl, as a kindness. It would have been wrong to let her leave feeling unforgiven. And she was so happy to agree to help. Alicia very nearly had to restrain her from rushing straight upstairs there and then to heave whatever Alicia wanted over her ready shoulders and carry it down the stairs. But Alicia needed time to get used to the idea. So they agreed to start on the removal the following week and Alison said she would make sure to come in suitable clothes for carrying things.

Alicia and Leonard had thought to finish their days in this house. Finish their days together, with firelit evenings and lamplit suppers, serenely sinking down into their sunset
years. They had turned a blind eye to the house’s obvious shortcomings – poor state of decoration, drains, damp in the kitchen and scullery – thinking that would give them something to busy themselves with, if time ever hung on their hands. It was, not counting the boarding-house, their first and last home of their own. But, less than two years after they moved in, before they had a chance so much as to ask a man in to look at the damp or the drains, Leonard had caught his cancer which was horribly enough his birth sign also, and in a matter of months he had wasted away and died. Alicia had been left in a dingy house full of memories; wardrobes and chests of drawers and photograph albums full of memories, a house which reminded her cruelly of Leonard at every step. The decoration and the drains and the damp had never been seen to. It wasn’t a woman’s business, Alicia believed.

She felt quite agitated at the thought of Alison penetrating so much deeper into the house. All right, a lot of her memories were already on display downstairs and Alison was a sharpish little thing; who knows what she might well have spotted already? But there was something undeniably more intimate about her coming upstairs into the bedroom, seeing, lifting up their bedding. Alicia worried that Alison might tramp roughshod through her secret kingdom, that in her innocence she might blurt out some question which Alicia wouldn’t be able to answer without weeping.

She spent a miserable week. She couldn’t shake off her cough nor an accompanying feeling that she was drowning, which came over her when the tide rolled into her chest and the seagulls started squealing. One day, during a coughing fit, she had a clear vision of a summer bandstand on a promenade, with a blue and white striped awning flapping and the sunshine sparkling off the instruments and the waves. When she got over it, she found herself half-dead in her armchair.

Dr Chowdhury, the Indian doctor whom Miss Midgley had sent round to see her just before Christmas, had shaken his head solemnly when he listened to her chest. He had prescribed her two types of capsule and a cough mixture, but tuttingly refused the only thing which Alicia had asked him for: a tonic. She left the capsules contemptuously on the
table-top where Dr Chowdhury had put them, although she did grudgingly take small spoonfuls of his cough mixture. She didn’t hold with Indian doctors and she was blowed if she was going to take his potions.

I thought I would tell Rob about Mrs Queripel straight away when he came back from his last sitar lesson. I knew he would be in a relaxed frame of mind, pleased with his new resolution, with an end which was also a beginning. And, having just come back from Mrs Queripel’s, I knew I would have the determination to stick by her. She had asked me to help her move some of her furniture the following week and that was a guarantee that, however much I weakened at the moment of the revelation, I knew I had to go back.

I did it badly. I was so tense when Rob got back that I didn’t pay any attention to him or think about his feelings. I took his good mood for granted. Obsessed by my own worry, I didn’t see his depression.

‘Rob, I’ve got something to tell you,’ I said. Anyone but an idiot would not have used that sentence.

Rob looked horrified. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he exclaimed.

And I laughed. I laughed merrily and gaily because what I had to tell him was not nearly as bad as
that.

‘Not that,’ I said. ‘Not that! We’re safe. It’s to do with what I’ve been up to all this time while you were at your sitar lessons.’

Then I told him. I told him quite simply and factually how I had been put in touch with Mrs Queripel, roughly where she lived, how old she was and what her house was like. I finished feeling rather hot and embarrassed, as if I had built the whole thing up into something much more important than it was.

Rob sighed and said, ‘Do you mind if I make myself a coffee before we go into this?’

Disappointed, I followed him into the kitchen. I got out the biscuit tin for him over-eagerly and I sat opposite him at the kitchen table as he began to drink his coffee. He just drank.

‘She used to be an actress, you know,’ I volunteered. ‘It’s extremely interesting talking to her.’

‘Uh huh?’ said Rob.

‘You’re not angry, are you?’ I insisted. ‘You’re not cross with me?’

‘Come off it,’ said Rob. He looked at me with a vaguely irritated expression, as though I were tiresomely thrusting my petty concerns on him when he had much greater matters on his mind.

‘Because I would have told you sooner or later. You do realize that? It’s just now seemed convenient since you were stopping your lessons.’

Rob concentrated on me with an effort. ‘Look, if you choose to spend your Sunday afternoons having tea with old ladies, that’s your affair,’ he said rudely. ‘I can’t pretend I think it’s the most wonderful way in the world to spend your Sundays. But if it gives you a kick –’

‘It’s not so much that it gives me a kick,’ I persisted. ‘It’s just that I feel I’m getting something out of it which I was missing before.’

Rob shrugged. ‘Well, great,’ he said sullenly. ‘Great. There’s no accounting for tastes. Just don’t expect me to get excited about it, that’s all.’

‘So you’re not annoyed that I’ve been being a bit … well, deceitful?’ I said desperately. ‘You don’t resent that I didn’t tell you?’

Rob looked at me almost blearily. ‘I’m getting used to your funny ideas,’ he said.

The next night, he brought the subject up of his own accord, in bed.

‘Tell me what you think you’re getting out of it, then,’ he said in the dark.

‘Out of what?’ I mumbled, which was ridiculous since of course I knew perfectly well what he was talking about.

‘Out of visiting this old biddy of yours.’

‘She’s not an old biddy.’

‘OK, Alison, let’s just try and be rational about this, shall we? Yesterday, you announce out of the blue that for the last three months you’ve been making weekly visits to some old biddy which you kept quiet about. Now that’s such an
innocent thing to do that I can’t help wondering why you went to such lengths to keep it secret; if there isn’t maybe more to this than meets the eye?’

We were lying in such a way that we were not touching each other at all and I made sure by lying rigid that we wouldn’t.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, who is this old biddy? You are … quite sure she exists?’

‘Rob!’

‘No need to sound so shocked, Alison. You must admit it would be an excellent cover if you were seeing someone.’

‘Rob!!’

‘Don’t start straight away getting into a state. I’m not for a moment suggesting you
are
. I’m just trying to work out why you should be being so extraordinary secretive about this.’

‘You’re disgusting,’ I said shrilly. ‘You’re absolutely disgusting! You only think in those terms, don’t you? You just can’t imagine anyone wanting to go and talk to an old person out of interest, can you? You’re supposed to be a writer,’ I said furiously, ‘and you can’t imagine anyone having a different motivation from yours.’

‘Wow!’ said Rob.

We lay in silence for a moment. Then, simultaneously, Rob said, ‘I didn’t mean to –’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry I –’

‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Rob said, ‘but I can’t help feeling there is something a bit fishy about this. I mean, do you do lots of other things which you haven’t told me about either? You’re not secretly a member of a witches’ coven, are you? You don’t dress up and fly through the streets at night on your broomstick?’

I giggled miserably and I said, ‘I turn into a vampire when you’re asleep.’

Rob’s hand reached across the bed in the dark, hoping for a part of me. It landed awkwardly on my face and I bit it quite hard.

‘Fuck!’ said Rob, withdrawing his hand. ‘You do too.’

‘I like going to see her,’ I said apologetically, ‘because she
tells me stories. She’s telling me her life story, you know. She’s quite a character. She’s had a pretty interesting life’.

‘OK,’ said Rob, as if he were setting me a problem in a maths exam. ‘But before you knew what she was like, if she hadn’t turned out to be – what was it you said the other day: “a bit of a one”? – what made you want to go and do it in the first place?’

He questioned me for what felt like ages, probing, sounding my secret depths of resentment. I ended up doing what he had done when I first mentioned Mrs Queripel the day before; confronted with a disclosure which threatened disruption, I rolled away and I moaned, ‘Rob, I want to go to
sleep
,’ which, of course, I then couldn’t. I knew perfectly well why I couldn’t explain my initial motivation – it was such a criticism of Rob.

Mrs Q was all set for the furniture removal. It was as if she had thought of nothing else all week; she had everything so carefully worked out, all her plans minutely laid. I thought we ought to do the moving first and then have our tea afterwards, as a reward. (Not that her teas could ever be a reward, they are so disgusting.) But she insisted that we sit down and have the tea first. It was almost as if she wanted to put off the evil hour. I thought she might have second thoughts after tea, which would have been frustrating because by then I was really quite looking forward to seeing the upstairs of the house and what it was that I had to move.

Apart from that one brief trip upstairs to fasten the bathroom window, which was almost opposite the head of the stairs, all I had ever seen of the house was the front room and the hall.

Mrs Q still looked a bit ill to me and I wasn’t too happy when she told me she was coming up with me to show me exactly what had to be moved where, and ‘to give you a hand’. I said, ‘I’m sure I’ll manage OK if you explain,’ but she wasn’t having any of it.

Climbing the stairs ahead of her – she said, ‘You go first and wait. I’m a teeny bit slow’ – I found myself entering such a dark and dismal region of neglect that the downstairs of the house suddenly seemed bright and cared for in comparison. Behind me, Mrs Q’s awful rasping breaths
sawed away at my sangfroid. I tried not to take in the sweet stench of damp nor the unbearable intimacy of a pair of tobacco-coloured stockings forgotten on a pile of newspapers, as I waited for her on the landing.