Mr Toppit (20 page)

Laurie forced herself to look into his eyes. “And if there’s nothing suitable?”

“I don’t know. I expect children bring their own books with them.”

“Why would you expect that?” she snapped back. Actually, she had no idea what children did or didn’t do. “Anyway, if people brought books with them, there wouldn’t be any call for a bookstore.”

“It’s nothing to do with me, the choice of books,” he said.

“Evidently,” she said.

He folded his arms and stared at her. His face was tinged with red. “I make sure the shelves are stocked,” he said. “We’re in daily contact with Central Distribution.”

His eyes were beginning to look quite scary. Laurie felt as if she was on a roller-coaster ride that was as exhilarating as it was frightening. The blood was coursing through her veins. “But you don’t know what they’re going to send, do you?” She was almost shouting now. “You just call them and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got five empty shelves. Fill ’em up!’ I don’t suppose you’ve even
heard
of
The Hayseed Chronicles
by Arthur Hayman?”

“The what?”

“This,” she said, taking one of the books out of her bag and banging it on the counter. He looked at it blankly. “I want to order it,” she said.

“If you already have it,” the man said, teeth clenched, clearly trying to control his voice, “why do you need to order it?”

It was not an unreasonable question, but Laurie had gone too far down the road now. “Because,” she snarled, “I want other people to enjoy it. Because I want kids to come into this godforsaken store and find something they might like to read among all that
crap
you’ve got over there.” She was trembling a little as she grabbed a pen from her bag, took a paper bag from the pile on the counter and wrote on it the titles of the five books, then
Arthur’s name. She thrust it into the man’s hand. “Okay?” she said. “Okay?” Then she walked away.

The phrase “Martini, straight up, no olive” was not one Laurie could recall using for some time. Because of Alma she didn’t drink much, and since St. Barts last summer she had really cut down—she didn’t think she’d even had a glass of wine at Arthur’s funeral—but it felt rather sophisticated now to be sitting on a bar stool ordering a proper drink. The place was almost empty: there were just two or three tables occupied and only a few people sitting up at the bar with her. Laurie was pleased that the barman took her order without a hint of surprise that someone might ask for a martini at ten o’clock in the morning. After she had got about halfway through the drink, she understood why people drank when they were stressed. She was a little dizzy, but she felt as snug and toasty as if she was lying under an electric blanket. She was almost ridiculously happy.

Behind her, seated at one of the tables, a middle-aged woman was talking softly to an older man. Laurie had noticed them when she came in because the woman had been having some difficulty in helping the man into a chair. He was walking with two sticks and was clearly nervous about letting go of them. The woman had to guide him so that he was standing in front of the chair with his back to it, then she had pulled away the walking-sticks and gravity had let him fall safely onto the seat of the chair. Now she was leaning over the table holding his hand. Laurie couldn’t hear everything she was saying, but she was obviously trying to reassure him. Laurie heard her say, “I’ll only be five minutes, I promise,” and then she pushed her chair back and got up from the table. The man’s face was completely impassive, but he let out a little moan.

Laurie got down from the bar stool. “Excuse me,” she said. The woman turned to her. “Would you like me to keep an eye on him?”

The woman looked surprised. “That’s very kind of you.”

“It’s no trouble,” Laurie said. “I work in a hospital.”

“He’s my father. He had a stroke last year,” the woman said. “He’s fine, just a bit shaky on his legs.”

“I’ll take care of him.”

“You’re very kind. I’m just going to the loo. I won’t be long. He can’t talk, but he can understand everything.” She put her hand on the man’s shoulder. “Can’t you?” The man stared blankly ahead of him.

Laurie sat down in the woman’s chair and watched her leave the bar. The man looked as if he was trying to turn his head to see. He made a throaty sound. She touched his hand. “I’ll take care of you, honey,” she said, then after a second she added, “I’m Laurie.”

The man was still looking straight ahead. His eyes were watery. On his cheek, just below the hairline, there was a little patch of shaving foam that whoever had shaved him had missed.

“Honey, you’ve got a … you know, a …” Laurie couldn’t think what to call it, so she turned the side of her face towards him and patted her cheek “…  shaving thing.” Now she had got used to his face, she realized it was just his eyes that showed any expression. She picked up a napkin and wiped the foam off his cheek. They sat in silence for a moment and then she said, “I’m American, I come from northern California. A place called Modesto.” She thought she saw movement in his eyes. She smiled. “People say we’ve got a lot to be modest about in Modesto.” He let out a moan, not of pain but an answering kind of moan. “I’m heading back there,” she said. He blinked.
“Would you like me to read to you?” she asked him. She pulled the first
Hayseed
book out of her bag. “This was written by a friend of mine,” she said. She held up the cover so he could see it, then opened it at the beginning and began: “ ‘When you were young, or maybe not so long ago, not very far from where you live, or perhaps a little closer, Luke Hayseed lived in a big old house …’ ”

The martini seemed to have softened her voice, taken the grate out of it. As she read, the man made a light, low noise like a distant aeroplane. It was as if he was humming along to the words.

Arthur and Martha’s flat on Shaftesbury Avenue was the second place they had lived since they were married. As chance would have it, it was not much more than a hundred yards from the corner where Arthur was to be mown down by a lorry over twenty-five years later. The block was called Alleyne House and the entrance was between an off-licence and an Italian restaurant from which, when they had something to celebrate, Arthur would order dinner for them and carry it up to their flat on the first floor.

The place they used to have off Gloucester Road had been too small and too damp, and anyway, after three years there, Martha’s relationship with their Polish landlord, who lived on the floor above them, had deteriorated to such an extent that their days were clearly numbered. The final acrimonious row about the state of what Martha called “the aptly named common parts” had resulted in a trail of smelly refuse being accidentally deposited outside their front door every time Mr. Bubek took his rubbish to the bins in the basement. On the day they finally left the flat, Martha had posted a representative selection of the garbage through Mr. Bubek’s letterbox, along with the last week’s rent and the keys.

The Shaftesbury Avenue flat had been Terry Tringham’s: he had had a lease on it, and it was he who suggested they might take it over. Arthur and Martha knew the flat, but not very well. When they met Terry, it tended to be at the Sphinx, or
at one of his regular pub haunts in Soho. The flat seemed to be reserved for the microscopic portion of his life that revolved around his wife Eileen and their three children. Eileen had been a script girl—they had met when they both worked on the last film that Wally Carter had done before going to America—and had married as soon as the divorce from Terry’s first wife, Liz, had come through because Eileen was already pregnant. Arthur had been their best man.

Martha and Arthur had been to the flat a few times for parties, normally drunken end-of-shoot affairs, and had had dinner there occasionally when Terry and Eileen were having one of their periodic attempts to pretend that their lives were not in freefall. These awkward domestic evenings involved grubby, crying children who would not have their bath or would not go to bed, who wanted to be read to not by the parent who was offering to read to them but by the parent who was opening another bottle of wine or trying to pull the disparate elements of the meal into some kind of order.

At some point during one of these evenings, several things might happen: Eileen might leave the table when they sat down to eat and never return, or she might leave the table when they sat down to eat and return a few minutes later with tears on her face or a sleepy child in her arms. At some point before or after her departure there might be a sudden electrical charge in the air that seemed to cause a wine glass to tip over or a chair to fall backwards.

But whatever happened during one of those evenings, the outcome tended to be the same. At a certain point, sometimes during the meal or sometimes after it, sometimes with Eileen in the room or sometimes not, Terry would say, “Fuck it! Let’s go to the club. Come on,” and stand up, groping for his cigarettes and matches among the mess on the table.

If Martha suggested that she stay behind with Eileen while Terry and Arthur went out, Eileen would have none of it. She was tired, she had to do the washing, she wanted to tidy the flat, the baby might need changing, she wanted to go to bed. She would argue so vociferously against Martha staying that it seemed as if, out of all the possible unsatisfactory outcomes of the evening for her, that was the most unsatisfactory of all. Finally, as they were putting their coats on to go out, Terry might say, “Domestic bliss, dear,” then give what passed for a wry laugh that echoed down the gloomy stairwell as they went downstairs.

Despite, or because of, the eventual messy disentanglement of the marriage and Terry’s offhand disposal of the children to various grandparents and relations when it became clear that Eileen would have to stay in what everyone euphemistically called the Nursing Home for the foreseeable future, Terry became his old self again. After a few drinks had loosened him up he would sometimes describe his wife as being a few pages short of the full script, but Eileen’s story, which he dismissed so casually, had somehow lodged itself deep inside Arthur. He could not help wondering if those pages had ever been there in the first place or if they had been slowly torn out, one by one, by Terry’s drinking and violence and casual infidelities.

Terry had been offered the job of production manager on a film to be shot on location in Kenya. He would be away for four months and he had decided to look for a new and cheaper place when he returned. The Kenya job, which he had originally turned down because it sounded too much like hard work, had begun to seem like an attractive option: he had been receiving an increasing number of aggressive letters from the tax man questioning the earnings he had been declaring over the
last couple of years; there was the potentially lethal husband of one of his girlfriends, whose anger over the affair seemed to be turning away from his wife in the direction of Terry. Being out of the country for a while might solve the problems: he took the job.

Despite their long friendship, Terry drove a hard bargain: to sign over the lease to Arthur he wanted key money and he refused to budge on the amount. There was no shortage of people—Martha included—telling Arthur that it was at least twice what it ought to have been, but nobody could offer a practical way to get Terry to reduce the price. Left to himself, Arthur might have withdrawn from the whole thing, not just because of the money but because the flat seemed tainted by what had gone on there between Terry and Eileen. But Martha, despite appearing to believe that the problem lay less with Terry’s intransigence than with Arthur’s inability to force down the key money, seemed so keen on it, had become so uncharacteristically positive about its perceived virtues—how central it was, how easy it would be to redecorate, how it might be a new start for them—that Arthur opted for the simplest solution: he agreed to pay Terry’s price.

They had already made major inroads into Arthur’s savings—of the two scripts he had been working on one had been rejected, leaving him only with the fee that had been paid on signature of the contract, and the other had been through so many rewrites that he despaired of ever getting the acceptance payment. One afternoon, without telling Martha, he had taken their secondhand Ford Consul down to a garage in Vauxhall and, after a short discussion over the price that only the most generous-spirited would have called a negotiation, sold it for a great deal less than it was worth. After accepting the money
with as much dignity as he could muster, he felt he had at least achieved his purpose: he was returning home with a pocketful of soiled notes that made up the deficit of the key money Terry was demanding.

Martha took the loss of the car without complaint. Anyway, there would be no shortage of public transport near the new flat : from dawn onwards, buses rattled along Shaftesbury Avenue right under the sitting-room window. The truth was, they rarely drove the car now. They used to go sometimes to Linton to see Arthur’s father at the weekend, a journey that filled Arthur with dread at the thought of the gloomy, cold house and his gloomy, cold father, but curiously turned Martha into a friskier version of her usual self—pottering around in the garden, trying to make jam from the fruit on the scrawny raspberry canes, taking meals up on trays to Arthur’s father, who rarely left his bed even though there appeared to be nothing specifically wrong with him—but they could take the train if they had to go.

The morning they left Gloucester Road, Arthur had arranged for a couple of the props boys from Elstree to bring a van early and move their furniture to the new flat. At Bermondsey Market, when they’d first got married, he and Martha had bought a Victorian double bed, which was taken down to the van first. A set of dining-room chairs and the desk he had had as a child went next. When they were about to leave, after the last pieces had gone into the van—the kitchen table and utensils, two armchairs, and three or four packing cases filled with books—and after Martha had delivered the garbage through Mr. Bubek’s letterbox, she and Arthur stood for a moment on the curb, gazing forlornly at the possessions they had accrued in their three years of married life, huddled together at the far end of the large, empty van.