Pleasure and a Calling (25 page)

‘It’s a date,’ she said.

I wore my Oxfam jacket and casual trousers for the occasion. Zoe was on duty at the office, and I steeled myself against her inevitable comment when I went in for the van keys. ‘My goodness, Mr Heming,’ she cried. ‘Are you in disguise?’

‘Just helping a neighbour out with a chore,’ I said.

‘A female neighbour, by any chance?’

‘An elderly neighbour.’

In the end it took three journeys. Abigail already looked more buoyant. She was wearing gardening gloves – said her nails were always breaking. ‘Mine too,’ I said. She was happy to be amused. She told me about her old job in London at one of the university libraries and her life there. There had been a boyfriend who had baled out (as she described it) when she’d had to come home to look after her mother. ‘Probably just as well. I didn’t have much time for socializing. But I got in touch with a couple of old friends here after Mum died. Also, I’d taken my part-time job at the library here. So things took off a little.’

We talked about me less, but imagine her surprise when she discovered that one of my favourite recent books was
Suit of Coins
by Barrington Gates. ‘I love that book!’ she said. ‘I have a signed copy!’

‘It says a great deal about loneliness,’ I said.

‘I
so
agree. And exile.’

‘You took the words out of my mouth.’

She insisted on buying me lunch in the tea room of a garden centre on the way back. A shadow passed across her face when I expressed sympathy for her bereavement (meaning her mother, though her mind doubtless seized upon Sharp), but she brightened when she learned of my own orphaned years, my suffering at the hands of a cruel aunt. I volunteered, too, the story of my relationship with a local girl that had ended in disappointment and soul-searching when she had simply taken off one day without a word. ‘Even though it was some years ago, I’ve never quite been able to shake it off,’ I said, trawling my memory for stray details of my ill-fated liaison with Zoe. ‘It occurred to me afterwards that she might have had emotional problems,’ I found myself saying, thinking of the antidepressants I had discovered in her bathroom cabinet early in our ‘romance’ (which, admittedly, I should not have found odd, given Zoe’s breezy, sometimes downright excitable, personality). ‘I actually discovered her creeping about in my garden late one night. I opened the curtains, and she was actually staring at my window.’

‘Oh my God. What did she say?’

‘She said she’d been missing me, but hadn’t wanted to wake me. Can you believe that?’

Afterwards we strolled down aisles of plants, our hands teasingly close but not touching. She sat on a rustic bench and motioned for me to join her. I noticed one of her nails
was
broken. She told me a joke that I didn’t understand about tobogganing. I laughed anyway – perhaps an instant too late because she then laughed even louder, sensing my discomfort. What was happening? There was a silence that allowed us to wonder. Perhaps she was just thinking about her own story – the one she couldn’t tell. I found myself not wanting to know. Or rather, wishing I wasn’t the only one who already knew.

When I dropped her at home she thanked me again. ‘I owe you,’ she shouted from the step.

I gave her a salute. Even now, I still feel at least that to be true.

A
ND THEN THERE WAS
Z
OE
.

‘How would you like to do
me
a favour, Mr Heming?’ she said, bringing me a coffee in my office before I’d hardly sat down with the mail. The
me
, I saw straight away, was a continuation of her playful remarks the day before, when she had made light of my casual wear.

‘A favour? What did you have in mind?’

‘Well.’ She closed the door and settled herself in front of me, smiling. ‘To be brutal, I have a forsythia, a dead one. Well, practically dead. And it needs shifting.’

She looked at me. I looked at her. Was she speaking in code?

‘In fact it needs digging out, uprooting. It’s quite a task. And then shifting – to the dump. Organic recycling.’

‘It’s a tree?’

‘You might call it a tree, Mr Heming. I would call it a shrub. The point is, it’s a job for a man.’

‘I am quite busy. I don’t suppose you know any other men?’

‘That sounds rather mean, Mr Heming.’ She paused. ‘I do
have a cousin, Tom, in Northumberland. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind popping down the four hundred miles or so to do it.’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t, Zoe. Perhaps one evening?’

‘I have Wednesday afternoon off. How about then?’

She gave me one of her radiant smiles and skipped off.

It had been a while since I had last set foot in Zoe’s flat, a tiny but attractive ground-floor converted terrace less than ten minutes from the high street. Two osteopaths, I remembered, shared a practice upstairs but lived elsewhere. Her narrow, nicely kept garden backed on to the premises of a small auto workshop to the rear, being bordered to the side by a high fence adjacent to an alley, where she parked her car.

If I had one strange story to tell about Zoe it would be the night she found me in her garden. I don’t know why she suddenly chose that moment to fling back the curtains (a dazzling cruciform figure against her patio windows), but she seemed oddly unsurprised at my presence, illuminated by two movement-sensitive spotlights that I can only think must have been set off by Zoe herself. She fumbled to open the door. ‘Mr Heming, what in God’s name …’ Rather than scream the street down and summon the police, she ushered me in, wearing only a dressing gown. I have to assume she knew it was me out there – had already spotted me lurking. It was possible she had seen me at least two nights previously, hesitating in the alley, lit by the yellow street lamp, not daring to enter.

It wasn’t entirely out of the blue. We had had our moment in the office some time before, the two of us working late on something, an accidental brush of bodies, a significant look, a subtle catch of breath, a rise in temperature. It could have happened there and then had I not retreated. Even so. I mumbled
something about how I happened to be passing, that I recalled how she’d moved heaven and earth to buy this flat (no drama of Zoe’s was safe from the office), that the gate was open …

‘The gate was
not
open. Did you climb that fence? Are you mad? You could have broken your neck.’

I could smell perfume. Her feet were bare.

She leaned across me to switch off the light and we went through to her bedroom without a word. What can I say? I am only human. There was passion, at least for a time. As I have suggested, the higher its flame burned in Zoe, the more it faltered in me.

All that was a long time ago, and yet I didn’t believe for a moment that this invitation to uproot Zoe’s shrub was purely a gardening matter. There was too much frivolity and glancing. It was true that the old lightness between us had reappeared in recent weeks. We had visited one or two projects together in my little car. She was as clumsily flirtatious as she had always been and no less reasonably attractive, but – even without the consuming distractions of the Sharp case, not to mention Abigail – my interest in Zoe was no more. Had there been something in my responses that had suggested otherwise?

‘I think we’ll have to get you out of that jacket,’ she said, turning her indulgent smile for the second time in a week on my casual garb. Then, taking my arm, she led me out to the forsythia, which was more like a small tree and didn’t look dead to me, judging by the yellow flowers and sprouting greenery, though I am hardly an expert. She handed me a spade. ‘I imagine it goes quite deep, but I’m sure you’ll be able to get it up,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’m going to run out to the shop for some cold drinks. Won’t be long!’

I heard her start her car in the alley and drive off. I shouldn’t
have been there, and wished I wasn’t. Why had she left me on my own? I wondered if it would even surprise her to come back and find me snooping in her private areas. Perhaps it was what she wanted me to do. I felt nothing urging me on. Zoe’s novelty had long been faded by familiarity. On the other hand, there was no risk. It was a tiny flat, and if she arrived back too soon, I could simply say I needed to use the bathroom.

I sank the spade into the soil, went back inside, took off my shoes and entered her room. In the light of what I have said, you will forgive my immodesty if I tell you I was expecting at least a shrine to myself, with a photograph surrounded by candles – perhaps an open journal declaring her love on every page. But there was nothing, unless the bed itself – beautifully arranged, with an embroidered coverlet and arrangement of cream pillows – was to be the bait. The curtain was closed, casting the room in a pale, jaundiced shade. There were a few contemporary novels in a pile alongside guides to successful estate agency and basic management techniques. She had the Gates novel and other popular titles I recognized. I wasn’t disappointed, but I was puzzled.

I went back to the garden and set to work. The soil, which yielded at first, soon became dense, and the root could have gone anywhere. I had made little progress by the time Zoe returned fifteen or twenty minutes later. ‘Come and get it!’ she announced, tiptoeing across the patio with a tray containing a jug and glasses with ice. ‘Homemade lemonade. Well, homemade by the deli.’

I gulped down a glassful and returned to my impossible task while she sat on a patio chair and chattered.

‘Isn’t it wonderful that Katya and Evan are getting engaged at last?’

‘Evan?’ I panted. ‘I don’t think I know Evan.’

She laughed. ‘Evan. Her Mister Jones. You’re terrible.’

‘Am I?’

‘What were those policemen asking you about?’

‘What do you think? Have they spoken to you?’

‘They’ve spoken to all of us. Even Wendy.’

‘Well, there you are, then.’

Her gaiety ebbed somewhat. ‘They asked about the Sharps’ house coming up for sale. And they wanted to know if I was in the office that Friday, then asked why I wasn’t the one to go and speak to them when Wendy took the call.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told them I was busy, and that it was urgent and that I supposed that was why Wendy called you. Are you all right? I do worry—’

‘Me?’ I carried on working furiously, tugging now at the fibrous trunk of the plant. The sun, out viciously ahead of the summer, was beating down. The sweat was pouring off me.

‘You’re getting into
quite
a lather, Mr Heming,’ she said.

‘I don’t think I can get it completely loose. I think we need a saw, and then you’ll have to poison the root, I think. Isn’t that what you have to do?’

She found a saw in her shed, and after more manoeuvring and more panting and pulling I finally had the thing out and on its side.

‘Hurray!’ cried Zoe, giving me a hug that she didn’t quite want to relinquish – a quick yearning in her eyes that was painful to see. ‘Well done,’ she cried.

She helped drag the plant into the van and we took it to the composting skips near the allotments on the outskirts of town. I could have pointed out that she might have done this part by herself in her own car, perhaps even in a couple of weeks when
the foliage had withered down. But I said nothing; just listened to her chattering about this or that day we’d once spent together as we wove through the sluggish afternoon school traffic and muffled noise of children. Clearly she had simply engineered this afternoon of labour and leisure – a project that would providentially throw us together. When eventually we pulled up outside her place, she kissed me on the cheek and held on to my arm. Perhaps she was waiting for me to cut the engine.

‘Will you come back in?’

‘I think probably not. I need a shower. Best get back.’

‘You could have a shower here. We could hang out. The lemonade is still cold. Perhaps something stronger?’

‘Probably better I didn’t.’

Her teeth were white, her skin smooth, her breath minty fresh. And all for me.

‘I think you
should
,’ she purred, her gaze like a hypnotist’s.

‘Maybe next time!’ I beamed.