The Count of Eleven (14 page)

If he tried to push the envelope all the way in, the noise might bring someone to the door. Jack seized his knee with both hands and shoved himself to his feet. He was passing the gate post when he heard a sound behind him like the closing of a trap. Someone had pulled the letter into the house. He hesitated, screened by the privet, and heard an outburst of barking which abruptly grew louder, and then the slam of the door. Someone and their dogs had come out of the house.

Jack managed not to look around as he walked downhill, fast but not too fast. He was ready to cross the dual carriage way when the barking started downhill. He couldn’t resist the chance of seeing who had received the letter. Moving a few paces along the kerb, he stood at a bus-stop.

The barking reached the corner, and two obese panting bulldogs wallowed out of Druid Stones Lane. They were harnessed to a woman in her fifties who was wearing expensively casual trousers, an ankle-length leather coat, a tortoise shell comb in her silvery hair. Her skin was aged by sunlight, and so brown that some of the light must have been artificial. She heaved at the leads, causing the dogs to snuffle and choke, and came straight at Jack, brandishing the letter. “Rubbish,” she said in a voice that smelled of cigarettes.

She wasn’t talking to him; indeed, he could see that she wasn’t aware of him. She tore his letter up before his eyes and dropped the pieces in the bin attached to the bus-stop. “Major,” she said, jerking the left-hand lead as its dog cocked a leg against the concrete pole, splashing Jack’s shoes. “Come along, General,” she said, and urged the dogs across the carriage way and up the road to the park.

She must have destroyed the first letter too, but why should that have affected the Orchards? The bad luck was meant to settle on anyone who ignored the letter, not on the sender unless, he thought in a sudden rage, she’d wished the bad luck on whoever had sent her the letter. His anger felt like a fire in his brain, growing hotter as she dwindled and vanished around the corner towards the park. He could still smell her: leather, dogs, perfume which was undoubtedly expensive, stale flesh. He grabbed the fragments of the letter out of the bin and strode fast up the hill.

He was only going to stuff the pieces through the door, but part of him knew better. His free hand was reaching in his pocket as he passed the Audi. He felt as though only the actions he was performing could fit into these moments. As he squatted in front of the door, farting inadvertently, he flicked the lighter and set fire to the bunch of paper. “Try some of our luck for a change,” he said through his teeth, and levering the slot wide with the hand that held the lighter, posted the blazing paper into the house.

He let the flap down gently, enjoying the strength of his fingers, and stood up. “You’ve done it now,” he heard himself say, perhaps aloud. He felt as if his bad luck was a burden which he’d managed to place outside himself at last a burden whose removal left him feeling exhilarated and youthful. He couldn’t quite believe what he’d done; even gazing at the blurred dance of the flames, magnified by the leafy pattern in the frosted glass, didn’t entirely persuade him. “Got to laugh, haven’t you?” he said to the grin which was tugging at his lips, and turned away from the bungalow. But as he walked towards the Audi he saw the flames reflected in its windows brighten and rear up.

He felt as if they were chasing him, until he swung round and saw that they were still beyond the door. The object which he’d assumed to be a chest or a wardrobe was made of cardboard, judging by the speed with which the flames were consuming it. In hardly any time the lower section of it collapsed, throwing the upper section across the floor, and Jack guessed it had been a pile of cartons. He had a sense of inevitability: events had been taken out of his hands yet again. Almost at once the carpet was ablaze and the flames were knocking soundlessly at the nearest inner door.

Either the door was ajar and swinging wider or the rush of fire was making it appear to move. When he saw smoke beginning to drift across the room beyond the long uncurtained window he backed away from the house and stood at the bottom of the concrete semicircle, waiting for the flames to invade the room, then he walked rapidly downhill.

He thought he meant to call the fire brigade, but there was no phone box in sight on the dual carriage way and walking for some minutes didn’t show him one. He couldn’t very well ask to phone from anyone’s house. He heard a fire engine in the distance, and fled to his van. Someone else had called the fire brigade, and Jack was suddenly afraid of coming face to face with Veronica Alan.

She was just visible on a wide lawn, her dogs doing their ponderous best to leap at a stick she was flourishing. The sight of her, shrunken by distance and quite unaware of events at her house, made Jack grin and shudder simultaneously. He climbed into the van and swung it out of the car park, so violently that the pile of letters spilled off the passenger seat onto the floor. He was waiting for the stream of traffic to let the van onto the dual carriage way when he discovered he had no idea where he was going.

He couldn’t think which was the nearest address on the envelopes. Besides, his compulsion to deliver them had lost momentum. The only place he wanted to go now, he decided, was home but Julia would sense he had done something which he couldn’t tell her. He’d committed a crime, he’d destroyed someone’s property. He hadn’t meant to do so, at least not to begin with, but how could he explain that to her? He felt as though the events of the last half hour, or however long it had been, had involved someone other than himself.

The blare of a horn behind the van jerked him out of the state into which he’d fallen, he wasn’t sure how long ago. He stamped on the accelerator and stalled the engine. As a black sports car swerved around the van and into the main road, the flash of glossy black made him think of some kind of reptile slithering under the trees. He twisted the ignition key and drove as if the act itself might eventually suggest a route.

He drove for hours. Avenues led him through shopping districts where the pedestrians appeared to think he’d done nothing out of the ordinary. Someone shouted, and an apple rolled towards the van from the market stall behind which the trader was shouting. Jack thought he might be able to think if he reached open country, but he seemed incapable of escaping the maze of unfamiliar streets or of reading the map. “Smile’ added up to thirteen, he found himself thinking, as did ‘laugh’, but ‘fire’ was eleven. “Smile, laugh, fire,” he muttered, driving. “I’m fire.”

At last he had to stop for petrol. The filling station included a video library, and some of the cassettes were for sale. He was examining the titles before he remembered he was no longer in the business. The realisation seemed to bring him back to himself. The events at Veronica Alan’s had been yet another instance of the slapstick that was his life, but for once the butt was someone other than himself or his family. The woman behind the counter gave him a slightly puzzled look as he felt his face change. “Got to laugh, haven’t you?” he said, and asked her the way home.

He could keep a secret from Julia if he had to. He was seeing images of Keystone Kops, demented figures in uniform falling silently over one another and over their hose pipes as they threw oil instead of water on the flames. He ought to have an answer when she asked him where he’d been, but he mustn’t say anything which might make him laugh: not “Nowhere to set the world on fire’ or “Fighting fire with fire’. “I just drove around and walked for a bit,” he told himself in the driving mirror, and was pleased with how convinced he looked.

He felt as though he was coming home from another country, one of which his memories were few and very vague. As he drove, houses obscured the sunset except for a generalised reddish glow, a sign of distant fire. On the river at the foot of Victoria Road it had left a wake of burning oil. “I’ve been driving round and round and no, just round,” he said as he turned the van along his road. The wheels nudged the kerb at the end of the garden path, and he switched off the engine and leaned over to pick up the letters from the floor. As he reached for them he glimpsed someone, not Laura or Julia, in the front room.

Jack froze, his knuckles aching as they rested on the envelopes. He’d been found out, but how? Had Julia already been told what he’d done? He wanted to hide, except that wouldn’t be fair to her, whether she knew or was only wondering why they’d come for him. He forced his head up, his fist crumpling the letters. There was nobody in the front room.

Someone could be coming out to find him. He waited until it seemed certain that no such thing was about to happen, then he shoved the letters into his inside pocket and clambered out of the van, hoping that the glimpse of an intruder was the only symptom of jumpiness he would experience, otherwise Julia might notice. He let himself into the house and closed the door behind him. “Home,” he announced.

Julia responded from upstairs. “Someone’s waiting to see you, Jack.”

Her voice was neutral. He couldn’t judge if she had been told about him. Either way he thought she was being brave, almost too brave for him to bear. At least she needn’t hear him confess surely that could wait until he and the police were out of the house. “Where he tried to shout, and had to clear his throat. “Where are they?”

“Here I am, old pip.” Andy Nation appeared from the kitchen. “I’d have had tea coming out of my ears if you’d kept me hanging around much longer. How’d you like to work with me for a bit? I was just saying to Mrs. Apple that it’s time for your luck to improve.”

Mrs. Merrybale lived in a tall house in a street largely occupied by retirement homes. The old man’s on his way back. You’ll be giving him a surprise,” she said, and Jack gathered that her husband would be away at sea for some weeks yet, though perhaps her comment was also meant to imply that he hadn’t time to redecorate. She was obviously unused to strangers in the house and determined to make them feel at home. At first she called them Mr. Nation and Mr. Orchard, until Andy persuaded her to use their first names, which she proceeded to apply enthusiastically and at random. She brought them pallid milky tea in fragile cups on brimming saucers, sometimes accompanied by stale currant cakes which Jack and Andy dutifully chewed and chewed. Often she lingered to chat, always breaking off before the end of any anecdote and apologising for taking up their time. That set Andy rubbing his forehead as soon as she turned her back, and her favourite refrain “If there’s anything I can do to help’ provoked him to denials so heartfelt it was pitiful. It was like a running gag, Jack thought, with Andy struggling not to deliver a punch line. As for Jack himself, he was having the time of his life.

He’d always enjoyed decorating, but doing so with Julia couldn’t be compared to working with a professional. After the destructive fun of stripping the walls competing with himself to see how large an area of paper he could tear off in one piece came the painstaking business of preparing the walls, and then the decorating itself. Andy wasn’t satisfied unless every join in the new paper was invisible, and Jack learned more about paper-hanging than he would have believed possible. He mightn’t have been able to sustain such minute concentration if it hadn’t been for the comic relief.

At the end of the second day’s work Andy said “I deserve a drink.”

“I’ll keep you company.”

“Climb into the limo. just chuck the treasures in the back.”

Jack managed to sit in the passenger seat of the Datsun, whose exterior was patched with dabs of not quite matching paint, without treading on any of the toys and comics and fragments of biscuit abandoned by Andy’s children. “We could do with using your van to carry the materials,” Andy said.

“It’s out of commission. Engine trouble.”

“I’ll call my friend and get it fixed for you.”

Tve already booked someone, thanks, Andy.” Jack thought better of saying “It’s going to take a few days’ in case Andy offered to have the work done sooner. All that was wrong with the van was that it contained the twelve remaining letters and the blow lamp a reminder which Jack had preferred to stow out of sight. Andy would have been bound to question its presence in the van.

They drank at Stanley’s Cask, a small pub which served such ales as Wobbly Bob and Black Bat and Old Fart and Old Peculier. Jack expected Andy to pour out his frustrations about Mrs. Merrybale, but even after two pints of Bishop’s Finger, Andy confined himself to talk about his family and Jack’s. He must think it was bad form to decry an employer for simply being herself, and Jack reflected that both he and Andy had secrets to keep.

His own didn’t seem to have attracted much comment. He hadn’t heard the fire reported on either of the local radio stations. The Liverpool Echo had carried a paragraph to the effect that Veronica Alan’s bungalow had been partially destroyed and that the cause of the fire was unclear. The property must have been insured, Jack thought, and if not she had nobody to blame except herself, but he couldn’t help feeling angry: the woman had only had to send out copies of the letter and then nothing untoward would have befallen her. “Sometimes,” he said to Andy, “I think it’s fear of change that stops people improving their lives.”

“What’s given you an attack of the philosophers?”

“I was just thinking how little it takes to change ourselves.”

“Here’s to making the most of ourselves.”

To ourselves,” Jack simplified, and clinked tankards with him.

As Andy delivered him home Julia opened the front door. Jack’s first glance was for the stairs behind her, but they were bare of envelopes. “No responses yet,” she said.

He put an arm around her waist as they went along the hall. There will be.”

“Don’t count on too much, Jack.”

“Hey, I’m supposed to make the puns around here,” he said, and was reminded by her puzzled look that she couldn’t know she had made one. “I won’t promise anything I can’t deliver.”

“I’ll hold you to that later,” she said, giving him a quick open-mouthed kiss.

Later the Quails, who had viewed the house last week, rang. They were still interested, and almost certainly had a buyer for their own property, though that depended on someone else’s ability to find a purchaser. Jack imagined an infinite series of house-buyers stretching through time and space, the people at one end of the series dying of old age before the succession of purchases could reach, the far end. “Except,” he said to Laura over dinner, ‘there isn’t an infinite number of people, so the person at the end must be the person you began with, holding themselves up.”