The Count of Eleven (17 page)

He had to say something, however feeble. More than one of the dozen or so people seated on the stark chairs had given him a sharp look, as if he might be responsible for Laura’s condition. He sat next to her on the back row of seats and clenched his hands together in his lap until the skin between the fingers felt as though it was on fire. Might he cheer her up by pointing out that the room seemed to be full of people who had thumped themselves on the head or dropped something on their toes? He thought of suggesting that it was like a room off the set of a slapstick film, but that wouldn’t go down too well if anyone besides the family heard him. Silence was the best bet, particularly since a woman in the front row was already glaring at him.

She was barefoot except for slippers decorated with tufts like the tails of two white rabbits, and wore a frayed overcoat whose pattern of green and purple checks was enough to aggravate anyone’s suffering. Two combs, a pink one and a yellow, were stuck in her hastily tidied greying hair. Jack closed his eyes in the hope that would make her attention stray, and when he opened them she was glaring at Laura while she murmured something to the boy next to her. Jack went to the end of the front row. “Excuse me, is there some problem?”

The woman turned towards him in a crouch that managed to suggest both that he was threatening her or her child and that she was ready to fly at him. Tell him what you told me, son,” she said in a drone loud enough to be heard in the next room.

The boy held up one hand, which was wrapped in a dishcloth. “She ran me over and hurt my hand.”

“That girl did,” his mother said to the room at large in case anyone thought he meant her. “Don’t just tell him, Eli, show him.”

As the boy unwrapped the cloth he wailed “Ow, ow, fuck’ and the woman slapped the side of his head. “Less of the language. I don’t know where he gets it from,” she complained to everyone within earshot. “There, see what she did to him.”

The boy raised two fingers, which were bruised almost black and weeping blood from two parallel cuts close to the knuckles. He glanced at Laura as though he was afraid she was about to assault him, and Julia gestured clumsily for her to stay put and came forwards, her face pulled out of shape by suppressed anger. “And what did he do to her?”

The woman’s drone grew even louder. “Look, now there’s two of them. Two adults bullying a widow and her little boy.”

“Nobody’s doing that, Mrs. Evans,” Jack said. “But I’m afraid your son isn’t telling the truth.”

The woman flung her hands up, almost dislodging both her combs. “They don’t waste any time, do they? They’ve been finding out our names. I expect they’ll be having us thrown out of our house and put in prison, as if there aren’t enough people who already want to.”

Eli started to blubber, and cringed when Julia took a step forwards. “We’ve a witness to what happened, Mrs. Evans,” Jack said.

“A witness, is it? Who, the devil who sets dogs on little boys while they’re hurt and can’t defend themselves?” Mrs. Evans shoved herself to her full height, somewhat less than Jack’s or Julia’s, and shook a finger at Laura. “How old is she?”

“Twelve,” Julia said.

Mrs. Evans had obviously expected a higher figure, but rallied at once. “Well, Eli isn’t even that, and you just try and find me another boy as gentle. You looked after your mother, didn’t you, Eli, after your father went to see Jesus.”

Jack felt as though her words were being heaped on top of the burden that had gathered in his mind. Hardest of all to deal with was the banality of the confrontation, its emotional messiness, its lack of any clarity. “Take a good look at what he and his brothers did to our daughter,” he said through his chattering teeth.

“What were his brothers supposed to do? Stand by while she cut their little brother’s fingers off? All he wanted was a go on her precious bike. If you ask me she’s not quite right in the head. You want to have a doctor take a look at her.”

Mrs. Evans bumped into an empty chair in the next row and sent it clattering. “Look at the mother, she wants to knock me down. Just you try and I’ll have the law on you. They’re dangerous, the whole lot of them. They all want locking up.”

The receptionist emerged from one of the examination rooms. “Excuse me, if you’d like ‘

“We’re next,” Mrs. Evans said, tugging Eli to his feet. “Let them wait. You aren’t supposed to let them jump the queue, however much money they’ve got.”

“I wasn’t about to, Mrs. Evans. I was about to ask you if you’d like to go in now.”

Mrs. Evans threw the Orchards a triumphant look and pushed Eli into the examination room. “If that woman comes anywhere near me,” Julia said in a low tight voice, “I shall kill her.”

“No you won’t, Julia. Leave them to the police.” Jack tried to steer her to her seat and found she was shaking. She disengaged herself from him and hurried away to the Ladies, and he returned to Laura. “It’s over now, love.”

It wasn’t over. He felt as though all the undischarged violence of the encounter with the Evanses was massing inside him. Quite soon a red-eyed Julia sat down beside Laura, and they waited. The possibility of another confrontation with the Evanses scratched at his nerves, but just as the door of the Evanses’ room opened Laura was called. When the woman doctor suggested that Jack wait outside he did so, the heat crawling over his skin and parching his mouth. He felt utterly useless, not even able to help Laura while everyone else was doing so. If he couldn’t somehow overcome his sense of helplessness and of having inadvertently harmed her, he thought he might go mad.

“Yes, I was right,” Jack said, and at once was wide awake. He lay still in case he’d disturbed Julia, but she had managed to fall asleep at last and was breathing deeply in a way which, if she had been awake, would have denoted an attempt to be calm. Outside the window the sky was growing faintly red. He lay and watched bars of cloud turn redder and told himself again that he should have used the van.

He’d done everything else he could think of. He’d waited near the examination room until Julia had let him in, his admission seeming like a token forgiveness for some negligence on his part which he had been unable to define. Laura’s ankle was sprained and her body was a mass of bruises, but since no bones were broken the doctor had thought it best for her to be home with her family, especially since the hospital was short of empty beds. Once she was home in bed Jack had driven to the police station to report the Evanses and leave the address of Mr. Stringfellow, the witness. He’d hoped Julia would be asleep when he returned home, but she had needed to talk out her distress. He’d held her and murmured and wondered why, as soon as he’d climbed into the van, he had begun to think he should have used it earlier. There had been nothing wrong with it when he’d let Julia think there was -he had just been unnecessarily anxious that she might see the letters in the back but even if they had driven to find Laura they wouldn’t have been able to take the vehicle onto the stretch of promenade where she had been attacked, so what should he have done? “Used the van,” he said to himself as the fire in the sky grew brighter.

It added up. Andy Nation’s near-accident ought to have shown him that he and those close to him couldn’t simply trust to luck. Visiting Veronica Alan had earned him some, but it had run out. He should have realised that she wasn’t the only person who hadn’t copied his letter.

He couldn’t altogether blame them. He himself had initially dismissed the letter. It really wasn’t reasonable to expect someone to appreciate how crucial an unsigned impersonal letter might be to their lives you could say it was a test of faith but he was sure he would be able to convince them if he met them face to face. His sense of Tightness let him doze, and he awoke feeling ready for action. He hurried downstairs, eager to give Julia a hug which would tell her that everything was going to be fine without his having to put it into words, but he hadn’t reached her when she stopped him in his tracks. “You won’t be going anywhere today, will you,” she said.

She clearly hadn’t had much sleep, and now she was going to work on the computers at Luke Rankin’s office. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after her,” he said, and went to find Laura.

She was sitting in the front room, her shoeless bandaged leg stretched out. Her face seemed even more multicoloured than last night, particularly her lips and her left eye, though at least they weren’t quite as swollen. A school story abandoned after a page or so lay on its face by her chair. “How do you feel now?” Jack said.

“Mummy says I should feel better when I’ve had a sleep.”

She was staring at her hand which she’d raised to her face, and he realised that she didn’t want him to see how she looked. “You look he floundered, and thought that a lie would be worse than the truth. “You look like an accident in a paint factory.”

Assuming that it hurt her to smile, her response was heartening. “I’ll be down again soon if you need me,” he said.

He was stepping into the shower when Julia followed him into the bathroom. “It wouldn’t hurt to lie occasionally,” she told him.

“Even if she knows I am?”

“It isn’t too much to ask, is it?” she said, and more gently

“It’ll give you a chance to do a bit of acting.”

“Do you have to go to work today? You need to catch up on your sleep as much as Laura does.”

“We can’t afford me taking time off work.”

“We can now. I’ve figured out what was wrong with our luck.” He couldn’t say that to her, not only because the letters were his secret they felt like more of one every time he failed to mention them but because even if she had only been reminding him that the family needed her income she had succeeded in making their life seem precarious. “Look after yourself, that’s all I’m saying,” he said, and drew the plastic curtain inside the bath.

Through the mounting drizzle of the shower he heard her brushing her teeth. The sound reminded him of sandpapering. What must using a toothbrush feel like now to Laura? The curtain billowed at him as Julia left the bathroom, the clammy plastic clung to him. He heard her murmuring to Laura as he towelled himself. Once he was dressed he tiptoed down, hoping that sleep might have caught up with Laura, but she was holding her book and staring at the inactive television, which appeared to be showing a photograph of smoke. “Would you like to watch something?” Jack said.

“What’s that film where he kills all those people who are really the same one?”

“A comedy, you mean? With Dennis Price and all the Alec Guinnesses? Kind Hearts and Coronaries,” he said, and hoped that she was wincing only at the joke. “It’s one I saved from the fire,” he assured her, and slipped the cassette into the player.

It was a good choice. When she had watched it previously it had made her smile rather than laugh. “It only hurts when she laughs,” he heard himself say wildly in his head. When the photographer went up in smoke Laura let out a gasp as though she’d thought of something, but she had fallen asleep. Rather than risk disturbing her he watched to the end, reflecting that it could be said the film contained eleven deaths if you counted the one which presumably followed the final scene. He stopped the cassette and withdrew it quietly from the player, having turned the television off, then he crept into the hall and closed the door. Even if he was trapped in the house until Julia came home he wanted to have good news for Laura when she awoke.

He carried the phone as far up the stairs as the cord would reach and phoned the estate agent’s. “Mr. Orchard. I was going to phone you,” the junior partner said.

“Then I’ve stopped you from making me jump. Will I be pleased?”

“I’ve just heard from the Quails.”

“Not quailing, I hope.”

“I’m afraid they’ve decided to stay where they are. Someone further down the chain got knocked back on his mortgage.”

“Never mind. The young couple you sent were decidedly in favour. They said they’d be in touch as soon as their bank manager gave them the green light.”

“We’re speaking of the Mabeys.”

“Maybe. It’s only his name so far, I thought.”

“Actually …” The estate agent grunted hard. “They gave us a false name and address.”

“A f Jack sounded as if he’d been hit in the stomach. “A false-‘

“Don’t worry, Mr. Orchard, we’ve no reason to believe they’re criminals. They were up to the same tricks last year with some clients of our friend next door. Unfortunately there are people who enjoy viewing properties for sale when they have no intention of buying. You’d be surprised how many of them we encounter.”

“I’m surprised,” Jack said and rubbed his aching stomach. “So what happens now?”

“Rest assured we’ll keep pushing your house. I shouldn’t think of dropping the price just yet unless you really feel you have to.”

Which meant that it might become necessary, Jack assumed as he brought the receiver and the body of the phone together and dropped both onto his lap in order to redial. He had to calm the nervous jogging of his legs before he could. Nothing could go wrong with this call he knew that Laura’s bicycle was included in the house insurance even when it was away from the house but though the insurance clerk promised to send him a claim form that day he felt as though the family was at the mercy of events. He felt as though their luck was poised to grow worse if he didn’t act soon and then he saw the light. He didn’t need to leave Laura after all.

He left the front door open and climbed into the back of the van. The blow lamp was squatting on two piles of letters in the corner behind the driver’s seat. The bottom of the tank had imprinted segments of a circle like a secret sign on the envelopes. He took the first letter that came to hand into the house and found the phone number.

The phone barely rang before it was picked up. “Alston School.”

Jack sat up straight and drew a breath which smelled unexpectedly of the blow lamp “Could I speak to Mr. Alston?”

He hadn’t got the name out when the man interrupted him. “Jeremy Alston Riding School.”

He sounded too impatient to be anybody but the owner. “Is that Mr. Alston?” Jack said.