Chapter ten #2
Not the magical memory he’d hoped for, but a chink of light into what might have shaped Eunice’s jaundiced world view.
‘He used to water down the milk too. And make my mother reuse stamps. We never had the fire on, not unless someone was coming round. I was nine before I realised most people take their coats off when they go inside.’
Lewis waggled his pen. This was fascinating social history, but he wasn’t sure this was the sort of conversation topic that was going to lead to a more joyful Rosemount experience. For either of them.
‘So, on a brighter note . . . What would you say was the most memorable moment of your childhood?’
‘My dad dying in an accident at the steelworks when I was five.’
Bloody hell. Lewis blanched. ‘Oh dear, Eunice. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Mam wasn’t. I wasn’t. He was a mean bastard too.’
‘But then she met your stepfather and . . .’
‘He were my dad’s best mate.’
‘Oh.’ Lewis hastily cast his eye around the room for more uplifting inspiration.
On her sideboard, amongst the usual crop of china dolls and dogs and pigs, was a group of family photographs: her own black-and-white register office wedding, Michael’s brightly coloured nineties wedding, and a couple of baby photos of frowning toddlers with massive foreheads, wrinkled in familiar displeasure.
‘What about your wedding? Looks like it was a lovely day!’
Eunice huffed. ‘It rained.’
‘People say that’s good luck.’
‘It was for the man in the shop selling umbrellas near the church. He did a roaring trade.’ But there was a twinkle in her eye.
‘So where did you get married? Was it near here?’ he started, but she interrupted him.
‘Are you married, Mr Levison?’
‘Me?’ Lewis was caught off guard. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Sweetheart?’
‘Um, no.’
‘Boyfriend then?’ And when Lewis spluttered, she said, ‘No need to be shy, Mr Levison.’
‘I’m not gay,’ said Lewis. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that.’
Eunice tipped her head to one side with a sly smile, much more engaged than he’d ever seen her. He was reminded of the cat that hung around the kitchens, staring fixedly at a spot behind the skirting boards, biding its time.
‘Broken heart, is it?’
‘I . . .’ He could hear himself spluttering again, searching for the words.
Not a broken heart, but a longing for the right one, with its accompanying wariness of the wrong one – so many slippery reasons why he’d never quite managed to do what everyone else seemed to do almost by accident.
He’d got off to a bad start. Long school holidays spent with grandparents, not hanging out with kids his age, absorbing the unspoken rituals of the opposite sex, the whispers and giggles.
No practice as a teenager, despite many female friends at the girls’ school twinned with his.
In fact, according to more than one of them, that had been the problem.
Girls ‘liked him too much as a friend’ to want to spoil it with romance, but on being pressed, wouldn’t explain why, exactly.
And somehow, despite a new haircut and contact lenses, that had followed him to university.
This time cemented with an unfortunate Freshers’ Week misunderstanding that no matter how many times he’d tried to explain only seemed to reinforce the initial assumptions.
Once some well-meaning friend had decided you were gay, it seemed, it was actively homophobic of you to try to insist otherwise, let alone anyone else.
But Lewis hadn’t given up hope. He’d seen too many very, very late-doors romances blossom in care homes just like Rosemount to believe that love had an age limit.
The problem was, most of the women he met were over seventy-five and judged any new man by standards he wasn’t sure anyone under forty could possibly meet.
‘You can tell me,’ said Eunice, with an unconvincing show of sympathy. ‘Was there someone once? Someone you’re not quite over? A sister-in-law, maybe?’
‘What? No!’ Lewis pulled himself together. ‘Nothing like that. I’m just too busy for a relationship. It would be very unfair, when my work takes up so much of my time and energy. I’m committed to making Rosemount—’
‘Before Rosemount? Were you too busy with another residential home to find a girlfriend?’
Eunice was very forthright.
‘Yes,’ said Lewis. ‘I was, since you ask.’ There had been a few promising dates, some set up by the same loyal female friends for whom he was now ‘the best godfather ever!’.
But his hours were long, and the older he got, his continued bachelordom became its own ‘red flag’, whatever the hell that meant.
What were you supposed to do about it, anyway?
Embroider your love life CV, the way some people added degrees and fictitious promotions to their work experience? Lewis didn’t like lying.
He gave Eunice a direct look. ‘When I make a commitment I stick to it, and the last few years have been challenging, as you know, for the care industry.’
‘That’s so sad. You spend your whole day with us old folk, and you don’t even have a warm body to go home to at the end of the day.’
‘Eunice.’ His voice sounded strangulated, even to his own ears. ‘Please. Tell me about your—’
‘Because it’s not like you’re getting any younger. How old are you, Mr Levison? And don’t pretend it’s a state secret – there’s no room for coyness in here. I’ve got to put up with strangers asking me about my bowel movements twice a day, as you well know.’
‘I’m thirty-eight.’ Lewis drew a line in his head under that fact.
He wasn’t going to let Eunice turn this into a session about him, not her.
But as he said it, he noted that thirty-eight suddenly sounded a lot older than thirty-four.
Lewis had always rather looked forward to turning forty – it felt like a good age, experienced, but still energetic – but his imagination had always supplied a happy, supportive wife and three inquisitive primary-school children, which he realised he couldn’t now deliver within that deadline.
‘Thirty-eight?’ She raised her eyebrows enigmatically. ‘Mmm.’
Don’t rise to it, Lewis told himself.
‘What was the most exciting thing you did as a child?’ he asked swiftly.
‘I didn’t do exciting things as a child. I had three brothers.’
‘Was that not fun? Didn’t you get to climb trees and ride bikes with them?’
‘Hnngh.’ The snort again. ‘I wasn’t even allowed to learn to ride a bicycle.’
‘Why not?’
There was a momentary hesitation. ‘Because that’s how my dad was killed, on his way to work one morning.
Got knocked off it by a lorry turning into the yard without looking.
Mam said no way would we ever get on a bike.
’ Eunice pursed her thin lips. ‘My brothers had bikes, course they did, bought them with their paper-round money, hid them in their mates’ sheds.
But I wasn’t allowed one. A job, or a bike. Not allowed anything, me.’
She glanced out of the window, and Lewis caught a lifetime’s resentment flickering across her face, escaping from a hairline crack in her memory like a wisp of smoke.
‘Didn’t you ask?’
‘Didn’t want to upset Mam. She hated the damn things. Wouldn’t let my kids have one either, I had to promise her.’ Eunice looked up. ‘And I kept my promise. Before you ask.’
‘So you’ve never been on a bicycle?’ Lewis felt sorry for her. He felt sorry for anyone who’d never felt so close to flying.
‘Are you deaf? No.’
‘Would you like to?’
Eunice turned back to him and the familiar tartness had returned. ‘Would I like to go to New York? Would I like to water-ski? Would I like to have a night of wild passion with Tom Selleck? There’s a time and a place, and at my age, you have to admit the time for bicycles and the like has passed.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Lewis, then quickly added, ‘Not about Tom Selleck. No can do, on that front.’
Eunice sat back on her sofa with a huffy snort, and crossed her legs, but Lewis noted her left red shoe was now wagging. With amusement, he hoped.
Afterwards, striding back to his office for his meeting with Marek about the mouse droppings, Lewis debated with himself about whether he’d responded properly to Eunice’s memories of her stepfather – or her father.
The only downside of this project, in his opinion, was its potential for stirring up long-suppressed pain.
Was Eunice now stewing on those unhappy memories?
It would be wrong to assume people would only select happy memories, and Lewis’s own view was, why would you want to dwell on sadness – sadness that you couldn’t change, at a time in your life when the present day held enough unavoidable pains already?
But that might not be true for everyone.
Lewis stopped opposite the portrait of the Earl of Longhampton, whose pale and bulbous eyes reminded him of Eunice’s, and made a note in his book to ask Gayle for advice on keeping stories upbeat.
She’d warned him of potential points of friction – allowing each spouse to tell their own version of a story, not being afraid of tears or silence, and so on.
She seemed almost excited by the potential for drama.
‘You often find,’ she’d added, ‘that the stories the families know and the stories the volunteers are told don’t always match up exactly!’
Lewis wondered what Michael Stafford’s version of the bicycle ban would be, whether he too had kept a secret bike in his mate’s shed.
As if by serendipity, as he was making his note an email from Gayle pinged on to his phone. It was a reply to his request for a volunteer update, and when he saw Beth Cherry’s name as a lead writer, along with her email address and phone number, Lewis’s heart lifted unexpectedly.
He stared at her contact details for a moment, amazed that something as mundane as an email address could feel so exciting.
Lewis knew other men would probably find an excuse to get in touch without a second thought.
Before he left that evening, he’d make dozens of calls, to his boss, to families, to the oil supplier, to contractors, not always with good news or easy questions, but he’d launch into those conversations without a second’s hesitation. And yet when it came to Beth . . .
Why was it so different?
It was an invasion of privacy, he reminded himself. Highly unprofessional.
And what would he say? Lewis had been on an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion course only last month; the minefield of potential offence had grown exponentially since he’d last been on a date and even then he hadn’t been totally sure if he was supposed to say his friend Helen’s cousin looked nice or if that was objectifying her.
He looked up and the withering gaze of the Earl of Longhampton reminded him of his grandfather, when he’d made excuses for not ironing the bits of his shirt hidden by jumpers.
Before he could think, Lewis found himself dialling Beth’s number, but the moment it started ringing out, his brain howled in protest.
What are you doing? Hang up now, Lewis!
‘Beth Cherry?’
Too late. ‘Hello there, Beth! It’s Lewis Levison. From Rosemount Court.’
Lewis! This is an egregrious breech of data protection regulation!
‘Oh, hello, Lewis.’ Beth’s voice was warm and soft. She could have done voiceovers for Marks and Spencer. ‘You don’t have to say all that, I know who you are by now.’
‘Ha-ha!’ Lewis’s heart swooped around his chest in an embarrassingly teenage way.
‘I was . . . I was ringing to, um, thank you for stepping up to join Gayle’s writing team.
I’ve just had an email from her – I really appreciate the extra time you’re giving us.
It’ll make a huge difference to the project. ’
He was congratulating himself on coming up with a legitimate reason for the call when she said, solemnly, ‘Ah, well, I’ve got a bone to pick with you about that.’
‘What?’
‘Someone told Gayle I was a writer. You know I’m not, right? I really hope you’re good at managing expectations!’
‘But I thought . . .’ Was her voice really stern, or was she joking? He couldn’t tell. He stared up at the Earl, who was no help. ‘I’m so sorry if I’ve—’
‘Stop it! I’m only joking. Well, sort of. I guess it’ll be a learning experience for us all!’
‘Is there anything I can— we can do to help?’ he asked quickly. ‘Do you need, um . . .’ He racked his brains again. What did writers need? ‘Pens? Or paper? Extra notebooks? Just say!’
Lewis would have happily delivered an entire stationery cupboard to Beth, personally, in a wheelbarrow, had she asked.
‘Hmm, now you’re asking.’ She sounded amused. ‘I always need new notebooks. And if you think a special pen would be a good idea . . .’
‘No problem,’ said Lewis, wriggling his small notebook back out and leaning against the wall to scribble down notebook and pen.
‘I’ve got a couple of journalists on my client list who claim the most ridiculous stationery,’ Beth went on. ‘So I can reassure you that it is tax deductible.’
‘Ha-ha!’ Lewis’s nerves began to rise. This was the point in the conversation when, legitimate reason for call concluded, someone more experienced would pivot smoothly to flirting, maybe even an offer of a thank-you drink?
But Lewis didn’t have anything like that in his armoury; his mind had gone blank and the pause was extending and the conversation was hanging by a thread.
Beth was waiting for him to say something, and when he didn’t – although he desperately wanted to – she said, ‘OK, then, I’ll see you next week, will I?’
‘Yes!’ said Lewis. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Me too!’
He heard the big dog bark in the background and remembered he could have asked her how Tomsk was, but she was saying goodbye, in that sweet friendly way, and the call was over.
Lewis pocketed his phone with mixed feelings. That had been fifty per cent successful. Much better than not calling at all, surely.
The Earl of Longhampton, he felt, would have rolled his eyes, if he could.