Chapter 13
Monday 16 October
It was a still, cool evening. The sky gleamed like pale blue stone and looked further away than usual. Dan and Jeremy were zipped-up in their jackets seated on deckchairs on the little patio behind Dan’s new flat, sipping Morettis.
“What do you think of it?” Dan asked, indicating his lawn. The small, rectangular patch of healthy grass filled the garden to the boundary hedges like wall-to-wall carpeting.
“It’s so lush and green,” replied Jeremy. “It makes me want to roll around in it.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
Dan didn’t want to roll around in his lawn, but he just about remembered what that urge felt like. As a thirty-year-old, his emotional response to it was in many ways just as simple: he felt immense pride. This was his first lawn, and he would nurture it like a farmer tending his field.
“It’s nothing like Uncle Nigel’s lawn though, right?” said Jeremy.
Dan shuddered at the memory. “That was the ugliest patch of grass on God’s Earth and he made me mow it every Sunday. It was more weeds than grass in fact, and there was that bare circle in the middle that never grew, do you remember? Like the bald patch on a monk’s head.”
“You told me that was where he buried his wife. You said he fed her so much poison, the grass wouldn’t grow on top of her.”
“Yeah, but I was only messing with you. Mum told me Aunt Angela died of lung cancer, but you wanted to know why the bare patch was there so I had to make something up. Anyway, you could say he poisoned her. She wasn’t the smoker in that house, he was.”
Dan remembered scrubbing the kitchen floor while his uncle just sat there, his long yellow fingers pinching the end of a rollup as his eyes watched him beadily, trying to read his thoughts. And the stink of stale tobacco that permeated everything in that house, even the cat’s fur.
“It scared me thinking about her under that lawn,” said Jeremy. “Still, I’d have played football on it all the same, if Uncle had let us.”
“He said we’d ruin it, which is like saying you’d ruin a car wreck by sitting in it. I think he just hated the idea of us having fun. He wanted that lawn all to himself. When I finished mowing it, he made me carry out his table and chair so he could drink his whisky and smoke his roll-ups in the garden. He’d put on that velvet jacket like he was Lord of the bloody Manor, but the guy had no class. What was it Bill Clinton said?”
“You can stick wings on a pig, but it won’t make it a swan,” said Jeremy.
“I think he said eagle , not swan , but it comes to the same thing.”
They sipped their beers. Somewhere nearby, a dog howled. An aeroplane, impossibly distant, drew a slow chalk line across the sky.
“I think you should let this one grow,” said Jeremy, stretching his leg out so the toe of his trainer brushed the edge of the lawn. “Let it grow ten inches or a foot, just to spite Uncle.”
Dan laughed. “It’s tempting, but I don’t think so. I’m going to buy myself a little electric mower this weekend, take it down to a nice height. I’ll trim the hedges, too. Maybe I’ll do it on Saturday afternoon so Elaine will see it at its best.”
“It’s funny that she’s called Elaine,” said Jeremy.
“Oh yeah, why’s that?”
“Don’t you remember? That was the name of that woman I met at the library – Kay’s friend.”
“As in Kay who you were dating, the one who died?”
“Yeah. Her friend was called Elaine. Is that quite a common name do you think?”
“I’m not sure. Anyway, it can’t be the same one. The Elaine I met is an actress.”
“Right.”
More sipping of beers. Dan enjoyed the quiet. It was different to the quiet of pubs in the afternoon, which made him feel lethargic and purposeless. The quiet that came at the end of a working day felt earned. The beer tasted better at this time, too. All in all, what with this Elaine thing, he was feeling very contented. He’d enjoyed himself last night. She was quite something, like a new taste in the mouth – sweet with dark depths. On second viewing, she had no longer reminded him so much of the young Hillary Clinton, not that it mattered – in fact it was a good thing. Her prettiness was based on no pre-existing templates. It was all future, and free of predilection. Not his type or anyone’s type. Just herself.
Of course there were one or two minor doubts. The sheer speed at which they’d moved from driving lesson to kissing on her sofa was enough to trigger a faint warning light on his inner dashboard. And then there was that thing she’d said, just before they started kissing, that hadn’t made any sense. If only he could remember what it was.
But he was probably just trying to find faults, like when he’d seen that sixth-gen, 1.0-litre EcoBoost Fiesta with immaculate bodywork on a forecourt for under ￡900 and immediately wanted to check under the bonnet. But he ought to trust his instincts in this case. She made him feel good, and what else mattered in the end? Another serious romance had definitely not been in his plans this soon after Lorna, but Dan had always taken the attitude that plans, like rules, should adapt to meet new realities. Ideally, he’d have liked to meet her in six months or a year, but you could never time these things.
Whenever Dan felt this happy, he’d think of his brother, wanting the same for him. Jeremy, quietly sipping his beer, seemed okay, at least on the surface. But he’d lost that glow, that spring-heeled vitality he had whenever he was e-dating.
“Are you back on Serendipity, Jerry?” he asked.
Jeremy shook his head. “My heart’s not in it any more. Not after what happened with Kay. I can’t believe she just died like that. It’s so sad.”
“Yeah. And she liked you too.”
“I know! It’s enough to make me think I might be cursed. Finally, a woman likes me, and then bam! She’s dead.”
Dan did the sympathy pout with his face – wasted on Jeremy in the fading light. “Still,” he said. “It should give you confidence that she liked you. She was a corker that one.”
“Wasn’t she just.”
Dan drained the last of his beer. He made out the shadow of a blackbird perched on a neighbour’s fence post. In a distant garden, a child shouted. He smelled cooking somewhere – grilled fish maybe.
“You should get back out there, Jerry,” he said. “When you’re ready I mean.”
“I will. You know me. Nothing keeps me down for long.”
Dan chuckled. “That’s for sure.”
“So what’s she like then, this Elaine? ”
“Oh, mad as a box of frogs, but nice. Very nice.”
“Mad how?”
“Well, she was one of my pupils, and at the end of the lesson, right out of the blue, she invited me over to hers for a bakery lesson.”
“Does that sort of thing happen to you often?”
“Never. But it’s not just that. There’s something about her. She believes in ghosts for one thing.”
“Yeah, well so do I,” said Jeremy. “You never believed me but I swear I heard Mum and Dad sometimes in Uncle Nigel’s house.”
“Yeah, I told her about that. But she was talking about ghosts of the living. Reckons she sees her Dad sometimes in this little park in Hampstead Heath, even though he’s still alive – or she says he is. She hasn’t seen him in years, so who knows? Oh yeah, and she has this unusual hobby: taking photographs of infrastructure.”
“What’s that?”
“Roads and bridges and stuff. Her pictures are good. I really liked them. They’re just little bits of urban landscape, mostly without people. Things you see every day but never think about.”
“She sounds quite similar to Kay,” said Jeremy. “She used to take pictures of empty car parks, remember?”
“That’s right, she did! It’s funny, you know I thought of that when she mentioned infrastructure, but I didn’t make the connection. It’s another one of those weird coincidences.”
“Life seems to be full of them. ”
“Yeah, it does,” said Dan. “Well, I suppose we should go in. My beer’s finished and I’m getting cold. Will you stay for something to eat?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“It’s fine if you want to, Jerry. I’ve got plenty in.”
“No really, I fancy a walk and then maybe a pub supper.”
“As you please.”
They went inside, into the almost empty shell of a flat with its newly painted walls and bare, varnished floorboards. The rooms were big with high ceilings. There were sash windows, dado rails, ceiling roses and big iron radiators, and all that somehow made it seem even emptier. Dan had bought himself a bed, a table and a couple of dining chairs. He needed more furniture but he was enjoying the spartan feel for now and the lack of clutter. It matched his state of mind: a future unwritten, unfolding before his eyes like an open road with no signposts or destinations. He could see himself driving that road in a convertible, maybe a Jaguar F-Type or a Porsche Boxter, with Elaine by his side. A perfect scene, apart from that one little doubt hovering there, like a stain on the horizon. She’d said something that evening – something that made no sense. The memory of it kept scratching away at a corner of his consciousness, trying to gain access. What had they been talking about?
He stood on his front step and waved his brother goodbye, watched him amble away along the pavement until a hedge hid him from view. Dan lingered there for a moment, taking in the view of his new street: a row of big houses, built more than a century ago, with walls of deep, brownish-red bricks, generous windows and steep-pitched roofs. The big corner house diagonally opposite had a turret with a tall, steepled roof, like an Edwardian rocket ship, complete with finial, pointing into the deep blue sky. In one of the turret’s upper windows a curtain fluttered. Briefly, Dan saw a face there, or thought he did, then the curtain dropped.
Something snapped in his mind at that moment, like a circuit closing, and he remembered the impossible thing Elaine had said. They’d been talking about his brother and the ghosts, and he’d told her how he regretted being so tough on him, not allowing him to believe in them, and she’d told him not to be so hard on himself. You were only thirteen yourself , she’d said, and you had little Jeremy to look after.
That was it – that mention of “Jeremy”. He didn’t see how she could have known his name, because he definitely hadn’t told her.