Chapter 47
NANCY
The next morning, Nancy went into the kitchen to make a piece of toast before she left for work and found Clifford sitting at the table staring forlornly into his cereal bowl. He looked tired and lost. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him even though he’d brought all this on himself.
‘I’m making a cuppa. Do you want one?’ she asked.
He looked up at her, his eyes solemn. ‘What I want is my old life back.’
She sighed. ‘You gave it up, Clifford. There’s no turning back the clock.’
‘Why not? Can’t we call it a middle-life crisis, a blip, and get back to how we were?’
That would be so convenient for him, but it was something she wasn’t prepared to do. Couldn’t do. She literally couldn’t bear to go back to her former life with Clifford. It lacked fun, colour, purpose. ‘We’re divorced, Clifford. I’ve moved on and you must too.’
‘I don’t even know how you can live with these people! That woman Jackie is clearly a nymphomaniac – she’s always strutting around half naked and the other one, Phyllis, is as mad as a hatter.’ He leaned forward. ‘She’s got a crystal ball in her room and she talks to herself.’
‘She’s a spiritualist,’ Nancy told him. ‘She can foretell the future. And contact spirits.’
The spoon dropped out of his hand with a clang. ‘What! She thinks she can talk to dead people? That’s a load of rubbish.’
Nancy shrugged. ‘Well, she believes it.’ She stirred sugar in her coffee, put it on a tray with her toast and was about to take it out with her when Clifford called her back.
‘Nancy, that box room… I think it’s haunted.’ Luckily, she held onto the tray firmly or the whole lot would have gone crashing to the floor. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I keep being woken up in the night by someone cackling or whispering. Whenever I get out of bed and go out into the hall it’s all quiet, you’re all in bed asleep.
It’s happened both nights. When I finally manage to go back to sleep I get woken up by that bloody cat staring at me.
Looking right into my eyes. She’s like a perishing witch’s cat. ’
Nancy had to force back a giggle. Cobweb was as soft as they come, but then Clifford didn’t like cats, did he? She bet that Phyllis had let Cobweb into the room. And she knew that the cackles in the night were Slate’s doing.
‘You must have been dreaming about the cackling and whispers, and Cobweb must have slipped in when you left the door open.’ She put the tray down on the worktop. ‘Look, Clifford, you had your early retirement payout and surely must have some of our savings left. Go and get yourself a flat.’
The door opened and Phyllis walked in. She was holding her tea-reading cup. ‘Anyone want their tea leaves read?’ she asked.
Clifford uttered a sigh of exasperation and stormed out.
‘Oops, has something upset him?’ Phyllis asked innocently.
Nancy repeated what he’d told her about his disturbed night. ‘He said his room is haunted.’
‘What an imagination,’ Phyllis said. ‘By the way, dear, has Clifford got a relative who’s passed over? Ideally someone whom he didn’t get on with?’
‘Yes, his brother, Raymond. Why?’
Phyllis winked. ‘Now that would be telling.’