Present day #2
‘I guess not. But if I say yes, it means Apollo can stay at his school.’ The young woman spoke with a certain reticence, as if she might be letting the side down. Not that Lilly viewed it in this way, not at all.
‘Well, that’s a good thing.’ Lilly hated the thought of everyone moving on and moving out.
Not that she had any intention of doing either.
Equally, she knew that a lack of housing security for Clodagh and Apollo meant it was probably smart to take what was on offer and make it permanent. The best thing to allow them to settle.
Mrs Veerswamy had, unsurprisingly, already accepted a move to Bromley to be nearer her son and his wife.
And Mr Chaplin in flat four was apparently being moved into residential care at a place in Walworth.
Not that she saw much of him any more. Various carers popping in and out gave her updates.
He was the second-longest resident of Waide House after herself.
She remembered with fondness his late wife, Alma, who used to smoke out of the window, and their daughter, Judy, who moved to Canada decades ago.
Alma had bought Lilly a paperweight for her birthday one year.
She still had it somewhere. And the kindness of the Chaplins on that day when she had almost fallen apart . . .
‘Do you want me to change my shift at work? I can try and wangle it so I’m here for the meeting?’ Clodagh’s offer was touching. She wished Glenda could have heard it.
‘Goodness, no! I can handle Mr Vaughan. Off you pop. Come in for a cuppa later and I’ll fill you in.’
‘Yes, I will. I’ll bring unsold cake!’ Clodagh called as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
Lilly placed the stick in the corner of the hallway, propped behind the door.
The brochure for The Fortescue was on the table.
It was impossible to imagine: the shiny kitchens, fancy bathrooms, spacious open-plan living rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows, communal spaces with velvet sofas, the vast chandeliers, and a bloody rooftop swimming pool!
All on the footprint of this little development.
Were it not her home that was at risk, it would have been nothing but impressive.
She put the kettle on to boil, then was drawn by a knock at the door.
‘Hello, Mrs Cooper?’ a voice she recognised called through the letterbox.
‘Mr Vaughan!’ She stared at the little metal flap, now raised and through which he spoke.
‘Yes.’ He seemed a little out of puff. ‘I’m aware I’m horribly early.’
‘Two hours early,’ she pointed out.
‘Yes, I know. Thing is, I now have to be in Romford this afternoon and wondered if it might be possible for us to chat now, so I can fit it all in.’
‘You see, that bothers me, Mr Vaughan. The assumption that I am simply at home waiting for you to turn up. I might have plans, places to be, people to meet!’
‘Do you – have places to be, people to meet?’
‘That’s not the point!’ she snapped. ‘I don’t have to let you in!’
Lilly Cooper knew her rights.
He stood his ground. ‘I am not asking to come in, Mrs Cooper—’
‘For the umpteenth time, it’s Miss!’ she interrupted him, riled by so much more than his inability to address her properly and the fact he was in her space, upsetting her morning, bringing this horrible, horrible possibility of having to move out to her front door.
‘My apologies, Miss Cooper,’ he enunciated. ‘What I’m proposing is that you let me in so we can talk face to face. Things are tricky enough without us having to converse through the letterbox.’
‘I agree, so let’s not converse at all!’ she suggested, pulling her kimono close around her body, leaning on the wall of the hallway, feeling the bite of the defunct storage heater against the back of her legs.
It happened this way sometimes, when she got up too quickly or hadn’t eaten; she felt a little light-headed, a bit chilly in her bones.
Her eyes sought out the dent in the wainscot where her dad had once chased a visiting mouse with a hockey stick.
Don’t kill it! she’d screeched with an emotional teenage sentiment that hadn’t really left her, as he lunged towards the tiny furry creature who seemed to be cowering, all wide-eyed and cute. No doubt due to her diversionary shout, he had missed the target and whacked the wood, hence the dent.
I’m not going to kill it, but I’d rather it didn’t move in with its fifty siblings! They’d both laughed at another absurd tale that, like so many other memories, became part of the fabric of this flat, this building . . . all lost for ever if it were to be razed to the ground.
‘The only way to resolve this issue is to talk about it, Mrs – Miss – Miss Cooper! Miss!’
‘No, the only way to resolve this issue, Mr Vaughan, is for you to leave me alone! I am not moving, and I am not selling!’ she fired.
‘Or you could write me another of those threatening letters. I have so many I might wallpaper my kitchen with them!’ She smiled at the thought and wondered if she had any wallpaper paste, liking the visual as a way to protest.
‘So, you’ve read them?’ His tone suggested this was a win.
‘Some of them,’ she admitted, unwilling to confess that she had found most of them down the back of the unit in the hallway, gathering dust where they must have toppled.
‘You seem like a nice lady. I am only doing my job, but I would like to say that this development is going ahead. We have gone through all the correct legal channels and notified you accordingly. The fact that you have not responded within the time frames allowed for response is not really our fault. Your obstinacy at this stage in proceedings is only making things harder for everyone.’
‘I disagree. I think my obstinacy at this stage in proceedings is making things decidedly better for me. If I wasn’t obstinate, I’d be preparing to go like Mr Chaplin, Mrs Veerswamy, the lovely Polish couple on the ground floor, and Miss Newman and her son.
’ She stared at the stick Apollo had given her for safekeeping and briefly imagined poking young Mr Vaughan through the letterbox with it.
‘I don’t want to be whisked off to a bloody newbuild in the suburbs.
I don’t want to leave my home! My obstinacy is the only reason I’m still here after all these years and why I will remain here. I’m not going anywhere!’
‘So you’ve said, but the thing is, you can go wherever you want to.
No one’s suggesting a newbuild in the suburbs.
We will honour the market value of your property, which I can tell you is coming in at a very attractive price, well over a million.
’ It was, she knew, a lot of money, but it wouldn’t buy her this flat anywhere else, because there was no other flat like this one and certainly not with the view, her memories, her childhood footprints on the floor, her dad’s scent in this hallway, her history in its walls.
‘You could even buy a one-bedder in The Fortescue!’
She wasn’t sure if he spoke in jest, but her anger boiled just the same.
‘I don’t care about market value. This is my home, it’s always been my home, this is where I want to live!
I have no intention of selling! And if I ever did, it would be because I had decided the time was right, and not because some upstart developers with a shiny brochure were harassing me and trying to force my hand! ’
‘We’re not harassing you, Mrs Cooper. We just want to talk. Mr Portland himself has said he’d be happy to come and see you, if you would prefer that?’
‘Sweet Lord above! I don’t want to talk to anyone about it! Don’t you ever get bored of going around in circles, Mr Vaughan?’
‘Actually, I do. Yes.’ He sounded resigned, tired, fed up. It was hard to tell which. ‘I have a bad back and having to walk up and down your stairs and bend to holler through this letterbox is doing me no favours at all.’
Lilly smiled. It was funny, human and too bloody bad!
‘How did you hurt your back?’ She was nosy, curious. He was only young, early thirties if she had to guess.
‘I got roped in to play cricket in Greenwich Park last year, fielding. My lack of prowess on the sporting field was no match for my overconfidence. Someone lobbed a ball and I overreached, skidded on wet grass and landed in a heap. I was in agony, and when I looked up my teammates were crowded around me, screaming at me for dropping the ball. I felt like a right chump. I never played again.’
‘There’s a lesson there, I suppose: don’t drop the ball.’ She smiled.
‘Good advice.’ She heard the echo of amusement in his tone.
‘Doesn’t sound like cricket is your thing.’
‘No, I prefer football. Watching it, that is, not playing.’
‘Who do you support?’
‘Millwall.’ She noted the man’s silence, as if waiting for her response. ‘You not a Millwall fan?’
‘No. Not a football fan at all,’ she admitted, thinking of Derek Manners . . . You heard about Lineker?
‘Look, Miss Cooper . . .’ Hurrah! He’d got it right, this momentary joy tempered by the fact that they had very quickly, it seemed, got to the ‘look’ stage, suggesting he might be running out of options and patience.
Look . . . we need you to comply. Look .
. . everyone is getting a little sick and tired of your shenanigans.
Look . . . you’re only going to make it harder for yourself in the long run.
Well, everyone could sod off! ‘I want this to be as straightforward as possible for you,’ he continued.
‘Once the compulsory purchase notice is issued, things change, and sometimes they change quite quickly.’
‘Change how?’ The idea of having no legal say and being forced to sell made her feel sick.