Every ten minutes, when Mr Rowse was working, the line would shuffle forward one place. When Mr Rowse took a rest, the line stayed as it was, sometimes for hours. Occasionally, in the evenings, Mr Rowse would catch up with himself and the line would clear altogether. But it wasn’t uncommon for clients to stand waiting all night.
‘Just like Harrods’ sale,’ said Rhoda.
‘Not in the least like Harrods’ sale,’ said Ken. ‘These people are destroyed by the system, not those who lick its arse.’
‘Neither of you have ever been to Harrods’ sale,’ said Apricot.
‘Oh-ah,’ groaned Rhoda this Thursday morning in November, holding her stomach. It was a warm day for the season, though damp. The roses had given up their annual struggle to keep things cheerful and now hemmed in Mr Rowse’s path with thorns.
‘You’d better go to the doctor,’ said Apricot.
‘And sit in his waiting room and catch God knows what? I’d rather die.’
‘Then why don’t you go to Mr Rowse?’ said Apricot. ‘The line’s only as far as the gate.’
‘Ken wouldn’t like it,’ said Rhoda.
Mr Rowse’s patients, forever winding down the path, oppressed Ken with the sense of his own age and mortality.
‘Ken won’t know,’ said Apricot. So Rhoda went.
Rhoda came home without a pain, besotted by Mr Rowse.
‘When he touches you his hands strike fire into you,’ she said. ‘I’m still tingling from head to toe.’
‘Did he say what caused the pain?’ asked Apricot, who, perforce, spoke and behaved pretty much like Rhoda’s mother, rather than her granddaughter.
‘He said I’d done something bad to deserve it,’ said Rhoda. ‘And he’s quite right, I have.’
‘What was it?’ asked Apricot, interested. Burned Ken’s sheet music by mistake or on purpose, argued with him, failed to stay up till he got home, and/or have his supper waiting in the oven? Those were the normal and acceptable patterns of Rhoda’s crimes. Apricot’s were to spend too much time on homework, not to have a boyfriend, not play an instrument, talk too much and be too big for her boots.
‘You remember your sister Wendy,’ said Rhoda, ‘the one who died of drink so young? Actually she was your mother. I should never have married your father. I told myself it didn’t matter because they weren’t husband and wife but Mr Rowse said the ceremony made no difference. Sin’s eaten a hole in the lining of my gut. Now I’ve got that off my chest I feel much better. Make me some cheese on toast, there’s a dear. It will give me a pain but it’s worth it.’
Apricot made Rhoda some cheese on toast, overcooked it and shrivelled the cheese.
‘Poor me,’ said Rhoda, ‘poor me,’ and she poured herself another cup of sweet strong tea, which burned all the way down. She wasn’t looking well. Her eyes were huge, her hair grey and her skin papery, but her heart remained childlike. The longer she lived with Ken the more like Wendy she became.
‘Poor you,’ said Apricot, agreeably. There was little point in taking offence, and no time to do so in any case. She had to pass her exams.
Rhoda’s pain and Mr Rowse battled it out for well over a year. Rhoda took to table-tapping and séances and reported seeing the ghost of Wendy hovering over her bed at night. Ken was always asleep when Wendy appeared.
‘I’m surprised she bothers,’ said Ken. ‘I’m surprised she isn’t too busy delivering milk bottles in the sky.’
‘She’s like she was the day she had Apricot,’ said Rhoda. ‘Her hair all frizzed out like a black halo and ever so sweet. One thing you could say for my daughter, she never let herself go. Even when she’d had a drink or so too many she still had her stocking seams straight.’ Since Wendy had taken to hovering over the bed, Rhoda had reclaimed her as a daughter and now spoke freely of the past.
‘She should have consulted me about Apricot’s name,’ said Ken. ‘She had no business not doing that.’ Some things out-rankle death.
‘Are you sure you shouldn’t see a doctor?’ asked Apricot, as Rhoda’s cough grew nastier. She smoked sixty cigarettes a day. The white paint on the window frames was encrusted with black. ‘What can a doctor do for her?’ said Ken. ‘When your number’s up your number’s up.’
Money was tight. Ken found it hard to adapt to the new age. Music was now for the young, not the middle aged: folk had taken over from jazz as the language of the radical and the