ordinary bank overdraft is always at maximum. The finance company was inflexible. I knew Malcolm wouldn’t give me the money, he has those stupid warped views, but I did think he might guarantee… just for a short while…’
To save the whole pack of cards collapsing, perhaps he might. Malcolm wasn’t cruel. He’d lent Edwin money sometimes in the past. Donald, I thought, had stood a good chance.
‘But when you’d found where he was, you didn’t get in touch with him, did you?’
‘No,’ Donald said, i didn’t relish telling Malcolm our troubles. I didn’t want to look a fool, and Helen thought of a different way out.’
I looked at her enquiringly.
‘Popped my baubles,’ she said with a brave attempt at lightness. ‘Took them to London. All my lovely rocks.’ She held her head high, refusing to cry.
‘Pawned them?’ I said.
‘We’ll get them back,’ she said valiantly, trying to believe it.
‘What day did you pop them?’
‘Wednesday. Donald took the money in cash to the finance company, and that gives us a three-months’ breather.’
Wednesday, I thought. The day after someone had failed to kill Malcolm at Newmarket.
‘When did the finance company start threatening you?’
‘The Thursday before,’ Helen said. ‘They gave us a week. They were utterly beastly, Donald said.’
‘Vivien tried to get Malcolm to give us some money,’ Donald said with resentment, ‘and he flatly refused.’
‘Well,’ I said, half smiling, ‘she called him an evil, wicked, vindictive tyrant, and that’s not the best way in the world to persuade Malcolm to be generous. If she’d used honey, she might have succeeded.’
Helen said, ‘You’re the only one he’ll listen to. I don’t care if you get millions more than us. All the others are furious about it, they don’t believe it about equal shares in his will, but I don’t care. If you could just… I mean…’
‘I’ll try,’ I promised, ‘but the equal shares are true.’
It fell on deaf ears. They believed what they believed, the whole lot of them, feeding and reinforcing their fears every time they consulted.
I left Donald and Helen among their antique furniture and behind their shaky facade and trundled along to Quantum to see how things were developing.
Not fast, was the answer. The place was abandoned except for a solitary uniformed policeman sitting in a police car outside what had been the front door. One could see right through the house now. The tarpaulin that had hung from the roof had come down. The policeman was the one who had accompanied me on my tour of peering in through the windows, and I gathered he was pleased to have a visitor to enliven a monotonous stint.
He picked up his car radio and spoke into it to the effect that MrIan Pembroke had come by. A request came back, which he relayed to me: would Mr Pembroke please drop in at the police station when he left? Mr Pembroke would.
The policeman and I walked round to the back of the house. Mr Smith had gone, also his helpers. The last of the rubble was away from the house and overflowing a skip. A flat black plastic sheet, the sort used for roofing hayricks, lay where a week ago the walls of my bedroom had come tumbling down. The interior doors had been sealed with plywood, like the windows, to deter looters, and the broken end of the staircase had been barred off. A house with its centre torn out; a thirty-foot yawn between surviving flanks.
‘It looks terrible,’ I said, and the policeman agreed.
Arthur Bellbrook was cleaning his spades, getting ready to leave. I gave him a cheque for his wages for that week and the next, and added a chunk for the care of the dogs. He gave me dignified thanks. He hoped Mr Pembroke was all right, poor man, and I said I thought so.
I had my picture in the paper,’ he said. ‘Did you see it?’
I said I was sorry I hadn’t.
‘Oh, well. I did.’ He shrugged disappointedly and set off homewards, and I walked down to where he’d earlier been digging potatoes, and then further, to check that the nettles were still untrampled on the far side of the wall.
The green sea looked dusty and ageing but upright. They too, I supposed, would die with the frost.
The policeman was watching me incuriously. I stopped and stared at the house from a distance, giving the impression that that’s why I had gone as far as I had, and then walked back and took my leave. The house from