as sugar…’ He paused, remembering. ‘I don’t know what you’d call it, really, what she was. But for instance last year, as well as the ordinary vegetables for the house, I grew a special little patch separately… fed them, and so on… to enter in the local show. Just runner beans, carrots and onions, for one of the produce classes. I’m good at that, see? Well, Mrs Pembroke happened to spot them a day or two before I was ready to harvest. On the Thursday, with the show on the Saturday. “What huge vegetables,” she says, and I tell her I’m going to exhibit them on Saturday. And she looks at me sweet as syrup and says, “Oh no, Arthur. Mr Pembroke and I both like vegetables, as you know. We’ll have some of these for dinner tomorrow and I’ll freeze the rest. They are our vegetables, aren’t they, Arthur? If you want to grow vegetables to show, you must do it in your own garden in your own time.” And blow me, when I came to work the next morning, the whole little patch had been picked over, beans, carrots, onions, the lot. She’d taken them, right enough. Pounds and pounds of them, all the best ones. Maybe they ate some, but she never did bother with the freezing. On the Monday, I found a load of the beans in the dustbin.’
‘Charming,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘That was her sort of way. Mean, but within her rights.’
‘I wonder you stayed,’ I said.
‘It’s a nice garden, and I get on all right with Mr Pembroke.’
‘But after he left?’
‘He asked me to stay on to keep the place decent. He paid me extra, so I did.’
Walking slowly, we arrived back at the kitchen door. He smelled faintly of compost and old leaves and the warm fertility of loam, like the gardener who’d reigned in this place in my childhood.
‘I grew up here,’ I said, feeling nostalgia.
He gave me a considering stare. ‘Are you the one who built the secret room?’
Startled, I said, ‘It’s not really a room. Just a sort of triangular-shaped space.’
‘How do you open it?’
‘You don’t.’
‘I could use it,’ he said obstinately, ‘for an apple store.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s too small. It’s not ventilated. It’s useless, really. How do you know of it?’
He pursed his lips and looked knowing. ‘I could see the kitchen garden wall looked far too thick from the back down at the bottom corner and I asked old Fred about it, who used to be gardener here before he retired. He said Mr Pembroke’s son once built a sort of shed there. But there’s no door, I told him. He said it was the son’s business, he didn’t know anything about it himself, except that he thought it had been bricked up years ago. So if it was you who built it, how do you get in?’
‘You can’t now,’ I said. ‘I did brick it up soon after I built it to stop one of my half-brothers going in there and leaving dead rats for me to find.’
‘Oh.’ He looked disappointed. ‘I’ve often wondered what was in there.’
‘Dead rats, dead spiders, a lot of muck.’
He shrugged. ‘Oh well, then.’
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell my father.’
His lined face showed satisfaction. ‘You tell him I’ll keep the dogs and everything in good nick until he comes back.’
‘He’ll be grateful.’
I picked up the suitcase from inside the kitchen door, gave a last look at Moira’s brilliant geraniums, vibrantly alive, shook the grubby hand of Arthur Bellbrook, and (in the car hired that morning in London) drove away towards Epsom.
Collecting my own things from my impersonal suburban flat took half the time. Unlike Malcolm, I liked things bare and orderly and, meaning always to move to somewhere better but somehow never going out to search, I hadn’t decked the sitting-room or the two small bedrooms with anything brighter than new patterned curtains and a Snaffles print of Sergeant Murphy winning the 1923 Grand National.
I changed from Malcolm’s trousers into some of my own, packed a suitcase and picked up my passport. I had no animals to arrange for, nor any bills pressing. Nothing anywhere to detain me.
The telephone answering machine’s button glowed red, announcing messages taken. I rewound the tape and listened to the disembodied voices while I picked out of the fridge anything that would go furry and disgusting before my return.
Something, since I’d left the day before, had galvanised the family into feverish activity,