army of childhood toys, bodies in heaps, defeated, on the shelves. I picked up a dusty lion, and a long strawberry-blonde hair was caught in the polyester fur – a fine thread, sixteen inches long, frail and yet here it was, even after all these years. The light glinted on its kinks. My heart began to swell with a fresh sense of loneliness and despair.
It was coming up to 5 p.m. when the doorbell rang. The hours of waiting dissolved, suddenly meant nothing. With indecent haste, I rushed to open it.
Tom was standing in the porch. His hair was dishevelled and he had a scratch across his cheek. He was already turning away.
‘Tell Ailsa I’m home, could you?’ he said. ‘Only for half an hour, so I wouldn’t mind a quick chat. I’m out again this evening. Client drinks.’
‘Ailsa’s not here.’
He slowly twisted until he was facing me. Carefully he rubbed the scratch on his cheek. ‘I thought she was supposed to be spending the afternoon with you. I thought she was finally getting to the bottom of the smell.’
His complexion was grey with tiredness and there was something vulnerable in his expression. For a second I felt sorry for him, but I thought about his drunken grope with Delilah and pulled myself up.
‘Nope,’ I said.
He stood for a second or two, his eyes half closed. He started nodding. ‘Fine. OK. Whatevs.’ He took a step back and raised both his hands to his head, elbows out, as if to take up as much space as he could; to intimidate me, I suppose. ‘But listen – I’ve had enough. This can’t go on.’ He made an expanding balloon-like gesture with his arms. ‘The stench. It’s coming through the walls.’ He wrinkled his face in disgust. ‘I’ve looked it up. I think it’s dry rot. Fruiting bodies.’
I made to close the door.
He took a step forward. ‘You’ve got worse, not better,’ he said. ‘You’re ill. Ailsa’s efforts, they’ve made no difference. I mean – what’s this?’ He pointed. His voice got louder. ‘Where’s it come from? What is it?’
I didn’t answer.
For the record it was a rotary clothes dryer I’d found down by the railway line on my way back from lunch with Fred.
‘Let me in.’ He took a step towards me, looming into the porch. ‘I want to see what’s going on.’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to report you to the council. I’ll have you evicted if nothing else. You’re a danger to the community.’
Trembling, I managed to get my weight behind the door.
‘Last chance,’ he said.
I upped my listening that evening. Scraps, mainly. Clunking on the piano (Bea?). A door closing too loudly (Melissa?). Tom and Ailsa’s voices, quiet. Mainly, a deadly silence interrupted only by the scrape of their kitchen chairs on the limestone tiles, the chink of cutlery, an occasional clearing of a throat.
I was convinced the next morning I would pull back the curtains to see someone from the council staring back at me. Adrian’s pale moon face.
Instead, I heard a tapping, regular and insistent, like the light hammering of a nail. I was using a glass, then, and when I held it to Mother’s wall I realised it was intercourse. A male grunt and a female cry gathering in intensity. So relations had resumed, I thought. But how awful, how humiliating for her, after how I’d seen him behave. I slid the glass away then, threw it down, with shame and embarrassment.
A few hours later, Ailsa texted me: ‘Sorry about yesterday. Held up.’ Naturally, I replied generously: ‘Couldn’t matter less.’ She followed with another: ‘Have to cancel Max’s session today – late notice. End-of-term madness! My bad!’
Stupid of me, I know, to have been upset. It took me a few minutes to compose both myself and my response. In the end, I wrote: ‘No problemo!’ and signed off with an ‘x’.
That afternoon, for something to do, I took Maudie and caught the bus down to Clapham Junction for a new ink cartridge, then walked back. It was a warm day and the common was busy. Brueglel meets Richard Scarry: small children haring along on scooters, legs dangling from trees, a mishmash of balls and dogs and picnics. The light was hazy, more white in the sky than blue. The leaves overhead looked limp, poised to wrinkle; the grass a vast, dried, pale-olive prairie.
I was passing the ice-cream van, temporarily blasted by heat from its generator, when I heard my name. ‘Verity; coo-ee.’
At first I thought I was hallucinating.