had passed the Aquarium where he used to take Jessica when she was small, then carried on up Roedean Road that rose with the cliff. No. 26 still had its stained-glass hotel fanlight: a rising sun with LYNTON HOTEL written underneath. It used to belong to Jim, Linda’s stepfather, and after his death it had been bought by a trust that built sheltered accommodation for the elderly. It was flats now – he didn’t know how many. There were six buzzers by the door and he was sure there had only been four the last time he came.
How could they say the world was getting bigger when all the time they just kept on dividing it up like this. What was it Jessica said? Something about matter being continuous, that you could divide up one piece over and over again and never stop. He didn’t understand what Jessica said half the time – hadn’t understood what she’d been saying, in fact, since she was about nine. But then children, he discovered, were the one thing in life you could love without understanding.
He rang the bell for Flat Three, which used to be the upstairs residents’ lounge, and about four minutes later a young woman in jeans opened the door, a pair of scissors in her hand.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi.’ She stared at him. ‘Belle said it would be you.’
‘Who’s me?’
‘You’re Joe, aren’t you? Her son-in-law, Joe? There’s a photograph of you on the sideboard upstairs. You on your wedding day,’ she said slowly.
‘Ah.’ Joe didn’t want to think about his wedding day right then, and his prick – which had gone from belonging to Joe Palmer to belonging to a munchkin to belonging to a Lego man – was about to drop off with the cold.
‘Only you’re old now.’
‘Older,’ he corrected her, shoving his way into the hallway. ‘But then that’s only natural.’
The girl nodded, unconvinced, and led the way upstairs past the badly maintained stairlift tracks.
‘I sent Lenny down to get the door. She’s younger than me,’ Belle said as he walked into the flat.
She was sitting in her wheelchair with a Chanel towel wrapped round her shoulders, which Linda had got free with some perfume and given to her mum as a Christmas present. The girl, Lenny, went and stood behind her and carried on cutting Belle’s hair. The toes of her boots were covered in grey curls and a halo of them had formed on the carpet around the chair.
When Joe thought about it later, it was what he remembered most about that afternoon in December: the sound of the scissors and Belle’s grey curls on Lenny’s boots.
‘Don’t mind, do you, Joe?’ Belle asked. ‘We was right in the middle.’
‘You go ahead. Wouldn’t want to get between a woman and her hair.’
He went over to the window, pulling the nets to one side. A seagull on the ledge eyed him and let out a shriek then flew away. In summertime you got a bird’s-eye view of the nudist beach from here.
‘Not such a good view in December, is it?’ Belle said, smiling.
He looked to see if Lenny was smiling as well, but she wasn’t.
The room was lit by the gas fire and a couple of heavily tasselled standard lamps with shawls draped over them. The lack of overhead light combined with net curtains, snow and twilight made it difficult to see anything but shadows in the room, and the flat suddenly felt as though it was waiting for somebody long overdue.
‘Your eyes all right?’ Joe asked Lenny.
She nodded, tucking the scissors into her belt as she started setting fat pink curlers in the old woman’s hair.
‘D’you want tea?’ Belle asked Lenny, her eyes closed. Then, without waiting for an answer, ‘Go and make us some tea, Joe, and don’t forget the biscuits.’ Her eyes opened and followed her son-in-law into the kitchenette in the corner. ‘And you can take your coat off – the flat’s got central heating.’
The light in the kitchenette was orange and unsteady, and speckled with the corpses of flies. It made his eyes hurt. Belle’s cupboards were full and it took him a while to find the tea caddy – the one with elephants on that he remembered from his courting days – behind the rows of sugar, flour and canned fruit and vegetables that she always had in, never having recovered from rationing and the urge to stockpile. The whistling kettle had been replaced by an electric one, and as he plugged it in he wondered when the overhaul had happened and why Lenny, the hairdresser, didn’t like him. Animals and children liked him, which meant that most men and women did as well. Why didn’t the hairdresser? He looked down at his black suit and dark purple tie and thought about her standing in the hallway with the scissors.
In the room next door the hairdryer went on, and when he took the tea in neither of the women looked up. Belle still had her eyes closed and he hoped she hadn’t fallen asleep. He put the Coronation tray on the coffee table and walked past the photographs on the sideboard, as alarmed as he always was at how prolific they made his life seem. They were nearly all of him, Linda and Jessica. The only one Belle had of herself was of her and her first husband, Linda’s father, who had drowned in the sea while home on leave at the end of the war. This was the first thing Belle ever told him. Then she said that Eric had never been able to make her laugh while he was alive, but talking about his death always set her off.
There were no photographs of her and Jim, her second husband, or even just of Jim. When he died all the money from the sale of the hotel went to Brighton Cricket Club, who got a new clubhouse and practice wickets built with it.
Joe looked at a photograph of himself as a grown man then looked away. The hairdryer cut out.
Belle’s hand went up to her hair and Lenny unhooked the mirror from the chimney breast.
‘Isn’t it nice? Won’t last, but isn’t it nice?’
‘Won’t last if you keep touching it and messing it up. Here.’ Lenny took a can of spray out of the case on the table and covered Belle’s head in it.
The spray hung heavily in the heated air.
‘You staying for tea?’ Belle asked her.
‘I should go. I’ve got Mrs Jenkins in Flat Four to do, and she’s going out tonight.’
‘Jenkins is always going out,’ Belle grumbled. ‘Probably goes out more than you do, and she’s not “Mrs”. Never got married – whatever she says. Pour her a cup, Joe.’
‘Milk? Sugar?’ he asked.
‘Both,’ Lenny said, packing away the hairdryer, scissors, spray and rollers into the case.
‘How many?’
‘How many what?’
‘Sugars.’
‘Three. Please.’
‘How many sugars’ll you have, Joe, now she’s not here to tell you off?’
He smiled, but didn’t put any in his cup.
‘Go on, just have one.’ Belle turned
