his voice, become confidential. ‘Can’t say too much, bit of a sad case – old lady’s died, and her daughter, she’s not quite right, know what I mean? Gone into hospital.’
‘You mean they’ve put her away?’
‘The old mother died suddenly, there was an inquest. It was in the paper, in the Reporter.’
She didn’t say, my husband was there when she died. That was irrelevant. But they’d wondered what had happened to the Axon girl. Not that they’d known the Axons, really; they were the kind of neighbours you didn’t set eyes on from one year to the next. ‘What hospital has she gone to?’
‘As to that, I couldn’t say. You see what it was, madam, they were recluses. They didn’t like other people in the house. So they didn’t keep up with repairs. Well, two ladies, you don’t expect it. But it’s a lovely property.’
‘All right. When can we have the key?’
They’d been to see it together. Florence met them at the gate. ‘Well?’ She was anxious that Colin’s decision should not be coloured by the unpleasant episode that had taken place in the house a few weeks earlier. He’d called on Florence late one afternoon, fortunately as it turned out; plodding out through the twilit garden to inspect, at her request, a dubious bit of guttering, he’d noticed something very strange going on at the Axon house. At an upstairs window, a young woman was gesturing, calling for help; very odd, but Colin hadn’t hesitated. Florence had watched amazed as he crashed through the shrubbery and pounded on the Axons’ back door, ready to break it down. Once inside he’d raced up the stairs to let the girl out; Mrs Axon had pursued him, only to meet with an accident. It came out later that she’d had a heart attack, as well as a fall. Colin had given artificial respiration; with no result. And the young woman? She was a social worker, making her calls; the old lady had tricked her into the spare bedroom and turned the key. God knows what else had been going on at number 2. Would Colin want it?
‘Well,’ he’d said cautiously, ‘it’s cheap. It needs work.’ But if the last occupants had left shadows, he thought he could dispel them. ‘We could cut some of these trees down,’ he said. ‘Let some light in.’
‘Yes,’ Sylvia had said. ‘Then Florence could see in our garden, couldn’t she?’ She was not enthusiastic about that. But the trees would have to go, and all the junk that the Axons had left behind them; and that little glasshouse that the agent had called a conservatory, with its cracked and grimy panes and its mound of cardboard and newspapers all festering and damp. What a clean-up job! But think of the possibilities…
So they had put down a holding deposit, and Colin had called the solicitor. Contracts were exchanged within weeks. Their married life had been full of upheavals; this was the only thing that had gone smoothly.
Sylvia turned back to her albums.
How the photographs improved, from shiny dog-eared scraps, faded brown with age, to the borderless silk prints of recent date. Here she stood before the front door of Buckingham Avenue, her arm through her husband’s. Florence, she thought, must have taken the picture. Behind them, the house looked like the set of a Hammer Films production; that ugly stained glass in the front door, those great clumps of evergreens shading the paths. The woodwork was rotting, the downspouts were in a deplorable condition; and the two figures who stood before it were hardly in a better one. Colin must have been fourteen stone there, she thought. Look at his belly hanging over his belt. Look at the silly expression on his face.
Her own image offered little comfort. Her tight skirt – surely unfashionably short? – emphasised her large hips and stocky legs; she was still out of shape after her recent pregnancy. Here she was, holding the new baby Claire, peeping at the camera with a simper above the infant’s shawled bulk. Her hair had been bleached out to a strawlike mess. Had she not known that backcombing and lacquer would ruin it? Worse, had she not known that no one else had used them for years?
No doubt at the factory, she thought, we were behind the times. We didn’t know any better. She accorded an indulgent smile to her teenaged self, making up for a Friday night out, scrubbing her fair skin until the aura of animal fat, sodium polyphosphates and assembly-line sweat was completely wiped away and she moved in a mist of Yardley’s cologne and heart-skipping expectation towards the weekly dance; off she went, a great big beautiful baby doll. Then, on the seven o’clock train, she had met Colin.
It was an awful photograph, why had she ever kept it? Quickly she detached it from the page and put it down on the bedside cabinet. There was a blank space now in the album, a testament to her vanity. There she was again, arms folded outside number 2. The garden had been dug over, and the house behind her had all its woodwork painted a gleaming white. It had been a gruelling yearlong slog, up and down ladders with buckets of paste, backbreaking work; but it was a big house, and there was land at the side to accommodate the extension they had eventually built, giving them a fourth bedroom and a much bigger kitchen. That was the whole point about Buckingham Avenue, it offered such scope for improvement. How much easier it would have been if their removal had not coincided with the crisis in Colin’s life. There had been a girlfriend, of course; he supposed she didn’t know. His behaviour was odd and abstracted, even by his own standards. He had drunk too much, whenever he could get his hands on some alcohol; they could not afford, in those days, to keep a stock in the house. Their petrol bills had soared; where did he go? Finally, of course, he’d been breathalysed and banned from driving. His little affair had come to nothing. That was obvious, wasn’t it? He was still here, she was still here; here they were.
Sylvia looked at her watch. Ten past one. She let the albums slip onto the bed, yawned, stretched, and peeled off her tracksuit, dropping it into the laundry basket. She went into the bathroom, washed, and cleaned her teeth vigorously. Back in the bedroom, she averted her face to avoid the sight of herself half-naked in the dressing table mirror. Her thighs were going, her tummy had gone; after four pregnancies, what could you expect? If she had known then what she knew now … She pulled on her baggy cotton trousers, and took out of the drawer a tee shirt which said in big black letters NURSERY SCHOOLS ARE OUR RIGHT. Running a hand through her hair, she mooched off downstairs.
Lizzie Blank, the daily (a German name, Sylvia supposed), was standing at the sink wringing dirty water from a cloth. ‘All right, Lizzie?’ Sylvia said.
‘All right, Mrs S?’
Sylvia crossed to the fridge. She opened it, picked out a lettuce leaf, and stood nibbling it while she surveyed her domestic. She supposed that a survey of Lizzie Blank would be a comfort to any normal woman who was afraid of losing her looks. Weird was the only word for her.
Lizzie Blank was a woman of no age that could easily be determined. Her dumpling body, entirely without a waistline, was supported on peg-shaped legs. Her hair, platinum blond and matted, had a height and stiffness that Sylvia’s in its heyday had never approached; two little squiggles, shaped like meat hooks, stood stiffly out by each ear. Her large face – rather blank in truth – was so caked with make-up that it was impossible to decide what it might look like naked, and her eyelids, outlined in thick black pencil, were painted a vivid teal blue. How many pairs of false eyelashes she wore, Sylvia could not take it upon herself to say. Her magenta lips bore no relation to her real mouth, but were overpainted greasily onto the skin, so that the merest twitch of her cheek muscles brought about a smile or a pout. The lips worked unceasingly; the eyes remained quite dead.
‘How was your trip?’ Sylvia asked.
‘Okay. One of us thought there would be donkeys. We had them before, when we went on a day trip.’
‘I think you only get them at the seaside.’
‘I
