it won’t look so bad. And then we’ll leave it till spring.’
That wasn’t really what she’d meant, but she said, ‘You’ll need more than a lawnmower. It’s too long for that, the grass. You know, I wish—’
‘What do you wish?’ he said, smiling; it was something they had always come back to, her wishing, his asking to know her wish.
‘Oh, I was thinking about the carpets,’ she said. ‘What’s it going to look like, none of the old carpets fitting properly? I wish we’d persuaded the Watsons – oh, well, never mind. You don’t suppose—’
‘What?’ Bernie said.
‘I’ve just had an awful thought,’ Alice said. She loosened Bernie’s arm, and turned round to look at the light fitting. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘They haven’t,’ Bernie said. ‘They can’t have done.’
‘Maybe they’ve just taken that lightbulb,’ Alice said, without any hope.
‘Let’s go and look,’ Bernie said.
Room by room, they went through the house, and it turned out to be true. ‘What are you looking at?’ Sandra said, as they came into the room where she and Francis were bickering, and her mother explained. The children stopped their argument, and followed their parents through the house. For whatever reason, perhaps after the negotiations over the curtains and the failed ones over the carpet, the Watsons had apparently, before leaving, gone through the house and carefully removed every single lightbulb. It was incredible. On Francis’s face was a look, a usual one with him, of something like fear; he felt these difficulties as catastrophes, personal catastrophes, Alice always thought.
‘Well,’ Bernie said, when they had finished, and had settled, the four of them, on the sofa in the middle of the sitting room, ‘I’m going to write them a letter. Give them a piece of my mind. How many lightbulbs is it? Fifteen?’
‘Problem?’ the foreman said, coming in with the smaller of the coffee-tables. Alice explained.
‘Happens all the time,’ the foreman said. ‘You’d be surprised. Mostly out of meanness.’
‘My dad works for the Electricity,’ Francis offered.
‘Well, he’ll know all about lightbulbs,’ the foreman said jocosely.
‘No,’ Francis said seriously. ‘It’s mostly other things.’
Katherine had made her phone calls now, lying to everyone except the police. To the building society she said that Malcolm was unwell; he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sleeping after a restless night. She said this in her best, her bored telephone voice, consciously removing the fact that she had, the night before, called the same woman in a state of panic, telling her about Malcolm’s disappearance. She could hear the puzzlement at the other end of the line, and finally his secretary said, ‘But he seems all right.’
Katherine said sharply, ‘No, he’s not well.’
‘He’s asleep at home?’ his secretary said. ‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Are you suggesting—’ Katherine said.
‘It’s just that he phoned five minutes ago,’ the secretary said. ‘I was sorry to hear about his mother.’
‘His mother?’ Katherine said. ‘Oh – his mother—’
‘Yes, being taken ill like that – what I don’t understand—’ she went on, but Katherine interrupted her with apologies before putting the receiver down. She sat by the telephone, breaking out into a light sweat of sheer panic, her heart thumping, and in two minutes she dialled the same number and apologized – the confusion with Malcolm’s mother, she’d meant to be phoning the children’s, Daniel’s school, it was Daniel, their son, who was ill. ‘I must be going round the bend,’ she said amusedly, ‘ringing the number next to the school’s in the address book and saying Malcolm when I meant Daniel.’
‘That’s all right,’ the secretary said, obviously thinking there were better things for her to be doing. She phoned the florist’s, and this time, to Nick, but with even more of a telephone voice, it was her that was ill. ‘Eaten something,’ she said. ‘Awful bore.’
Nick told her not to worry, he’d hold the fort; there was something almost enthusiastic about the way he said it, and then he apologized again for not making it to her party the other night. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ he said. She had forgotten all about that; almost all about that; but he had reminded her, and that absence, so painful and crucial, returned at once, shamefully battling in her mind against this now more urgent, more dutifully felt absence. To the police, she would have told the exact truth, but now she could only tell them that Malcolm had turned up safe and sound, and in a sense, so he had.
Thank God, with five of them, the washing was constant; thank God that supplied her with something to do. As far as she could see, going through the piles, then, her heart beating, their joint wardrobe, Malcolm had taken no clothes. What that meant, good or bad, she couldn’t articulate even in her mind. She took it all downstairs, at least three loads, and deposited it on the utility-room floor. That was where the washing-machine, the boiler, the freezer, all sat together. It was a good thing with the washing machine; an efficient new one, its cycle went into passages of immense fury you couldn’t make yourself be heard over when it had been in the kitchen. Even in the utility room, it made the walls of the house shake at its juddering climaxes. She put a load of washing in. That would be something to fill the time, that and the ironing. She could have welcomed the children going off to school, or at least engaging in some kind of holiday activity that would have removed them for a while.
As for her, back in the dining room, she looked out of the window at the activity outside. Then, quite abruptly, she decided to go and offer the new neighbours a cup of coffee. Get to know them. It wouldn’t do to give the removal men coffee, and then be remote and stand-offish with the people you were going to live opposite. She stared, hard, at the unit, identical to her own, facing her house for anyone to see. Drawn out by that, she slipped on a pair of shoes and walked out of the house, leaving the front door open. ‘Won’t be a moment,’ she called.
‘There’s Katherine Glover,’ Anthea Arbuthnot observed to Mrs Warner, both comfortably settled at the window with the best view. ‘I thought she wouldn’t be long.’
‘Why’s that, then?’ Mrs Warner said, enjoying this.
‘I wouldn’t suppose she’d put up with all that cheap tat lying about in the road,’ Anthea said. ‘She’s very hot on that sort of thing. Only the other night, she was saying to me that something or other, I forget what, was bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood. One of nature’s complainers, I’d say.’
‘She works, she was telling me,’ Mrs Warner said, not believing a word of Anthea’s version, quite rightly.
‘That’s right,’ Anthea said. ‘But it’s a very superior job, I believe.’
‘Those children, they’re not very superior,’ Mrs Warner said.
‘Not at all,’ Anthea said. ‘Do you know, I think she’s just going over there to take a better look. Some people really are appallingly nosy,’ she went on, but that was a joke, and both she and Karen tittered
