‘Hello,’ the youngest of the removal men said satirically, coming through with a single chair. ‘Mind your back.’
‘Hello?’ she called again, and a woman her age, hair untidy, an expression of nervousness, came out into the hallway. At the same time, a pair of children, a boy, a child’s face, but too tall, and a girl with an unusual forward stance, dark and unformed, came halfway down the stairs, stood and looked.
‘Not there,’ an impatient man’s London voice said from somewhere else, and then ‘Who’s that?’ as he, too, came through, his shirt sleeves rolled. The four stood there and looked at Katherine, almost as if puzzled. She gathered herself.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Alice said, once Katherine had explained, had welcomed them to the neighbourhood, had suggested refreshments. Introductions had been made; Bernie had smiled quickly and returned to the sitting room. The children stayed where they were. ‘We’d like that –’ but the children shook their heads, and Bernie had things to do. ‘Well, I would, anyway.’ Katherine would have liked to have a look round the house – she’d never really known the Watsons, and the layout of all the houses was slightly different – but in a moment she and Alice were going back together over the road, and Alice was asking what the previous owners were like.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ Alice said, ‘I hope they weren’t great friends of yours, but…’ and she explained about the lightbulbs.
Katherine laughed a little and, no, she hadn’t known them well. ‘Come in,’ she said, with a big gesture. Alice had stopped halfway down the front garden path and was looking up at the front of their house. ‘It’s wistaria,’ Katherine said, laughing. ‘You’re shocked to see it doing so well up here, I can see, but it’s had a good year, ours,’ and, seizing Alice’s arm in a frank way, brought her into the house. ‘They surely didn’t take all the lightbulbs,’ she said, and then she was explaining about the Yorkshire character. ‘You’re from London,’ she said, not asking a question, and then was off on a great paragraph of generalisation. She could hear herself, how faintly mad she sounded, setting out what the people of Sheffield were like, and the people of the whole county too, all three ridings, ‘though we aren’t to say ridings any more, that’s all gone’, their tightness with money, the way they wouldn’t waste a word, their honesty and openness.
‘I see,’ Alice said, evidently wondering a little as they came into Katherine’s house. But Katherine went on, unable to help herself, and Alice helped her out with a banality she’d heard or read or seen, that there was a friendliness and openness in the north, which just wasn’t there in the south.
‘You won’t find people keeping themselves to themselves in the same way here,’ Katherine went on, forgetting that she had said exactly that of the departed miserly Watsons, who were nothing if not Yorkshire, had, indeed, according to Katherine, embodied the manners of the whole county.
‘I can see that already, the friendliness,’ Alice said, smiling awkwardly at this generous neighbour.
‘That’s kind of you,’ Katherine said. ‘But you’ll find that we’re all like that around here.’ She thought of saying that there were few people in the area who didn’t keep their door on the snib, but fell silent: this new neighbour would quickly discover that it wasn’t true, for one thing, and in any case it would have made the road sound a little common. She put the kettle on; she heard herself and her brave party voice, not able to be kind without making a comment on that kindness.
‘Normally,’ she went on, ‘I’d be at work by now.’
‘Really?’ Alice said. ‘Where do you work?’
‘Well, it’s quite a new thing,’ Katherine said. ‘I used to work, before the children were born. I mean, when I met my husband I was working at a solicitor’s, and then, after we married, I carried on working, though of course there was no real need, not at the solicitor’s, I didn’t carry on there. I worked at a school, not as a teacher, a sort of administrative job. Do you know Sheffield? No? Well, you must go and have a look at Peace Square. Most of Sheffield was bombed in the war, but that, it’s eighteenth century, untouched, really charming. That was where I worked, in the solicitor’s. Of course, when the children came along I gave up work, though you know, then, I don’t know if it was different in London, but it was quite unusual for a woman to go on working after she was married. You gave up, didn’t you, when you married, not when the children came along? It was the done thing.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said.
‘And, of course, the children – well, there were three of them, there are three of them, I should say, so it’s only quite recently that I suddenly thought, I’m bored with sitting at home all day, doing nothing, I’m going to go out there and get a job to keep me occupied. And I did, and it’s the best thing,’ she said emphatic ally, as if insisting on her point, ‘I ever did.’
‘Where do you work?’ Alice said.
‘In Broomhill – oh, you won’t know – a florist’s shop, a new one,’ she went on. ‘It’s only opened a year or two. Nick, the owner, he’s from London – he studied up here, and then he stayed, and he’s opened this little florist’s, and it’s doing very well. He was supposed to come to a party here a night or two back, but something came up and he couldn’t come. Actually, we were thinking, your house, we thought you’d probably be moved in by then and it would have been a good chance for you to meet everyone in the neighbourhood. That’s when we were planning it, and we set the date, thinking, they must be in and settled by then, the Watsons, they’d been gone so long, and then the date was fixed and the invitations sent out and we discovered, my husband and I, we’d missed you by two days. What a shame! You could have met him then.’
‘Your husband?’ Alice said. ‘I’m sure—’
‘No,’ Katherine said, ‘Nick, you could have met Nick, except that he couldn’t come. And you hadn’t moved in. I meant Nick. I don’t know why he didn’t come. Go away,’ she said, raising her voice, as Daniel wandered into the kitchen.
‘Your son?’ Alice said, nervously taking a cup of coffee.
‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘I’m sorry, I should have introduced you. How old are your children?’
‘Well, Sandra’s fourteen, and Francis, he’s eleven,’ Alice said.
‘So they’ll be going to—’
‘Going to?’
‘I meant their schools.’
‘Oh – I think Sandra’s, it’s called—’
‘The thing is,’ Katherine said, setting her cup down on the work surface and staring out of the window, ‘you’ve really found us at sixes and sevens this morning.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said, thinking that the woman needn’t have asked her over if it was as inconvenient as all that.
‘The fact is that my husband’s left me,’ Katherine said.
All at once there seemed to be an echo in the kitchen, and both Katherine and Alice listened to the noise it made. Katherine had spoken definitely, but she listened, now, to the decisive effect of a statement she had not quite known to be true; she listened to it with something of the same surprise as Jane, sitting on the stairs listening to her mother going on. Alice listened, too; she knew that
