drunk from the North African sunshine and the astonishing pleasures of marriage, did actually walk in through the manager’s door and put these points to him.
Unfortunately the manager didn’t share Lisa’s opinion. He informed Derek in loud clear tones that it was only by a miracle the firm was surviving at all, he was currently giving serious thought to the question of redundancies. ‘If you’re not satisfied,’ he added, ‘you’ve been here long enough to know where the door is.’
And that was that. Unemployment was high in Cannonbridge and still rising; there was certainly no massive demand for clerks approaching middle age.
Derek daren’t tell Lisa he’d failed but allowed her to believe his efforts had been successful. ‘My salary’s being raised from the beginning of next month,’ he told her, in the mad hope that something would happen to rescue him before his savings finally ran out. The greater part of these had already been swallowed up by his courtship and honeymoon, above all, by that wildly extravagant North African honeymoon; he had had no idea until then that it was possible for two people to spend so much money in fourteen days. And week by week the relentless expenses of his new life bit savagely into what was left of his nest-egg. He felt himself beset these days by problems, every one of them relating at some point to money. And in his dreams now the feet were getting closer.
Lisa had given up her job before the wedding and appeared to have no intention of ever again darkening the door of any place of employment. She was in any case now three months pregnant and as a consequence exempt in her own eyes from all but the very lightest endeavours.
He turned from the window, suddenly hungry, and made himself some toast. He sat down at the table, buttered the toast and smeared it with marmalade. He took a thoughtful bite.
Until his marriage he’d had scarcely any idea how expensive it was to run a house. Before he took to bedsits he had lived with his father in an old rented terrace house in a seedy area of Westfleet, a small town twenty-five miles from Cannonbridge; he had been born and brought up in the house.
Derek was an only child. His mother had run off with a neighbour when he was six years old and there had never been any other woman in the life of the deserted father and son.
His father – now dead – had been a labourer in the yard of a builder’s merchant in Westfleet. He was out of doors in all seasons and as time went by he became afflicted with chronic bronchitis. ‘Don’t do what I’ve done,’ he warned Derek when the time came for him to leave school. ‘Get yourself a job that’ll shelter you from the weather, one that’ll keep your hands clean.’ And that much at least Derek had managed to do. Lowly as his status was at Cannonbridge Mail Order, it had always seemed an achievement to him – until his marriage.
The bronchitis finally carried his father off when Derek was nineteen. ‘I haven’t amounted to much,’ he said to Derek on the day before he died. ‘You’ve got your whole life before you. Watch out you don’t end up like me.’ His gaze wandered round the dismal bedroom. ‘I’ve left you everything.’ Everything amounted to forty-odd pounds in the post office, some tools, a cupboardful of cheap clothes and a few sticks of worthless furniture.
The landlady didn’t wait for the earth to settle over his grave before she marched round to the terrace house.
‘I want you out of here inside a fortnight,’ she informed Derek. ‘I’m going to do this place up and sell it.’
She knew her man; Derek moved out at once without protest, almost with apology, into the first of his bedsits.
Now he blinked away the memories with a jerk of his head. He finished his toast and went over to the dresser, pulled open a drawer and took out a handful of bills. He sat down at the table to study the figures although the amounts were accurately burned into his brain. He clenched a fist and dug it into his chin, frowning down at the papers, trying to think of some way out of his difficulties. At last he blew out a long breath and stood up. ‘Something’s got to be done,’ he said aloud.
In the meantime, in the big double bed upstairs, Lisa would be beginning to stir. He made a fresh pot of tea, found a clean linen cloth and smoothed it on to a tray. He poured a cup of tea and set it on the tray beside a small plate of biscuits and the peach-coloured rosebud in its glass of water. He carried the tray carefully upstairs to Lisa.
She woke and stretched like a cat and her long blonde hair fell back against the pillows. She smiled at him and held out her cheek for a kiss.
She drank some tea and nibbled at a biscuit, then she reached for the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table.
‘I really think you ought to try to give them up,’ Derek said apologetically. ‘You know what the doctor said.’
She pulled a face. ‘The doctor’s an old woman.’ She took out a cigarette and he lit it for her; she inhaled deeply. ‘The doctor we had in Ellenborough smoked all the time.’ The Marshalls had lived in Ellenborough, a large town forty-five miles away, before they moved to the Hadleigh suburb of Cannonbridge.
Outside there was the sound of feet on gravel, the click of the letterbox. ‘That might be a letter from Janet,’ Lisa said. ‘Do go down and see.’ There was only one post a day now in Hadleigh. Lisa had written to Janet again last week, asking her to come over as soon as the school term ended on Friday, stay as long as she liked.
Derek went downstairs to the hall. Three envelopes lay in the wire cage at the back of the door. The first was postmarked Cannonbridge, addressed to Lisa in the bold handwriting of her friend Carole Gardiner. The second was an advertising circular, and the third – he drew a long breath and ripped it open, running his eye rapidly over the sheet, biting deep into his lip as he read, unaware of any sensation of pain. He stood frowning down at the letter and then went swiftly into the sitting room and knelt by the grate.
He pushed aside the tapestry firescreen that had been worked by Mrs Marshall, struck a match and set fire to the letter and its envelope. When they were both thoroughly consumed he ground the ashes into dust with the poker and replaced the screen. He got to his feet and went back upstairs.
‘Nothing from Janet,’ he said as he entered the bedroom. On his tongue he could taste the blood from his bitten lip. ‘But Carole Gardiner’s written to you.’
‘When are we going to have the phone put in?’ Lisa said impatiently as she took the letter he held out. ‘It’s such a nuisance, all this letter-writing.’
‘There’s a waiting-list for phones,’ he said. He had no idea if this was so; he had made no application for a phone. What he did know with bleak certainty was that he could afford neither the installation fee nor the quarterly expenses.
‘You couldn’t ring Janet even if we did have a phone,’ he reminded Lisa. There was no phone at Rose Cottage and Janet didn’t intend to have one put in.
Lisa’s full red mouth looked sulky. ‘What’s your letter?’ she asked after a moment’s silence.
He glanced down at the envelope in his hand. ‘It’s only a circular,’ he said. ‘Some central heating firm.’ As soon as the words left his lips he knew his mistake.
‘We’ll have to get some kind of central heating put in before next winter,’ Lisa said with energy. ‘We must have the house nice and warm for the baby.’
‘There are gas-fires in the bedrooms.’ He drew a little sighing breath. Even the gas-fires, small and old-fashioned, would be expensive enough to run. And Lisa wasn’t
