bear thinking about – couldn’t get up to see the view, not that you would want to see the view even if you could, but Sally was a humane person and she couldn’t bear to think of poor Ellie Fazackerly, trapped in her bed, second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, always. Of course a lot of people didn’t feel sorry for Ellie. All her own fault. Brought it on herself. Saw her eat seven pies in half an hour once.
But Sally did feel sorry, and she thought of calling on Ellie, helping a few of those minutes to pass. But Barry was a stickler for his tea, however unwise it was to broadcast the fact, and he was a good man, on balance, and not every woman could say that about her husband.
She was coming to the edge of the town centre now, and High Street West was beginning to lose what little charm it had. To the right was Vernon Road, home to three adjacent Indian restaurants, the Old Bengal, the New Bengal (family feud) and the Taj Mahal. Already the smell of frying spices was drifting in the evening breeze. On the end wall of a Chinese takeaway, beneath a window beyond which rows of cheap pink clothes were hanging, someone had sprayed ‘Immirgants Go Home’ in angry black.
Now, at a confusing mini-roundabout, High Street West breathed its last. To the left were allotments, extensive, too extensive for these busy times, sadly. Many of them were badly cared for, and quite a few were unoccupied. Beyond them was only the supermarket and its huge car park, and then the bare inhospitable hills marked the head of the Pother Valley.
To the right, the moment you left the remnants of High Street West, you were suddenly in smarter territory. The houses were larger than anywhere else in the town, most of them were detached, and two or three even had swimming pools, which was ridiculous in that climate. Even the occasional solar panel spoke of wild optimism.
Now the road forked. Sally took the right-hand fork, along Oxford Road. Beyond the road, at the head of the valley, high above the rushing streams that formed the headwaters of the Pother, stood the nearest things to spires that Oxford Road afforded. Eight vast windmills stood guard on the tops of the hills, motionless and silent in the still air, neutered by nature.
Peter Sparling was walking towards her with his Labrador, and she knew the sort of thing he was going to say, and she dreaded it.
‘Not a bad day.’
She thought of the shock there would be if she told Peter Sparling to piss off. Or worse. Something sarcastic was needed, though. She had to bleed this sudden overwhelming feeling of frustration.
‘Yes, not bad at all,’ she said. ‘Very little thunder, the lightning scarcely forked, and not a tsunami in sight. Mustn’t grumble, eh, Peter?’
Peter Sparling gave her a puzzled look, said ‘Come on, Kenneth’, as if urging his beloved dog out of the contaminated area surrounding this madwoman, and walked on.
Sally walked on up Oxford Road, past ‘Windy Corner’, the home of the town’s only psychiatrist, the overworked Dr Mallet, and past the trim, neat, lifeless garden of ‘Mount Teidi’, where her neighbours the Hammonds were so silent that she often thought they must be in Tenerife when they were in fact at home.
Everything was silent today. The silence oppressed her.
She opened the gate into the immaculate garden of ‘The Larches’, just as lifeless at this early moment in the year, but full of the promise of bloom. She noticed a weed or two, and decided to let them live a little longer; she wasn’t obsessive, she wasn’t a Hammond.
She put her key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, entered the hall.
Inside the house it was silent too. She saw him straight away, and, that day, he was definitely not being a stickler for his tea. That day he had done something that was definitely dramatic, and might even be considered by some people to be brave. He was hanging from a beam at the top of the stairs. There was a rope round his neck. He was very, very dead.
‘They’re old,’ said Arnold Buss in a low voice.
‘And we aren’t?’ said Jill, also in a low voice, although it was absurd to feel the need to speak so quietly, as their new neighbours had only just pulled up behind the furniture van, and were busy getting things out of the ample boot of their silver VW Passat.
The Busses were standing a little back from the window, Arnold further back than Jill, in the cold spare front room on the first floor of number 11 Moor Brow, which was always referred to as ‘The Cul-de-Sac’, as if Potherthwaite was actually rather proud of having such a thing as a cul-de-sac. They didn’t want to be caught peering out. Arnold had taught history, and Jill had been in the forefront of the world of the colonoscopy in the District Hospital. It wouldn’t do to be seen to be curious about their new neighbours.
The man, now carrying two small suitcases, suddenly looked up to examine his new surroundings. Jill and Arnold hurriedly stepped back even further from the window.
‘I don’t like the look of their standard lamps,’ said Arnold.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘Ostentatious. They’re going to be materialistic. I know the type.’
‘And what did they do for a living?’
‘I don’t know. How could I possibly know that?’
‘I’d have thought their occasional tables might tell you.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly, Jill. Where are you going?’
Jill Buss was striding towards the door with a sudden sense of purpose. It unnerved Arnold when she showed a sense of purpose.
‘I’m going to tidy my make-up, if you must know.’
This was dreadful news. No good could come out of Jill tidying her make-up. Arnold was not sociable.
‘And why might you be going to tidy your make-up at this moment?’
But Jill was far ahead, out of earshot. She had marched across the landing, now she burst through their large bedroom – the rooms were big in these old houses – strode into her en-suite – they had separate bathrooms, the en-suite was her stronghold – and shut the door in Arnold’s face. She didn’t like him in the room when she was doing her make-up; he could never resist sarcasm. ‘We’re going to the pub for the early bird, not Buckingham Palace.’
He hesitated, then plucked up his courage, opened the door, and went in.
‘Arnold! I might have been on the toilet.’
‘You aren’t.’
‘But I might have been, that’s the point. You couldn’t know I wasn’t.’
‘I’m surprised that …’ He stopped. What he had been about to say wasn’t wise, wasn’t wise at all.
‘You’re surprised what?’
‘Nothing.’
