suppose I should have a quick word with him,’ I murmur, registering the hungry grumble of the Rye bus on the Fairlight Road as Mrs Barrow takes out a scarf and ties it around her head, forming a small knot under the chin and pulling the two ends tight with such a jerk that one might almost imagine the cosmopolitan Mr Huff’s head compressed between them.
‘I won’t pretend as I’m not prone to having the odd grumble about the quality of the furniture in Mulberry,’ she confides. ‘I know as it has historical value, Carla, and all the rest of it’ – she raises a jaundiced brow – ‘but it’s just a pile of old driftwood and matchsticks for the most part. Even so, how one middle-aged man on his lonesome-ownsome can cause so much mess and mayhem is quite beyond me, I swear!’
She reaches out her hand towards the oncoming bus and it slows to a gradual halt with a blood-curdlingly cacophonous squeal of brakes, as if each of her calloused fingers has summoned a banshee from between its wheels.
‘All as I can say is: I hope his poor wife paid you the full deposit – in cold hard cash – before she upped and ran off!’ Mrs Barrow barks over the engine noise, then clambers on board. I pass over her old shopping trolley. It has a tricky wheel on the right-hand side which is sometimes given to seizing up. She grabs it, gives the offending wheel a practised kick, then disappears into the bus with a sharp – and suitably conclusive – bantam-like cluck.
2
In the end it was Carla Hahn who approached me. I knew the only way to draw her in – the only way – would be to ignore her completely. It had taken six weeks, in total. I was sitting on top of the gun emplacement eating a stale, unbuttered roll and a jar of pickled walnuts. She was slightly out of breath after cycling up. I’d seen her from atop my airy lookout talking to Mrs Barrow at the request bus-stop on the Sea Road. Mrs Barrow – like so many of the permanent residents on Toot Rock, not to mention those of Pett Level in the flatlands below (although the weekenders, I confess, are of a different complexion altogether) – appears to hail from an indeterminate epoch. She seems to have no presentiment whatsoever that she’s living in a modern age: the 1980s for heaven’s sake!
This morning, as she skivvied, we had an extraordinary discussion about the Home Computing Revolution. She’d gleaned via the elusive Mr Barrow’s tabloid rag (Mr Barrow is Toot Rock’s very own smooth-skinned McCavity; he may only ever be apprehended as an absence) that something called the ‘Apple Mackintosh’ was, as of this very day, to be made available, for money, in shops, to the general public. She was unable to comprehend how or why this much heralded object would be in any way better or more useful than a standard typewriter: ‘And they only ever as write out bills to torment us poor working folk with those!’ she muttered. I silently held up my book. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ she grumbled. ‘Words is words is words is words.’
‘Well, thank goodness Trollope and De Quincey weren’t of your blinkered mind-set, Mrs Barrow!’ I quipped, then went on to laboriously explain the demarcation between mechanical, electronic, analogue and digital technologies – even drawing a little diagram on the inside back cover of my jotter. I cogently summarized Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication and Moore’s Law in what I hoped were layman’s terms. I said, ‘This is the Third Industrial Revolution, Mrs Barrow. You are witness to the genesis of a new era: the Information Age – the paperless office, the revolutionary concept of information sharing. This is bigger than people walking on the moon,’ I said. ‘One day our entire lives – everything, literally everything: transport, personal hygiene, sex – will be digitized.’
As Mrs Barrow brushed out and then re-set the fire I explained how I’d been posted as a foreign correspondent to California during the late 1960s and how it’d been – by a lucky coincidence – the fertile breeding ground, the hub, of all these extraordinary, nay game-changing hypotheses. I told her how the scientists had discovered a way of sending letters to each other via computer: digital letters! Mrs Barrow paid great heed as she flitted about the cottage – a spry grey squirrel in pleated skirt and pop socks – with her bucket, her broom and her mop. Then, once I’d completed my lecture, she placed her hands on her hips, laboriously cleared her throat and said, ‘I remember as when they invented the ballpoint pen, Mr Huff. Everyone making a big old fuss about it, they was. Now it’s just something and nothing. I’m as happy to be using a pencil myself! Nobody cares about the ballpoint pen no more, Mr Huff. This’ll be the same. A flush in the pan. You mark my words.’
‘Those walnuts have been in the cupboard for at least five Christmases, Mr Huff!’ Miss Hahn yells up at me, throwing down her bike into the long grass. I’ve seen her throw it down before. Many times. Toss it down, without a care. I find it difficult to marry this apparent recklessness with her complete fastidiousness in regard to every detail connected to Mulberry Cottage. The lists! The rules! The special requirements! I also observed the pointed way she used my surname. Of course we made the booking for the cottage under Lara’s maiden name: Ashe. I’m no fool. We’d never have got it for the full eight weeks otherwise.
‘They have sentimental value?’ I ask (somewhat facetiously, I confess).
‘Sorry?’
‘The walnuts?’
‘Mrs Barrow tells me there’s a problem with the dining table,’ she says, swiping her short, unkempt, sun-bleached blonde hair impatiently behind her ear. I can instantly tell that she cuts it herself. She’s that kind of a woman. No make-up bar a light smear of Vaseline on the lips and the angular bone of either cheek. Dressed in a pair of men’s baggy, canvas trousers (rolled over at the waist and belted with what looks like a length of old rope) and a drab, linen blouse in grey or brown – or both, or neither – un-ironed but worn and worn into a flat shine, buttoned right up to the neck. Scuffed plimsolls on her feet, no socks. She has broad shoulders and is tanned. She is built like a swimmer. I see the German in her, and I see the Soviet.
Around the nose – the chin. Poor thing.
‘It collapsed,’ I say, screwing the lid back on to the walnuts. ‘I’d placed the television on top of it to try and improve the reception. It caved under the weight. The middle flap seems to’ve been constructed out of plywood. That or the woodworm’s got the better of it. Either way, the table is irretrievably damaged, although – on a positive note – the picture on the TV’s been much clearer ever since.’
‘Your wife left,’ she says, her eyes – the colour of a mean bruise, edged in octopus ink – slitting, infinitesimally.
‘The second week.’ I nod, studiedly indifferent. ‘Mrs Barrow mentioned it? One of the other neighbours, perchance?’
Of course nothing ever happens in this ludicrous place without the neighbours mentioning it! A fool might imagine it to be the kind of wonderful location where a person might be rendered invisible – somewhere an artist or a criminal or a film star might flee in order to cultivate a precious, fragile sense of anonymity; a place where you might melt into the fringes, the margins, the nothingness; a place of privacy – insularity – isolation – retreat. But Toot Rock is not like that. Oh not at all! Not a whit of it.
‘She ran over a cat,’ Carla Hahn says, inspecting my tie with a small frown, her hand lifting, unconsciously, to her own very slightly frayed collar.
Her hands are the colour of boiled gammon! Extraordinary! Raw-looking. I quite pity her those awful hands.
‘Yes. The tail,’ I confirm, ‘in broad daylight. The cat was immensely
