a few days before his death Stanley continued to visit the basement to work on the latest dolls’ house.
Since his retirement he had slowed down, and the quality of his work had also deteriorated. But the last model was nearly complete, a tall Victorian terraced house looking foolish without its fellows on either side. He had been sewing the curtains at the time of his death.
Stanley died in hospital in the early hours of the morning. The following afternoon Eddie found the miniature curtains bundled into the sitting-room wastepaper basket, together with Stanley’s needles and cottons. The discovery brought home to him the reality of his father’s death more than anything else before or later, even the funeral.
This was a secular event. The Graces had never been churchgoers. Eddie’s experience of religion had been limited to the services at school, flat and meaningless affairs.
‘He was an atheist,’ Thelma said firmly when the funeral director tentatively raised the subject of the deceased’s religious preferences. ‘You can keep the vicars out of it, all right? And we don’t want any of those humanists, either.’
His mother’s reaction to Stanley’s death took Eddie by surprise. She showed no outward sign of grief. She gave the impression that death was an irritation and an imposition because of the extra work it entailed. In many ways widowhood seemed to act as a tonic: she was brisker than she had been for years, both physically and mentally.
‘If we can clear out some of your father’s stuff,’ Thelma said as they ate fish and chips in the kitchen on the evening after the funeral, ‘perhaps we can find a lodger.’
Eddie put down his fork. ‘But you wouldn’t want a stranger in the house, would you?’
‘If we want to stay here, we’ve no choice.’
‘But the house is paid for. And haven’t you got a pension from the Paladin?’
‘Call it a pension? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve already talked to them about it. I’ll get a third of what your father got, and that wasn’t much to begin with. It makes me sick. He worked there for over forty years, and you’d think by the way they used to go on that they couldn’t do enough for their staff. They’re sharks. Just like everyone else.’
‘But surely we could manage?’
‘We can’t live on air.’ She stared at him, pursing her lips. ‘When you get another job, perhaps we can think again.’
When. The word hung between them. Eddie knew that his mother meant not when but if. Like his father, she had a low opinion of his capabilities. He thought that she could not have made the point more clearly if she had spoken the word if aloud.
‘So we’re agreed, then,’ Thelma announced.
‘I suppose so.’
She nodded at his plate, at half a portion of cod in greasy batter and a mound of pale, cold chips. ‘Have you finished, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, pass it here.’ Thelma’s appetite, always formidable for such a small person, had increased since she had stopped smoking the previous summer. ‘Waste not, want not.’
‘So we’ll need to clear the back bedroom?’
‘It won’t clear itself, will it?’ said Thelma through a mouthful of Eddie’s supper. ‘And while we’re at it, we might as well sort out the basement. If we have a lodger we’ll need the extra storage space.’
The next few days were very busy. His mother’s haste seemed indecent. The back bedroom had been used as a boxroom for as long as Eddie could remember. Thelma wanted him to throw out most of the contents. She also packed up her husband’s clothes and sent them to a charity shop. One morning she told Eddie to start clearing the basement. Most of the tools and photographic equipment could be sold, she said.
‘It’s not as if you’re that way inclined, after all. You’d better get rid of the photos, too.’
‘What about the dolls’ house?’
‘Leave that for now. But mind you change your trousers. Wear the old jeans, the ones with the hole in the knee.’
Eddie went through the photographs first – the artistic ones in the cupboard, not the ones on the open shelves. The padlock key had vanished. In the end Eddie levered off the hasp with a crowbar.
The photographs had been carefully mounted in albums. The negatives were there too, encased in transparent envelopes and filed in date order in a ring binder. Against each print his father had written a name and a date in his clear, upright hand. Usually he had added a title. ‘Saucy!’ ‘Blowing Bubbles!’ ‘Having the Time of Her Life!’
Eddie leafed slowly through the albums, working backwards. Some of the photographs he thought were quite appealing, and he decided that he would put them to one side to look at more carefully in his bedroom. Most of the girls he recognized. He came across his younger self, too, but did not linger over those photographs. He found the Reynoldses’ daughter, Jenny Wren, and was astonished to see how ugly she had been as a child; memory had been relatively kind to her. Then he found another face he knew, smiling up at him from a photograph with the caption ‘What a Little Tease!’ He stared at the face, his excitement ebbing, leaving a dull sadness behind.
It was Alison. There was no possible room for doubt. Stanley must have taken the photograph at some point during the same summer as the Peeing Game. When else could it have been? Children grew quickly at that age. In the photograph Alison was naked, and just as Eddie remembered her from their games in Carver’s. He even remembered, or thought he did, the ribbon that she wore in her hair.
They had both betrayed him, his father and Alison. Why hadn’t Alison told him? She had been his friend.
After lunch that day his mother sent him out to do some shopping. Eddie was glad of the excuse to escape from the house. He could not stop thinking of Alison. He had not seen her for nearly twenty years, yet her face seen in a photograph still had the power to haunt him.
On his way home, Eddie met Mr and Mrs Reynolds in Rosington Road. He turned the corner and there they were. He had no chance to avoid them. The Graces and the Reynoldses had been on speaking terms since Jenny Wren’s visits to the dolls’ house. Eddie glanced at Mrs Reynolds’s sour, unsympathetic face, wondering whether she had seen him trespassing in Carver’s the previous autumn.
‘Sorry to hear about your dad,’ Mr Reynolds said, his face creasing with concern. ‘Still, at least it was quick: that must have been a blessing for all of you.’
‘Yes. It was very sudden.’
‘Always a good neighbour. Couldn’t have asked for a nicer one.’
The words were intended to comfort, but made Eddie smile, an expression he concealed by turning away and blowing his nose vigorously, as though overwhelmed by the sorrow of the occasion. As he did so he noticed that Mrs Reynolds was staring at him. He dropped his eyes to her chest. He noticed on the lapel of her coat a small enamel badge from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Perhaps that was why she spent so much time staring over Carver’s, why she had the field glasses. Mrs Reynolds was a bird-watcher, a twitcher. The word brought him dangerously close to a giggle.
