Going Away and Other Stories Page 11

  I was despatched by UT to the nearest flower stall to get a really big bunch of roses before we set off gain for Cromer.

  Agniezka lived in a dull little house in a side street, no doubt inhabited by several other Poles. I hoped she had a boyfriend! I was instructed to go to the front door, knock on it, then present the roses and say: ‘From Toby. He’s waiting in the car.’

  Agniezka sat on the back seat of the car with UT. I took surreptitious glances at her in the rear-view mirror when I could as we drove along the coast road. Yes, she had got herself up a bit and looked very pretty. Uncle Toby was sitting very close to her and talking to her in such low tones that I couldn’t hear what he was saying. They managed to get a table at the first restaurant we stopped at. It looked very expensive! And I spent a very boring evening in the nearest pub I could find.

  At last, just after ten thirty, my mobile rang.

  ‘Paul, will you come and pick me up as soon as possible.’

  He didn’t sound at all happy.

  ‘From the restaurant?’

  ‘No, I’ll be sitting in the bus shelter opposite. I want a breath of fresh air.’

  I managed to get to the bus shelter in just under five minutes. There was a street lamp nearby and I could see Uncle Toby huddled in the corner. He was alone. He didn’t move as the car pulled up. I got out and went over to him. To my amazement he was crying. The tears were trickling down his mottled cheeks and I noticed that he had a bruise under his right eye.

  ‘What on earth is the matter, Uncle? Where is Agniezka?’

  Uncle Toby rallied a little and forced a bit of a smile.

  ‘She went home on the bus.’

  ‘Oh. What went wrong?’

  ‘I don’t really want to talk about it, but you’d better know that she said I was a silly old fool and hit me. Have I got a black eye?’

  ‘Well, a bit of one.’

  ‘Let’s go back to Norwich.’

  UT’s smart suit that he had put on for the occasion looked distinctly sad and crumpled as he sat beside me in the front of the car. He’d stopped weeping, and was totally silent except for snuffling from time to time. Eventually, he took a deep breath and made a long speech, looking straight ahead at the road.

  ‘You probably thought it was very odd my asking that young woman out to dinner, but there was a reason. If I may digress – it’s true that my housekeeper retired – she was seventy – but I sacked my chauffeur as, frankly, I couldn’t afford him any more. In reality, I could hardly afford the housekeeper either. You see, at one time I was quite well off, but then there was all that wretched business with Lloyd’s Names. I was one of the “names” of course and lost a packet. Nearly broke me, but I had the house and you can take out things called equity releases. Gives you capital which is repaid out of the sale of the house when you die. So I took out quite a large sum by this equity release business as the house had gone up hugely in value since I’d bought it. My financial advisor (curse them all!) told me to put the money into one of these hedge-fund things. Of course, the hedge fund did terribly badly, but with the income that I can still get from it and my state pension I’ve just about enough to live on. I’ll have to sell the car. It guzzles petrol. But I’m a bit tottery as you can see and need looking after. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and when I saw that girl in that hairdresser’s, obviously an Eastern European girl, I thought she might be interested in, well … you know, coming to live in my house rent free and doing a bit of housekeeping as well as hairdressing. I’ve got a friend who’s managed a similar arrangement. These immigrant girls are often wanting something like that. Well, I picked the wrong one. I admit I did put my hand on her knee under the table, which was silly of me, but she was awfully attractive and I thought she might like it. But she didn’t. She caused an awful scene in the restaurant and stormed off to catch the bus. She must have known that one was coming at that time. I went to the bus shelter and pleaded with her, but it was no good. That was when she called me a silly old fool and hit me. I had to cover my face with a handkerchief and go back into the restaurant to call you on the telephone.

  ‘So I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I had hoped, you know, Paul, that I’d be able to leave you quite a bit because you’ve got a neurotic wife and two children and have had a very bad time financially. But there we are. You know it all now!’

  And so vanished the fantasy of inheriting Uncle Toby’s money; instead I had to accept the reality of having to finish my PhD, which I did quite quickly. But it took much longer to get a post at a university.

  What happened to Uncle Toby is another story.

  Day Trip to Manly

  Somebody once said that the one good thing about spending February in Britain was that it only lasted 28 days.

  By mid-January I couldn’t bear the prospect of the gloom. Sunshine beckoned; but was it to be the West Indies, South Africa or Australia? Even though it’s a long flight, Australia won, mainly because my wife had died and I didn’t like having holidays on my own, and I had some cousins in Sydney who seemed delighted at the thought of my staying with them.

  It was a mistake, I realised, after the third day, and so I think did they. Day 1, I rested, day 2, they showed me some sights, day 3, cousin Annie (she was only 50) complained that her legs hurt and Bill had an asthma attack!

  ‘You’d better go off on your own today. Why don’t you take the boat to Manly? You’ll like it there.’

  And it did seem a very nice place, although I don’t remember it in much detail. But the sun was shining and I found the beach. The waves were breaking, the surfers were surfing and I was wandering along in my shirt, shorts and sandals, very conscious of my elderly white knobbly legs. I was trying to think of a gentle way of detaching myself from my cousins – a trip to Brisbane perhaps? – when what looked like a child’s exercise book came blowing along the pavement towards me in the wind. I felt I couldn’t just let it blow away, so, as bending had become a bit of a problem, I put my foot on the book and then gently bent to pick it up. Unfortunately, I’d left a dirty print of the sole of my sandal on the cover. I opened it up. On the first page in big block capitals was written: ‘I HOPE NOBODY EVER READS THIS’.

  Of course, I promptly sat down on the nearest seat, turned the page and started reading. The writing was obviously not a child’s. It was rather good, in an old-fashioned style – somewhat like my own; the sort of thing they taught you in school in England during and just after the war. I read:

  I was a newly qualified solicitor working in London. Things in the 1950s were very different from today. Now, solicitors’ offices are quite smart and some even have air conditioning. The firm I worked for had its offices in Holborn: Bedford Row. There were only two partners (that was quite usual then), three managing clerks, two lady secretaries, a telephonist/receptionist, a junior clerk/office boy, and me. The partners had a good room each on the first floor of what originally had been a rather fine Georgian house, with their secretaries in an office together near them. The ground floor had been badly and cheaply partitioned to form a reception area, where the telephonist sat, a waiting room and two cubby holes for two of the managing clerks. In the basement was the other managing clerk, file storage and a strong room. I was on the top floor in a small room which overlooked a dismal back yard. The rest of the top floor was let out to a Chartered Patent Agent. He never seemed to be there. I’m sure my room had not been painted since before the 1939-45 war. There was cracked lino on the floor and a square of worn red carpet under my dilapidated desk and chair. I had a telephone and an unreliable dictating machine. The fireplace had been blocked up and heat was provided by a one-bar electric fire which was totally inadequate in winter, so when it was cold I had to come to work in a thick suit and a pullover. In a corner of the room by the door was a photocopying machine which everyone (apart from the partners) came and used from time to time. It was a ghastly contraption which had to be filled with smelly liquid chemicals. I forget exactly how it wor
ked but each page took some time to copy. I resented the presence of the machine greatly, particularly if it was being used while I was trying to interview a client. Not that my work was very important. It consisted mainly of house purchasing, disputes between neighbours, minor road accidents, and landlord and tenant problems. The partners treated me with formality and a certain amount of what I regarded as contempt and the managing clerks as ‘not one of them’, because I was qualified. The secretaries (both of uncertain age) seemed to have a conspiracy to ‘keep me in my place’ – wherever that was supposed to be. They condescended to type my work ‘if they were not too busy’. So I was not very happy at work and it was even worse at home.

  I had married Audrey eighteen months previously. The first problem was with her parents. They were very comfortably off, but when I talked to Audrey’s father about getting married (you did that in those days) he stipulated that I should buy her a house and be able to support her financially otherwise he would be opposed to the idea. I’m not quite sure what he would have done if I hadn’t agreed. But I invested all the money my father had left me (and which I had been living on while I was an articled clerk) into a semi-detached house in East Finchley. Having then only my meagre salary, we had little spare money and I had to redecorate the inside of the house myself. Not something I enjoyed! Audrey had given up her job as a teacher before we got married. No doubt her father told her it was unseemly for married women to work. She quickly became bored and discontented and continued to be like that even after I had slaved for many evenings and weekends redecorating every room in the house. Then she became pregnant and that’s when the troubles really started. I’m not sure how ill she really felt, but she moaned all day and half the night about feeling sick, having heartburn, putting on weight, etc., etc. To me, she became physically very unattractive. I almost dreaded coming home from the office.

  And then the baby was born – a boy. I think Audrey must have been a bad mother because he cried all night, every night – at least that’s how I remember it! She was constantly rushing him to the doctor with some ailment or other; largely imaginary I suspected. At first, she kept giving me the baby, Andrew, to hold, but after a few weeks she said I was ‘hopeless’ with him and wouldn’t let me touch him. She said I ‘upset him’. So things progressed from bad to worse. It was when he started to crawl I think that Andrew began to hate me. I remember one day when his mother was out of the room, I knelt down beside him and made the silly animal noises that babies are supposed to like. But Andrew just gazed at me with an expression of such malevolence that I was almost frightened. And then he let out the most terrible howling noise so that Audrey came rushing from the kitchen and saw me with him on the floor.

  ‘What are you doing to him?’ she shouted. ‘Leave him alone!’

  From then on things were never the same between us.

  And then things at work became unpleasant.

  One morning I was summoned into one of the partner’s offices – Mr Budgen (name changed). I remember him well. Three-piece suit, watch chain, moustache, pompous manner. His verbal delivery was very similar to Mr Macmillan’s, the Prime Minister of the time.

  ‘Well, Smithers (again name changed),’ he said, ‘I wanted to have a word with you. We’re taking on a junior partner with a connection of his own. We shall need your room to accommodate him. So from next Monday you’ll have to move to the basement and share with Mills. Sorry about that, but it can’t be helped. I’ll speak to Mills in due course. I think there’s a spare table in his room.’

  I visualised Mills’s room. There was indeed a side table piled high with old files. The table was also home to the kettle and tea things for making drinks for the whole firm! Mills was very grumpy and elderly and smelt of mothballs. I had no doubt that he would be about as pleased with the arrangement as I was.

  ‘What about when I see clients, sir?’ was the only reply I gave.

  ‘You’ll have to manage that as well as you can, I’m afraid.’

  I think today it would be called ‘constructive dismissal’. During my lunch hour I went to the Law Society in Chancery Lane and looked at their Appointments Vacant list, but there didn’t seem to be anything suitable for me. I’d have to wait until the advertisements appeared in the next issue of the Gazette. I think I must have been very angry.

  And it was the same day that when I arrived home I found Audrey sitting red-faced on the sofa and crying. There was no sign of Andrew and at first I thought he must be ill or even have died.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Auntie Gladys is dead.’

  ‘Oh. Where’s Andrew?’

  ‘He’s cried himself to sleep. He’s very upset, too.’

  How a small baby could be so upset about the death of a relative whom he had probably only seen two or three times was a mystery to me, but I said nothing.

  I had only met Auntie Gladys twice and we had taken an instant dislike to one another. Gladys was Audrey’s mother’s unmarried sister. She lived in a small house near Richmond crammed with antiques and knick-knacks.

  ‘She’s very wealthy,’ Audrey had whispered to me as we went to see her shortly after our engagement, ‘and she says she’s going to leave everything to me. So be nice to her. ’

  Well, she had left everything to Audrey, who for a few days cheered up considerably at the thought.

  ‘I hope your firm will do the probate work for free,’ she said.

  I very much doubted that, but I thought they might do it at a concessionary rate.

  ‘We’ll give your wife a ten per cent reduction on the scale,’ said Mr Budgen, ‘as you tell me you think it’s quite a substantial estate. Norman had better go with you to take the inventory.’

  I should explain that Audrey had already indicated that she was far too busy looking after Andrew and wanted me to deal with the house contents. So a few days after the funeral, which was a very tearful affair on the part of Audrey and her mother, I duly went by train to Richmond with Norman and then by taxi to Gladys’s house. Norman, the firm’s probate clerk, was called by his Christian name because he’d worked his way up from being the office boy. He was sharp-suited, cheeky and brash. I always thought he had a secret ambition to get himself qualified as a solicitor.

  ‘Bloody lucky you are, James. Your wife’s going to be rich. Be able to set up in practice on your own no doubt. Can’t be much fun for you down in the basement with old Mills. You’re starting to smell of mothballs yourself, I think,’ he said, sniffing loudly.

  In fact old Mills had made me quite welcome in his grumpy way. We’d moved the tea things and files off his side table and he’d put the telephone on the side of his desk so that I could reach it if a call came through for me.

  ‘I don’t think they like either of us very much, young Jim,’ he’d said. ‘Still, you can always move on. I’m stuck here until I retire. It’s because of my pension, you see.’ (You couldn’t easily ‘move’ pensions in those days.)

  I must have been thinking about ‘moving on’ when we arrived at the house. Norman was still blithering on about how I’d be able to start a new practice. I couldn’t imagine Audrey in her present frame of mind giving me anything. In fact, she’d probably want to take Andrew and go and live somewhere on her own. As we went through Auntie Gladys’s front door, Norman said, ‘You know the reason why I’ve had to bloody come with you? Old Budgen wanted me to keep an eye on you to make sure you didn’t pocket any nice pieces of jewellery!’

  At that moment a sort of red haze of rage appeared about two or three feet in front of my eyes. ‘The miserable old bugger,’ I thought. It was a totally unwarranted defamatory remark about an employee who’d never shown any signs of dishonesty. Why was everyone against me? My wife didn’t like me, my son seemed to hate me. Although I’d done exactly as they wanted, my wife’s parents seemed to despise me and this idiot Norman obviously thought it was funny that I should be thought of as a potential thief. Whether at that moment I resolved to stea
l something I’m not sure, although I think it was at that moment that I remembered that Audrey had said to me:

  ‘Look inside Auntie’s desk won’t you? She always hinted that there was a secret drawer or compartment or something. So it may have something valuable in it!’

  Norman had made straight for the desk which was in the living room. Well, the desk was in fact a large bureau with a pull-down front, which he opened, causing a shower of share certificates to fall out all over the floor, much to his glee.

  ‘Look at that, Jim. God, she must have been rolling in it.’

  He gathered them all up and took them over to the dining table.

  ‘Look at that, 20,000 Imps, 10,000 ICI, for a start. Have a look and see if there’s a valuation from her brokers anywhere. It’ll make things a bit easier if we can make sure we’ve got all the certificates.’

  But first I foraged about in the bureau, remembering Audrey’s words about the secret drawer. It was easy! I’d seen the sort of thing before. I pressed down on one of the compartments and what looked like a blank piece of wood clicked out about an inch. Obscuring Norman’s view from where he was sitting at the table gloating over the share certificates, I slid the drawer out a little further and put my hand inside. There was a stone there, the size of a large pebble. I picked it up, slid it into my jacket pocket and shut the drawer. Then I pulled a chair up to the desk and started to sort systematically through its contents.