Читать книгу Fallen Angel - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 13

‘… we carry private and domestick enemies within, publick and more hostile adversaries without.’

Religio Medici, II, 7

On the morning of Saturday the thirtieth of November, Angel opened Eddie’s bedroom door and stood framed like a picture in the doorway.

‘Are you awake?’

He sat up in bed, reaching for his glasses. Angel was wearing the cotton robe, long, white and in appearance vaguely hieratic, which she used as a dressing gown. As usual at this time of day, her shining hair was confined to a snood. Eddie liked seeing Angel without make-up. She was still beautiful, but in a different way: her face had a softness which cosmetics masked; he glimpsed the child within the adult.

‘Just the two of us for breakfast today. We’ll let Lucy sleep in.’

‘OK. Have you been down yet?’ He had heard the stairs creaking.

‘You know I have. And yes, Lucy’s fine. Sleeping like a baby.’

He felt relief, a lifting of guilt. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

A few moments later, Eddie trotted downstairs to the kitchen. He filled the kettle and set the table while waiting for the water to boil. The washing machine was already on, and through the porthole he glimpsed something small and white, perhaps Lucy’s vest or tights. In the quieter phases of its cycle, he heard Angel moving about in the bathroom. He had hardly slept during the night and now felt light-headed. He did not know whether Angel had really forgiven him for acting on impulse the previous afternoon. But he could tell she was pleased to have Lucy safely in the basement. The latter, he hoped, would outweigh the former.

At length Angel came downstairs, carrying the receiving end of the intercom to the basement. She plugged it into one of the sockets over the worktop. The tiny loudspeaker emitted an electronic hum.

‘I thought I’d do a load while Lucy’s asleep,’ Angel said. ‘Lucy’s things, mainly. That toy of hers stinks.’

‘Jimmy?’

Angel stared at him. ‘Who?’

‘The doll thing.’

‘Is that what she calls it? It’s not what I call a doll.’

Eddie shrugged, disclaiming responsibility.

‘It had to be washed sooner or later,’ Angel went on, ‘so it might as well be washed now. It’s most unhygienic, you know, as well as being offensive.’

Eddie nodded and held his peace. Jimmy was a small cloth doll, no more than four or five inches high. Yesterday Lucy had told Eddie that her mother had made it for her. It was predominantly blue, though the head was made of faded pink material, and Sally Appleyard had stitched rudimentary features on the face and indicated the existence of hair. Eddie guessed that Jimmy was special, like his own Mrs Wump had been. (Mrs Wump was still in his chest of drawers upstairs, lying in state in a shoe box and kept snug with sheets made of handkerchiefs and blankets made of scraps of towelling.) The previous evening, Lucy had kept Jimmy in her hands the whole time, occasionally sniffing the doll while she sucked her fingers. She had not relaxed her grip even in sleep.

‘Lucy looks rather like how I used to look at that age,’ Angel told Eddie over breakfast. ‘Much darker colouring, of course. But apart from that we’re really surprisingly similar.’

‘Can I see her this morning?’

‘Perhaps.’ Angel sipped her lemon verbena tea. ‘It depends how she is. I expect she’ll feel a little strange at first. We must give her a chance to get used to us.’

But it’s me she knows, Eddie wanted to say: it was I who brought her home. ‘She wants a conjuring set,’ he said. ‘You can get them at Woolworth’s; they cost twelve ninety-nine, apparently. I thought I might try and buy it for her this morning. I have to go out for the shopping in any case.’

‘I think she’s like me in other ways.’ Angel’s voice was dreamy. ‘In personality, I mean. Much more so than the others. She’s our fourth, of course. I knew the fourth would be significant.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Because –’ Angel broke off. ‘What was that about a conjuring set?’

‘Lucy wants one. Perhaps I could buy it and give it to her this afternoon.’

Angel stared at him, her spoon poised halfway between the bowl and her mouth. ‘Lucy isn’t like the others. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’ He dropped his eyes: facing that blue glare was like looking at the sun. ‘I think so.’

Eddie didn’t understand: why wasn’t Lucy like the others? She was no more attractive than Chantal or Katy, for example, and probably less intelligent, certainly less articulate, than Suki. And why should the fact that Lucy was their fourth visitor be significant?

As he spread a thin layer of low-fat sunflower margarine on his wholemeal toast, he thought that Angel resembled one of those rich archaeological sites which humans have occupied for thousands of years. You laboriously scraped away a layer only to find that there was another beneath, and another below that, and so the process went on. How could you expect to understand later developments if you did not also know the developments which had preceded them and shaped them?

Angel dabbed her mouth with her napkin. ‘If you want to give Lucy a present, why don’t you buy her a doll?’

‘But she wants the conjuring set.’

‘A doll might distract her from that little bundle of rags. What does she call it?’

‘Jimmy.’

The intercom crackled softly.

Angel cocked her head. ‘Hush.’

A cat-like wail drifted into the kitchen.

Jenny Wren had liked dolls, especially the sort which could be equipped with the glamorous accessories of a pseudo-adult lifestyle. Her real name was Jenny Reynolds but Eddie’s father always called her Jenny Wren. She had been overweight, with dark hair, small features and a permanent look of surprise on her face.

Her father was a builder in a small way. He and his wife still lived in one of the council flats on the estate behind Rosington Road. The Reynoldses’ balcony was visible above the trees from the garden of number 29. When Eddie discovered which flat was theirs, he realized that the woman on the balcony whom he and Alison had seen, the woman who stared at the sky over Carver’s, must have been Mrs Reynolds.

Jenny Wren was their only child, about two years older than Eddie. She started to come to the Graces’ house in the summer of 1971, the Alison summer, always bringing her favourite doll, who was called Sandy. Alison used to laugh at Jenny Wren and Eddie had joined in, to show solidarity.

Eddie did not know how Jenny Wren had come to his father’s attention. Stanley did house-to-house collections for several charities and this helped to give him a wide acquaintance. Or Mr Reynolds might have done some work on the house, or his father might have advised the Reynoldses on financial matters. Stanley might even have stopped Jenny Wren on the street. Eddie had witnessed his father’s technique at first hand.

‘You’ve got a dolly, haven’t you?’ Stanley would say to the girl. ‘What’s her name?’ Eventually the girl would tell him. ‘That’s a pretty name,’ he would say. ‘Did you know I make dolls’ houses? Do you think your dolly would like to come and see them? We’d have to ask Mummy and Daddy, of course.’

If there were concerned parents in the picture, as with the Reynoldses, he took care to reassure them. ‘Yes, Eddie likes a bit of company. He’s our only one, you know, and it can get a bit lonely, eh? Tell you what, I’ll get my wife to give you a ring and confirm a time, shall I? Around tea time, perhaps? I know Thelma likes an excuse to bake a cake.’

Thelma lent her authority to the invitations, though they sometimes made it necessary for her to talk to neighbours, an activity she detested. But she had as little as possible to do with the girls as soon as they had crossed the threshold of 29 Rosington Road. Among themselves, Stanley and Thelma referred to the girls as ‘LVs’, which stood for ‘Little Visitors’.

The proceedings usually opened with tea around the kitchen table. This would be much more lavish than usual. There would be lemonade or Coca-Cola, chocolate biscuits and cake.

‘Ah, tea.’ Stanley would bunch up his pale cheeks in a smile. ‘Splendid. I’m as hungry as a hunter.’

During the meal Thelma spoke only when necessary, though as usual she would eat greedily and rapidly. Afterwards Thelma and Eddie cleared away while Stanley took the LV down to the basement, closing the door behind them. Eddie and Thelma carried on with their lives as normal, as though Stanley and a little girl were not in the basement looking at a dolls’ house. When it was time for the LV to go home, Thelma and Eddie often walked her back to her parents, usually in silence, leaving Stanley behind.

If all had gone well, there would be other visits. Then Stanley would introduce the subject of his second hobby, photography. As ever, he was meticulously careful in his handling of the parents. Would they mind if he took a few photographs of their daughter? She was very photogenic. There was a national competition coming up, and Stanley would like – with the parents’ agreement, of course – to submit a photograph of her. Perhaps the parents would like copies of the photograph for themselves?

It was after Alison moved away that Stanley Grace first asked Eddie into the basement when one of the little visitors was there.

‘I’d like a two-headed shot in the big chair,’ he explained to the space between Thelma and Eddie. ‘Could be rather effective, with one fair head and one dark.’

Eddie was excited; he was also pleased because he interpreted the invitation as a sign that he had somehow earned his father’s approval. The LV in question was Jenny Wren.

He remembered that first afternoon with great clarity, though as so often with memories it was difficult to know whether the clarity was real or apparent. He and Jenny Wren had been too shy to talk much to each other, and in any case, the two-year age gap between them was at that time a significant barrier. His father posed them in the low Victorian armchair, which was large enough to hold both children, their bodies squeezed together from knee to shoulder. He arranged their limbs, deftly tweaking a leg here, draping an arm there. The camera was already mounted on its tripod.

‘Now try and relax,’ Stanley told them. ‘Pretend you’re brother and sister. Or very special friends. Lean your head on Jenny’s shoulder, Eddie. That’s it, Jenny Wren: give Eddie a nice big smile. Watch the birdie now.’ His father squinted through the viewfinder. ‘Smile.’

The shutter clicked. Jenny Wren’s breath smelled sweetly of chocolate. Her dress had ridden up almost to the top of her thighs. The rough fabric of the upholstery rubbed against Eddie’s bare skin and made him want to scratch. He remembered the musty smell of the chair, the essence of a long and weary life.

‘And again, children.’ Click. ‘Very good. Now hitch your legs up a bit, Jenny Wren: lovely.’ Click. ‘Now, Eddie, let’s pretend you’re kissing Jenny Wren’s cheek. No, not like that: look up at her, into her eyes.’ Click. ‘Now let’s have some with just you, Jenny Wren. How about a chocolate first?’

It wasn’t all photographs. Stanley encouraged them to examine the dolls’ house. He allowed Jenny Wren to push her doll Sandy about the rooms and sit her in the chairs and lie her on the beds, even though Sandy was far too large for the house and Jenny Wren’s movements were so poorly coordinated that the fragile furniture was constantly in danger. The children helped themselves from the large box of chocolates. Eddie ate so many that he felt sick. At last it was time for Jenny Wren to go home.

‘You can come again next weekend, if you like.’

Jenny Wren nodded, with her mouth stuffed with chocolate and her eyes on the dolls’ house.

‘By that time I’ll have developed the films. Tell Mummy and Daddy I’ll give you some photos to take home for them.’

Next weekend the photographs were ready. There were more chocolates, more posing, more games with the dolls’ house. Stanley took some of his special artistic photographs, which involved the children taking off some of their clothes. Next weekend it was very warm, one of those early autumn days which until the evening mimic the heat of summer. At Stanley’s suggestion the children took off all their clothes.

‘All artists’ models pose without their clothes. I expect you already knew that. And I dare say neither of you would say no to a little extra pocket money, eh? Well, famous artists always pay their models. So I suppose I shall have to pay you. But this is our secret, all right? That’s very important. Our secret.’

After taking the photographs he suggested that they played a game until it was time to go home. It was so hot that he decided to take off his clothes himself.

‘You won’t mind, will you, Jenny Wren? I know Eddie won’t. He’s seen me in the buff enough times. All part of our secret, eh?’

So it continued, first with Jenny Wren and later with others. The children who excited Stanley’s artistic sensibilities were always girls. Even as a child, Eddie was aware that he was of secondary importance. In the photographs and in the games his role was not much more significant than that of the Victorian armchair. His father’s attention was always on the girl, never on him. As time went by, the invitations to the basement became rarer and rarer.

Once Eddie had reached puberty, his father did not want him there at all. On one occasion he plucked up his courage and knocked on the basement door. He was fourteen, and his father was about to photograph the latest LV, a girl called Rachel with light-brown hair, wary eyes and a freckled face. His father’s feet clumped slowly up the stairs. The key turned in the lock and the door opened.

‘Yes?’

‘I wondered if I could –’ Eddie looked past his father into the basement: the camera was on its tripod; Rachel was fiddling with the dolls’ house. ‘You know – like I used to.’

Stanley stared down at him, his face moon-like. ‘Better not. Nothing personal. But for child photography you have to get the atmosphere just right.’

‘Yes.’ Eddie backed away, hot and ashamed. ‘I see that.’

‘Young children are more artistic.’ Stanley rarely missed an opportunity to stress that his photography was driven by a high, aesthetic purpose. ‘Ask any sculptor from the Classical world.’ At this point he glanced behind him, down into the basement, as if expecting to see Phidias nodding approval from the Victorian armchair, or Praxiteles leaning on the workbench by the window and smiling encouragement. Instead, Stanley looked at Rachel, who was pretending to be absorbed in the dolls’ house. ‘Children are so plastic.’

As a very young child Eddie had admired Stanley and wanted to please him. Then his father had become a fact of life like the weather – neither good nor bad in itself, but liable to vary in its effects on Eddie. Then, with Stanley’s lecture on the aesthetics of his hobby, came the moment of revelation: that Eddie hated his father, and had in fact done so for some time.

The strength of Eddie’s hatred took him unawares and had a number of consequences. Some of these were trivial: he used to spit discreetly in his father’s tea, for example, and once he took one of his father’s shoes and pressed the heel into a dog turd on the pavement. Other consequences were more far-reaching, and affected Eddie rather than his father. It was Stanley’s fault, in a manner of speaking, that Eddie became a teacher, and Eddie never forgave him for that.

In his final year at school, Eddie told his father that he thought he might like to be an archaeologist. This was a few months before Stanley retired from the Paladin.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said his father. ‘There’s no money in archaeology. I bet there aren’t many jobs, either. Not real jobs.’

‘But it interests me.’

‘That’s no good if it won’t pay the mortgage, is it? Can’t you do it as a hobby?’

‘There are jobs for archaeologists.’

‘For the favoured few, maybe. Top scholars. One in a million. You’ve got to be realistic. Why don’t I arrange for you to have an interview at the Paladin? There’s a chap I know in Personnel.’

The upshot of this conversation was that Eddie attempted to lay the foundations for a career in archaeology by studying for a degree in history at a polytechnic on the outskirts of London. It was not a happy time. As a student he floundered: it was not so much that the work was too demanding; it was more that there seemed such a lot to do, and it was difficult to know what was important and what wasn’t, and besides, his mind had a tendency to drift into daydreams. He lived at home, which distanced him from the other students. In the first summer vacation he spent a fortnight on an archaeological dig in Essex, where he began to grow a beard. It rained all the time and the work was hard and tedious. Eddie’s interest in the subject never recovered.

He kept the beard, however, wispy and unsatisfactory though it was, primarily because it annoyed his father. (‘Makes you look a scruffy little wretch. You’ll have to shave it off if you want to find a proper job.’) As a token of rebellion, the beard made a poor substitute for a career in archaeology, but it was better than nothing.

Stanley continued to badger Eddie about the Paladin, showering him with information about vacancies for graduates.

‘I’ve already dropped a word in the right ear,’ he said towards the end of Eddie’s final year. ‘Or rather ears. It’s never a bad thing to have a few friends at court, is it? And naturally, anyone who’s the son of a former employee is bound to have a head start. But you’d better get rid of that beard.’

With hindsight, Eddie agreed that a job at the Paladin might have suited both his talents and his needs. At the time, however, the source of the suggestion automatically tainted it. Desperate to find an alternative, he glanced round the room. His father had draped the Evening Standard over the arm of his chair, and one of the headlines caught Eddie’s eye: TEACHERS IN NEW PAY TALKS. Beside it was a photograph of a group of teachers armed with placards. Several of the men had beards. That was the deciding factor.

‘If my results are good enough, I’m going to be a teacher.’

His father’s attention sharpened. ‘Really? I hope you’ve got the sense to teach younger children. If what you hear nowadays is anything to go by, older children are becoming quite unmanageable.’

‘Secondary education’s much more interesting. Intellectually, I mean.’ Eddie hoped this last remark would remind his father that he had left school at sixteen, and therefore lacked his son’s qualifications.

‘It’s your life,’ Stanley replied, apparently oblivious of his intellectual inferiority. ‘People don’t look up to teachers as much as they used to in my day. There’s the long holidays, I suppose.’

‘Teachers have to work in the holidays. It’s not a cushy job.’

His father took his time over lighting a cigarette. ‘Yes.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Well – as I say, it’s your life. I doubt if you’ll be able to cope, but that’s your affair.’

His mother had been in the room but contributed nothing to the conversation. Eddie still felt that if his parents had handled the situation more diplomatically, they could have helped him avoid the disasters which followed. Thanks to them, he forced himself to spend another year at college doing a postgraduate certificate of education. He was lucky – or perhaps unlucky – in his teaching practice: they sent him to a quiet, middle-class school where class sizes were small and his stumbling attempts to teach were carefully and even kindly supervised. At that stage, he had realized that he was not a natural teacher, but he had hoped that with luck and perseverance he might grow used to it.

Nothing had prepared Eddie for Dale Grove Comprehensive. It was a school in north-west London, not far from Kensal Vale, in an area which even then seemed to be slipping away from the control of the authorities. He applied for the job because the school was an easy tube journey from Rosington Road, and without discussing the matter both he and his parents assumed that for the time being it would be best if he continued to live at home.

Keeping order was by far the worst aspect of the job. His failure in this department affected his relationships with other teachers, who regarded him with a mixture of irritation and scorn. It was not unusual for Eddie to find himself trying to teach three or four children at the front, while in the rest of the room the remainder of the class split up into small noisy groups engaged in disruptive activities.

He was scared of the children, and they knew it. He thought them outlandish and disgusting, too, with their croaking voices, their shrill laughter, their burps, their farts, their blackheads, their acne, their strange clothes and stranger customs. The girls were worse than the boys: strapping, big-boned brutes; delighting in mockery and subtler in their methods; scenting weakness as sharks scent blood in the water. He had fallen among savages.

Matters came to a crisis towards the end of the summer term. There was no one he could talk to about it. There were problems at home, too: his father’s health was worsening, and his mother was never easy to live with. In the circumstances was it any wonder that things went wrong?

Two girls orchestrated what amounted to a campaign of sexual harassment against him. Their names were Mandy and Sian. Both were taller than he was. Mandy was thin, with spots and lank red hair. Sian was overweight and unusually well-developed. They began with innuendo, with whispers at the back of the class. ‘Do you think sir’s sexy?’ Gradually the campaign picked up momentum. ‘Please, sir, there’s a word in this book I don’t understand. What does S-P-E-R-M mean?’

After each of Eddie’s failures to control them, his torturers would take one small step further.

‘I can’t go to sleep without my teddy in my bed,’ Mandy confided to the class.

‘Me too,’ Sian remarked. ‘Mine’s called Eddy-Teddy. He’s so warm and cuddly.’

Eddie found repellent drawings on his table when he returned from the staff room. Mandy, something of a raconteur in her primitive way, told dirty jokes to anyone in the class who would listen, which was most of them.

As the weeks passed, Sian hitched her skirt higher and higher. She and Mandy fell into the habit of sitting at a table near the front of the class. They would pull their chairs out and sit facing the front with their legs apart, forcing Eddie to glimpse their underwear, some of which was most unsuitable for schoolgirls, or indeed for any woman who wasn’t the next best thing to a prostitute. One day, early in July, Mandy sat in a pose which revealed beyond any possible doubt that she was wearing no knickers at all.

The crisis arrived late on a Friday afternoon. Eddie’s guard was down because he thought the children had gone; he was alone in his classroom, sitting at his table, trying to plan the next week’s lessons and feeling relieved that the teaching week was over.

Mandy, Sian and three other girls strolled nonchalantly into the room. Mandy and Sian came to stand beside him, one on each side. A third girl lingered by the door, keeping watch; the other two constituted an audience.

‘Wouldn’t you like to fuck me, sir?’ whispered Mandy on the left. She put a hand on the back of his chair and leaned over him.

‘No – me.’ Sian undid the top two buttons of her shirt. ‘I can give you a much better time. Honest, sir. Why don’t I suck your cock?’

Eddie tried to push back his chair, but it wouldn’t move because Mandy now had her foot behind one of the rear legs as well as her hand on the back.

The other girls were sniggering, and one of them said in a loud whisper: ‘Look – he’s getting a hard-on.’

Mandy was now unbuttoning her shirt too. ‘Go on, sir. Lick my titties. They taste nicer than hers.’

Eddie found his voice at last. ‘Stop this.’ His voice rose. ‘Stop this at once. Stop it. Stop it.’

‘You don’t mean that, sir. You like it. Go on, admit it.’

‘Stop it. Stop it. I shall report you to –’

‘If you report us we’ll say you were interfering with us.’

‘Mr Grace is a bloody pervert,’ said Sian. ‘We got witnesses to prove it.’

The latter’s shirt was now entirely unbuttoned. She pushed up her breasts, encased in a formidable black bra, and poked them hard into his face. The lace was rough against his nose. There was a smell of stale sweat.

‘Fuck me, darling,’ she murmured.

Eddie leapt up, knocking over his chair. Mandy shrieked and groped at his crotch. Abandoning his briefcase, he ran for the door. Their hands clutched at him. He collided with the sentry in the doorway, pushing her against the wall. The girls’ laughter pursued him down the corridor. As he ran across the school car park, scattering a knot of teenagers, the laughter drifted after him through the open windows. In a way it was a relief that the final humiliation had come at last. Failure had its compensations.

The following Monday morning Eddie phoned the school secretary and, having pleaded illness too often in the past, desperately invented a dying grandmother. The same day, he saw his GP, who listened to him for five minutes and gave him a prescription for tranquillizers. On Tuesday he wrote a letter of resignation to the head teacher.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Stanley said when Eddie told him the news. ‘I saw that coming from the start. I told you, didn’t I?’

‘You don’t understand. I’ve decided that I don’t approve of the philosophy behind modern education.’

His father raised his eyebrows, miming the disbelief he did not need openly to express. ‘What now? You’ve probably missed the boat with the Paladin, but if you like, I –’

‘No.’ Stuff the Paladin. ‘I don’t want to work there.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

At the time Eddie could not answer the question, but over the years an answer had evolved as if by its own volition. First he had made a half-hearted attempt to see whether he could retrain as a primary-school teacher. But he could not whip up much enthusiasm even for teaching younger children. In any case, he guessed that the head teacher at Dale Grove would give him an unsatisfactory reference. Quite apart from the discipline problem, there was also the possibility that Mandy and Sian had circulated rumours of sexual harassment, with Eddie in the role of predator rather than victim.

Worse was to come that summer – the unpleasant business at Charleston Street swimming baths. As a schoolboy, Eddie had learned to swim there, though not very well. It was an old building, full of echoes, with an ineradicable smell of chlorine and unwashed feet. In the first few months after he left Dale Grove, Eddie paid several visits to Charleston Street, partly to give himself a reason to get out of the house and away from his father, now a semi-invalid.

He disliked the male changing room, where youths who reminded him of the pupils at Dale Grove indulged in loud horseplay. The pool, too, was often too crowded for his taste. Nor did he like taking off his clothes in front of strangers. He was very conscious of the soft flab which clung to his waist and the top of his thighs, of his lack of bodily hair, and of his small stature. But he enjoyed cooling down in the water and watching the younger children.

He clung to the side and watched girls swimming races and mothers teaching their children to swim. Some young children appeared to have no adults watching over them, even from the balcony overlooking the swimming pool. Latchkey children, Eddie supposed, abandoned by mothers going out to work. He felt sorry for them – his own mother had always been at home when he came back from school and during the holidays – and tried to keep a friendly eye on them.

Sometimes he became quite friendly with those deserted children and would play games with them. His favourite was throwing them up in the air above the water, catching them as they descended, and then tickling them until they squealed with laughter.

On one occasion Eddie was playing this game with a little girl called Josie. She was in the care of her older brother, a ten-year-old who for most of the time horsed about with his friends in the deep end. Eddie felt quite indignant on Josie’s behalf: the little girl was so vulnerable – what could the mother be thinking of?

‘You funny man,’ she said. ‘Your name’s Mr Funny.’

He came back the following day to find Josie there.

‘Hello, Mr Funny,’ she called out.

They played together for a few minutes. As Eddie was preparing to throw Josie into the air for the fourth time, he noticed surprise spreading over her face. An instant later he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Beside him, standing on the edge of the pool, was one of the lifeguards, accompanied by a thickset, older man in a tracksuit.

The latter said, ‘All right. You’re getting out now. Put the kid down.’

Eddie looked from one hostile face to the other. Another lifeguard was walking towards them with Josie’s brother. It was unfair but Eddie did not argue, partly because he knew there was no point and partly because he was scared of the man in the tracksuit.

He climbed up the ladder. Eddie was conscious that other people were looking at him – the other two lifeguards on duty, and also some of the adults who were swimming. It seemed to him that everyone had stopped talking. The only sounds were the slapping of the water against the sides of the swimming pool and the rhythmic thudding of the distorted rock music coming over the public-address system. The two men escorted him back to the changing room.

‘Get dressed,’ ordered the older man.

One on either side, they waited while he struggled into his clothes. He did not dry himself. It was very embarrassing. Eddie hated people watching him while he was getting dressed. Gradually the other people in the changing room realized something was up. The volume of their conversations diminished until, by the time Eddie was strapping on his sandals, no one was talking at all.

‘This way.’ The older man opened the door. Eddie followed him down the corridor towards the reception area. The young lifeguard fell in step behind. Instead of leading him outside, the thickset man swung to the left, stopped and unlocked the door labelled MANAGER. He stood to one side and waved Eddie to precede him into the room. It was a small office, overcrowded with furniture, and with three people inside it was claustrophobic. The lifeguard, a burly youth with tight blond curls, shut the door and leant against it.

‘Identification.’ The manager held out his hand. ‘Come on.’

Eddie found his wallet, extracted his driving licence and handed it over. The manager made a note of the details, breathing heavily and writing slowly, as if using a pen was not an activity that came naturally to him. Eddie trembled while he waited. Their silence unnerved him. He thought perhaps they were planning to beat him up.

At last the man tossed the driving licence back to Eddie, who missed it and had to kneel down to pick it up from the floor. The manager threw down his pen on the desk and came to stand very close to Eddie. The lifeguard gave a small, anticipatory sigh.

‘We’ve been watching you. And we don’t like what we see. There’ve been complaints, too. I’m not surprised.’

Eddie’s voice stumbled into life. ‘I’ve done nothing. Really.’

‘Shut up. Stand against that wall.’

Eddie backed towards the wall. The man opened a drawer in the desk and took out a camera. He pointed it at Eddie, adjusted the focus and pressed the shutter. There was a flash.

‘You’re banned,’ the manager said. ‘And I’ll be circulating your details around other pools. You want to keep away from children, mate. You’re lucky we didn’t call the police. If I had my way I’d castrate the fucking lot of you.’

It was so unfair. Eddie had been only playing with the children. He couldn’t help touching them. They touched him, too. But only in play, only in play.

It frightened him that the people at the swimming pool had seen past what was happening and through into his mind, to what might have happened, what he wanted to happen. He had given himself away. In future he would have to be very careful. The conclusion was obvious: if he wanted to play games it would be far better to do it in private, where there were no grown-ups around to spoil the fun.

Summer slid into autumn. Goaded by his parents, Eddie applied for two clerical jobs but was offered neither. He also told them he was on the books of a tutorial agency, which was a lie. He looked into the future, and all he foresaw was boredom and desolation. He felt the weight of his parents’ society pressing down on him like cold, dead earth. Yet he was afraid of going out in case he met people who knew him from Dale Grove or the Charleston Street swimming baths.

While the weather was warm, he would often leave Stanley and Thelma, encased in their old and evil-smelling carcasses, in front of the television and escape to the long, wild garden. He listened to the trains screaming and rattling on the line beyond Carver’s. Sometimes he glimpsed Mrs Reynolds among the geraniums on the balcony of the Reynoldses’ flat. Once he saw her talking earnestly with a large, fat woman who he guessed was Jenny Wren. The ugly duckling, Eddie told himself, had become an even uglier duck.

Over the years the tangle of trees and bushes at the far end of the Graces’ garden had expanded both vertically and horizontally. The fence separating the back gardens of 27 and 29 Rosington Road had been repaired long before. But there was still a hole in the fence at the back: too small for Eddie’s plump adult body, but obviously used by small animals – cats, perhaps, or even foxes.

Thelma said that Carver’s was an eyesore. According to Stanley, the site of the bombed engineering works had not been redeveloped because its ownership was in dispute – a case of Dickensian complexity involving a family trust, missing heirs and a protracted court case.

‘Someone’s sitting on a gold mine there,’ Stanley remarked on many occasions, for the older he became the more he repeated himself. ‘You mark my words. A bloody gold mine. But probably the lawyers will get the lot.’

Time had on the whole been kind to Carver’s, for creepers had softened the jagged brick walls and rusting corrugated iron; saplings had burst through the cracked concrete and grown into trees. Cow parsley, buddleia and rosebay willowherb brought splashes of white and purple and pink. It was a wonder, Eddie thought, that the ruins had not become a haven for crack-smoking delinquents from the council flats or Social Security parasites in search of somewhere to drink and sleep. Perhaps the ghosts kept them away. Not that it was easy to get into Carver’s, except from the back gardens of Rosington Road. To the north was the railway, to the east and west were high walls built when bricks and labour were cheap. Access by road was down a narrow lane beside the infants’ school which ended in high gates festooned with barbed wire and warning notices.

Eddie was safe from prying eyes at the bottom of the garden. He liked to kneel and stare through the hole into Carver’s. The shed was still there, smaller and nearer than in memory, with two saplings of ash poking through its roof. One evening in September, he levered out the plank beside the hole and, his heart thudding, wriggled through the enlarged opening. Once inside he stood up and looked around. Birds sang in the distance.

Eddie picked his way towards the shed, skirting a large clump of nettles and a bald tyre. The shed’s door had parted company with its hinges and fallen outwards. He edged inside. Much more of the roof had gone. Over half of the interior was now filled with the saplings and other vegetation. There were rags, two empty sherry bottles and a scattering of old cigarette ends on the floor; occasionally, it seemed, other people found their way into Carver’s. He looked slowly around, hoping to see the paint tin that he and Alison had used for the Peeing Game, hoping for some correspondence between past and present.

Everything had changed. A sob wrenched its way out of his throat. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. A tear rolled slowly down his left cheek. Here he was, he thought, a twenty-five-year-old failure. What had he been expecting to find? Alison with the pink ribbon in her hair, Alison twirling like a ballerina and smiling up at him?

Eddie stumbled outside. On his way back to the fence he looked up. To his horror, he saw through the branches of trees, high above the top of the wall, Mrs Reynolds on the balcony of her flat. Something flashed in her hands, a golden dazzle reflecting the setting sun. Eddie ran through the nettles to the fence and flung himself at the hole. A moment later he was back in the garden of 29 Rosington Road. His glasses had fallen off and he had torn a hole in his trousers.

When his breathing was calmer, Eddie forced himself to stroll to the house. At the door he glanced back. Mrs Reynolds was still on her balcony. She was staring over Carver’s through what looked like a pair of field glasses. At least she wasn’t looking at him. Not now. He shivered, and went inside.

Autumn became winter. After Christmas, Stanley caught a cold and the cold, as often happened with him, turned to bronchitis. No one noticed until it was too late that this time the bronchitis was pneumonia. He died early in February, aged seventy-two.

In recent years the trickle of LVs had died away. But until 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.

‘Let us know if we can help, won’t you?’ Mr Reynolds patted Eddie’s arm. ‘You know where to find us.’

The Reynolds turned into the access road to the council estate, passing a line of garage doors daubed with swastikas and football slogans. Eddie scowled at their backs. A moment later, he let himself into number 29.

‘Where have you been?’ his mother called down from her room. ‘There’s tea in the pot, but don’t blame me if it’s stewed.’

The hall felt different from usual. There was more light. An unexpected draught brushed his face. Almost instantaneously Eddie realized that the door to the basement was standing wide open; Stanley’s death was so recent an event that this in itself was remarkable. Eddie paused and looked through the doorway, down the uncarpeted stairs.

The dolls’ house was still on the workbench. But it was no longer four storeys high. It had been reduced to a mound of splintered wood, torn fabric and flecks of paint. Beside it on the bench was the rusty hatchet which Alison had used to break through the fence between the Graces’ garden and Carver’s, and which Stanley had found lying under the trees at the end of the garden.

Eddie closed the basement door and went into the kitchen. When she came downstairs, his mother did not mention the dolls’ house and nor did he. That evening he piled what was left of it into a large cardboard box, carried it outside and left it beside the dustbin. He and his mother did not speak about it later because there was nothing they wanted to say.