SEVENTEEN
Dean Close tried to look nonchalant as he rose from the kitchen table. Four pairs of eyes gazed at him: Keith’s, Julian’s, Alice’s and Alice’s friend Deirdre’s. He did not engage with any of them, particularly not Deirdre’s, which were large, brown and moist, like a cow’s.
‘I’m going out,’ he said, shortly.
‘Bring us back a couple of Buds.’
‘Get a pack,’ said Julian.
‘Not the off-licence,’ he said.
‘You mean really out?’ Julian could not help giving Alice’s friend Deirdre a glance.
‘Yes,’ he said, trying not to be self-conscious.
‘Where?’ said Alice baldly.
‘Out.’
People on the tube stared at him. He pulled his Nike cap further over his eyes and ignored them. One shrivelled little woman in a raincoat kept darting nervous glances at him. She looked positively stricken when they got off at the same stop. Dean did not notice. He felt even more nervous now that he was here, and his feet dragged as he walked along the Terrace. He was keeping his distance behind the woman from the tube, who muttered to herself and kept clutching at her chest. He scarcely noticed. Then, at the top of the Terrace, they both turned right into the High Road. Dean kept his hands in his pockets and his head down. He speeded up and he slowed down, lost in anxiety. It was at the second corner that the woman in the raincoat stopped an idling police car and pointed to her stalker. A couple of seconds later, the two very bored policemen pulled him in.
‘Good job you weren’t black,’ said Keith when he collected him. ‘And a good job I’m a solicitor.’
‘In training,’ said Dean. ‘Only in training.’
Keith laughed and set off for the flat. Dean sat up, touched his arm. ‘No –’ he said suddenly. ‘Continue down here. I’ll show you a route away from the traffic.’
Keith eyed the entirely empty road. ‘Er –’ he said, nodding at the emptiness.
Dean nodded impatiently. ‘A brilliant solicitor – but occasionally a tad too fucking literal.’
Keith drove on. He did not, at first, realize why. And when he did, he shut up.
As they turned the corner into her road Dean’s heart gave a surprising lurch. He peered through the windscreen. Halfway along the street, just about outside her house, he saw the lights of a car being parked. It must be her.
His heart lurched again.
‘Inch forward a little,’ he said to Keith, and he leaned across to switch off the lights.
Keith tutted and went to turn them on again. ‘I’m a trainee solicitor, you nut – do you want me to get done?’ But he steered forward slowly.
Dean’s eyes never left the other car. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘she’s got a GTI Three Hundred Series.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘But she can’t park it.’
They both peered in the darkness. ‘Pull in here,’ he said suddenly. They were about a dozen houses away from hers. ‘Maybe she’ll need my help.’
The parking was finished. He watched the lights go out, heard the engine die, saw the driver’s door open and the driver step out. He felt clammy with excitement and fear. Would he speak to her? Would he get out now and go up to her and say, ‘Hi, I was just passing?’
He watched. Her house was lit up but everything else around it was dark. He watched the driver walk across the pavement, right up to her gate. Then Dean saw that it was not her. He watched the shadowy figure intently. He thought it behaved oddly, peering round her hedge, up at her bedroom. Particularly, he thought, up at her bedroom. He screwed his eyes against the darkness. It was a bloke.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said to Keith. His heart began to pound and, suddenly, he was out of the car, running along the street, driven by an emotion that was quite beyond control.
She was being stalked. Right. . .
No knight on his steed could go faster. He gave a bloodcurdling yell, took a spectacular leap, missed the man completely, and landed right in the middle of the privet. He heard a yelp – then a voice, female, not hers, calling – a door opened, light flooded the scene and he heard the words ‘Police’ and ‘Telephone’ and ‘Dad’.
Before he could rescramble his thoughts, and just about aware of a small blonde person yelling her way down the path, somebody heaved him from the hedge.
‘Jesus, Dean,’ groaned Keith, ‘do you want to get arrested again or what?’
Back in the car he kept the lights switched off until they reversed back round the corner, and then shot off in the direction of Kew Gardens.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ said Dean wearily.
‘Why don’t you just grow up?’ Keith said furiously.
‘I didn’t hurt him,’ Dean said righteously. ‘I didn’t even touch him. Wish I had – the dirty –’
‘He was a neighbour.’
‘He was a dirty peeper.’
‘He was a neighbour,’ said Keith. ‘And what you did to that hedge was an act of criminal vandalism. You prat,’ he said with feeling. And turned the car on to the High Road.
‘She’d laugh if she knew it was me.’
‘Dean, you are talking out of your arse. Forget it. Forget her. If you take the advice of your lawyer, you’ll get stuck in with one of those friends of Alice’s –’
‘Get stuck in?’ said Dean incredulously. The knight reared in shock. ‘Get stuck in?’ That was it. That was exactly it. Nobody of his own age really understood.
‘Or whatever you straight blokes do,’ said Keith serenely, as they drove back past Chiswick Police.
‘Stop the car,’ said Dean.
‘What?’ said Keith.
‘Stop the car.’
He was fed up with being treated like an adolescent.
He got out.
He was going back.
*
He removed the hat and avoided any more oddballs in the street. He bought an African violet at the station flower stall, pink champagne at the offie, and chocolates from Patel’s at the end of her road.
The son served him. Last time Dean saw him he was just a schoolboy. Now he had face hair and a giggling girl draped all over him. The giggling girl looked him up and down. She must have been all of fifteen. Suddenly he saw that she thought of him as old. He could have kissed her.
Just as he left the shop, the boy called, ‘You’re Danny’s friend, aren’t you?’
Their cover story.
‘You taking his place now, then?’ he added, indicating the gifts.
The girl giggled anew and clung on tighter.
Dean shrugged and opened the door to go. ‘Sort of,’ he said.
‘I suppose she misses him. Is he lucky or what?’
Dean said, ‘Misses?’
The boy nodded, fingering his moustache self-consciously. ‘Now he’s in Liverpool. Talk about freedom,’ said the boy. ‘Job, flat, girl. Brilliant.’
Dean stared.
The penny dropped.
He was enraptured.
Daniel had left home.
He strode up her path, noticing the hole in her hedge with amusement. She’d laugh. He pictured her face when she opened the door and found him standing there with all these gifts. He was about to ring the bell when he heard music – Danny’s guitar, it sounded like. Puzzled, he waited. It definitely, definitely was his guitar. But who was playing? And then he heard the unmistakable sound of a male voice, not Daniel’s, and her laughter.
He froze. In all the considerations that passed through his mind he never thought she might have another man. Standing there on the step with the flowers and the chocolates and the bottle, he felt exactly what Keith said – a prat. He sat on the step, leaned against the wall of the porch, popped the cork on the bottle and drank the lot. All the time he could hear the voices, the guitar, the laughter from within. When he finished he put the bottle tidily with the milk empties, left the flowers and the chocolates where they would be tripped over, and posted the cork through the letter-box.
Putting on the hall light to let Rick out, she stumbled over a champagne cork. When she picked it up it felt fresh, slightly damp.
‘Yours?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘Gut rot.’
She opened the door and out he went into the night, guitar slung over his back, jauntiness in his step.
‘Thanks for a great time,’ he called loudly.
Oh, shit, she thought, and hoped Peaches was fast asleep.
Then she looked down. At her feet was a very pathetic little African violet lying on its side in a pot, its flower heads drooping with cold. Next to these was a box of chocolates. And in the milk bottle holder was an empty champagne bottle. She puzzled over it all for a moment. And then she knew. There was only one person in the world who thought that the Lady Really Did Love Milk Tray – apart from Danny – and that was Dean. They both seemed incapable of getting their heads around the fact that she preferred her chocolates plain.
Just as well he went before Rick found him, or he would have hauled him in, said, Bless you, my children, and left them to it with a cheery wink and a flash of his silly earring. When she told him about tracing Dean’s call, he spent a lot of time trying to persuade her to call him back. ‘You don’t need the hang-ups of old guys like me,’ he said, shrugging and smiling like a mystic. ‘Seek him out. He just might be pining for you.’ She stared at the champagne cork. Perhaps Rick was a mystic? She put the poor little violets where Peter’s white roses had been. Only one left to go for the floral tribute, she thought. And her heart turned over. He would not, of course; Douglas was always capable of keeping his responses under control.
*
‘Clubbing?’ said Deirdre. ‘At this time of night? As if. . .’
She got up from the settee, picked up her coat, rearranged her brassiere and did up her skirt. ‘Anyway, you’re pissed,’ she said, and stalked out.
Nice Catholic girl, he giggled to himself, nice Catholic girl. How his mother would approve.