Pastor Lewis’s address burned in his ears. The hungry. The poor. The homeless. Not quite, but she was old, infirm and lonely. Her daily life was a struggle. He had a pain in his chest, where tears of remorse formed a hard lump.
Solange wept when he talked about it to her. He realised he had never seen her weep before.
‘It’s the answer to a prayer,’ she said, ‘the answer to a prayer, Norman.’
She wanted to be off now, tonight, it was all he could do to rein her in, prevent her from making a start on the packing. They agreed that, for the time being, she would simply close up this house and leave it. In six months, assuming that she had settled and was happy, he would come up again and put it on the market. (‘And of course the money will be yours, yours and Belinda’s and the children’s, in return for taking me in. God bless you.’) But he said that they would not dream of it.
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ he said to Belinda. ‘The right thing.’
They felt good about themselves.
She had said that of course she did not need to see the room, she knew it would be wonderful. It was going to be all she had longed for. But when she did see it for the first time she seemed taken aback.
‘How do we put it to her,’ Belinda had asked, ‘about, you know, “house rules”?’
Their idea was that Solange would share Friday evening supper with them, and Sunday lunch every week, but cater for herself the rest of the time. Belinda was happy to drive her anywhere, in the quest to meet new people and make friends with at least some of them. She had thought vaguely of their chapel, or any other church Solange might prefer, and of the community centre, which offered classes and social groups. And, of course, these new friends must be invited back to her room, whenever it pleased her. She could book taxis to take her out when Belinda was not free. Anything she needed she would be encouraged to suggest – a DVD player, Norman thought, and they had gone out and bought an expensive radio the moment she mentioned having left hers behind.
The children were always to knock if they wanted to visit, ‘Just the same as if she lived in the house next door.’
She arrived on a Friday, ate early supper with them, but then retired to the front room. They heard the radio, then the television. Slow footsteps and the flush of the toilet. The shower defeated her. ‘I have baths,’ she said, ‘I’ve never had a shower in my life.’
Norman explained the workings of the shower patiently, several times, and in the end, Belinda overcame a small reluctance to help Solange into the shower, wash and get out.
‘I don’t know I’m sure. I can’t see that I shall get used to it.’
‘No,’ Belinda said that night, ‘I’m sorry but not our bath, there are already too many of us and also, it’s a question of the stairs.’
Solange made quite a business of crossing the hall on her sticks. Hearing her breathe heavily as she shuffled, Norman had opened the living room door and offered help. She had turned on him a look of hatred, which he felt like an electric shock. She did not speak. He closed the door.
Belinda did not teach on Mondays. She dropped the children at school, tidied the kitchen, put a load of washing on, and gave Laurie his snack before putting him down for his sleep. Then, as usual, she settled down for a coffee and the paper. She had just done so, on this first Monday, when the door opened.
‘Solange! Come in. Is everything all right for you? Would you like some coffee?’
Solange looked slowly round the room, eyes resting on every surface, every object, and then out of the window onto the garden, and then back to Belinda. Hers were odd eyes, pebble-coloured with a needle of yellow at their centre.
Belinda cleared her throat. ‘Do come and sit down.’
‘There’s a nasty draught in that room.’
‘Is there? I’m sorry, Solange. I’ll check your windows and if it isn’t that, Norman will have a look when he gets home.’
‘Nobody comes.’
‘Solange, don’t just stand there – talking of draughts. Come in and have coffee.’
‘I can’t think why you had me here. I sit on my own wondering that.’
‘Well, because …’
‘You never liked me. And there goes that child. Cries a lot doesn’t he, that Laurie.’
‘No more than any other two-year-old. He’s rather a contented little boy, actually.’
‘I hear them clumping up and down right over my head, clump clump, up and down.’
The effort of holding the words back made Belinda’s face burn. ‘Why did you call him Laurie?’
‘Well, it’s Lawrence, really…’
But Solange had turned away, though as she did so, Belinda saw a needle-flash of hatred from the woman’s eyes that seemed to pierce her flesh with a split second of pain.
The door closed.
She decided to say nothing.
That Sunday, family lunch was uneventful, with everyone on their best behaviour until, without warning, Solange leant over Fern.
‘Don’t make that gobbling noise when you’re eating, you disgusting little girl.’
Spittle from the venom with which she spoke caught Fern’s cheek. Fern went white. Wallace ducked, fearing his turn would come next. The air crackled. Only Laurie laughed and laughed and banged his spoon. Solange picked up her knife and fork and went on eating quite calmly.
‘You,’ Belinda said, fighting back either tears or fury, or both. They had put on a TV cartoon for the children, an unprecedented thing on a Sunday, and were upstairs in their bedroom. ‘You. She’s your stepmother.’
‘Yes.’
‘How dare she?’
‘Yes. No, I know. Awful.’
‘I will not have her speak to the children like that, I will not have her correcting them.’
‘Yes. No.’
She sat down on the bed. ‘Fern wasn’t even making a noise when she ate.’
‘No.’
‘This has to stop now.’
‘Yes.’
The following morning, Belinda came in ten minutes earlier than usual from her school and saw that the front room door was ajar. She had wrestled with herself but in the end, wanting peace in the air, had bought Solange a small bunch of flowers.
There was no reply from her tap. She looked in. The room was empty, as was the kitchen, shower and toilet. Solange was slightly deaf, enough not to hear Belinda’s quiet footsteps on the staircase.
She was sitting at the dressing table, whose drawer was hanging open and spilling its contents. She did not turn round, only stared at Belinda’s reflection in the mirror, eyes gleaming.
‘Please do not come into our room when we are out and please do not go through my drawers. I would not dream of doing that to yours. If you want something, ask me.’
As she was speaking, she was aware of an unpleasant smell surrounding Solange. Oh God, not that, please not that.
‘I would like you to go back downstairs.’
Solange did not move. ‘I am not your child to order about. And your child has been in my room, poking and prying.’
‘I am quite sure they have not.’
‘She. The girl.’
‘Fern would never do such a thing.’
‘The little listener. She’s a sly one.’
If she had stayed there Belinda might have hit her, but Solange got up and scuttled off like a rat, without her sticks or, apparently, the need of them.
‘We can’t just throw her out,’ Norman said, twisting his fingers together. ‘Doesn’t it defeat the whole point of …’
‘She is not staying here to pry into my things and malign our children.’
‘I’ll have a word.’
‘A word won’t be of any use, Solange is beyond words. She sits in there. She has made no attempt to socialise. I have offered to take her to all sorts of things, but she says she wouldn’t like the people. She comes into the kitchen unannounced, she …’
‘I said I’d have a word.’
Somehow things
were smoothed over, or else brushed under the carpet and never mentioned. Somehow they sat through a Friday-night supper without unpleasantness.
A week later, in the evening, urgent, hysterical crying came from the children’s room. Belinda ran up. Norman switched off the television.
Wallace was sitting up in bed, pale as dough, holding out his arm and making an odd, gulping noise. In the soft flesh above his elbow, teeth marks were swelling into a red weal. As she screamed out for Norman to come, the smell was there again, a little pocket of it in the air above Wallace’s bed, foetid, rancid.
When Belinda flung herself in through the door of the front room, without knocking, she found it dark, but in the orange glow of the street lamp, through a chink in the curtains, she saw Solange in bed, and asleep, snores coming from her half-open mouth. The smell, coming from around her bed, was stronger than ever now.
‘Oh God,’ Belinda said, ‘Oh God.’
‘But where can she go?” Norman stared at the wall, desperate to be anywhere but in his own house, facing his own wife.
It was not quite the answer to a prayer when the front door bell rang, but close to it: Pastor Lewis was on the step, although he was only delivering papers for the next meeting of the chapel council.
He accepted coffee, sat with them at the table, cigarette-stained forefingers in an arch, permanent evidence of his miracle.
‘Evil,’ Belinda said.
‘Now evil is a very strong word.’
‘I can’t think of another, can you?’
‘What you did was a very good thing, a good act,’ he said, ducking and diving. ‘Few would have taken me at my word, or rather, the Lord at his. Few ever do.’
‘But no good deed goes unpunished.’
‘I would never say that, never. That is to be cynical.’
‘If you have no advice, Pastor …’
‘Of course, I see your problem, I do see it.’
‘She has to go,’ Belinda said, looking him in the eyes, ‘it is only a question of where.’
‘And when.’
‘As soon as possible, is the when.’
‘But where, you know.’
‘Back to her own house. Or into a home.’
‘Homes have to be paid for,’ Norman said, uneasy, unhappy.
Belinda stood up and banged her hand hard down on the table, so that the mugs jumped, coffee was spilled, and the door opened on Solange, leaning on her sticks, hair like a half-blown dandelion clock.
Then Pastor Lewis did an unexpected thing. ‘Come, Solange,’ he said leading her from the room. ‘I think you and I should have a talk.’
It was two hours later, when he was running very late for all his evening appointments, that he put his head back round the kitchen door. ‘I think we have an understanding,’ he said, ‘though I’m afraid I got nowhere with the concept of error, let alone wrongdoing. Meanwhile, praise the Lord, I hope you will find that things improve.’
‘Thank you, Pastor,’ Belinda said, though unconvinced. They stood on the step and she lowered her voice. ‘Were you aware of a smell? A very unpleasant smell, in the front room?’
He was fidgeting to get away. ‘No criticism, Belinda, none at all of anyone, but managing that sort of thing gets harder as we grow old. Perhaps, a cleaner once a week? The district nurse would advise.’
Oh God.
*
The children scuttled past the front room now, even Laurie, for the fear was contagious. Wallace’s bites healed, though the bruising took a while to fade. Fern stood close to Belinda if Solange came near.
‘You’re welcome, any of you, at any time. I could teach you to knit, Fern.’
‘I don’t want to knit.’
‘I could teach you to play Racing Demon.’
Fern’s hands tightened round her mother’s arm.
Meeting a neighbour at the gate, Belinda suggested she might like to pop in on Solange, when she herself was teaching. ‘Tuesday mornings and Thursday all day. She would so appreciate some company.’
The neighbour came on the following Thursday, with an offering of cake and a bunch of pinks. She came on the Tuesday, too, though empty-handed. But not again.
‘She won’t want to make a habit of it and then not to be able to stick to that, it can be very disappointing, when there’s an expectation.’
‘There must be someone else.’
But any others there were made excuses, not meeting Belinda’s eye.
‘She’s talked to them – Mrs Baker. Put them off.’
‘Now why would she do that?’
‘The same reason as she won’t come again herself.’
‘And that would be …?’
‘Because Solange is evil.’ Norman raised his eyebrows.
‘They can smell it.’ But Belinda did not actually say that.
Nothing else happened, except that sometimes, as Belinda went across the hall, the door of the front room was opened a chink and then closed quickly. She still came in to eat Sunday lunch with them. Her radio or TV were turned up too loudly. She left the shower running. Laurie ran up to her door and bashed on it with a wooden brick or his tractor and laughed at the rage of words coming from inside. The next time, the door opened very suddenly, and he fell flat, hitting his face, and wailed in pain and outrage. Solange turned on the radio to full volume and ignored him.
‘I cannot stand it. I cannot have her in my house a day longer.’
‘Our house.’
‘Your stepmother.’
‘I’ll have a word.’
‘When? When? You say that, you say it, but you have never had any word, you never see her, you avoid her, anything to save your own skin. WHEN?’
‘When’ was eight o’clock that evening. Solange heard him in silence. He took some time, twisting his hands together, clearing his throat.
‘You do see? That it isn’t working well – I mean, for you. You do understand? We are thinking of you, Solange. So … So, these would seem to be the options. Back to Linden Close. Or … a nice home.’ He said it again, stressing the ‘nice’. ‘There. Or here, where you would still be near to us. Obviously it’s entirely up to you. Obviously.’
Solange leaned forward. ‘Come here, Norman. Come nearer to me.’
He moved nearer, smiling.
She spat in his face.
At three in the morning Belinda came awake like a diver surfacing fast, to a ringing in her ears and a brutal pressure in her chest, and as she awoke fully, the smell was so strong that she gagged. It was slightly different now, a rotten, decaying, almost sweet smell, full of noxious gases.
‘Oh God, Oh God.’
The smell thickened, became a vapour, one that she could see ballooning up from the floor, faintly yellow-green.
They did not sleep again but huddled together, cold and afraid, and in the end they dozed, and slowly became aware that the smell had faded and the vapour thinned away to nothing.
The children had not stirred.
There was no sound from the front room when Belinda went down. There was none at nine ‘o’clock, then ten. Laurie pottered across the hall while she filled the dishwasher.
‘Oh look,’ she heard him say. ‘Oh look.’
Solange was lying on top of the bed covers, fully dressed, her flesh mushroom-coloured, eyes wide open and sightless.
Two
‘You are not to blame,’ Pastor Lewis said several times, after the small, bleak funeral, which was not held in the chapel. Belinda had insisted they go straight to the crematorium. There was something purifying about a fire. She wanted to see it. If she had been brave, she might have asked to go behind the curtain, have them open the metal door and look into the heart of the furnace.
That night she slept better than she had since Solange had taken over the front room. The children’s faces were smoothed of anxiety, their bodies seemed lighter, they skipped about. They ate and ate.
‘What are we going to do with it?’ Norman said.
‘Leave it
. Lock the door. I am never going in there again.’
‘Don’t be silly, Belinda.’
‘You do what you like.’
‘Well … let it all settle shall we?’
‘Every morning I woke feeling as if cobwebs clung to my face. Every time I came home … opened the door … I could smell it.’
‘I never really understood,’ Norman said, ‘about the smell.’
‘Then there was something wrong with you.’
But he shook his head. Perhaps now she had gone, things really could go back to where they were, settled, Belinda happy in her routine, the children aware, without being able to express as much, that it was over.
‘Why did she come here?’ Fern asked once.
‘She was very lonely. She was our relation and we wanted to do her a kindness. We thought it was for the best.’
Fern’s small face tightened. For a second, she looked semi-transparent, as if her skin was the white of egg painted over her bones. Wallace never spoke of it. Laurie banged on the front room door occasionally but, getting no reply, wandered away. Soon, he stopped doing it altogether.
The year turned. The street smelled of burning leaves.
*
At the end of October, when the clocks had gone back and it was dark by five, Belinda came home to see a light in the front room – not a bright light, but as if someone had left a side lamp switched on. Perhaps Norman had gone into the front room the previous evening and left it on. But would one of them not have noticed?
She hesitated in the hall, outside the front room. She put her hand on the knob, then whipped it away. The knob felt red-hot. Touching it, it was as if her palm had been branded.
But when she looked at it in the kitchen, nothing showed, skin and flesh were normal. She said nothing to Norman when he came in except, ‘Will you switch off the lamp in the front room?’
He pulled off his coat. ‘You’ve been in there?’
‘No, you must have left it on when you went in last night.’
They looked at one another. She knew what he was going to say and she would not let him say it.
‘Just switch it off. No point in wasting electricity.’
He went into the hall and hung up his coat. She heard him go into the front room.