All Bones and Lies Read online

  Mr Stastny rattled back through the bead curtain. ‘No cornplasters. Only brown bread. And here’s your mother’s tea.’ He jammed it all in. ‘One bag will do you, won’t it?’

  Scarcely a question. More a restatement of the shop’s policy of thrift. Colin set off, past Warburton’s Funeral Emporium ‘poised to assist’ on the corner, and back down the alley. There’d been no change to speak of from his note, and he knew perfectly well from long experience just what a chore it was going to be, prising the loot for his purchases out of the fuddy-duddies. And so it proved. ‘That’s eighty pence I owe you, is it, Colin?’ said Mr Manson, with no sign of any hand movement towards his trouser pocket. Prising the loaf from him, June Royston asked, ‘I don’t suppose you have change for a twenty, dear? Shall I bring it along later?’ And Mrs McKay’s energetic rootings in her purse proved, as ever, quite fruitless. It wasn’t, thought Colin, as if any of them even had the excuse of being poor. As Dilys was forever pointing out with reference to their own mother, ever since old-age pensioners had been turned into sacred cows, most had been swilling in it. But try to winkle a coin or two out of them in return for a brown loaf and you’d soon see their fighting spirit. What were they planning to do with it, anyway? Buy yachts? Winter in Val d’Isère? Live for a thousand years?

  In fact, the sole advantage of their seeming immortality was that they had at least all stayed alive long enough to relieve him of the shopping. Flexing his fingers to work back the blood flow, Colin crept past the last of the garden ends, dragging Flossie in his wake. His mother kept on at him. ‘You’ll be old one day too, Colin. It’ll happen to you.’ But he didn’t believe it. He couldn’t imagine a world in which he was hobbling around on a Zimmer frame, frittering away his pension on new hips and peppermints, and engaging the neighbours in mad conversations. ‘I see you’re escaping the worst of our couch grass epidemic, William.’ ‘Indeed, yes, Edmund. You see, I live by a simple axiom. Never let it see a Saturday.’

  How did they do it, he wondered. Even the ones who could barely cut up their own grub could still think of something to say – his touchstone of ability. ‘Sizeable rascals, aren’t they, your chrysanthemums?’ ‘Yes. They’re from Manderley’s. Mind you, I did get a lovely crop of thistles out of that grass seed he sold me.’ What must they think of him, slinking past with his head down, desperately hoping he wouldn’t be noticed?

  But at least he was safe at his own gate. Well, nearly safe. Now all he had to do was run upstairs with the paper, mutter something she couldn’t quite catch, and slip out again while she was momentarily distracted with whichever idiocy of the day they had chosen to headline. She’d just assume that he was letting Flossie in, or Flossie out. So if he could get the side door unbolted without a rattle and not catch his head on the old goblin next door’s windchimes, he could escape for a further few minutes and reward himself for all his good deeds with a quiet five minutes with Suzie in the woodshed.

  Strange that he’d lighted on his father’s favourite. He tugged the magazine out from beneath the chisels, and it fell open, as it had from the start, at one of her pages. Suzie. Nineteen. It was her poolside party, and she’d been given one too many birthday cocktails. Suzie liked animals, her favourite colour was pink, and her hobbies were dancing and skating. There was a nice line drawing over the page of her doing a twirl on the ice rink with her skirt lifted to show everything. But (obviously like his father) Colin much preferred the drawing of her toppling tipsily into the pool. It was the way that cosy rounded bottom seemed to be quivering, as if, with some special and hitherto untried effort of will, she might be able to regain her footing – a hopeless quest dynamically, since her head, though unseen, was about to hit the water. But still, it gave him pleasure to think about how those pretty buttocks might be, first trembling in anticipation, then clenched in shock. Also, he rather liked the way the artist hadn’t cared what would become of the cocktail. Off flew the glass, cherries spinning. And the way it was careering over the water, it was bound to end up shattered in wicked splinters against the steps. But Colin wasn’t bothered, certainly not now, and even less afterwards, when he was reaching behind the cans of flat white emulsion to find the rusty old tobacco tin in which (also, he suspected, like his father) he neatly burned the insalubrious evidence of his desire.

  He loved the woodshed. And it wasn’t just the feeling of peace afforded him by such moments. It was the place itself – dark, cobwebby and hidden. From as far back as Colin could remember, simply to lift the brambles that tumbled protectively over the blistering paintwork and step inside was to feel the world stilling around him. Part of it was the silence, obviously. But mostly what he loved about the shed was the sense that he had inside it of being himself and real, not just some person others had invented and taken to criticizing for being things like careless, or awkward, or even, more outlandishly, something like ‘heavy on his shoes’. Inside the shed he’d sit in peace, and feelings, like tiny beansprouts, would burgeon inside him. It was, for example, sitting quietly in the woodshed that he first came to realize he missed his father. (Till then, in the terror of triggering further outbursts from Dilys, any grief of his own had been totally neglected.) It was here that he wept as he burned the teenage diary that had made him the butt of such merciless teasing (though it was now a mystery to him how he could have believed that arid decoy he’d planted so carefully under the lining paper of his sock drawer would ever have fooled prying eyes).

  And it was here he cast his spells.

  There’d been enough of those over the years. Colin cast spells for every reason under the sun. Spells to avert attention. Spells to silence people. Even, in bad times, spells not to wake in the morning. All through his childhood he had walked around laden with pebbles and foreign coins and fragments of coloured glass. Even through adolescence he’d kept his passion for talismanic objects. He could spend hours shunting shells and feathers into significant patterns, and cobbling phrases into impressive incantatory rites. He’d have kept owls and ravens if his mother had let him. And if Dilys had not been allergic to feathers.

  He blew one away now, with the pale, spectral ashes from the tobacco tin. Better get back. And, considering what his mother could be like, it hadn’t been at all a bad visit. A snatch of routine grumbling about the tea, a few squawks of resentment at having, like every other homeowner on the planet, to cough up a bit more for her annual insurance. And that was about it. A doddle, really. He could have done a whole lot worse. She could have had one of her migraines. Or fallen into one of her virulent allergies against one or another of her neighbours, tiring him out with her self-righteous bleating. No, it had been a good visit. And that was an excellent joke she had told him about the Welshman on the hill. It couldn’t be easy, being stuck in an armchair staring at suppurating bits of yourself. No, he’d go in and make them both a nice cup of coffee.

  When he got up there, she was busy on the phone. ‘Really? No, I didn’t know that . . . Well, I must say, that does sound better . . . Much cheaper, yes. Good heavens! And you’re quite positive that there’s no trouble with the refund?’ She took the cup without so much as acknowledging his presence in the room. ‘Yes. Yes, I think I will. It sounds as if it would be mad not to consider it.’

  At last she hung up, and looked at him smugly.

  ‘What are you plotting?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Guess how much Dolly pays for house insurance. Guess!’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘She pays half what I pay. Half! Can you believe it?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s some fly-by-night company.’

  ‘Frampton Commercial? Fly-by-night?’

  That was him put in his place. Shrugging, he tried to look indifferent, but she wasn’t watching. She was struggling with the phone again.

  ‘Who are you ringing now?’

  ‘Directory Inquiries.’

  ‘It costs,’ he reminded her.

  Hastily, she hung up. ‘I’ll get the number from Dolly later.’


  ‘You ought to think twice before switching companies,’ he warned, adding spitefully, ‘Especially at your age.’

  She made a face and asked, ‘Did you get all the shopping?’ clearly hoping for the chance to console herself either with criticism of any substitutions he might have made, or with scorn at his failures. Stung, he said, ‘Yes,’ and scowled.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You look like the man sent to empty the bath with a teaspoon.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  And then, of course, it was open season on him. Astonishing how expressive a face could be that could hold two weeks’ rain in its wrinkles. ‘Oh, yes. You’re all right,’ the look said. ‘You’re not hobbled half to death with a bad leg, and nothing and no one to amuse you except some mardy visitor who slips out of the room each chance he gets.’

  And it was true. He wasn’t making any effort to entertain her. She must have been at least as bored as this back in the days when he and Dilys were tiny, and she was sharing out their fuzzy-felt shapes, and praising their wooden block towers, and itching to snatch the pastry cutters away from their fingers to make the tarts better and faster. She might not have been all that pleasant through their childhood. (The sunny temperament was foreign to her. A closed book.) But she was there. She hadn’t hopped it off to the south of France with a lover, like Val’s mum, or got herself some hot-shot, high-flying career like those women forever nattering about nannies on the telly. Or even simply vanished (which must have been a bit of a temptation, given the way she always spoke of their father).

  Fair’s fair. She’d put in the years. So if it fell to him to offer her a soothing game of gin rummy . . .

  ‘Want to play cards?’

  She still looked sour. ‘Why? Is it so very tiresome, having to spend a bit of time with an old lady once in a blue moon?’

  ‘Once in a blue moon?’

  She backtracked, in her way. ‘I’ll give you this, you come a lot more often than your sister.’

  ‘Well, thanks for nothing.’

  She shrugged. ‘Oh, if it’s gratitude you’re after . . .’

  And that was him, wrong-footed totally. ‘I’ll just check that Floss isn’t stuck in the kitchen.’

  ‘Yes, slip off again. I know you’re bored rigid. It’s been written all over your face from the moment you got here.’

  He picked up the tray. If she hadn’t peevishly turned her face away she would have seen the creamy thick envelope – ‘Be Properly Insured’ – slip from beside her cushion into the folds of the newspaper tucked between the cups and the milk jug. He wasn’t going to mention it. Let her thrash about looking for it, then fret at the thought that he might be downstairs already ploughing his way through its contents.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Don’t hurry back on my account. I’m used to sitting alone for hours.’

  Christ! he begged, shutting the door behind him. Please don’t let me ever grow old. Don’t let me ever act this way in front of my own children. Then, cheered beyond measure by the realization that he’d never have any, he went down to the kitchen and read the paper from start to finish before slipping back to the woodshed to put one spell on her, and another, for good measure, on her favourite hydrangea.

  2

  ‘FRAMPTON COMMERCIAL?’ DILYS shrugged. ‘Nothing wrong with them. They’ve been going for years. Part of the Stanger chain.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘Solid.’ She tipped the steaming pasta into the colander. ‘What’s all this got to do with you, anyhow?’

  ‘I’m just interested.’

  ‘In Mother’s house insurance? Why?’

  ‘It worries me. I think she might have reached the stage where she starts making mistakes.’

  His sister rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, don’t you worry about her. She’s always been cute as mischief about money.’

  ‘Always has been. Might not be any more.’

  She reached across him for the grater. ‘What does it matter? She’ll probably leave it to some cat home, anyway.’

  ‘It matters that it’s insured properly. You can’t just walk away from a place like Holly House. If it burns down, it’ll have to be rebuilt strictly to specification.’

  ‘Colin, you sound exactly like your job.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ he said, filled with the daring that came from knowing his sister wasn’t in a fighting mood. Only despondency could have propelled Dilys into the kitchen, just as only bad blood with Perdita could have prompted the decision to invite him in the first place.

  Reminded, and hearing footsteps overhead, he nodded upwards. ‘Will she be joining us?’ Dilys made a face but didn’t answer, so he set for three, leaving the cutlery for the third place lying so casually that, in extremis, it could be taken for a pile of miscounted extras he’d forgotten to pick up and return to the kitchen. Dilys dumped the salad bowl equidistant from all three chairs. Was that a clue? Trawling for evidence, he asked, ‘How are her alterations going, anyway? Is that decrepit little workman of hers anywhere near finishing?’

  ‘He’s on the last bedroom, so she can move back tomorrow.’ His sister suffered one of her very brief tussles with discretion. ‘And I must say, I won’t be sorry. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people who are prepared to exhaust themselves and others simply to save a few pennies.’

  The door swung open. There stood Perdita, a pillar of ice. ‘Excuse me?’

  You had to hand it to Dilys. For quick wits, only Mother could beat her. ‘Colin and I were just discussing how much fuss Norah’s making over this rise in her insurance premiums.’

  Perdita’s eyes rolled. ‘Oh, God! Not her again. All you two ever seem to talk about is your mother.’

  Was it really true? Last time he’d called by, hoping he’d summon the courage to wriggle out of some bank-sponsored event to which Dilys had just sent him a spare invitation, his sister had been regaling Perdita with tales of how, to frighten Colin out of bed-wetting, Mother had painted his name on a trunk and kept starting to pack it, telling him he’d be taking it with him to the orphanage.

  Perdita’s response had been startling. Turning to Colin, she’d asked him sharply, ‘And what about your father? How come he didn’t slap your mother hard, and tell you it was all nonsense? Or was he just a wuss, like you?’

  Colin sat silent, all too aware he might have been a little more successful in finding her response offensive, rather than disquieting, if it had not raised such a clear echo of Val on the same sofa: ‘There’s no such thing as one bad parent in a marriage, Colin. They always come in pairs. The bad one. And the other bad one, who just sits quietly and lets it happen.’

  Unnerving, even to recall. And, now he came to think of it, only an hour later, at the grim event itself (‘New Portraits for a New Age’), Dilys had slid all too quickly from the general subject of portraiture into her memories of their school photos on the landing: ‘You were all right, Col. She just walked past yours without even looking. But every time she went past mine she shook her head and made this little clucking noise. Don’t you remember? Half disbelief and half contempt. Imagine! Twenty times a day! No wonder I can barely stand to look in a mirror!’

  So he could see how Perdita could end up accusing the two of them of spending their entire waking lives carping on about their mother. But Dilys clearly wasn’t going to give an inch.

  ‘On the contrary,’ she countered. ‘Up till that moment we were actually discussing’ – she barely faltered – ‘Colin’s work.’

  ‘Really?’ Out of spite, Perdita turned her quite evident disbelief onto the weaker witness. ‘Go on, then, Colin. Don’t let me interrupt.’

  Oh, God. Back came that terror from childhood that, if he let her down, Dilys would slap him. Spitting words out at all in such a poisonous atmosphere was tricky enough. To lie was beyond him. He would have to tell them something about his week.

  ‘I went to listen to a
singing house.’

  Even Dilys had trouble pretending she was halfway through hearing this one. And Perdita was startled fresh out of peevishness. ‘A singing house? What on earth’s that?’

  ‘We have a lot of them,’ said Colin. ‘They cause a good deal of trouble. We’re forever being called out.’

  ‘To houses that sing?’

  ‘Well, hum, really,’ he admitted. ‘But it usually sounds far more like singing, so that’s what we call it. It can drive people mad.’

  Perdita was making a pretty fast comeback on the spite front. ‘Must do, if they’re prepared to call out people like you.’

  He knew it was curiosity, rather than a favour returned, that made Dilys break in and rescue him. ‘Where does it come from, this singing? Is it power lines?’

  ‘Sometimes there aren’t any. And it’s nothing inside. We can spend hours traipsing round with fancy monitoring equipment, following cables and drains. But nothing fits. The house just keeps on singing.’

  ‘So what happens?’

  ‘The owners go mad. Or move.’

  ‘Really,’ said Perdita. ‘Who would have thought that being an Environmental Health Officer could be so exciting?’

  She hadn’t even bothered to pretend it wasn’t sarcasm. But, still, he was too cowardly not to respond. ‘Mostly it isn’t,’ he admitted. ‘Mostly it’s just smells, noise and germs.’

  She looked down her thin nose at him rather as if he personally embodied this unsavoury trinity, and, not for the first time, Colin found himself wondering just how it was that his sister, who, scathing and insensitive as she was, had never been malicious, could spend so much time in the company of such disagreeable people. Was it some mere continuation of that perverse principle of boyfriend recruitment whereby, if the young man concerned didn’t annoy Mother mightily, he held no charms for Dilys? Now, it was women friends she picked up with a passion, and dropped just as quickly. He’d never thought that it was sexual. He didn’t even think she ‘swung both ways’. He just thought that she hadn’t changed since she was four and terrorized the playgroup. ‘Today, only people with yellow ribbons are allowed in the sandpit. And that’s just Tessa and me.’ Did his sister get lonely between her great enthusiasms? He suspected not. Rather, that the one thing the two of them had both inherited from Mother was that they were happier – well, less on edge, at least – in their own company. He was straightforward about it. And Dilys had this strange, exhausting – not to say downright unpleasant – way of disguising her preference to herself and to others. For, of course, if you’re continually in the habit of dumping friends, after a bit you’re bound to find that all that’s still available is the dregs. Of all the companions his sister had chewed up and spat out over the years, the only truly kind one – indeed, the only one with any heart at all – had been dear Val, now spotted only as an occasional flash of friendly headlights and a brief backwards wave in his blemished rear-view mirror.