Funny or not, she could do with his help now, she thought as she climbed down. That Soft wasn’t something she’d like to tackle on her own, nor the rest of the house, come to that. If he hadn’t died when he did, she could have given him a ring and…
But then she wouldn’t have had the house anyway, not without the money he left her.
‘Has to be done though, somehow,’ she told herself firmly as she replaced the hatch and came down the step-ladder again. ‘By just me an’ Guy if necessary. Hell, I hope it doesn’t come to that.’
Merely hoisting herself up on to that step-ladder had left her out of puff. Too much weight on her, that was a fact. She’d tried everything she knew just to lose a few' pounds but nothing worked. Month after month she seemed to put on a iitde more; the bathroom scales bore brutal witness, and so did her own eyes when she examined herself in the full-length mirror. She was going the same way as her mother, and that really was a depressing thought.
‘ ’Bout time I stopped talking to myself too,’ she said aloud as she went downstairs back to the telephone. ‘That’s a barmy habit if there ever was one. Wonder if Guy ever talks to himself? Bet he doesn’t. God, he bores me sometimes!’
The Yellow Pages still lay open, as she’d left it, at the list of contractors specialising in timber pests, though she’d already put a cross by most of them, having drawn a blank earlier in the morning. Two or three months was the shortest waiting time she’d been quoted; when she’d suggested they might come the same day they had merely laughed.
‘Seen the papers this morning, darling?’ one had sneered at her in a high-pitched nasal voice, which had raised her hackles right away. ‘You’re lucky we’re even answering the blower. Lots of firms aren’t bothering.’ She’d told him — politely enough — to get stuffed, and then she’d gone on to the next, but with much the same result.
Now, taking her ball-point in her hand, she carried on down the list. Several seemed to be permanently engaged, one offered a recorded voice suggesting that she should ring again later, and the rest informed her bluntly that they didn’t want the work.
And that, it seemed, was that. She had no alternative but to ask Brian and Pete. Perhaps if she offered to pay them, they might…
‘Damn!’ she swore, putting the phone down. ‘Damn and blast it!’
Whoever did the work, she realised, it was going to undo all the effort she’d put into getting the house straight. Guy had already made a hell of a mess of the front room; when she’d seen it last night she’d been furious, and she’d have told him about it in no uncertain terms if she hadn’t already heard some news about the beetle attacks from her minicab driver. Plus the message from the Armstrong woman on her answering machine; that voice had reaiiy sounded scared.
Right, Brian and Pete then, she thought; and she could use a drink. She wasn’t thinking straight any longer.
Slipping on her raincoat, she locked up the house and made a beeline for the Plough. What she’d do without that pub she just didn’t know, but then she’d always liked the atmosphere of a good pub. It was one of the things she’d missed on overseas postings.
Not many people in yet, she noticed as she let the door swing shut behind her, and she stood for a moment looking round. No sign of Pete, but Brian was behind the bar. That was something. She went over to claim her usual comer bar-stool.
'Gin and tonic, Brian. Please.’
‘Thea, sweetie! What happened to you last night? You weren’t in.’
‘No, I got back late.’
‘Oh! All right for some. Seen the papers?’
‘Brian, if anybody else asks this morning have I seen the papers,’ she answered heavily, Til throw up.’
‘Oh, you. are in a mood, aren’t you? One gin and tonic coming up! Large one?’
‘Small.’
‘Don’t tell me! You’ve got a hangover.’
‘It’s a busy day. Don’t want to get tiddly,’ she said. ‘Talk about it later.’
‘Be like that!’ He turned away to draw a pint for a thickset grey-haired man in a donkey jacket, a regular she knew only by sight. When he came back to her, he said seriously: ‘These big snake things are no joke, are they? What do they call them? Bloodworms? What does Guy think now he’s been proved right?’
‘Hasn’t said.’ She sipped her drink. ‘But now we have to spray the house. I tried every firm in the Yellow Pages this morning but none of them want to do it.’
‘People’ll be queueing up.’
‘Fra hoping you an’ Pete can help me out. Not as a favour; I mean, there’ll be something in it for you. Can’t expect you to do it for nothing.’
‘Don’t know, sweetie. Have to ask him first. We’re run off our feet here today. Janet’s not come in. The landlord was saying she lives down in Miller Road. That’s one of the places where there was trouble last night, but nobody’s heard anything.’
‘Who’s going to do the food then?’
‘Looks like muggins. Thea, darling, you couldn’t do a turn behind the bar, could you? You’ve done it once before. Should I ask the landlord what he thinks?’
Joe Hanson, the landlord of the Plough, was a burly man with handlebar moustaches, no longer young, who could usually be found reading Sporting Life in the far comer of the saloon, his Labrador at his feet and a half-pint of bitter in front of him. He seldom worked behind the bar, save in the early evening when some of his bookie friends dropped in; on this occasion, his flushed face damp with sweat, he was carrying in the shepherd’s pie fresh from the oven. Cursing, he dumped it down on the hotplate.
‘The bar, love?’ he puffed, mopping his face with the oven cloth. ‘Know the prices? No, ’course you don’t. They’ve gone up since you last did it. I’ll take you on in Janet’s place, though. Pay you for two hours. That’s fair enough, innit? Plus your lunch if anything’s left over.’
Catching Brian’s eye, Dorothea felt she had to agree. There was no other way she was going to get help with spraying the house. She hung up her raincoat and tied one of Janet’s short aprons round her waist while the landlord went through the price list with her. Not that she didn’t know it practically by heart anyway.
‘Anything you need, just—’ He stopped as his eye lit on the pickle jar, which was practically empty. ‘Like pickled onions, for instance. On the shelf in the cellar you’ll find them. I’ll take you down there and show you the book. When you’ve taken something from stock, always enter it in the book.’
He led her through the door at the rear of the food bar, then down a flight of narrow stone steps, which he took one by one. For the first time she realised he was lame. At the bottom he paused to switch on the lights. Beetles had been found down here too, she remembered, as she looked around the eerie place.
A large area of the cellar was taken up by wooden beer barrels and metal kegs serving the bar immediately above, and she found her eyes drawn to the deep shadows between them. She had an uneasy sense that there must be insects lurking there, waiting for their prey. The pale daylight filtering in down the chute from the street revealed a tangle of old, dust-laden cobwebs. No spiders though, and that fact did nothing to reassure her.
‘Are you sure this place is safe?’ She hadn’t meant to use quite those words; they’d just slipped out.
‘Safe?’ A heavy timber partition divided one end of the cellar from the rest; set in it were two doors, and he’d been explaining that the right-hand one belonged to the foodstore. ‘Oh, beetles, you mean? No need to worry on that Score. After Janet found those two, we cleared everything out and had the place fumigated. Haven’t seen any insects here since then.’