No teeth maybe, but Brenton Wilkinson appeared to have all his marbles intact. Forewarned of their visitation, he greeted Carole by name before Malk had a chance to introduce them.
It wasn’t the easiest place to conduct any kind of conversation. But the care home had no quieter rooms available, and visitors were only allowed in the bedrooms if the resident was unwell and confined to bed.
To one side of Brenton Wilkinson sat a frail old woman with wispy white hair who kept, every couple of minutes, saying with what sounded like satisfaction, ‘Oh no, he won’t.’
On the other side, an equally frail old woman was knitting a square of green wool. Soon after Carole and Malk’s arrival, she completed the job, then unravelled it, wound up the wool into a ball, cast on and started knitting the square all over again.
‘Carole,’ Malk Penberthy managed to make himself heard over the television hubbub, ‘was interested in the decorating you did back at Footscrow House.’
‘“Footscrow House”?’ The old decorator let out a wheezy, liquid chuckle. ‘“Fiasco House” more likely. That place has a … what’s that thing young people say? A “death kiss” about it?’
‘“A kiss of death” …?’ Carole suggested tentatively, trying not to sound as if she were correcting him.
She needn’t have worried. ‘Yes, “kiss of death”!’ he echoed cheerily. ‘God, the money I made out of Fiasco House over the years … Every time the latest company owning it goes bust, the new one wants it all redecorated. And fortunately, I’ve got a good name round Fethering, so I keep getting recommended and end up doing the job. The number of layers of paint me and my boys have put on that building doesn’t bear thinking of. Footscrow House was my Forth Bridge, you know. I done very nicely out of it.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Carole. ‘I wonder—?’
But before she could ask another, more specific question, Brenton was away again. ‘Coo, hard work it was back then. Today’s decorators don’t know they’re born. It’s all easy for them.’
‘In what way?’ asked Carole, careful not to put the old man off by rushing him.
‘Well, a lot of it’s technology, new inventions and stuff. When I started, way back when, we didn’t have any rollers, for one thing. Done everything with brushes, haven’t we? And all the ladders was made of wood. Heavy to pull those buggers around – pardon my French. Easy with the aluminium ones they’ve got now.
‘And the paint – blimey, the technology’s changed there. Some of it we had to mix up ourselves. Snowcem for exterior masonry … well, that’s still a powder. But the mixing for the colours – we had to do a bit of that when I started out. And working with thinners and driers and I don’t know what else. Lot simpler once they got vinyl into paints. Easy with colours now, too. You just go down your local trade counter and buy your paint all mixed up and ready to go.’
The sentence ended in a bout of coughing. Again, Carole thought she might get in with a question, but Brenton recovered too quickly and continued, ‘Of course, the big change come in the 1970s and 80s – that’s when you get some of the one-coat paints being developed. And then, non-drip comes in then, and all. Blimey, that makes a difference! Yeah, you still need to put sheets over the furniture, and that, but when you’re doing a ceiling, you don’t get your overalls all splattered like you used to.
‘We done ceilings with six-inch brushes in my day. Hamilton Perfection was the best brushes. Still are. Cost more but last longer. Mind you, back then you had to spend a long time cleaning the ceilings before you could start on the painting. Nicotine, particularly if you was doing a pub or somewhere like that. God, it was a messy business. Today’s kids may call themselves decorators, but they don’t know the half of it.’
The chuckle that followed this developed into a more serious spasm of coughing. Clearly, a lifetime of breathing in paint fumes, and who could say what else, hadn’t done much good for the old boy’s respiratory system.
As the coughing subsided, Carole did manage to get a question in. ‘Do you remember when you did the decorating after Harry Lasalle changed Footscrow House from being a care home to a boutique hotel?’
‘Certainly do,’ said Brenton Wilkinson. ‘And I bet I know why you’re asking.’
‘Oh?’
‘Because that was around the time that Anita Garner disappeared, wasn’t it?’
‘It was.’
‘Oh yes, I remember that well. The police were very keen to talk to me and my lads about that. Well, they reckoned the fact that we were outsiders made us suspicious. Everyone else in the building had been working there for a while. We’d only just been brought in to do the decorating. And a couple of the lads hadn’t been working for me that long. I didn’t know what they’d done in the past … well, only the bits they chose to tell me. So, we went through quite a lot of questioning.’
But, if Carole thought she was about to get the detail she wanted, she was in for a disappointment, as Brenton Wilkinson went off on another tangent. ‘One of the lads was still doing his apprenticeship. Four days a week working with me, one day in college. We all done apprenticeships back then, that was the way it worked. Mind you, there was no college when I started, just working for a right difficult old bugger – pardon my French. He kept my nose to the grindstone, all right.
‘And when we was apprentices then, we had to drink a pint of milk every day before we started work. It was the lead in the paint, you see. Milk supposed to line your stomach, so’s it didn’t poison you.’ He wheezed. ‘Mind you, I think it was the asbestos in some of the schools we painted that did for me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Carole, leaping in as he paused for another gulp of air. ‘What did the police actually ask you about the—?’
But he hadn’t finished talking about apprenticeships. ‘Do you know what the lads did on their college days? Oh, they had lectures and stuff, but they also each had their little station, a bit of wall with a door in it. They had to wallpaper it, paint the door and the architraves, all the right primers, right number of coats, all that. Minute they’d finished it and had it inspected and marked – tough taskmasters they had then – they have to strip off the wallpaper, remove the paint, sand down the surfaces, get them back to being totally undecorated. Soon as they’ve done that, they have to start again, wallpapering, priming, all the right coats of primer and paint. And they keep doing that one day a week for four years. God knows how many times they did the full sequence. But tell you what – those lads certainly knew how to decorate a doorway!’
The high note on which Brenton finished this speech set off a really serious attack of coughing. What he’d said about asbestos had Carole really worried. She looked around the crowded room for a carer but there was none in sight. She exchanged an anxious look with Malk Penberthy who said, ‘I’ll go and get him a glass of water.’
By the time Malk came back, Brenton Wilkinson’s coughing had subsided into rasping breaths that shuddered through his body. He looked totally exhausted by the spasm. His visitors realized they couldn’t stay much longer. Selfishly, Carole hoped he’d still be able to give her the information she sought.
The old decorator took a long swig of water and was silent for a moment.
‘Oh no, he won’t,’ chuckled the woman beside him, for the umpteenth time. The woman on the other side was once again unravelling her square of green wool.