TWO
At times, Carole was very good at blanking things out. Like her divorce. With determination, she could spend whole weeks without remembering that she had once been married to David. And that morning, she managed to give Gulliver his freedom on Fethering Beach without considering the implications of the unwelcome gift in her kitchen.
When they got back to High Tor, she found herself hoping, illogically, that the object would no longer be there. But, of course, it was, as unpleasant as a cat’s deposit of an eviscerated rodent. And she could no longer stem the flood of thoughts it prompted.
The biggest shock was how that piece of paper changed what had happened to her car. Up until then, she had been affronted by a random attack from Bill Shefford’s computer-gaming, glue-sniffing youngsters. Now it had become personal. The perpetrator of the glass-smashing knew who she was, and he or she was planning a campaign of further harassment.
Also, the personal invasion had now extended to her home. In the phrase beloved of gangster movies, the enemy ‘knew where she lived’. A gate at the back of her garden led to an alleyway behind the houses of the High Street. It was only locked by a bolt which could be easily reached from outside. Someone had opened the gate and crossed her back garden to stuff the missive under the door to her kitchen. Knowing that was not a nice feeling.
Carole needed to be busy. She always needed to be busy, to keep unpleasant thoughts at bay. And her current thoughts were so unpleasant that she need more than ever to be busy. She checked her watch. Less than an hour had elapsed since she left Shefford’s. The windscreen repair man would hardly have arrived at the garage, let alone finished the job. It was the perfect opportunity to sort out the insurance.
The documents were neatly filed in her upstairs study, which had been designed by the architect who built High Tor as a second spare bedroom. And it was occasionally used as such, on the rare occasions when her son Stephen, daughter-in-law Gaby and two adored granddaughters, Lily and Chloe, all came to Fethering at the same time. Then the adult visitors would stay in the twin-bedded spare room and the little girls would sleep on fold-out mattresses in the study.
Everything in her workspace was neatly filed. It was a legacy from the time Carole had spent working at the Home Office. There, she had been constantly commended for her efficiency and in her Fethering retirement, though there was no one to witness it, she still prided herself on that efficiency.
Her filing cabinet stood to one side of the table on which sat her laptop. The machine, whose purchase had been long resisted but was now an essential part of Carole’s life, had rarely had its portability put to the test. She treated it like a desktop computer. Inside her compartmentalized mind, doing things online was an activity to be pursued in her study, not in any other part of the house. And the laptop was certainly never used for entertainment, music or television streaming. Its exclusive purposes were the sending of emails and the occasional fact-checking foray into Wikipedia.
Practical activities, like contacting insurance companies, also belonged in the study. The downstairs phone and the bedside one, on the same landline, were used for social purposes, which meant not very often (except for calls to the Fulham home of Stephen, Gaby and the granddaughters). Carole Seddon’s mobile was rarely used at all, and certainly not when she was inside High Tor. As she would say tartly, if asked about the subject, ‘I am not of the generation that needs to consult their screen every five minutes.’ Everything within Carole Seddon’s life had very strict rules.
But she was soon going to have to bend or extend her rules in relation to the mobile. Gaby had recently set up a family WhatsApp group, on which Carole received treasured photos and videos of the grandchildren. Lily and Chloe would be coming to stay on their own for a weekend in March and Carole was very much looking forward to their visit. So much so that she had spent a whole weekend redecorating the spare room where they would stay. She had covered the old magnolia emulsion on the walls with a more girly pink, but not been so bold with the gloss on the door, window frames and skirting board. They had been repainted white as before. The project had been hard work because Carole was – no surprise – a very meticulous decorator. She sanded down the old paint on the wooden parts, filled in the crevices with Polyfilla, then used primer and gloss. For the skirting boards, this mean a lot of getting up and down off her knees. Her body felt the effects for a good few days. But she was very pleased with the result and couldn’t wait to see the little girls’ reaction.
By the time they came, she was determined to be a proficient contributor to the family WhatsAppery, so that she could send photos and videos of her granddaughters’ activities back to Fulham. As a result, Carole had started very tentatively teaching herself how, for the first time, to use the camera facility of her phone.
She quickly discovered that the mobile she had was far from state-of-the-art. The cameras on newer phones were much more sophisticated. They had more pixels, whatever they might be. So, Carole didn’t get rid of her old phone but she did buy a new one, which would take better photos and videos. She had ordered it online but did not want to let it be seen in public until her mastery of it was complete. In fact, so far, she hadn’t taken it out of the box.
But she wasn’t going to use either mobile that morning. From the landline in her study she rang the claims line of her insurance company. Once she had gone through the process of identifying herself and giving her policy number, she announced, ‘I have been the victim of vandals who have smashed in the back window of my car.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ said the Northern female voice at the other end of the line. The sympathy was automatic, impersonal. ‘Have you reported the incident to the police?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Well, you’ll have to. We’ll need a Crime Number before we can process your claim.’
‘Oh.’
Carole must have sounded deflated, because the girl said, ‘It’s a very simple process.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘You don’t dial nine-nine-nine, though. You dial one-oh-one.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ said Carole testily. Although she didn’t. The person she was talking to had no idea her caller had ever worked for the Home Office, but Carole still never liked to admit ignorance on police matters.
‘Get back to us when you’ve got the Crime Number and then we can proceed and put you in touch with one of our authorized windscreen repair services.’
‘But I’ve already arranged to have the glass repaired. I can’t leave my car open to anyone who wants to help themselves to the contents.’
‘Are you saying that you keep valuables in your car? Because if you do, we would recommend that you remove them as soon as possible.’
‘That’s not the point. The point is that the glass is already being repaired.’
‘May I ask the name of the company that is effecting that repair?’
Carole supplied the name that Bill Shefford had given her.
‘Can you just hold for a minute, Mrs Seddon?’ There was a long silence, but not, mercifully, long enough to be filled by music. Then the girl came back on the line. ‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Seddon. I’m afraid that is not one of the companies authorized by us.’
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘I am saying that, if you get your glass repaired by that company, your insurance with us will not cover the expense.’
Carole could think of a lot of responses to that, many involving expressions like ‘cartel’, ‘restrictive trade practices’ and ‘mutual back-scratching’. But she did not give any of them voice. She simply rang off, seething with fury.