Of course I didn’t know how to get hold of more oil. Then he asked if there might be any papers kept anywhere, to do with the house, that would tell us. For example, what happened about the post? I explained that I had been picking the post up first thing before he or Steph could see it, and that I put it in the library desk, as instructed. But then I remembered the study upstairs, and I told Michael that there were lots of papers there, and filing cabinets. He took it out of my hands, told me not to worry about another thing, he would deal with all of it. He and Steph together, he added, and I could tell that he felt he needed her help. So I gave him the key to the study, and knew I trusted him to do as he said. And he did, of course. Steph too- she’s a clever girl, easy to underestimate a girl like that. They took care of all the money matters. In fact, until I started coming up here to use the typewriter to write all this down, I had no call to come in here at all. They have saved me from having to worry about that kind of detail.
I suppose I never have been very skilled with money; I mean look at me and Father’s clock for a start. I found myself wishing that somebody like Michael had been around all those years ago to help me with the business of Father’s clock. Not Michael, of course, how could it have been? I was only sixteen myself. I mean somebody older than me at the time, who would have known what to do. Mother was useless, not that I would have consulted her in any case; we had by then set out our positions about me and university and I knew she would have done nothing whatsoever to help me get there. She did not single out that one thing to be useless over, she was useless in everything from that point on, because when Father died Mother simply declined to be of any further use. She declined even to get up much any more. I think at first it was mainly to make sure that I didn’t go off to college or indeed anywhere else. Whether or not she was actually ill at that point I cannot say, but she kept to her bed. Not their bed, note. She couldn’t abide to be in the bed she had shared with him (I did think to myself, well, she probably couldn’t abide it while he was alive) so she took the room at the back of the house, beyond the kitchen, that the previous owners had built on for a lodger. There was some money from somewhere that Father left to her, and that went on putting in a bathroom alongside. No, I was on my own over the clock.
I went to Hapgood’s in the High Street. It sold jewellery and clocks and also mended them, so I thought they would know about my clock, even though mine was an antique and they sold mostly new things. Mr Hapgood was about thirty, I suppose. He had a wide face, not like a grown-up’s at all, but even so I thought of him as old. He had sandy hair and sharp little teeth, and very careful hands, and he was kind. He asked me how a young lady like me came to have an antique longcase clock in the first place. It was only two weeks since the funeral and the question made me cry, and Mr Hapgood took me behind the counter and into the back of the shop. It was quite dark except for the space over the two long benches that were lit by angled lamps, and very warm, with the smell of an oil stove. He sat me down on a torn leather sofa, surrounded by boxes of bits of metal and cogs and sharp-looking tools, and made me a cup of tea. And he said he would come and see the clock if I gave him my address. I was grateful.
Steph and Michael shut themselves in the study, leaving Miranda, newly fed, with Jean in the kitchen. Now alone, they assumed the authority of the young taking responsibility for the supposedly incapable old. Michael could hardly admit to enjoying the slight sense of crisis that Jean’s collapse had brought, but there was something uniting in the idea that he and Steph were now being relied upon.
In the filing cabinet under Suppliers Michael found receipts and details of the oil supplier’s quarterly debit scheme.
’It couldn’t be easier! Simply ring to order your oil whenever you need it. As a valued direct debit account customer your payments will not fluctuate, whatever the current oil price. Then once a year we will work out the credit or debit on your account and arrange with you for part or full settlement!’
It did sound easy, but would they take an order by telephone from Michael? Could just anyone ring up and order oil for any address?
‘Say you’re the handyman,’ Steph suggested, but frowned. It might work, and it might not. What if the oil supplier would deal only with the customer direct? There were receipts going back five years, so presumably the suppliers knew Mr Standish-Cave, even if only as a voice on the telephone. ‘No, better not. No, you’ll have to say you’re him, Mr What’s-his-name.’
‘Well, that’s not a problem, is it?’ Michael said. ‘I can do voices, remember.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ Steph said witheringly, ‘but you’ve got to know what he sounds like first, haven’t you?’
‘He’ll be posh, that’s all. Won’t he?’
Steph looked even more withering and said, ‘That’s not the only problem anyway. What about a signature? They might want a signature, when they deliver.’
They fretted along these lines until she said firmly, ‘No, it’s too risky. We need to get hold of cash and just pay for the oil. What would it cost? We could sell some of the stuff here, couldn’t we?’
‘Jean wouldn’t like that. She likes to have all her things round her. Anyway, we need the oil now, today.’
‘Okay, but all this office stuff, she doesn’t need that. We could flog some of the stuff in here, for a start. The smaller bits, like them.’ She nodded towards the disconnected fax and answering machines and moved across to inspect them. Michael watched her dumbly, with nothing better to suggest.
‘Michael,’ she said, peering into the answering machine, ‘there’s a tape in here. Reckon it’s got what’s-his-name’s voice on it?’
Within half an hour Michael had produced a very passable impersonation of Oliver Standish-Cave, whose voice on the tape had sounded unsurprisingly public school, yet surprisingly pleasant. It was true that there was only his ’Hello. This is the office line at Walden Manor, 01249-588671. Please leave a message at the tone and we will return your call as soon as we can’ to go on, but with Steph’s encouragement Michael quickly found both the vowels and the correct pitch of assumed authority. Steph tried it too, until they both collapsed with laughter. Steph was finding that laughing hard could make her pee in her knickers, just a little, and when she told Michael this, he said, ‘Oh how absolutely frightful, for Heaven’s sake, woman, contain yourself’ in Oliver Standish-Cave’s voice, and they collapsed all over again.
‘But even if you phone up for the oil,’ Steph said, ‘we’ll need to sign something when it comes, won’t we? There’ll be stuff to sign some time.’ The thought sobered them again. Further rummaging in the filing cabinet produced any number of examples of the swirling, enormous signature on receipts and photocopies of letters.
‘Give it over here,’ Steph said, with determination. ‘I’m good at art, remember.’
And forgery, it emerged. The trick, she discovered, was not only to copy the shape of the signature but to work quickly. Oliver Standish-Cave had long ago given up signing his name in discernible letters; Steph had little trouble with the double hillocks of his first two initials and the huge, pretentious letter C that embraced them. Then all she needed to do was place, at just the right point, the long waving line of the rest of his name. It looked like a small rolling field, and one flick of the pen to dot the I of Standish became a bird tossed in the sky above it. She sat and practised at the desk, covering sheet after sheet of paper, while Michael carried on through the filing cabinet. Absorbed, they looked up at each other from time to time. Quiet elation at what they were doing hung in the air.