Eventually Jake decided he might as well go and pick up the back numbers as he had planned. He needed them, the walk would do him good and it would probably be raining tomorrow.
27—Smudger Turns up Trumps
The week passed in a flurry of tedium. There was the money to be settled: all four parties had some, Jake what there was from his academic posts and the odd bob from his books, Brenda a little from her family, Geoffrey a competence from the recklessly spendthrift chutney-merchants, Alcestis something from her terrifying tenure of a post as a social worker and perhaps something too from shares. What held things up was everyone being decent; a touch of rapacity here or stinginess there would have worked wonders. As it was they got no further than deciding that for the moment you hung on to what you had. In the same sort of way the furnishings of 47 Burgess Avenue were to be left as they were down to the last china cat till Brenda had somewhere else to put them, or rather a yet-to-be-agreed proportion of them. She could have the bloody lot as far as Jake was concerned but he couldn't say so.
Several times he considered getting the hell out and making for Oxford, not just for now but for the rest of his time there, letting the house despite Brenda's guarded forecast and doing up his rooms in Comyns and perhaps finding a cottage later. But he always came up against the thought that Oxford wasn't very nice really, not any more, and he had as many or as few friends in both places, and he might not enjoy the garden exactly but he wouldn't like to be without it, and there was the dub, and above all he was used to being here, though admittedly not on his own.
There was some minor hitch in Geoffrey's arrangements when it came to it and Brenda didn't leave till the following Monday. The days in between had been normal to a degree that might have been comic: television, desultory work, the dub, to the Thomsons" for drinks Sunday midday, the garden, television. Finally he was standing in the bedroom among her packed suitcases.
"That's the lot for now," she said. "I'll be back tomorrow for another load if that's all right. I'll ring you first."
"Yes of course. Er, it's a bit late, but you remember that evening we went to the Bamboo Bothy?"
"How long ago?"
"Well, it must have been the same night you gave me the pep-talk about affection. I was waiting for you downstairs after we'd had a..... You came in and I said you looked beautiful."
"Yes, I remember that all right. What about it?"
"You were touched and so was I. I thought if that could still happen, after all it's only a few weeks ago, then we still have something, and we could sort of build on it and make more of it. Oh I mean have your fling now but perhaps in a month or six weeks...."
"We'll always still have something darling, after all those years but it wouldn't be enough, it wouldn't, you know, come round often enough. It would be very nice when it did, but at the moment I honestly can't see...."
"No, I suppose not, you're right. I thought I ought to mention it, though."
"Yes, I'm glad you did. It was sweet of you."
"Good. Well I'll get this stuff down."
"I can take these two."
"No, leave the zip one to me. You take that one there."
There was a horrible interlude in the sitting-room while the driver of the pre-ordered minicab sat in traffic, couldn't find the house, stopped for a hamburger, chatted-up a bird, anyway didn't appear. In the end of course he did appear and proved most surprisingly willing to deal with the luggage. While he did so Brenda walked round the room crying. Jake knew that she was crying because of the room and the house and her life there rather than because of her life with him. That part didn't take very long. When it was over he went out into the front garden with her. The air was cool and the sky covered with loud but no rain was falling.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For it and about it."
"You are a silly old Oxford don."
"Off you go now. Good luck. Hey, hold it. I've just thought, we're mad. You have the house, you've put so much into it and made it so nice, you must have it. I'll find a couple of rooms somewhere and you can move back in. Give me a week or two to look round. Thank Christ I thought of it. Insane."
"What about you and the garden?"
"Well I'll miss it but nothing like the way you'd miss the house. That's decided then. Ring me tomorrow. I'll be here all day."
Back in the sitting room he thought about Geoffrey properly for the first time since hearing that Christendom's premier fucking fool had taken his wife off him. Not that there was a great deal to be said about that circumstance, because it was so hard to imagine anything of what it must be like. Geoffrey and Brenda out to dinner at a restaurant, Geoffrey handed the menu, Geoffrey baffled not by the language or by where a Dover sole came from but by the concept of choosing what he wanted to eat from a proffered list of available dishes. Geoffrey and Brenda off on a trip to the land of the mango and the tamarind, Geoffrey with his papers at the airport—incidentally there must be someone at his office who knew which way up to hang a map of the world and had the authority to stop him darting off to the Yukon or Monte Carlo to do his shopping. Jake's mental two-shot of Geoffrey and Brenda regularly cut to a close-up of Geoffrey frowning as some aspect of reality came to his attention. That was just as well; long might it remain so.
One o'clock: nearly time for lunch. What had Brenda—but Brenda had gone. All the same she might well have left something for him in the larder, in fact now he came to think of it she had said as much. He went out to the kitchen and found a saucepan of brown soup (oxtail? chocolate?) on the electric stove. He turned the ring under it on full, thus ensuring it would be warm enough to eat by nightfall. The larder revealed most of a cold leg of lamb and a salad; he carved the meat and made a dressing, then uncorked the remains of the Medoc they had shared the previous evening. All this was very fine but things would assuredly take a turn for the worse in a few days. In pursuance of the principle that those who are always about when they're not wanted are never about on those admittedly very rare occasions when they are wanted, Mrs Sharp, who had been known to collect the odd pound of sausages on her way to work here, was going to be on holiday for the next three weeks; her usual replacement had fallen out at the last minute and Jake didn't know how to find a replacement for the replacement, at least he knew how to summon candidates for the situation but not how to separate the thieves and arsonists from those at the other end of the scale, the merely idle and inefficient. But perhaps he would find a lodging before any of this should start to matter; he had no idea how long it would take.
While he was assembling his lunch things, which included a jar of sweet pickle with the name of Geoffrey's firm on it, on the little round table Jake heard the doorbell chime. His immediate thought was of Kelly, Kelly couched till a moment ago in a hide in a neighbour's garden and now, with Brenda well and truly gone, moving in if not for the kill (and better not be too bloody sure about that) then certainly for the fuck-up. But it wasn't Kelly, it was Alcestis.
"Christ," he said in simple surprise and dismay. He had thought vaguely that one (on its scale considerable) offset against Brenda's departure would be to see no more of the Mabbotts, by which term he would really have meant Alcestis, because Geoffrey was quite good value for the mean-minded, but of course that was, well, wrong.