Last night I found myself on my knees staring down into the inspection chamber in the yard. I must have only just dragged the cover off because it was still rocking beside me on the flagstones, and I felt the memory of its weight in my arms and shoulders. That huge Italian pot you liked so much – I’d moved that too. There was nothing to see, but I found myself weeping for the whole intricate system of waste pipes and soil pipes that used to rush our used water through the building’s secret cavities to gather here and be funnelled away into the septic tank – all abandoned now to mice and spiders.
And today I’m alerted by the sound of someone else’s weeping, and find I’m at the top end of the yard, working in the old outhouse, the one with the broken wall and the rotten roof timbers, sorting bricks, tossing the cleanest into the wheelbarrow in the doorway.
I imagine for a moment that it’s you, Caroline, up in the house. You’re alive and I’m dead and you’re weeping over me.
These bricks are beautiful. The old lime mortar crumbles off them and they’re good as new, grained with soft colours and warm in the hand. I’m working on a composting toilet. It’s my project and I’m going to do it right, with a ventilator shaft and an insect filter, enough capacity that it won’t need digging out all the time, boxes for ash and sawdust – all that, and sweet-scented flowers under a skylight – a palace of a latrine.
I should be working on the house. It’s drizzling. I remember now the heavy rain in the night, and the steady dripping somewhere along the top corridor. I took a candle and put a pot down to catch the water, an old pillowcase inside to deaden the splash. Later I put a ladder up to the trapdoor and got as far as poking my head inside, but found I’ve lost my sense of balance – had to get back to floor level again until the spinning stopped. I need to get up on the roof, though, or the place will rot from the inside.
She hasn’t stopped weeping. It’s Deirdre. Who else would make so much noise over a bit of grief, an average day’s hopelessness?
She’s up in her bedroom, wailing at the open window. It’s like a drill in my head.
I leave the outhouse, toppling the barrow out of my way, step across the spilled bricks and cross the stable yard to the kitchen door. Aleksy comes in from the fields with a spade over his shoulder. He hurries to catch up with me, his weight barrelling from side to side as he walks. The monkey appears on the roof of the stable and chatters down to meet him. ‘Onions must be planted,’ Aleksy says. ‘Also beets.’
‘Good of you to take the time.’
He raises his free arm in an expansive gesture. ‘And why not?’
‘Because you’re on your way to Ireland.’
‘Like you said, a pipe dream. You know she was born there. But if Django stays, Deirdre will stay also. She’s fallen for Django, which is too bad.’
From somewhere inside comes the sound of the clarinet. The monkey clambers back on to the roof and finds an open window.
‘You see. Even Rasputin has fallen for Django.’
‘So you plan to stay.’
‘With your permission.’ He makes a gesture of old world gratitude, which is overtaken by a spasm before I can work out whether the politeness was meant ironically or not.
Deirdre arrives in the kitchen from the hallway as we’re coming in through the back door. Her eyes are red and she’s chewing on a finger. She isn’t smoking, so I assume she’s worked through her stash. I expect a revelation, an unmasking. That Simon – she’ll say – I’ve just worked it out, he’s the boy who was on the news, I knew I’d seen that face before. So her words take me by surprise. ‘We’ve had a break-in.’
‘What do you mean, a break-in?’ I ask her. ‘There’s no one for miles.’
‘We don’t know that.’
Abigail’s on her knees at the stove, sweeping out the ash. She doesn’t stop working.
‘And why you say break? Break what?’ Aleksy’s question is just a pointless quibble, but it echoes mine, so we seem to be ganging up on her. ‘What’s to break? Who now locks doors at night?’
‘Everybody.’ Deirdre looks at me and at Abigail. ‘Don’t they?’
Aleksy shrugs. ‘Sometimes people must go out to piss.’
‘Then they should lock the door afterwards. We could all have our throats cut.’
‘And you go at night sometimes down the back stairs and out into the stable to talk to your horses. I hear you telling them secrets about your lovers.’
‘No you don’t, Aleksy. You’re disgusting, making things up like that.’
Abigail rises, tucking some lose strands of hair under her scarf. ‘What’s missing, Deirdre?’
‘My wallet.’
There’s silence while we all take this in. Abigail looks at me, puzzled.
Aleksy is the first to speak. ‘You wanted to order pizza?’
‘I’ll help you search for it,’ I say. Deirdre irritates me but I’m not joining Aleksy’s gang. ‘Why don’t we start in your bedroom and work from there. It can’t have gone far.’
Aleksy’s muttering. ‘Yes certainly, start in bedroom, end in bedroom. Why should I care? Onions must be planted.’
Abigail looks relieved, glad for my help. She stoops again to her sweeping. They’re subtle, these shifts of light across her face, but I begin to find them more eloquent than the gaping and grimacing that most people use to express their feelings.
I lead Deirdre into the hall. Django is kneeling on the floor, breathing into his clarinet. He’s made a start on sorting stuff into piles, boots and shoes in one corner, clothing in another. The monkey’s in the clothes pile with a pair of trousers on its head. Simon is laying leather belts neatly side by side.
I rest my hand on his head as I pass. ‘All right, Si?’
He nods without looking up.
Django raises his head and peers at me through a pair of glasses that make his eyeballs bulge. ‘They’ll be ready for you, Jase,’ he says, ‘when the old eyes begin to go.’ He takes them off and slides them across the floor to a heap of spectacles by the staircase. Seeing Deirdre, he gets up, head tilted in sympathy. He reaches into the inside pocket of his blazer and pulls out a bunch of wild flowers. Yellow petals spill across the oak boards. ‘I picked these for you.’
Deirdre snorts, but takes them and looks pleased.
Abigail has given her the first floor bedroom at the back, overlooking the stable yard, the room with the four-poster bed. There’s a heap of bedding. Clothes spill out of bags and suitcases and trail across the floor.
‘I left it there,’ she says, pointing to the dressing table. Clustered on either side of the mirror are bottles and jars – perfumes, powders, creams. She pushes them around as if to tidy them, and screws a lid on to a jar. ‘I try not to use them.’ I know what she means – there’ll be no more when this lot’s gone. She puts Django’s daisies down on the chest of drawers and looks around. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s a mess.’ She starts sobbing again.
‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s try and sort this lot out. It’s got to be somewhere. Maybe in a pocket.’
‘But I know it was just there, by the mirror.’
‘Even so. Think of it like an investigation. That’s what my dad used to say if I lost something. Eliminate the suspect from your enquiries – this shelf, or this corner of the room. He liked cop shows – The Bill, Juliet Bravo. Search each place carefully, he used to say, and you won’t have to keep coming back.’
I’d forgotten that about him. It takes me by surprise to be reminded of it now. He was calm and orderly in everything he did, my dad, the same way he’d do a job, dusting thoroughly before opening a paint tin, meticulous about washing brushes.