The light upstairs went off.
The light downstairs came on.
George dragged his shoe as a brake and the merry-go-round clinked to a halt.
The front door of Number 37 opened and Emily stepped onto the garden path. She walked a few steps, threading a handbag along one arm. Her hair was different, but the movements of her body its tiny hesitations, were the same.
George stood up and quietly cried, ‘Emily’ He couldn’t get his mouth and lungs to work. He was spent. He could only lift and drop his feet.
Suddenly the light from the open door was blocked. A large man appeared, jangling a set of keys. He angled them to the light, to find the one he was after.
‘Have you got everything?’ he said wryly.
Emily nodded. She was looking up at the stars.
George couldn’t stop his legs. His eyes swam and his hands were joined. He was still in shadow and about to enter the pale orange light.
The door banged shut and the big man placed a heavy arm around Emily His keys jingled again and two headlights flashed. George stepped off the grass but veered aside with a groan. He tripped on a paving stone but kept his balance, heading back along Aspen Bank — the way he’d come, a few minutes earlier, and the way he’d gone a few years before.
An engine coughed and tyres began to turn. A few moments later they drove slowly past him and for an instant George saw his wife. She was straining forward in the passenger seat, her face framed in the wing mirror. But he couldn’t read the expression because the car moved on, gathering speed. He watched the indicator blink at the end of the road and then he was alone.
Where do I go now? he thought. Nino had said nothing about this sort of thing.
12
All those years ago, Mr Wyecliffe had called to tell her the good news.
‘We’ve won,’ he exclaimed, and his beard scratched against the receiver.
Feeling sick, she waited on the doorstep for her man. When he arrived, he wasn’t smiling and he said nothing about how the case against him had fallen to bits. He just pulled her into the sitting room and asked her if she trusted him. Staring back, she said, ‘I do,’ with all her soul and with all her might, and he quickly kissed her on the cheek, as if there were people waiting to clap. Then he drove off.
Riley put Quilling Road on the market. He decorated the bungalow He quit his job. Within the week, Mr Wyecliffe was in the sitting room dishing out advice over a spam fritter: ‘You might give constructive dismissal a run.
Riley did. He took Mr Lawton to court for sacking him. It was another triumph and the company had to pay him thousands. Nancy never got her head around that one, but Mr Wyecliffe knew his onions. No one seemed to realise that this second victory was Nancy’s loss. She could hardly stay on as Mr Lawton’s bookkeeper. She handed in her notice. Mr Wyecliffe deemed it ‘prudent but outside the compass of economic redress’.
With all that money her man bought a shack on a bed of crushed cinders opposite a crummy fish and chip shop.
‘What do you want that for?’ asked Nancy.
‘We’re going into business,’ said Riley as if they were emigrating. He was edgy. It was as though he were destroying everything behind him.., except for Nancy He didn’t even ask her what she wanted. She was part of him, like his hands or feet. They were man and wife.
As for Riley he bought a big van without windows. He lined it with thick plywood — floor, roof and sides — and he put up shelves and straps. He put an advert in the local papers offering to clear houses. And he made good. In fact, two years on he’d had to rent some garages for storage. If you came with a voucher from the Salvation Army you could take what you liked. He was a good man, was Riley in his own way.
So that was where all the pieces landed after her man came back from the Old Bailey Day in, day out, Nancy sat by a gas fire, working her way through a bumper book of puzzles. It was a long way from the banter with Babycham at Lawton’s. That was when she’d started thinking of a house by the sea in Brighton, going back to the place of childhood holidays on the pier, back to the bright lights of the Palace, to the magicians and the rousing bands. But her man wouldn’t hear of it. They had a new life: Riley on the road, and Nancy in the shop. He had to keep moving, and she had to keep still. If this is what it means to win a trial, she often thought, I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose.
A few months later, feeling guilty but resolved, Nancy bought Stallone, her first hamster: guilty because she was satisfying an ache in her heart; resolved because Riley couldn’t heal the injury. He had, after all, caused it. As she stood at the counter, with her new friend, a cage and a bag of dried corn, she didn’t even feel humiliated. On the contrary, she almost trembled with excitement, because something so small, so unnoticed, was going to receive the simplicity of her affection. The complex stuff would go to her man.
The trouble was, Riley was no fool. He sensed the division of Nancy’s warmth. And he was jealous… jealous of a hamster. Nancy would have enjoyed being the nub of competition if she hadn’t known, deep down, that the situation was pitiful. It was also, in practice, distressing because unfortunately hamsters don’t last that long. (Stallone made it to three, but Mad Max and Bruce dropped tools at two and a half.) And you can’t let on that you’re grieving, not without looking a fool. Pretending she felt nothing, she’d attend to the burial and then pop down to the pet shop for another one. It was unseemly. But there was nothing else to be done.
Riley watched the hamsters come and go without saying anything — except once.
After Nancy found Bruce on his side, she said wistfully ‘Aww. Where’ve you gone?’
‘Nowhere,’ said Riley from a rocking chair in the next room. ‘What do you mean?’ said Nancy sharply She didn’t like this kind of talk.
‘We came from nowhere, out of nothing, and we end up nowhere, back to nothing again,’ he replied, like an old-timer whittling wood, ‘and in between we’re alive.’
Nancy glanced at Bruce, wanting him to survive in another place… along with Uncle Bertie, her mum and dad, everyone she loved… even though none of them had been on speaking terms.
‘What’s the point?’ asked Riley quietly.
There was an odd excitement about him, and Nancy wondered what he could do — what anyone might do — if it were true, if you didn’t have any beliefs that made sense of being alive (not necessarily the whole package, of course, but at least the wrapping). But that was Riley He didn’t really mean it. He said one thing and did another. He loved Nancy — though he’d never said it, though he couldn’t show it.
Riley stomped off to work and Nancy went and bought Arnold. Thinking of her man, she said (not for the first time), ‘How did he end up like that?’ But she asked the question mechanically without any real interest in the answer. It wasn’t important to her. If there were a book called The Secret to Graham Riley, she wouldn’t have bought it. The contents would have nothing to do with why she actually loved him.
And why did she love him? There weren’t answers to questions like that. If there’d been a list of ‘reasons’, Riley’s conduct would have torn it up years ago. Lists were for the likes of Mr Wyecliffe. Ultimately nothing could explain why his constant testing of Nancy’s attachment had opened her heart rather than closed it. It was very simple: what she saw she loved. Babycham hadn’t been able to understand her —and she’d said so (she’d always spoken her mind). Sitting in the Admiral on a Friday night, at one of their last gatherings as a group, Nancy had struggled to find the words, fiddling with her glass. She’d blushed and a slot machine went ding. Finally she’d said that to see Riley as Nancy saw him, you needed Nancy’s eyes.