2
Nancy had the day to tidy up the shop because Prosser was coming to barter with Riley at the close of play This room of bumper puzzles would be sold. The sound of cars bashing the hump near the bridge, the sight of the flints by the railway embankment, the clang of the bell over the door: all this would pass. Riley was with the estate agent, arranging the sale of the bungalow. The world she had known was coming to an end. They were going to the seaside.
For most of Nancy’s life Brighton had been the object of her dreams. Even the word shone. It was the place of childhood memories of her mum and dad, of fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, of warnings about Uncle Bertie’s wayward habits. And now it was as though the pier had broken away and drifted out to sea, with her memories giving chase, like dwindling gulls. She covered her face, defeated: so much remained unresolved, undone and unspoken.
The bell rang, and she turned.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye, Nancy.’
Mr Bradshaw’s overcoat was stiff and creased with frost. His beard had thickened since she’d last seen him at the police station. There were no goggles and his eyes were pale and defenceless.
‘Not just yet, please,’ she entreated. ‘Warm yourself, one last time.’
Mr Bradshaw sat in a small sewing chair while Nancy lit the gas fire. As the heat drugged the air, the windows streamed, and George said what he couldn’t have prepared (for, as Nancy well knew, he could do that sort of thing).
‘When I first came here,’ he said, rubbing his hands, ‘it wasn’t to deceive you. I just pretended to be someone else, but I’ve only told you the truth about myself. There’ve been no lies between us.
‘Thank you.’
Mr Bradshaw inched his boots towards the fire and vapour rose off the caps. This is how I shall always think of you, thought Nancy: steaming as if you’d been hung out to dry.
An old man once gave me a golden rule,’ continued Mr Bradshaw “‘Don’t be lukewarm, old friend,” he said. “That’s the only route to mercy or reward.” It’s the reason I came, Nancy I’d walked away from the trial, and this was my last chance to go back, to make up. I might have failed, but something happened that I hadn’t thought possible, and it has made losing worth the candle: I didn’t expect to become your friend.’
‘Thank you,’ said Nancy again, warmly Emotion wouldn’t let her say much more. She glanced back at her life, at its many candles, and the burnt-out stubs. It was like one of those big stands with tiers in a church. Was this really the Golden Rule: to keep on lighting another wick, when the wax always melted? To keep on hoping, no matter what? She mastered herself by making a confession.
‘You left behind a plastic bag full of notebooks,’ announced Nancy ‘I’m afraid I read some of them.’ To show that she’d made good the wrong, she added swiftly ‘I also took the liberty of returning them to your wife.’
At first Mr Bradshaw didn’t reply — he nodded at the first part and then shook his head at the second, which Nancy took as a sort of quits, since one cancelled out the other, like in the ledger at Lawton’s — but then he said, ‘I hope Emily reads them.’
With a slap of each hand on a knee, Mr Bradshaw stood up, and said, ‘Well, I’d better be making tracks.’
‘Where to?’ asked Nancy surprised by the worry in her voice.
‘I don’t know’
‘Have you ever been to Brighton?’ she blurted out.
‘No,’ said Mr Bradshaw, checking his buttons, ‘but I’ve heard of the pier.’
‘There’s two,’ stammered Nancy ‘The West Pier, which is falling into the sea, and the Palace.’ She wanted to share it with him, while it was still good, before it was altered. She raced like a guide in a tourist office, telling Mr Bradshaw what she’d told him many times before. He always listened as if it were new, as if it were fresh. ‘I went there every summer, with my mum and dad and Uncle Bertie. We stopped going after I got married. There was all sorts … magicians, jugglers … the helter-skelter … a clock tower … and right at the end a funfair with a ghost train. We’d walk around eating rock, wasting pennies in the one-armed bandits. But it was the sea I liked most, now grey now blue, stretching away lonely Long ago, I heard that the whole lot was slowly falling to bits … like me’ — she smiled, looking down at her legs, the strong veins behind the tights — ‘but it’s been completely renovated. Nowadays the deckchairs are free.’
‘Magnificent,’ whispered Mr Bradshaw, sitting down again.
Boldly but decisively Nancy said, ‘Would you like a holiday by the seaside?’
Mr Bradshaw’s agreement was far more emphatic than his surprise at the forwardness of the question. Nancy drew some directions that would take him along Limehouse Cut to the agreed meeting place. She wrote down the time he should be there, and she gave him her watch. Throughout he made a show of impatient nodding, as if the mastery of such details was child’s play After Mr Bradshaw had gone, Nancy tenderly thought: The great thing about someone who’s lost their memory is that they’re so used to forgetting answers that they don’t ask too many questions. And that was a help, because Mr Bradshaw hadn’t asked what Mr Riley might think of her invitation; or what Nancy proposed to do with the options that remained open to her; or how she, too, might take the route to mercy or reward. It would have taken Nancy a very long time indeed to explain.
3
Perhaps Nick’s father had dropped a hint along these lines: ‘He hasn’t come to terms with the passing of his mother. He could do with a treat … something to take him out of himself.’ Or maybe it was simple generosity of spirit. Either way the tubby executive at British Telecom — last seen sipping sherry at the funeral — had offered Nick a treat closed to the general public for donkeys’ years: a view from the top of the BT Tower. The executive was called Reginald Smyth.
‘One hundred and eighty-nine metres high,’ he said, reverently, on the thirty-fourth floor. ‘Sways twenty centimetres in a high wind.’
Reginald was a plump and ponderous man with active eyes, and a commiserating manner. He’d lost all his hair save for white curls above each ear. Standing with joined hands, he ushered in fact after fact as if they might soothe the bruised and broken. ‘As you can see, there are no walls, just windows and, of course, the floor rotates, obtaining a full circuit in twenty-two minutes…’
Nick missed the details about tonnage, nylon tyres and speed. He was already gazing at the sprawling majesty of London. Sitting down, he picked out St John’s Wood, hazy under the threat of snow and, with an alarming shudder, the floor began to move.
From this suburban pinnacle Nick looked upon recent events as if he were detached from their happening and significance. It was calming; it was a treat. He listened and watched while the world seemed to go round. Reginald, being a man with a sense of moment, kept a respectful distance.
‘We had a long-drawn-out argument,’ Charles had admitted, clinking more ice into more scotch. After the visit to Doctor Okoye, Elizabeth wanted to tell Nick about Riley and his place in her life.
‘I didn’t know about the heart condition,’ said Charles, handing Nick a glass. ‘Your mother only said that maybe it was time to retire, that the cut and thrust was all getting a bit much for her valves.’
Husband and wife toyed with selling up and fixing the tap in Saint Martin’s Haven. Led by Elizabeth, they talked of all the things they agreed about, until Charles realised she was trying to seduce him. Snapping a thumb and finger, he said, ‘No.’ He was against any disclosure of the past, not because he was ashamed, but because he was frightened: for Nick.
‘There was no need for you to know’ — he hunched his shoulders and squinted — ‘You’d be shocked. You’d been protected. And what did it matter? She’d moved on, wonderfully.’