One Good Turn

22

Gloria woke early and padded quietly downstairs as if there were someone else in the house whom she might wake, although she was wonderfully alone. When Graham was here the house crashed and boomed with noise, even when he was still asleep in bed. Without him, the day fell into its own quiet pattern, soft col-ors and slants of light that Gloria never saw otherwise.

She felt the lamblike nub of the oatmealy Berber stair-carpet between her bare toes and the smooth glide of the red Oregon pine of the banister beneath her palm. She spared a thought for the hundred and fifty years or so of polishing that had gone into creating this satin, some by her own hand, not with Mr. Sheen but with a hard block of beeswax. Gloria had schooled herself to appreciate small joys, of which there were many in the house, a house that would be standing long after Gloria herself was in the ground.

Every day was a gift, she told herself, that was why it was called “the present.” They were going to lose this house. It would be dragged into the whole sorry mess Graham had created, it would come under the Proceeds of Crime Act (she had been reading up about it online) and be taken and sold to make some reparation for all Graham had done over the years. A house of cards, that’s what he had created, an illusion. His death or the Fraud Unit, whichever came soonest, would reveal everything, throw open the curtains and the shutters and let the light in on every filthy corner.

Gloria opened the French windows in the living room and stood for a few minutes, breathing in the early morning air, watching a sparrow hopping delicately along the fence. An ounce of brown feather and black bib. It would be nice to think that God’s eye was on it, but failing that, both Gloria and the CCTV cameras would notice its fall. A magpie came swooping and chattering, and Gloria chased it off.

The house in the Grange (“Providence,” named long before Gloria and Graham took ownership of it) had nothing in common with the jerry-built, overpriced rubbish that had made Graham rich. The houses Graham built had badly hung cabinet doors, imitation-stone cement fireplaces, and cheap contract carpeting. They were houses that smelled as if they were made from plastics and chemicals. Last year, Graham had talked about moving from their house in the Grange, he said they were “too rich” for it and he “had an eye” on an estate up north, acres of land where he could fish for trout and surprise unsuspecting birds by shooting them from the sky. Over the years, the Grange house had molded itself comfortably around Gloria, and it seemed cruel suddenly to shuck it off in favor of some cavernous pile in the middle of nowhere.

Gloria said she didn’t see how you could be too rich. If you were too rich, you could just give some of your money away until you were just rich. Or give it all away and be poor. And they weren’t really rich anyway, it had all been just smoke and mirrors, their lives predicated on dirty money.

She moved into the kitchen and made the first pot of coffee of the day, inhaling the aroma of the beans before putting them in the grinder. The Italian marble tiles on the kitchen floor were cold and inert, it was like walking on tombstones. They were incredi-bly expensive, but Graham had acquired them incredibly cheaply (naturally). Last year the house had been renovated, using the more qualified members of Graham’s workforce. Among other things, they had knocked through and installed a vast American kitchen. “Nothing’s too good for my wife,” Graham said expan-sively to his architect. “How about it, Gloria-a larder fridge, a Gaggenau hob, one of the ones with an integral deep-fat fryer?” So she said she would like a pink sink because she’d seen one on a home show program on television, and Graham said, “Pink sink? Over my dead body.” So there you go.

Gloria liked to visit any new Hatter Homes development. The farther afield the estates, the more of an outing these visits were, she might pack a picnic or find out where the local tearooms were. She liked to look round the show home, listen to the selling shtick (“This is a lovely room, a real family room”). Graham never knew about these little excursions.

Occasionally, Gloria posed as a prospective buyer-a wild-eyed di-vorcée or a recently bereaved widow who was “downsizing” into a husband-free apartment. On other occasions, she was looking at “family homes” on behalf of her daughter or a “starter home” for a son working abroad. It was harmless and it gave her the opportunity to open and close the cupboards and peer into the tiny en suites, only big enough for a malnourished person. Everything was built to the tightest specifications, as little garden as possible, the smallest bath-room-it was as if a very mean person had decided to build houses.

Before Easter, she had driven over to a development of houses in Fife. The builders had finally moved out, and the last of the res-idents were moving in, although there was still a show home and a sales-office Portakabin on site, and the flag still flew above their heads, emblazoned with HATTER HOMES-REAL HOMES FOR REAL PEOPLE. A flag of convenience.

She had felt particularly bad for the new householders because the estate was built on a landfill dump, and the gardens had been created out of a few inches of topsoil.

(“But surely that’s not legal?” she said to Graham.

“Caveat emptor, Gloria,” Graham said. “It’s the only Latin I’ve ever needed to know.”)

Maggie Louden had been in the sales Portakabin and had regarded her with alarm. “Mrs. Hatter? Can I help you?” She looked different out of her cocktail clothes, more frumpish and decidedly less festive.

“Just looking,” Gloria replied, feigning nonchalance. “I like to keep an eye on things.” But her little day out was spoiled. She had been intending to pose as the mistress of a rich man who was planning to set her up in a house. The irony of the situation was not lost on her now.

Gloria had gone back secretly, at night, like a terrorist, and left a nice pot plant on every doorstep. It hardly made up for a gar-den, but it was something.

Gloria sometimes wondered if Graham was building homes for families because he found his own family so unsatisfactory. They had been to see a production of The Master Builder at the Lyceum-Hatter Homes was some kind of sponsor-and Gloria couldn’t help but make comparisons. She had wondered then if Graham would fall from a spire one day, metaphorically or other-wise. And he had. So there you go.

The coffeemaker hissed and spat and finally came to its usual fu-rious climax. Gloria poured her coffee and carried it through to the peach-themed living room and settled herself on the couch. She breakfasted on the remains of a packet of chocolate digestives. When Graham was here, they always ate at the kitchen table, he liked something cooked-scrambled eggs, an Arbroath smokie, bacon, sausages, even kidneys. While they ate they listened to Good Morning, Scotland on the radio, ceaseless disembodied chatter about politics and disasters that Graham considered important and necessary, yet it made no difference in their lives whatsoever. There was more to be gained from watching a pair of blue tits pecking away at a bird feeder full of peanuts than from cursing the Scottish Parliament over your porridge.

She turned the dial on the radio to Terry Wogan. Wogan was a Good Thing. The phone rang. The phone had been ringing at reg-ular intervals since Gloria had woken at five. She had already phoned the hospital to ascertain Graham’s unchanged condition, and she really wasn’t interested in speaking to all the people who wanted to know why Graham had disappeared off the face of the planet in the middle of the working day and wasn’t answering his mobile. She let them talk to the answering machine, it was less taxing than lying.

While she stood in the hallway, listening to the latest message (“Graham, you old bugger, where are you? I thought we were playing golf today”), the morning newspapers clattered through the letter box.

What kind of person bites the head off a kitten? What kind of person walks into the back garden of a complete stranger, picks up a three-week-old kitten, and bites its head off? And doesn’t get pros-ecuted! Gloria dropped the newspaper to the floor in disgust.

What would be the correct punishment for a person (a man, naturally) who bites the head off a three-week-old kitten? Death, obviously, but surely not a swift and painless one? That would be like an undeserved gift. Gloria believed in the punishment fitting the crime, eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. Heads for heads. How would you go about biting a person’s head off? Unless you could somehow employ a shark or a crocodile to do the job for you, Gloria supposed, you would have to settle for simple decapitation.

The man who bit the head off the kitten was, according to the newspaper, high on drugs. That was not an excuse! Gloria had once smoked a joint during her brief period at university (but more from politeness than anything) and had imbibed a consider-able quantity of alcohol in her time, but she was sure that she could have consumed any amount of illegal substances and not felt the urge to bite the head off an innocent household pet. A little basket of kittens-Gloria imagined long-haired tabbies with ribbons round their necks, like something you would find on an old-fashioned chocolate box. Tiny, helpless. Innocent. Did chocolate boxes still have those pictures? She had bought a lovely painting on eBay, two kittens, basket, balls of wool, ribbons-the works- but she still hadn’t found the right place to hang it. And, of course, Graham said it was “twee,” being more of an about-to-be-murdered-stag connoisseur himself.

There was a barbecue, “a family barbecue,” in progress and the man strode in, uninvited, unannounced, and picked up one of the kittens from the basket and bit its head off as if it were a lollipop. Had the man eaten the kitten’s head? Or just bitten it off and spat it out?

You could put the man who bit the head off the kitten into a cage of tigers and say, “Go on, then, let’s see you bite the head off one of those.” But then it would be wrong to put the tigers in a cage. There was a Blake poem about that, wasn’t there? Or was it robins?

Bill, the gardener, announced himself with the muffled clanking and thudding of tools in the shed, as if he wanted Gloria to know he was there but didn’t want to actually talk to her. His surname was Tiffany, like the jewelers. Graham had bought her a Tiffany watch for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. It had a red leather strap and little diamonds all round its face. She dropped it in the fishpond yesterday. All the fish in the pond except for one-a big golden orfe-had been gradually picked off by the neighborhood heron. Gloria wondered if the watch was still keeping time, ticking away quietly in the mud and green slime at the bottom of the pond, marking off the days left to both the big orange fish and Graham.

Gloria made more coffee, buttered a scone, switched her computer on. Gloria was good with computers. She had learned way back when it was the old Amstrads, with their black-and-green screens and infuriating habits. In those days she used to help keep the accounts for Hatter Homes. That was before the firm took off, when Graham was still following in his father’s cautious footsteps, building small developments, the profits of one venture funding the building of the next. He was cooking the books even then, but the sums were still relatively small. Hatter Homes had remained a family business, owned by Graham and Gloria. It had never been floated on the stock exchange, never subject to rigorous external scrutiny. The auditing was done by his own accountants. There was a web of complicity stretching as far as the eye couldn’t see, accountants, lawyers, secretaries, sales force (sales-force-cum-mistresses). Gloria herself had signed anything put in front of her for years-papers, documents, contracts. She hadn’t questioned anything, and now she seemed to do nothing but question. Inno-cence was not ignorance.

Gloria had a nice little laptop of her own, hooked up to a broadband connection in the kitchen-which was where she spent most of her time, after all, so why not? Graham never used her computer, he did all his dirty business in the office. She could imagine him going on pornography sites, watching one of those webcams where a woman in a room somewhere (anywhere) in the world performed for him.

The only messages Gloria tended to get-apart from the odd missive from her children-were invitations to enlarge her penis or special offers from Boots.com. She would have liked to have checked Graham’s e-mail, but it was password protected. Gloria had been worrying away at it long before the events of yesterday, but she hadn’t yet come up with the open sesame-she had tried that too, along with every other word and combination of words she could think of. “Kinloch,” “Hartford,” “Braecroft,” “Hopetoun,” “Villiers,” and “Waverley.” Nothing. They were the names of the six basic models of Hatter Homes-the “Kinloch” was the cheapest, the “Waverley” the most expensive. The “Hart-ford” and the “Braecroft” were semidetached. Nowadays Graham built a lot more detached houses than he used to. People like de-tached no matter how small, the “Kinloch” was so tiny it reminded Gloria of a Monopoly house.

Next month Gloria would be sixty. She had heard someone on the radio say that “sixty was the new forty.” She had never heard anything so stupid in her life. Sixty was sixty, there was no point in pretending otherwise. Who was going to provide for her in her old age? Whether Graham was dead or alive wasn’t going to make any difference to the police and the courts, they were going to de-stroy Hatter Homes. Quite rightly, in Gloria’s opinion, but it would have been nice if she could have salvaged a little pension for herself before they did. She imagined that somewhere there was a big black book that contained all of Graham’s secrets, all of his money. The Magus’s book. As with capitalism, it was too late to ask him about it now.

She gave up on the password and checked her online bank account. They had a joint account that was mainly for day-to-day bills and housekeeping. Gloria was entirely dependent on Graham for money, a shocking realization that had taken several decades to sink in. One minute you’re sitting on a bar stool drinking a gin-and-orange, worrying about whether or not you look pretty, the next minute you’re a year away from a bus pass, staring bankruptcy and public humiliation in the face. And sixty was the same old sixty as it ever was.

The housekeeping account was drip-fed automatically from a Hatter Homes account, whenever money was debited from it, more was credited, whatever went out one day was topped up overnight. It was almost like magic. No one seemed to have noticed the five hundred a day that Gloria had been siphoning off. Her nest egg. It was entirely legal, it was a joint account, her name was on it. Five hundred a day, every day except Sunday, Gloria’s day of rest, monitored by her Baptist conscience. The new money-laundering regulations made it difficult to move large sums of money around, but five hundred a day seemed to keep her below the radar of both the Hatter Homes accountants and the bank. Sooner or later, she supposed, an alarm bell would ring, a flag would go up, but by then the accounts would all probably be frozen, and if there was any justice in the world, Gloria would be gone with her black plastic bag of swag. Seventy-two thousand pounds wasn’t a lot to start a new life on, but it was better than nothing, better than what most people in the world had.

Gloria emptied Graham’s belongings out of the bag and laid them on the maple wood draining board of the laundry room. His shoes, polished to a licorice-like shine, the jacket and trousers of his suit, the Austin Reed shirt, his expensive silk socks that someone, a nurse presumably, had rolled into a ball, the cotton vest and boxer shorts from Marks and Spencer-his underwear seemed particularly depressing to Gloria-and, last, his blandly corporate tie, curled limply at the bottom of the plastic bag like a dispirited snake.

It was strange to see his clothes laid out like that, flat and two-dimensional, as if Graham had suddenly become invisible while wearing them. Now they had all been swapped for a cotton gown that showed his Roquefort legs and his not-so-firm buttocks. The cotton gown would in turn soon be swapped for a shroud. With any luck.

Gloria had a sudden image of her brother’s mutilated body when it had been shown to his family in the hospital mortuary, wrapped up in white sheets, like a mummy or a present. Gloria wondered which of her parents had thought it was a good idea to let their fourteen-year-old daughter view the dead body of her brother, nicely wrapped or not.

Jonathan had a place at college to do an HND and was working in the mill only for the summer between school and college. There had been several mills in Gloria’s hometown when she was a child, now there were none. Some had been demolished, but most had been converted into flats or hotels, one into an art gallery and another into a museum where ex-mill workers demonstrated to the public the jobs they used to do in a past that was now officially history.

The week before her brother died, he had taken Gloria inside the mill. He was proud of where he was working, doing a “man’s job.” It wasn’t dark and satanic, as she had imagined from singing “Jerusalem” in school assemblies, rather it was full of light and as big as a cathedral, a hymn to industry. Tiny strands and puffs of wool floated in the air like feathers. And the noise! The “clattering, shattering, shuttling noise”-she had written a poem later for her grammar school magazine “in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” thinking it might heal some part of the grief, but the poem was poor (“wool-dappled white air”) and came from the head, not the heart.

There had been talk of prosecution after Jonathan’s death-all kinds of health and safety laws had been flouted at the mill-but it never progressed beyond talk, and Gloria’s parents lacked the passion to pursue it. Her sister (so recently dead) was twenty at the time and upstaged their brother by turning up in a pair of jeans and a black polo-neck sweater for his Baptist funeral. Gloria had fully admired her sister’s gesture.

The only other time Gloria had been inside a real cathedral of industry was long ago, on a school visit to Rowntree’s factory in York, when her class had marveled every step of the way, from the Smarties being tumbled around in what looked like copper ce-ment mixers to the packing room where women were tying ribbons around boxes of chocolates with (yes) pictures of kittens on them. At the end of the tour they had been given bags of mis-shapes of all kinds, and Gloria had returned home triumphantly bearing dozens of two-fingered KitKats that had, like Jonathan, been mangled by the machinery.

She took the phone from Graham’s jacket pocket. What had Maggie Louden said last night? “Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?” Was that what she was-an old bag? Maggie Louden was well over forty, she’d be an old bag herself soon enough.

The phone had run out of battery power (rather like its owner). Graham’s suit could do with going to the dry cleaners, but really, why bother? If he died, all of his suits were going to the Oxfam shop on Morningside Road, apart from the one he would wear for his funeral. This one might do, a bit of a brush and a press, no point in getting something cleaned when it was going into the ground to rot.

She plugged Graham’s phone into the charger in the kitchen and carefully typed out a text to Maggie Louden. She tapped out “Am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g”-she was pretty sure Graham wouldn’t bother with any punctuation or grammar, but then she changed it to “Sorry darling am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g” and then redrafted it a third time to “Sorry darling am in thurso not much of a signal here don’t bother phoning speak to you tomorrow g.”

What Gloria remembered most was that York was a town that smelled of chocolate whereas she came from a town that smelled of soot. Of course, you could no longer go on tours of Rowntree’s, now it was owned by some multinational conglomerate that didn’t want anyone inside their gates, watching what they were doing. Now that her sister was dead, Gloria was the only person who remembered her brother. It was extraordinary how quickly a person could be erased. Death triumphant.

She took a bag of birdseed from underneath the sink in the laundry room and poured it into a bowl. Out in the garden, she broadcast the seed around the lawn and, for a moment, felt quite saintly as all the birds of Edinburgh descended on her garden.