The Detective's Daughter

44

Friday, 21 January 2011

Sarah tidied up before Jack arrived. Antony would laugh at her for cleaning for the cleaner. She explained to her absent brother as she scrubbed at a pan, excavating years of burnt food, that a cleaner was not there to do her washing up or tidy up after her. Yet as she scoured her blackened cooking utensils, rinsing a film of grease off glassware with scalding water, cleaning for Jack Harmon was precisely what she was doing. Sarah would hide from Jack how careless of hygiene she was.

Antony had a dishwasher; if it broke he got in an engineer.

You solve your problems with a phone call and a cheque.

She ground the wire pad into the sides of the stewing pot. Calling Clean Slate had been a passing idea that she might have abandoned, but for her brother’s dismissive response.

Shovelling papers and unopened post into the cutlery drawer, she declared to Antony that it had paid off. She had found who she was looking for. She did not care what he thought, she uttered firmly, keeping to herself that she had booked Jack Harmon for the days when Antony was in the country.

This is my house and you are welcome to visit, but only when I invite you.

She chucked out a two-year-old packet of dried apricots and a tin of rock-hard cocoa powder.

I can do what I like.

She flurried about her bedroom, throwing shoes into the wardrobe, hanging her kimono behind the door. She was in the bathroom dusting incense ash off the sill into her palm when there were three knocks on the front door.

Jack Harmon was not talkative. When she invited him to have coffee before he started, he shook his head and got straight to washing down the kitchen cupboards.

Sarah retreated to the sitting room to consider her next move. She could not go to her studio with Harmon in the house. She wanted his photograph and had an hour to obtain it.

She would wait until he was vacuuming the top floor and take him unawares. A photograph was a poor substitute for him modelling for her, but would allow her to study his face and make a sketch which would define him in lines and shade. Asking his permission was out of the question.

Jack was not real to Sarah Glyde. Not until the head under the damp cloth on her work table was complete would he gain life.

She unclipped the lens cap and rubbed the glass and viewfinder with the corner of her blouse, aimed the camera at the marble fireplace that, preferring the intimacy of her studio, she seldom lit. The battery was charged; it was ready.

Jack was in the doorway, his hand poised to knock. His soundless presence reminded her of Antony and she suspected he had been there some time.

‘Miss Glyde, sorry to bother you, but the back room is locked and there’s no key.’

‘Sarah, please.’ She attempted to be airy and tried to hide the camera under a sofa cushion, but it tumbled to the floor. Jack pulled it up by its strap and kept hold of it.

‘I’m sorry if I gave you a start.’

Sarah felt heat rising in her cheeks.

‘It looks OK.’ He turned it over and switched it on. ‘So, the top room?’

She wanted it cleared out and filled with sunshine.

‘It’s not mine.’ Sarah patted her hair, fitting a strand behind her ear that immediately fell forward. ‘ The room. I should have said.’

‘You did say to give everywhere an “overhaul”.’ He repeated her term without mockery, apparently to mollify her.

‘My brother has the key – it’s his old bedroom. He’s older than me. It’s ridiculous but that still counts so there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘Not a problem.’ The lens zoomed out; Jack retracted it.

‘Tony has his own house. Two actually.’ Sarah could not stop herself and offloaded oft-rehearsed phrases of injustice like ballast. ‘One in London where he works and a country cottage, yet he still has his room in my house. It shouldn’t matter because there’s loads of space. My mother took his side, you see. She believed he was fragile and needed extra support. He could eat what he liked, while she rationed my food because it was family lore that I was fat. He never put on weight. The silliest things upset one, don’t they?’

‘It’s working.’ Jack handed her the camera.

‘I’ll have a word and see what he wants doing.’ As she said the throwaway line, Sarah imagined that this was possible. She had only to say: I want it as a guest room.

You don’t have guests.

That’s because I don’t have a room for them.

It’s my room.

Dad said it could be mine when you left.

He’s dead. I’m in charge now.

‘Let me know when you want me to do in there.’

Sarah sank on to the sofa. Jack had switched the camera to display mode and his clay head, its shape defined, his jaw kneaded and moulded, was on the screen. She had smoothed the clay, working and reworking it, wiping it down, shaping it; caressing it. This would be her best creation. Jack Harmon must have seen it.

Jack Harmon. The name was familiar. She gazed at the face, the unformed features ghostly in the poorly lit image, seeking to reassure herself that Jack could not have recognized himself. Few recognized their own beauty.

She heard squirts of an aerosol, bumps and scrapes: above her Jack was shifting furniture in her mother’s room. Her bed – single once Sarah’s father had died – squeaked and rumbled as he manoeuvred it. Stella Darnell was right, he was thorough. The vacuum motor droned, overlaid with taps of the nozzle probing along the skirting boards.

By the time Sarah had nerved herself to creep on to the landing and up the stairs, Jack was in the bathroom. The window was painted shut and, like Antony’s bedroom, it overlooked the river. He had the best view in the house.

Keeping out of the way of the door, she confronted the vacuum: one of those red spherical machines with eyes and a mouth on its body. It was coy, grinning at her from the sink pedestal, its tube snaking out of sight. The lavatory lid banged.

He was using the lavatory. Sarah wanted to see him pissing. She wanted to hear him. She wanted that knowledge of him. Switching on the camera, she raised it to her face and inched closer.

Jack was standing on the lavatory seat with his back to her, his face pressed to the bathroom window set high in the little room, which unlike the lower panes was not frosted.

In the mirror above the sink Sarah had a perfect shot of his profile. She snapped, once, twice and then a third time. The shutter made no sound. She ran down the stairs, out of the house and into the studio where she collapsed on her work desk, panting and heaving to get her breath, exhilarated by her temerity.

Only when she had printed the pictures and placed them in a folder marked ‘Suppliers’ – that Antony would never pry into – did it occur to her to wonder what Jack Harmon had been doing. What was he so interested in looking at?

After he had gone she went up to the bathroom. The ceramic sparkled; the limescale that had stained the bath since her mother died had gone, as had the grime around the pipework. The taps shone. The room looked as it had when her father was alive.

The lid was still closed. Gripping the downpipe on the overhead cistern, Sarah climbed on to the lavatory. Below her, the river flickered with black and silver when wind rippled its surface. It was low tide, the muddy shore was exposed; she craned down, but could not see what had attracted Jack Harmon’s attention.

Sarah Glyde was still standing on the lavatory when her brother walked in.