Zbigniew assessed the house professionally as he stood there: he knew these buildings well. Decent condition, ugly but sound. A kind of job he’d done many times: make it less unfashionable, less out of date, fix up the wiring, bit of plumbing. A decent-size job. Quote in the high single figures.
The woman he’d spoken to over the phone opened the door; she looked tired and older than she had sounded. Mrs Mary Leatherby. She had the air of someone not giving the matter immediately in front of her her full attention. Zbigniew knew how that felt. It was fine with him. He had no interest in her either. She showed him round the downstairs. It was as he thought. Linoleum. Strip and repaint, take out the kitchen, put in a new one from a kit. Check the wiring. Zbigniew guessed that it would be OK; it didn’t look as if the place was broken, just tired. The toilet under the stairs was horrible and she wanted to take it out. He’d have to get help with that, which wouldn’t be a problem. Quote in the low teens. He scribbled in his notebook.
The sitting room was also straightforward. From the choices she was making it was obvious that Mrs Leatherby wanted to sell the house. Everything was going to be neutral, cream and white. Modern fittings. No problem; Zbigniew knew how to do that. More scribbling. Quote heading toward the middle teens. They continued going around the house. There was a bathroom upstairs, in more or less the same condition as the one downstairs, except this was for renovation rather than removal. More work for subcontractors, no problem. New bath and shower and basin and cupboards and fittings, good margin on all that, subs would be happy. Quote in the middle teens.
‘There’s another bedroom but we can’t go in there,’ said Mrs Leatherby. She showed him into a little study bedroom where she had been sleeping on a sofa bed. There was an opened, unpacked suitcase on the table and a photograph of a man and three children beside it. They went upstairs. The linoleum here would be going also, maybe to be replaced by carpet. That was a specialist job he could not do but he wouldn’t tell her that yet, he could put something in the figures and outsource it later, besides she had so little idea of what she wanted it would be premature to be too clear. The client not sure of what they want – every builder’s nightmare, every builder’s dream. Upstairs, two more bedrooms, both dark and poky, a small bathroom, ditto, a loft which had not been converted. He went up there and took a look: it was the usual – unlagged, warm and humid, with low exposed wooden beams and a centimetre-thick layer of dust. He could get in a crew to do this but it would be a step bigger than any job he had taken on for himself.
‘We might do it up, or might leave it for the buyer. A rough quote is all we’re asking for. But then there’s the hassle, the permissions… the council…’
Mrs Leatherby seemed to fade in and out. She was not always listening to herself. Zbigniew wondered what it was… wondered about the room he wasn’t supposed to be going into… wondered why it was she who was selling when it wasn’t her house. Then he got it. She was selling her mother’s house, and her mother was still alive. Not for long, obviously, or she wouldn’t be selling the house. But what it boiled down to, after all the rationalisations and justifications, was that she was getting builders’ quotations to renovate her mother’s house, in order to sell it after her mother’s death, while her mother was still in the house, dying. A feeling of wrongness grew in Zbigniew; a feeling that he was, by participating in this, doing something that he should not be doing.
‘I’m getting a few other people in,’ she said. ‘A few quotes. You were recommended… I told you that. Rough figures to start with then something more specific. I’ll have more idea later when… Well, anyway, thank you for coming. Look around a bit more if you like. I’ll be in the kitchen.’
Moving much quicker than before, she half-ran downstairs. Her heels made a skidding, skittering noise over the floor. It was too much for her, Zbigniew saw; she wasn’t a bad person doing a bad thing, she was just lost, didn’t know what to do.
As he thought: she doesn’t know what to do, Zbigniew came back from his holiday. It had been short but he had enjoyed it. Now he was thinking about Davina again; or not thinking about her, just remembering how it was. Her way of pretending that nothing had happened, while the fact of what had happened sat in the room between them like a rotting corpse. The complete lack of any way out, that he could see or imagine; her expression sometimes, when he caught her looking at him with a look that was like the look a dog gave its master, needy, abject, beaten, eager. The way all talk between them had taken on a falsity, so that even the smallest of small talk was like a perfumed fart.
Zbigniew, standing on the landing, heard Mrs Leatherby go all the way downstairs into the kitchen, then heard another door close. She had gone out into the garden. He was alone in the house, except for whatever or whoever was behind the bedroom door. It was like a horror film: the creature behind the door… And then for no reason he could name, Zbigniew went to the door and put his hand on the handle. It was wood, and warm to the touch. Very slightly loose, too; not fitted quite correctly; another piece of work. He took out his notebook, made a note, and then folded the book shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He turned the door handle for the moment, telling himself that he was checking the condition of the handle, seeing how smooth it was, how well the door had been fitted, but knowing that what he would do next was what he actually did do, turn the handle past the point of release, and then gently push the door so that it moved, with a faint creak. The door swung open. There was a smell of alcohol-based disinfectant.
An old woman was lying in the bed. She was lying against the wall with the wooden bedstead against the window, looking towards him. He was on the point of apologising, and then he realised that although the woman’s eyes were open and she was apparently looking straight in his direction, she could not see him. It was as if he was invisible to her. Zbigniew had seen that look in the eyes of animals: a cow could look at you with a depth and intensity that was explained only by its absence of mind. That was the look in the old woman’s eyes. The power of presence combined with the power of absence. He realised that she must be Mrs Leatherby’s mother, and also that she must be dying.
She looked at Zbigniew – if she was really looking at him, and not just lying with her eyes open in his direction – for about a minute. Then she slowly closed her eyes. Zbigniew felt his breath catch: perhaps she had just died, right here, right now! What could he do? What should he do? What was his responsibility? But no; that wasn’t what happened; dying people didn’t close their eyes like that, as if they were going to sleep. She hadn’t just died. She would soon, though, that was clear.
It was something Zbigniew was never to forget: the smell, the feeling of the close, over-warm air of the bedroom, the presence of the old woman who had already gone some distance over to the other side and was partly not-there, and with it the sense of another presence in the room. Zbigniew was no believer, not in anything; but he found himself believing, for the first time, in death. Death was not just an idea, or something that happened to other people. He would die one day, just as this woman was dying, and he would die, as she did, alone. Even if there were people who loved him all around, he would die alone. It is a thought, a realisation, that comes to many people for the first time in the small hours of the morning, but for Zbigniew it came right there in the middle of the afternoon, in the bedroom of 42 Pepys Road.