“And where do they get it?” said Pamela.
“Och, who cares?” said Mrs. Watson. “That boy could season a scabby rat and you’d not say no. Rosa Imperiolo tells me some of his special mixture-it’s a shame to put it in a curry.”
In his little study under the stairs, Kenny Imperiolo cocked his head and listened to the sounds of Rosa moving about the house, so familiar after all these years; the creak of a board in the smallest spare bedroom, a faint hiss, the clunk of plastic on metal, and then the creak again. She was ironing. Kenny screwed up his face trying to remember what the level had been in the plastic basket on top of the dryer that morning when he’d gone to the freezer to get his good fresh coffee beans. Surely it was piled high? Didn’t she always leave it until there was a mountain and then groan to herself as she carried it upstairs? She would be busy for hours, wouldn’t come anywhere near him. All the same, he moved a heavy box against the door of his little hidey-hole before he turned his computer on. There were no locks anywhere in this house, never had been-not even on the bathrooms, since that time Michael shut himself in in a tantrum when he was four and Kenny had put his foot through the garage roof climbing to the rescue. He pulled the door hard and the box didn’t budge. And anyway, Rosa never came checking up on him; it wasn’t her way. She was a good, trusting, loving wife who’d never done anything except make him proud to stand beside her, and she deserved no less than the same back from him. Kenny imagined those warm brown eyes of hers narrowed and hard, staring at him, asking him why. Then he shook the picture out of his head and started working.
Sandra Dessing followed Carmen and Melisande into the wood and put the little black bag with the integrated scoop away in her anorak pocket. She always carried it out for everyone to see while she was on the street, but she was damned if she was going to use one on the bark paths at £3.99 for ten. Ahead of her she could hear faint tuneless whistling and she pinched her cheeks and tucked her hair behind he ears. Iain Ballantyne came around the corner with Tig on his lead.
“Hello, hello,” he said. “I was just on my way home, but I’ll maybe turn back and have another wee stroll.”
“Why not?” said Mrs. Dessing. “Nice to see them having a good run and play together.”
“If you’re sure,” said Mr. Ballantyne, and something in his voice made Sandra look away from the dogs and glance at his face instead, right into his eyes.
“Why?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to talk,” said Iain. “We really need to talk today.” He bent to unhook Tig’s lead from his collar and all three dogs, well used to one another by now, bounded into the trees with their owners following after.
As Keiko held Viola in the warmth of the swaying bus, as Fancy and Yvonne egged one another on in the fug of the salon, as Etta McLuskie stood her ground in the parked car, as Pamela Shand whacked the books with the pricing gun, as Kenny clicked and dragged and deleted, as Iain and Sandra’s dogs raced on into the darkest part of the woods-no one thought of the letters.
Some, reduced to ash with the rest of the clearings from the grate, were tipped into carriers, tied in binbags, burned again in the council incinerator, tipped out of the back of the truck eighteen miles away and scraped flat by men with masks and heavy gloves against the dust and grit they were spreading.
Some, in shreds, had rotted to compost with clippings and peelings, until the narrow lines of ink were gone. And in the spring when the bin was emptied and barrowed over to the border, there would be no sign in the crumbling brown that any paper was ever there.
Some had been pressed between pages never to be parted again, not even when the executors put the house on the open market and the eaves were emptied after the place was sold. That whole year’s worth of Woman’s Realm would be bound up with brown string and taken away by the clearance companies, sold on to the recyclers, and entered in the bill under sundry other items as “non-confidential printed paper: three bales.”
Some grew pulpy on their way downstream, heavy and sloughing apart, turning to grey paste in the water, one piece tangling itself in a length of plastic twine and floating for miles before the line snagged on a jutting rock and the balls of sodden paper were washed away.
Only a single letter remained, resting again where it had rested for years, behind the radiator, by the door, under the shelf, above the genkan now, as secret as ever-except that Keiko knew.
Murray knelt beside the Harley, waiting just the right amount of time for the WD-40 to loosen the nuts under the saddle but not long enough for it to drip down between the rear mudguard and the battery. Malcolm stood at his bench in the back room, boning and rolling, dividing his store of fat evenly amongst the joints, tying the skin snugly over the pink and white spirals and patting each one before he laid them into the tray for the morning. Mrs. Poole could hear the regular slap of his palm on the skin as he finished another one, but she barely registered such a familiar sound as she snapped her ledger shut and pulled the first bundle of banknotes towards her.
twenty-seven
Wednesday, 20 November
Mrs. Poole was there again the next evening, listening, her hands spread flat on the empty desktop, when Keiko’s phone rang. She cocked her head to catch footsteps or talking, but nothing much came down through these stone floors. She of all people should know that by now.
“I can’t,” Keiko was saying. “I’ve planned something with Murray.”
“Oh, yeah?” Fancy said.
“I’m making him a meal. A proper Japanese meal. The works.”
“Just Murray?”
“Just the two of us.”
“After all Malcolm’s done, feeding you up like a Christmas goose too.”
She had made miso soup, stuffed fish, shaped dumplings. The first two batches, bland and heavy, she threw away but on the third attempt they came out as light as seed heads, as gold as sunshine. That would surely be enough, with the noodles and all the pickles, to make up for no sushi.
She laid two settings at the coffee table before the fire, put an extra pair of slippers on the genkan and put on her kimono, shaking out two months of folds and breathing in the scent of home. Murray arrived right on time, with flowers for her.
“Oops,” he said as she flung the door open and bowed. “Did I get you out the bath?” She smiled. “No really, you look great. And is it shoes off, then?” Keiko nodded and waited while he hopped around, unlacing his boots. “The total Tokyo experience, eh?”
“One night only,” said Keiko. “Starting tomorrow I’m going to have time for nothing except the experiments until Christmas.”
“Not even workouts?”
“I wouldn’t give up the workouts. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. And so tonight is like a thank-you. I want you to have a lovely evening.” She hesitated. “You deserve one.”
He held up his hand. “If we’re going to have a lovely evening,” he said, “could we agree not to talk about… things?” Keiko nodded. “Good. So, tell me what to do then. If you’ve gone to a lot of trouble, I want to get my end of it right.”
“No, no, no,” she said. “No etiquette, it’s too… I wanted to cook for you-just enjoy the food.”
Murray frowned, then smiled tightly. “Too complicated for me?”
“Well, if you’re really interested,” she said, backtracking. “Most foreigners think it’s silly.” She excused herself and went to the kitchen to set the noodle water on to boil. Murray had wriggled himself into a comfortable position on his cushion when she came back and folded herself down opposite him to pour sake.