I can’t work out what is more interesting, either their being virtually identical or that there are minor differences of appearance. One is creased at the top corner, the other slightly foxed along the bottom edge. I flick through both copies, one after the other. They smell exactly the same. They smell of second-hand bookshops, cardboard boxes, spilt tea. The faintest hint of cigarettes. Futility. Time.
I take out the five other books by Emma Tennant on Veronica’s shelf. The Bad Sister, Wild Nights, Alice Fell, Queen of Stones, Woman Beware Woman. I place them next to each other. I compare them in terms of smell, cover design, number of pages.
Cleo comes and brushes against my leg.
‘Hello, Cleo,’ I say. ‘What do you think? Either I mix Veronica’s books in with mine or move them elsewhere.’
I stroke her back, tickle her under the chin. She lifts her head up to encourage me.
‘You’re not much help,’ I say. ‘Are you? She’s been gone a long time.’
I collect the books up and put them back on Veronica’s shelf. I’m tempted to integrate them into my collection, but I’m not sure it would be the right thing to do. At what point will it be, I wonder? Will it ever?
I look again at the Ss on my shelves. Sinclair, Stevens. Something is missing. I picture my copy of Jane Solomon’s Hotel 167 on the corner of my desk at the university.
I follow Cleo down to the half-landing, where the Penguin shelves — wide and shallow, designed precisely to fit A-format paperbacks — are a mixture of orange and grass-green. I look at the Simenons, trying to commit to memory the titles that are there, but I know that as soon as I’m back in the bookshop, or any other bookshop, I’ll have forgotten.
There are occasional breaks among the orange and green for white-spined Penguins — Derek Marlowe, Isaac Bashevis Singer, D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel — which I am increasingly finding an unwarranted distraction, at least in this context. On these shelves. Nevertheless, I slip the copy of The Slave between The Estate and A Friend of Kafka.
I walk to the bottom of the stairs and sit on the last step to pull on my gardening boots.
A few streets away, a 1930s semi bristles with scaffolding. Sheets of heavy-duty plastic shift listlessly in the light breeze. The bell is one of those that cannot be heard from the outside, perhaps even from the inside, so I knock on the door. After a few moments, heavy footsteps come bounding down the stairs and the door swings open.
‘Ksssh-huh-huh,’ he laughs. ‘That was quick.’
‘My skip was delivered first thing. You mentioned a wheelbarrow…’
‘Come in, come in.’
‘I’ll just take my shoes off,’ I say, pointedly, then follow him down the narrow hall.
‘It’s in the garage,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘We could have opened it from the outside — it’s not like I ever lock it — but there’s stuff in the way that needs moving.’ As he passes through the kitchen, he flicks the switch on the kettle. ‘Make yourself at home. I don’t tend to lock this either,’ he says as he opens a door that appears to connect the kitchen directly to the garage. ‘There’s no need.’
While he rummages in the garage and I hear the scrape of a wooden door on the gritty tarmac of his drive, the kettle continues to boil and I look around his kitchen. There’s a calendar from a local business with scribbled notes and ringed dates. Between it and the fridge is a large, cheaply framed collage of old snapshots featuring a vivacious-looking redhead and two little blonde girls at various ages. The woman’s hair is longer in some shots, shorter in others. One shows her and Lewis in evening wear, about to set off for a party. They have their arms around each other: she looks proud and happy. He’s smiling, but looks slightly tense or awkward, as if he knows something she doesn’t. He had more hair then.
Lewis re-enters the kitchen and I step back from studying the picture.
‘Being nosy,’ I say.
Lewis edges past me and fiddles with the kettle. He drops the lid of the teapot, which clatters on the floor, masking the splutter of his characteristic laugh.
‘Me family,’ he says. ‘Me ex-family.’
‘You split up?’
Lewis pours the water. He shakes his head.
‘There was an accident.’ His voice threatens to break on ‘accident’. He spills the milk. ‘Oops. No use crying. Ksssh-huh-huh.’
I don’t say anything, but watch Lewis’ shoulders as he stands hunched over the sink, perfectly still.
‘So, anyway,’ he asks finally, ‘how you settling in?’
‘Fine.’
‘You should come down the pub. Everyone’s there. Thursday, nine o’clock. It would be good for you to meet some more people. Come down tonight.’
I imagine a load of blokes desultorily disagreeing with refereeing decisions.
‘Who goes?’
‘Everyone. All the lads. It’s not a piss-up. Very civilised.’
I drink my tea and make my excuses.
Ray had joined the RAF as a way of getting out of Britain in the early 1960s. His wife had died giving birth to their only child and it would have broken him if he hadn’t got out. Some say it did break him anyway. Others that it just changed him. The pinched-faced moralisers among his family said it had no effect on him: he’d always only ever been in it for himself. These are the people you might have expected to have got their heads together to decide who was best placed to offer the infant a home, until such time as his father tired of the tropics. But they didn’t exactly fight among themselves for that right.
Ray himself had been born into a community so tightly knit it cut off the circulation. His own domineering mother and subjugated father, all his uncles and aunts, were regular churchgoers. Some gritty, northern, unforgiving denomination, it would have been, where prayer cushions would have been considered a luxury.
It wouldn’t have mattered who Ray brought back to the house in Hyde as his intended, they weren’t going to like her. They’d have looked down on her whatever she was, princess or pauper. Not that they had any money of their own to speak of, they didn’t. But pride they had.
Perhaps Ray bore all of this in mind when he took the Levenshulme bingo caller to the Kardomah in St Anne’s Square. Victoria. Vic, Ray called her — his queen. She may have been only a bingo caller to the family, but Ray worshipped her. She turned up in the Cross household one blustery night in a new miniskirt. ‘Legs eleven,’ he blurted out, ill-advisedly. ‘Your father and I will be in here,’ his mother said, frowning in disapproval and pointing to the front room; Ray’s father shuffled obediently. ‘You can sit in t’ morning room,’ she said to Ray.
The morning room, an antechamber to the kitchen, was dim and soulless in the morning and didn’t get any lighter or warmer as the day wore on. Somehow it failed to benefit from its proximity to the kitchen. No one used it, not even his mother, despite her being temperamentally suited to its ambience.
Ray and Victoria’s options were few, if they had any at all, and sticking around wasn’t one of them. Ray got a job with the Post Office in Glossop, so they packed what little they had and moved out along the A57. He worked hard and earned more than enough for two, so that when the first signs of pregnancy appeared, they didn’t think twice. It didn’t matter that the baby hadn’t been planned; it was welcome.
After the birth, Ray held the tiny baby once, for no more than a few seconds. Victoria lost so much blood, the hospital ran out of supplies. She suffered terribly for the next twelve hours, during which time Ray stayed by her side. Twice the nurses asked him if they’d thought of a name for the baby. Each time he waved them away.