That day, as he stitched and measured, he imagined the place Mrs Acland wrote of, the secluded house with twenty female inmates, and the lawn and the rose-beds. He imagined the other house, 17 Lorelei Avenue in Richmond, and the third house, the Victorian residence in the Worcestershire countryside. He imagined Mrs Acland’s obese husband with his short hair and his aeroplane fasteners, and the children who had been killed in a motor-car accident, and Mr and Mrs Rachels whom they had haunted. All day long the faces of these people flitted through Mr Mockler’s mind, with old Miss Acheson and Sarah Crookham and Dr Scott-Rowe and Dr Friendman. In the evening, when he met his friends Mr Tile and Mr Uprichard in the Charles the First, he showed them the letter before even ordering them drinks.
‘Well, I’m beggared,’ remarked Mr Uprichard, a man known locally for his gentle nature. ‘That poor creature.’
Mr Tile, who was not given to expressing himself, shook his head.
Mr Mockler asked Mr Uprichard if he should visit this Mrs Acland. ‘Poor creature,’ Mr Uprichard said again, and added that without a doubt Mrs Acland had written to a stranger because of the loneliness she mentioned, the loneliness like a shroud around her.
Some weeks later Mr Mockler, having given the matter further thought and continuing to be affected by the contents of the letter, took a Green Line bus out of London to the address that Mrs Acland had given him. He made inquiries, feeling quite adventurous, and was told that the house was three-quarters of a mile from where the bus had dropped him, down a side road. He found it without further difficulty. It was a house surrounded by a high brick wall in which large, black wrought-iron gates were backed with sheets of tin so that no one could look through the ornamental scrollwork. The gates were locked. Mr Mockler rang a bell in the wall.
‘Yes?’ a man said, opening the gate that was on Mr Mockler’s left.
‘Well,’ said Mr Mockler and found it difficult to proceed.
‘Yes?’ the man said.
‘Well, I’ve had a letter. Asking me to come, I think. My name’s Mockler.’
The man opened the gate a little more and Mr Mockler stepped through.
The man walked ahead of him and Mr Mockler saw the lawns that had been described, and the rose-beds. The house he considered most attractive: a high Georgian building with beautiful windows. An old woman was walking slowly by herself with the assistance of a stick: Miss Acheson, Mr Mockler guessed. In the distance he saw other women, walking slowly on leaf-strewn paths.
Autumn was Mr Mockler’s favourite season and he was glad to be in the country on this pleasantly autumnal day. He thought of remarking on this to the man who led him towards the house, but since the man did not incline towards conversation he did not do so.
In the yellow waiting-room there were no magazines and no pictures on the walls and no flowers. It was not a room in which Mr Mockler would have cared to wait for long, and in fact he did not have to. A woman dressed as a nurse except that she wore a green cardigan came in. She smiled briskly at him and said that Dr Friendman would see him. She asked Mr Mockler to follow her.
‘How very good of you to come,’ Dr Friendman said, smiling at Mr Mockler in the way that Mrs Acland, had described in her letter. ‘How very humane,’ said Dr Friendman.
‘I had a letter, from a Mrs Acland.’
‘Quite so, Mr Mockler. Mr Mockler, could I press you towards a glass of sherry?’
Mr Mockler, surprised at this line of talk, accepted the sherry, saying it was good of Dr Friendman. He drank the sherry while Dr Friendman read the letter. When he’d finished, Dr Friendman crossed to the window of the room and pulled aside a curtain and asked Mr Mockler if he’d mind looking out.
There was a courtyard, small and cobbled, in which a gardener was sweeping leaves into a pile. At the far end of it, sitting on a tapestry-backed dining-chair in the autumn sunshine, was a woman in a blue dress. ‘Try these,’ said Dr Friendman and handed Mr Mockler a pair of binoculars.
It was a beautiful face, thin and seeming fragile, with large blue eyes and lips that were now slightly parted, smiling in the sunshine. Hair the colour of corn was simply arranged, hanging on either side of the face and curling in around it. The hair shone in the sunlight, as though it was for ever being brushed.
‘I find them useful,’ Dr Friendman said, taking the binoculars from Mr Mockler’s hands. ‘You have to keep an eye, you know.’
‘That’s Mrs Acland?’ Mr Mockler asked.
‘That’s the lady who wrote to you: the letter’s a bit. inaccurate, Mr Mockler. It wasn’t quite like that in 17 Lorelei Avenue.’
‘Not quite like it?’
‘She cannot forget Lorelei Avenue. I’m afraid she never will. That beautiful woman, Mr Mockler, was a beautiful girl, yet she married the first man who asked her, a widower thirty years older than her, a fat designer of aircraft fasteners. He pays her bills just as she says in her letter, and even when he’s dead they’ll go on being paid. He used to visit her at first, but he found it too painful. He stood in this very room one day, Mr Mockler, and said to Dr Scott-Rowe that no man had ever been appreciated by a woman as much as he had by her. And all because he’d been kind to her in the most ordinary ways.’
Mr Mockler said he was afraid that he didn’t know what Dr Friendman was talking about. As though he hadn’t heard this quiet protest, Dr Friendman smiled and said:
‘But it was, unfortunately, too late for kindness. 17 Lorelei Avenue had done its damage, like a cancer in her mind: she could not forget her childhood.’
‘Yes, she says in her letter. George and Alice and Isabel –’
‘All her childhood, Mr Mockler, her parents did not speak to one another. They didn’t quarrel, they didn’t address each other in any way whatsoever. When she was five they’d come to an agreement: that they should both remain in 17 Lorelei Avenue because neither would ever have agreed to give up an inch of the child they’d between them caused to be born. In the house there was nothing, Mr Mockler, for all her childhood years: nothing except silence.’
‘But there was George and Alice and Isabel –’
‘No, Mr Mockler. There was no George and no Alice and no Isabel. No hide-and-seek or parties on Christmas Eve, no Monopoly on Sundays by the fire. Can you imagine 17 Lorelei Avenue, Mr Mockler, as she is now incapable of imagining it? Two people so cruel to one another that they knew that either of them could be parted from the child in some divorce court. A woman bitterly hating the man whom once she’d loved, and he returning each evening, hurrying back from an office in case his wife and the child were having a conversation. She would sit, Mr Mockler, in a room with them, with the silence heavy in the air, and their hatred for one another. All three of them would sit down to a meal and no one would speak. No other children came to that house, no other people. She used to hide on the way back from schooclass="underline" she’d go down the area steps of other houses and crouch beside dustbins.’
‘Dustbins?’ repeated Mr Mockler, more astonished than ever. ‘Dustbins?’
‘Other children didn’t take to her. She couldn’t talk to them. She’d never learned to talk to anyone. He was a patient man, Mr Acland, when he came along, a good and patient man.’
Mr Mockler said that the child’s parents must have been monsters, but Dr Friendman shook his head. No one was a monster, Dr Friendman said in a professional manner, and in the circumstances Mr Mockler didn’t feel he could argue with him. But the people called Rachels were real, he did point out, as real as the fat designer of aircraft fasteners. Had they left the house, he asked, as it said in the letter? And if they had, what had they been frightened of?