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  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

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  Contents

  Sue Gee

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Sue Gee

  Last Guests of the Season

  Sue Gee

  Sue Gee is an acclaimed and established novelist. Reading in Bed (2007) was a Daily Mail Book Club selection; The Mysteries of Glass (2005) was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She ran the MBA Creative Writing Programme at Middlesex University from 2000–2008 and currently teaches at the Faber Academy. Sue Gee has also published many short stories, some of which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and her most recent publication is a collection of stories, Last Fling (Salt 2011). She lives in London and Herefordshire.

  Chapter One

  In the afternoon heat the peeling blue shutters in the bedroom at the back of the house had been swung to, their backs the colour of dark honey, unvarnished, smooth. The metal bar hung down: the shutters were not quite closed and sunlight came through the chinks at the hinges and at the gap in the middle, falling upon wooden floor and worn blue armchair, on the cotton dressing-gown slipping off the arm and canvas shoes kicked off on to the floorboards. A fly, which had found its way through the gap, was trying now to find its way out again; it buzzed from lampshade to shutter to the shadowy mirror on the wardrobe door.

  Outside, a haze hung over the valley, the dark shapes of the pines on the mountainside softened and indistinct, grey-green clumps of eucalyptus dissolving into blue, the winding river pale as the bleached sky. Above the clusters of terracotta rooftops the air shimmered; above the village the church bell chimed twice, but this indicated simply the passing of an hour, not a specific hour: it sometimes chimed twice at midnight, three or four times at noon.

  Below, the village slumbered, and here, in their double bed pushed up against the wall, Frances and Oliver Swift, who had risen in London just after daybreak, slept also, lying separately against their pillows, dreaming: she small, pale, exhausted; he a big man, dark, turned away from her, facing the bedside table, a neat pile of books, a pair of glasses. Frances and Oliver, dreaming deeply, and quite differently, did not hear the chime of the church clock on the hillside, nor the buzz of the fly, nor the sound of a door opening along the corridor. They did not hear the bare feet of their son on the rag runner, nor the hiss of a steam iron on the landing, where Guida, the little maid, stood in her flip-flops and denim skirt, pressing good white sheets with drawn-thread hems.

  It was warm on the landing, where the window opened on to a peach tree. Dappled squares of brilliant sun fell from the window on to the carpet, a faded green. Guida rested the steam iron for a moment and pushed back her hair; she turned the long white train of sheet and heard footsteps behind her. The eyes of the English boy, a big boy, one of the new arrivals, regarded her blankly. She smiled at him, lifting the iron again.

  ‘Bo tar’.’

  He frowned, then smiled back, but did not speak; he moved past the ironing-board, bare feet crossing the brilliant squares of sun, and went down the slippery wooden stairs. There was a turning, treads broadening to accommodate it, a place to sit. He sat. Below him, on a half-landing, was another window, where the curtains were drawn, so that this warm quiet place on the stairs felt enclosed and set apart from the rest of the house, which felt enormous. Tom was used to a flat.

  Here, there were three bedrooms opening off the passage from the landing, with its rag runner which slipped and buckled up on the boards every time you walked along. His parents were in the room at the far end, with the wonderful view, and he and Jack, from the other family, were on the left, in twin iron beds painted white, with blue and white covers.

  Jack was eight, a year older than him, and seemed okay. Tom hadn’t wanted to have a rest after lunch, but Jack didn’t seem to mind, so he’d followed him up the stairs, expecting a pillow fight, or some kind of game, anyway, but Jack had climbed on to his bed, reached for a book and begun to read, just like that. Tom shifted about, sighing, scratching his arm, moving his feet on the cover, messing it up. After a while he took his own book from the chair beside the bed, The Ship of Adventure. Enid Blyton was wicked: they’d done The Castle of Adventure on Children’s BBC last term, it was brilliant. He turned the pages, getting stuck in, smacking and pursing his lips.

  ‘Stop it,’ said Jack.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That noise.’

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘You’re making a noise. With your mouth.’

  ‘Oh.’ He stretched his lips taut and yawned. ‘D’you want to have a pillow fight?’

  ‘I’m reading.’

  ‘I mean after. When you’ve finished.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Okay. Great.’ Tom yawned again; he picked up his book and found his place. It was quite nice, really, reading up here with Jack. The pages rustled, the room was warm and the bed was okay, a bit hard. He yawned again, and the book felt very heavy. He closed his eyes.

  Jack was still asleep when he woke up, so he’d left him. He’d gone along to his parents’door, remembering to knock, but there was no answer; he pushed it cautiously and looked inside. They were sleeping, too, dead asleep, he could tell. For a moment, in the quiet warmth of the room, he thought he might like to slip in beside them and just lie there, not disturb them or anything, just be there. But then he thought he might, by mistake, wake them up, and he carefully closed the door again and came along here; now he’d found this place.

  He shifted his bottom in cotton shorts along the pleasing smooth surface of the wooden tread and listened, half listened, to the hiss and puff of the iron from the landing above him, and the buzz of a fly below, trapped between the half-landing window and the drawn curtains, patterned in orange and black. Guida’s flip-flops moved intermittently along the carpet; the folded sheet was placed on a table by the wall, another taken from the basket beside her; there was a cloud of steam. It was lovely and peaceful: he shut his eyes, and as he did so he had the funny sort of feeling in his head which he’d had before – as if something inside it had moved, or as if, for a moment, he had gone somewhere else. Where?

  He opened his eyes. He was still here. There was a dry dead fly on the stair: he flicked it with his finger and sat there making funny noises, absently. He thought he might go down in a bit and see if Jessica, Jack’s sister, was awake: she was twelve, so she had the bedroom downstairs, off the big sitting-room, away from the grown-ups. Lucky. She seemed all right, too, quite friendly, really. He hoped they weren’t all going to go to sleep every afternoon like this.

  Tom got up and made his way downstairs. At the bottom, a passage led off to the left to a bathroom; he went and had a pee, with the usual shiver at the end. The bathroom was cool and shady, with a lot of green creeper at the window, and it smelt a bit. He pressed the handle, which was stiff, so he pressed it again, several times
, getting impatient, until at last some water came, though not as much as at home. He wandered out, making clicking noises.

  At the end of the passage he was about to turn down towards Jessica’s room and the enormous sitting-room when he heard a sound, and stopped. It sounded like a cat, a rusty kind of cat: it was coming from the kitchen. He went in, and his bare feet stuck to the patches of old brown lino. It was dark in here, and felt like an olden-days kitchen, with a funny little gas stove and more of the creeper at the windows. He stood and listened, and the noise came again: it was a cat, outside the door, sounding weak. He hurried across, and tugged at the handle: this could be serious.

  Sunlight poured through the cracks in the shutters in the other bedroom, too, the one across the landing, where Jack and Jessica’s parents were waking up. Claire first, languorous and warm, stirring on the white cotton bedspread, stretching a long arm already browned from yesterday afternoon on the terrace and this morning by the river, flexing strong blunt fingers with pale unvarnished nails. Claire tanned easily: she was dark, with abundant hair and a skin which soaked up sun until by the end of the holiday she would be ripened to a sheen, the envy of the staffroom. She was wearing a sleeveless, soft white shirt with little, fabric-covered buttons, and a black and white unironed skirt, long and full, which no longer did up at the back; she lay with her head on her husband’s chest and yawned like a sleepy cat, opening her eyes on to the golden strips of light at the far window, which overlooked the valley, and the one in the right-hand wall, which opened on to a little stone balcony above the terrace.

  She had not finished unpacking and the room was strewn with clothes – clean ones, waiting for drawers, and grimy ones from the long drive across Spain, waiting for Guida. There were also jumbles of sandals and magazines, films and paperbacks and necklaces – on the floor, on the chest of drawers, on the little cane chair by the cupboard. After twenty-four hours the room looked, in truth, much as their bedroom at home looked – indeed, like many of the rooms at home, for Claire, although a capable person, had never in her life been tidy and had no ambition to be. There were moments in the mornings during termtime when she cursed herself, searching frantically for socks, keys and something to write with, but by and large she preferred muddle. It was friendlier.

  She yawned again, and rolled away from Robert, hearing, from down on the terrace, the quiet creak of the swing-seat. Somebody must be up, then. She herself had no desire at all to get up, although tea would be nice: she had spent the morning with the children while Robert drove dutifully out to the airport to collect the Swifts; she had prepared lunch and made them welcome and served it, and that felt like quite enough. And there was supper to come – hardly fair to expect them to cook on their first night. After this, they must come to some arrangement.

  They didn’t know the Swifts well, although Claire, at university, had once thought she knew Frances – Frances Horne, as she was then – as well as anyone. That was in Bristol, in the early seventies. They were both reading English, and in the first year they both lived in the same hall of residence, at opposite ends of the same corridor. They went to the same lectures but were in different seminar groups, and they went their separate ways for all other aspects of university life also, bumping into each other from time to time in the hall kitchen, making cups of coffee.

  But where Claire would linger for conversation, with Frances, or with whoever else happened to be around, Frances never lingered. She was slender and neat, with fair hair cut in a bob; she wore jeans and Tshirts from Biba in muted blues and greys, and she had, it seemed, no time for conversation, although she smiled politely. She made her coffee and toast and carried it away down the long corridor to her room, her gym shoes light on the new flooring, and shut her door. Claire gathered, through passing remarks from people in the same group as Frances, that she was clever, and had once given a paper on Metaphysical conceits which their tutor, whom everyone fancied, had praised effusively; afterwards, someone had heard her throwing up in the loo. Claire, whose own essays and seminar papers tended to be written at the last minute, wondered briefly at such intensity, and on the whole gave her barely a thought.

  At the end of the first year they all moved out into flats or bedsits.

  On a rainy Sunday morning in November, Claire walked along the road in Bishopston to get the paper, wearing her purple Laura Ashley cloak with the hood up, and bumped into Frances in the newsagents. She was wearing a black gaberdine mac, and carried a black umbrella. Walking back up the hill they discovered they were living quite close to each other, and on impulse Claire, whose flatmates were away for the weekend, invited Frances for coffee, wondering almost immediately if she would regret it.

  Claire’s flat was on the second floor of a double-fronted Victorian house with a neglected garden. The kitchen was at the back. Frances sat at the table by the window, resting her elbows on a green-checked cloth covered in toast crumbs, and while Claire made coffee looked out at the rain, falling on rooftops and gardens, drifting, in sudden gusts, away towards the hills. She did not chat, as Claire’s flatmates did, but neither, after the first few minutes, did she seem her usual stiff and awkward self: away from the vastness of lecture hall or canteen, or the crowded little kitchen in their old place of residence, she visibly relaxed, until she seemed at ease, as if she’d been here before, turning away from the window and taking the mug she was given – which in her thin white hands looked, Claire realised, not completely clean – and asking Claire about her course, her background, her plans. Claire had made no plans, she was too busy enjoying herself, but she felt flattered to be asked. Indeed, she found she could not remember anyone for a long time who had taken such an interest in her. Not in quite this way, drawing her out, attentive.

  ‘You’re a very good listener,’ she said, getting up to answer the phone on the landing. ‘That’ll be home, they always ring on Sundays.’ She sat leaning up against the wall and let her mother, on the cheap rate from Derbyshire, describe a contented week of WI meetings, parish council disagreements and supper with friends. Her father, an auctioneer, had taken the dogs out and sent his love, her brother had gone to the pub. Claire could almost smell the lunch they were all about to have; she said goodbye with affection and returned to the kitchen feeling hungry. Frances was looking out of the window again.

  ‘Would you like to stay for lunch?’ Claire asked.

  Frances turned to look at her, and smiled. ‘Why not?’ she said, as if she had known her for years. And over spaghetti with onions and tinned tomatoes, which was all there seemed to be, she described, in answer to Claire’s polite return of questions, the house a few streets away where she had taken a room, and revealed something of her own background, eating little, while Claire had second helpings.

  ‘I am the only child of elderly parents,’ she said. ‘They are dear, but it is a fate I should wish on no one. I grew up in a tidy little house in the suburbs of Middlesex, full of Dralon and air-freshener, and went to the local grammar school. I had a friend there called Rowan, who over the years prevented me from going crazy: she is now reading History at York, and I miss her. I find people a strain, in fact I am incapable of relating to more than one person at a time. I am still a virgin. Sometimes I feel my life is completely hopeless, but I am not without ambition and intend to let my work be my salvation.’

  Claire laughed.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ said Frances gravely. ‘I am clinging to the wreckage.’

  The rain fell away; they had flapjacks and more coffee.

  ‘Let’s go to a movie,’ said Claire.

  They walked through the damp Sunday streets to the Scala, which was showing The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. A son lay dying; his father raised his hand and waved two fingers, almost imperceptibly, in farewell. Claire turned to look at Frances and saw tears in her eyes; by the end, they were both in tears, as the family of Jews was taken away, losing their garden for ever.

  When they came out it was cold and almost dark, and begin
ning to drizzle. They put up their umbrellas and walked home in silence.

  At Claire’s house the second-floor windows were lit, the curtains undrawn. People had come home from the weekend, and she could see her friend Jo, ironing in the sitting-room, watching television.

  ‘Well,’ she said to Frances, ‘that was great. D’you want to come up?’

  Frances shook her head. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘We must do it again some time.’

  ‘Yes. That would be very nice.’

  ‘Your papers,’ said Claire. ‘They’re still in the kitchen – don’t you want to come and get them?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Frances looked suddenly as she usually looked, tense and shy, and Claire thought: she doesn’t want to have to come up and be jolly. So she said, ‘No, that’s silly, hang on, I’ll run up and get them.’

  When she came down again, Frances was standing by the gate where she had left her, but turned away, and beneath the black umbrella her face looked drawn.

  Claire handed her the Observer. ‘Well,’ she said kindly, ‘see you soon.’

  Frances tucked the paper under her arm. ‘Yes,’ she said stiffly, ‘see you soon. Thanks for a lovely day.’ In her gaberdine mac and good flat shoes she walked away down the wet street, and Claire, hearing the telephone, turned and ran up the path to the house.

  In the weeks that followed she did not see much of Frances; indeed, for a time she seemed almost to have disappeared; other people pressed enjoyably upon Claire’s days and she forgot all about her. But late one cloudy afternoon towards the end of term she came across her in the library. Frances wore a thick navy sweater and was wrapped in knitted scarves; bending over her books, she looked paler than usual, in a translucent, convalescent way. Claire touched her shoulder and she jumped. Claire smiled.

  ‘It’s only me. Where’ve you been?’