7
SHRINKAGE
Alma Sorrowbridge longed for the clear skies, white beaches and warm salty sea breezes of her homeland, Antigua. Instead, all she saw when she looked out of the window in Chalk Farm on Thursday afternoon was a man trying to shove a sodden mattress into a van. In her garden, sooty rain pattered on a sprawling bush of half-dead rhododendrons, underneath which a stray ginger cat sat with trembling haunches, trying to pass a stool. Alma pulled her cardigan over her immense bosom and sighed. If there was one thing more depressing than waiting for spring to arrive in London, it lay in the other direction of her view, sitting by the gas fire in a ridiculously long scarf and a ratty quilted crimson dressing gown, moaning about everything and everyone. And when he wasn’t complaining, he was extrapolating on subjects of no interest to anyone but himself.
‘—Looking for a lost Roman city full of treasure somewhere under Watling Street,’ Arthur Bryant was explaining to no-one in particular. ‘There’s still a place called Caesar’s Pond on Stan-more Common where Boudicca’s final defeat took place. It seems absurd to celebrate Boudicca as a rebel leader, considering she lost most of her battles, her troops were barbarians, she slaughtered her own people and she burned down half of London.’ When Alma next tuned in, Bryant’s topic had changed. ‘The Shoreditch Strangler took his last victim home in a taxi, and was almost caught by passing constables because the bollards in Boot Street prevented him from parking near the disposal site. Traditional street bollards were fashioned from French cannons captured at Trafalgar, but now—do you know what I’m talking about?’
‘Bollards,’ said Alma, who was only listening to one word in ten. Living with Mr Bryant, you soon learned to tune out most of his rambling diatribes and concentrate on something more important, like unclogging the sink. She turned to him in annoyance. ‘Why don’t you get out of the house for a while? Go on, go for a walk or something. It would do you good.’
‘I can be just as miserable here as in a park, thank you.’
‘For Heaven’s sake, will you just go somewhere? You can’t just sit around all day. Sometimes I can’t tell where you end and the armchair begins.’
Bryant set aside his copy of British Boundary Lines: 1066–1700 and turned his attention on her. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been acting strangely all morning.’
‘It’s you, stuck here at home with no office to go to, just plonked in front of the fire feeling sorry for yourself, reading out loud from all those dusty old books. Look at these things.’ She picked up several at random from the sideboard. ‘Intestinal Parasites, Volume Two; A Guide to the Cumberland Pencil Museum; Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers; The Pictorial Dictionary of Barbed Wire. And why are you learning Hungarian? Filling your head up with all this rubbish—and the mess you make with those chemical concoctions in your bedroom, and the language! I don’t mind a bit of swearing, it’s only natural, but I draw the line when you involve Jesus.’
‘Oh, please spare me the sanctimony. The Christian legend is an embarrassingly childish reiteration of hoary old vegetation myths, the simple impregnation-and-resurrection cycle of pagan tree gods. You should try one of the more complex, grown-up religions from the Far East for a while, rather than worrying over a bunch of ghost stories concocted by bored shepherds in tents. Wait until they confirm life on other planets, that’ll mess up Christianity for you.’
‘Shame on you, you wicked old man! Every time you blaspheme, an angel is stripped of its wings.’
‘A good job, too. Sanctimonious bloody things drifting about with their harps, ticking people off all the time like feathered traffic wardens.’
‘I don’t think you’ll ever get into Heaven.’
‘The only reason why people need to believe in an afterlife is because they’re fed up with this one.’
Alma tried to deflect his remarks by busying herself with the pile of washing stacked on the dining room table. She loved her old friend dearly but he was an affront to her sense of order. Bryant was not a private person. The details of his life were not kept under lock and key, but messily spread about him for everyone to see. Any door he passed through was left open, any chair he inhabited slowly filled with books, magazines, scraps of paper, pens and envelopes containing everything from seeds to microscope slides. He invited everyone into his world, the better to embroil them. ‘I don’t know why I should have to spend my day repairing your pants while you sit there having a go at me,’ she told him. ‘I’m not a wife. I tried that with Mr Sorrowbridge and look where it got me. Go on, sling your hook and give me some room to breathe.’
‘And where would you have me go, pray tell? My unit has been turned into some kind of electronic fraud investigation agency and I have been put out to pasture, sent off to the knacker’s yard to await execution.’
‘There’s no need to talk like that. What about your guided walking tours? I thought you were going to introduce a new one.’
‘I was planning to cover London’s forgotten burial grounds in a walk entitled “Whose Head Are You Standing On?,” but the response was so abysmal that I decided not to bother. You’d think people would be interested in what they’re walking over, but no, they’re too busy messing about on the interweb, indulging their infantile preoccupation with bosoms by perusing photographs of actresses falling out of nightclubs.’
‘Well, you could still go for a walk. I’ll get your hat and coat; just a half hour will do you the world of good.’
‘I am not creeping about Primrose Hill in the pouring rain, peering into shop windows and frightening small children. Or am I supposed to take myself off to the pictures and sit through some appalling Hollywood adventure about people who can turn themselves into giant ants?’
‘I just think a change of scenery—’
‘What are you up to?’ asked Bryant suspiciously. ‘And what have you got in your pocket? Not that one, the other one. Come on, I can see a letter poking out.’
‘You don’t want to hear about this right now,’ said Alma, suddenly solicitous. ‘It can wait until later.’
Bryant attempted to lever himself out of his cracked leather armchair, but had trouble getting upright. Since the PCU closed down and he had nothing to do anymore, he seemed to be ageing with undignified celerity. In the last few days he had even taken to staying in bed mornings, and Alma could do nothing to make him get up. She had heard of people who simply lost the will to live, and was beginning to fear for him. Mr Bryant had no faith with which to protect himself.
‘I’m not a child, Alma. If it’s bad news I might as well have it now. Come on, hand it over.’
‘I don’t know why you should want to read this particular letter,’ she huffed. ‘Look at that great pile of mail sitting over there. You haven’t opened anything in weeks. If I hadn’t fished out the electricity bill and paid it, you’d be sitting in complete darkness right now.’
‘Just give it to me.’
She knew he would worry at her until he had discovered the truth. Reluctantly, she pulled out the letter and passed it to him. ‘You won’t like it,’ she warned. ‘We’re going to be made homeless.’
Bryant extracted a pair of smeary reading glasses and found himself looking at a compulsory purchase order for their house. ‘Public meeting?’ he exclaimed. ‘What public meeting?’
‘It was last night, at the town hall. The letter only arrived this morning.’
‘The law says there has to be a notice posted on a public highway for at least a month. I didn’t see one.’
‘They stuck it on a section of pavement that’s been closed to pedestrians,’ Alma explained. ‘Nobody saw it. Besides, you haven’t been out the front door.’
‘Why, this is absurd.’ He read on. ‘New retail development, adequate compensation at market rates, a lot of old blather about shops and offices. Property developers, a bunch of sleazy sybarites with the morals of praying mantises—how dare they try to sell the ground from right under our feet?’
‘You put the property in my name, remember, so it’s my responsibility to sort it out. You’ll help me fight it, won’t you?’ Alma’s determined tone was a call to action, but the brief flare of energy was already fading from Bryant’s eyes.
‘Oh, I can try, but frankly what’s the use,’ he said, lowering himself back into his chair with a grimace. ‘First the unit, and now our home. Nowhere to go and nothing to live for. I’ve not got the energy to fight anymore. Let them do their worst. I’m sure they can find us a flat you hate just as much as this place.’
Alma had never expected to find herself living in a semi-derelict toothbrush factory at her time in life. The tumbledown building gave the rest of the neighbourhood a bad name. Last weekend several slates had come loose in high winds, and an upper corner of Alma’s bedroom now boasted a water feature, but neither she nor Bryant was in any fit state to get up a ladder and repair the damage. Perhaps a modern flat with easy access would be better after all.
With the ironing balanced in one broad hand, she took stock of her old friend. He looked smaller somehow, as if he had started shrinking on the day the unit closed down. His world was diminishing, too. She wanted to take his hand and softly stroke it, to tell him that everything would be all right, but found herself wondering if he had reached that part of his life beyond which there was no going back. Bryant had always been a noisy fidget, pulling down books, setting up experiments, fiddling and whistling and interfering with things that didn’t concern him, but this new placidity was the most disturbing change of all.
‘Why won’t you let John come and see you?’ she asked gently. ‘You know he wants to.’
‘He’ll try to convince me to go to Whitehall with a begging bowl,’ Bryant complained. ‘He’s an eternal optimist; he thinks we’ll survive by calling in a few old debts, but we’ve used up all our favours. Our work together is over and there’s no point in pretending it isn’t. I don’t want to end my days arguing with my oldest friend.’
For once, Alma was stumped for an answer. Her mouth opened, then shut again.
‘I think I’ll have a sleep now if you don’t mind,’ he said, lowering his head onto a cushion and closing his eyes. ‘Leave me alone. I feel tremendously weary.’
He had taken the news that they were to be thrown out on the street with alarming equanimity. She needed to shock him out of his complacent attitude, but could not imagine anything working, short of attaching her van’s jumper cables to him. His fire was fading, like a setting sun. She resolved to summon John May against his partner’s wishes, even though Bryant had expressly forbidden her to invite him over.
‘Suit yourself,’ she told him finally. ‘Do as you wish. But you can get rid of that skull on the mantelpiece. It stinks.’
‘That, Madame, is a religious artefact. It was smuggled out of Tibet.’
‘Yes, and it’s going to be smuggled into the dustbin. If you need me, I shall be upstairs. I have some urgent ironing to attend to.’ Slipping the telephone into her pocket, she beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen, wondering what on earth she could do to save her old friend from himself.