The Mistletoe Bride(7)

‘Yes.’ He takes the bait. ‘Thurs – day,’ he says, two staccato beats. Today, there is something living and breathing in the word. The whole story contained there, in that moment, and I think we might be getting somewhere.

‘Mrs Nash goes to the bingo Thursdays, isn’t that right?’

He doesn’t answer. His gaze slips away from me and towards the world outside the room and he starts mumbling. ‘Slip, slide, perish, cannot take the strain. Slip, slip, slide, perish.’

I’m caught on the hop this time, I admit it. Coming out with poetry. He’s never struck me as the type. Never done it before.

‘Thomas Sterns,’ he says, ‘that’s what T. S. stands for. Not many people know that.’ And he’s smiling the same sly smile because he thinks he’s bested me. Won another round. ‘Four Quartets.’

‘I know,’ I snap, though I shouldn’t let my feelings show.

His face is ablaze with cunning. He wags a finger at me. Points. ‘But which one? Guess. Air, Water, Earth, Fire? Guess.’

I can’t indulge him any further in this. It’s no good for him, can’t be. Won’t get us anywhere.

‘Why didn’t she go to the bingo that Thursday?’

My voice is level, but there’s enough displeasure in it and he hears and withdraws again, angry I’m not playing along. The praying hands, the bowed head, the crumpled shoulders, the swallowing and swallowing. My throat is dry too.

For an age, he is silent. The room is heavy with disappointment, with misunderstanding. He feels I have let him down and he might be right, but it can’t be helped. We need to get somewhere. Make progress. The water gurgles in the old iron radiator. Beyond the door, the monotonous rattle of a trolley and the slide of a bolt somewhere further along the corridor.

We don’t have much time.

I swallow. ‘Why didn’t Mrs Nash go to bingo that Thursday?’

‘She did,’ he says, sullen again. ‘Forgot her purse. Came back.’

‘Or she guessed.’

‘No.’

He shrugs, the shifty fidget of a child. A quick up and down of the shoulders. Guilt? Is it guilt? I can’t tell. Feigning uninterest, certainly.

I help him on his way. A firm hand in the small of the back. ‘She was suspicious, wasn’t she? Pretended to go, then came back to spy on you.’

‘It wasn’t my fault.’

‘No.’ I change tack. ‘An accident, when all’s said and done. Her fault, not yours. Stairs were too steep.’

And he looks at me for a moment with such gratitude that I feel happy. Actually happy.

‘She’d no cause to go on at me all the time,’ he says. ‘I said I’d move the box, just not got round to it, but . . . the smell, you see. Like seaweed or fish. Rotting fish. Thought it was coming from the box, she did.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘No.’

I look him in the eye. ‘So then what happened?’

I say it quietly and carefully, but it doesn’t work and he shakes his head, sent spiralling back to the beginning again. The bare bones of the story are the same – the tenant in Number Three going off, Mrs Nash asking him to clear out the room, the box sitting in the hall with the carriage clock and the painting of the Pyrenees. This time, though, no funeral and no lawyer. The brown envelope spilling money. Fifty-quid notes.

I’m getting impatient. ‘So,’ I say, ‘the twenty-first of October, Thursday, you decide to do it.’ I clap my hands and he jumps. ‘That’s it. Just like that, you decide today’s the day to make good on your promise. Pick up the box and you see all that money, yes? Been there all along. Put it in the pocket of your trousers, yes? Then you open the door down to the cellar. Yes? The paint’s peeling, isn’t it, chipped? You promised you’d have a look at that too, didn’t you?’

He frowns. ‘She was always on at me,’ he says. ‘Never gave it a rest, all the time on at me.’

‘So you open the door, yes, and you look down, but it’s too gloomy to see anything. Isn’t it, isn’t that right? You can’t see anything down there, so you don’t know what’s down there. You put out your hand, feel around, looking for a light switch.’

‘Wired wrong. Upside down.’

‘But you do find the switch. Flick it up. Sickly yellow light down there.’

‘Sickly yellow light.’

I nod. ‘And straight away, you know there’s something wrong down there, don’t you?’ I lean forward. ‘You can smell it, can’t you? Smell of the sea. Of rotting fish.’

He puts his hands over his ears. He doesn’t want to hear any more. He is seeing it all now, smelling it, remembering the cold on his bare skin and the dust and the cobwebs, the decay and damp of a cellar in a seaside town. He doesn’t want to be back at that cellar on that Thursday the twenty-first of October 1965.