to slacken its rapid beat.
The yellow sunlight of late July stole in through a gap in the curtains. He glanced at the bedside clock. Five minutes to six. If he lay down again he’d probably oversleep – and he daren’t risk being late for work, particularly not on a Monday morning. Things were already dicey enough at the Cannonbridge Mail Order Company without his making the boss an outright present of an excuse for cutting down on staff.
He eased his way out from under the bedclothes, found his dressing-gown and slippers and went from the room with accustomed noiselessness; he was always up long before Lisa.
At the head of the stairs sunlight streamed in through an uncurtained stained-glass window, throwing shifting patterns of colour on to the landing, luminous pools of amber and green, rose and blue, as a wandering breeze rippled the tall trees in the garden.
He went softly down to the kitchen, comfortable and old-fashioned, he crossed to the window and drew back the flowered curtains.
‘A nice cup of tea,’ he said aloud; the words had a cosy, reassuring sound. He filled the kettle and put it on to boil. As he turned from the stove he met his own gaze in the mirror that hung to one side of the fireplace.
An unremarkable face, not bad-looking in a nineteen-thirties bandleader way. His brown eyes stared back at him, large, habitually anxious.
He was thirty-seven years old but had the air of being older. His light brown hair had a strong natural crimp that he’d fought for years to subdue, only to discover now on the verge of middle age that it had suddenly become fashionable. The growth was beginning to recede from his temples and nowadays his exploring fingers could locate a treacherous spot of thinning on the crown.
While he waited for the kettle to boil he unlocked the back door and went out into the garden. Ivydene was a solidly-built Edwardian villa standing on the edge of Hadleigh, a semi-rural suburb of Cannonbridge; until fifty years ago Hadleigh had been an independent village.
The garden was large enough to stroll about in and gave a pleasant sense of space and seclusion. He plucked a weed here and there, lifted a wayward strand of a rambler rose and draped it over a neighbouring stem – he must remember to get a ball of garden twine in the lunch-hour. A fine climbing rose, trained along a trellis and over an arch, was just coming into flower, the blooms a deep soft peach tipped with cream. He selected a bud with care, the petals just about to unfurl, free from the smallest blemish. He carried it back to the kitchen and put it in a glass of water.
He made the tea, poured himself a cup and stood at the window drinking it, looking out at the tranquil garden, thinking about Lisa and his marriage, his new life at Ivydene.
There were moments when he felt as if it was all a dream; this struck him most often at work. He sat at the same desk, followed the same routine, nothing there was changed. But it seemed to him sometimes in odd disturbing flashes that he must shortly wake to find that home was still a cramped bedsitter in a down-at-heel quarter of Cannonbridge and Lisa no more than a beguiling face glimpsed in a bus queue.
She had married him two days after her eighteenth birthday, very much against the wishes of her sister. Janet was eleven years older than Lisa and was now her only close relative; their mother, Mrs Marshall, had died some months before the marriage, leaving Janet as legal guardian to Lisa till she came of age.
‘You’re surely not going to rush into marriage with the first man who’s paid you any serious attention,’ Janet had warned Lisa. ‘It’s madness at your age.’ Particularly when the intended bridegroom was nearly twenty years older than Lisa and was possessed of assets and prospects so meagre as to be practically invisible.
Derek poured himself another cup and returned to the window. He had been overwhelmed by the dead set Lisa had made at him when they first met. She was then only a little over sixteen and had just left school. Mrs Marshall had wanted her to stay on to take a secretarial course but Lisa would have none of it – and when it came to a battle between Lisa and her mother Lisa usually won. She had been born eight months after her father’s death and Mrs Marshall had always cosseted and cherished her second daughter, regarding her as a poor fatherless child to whom the world owed a great deal.
So Lisa threw her school hat in the dustbin, gave her blazer to a jumble sale and then went out and took the first job she could find. This turned out to be at the Cannonbridge Mail Order Company where Derek Schofield daily bent his head over columns of figures. In a matter of days the supper-time conversation at Ivydene became peppered with Derek’s name and within another two or three weeks Lisa was declaring herself madly in love with him.
Both Mrs Marshall and Janet fervently hoped the attachment would wither and die as Lisa grew up and got some sense, but in spite of their opposition – or more probably because of it – she became unshakably determined to marry him. Her mother’s death did nothing to weaken this determination and six months after her mother’s funeral, on a fine spring morning, marry him she did – in the Cannonbridge register office with no friends or relatives present, and two cleaners called in to act as witnesses. Derek was swept up out of his poky bedsitter into the spacious comfort of Ivydene.
Janet Marshall was a schoolteacher, at that time teaching in the neighbouring village of Stanbourne, catching the bus every morning from a stop fifty yards up the road from Ivydene.
When Lisa and Derek returned from their Easter honeymoon in Tangier, Lisa was astounded to discover that Janet had moved out of Ivydene two days earlier. Not only that, but she’d given up her teaching post at Stanbourne and found herself another at Longmead, a village a few miles away. She was renting a small farm cottage close to the Longmead school, had removed a quantity of furniture, china and linen from Ivydene and was already comfortably installed in her new home.
Lisa didn’t stop to unpack her bags but at once commanded Derek to drive her over to Rose Cottage.
‘You never said a word about all this!’ she stormed at her sister. ‘You planned it all behind my back!’
‘You chose to get married against my wishes,’ Janet said calmly. ‘I saw no reason to consult you about my own intentions.’ Derek had stood by, mute and forgotten.
He stared out now at the dewy garden, brilliant in the glittering sunlight. Until Lisa came along he’d managed well enough on what he earned, he had even been able to save. There had been difficulties of course, but nothing he couldn’t handle.
And then Lisa took control of his existence. ‘You’re being exploited,’ she told him. ‘You don’t value yourself properly. You should be getting much more than they’re paying you.’ Easy enough to rectify. All he had to do was approach the boss with righteous confidence and point these matters out to him.
And, fired by Lisa’s total certainty, Derek, shortly after returning from his honeymoon, still a little drunk from the North African sunshine and the astonishing pleasures of marriage, did actually walk in through the manager’s door and put these points to him.
Unfortunately the manager didn’t share Lisa’s opinion. He informed Derek in loud clear tones that it was only by a miracle the firm was surviving at all, he was currently giving serious thought to the question of redundancies. ‘If you’re not satisfied,’ he added, ‘you’ve been here long enough to know where the door is.’
And that was that. Unemployment was high in Cannonbridge and still rising; there was certainly no massive demand for clerks approaching middle age.
Derek daren’t tell Lisa he’d failed but allowed her to believe his efforts had been successful. ‘My salary’s being raised from the beginning of next month,’ he told her, in the mad hope that something would happen to rescue him before his savings finally ran out. The greater part of these had already been swallowed up by his courtship and honeymoon, above all, by that wildly extravagant North African honeymoon; he had had no idea until then that it was possible for two people to spend so much money in fourteen days. And week by week the relentless expenses of his new life bit savagely into what was left of his nest-egg. He felt himself beset these days by problems, every one of them relating at some point to money. And in his dreams now the feet were getting