A December to Remember (13)
“And why did he go to prison?”
“That’s a longer story.” She smiled sadly.
“Cup of tea before you set off?” He smiled hopefully and pushed open the door to his ground-floor flat. Gossip was Mr. Cavell’s lifeblood. If she told her landlord about her disastrous relationship with Stu, it would be all over the building by the end of the week. But what did it matter? In an hour she’d be gone, and if gossiping gave the lonely old man an excuse to talk to people, then who was she to deny him some juicy tidbits?
“Why not?” She smiled.
On the other side of the glass of the communal front door, the red-jacketed postman was trying to force all the post for the building through the letter box at once. The bundle landed with a thud in a crumpled heap on the welcome mat. Star gathered it up and placed it on the shelf by the stairs; some of the elderly residents had trouble bending down to get their post.
“Ooh, look!” she said, delighted to find a letter addressed to her. She didn’t often get mail. “Just in the nick of time too.” She left her belongings in the hallway and carried the letter with her into Mr. Cavell’s flat.
Mr. Cavell set the tea tray down on the small coffee table between two armchairs, which smelled like stale cigarettes and dust, and settled down on the one opposite Star. One of the quirks she had inherited from Augustus was a need to seek out at least one piece of magic in every place she found herself. The flat was run-down; the furnishings bore the mustard and burnt sienna shades of the 1960s, which was probably when it was last decorated. But on the wall above the faux stone fireplace was a massive blown-up photograph of Dave Grohl with his arm around Mr. Cavell, who was making a “rock on” gesture with his arthritic fingers. She smiled contentedly; there was her magic.
“So,” he started, his gray eyes twinkling as he bit into a digestive biscuit, “tell me everything.” Mr. Cavell leaned forward in his chair eagerly. He reminded her of an old tawny owl.
Where did everything begin? she wondered.
“The thing is, Stu has a pretty serious drug habit, as you’ve already guessed. He has to use several times a day to function. About three years ago, things got bad. We were living in Bristol then. He was stealing money from me, and I knew he was stealing from his mum, but Stu is not an easy person to break away from.” What she meant was that she was a soft touch and he was a master manipulator. “When I had no money left, he broke into the café where I worked, one night after everyone had gone home, and stole the takings. That was the last straw for me, so I broke up with him. Love isn’t always enough, as it turns out. He was already on probation, so he got sent down for two months and I lost my job, which meant I lost my flat. But it gave me the excuse I needed to not be there when he got out.”
“Good gracious me.” Mr. Cavell was riveted, and she couldn’t help smiling. “But you said he only went to prison for two months?”
“That time, yes. I went to stay with my sister Simone and her wife in Greenwich for a bit while I got myself together. Only when Stu got out, he came and found me.”
“All the way from Bristol!” he exclaimed.
“We’d been to visit my sister once before, so after having no luck in Bristol, he must have guessed I’d be there. He’d already tried my eldest sister in Rowan Thorp.”
“And then what happened?” His biscuit arm was suspended halfway to his mouth, his crinkly face enraptured.
“He turned up when Simone and Evette were out for the evening. I’d say with hindsight, he’d probably waited for the right moment.”
Mr. Cavell gasped. “What did you do?”
“I told him we were over, for good, and that he had to leave. I didn’t even let him in, kept him on the doorstep. Eventually he got the message and said he would go but that he needed some cash, and could he use the toilet before he caught the coach.”
Mr. Cavell clapped his hands over his mouth, the biscuit dropped onto the plate. Clearly he had better foresight than she did.
“I only let him in for five minutes. He used the toilet while I got him some cash from my bag, and then I chucked him back out onto the street. But when Simone and Evette got back from their night out, they found that Evette’s jewelry box had been ransacked and the holiday money Simone had been saving was missing.”
Mr. Cavell shook his head sadly.
“He got caught the next day trying to pawn Evette’s grandmother’s engagement ring. He got sent down for two years, and my sister hasn’t spoken to me since.”
“But it wasn’t your fault! You were hoodwinked. That scoundrel!”
“I let him in when I should have known better. But I felt sorry for him. He’s not violent or anything, he’s just troubled and addicted and it makes him do bad things. Anyway, you know the rest because you’ve seen. He doesn’t seem to understand that we’re over. It’s like he thought we were on a hiatus while he was in prison and now that he’s out he thinks we’ll get back together.”
Stu’s tearful drunken wailing in the communal hallways, not to mention his relentless banging on her door the last two months, had resulted in numerous police calls and her current eviction.
Star had always been attracted to troubled souls, unable to resist sad puppy eyes, even when they were attached to a manipulative scoundrel. But even she had her limits.