Of all the various liberties available, her favorite was to unfasten her girdle and lie at full stretch on the couch with an ashtray on her stomach and smoke two cigarettes back to back. There was no reason why she couldn’t do this in her mother’s presence—lying down in the day might prompt an inquiry about her health, no more—but it wasn’t nearly so enjoyable in company. The summer variant of this practice was to walk barefoot down the garden and smoke her cigarettes lying on the cool grass.
On this particular evening, she had just peeled off her musty stockings and stuffed them into the toes of her shoes when there was a tremendous clattering from the back parlor, as if all the tiles had fallen off the fireplace at once. Upon investigation she found that a blackbird had come down the chimney, bringing with it an avalanche of soot and debris. It lay stunned in the empty grate for a few seconds and then, at Jean’s approach, began to thrash and struggle, battering itself against the bars.
Jean recoiled, her heart heaving in horror. She was quite unequal to the task of either rescuing or finishing off a wounded bird. She could see now that it was a young pigeon, blackened with soot, and that it was perhaps more terrified than injured. It had flopped out of the grate and was beginning to flap unsteadily around the room, imperiling the ornaments and leaving dark streaks on the wallpaper.
Throwing open the door to the garden, Jean tried to wave it toward the doorway, with stiff-armed gestures more suited to directing traffic, until it finally sensed freedom and took off, low across the lawn, coming to rest on the branch of the cherry tree. As Jean stood watching, next door’s ginger cat came stalking out of the shrubbery with murder in its eyes.
By the time she had swept up the gritty mess from the hearth, wiped the worst of the marks from the walls and closed the door on the damp, subterranean smell of soot, she could hear the bathwater thundering in the drain outside. She smoked her cigarette standing up at the cooker waiting for the milk to boil for her mother’s Allenburys.
Now that her heart rate had returned to normal she felt quite a sense of accomplishment at having seen off another domestic crisis without having to call on anyone else for help—even supposing there had been anyone to call.
* * *
Sawdust is excellent for cleaning carpets. Damp the sawdust, sprinkle lightly over the carpet to be cleaned and then brush off with a stiff brush. It leaves no stain on the most delicate-colored carpet.
* * *
2
Number 7, Burdett Road, Sidcup was a 1930s row house in slightly better condition than Jean’s own. In the front garden a symmetrical arrangement of marigolds and begonias bloomed in weedless borders on three sides of a neat rectangle of lawn. A matching pair of tame hydrangeas flowered at either end of the low front wall. The brass letterbox and door knocker had been polished to a high shine. Jean, standing on the doorstep, taking a moment to collect herself before ringing the bell, resolved to pick up some Brasso on the way home. It was all too easy to overlook the chores that related to those parts of the house her mother didn’t see.
After a few moments a shape loomed behind the stained-glass panel and the front door was opened by a slender woman of about thirty with dark brown curly hair pinned off her face by a tortoiseshell clip. She was holding a balled-up duster and a pair of rubber gloves, which she passed uncertainly from hand to hand before depositing them on the hallstand beside her.
“Mrs. Tilbury? I’m Jean Swinney from the North Kent Echo.”
“Yes, come in, come in,” said the woman, simultaneously holding out a hand to shake and standing back to let Jean in so it was now out of reach.
After they had negotiated this rather bungled introduction, Jean found herself ushered into the front parlor, which smelled of wax polish and had the pristine, dead feel of a room that was saved for best.
Mrs. Tilbury offered Jean the more comfortable of the two chairs by the window, angled toward each other across a small table.
“I thought you might need to make some notes,” she said. It wasn’t so much her accent as the faintly staccato delivery that marked her out as foreign.
“Thank you—I usually do,” said Jean, taking out her spiral notebook and pencil from her bag and laying them on the table.
“I’ve made some tea. I’ll just get it.”
Mrs. Tilbury whisked out of the room and Jean could hear her clattering in the kitchen. She took advantage of this momentary absence to glance at her surroundings, evaluating them with a practiced eye. Bare floorboards, a tired-looking rug, tiled fireplace, the grate empty and swept. On the piano in the alcove were half a dozen photographs in silver frames. One was a family group, posed with unsmiling Edwardian rigidity, the patriarch standing, his wife seated with a baby in christening robes on her lap, a girl in a pinafore staring glassily into the camera. Another was a studio portrait of a girl of nine or ten with a cloud of dark curls—Mrs. Tilbury herself, perhaps—gazing up as if in wonder at something just out of shot. African violets and a Christmas cactus on the windowsill; a tapestry on the wall depicting an Alpine scene with snow-capped mountains and a wooden hut surrounded by fields of wild flowers; an embroidered sampler, reading “Home Sweet Home.”