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Doubler looked at his notes, the page divided into three columns representing each distinct threat, and reeled at the sheer enormity of the attack. He had wondered, at the arrival of the third envelope, whether stepping up his security might be a disproportionate response, but now, when the words were distilled into a gradient of menace, he knew that war had indeed been declared. Yes, there was no doubt: he needed Mrs Millwood.
Doubler always looked forward to his housekeeper’s arrival, but with such a clear agenda for their talk ahead, he was more restless than ever before. Ten minutes before she was due, he began pacing up and down by the window, looking constantly at the spot at the end of the drive and raising the binoculars to his eyes at every imagined disturbance.
As it was, he was fetching his notebook at the moment she came through the gate, but to ensure he was consistent with his diligent recordings, he noted the approximate time of her arrival as he watched the car pull forward on the drive. Scarcely able to contain his nervous energy, he wandered through the house awaiting her symphony of entrance, so it was a couple of minutes before he registered something different about the quality of sound of the engine on the drive. Mrs Millwood had a distinctive driving style. She kept the engine revs at a constant speed, taking the bends at a slow and steady pace that seemed to allow her to coast her way to the top. Although he had been absolutely certain that it had been her car he observed a couple of minutes previously, he was now not so sure. The car was revving up on the incline and then slowing to a crawl to navigate each turn, making the car sound strained and hesitant as it made its approach. Doubler stopped and held his breath to hear the small aural nuances of her arrival, listening carefully to the thud of the car door as she eventually reached the yard.
He stood stock-still, his ears trained on the kitchen door. When instead of it opening, the front doorbell rang, its noise echoing thunderously around the house, his heart leapt at the intrusion. There was no reason for Mrs Millwood to arrive at the front door – she never had done so before – so it was with great trepidation that Doubler made his way nervously down the hallway to see what Trojan interloper could possibly have made it as far as his doorstep. He eyed the doormat suspiciously, half expecting another one of the Manila envelopes to slide through the letterbox in front of his eyes, but the doorbell rang again, and unable to ignore it, he carefully undid the chain and turned the stiff key in the lock, his heart beating loudly in his ears.
As he opened the door hesitantly, a woman poked her head into the narrow space he had created. She was wearing a brightly coloured knitted bobble hat pulled down over her ears and some sort of duffle coat over jeans and wellington boots. He narrowed his eyes as he tried to process the threat.
‘Doubler?’
‘I am,’ he tried, though he wasn’t certain of anything at that moment.
‘Hello! I’m Gracie’s daughter.’
‘Gracie,’ he said, feeling even more nervous now she claimed to be somebody’s daughter. He didn’t know any Gracies.
‘Gracie,’ he said again, unsure whether he should yet betray the fact he knew nobody by that name.
‘Yes. Can I come in?’
He didn’t seem to have much say in the matter because she was already pushing on the door to enter his house. Her admission was almost forced, but Doubler was disarmed by her eyes, which were sparkling and bright, and there was a lightness in her look that he recognized and responded to. He stood back as she entered and walked ahead of him as if she knew the house.
‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ she asked as she made her way towards the kitchen. Her ease, her certainty became familiar. Gracie. Gracie must be the name of Mrs Millwood and this must certainly be her daughter. He shut the front door and hurried after her.
‘By all means put the kettle on,’ he said, perplexed, but by the time he had caught up with her, she was already filling the kettle at the sink as if she had performed this task a thousand times.
He sat at the kitchen table and allowed events to happen to him. He allowed this woman to feel her way around his kitchen as she assembled cups and saucers, and warmed the teapot, reaching for the tin of tea leaves as if it were second nature. He watched her and marvelled at the million little ways that identified her as her mother’s daughter.
‘Were you expecting me?’
‘Not at all. I was expecting your mother.’
‘Just as I thought. She was supposed to tell you, but she must have chickened out.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Mum’s poorly.’
She made this last announcement just as she sat down opposite him. She pushed a teacup towards him.
‘Drink this.’
He tried to lift the hot drink to his lips but found himself quite unable to grasp the cup with enough force to raise it. He looked at Gracie’s daughter.
‘Poorly. What sort of poorly?’
‘Oh, the worst you can imagine, I’m afraid.’ She reached forward and spooned some sugar into his tea, stirring it, and then she sipped at her own. She smiled a small, sorrowful smile, one that, irrationally in Doubler’s eyes, carried a trace of sadness for him as well as a multitude of sadnesses of her own. ‘She’s had it before, of course, but I’m afraid it’s back again with sharper teeth.’
Doubler found himself unable to swallow, as if the disease’s sharp teeth had sunk themselves into his own fleshy neck.
‘When? When did she have it before?’ he asked, once he had found his voice. This was all news to him. The first toothless episode and then the second, fanged one.
‘A good while back. She was younger then, much more able to deal with it and she’s been well for such a long time now, we really thought she’d beaten it.’
Doubler imagined Mrs Millwood beating a sharp-toothed thing with a stick. Or a mop. Or a broom. Surely it wouldn’t stand a chance. And he remembered, now, her absence. She had taken some time off and he had resented it enormously through a cloud of other resentments, and the combined force of his upset and all the other upsets had somehow obscured the reason for her absence. He had been at the lowest point of his life. He had settled into the routine of life without Marie, but nothing had made much sense to him still. He tried to remember how long Mrs Millwood had been absent for.
‘How long?’ he said. Using two hands, he lifted the cup unsteadily to his lips.
A sharp pain flashed across the face of Gracie’s daughter and Doubler realized what she might think he was asking.
‘Until she’s back here, I mean. Back at work, until she’s not poorly again.’ The word ‘poorly’ stuck in his mouth like fluff, getting tangled there and drying his tongue and lips until he thought they might never work again. It had been the daughter’s language, the daughter’s choice of words. But of course it wasn’t a big enough word to describe this thing with savage teeth.
Gracie reached across the table and took his hand in hers. ‘Mum’s really sick this time. We’re taking it one day at a time. She is going to fight it, and the doctors are going to throw everything at it. But the treatment’s going to be awful, so she’ll feel a lot worse before she feels better. If she feels better at all.’
Doubler was horrified by his own selfish thoughts and yet all he could think of was the absence he would be left with. Not the threat of the ultimate absence (this, he hadn’t even begun to process as a possibility) but the absence of the next few days and weeks. Without her visits giving his day some structure and purpose, he wasn’t sure he would cope. He felt his stomach cave in.
‘Will you cope, do you think?’ Gracie’s daughter asked, kindly.
Doubler was taken aback, completely, as if she had seen into his soul. He stumbled to find the words to express how utterly bereft he felt not to be sitting down for lunch with Mrs Millwood today, let alone the terror he felt when he tried to contemplate the bleakness of the horizon ahead of him.
‘There’s the day-to-day cleaning, I suppose. It’ll probably be easy enough to find somebody to help you keep on top of that,’ Gracie’s daughter said, looking around her at the kitchen. ‘I’m amazed she didn’t want to talk this through with you herself. She may be poorly but she has you on her mind, you know.’
Doubler swallowed back his thoughts. To cope with the housework didn’t even touch the surface of the loss he was feeling. And yet, somehow, a conversation seemed to be happening to him, around him, and Gracie’s daughter was covering both sides.
‘I tell you what. How about I find somebody to fill her shoes in the short term? I’d be happy to place some ads and do the first round of interviews if that would help. Shall I?’
Doubler nodded slowly, not entirely sure what he was agreeing to. He didn’t want somebody to fill Mrs Millwood’s shoes. Not in the short term, not in the longer term. He wanted her own outdoor shoes left under the bench by the kitchen door, and he wanted her own stockinged feet to slip into her indoor shoes, which she wore to dart around the house. The point of Mrs Millwood was that she barely wore shoes. She simply floated from room to room just above the surface. She only became substantial, a human form that might need shoes, when she sat down at lunchtime, and then they talked and talked. Nobody would fill those shoes; the footwear wasn’t the point.
‘I won’t hire anybody until you’ve met them, of course. I’ll just do the preliminary interviews and you can make the final decision. How does that sound? I think it will make Mum happy to know that somebody is taking care of things here. She worries a bit, you see, and I don’t want her distracted. I want her mind firmly focused on getting better. She’s strong in that she’s vital and vigorous, but there’s so little of her she’s going to have to use every ounce of her physical strength to deal with the chemo.’
There. She’d said it. Doubler had known that the language of Mrs Millwood’s poorliness would need to be upgraded to incorporate the technicalities of the practical. ‘Poorliness’ was too vague a word to describe her symptoms, and ‘treatment’ was too vague a word to tackle the solution. And here it was in black and white, a word that conjured up body-wracking drugs, tubes, needles, poison and pain. It didn’t sound like a treatment; it sounded like a penance.
Gracie’s daughter noticed Doubler wince and wondered, for the first time since she had arrived, whether Doubler was taking the news of her mother quite badly. She had assumed until now that his silence was born out of a taciturn nature, so she reached for his hand once more.
‘We’re all going to help each other through this. I need to make sure Mum has all the peace and quiet she needs to get better, so I’m going to shoulder her responsibilities. That means I’m here for you. You will do your bit, I’m sure, and it’s just that none of us can know what that might mean yet. I don’t, you don’t, and Mum certainly doesn’t. But I suspect you’ll be there to support her if you’re needed. Is that right?’
Doubler felt hope through the possibility of purpose. ‘Of course. Anything. I don’t really leave the house much. Certainly not since . . . not since Marie went. But, yes, I’ll do what is asked of me. Tell her that, will you?’ He closed his eyes briefly and allowed himself to imagine climbing into the car to leave the farm for the first time in years. ‘Tell her I’ll visit. She might be bored. She might like a bit of company.’
‘Well, that’s a very sweet offer, but I can’t imagine she’ll feel up to much – as it is, I’ll be fighting to keep her friends away. Golly, my mum’s amassed a few of those along the way! There’s the church lot, her knitting circle, the animal-shelter lot. Not to mention that gaggle of buddies she’s known all her life. They’re a good bunch, her school chums. They’re always there for each other, but they’re getting to an age where they have to offer this sort of support to one another all the time. They’re a marvel, though, really, quite an inspiration actually. But still, that’s a very nice thought and I will make sure she knows you offered. She’ll be most touched.’
Doubler recoiled. He knew about the knitting circle. He knew she went to church. He knew she volunteered at an animal rescue centre. But he had assumed when she talked about these different pockets of interest that they were mere pastimes, mere distractions to avoid having to stare intense loneliness in the face the way he had to every single time he looked in the mirror. A gaggle of buddies? He scrolled back through countless lunchtime conversations. Jean? Her name had come up often. Dot? Was she part of a gaggle? Mabel?
‘Jean? Dot? Mabel?’ he ventured.
‘Oh, Mum’s told you about them, has she? Mum does like to talk.’
‘She listens, too. She’s an extremely good listener.’
‘Hmm,’ said Gracie’s daughter, trying to imagine her mother listening, not talking.
‘I mean really. She really is an exceptionally good listener. She’s the type of listener who actually stops thinking while she listens to you. That’s rare in my experience. Most people in conversation are too busy thinking about what they’re going to say next to truly listen well.’
‘That’s a very nice thing to hear about my mother. I’m you sure you must be right, and perhaps that explains why she’s got such a wide circle of friends.’
A ‘wide circle’. Doubler contemplated the phrase. A circle was a complete thing, with no breaks, no gaps. No room for another. How ludicrous that he had considered himself a friend of hers. On the other hand, she was clearly his friend. Perhaps his only friend. Doubler imagined himself a small bubble on the outside of her wide circle. Was it possible for those two certainties to exist in his mind and for both of them to be truthful? That she was a friend to him but that he was not a friend to her?
Gracie’s daughter stood and began clearing away the teacups, taking them to the sink. As she rinsed them, she continued talking to Doubler, her back to him. ‘She’s got a week of intensive chemo, so we think she’ll be in hospital for the duration and then, if all goes according to plan, she’ll be treated as an outpatient thereafter. I’ll keep you up to date with what is going on, how she’s responding. And in the meantime, let’s keep focused on some of the practical issues. I’ll see if I can find somebody to give you a hand around here and I’ll let you know how I get on. Anything particular you’re after? Cooking as well as cleaning? Running errands? Shopping?’
‘Not cooking. I cook,’ said Doubler with a sharp bite of vehemence that surprised them both. ‘Just the other things.’ He went quiet for a moment, wondering how he could articulate his need for somebody who would sit with him and ask him just the right number of questions about his experiments. Somebody who cared almost as much as he did. Somebody who knew better than he did how to run his life but who never interfered, just trusted him to deal with it. Somebody who knew both his pre-Marie and post-Marie personas. Somebody who knew how far he’d fallen and how slow the climb up again had been.
‘Just cleaning,’ Doubler said, and he stood to dry the cups.
Chapter 6
A heavy bank of cloud planted itself above the farm and rained relentlessly on Doubler’s misery. The newly furrowed soil, dense and sticky, collected on his boots as he trudged round the fields, making each step heavier than the last. There was no glimmer of reprieve to suggest that this new pattern would ever be broken. Alone with the mud and his memories, Doubler had found the last few days intolerable, and by the end of the fourth, he was thinking of Mrs Millwood with rising resentment. His days had lost form and he found himself quite unable to fall into his usual routine without the additional punctuation Mrs Millwood’s visits usually provided, and he blamed her for this interruption to his routine and his ensuing aimlessness. He started many jobs but finished few, and even those tasks that were essential felt lacklustre and without purpose. He pulled himself begrudgingly around the farm, but even this, one of his most joyous of routines, lacked urgency with no lunch companion to hurry home to.
The threat from Peele had paled into insignificance. Doubler wondered now why he’d even concerned himself with the written letters. Peele wanted to buy the farm; Doubler didn’t want to sell it. That, as far as Doubler was concerned, was the end of the matter. He put the envelopes back in the drawer and buried them beneath a pile of paperwork. Peele would grow tired of waiting and turn his attention to some other prey. Doubler’s research either would or would not be contaminated by Peele’s farming methods. It didn’t feel important anymore.
That morning, he had wondered whether he might stay in bed. If he didn’t go downstairs, nothing would need tidying up and he then wouldn’t be constantly reminded of her absence. He wasn’t sad, he was irritable, and he wasn’t concerned for her, he was overwhelmingly concerned for himself. Self-pity washed over him in waves, and as his mood darkened, he felt less and less inclined to give the day any of his attention.
When he finally dragged himself slowly downstairs, he’d found the tea caddy was empty. Briefly confused, he realized he didn’t know what day of the week it was. He hastily made a new blend, carelessly tipping tea from each bag into the canister without weighing it and sweeping a mix of spilt leaves back into the first package he reached for. He took a sip and chided himself for his haste. It didn’t taste right and he knew it never would unless he started afresh.
He left his tea unfinished and reluctantly forced himself out into the cold and damp morning, not stopping for a coat or hat. The wind burnt his ears and squeezed tears from his eyes as he made a cursory inspection of the bare land. He glanced at the barns, looking for signs of breach, and as he returned to the farmhouse, he stopped to glower briefly at the security camera. A bilious anger rumbling deep inside him, he flung open the kitchen door and pulled off his boots, pushing them forcefully with his toe under the boot rack. He made his way upstairs, now certain that his bed was the only place he could feel comfortable. As he reached the top landing, the phone rang in the hallway beneath him. Doubler grimaced, interpreting the intrusion as part of a conspiracy to ruin his life. The phone didn’t stop. He turned round and padded down to the draughty hall below, where the telephone vibrated noisily on the small table.
His bad humour prepared Doubler for the worst and he was almost relishing the thought that it might be Peele calling him. As he reached for the telephone, he was already lining up a suitably sharp response, if it indeed were his rival having the audacity to disturb this precious time of quiet self-loathing. There was a small, disconcerting pause when Doubler lifted the receiver to his ear and into that pause swept a hesitation and uncertainty that Doubler felt echoing within the tiny space. He held the receiver more closely to his ear so that he didn’t miss the unspoken words while he waited for the spoken ones.
‘Mr Doubler. Where on earth were you? I timed my call in the certain knowledge you’d be in for your tea, but you took an age to answer the phone. I thought something might have gone awry.’
‘Awry here, Mrs Millwood? No, all is quite in order, thank you,’ boomed Doubler, projecting his voice in the general direction of the hospital. His response was immediately cheerful, all traces of that earlier hesitation vanishing at the sound of her voice. He squeezed the receiver to his ear even closer but wanted, really, to hold it to his heart, as, much to his surprise, that was the piece of him that most wanted to hear her voice.
‘How are you keeping?’ she was asking.
‘Me? How am I keeping? How are you keeping? That’s the pertinent question.’
‘Oh, not too bad, all things considered. I was supposed to be home, but the doctors, in their wisdom, want to keep me here. Some nonsense about my response to the treatment, when any fool could see it’s my body’s response to hospital that’s the root of the problem. My next few days are therefore a little unpredictable, but everything is going as well as can be expected.’ She paused and then launched into the reason for her call. ‘Mr Doubler, I’ve got some worries on my mind and Midge seemed to think you might help.’
Midge! Doubler repeated silently to himself and then, in joyful recognition, Mrs Millwood’s daughter! He congratulated himself on piecing this together for himself.
‘Midge, your daughter. Well, of course I would be delighted. Anything.’
‘Well, I’m a bit worried about my colleagues down at Grove Farm – you know, the animal shelter. I’ve left them in the lurch and I need my shift covered. Do you think you could manage it? It’s only a couple of hours twice a week, and I’m sure they’ll already be looking out for a more permanent replacement, but I think they’ll be struggling for staff for the next month or so.’
Doubler’s heart lurched, recognizing the threat in the words before his mind had a chance to process them.
‘What do you mean by a “permanent” replacement, Mrs Millwood? You’re coming back to us, aren’t you? I mean to the animal shelter and to Mirth Farm?’
‘Oh, heavens, yes, but you know what these doctors are like. Once they’ve got their claws into you, they never want to let you go.’
Claws. All Doubler could picture were sharp-taloned fingers prying and poking, tearing at Mrs Millwood while she was at her most vulnerable. Those same claws should be attacking the monster with teeth, not Mrs Millwood herself.
‘But it’s all going according to plan, is it? A bit of treatment in the hospital your daughter said, then you’ll be an outpatient. Is that still the plan? Home soon, right as rain?’
‘Well, that’s certainly my plan, but we’ll have to wait and see. I don’t want to promise anything as I don’t like letting people down. I just want to make sure there’s cover for me down at the shelter. I really don’t want the added responsibility of worrying about them when I’ve got quite enough to worry about here.’
‘What’s troubling you the most there? Other than . . . the obvious.’
‘Oh, they’re wonderful here – I’m in great hands – but I’m parched most of the time and that blessed tea trolley taunts me. I can hear it as it makes its journey round the place. It’s got a distinctive rattle. I swear it accelerates past me several times a day, only to slow right down again the minute it’s snuck by my ward.’
Doubler beamed.
Mrs Millwood continued, ‘I lie here dreaming of a cuppa, but it’s running me a bit of a merry dance, to be honest.’ Mrs Millwood paused. ‘Mr Doubler,’ she said sternly, ‘I can hear you smiling. It’s really not funny.’
Doubler bit his lip, trying not to let his joy escape noisily at the sound of her voice.
‘You know the worst of it? If I’m sleeping when they come, they don’t wake me! So I have to lie permanently alert just in case they pop their heads round the curtain. Sod’s Law says I’ll drift off or just close my eyes in a little daydream and that trolley is hotfooting it to the next ward. Practically mocking me it is.’
‘Oh, Mrs Millwood! That sounds like my idea of hell. Tea needs to be on demand.’
‘I’m lucky if I get three cups a day.’
‘Three? Only three? That sounds like a travesty!’
‘Quite. But other than that, no complaints. Shouldn’t even complain about that really – what with them working flat out to save my life.’
‘Your life, Mrs Millwood, shall be saved. By a combination of advanced medical techniques and Camellia sinensis. And if there are shortcomings in that area, just say the word and I’ll be there.’
‘Well, that’s a cheering thought, but my main concern is the shelter. Particularly darling old Percy. Would you be a dear?’
‘It would be my honour. I’ll give them a holler, shall I? Percy, is it?’ Doubler registered with a stealthy hostility the use of the word ‘darling’.