Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee (uplifting book club books TXT) 📕

but once up the stone stair and through the door, the area was spacious, and comfortably equipped with battered, pleasant furniture, books and CD’s and vinyl records, three music centres and four drinks cabinets, and innumerable photographs of dogs and parrots and—possibly—Sonia, a buxom young woman in a clinging one-piece bathing costume, under a tree. These photos may be fakes, or from somebody else’s albums. They look about 1950’s in style. George gave his current age as seventy-six, but looked more like fifty-six. I knew nothing of him until after my father died. I was almost fourteen then. Another accident, unfortunately, my father’s death. A plane crash off the coast of Norway.

As it often has been, when I got there the door of the flat was on the catch and ajar.

I sidled in, with my token present of three bottles of white wine and two red. The white was French, the red Californian.

“George?” I experimented. Sometimes he was in the front room that overlooks the High Street, listening to Bach, with the wine, if white, in an ice-bucket. He doesn’t like to be recognised as ‘uncle’. It’s always just George.

I couldn’t now hear any music. And nobody responded. He always had done. “Come in,” he would cry in his mellow voice, like that of an elegant first class actor acting an elegant first class drunk. “Come in, Roderick.”

Not this time, though.

The front room was, as ever, untidy and gently warm, the window letting in the sun between the dark red-wine curtains; no nets. The ice-bucket stood in place too, with a nearly fresh Saint Saône, just a half glass gone from it. But no glass on the table.

Sat on the turn-table of a well-polished, reinvented gramophone was a disk highlighting Mozart’s Don Giovanni. But the apparatus was switched off and cold.

George had a regular cleaner here, but I doubt he kept up an ‘arrangement’ with her. I had never seen her, but he had said in ‘later life’ he only liked young girls—about sixteen—or much older women, older than he was, ninety even—they made him feel young. I’ve never had any notion if recently he obtained sex with anyone. That was his business, presumably.

I took a turn round the crowded room, and looked out at the busy street—shoppers, buses, bikes and bicycles. Opposite was Furnished Futures, its windows that day crowded with glittering curtains and strange chairs that seemed made from dark yellow bones.

George had once confided he thought, in the small hours, when the road was unbusy, objects from Empress Designs crept across and had relations with stuff from Furnished Futures, and their resultant children subsequently appeared in both emporiums, and elsewhere along the High Street.

“George?” I tried again.

Was he in the bathroom?

I went back into the passage and along to the bathroom but the door stood wide on a pristine modern white water-suite scored for bath, basin and convenience.

I tried his study then, and his bedroom. George wasn’t there. I looked round the edge of the half-shut bedroom door, and saw the bed, a priest-like single, and the window that in turn, when the blind is up, gazes off at the wall of next door’s supermarket.

17

It appeared George had had to go out for something, but the wine was ready. He always offered me a drink, and went on offering, far more than I take as a rule. Later we’d go to The Palace, the Chinese restaurant up the road.

Presently I put the wine I’d brought into the already quite well-stocked fridge and cupboard. I took a plain, gleam-clean glass from the kitchen shelf that was full of gleamingly-cleaned glasses, and sat down in the front room with some Saint Saône cold from the bucket.

Taking out my notebook I made some notes. It was then about 3 p.m.

18

At 6 p.m. there was still no sign of George.

I had gone round the flat again, rather foolishly looking under the bed, and in the two big bedroom cupboards. One never knows, especially with the elderly. I could recall him saying to me, a year or so before, “You know, Rodders, you’re more of an oldster than I am. You’re what—thirty-five—thirty-seven—and you’re like an old chap around sixty. But I’m a lion, my lad. I’m eternally sixteen. The boy that never grew up.” I hadn’t argued.

But by six, I had begun to wonder if all these years of consummate boozing had at last accomplished what the medical fraternity endlessly warns everyone will now happen to them, if they drink as they like, and eat as they want, or pass within a two mile radius of a lighted cigarette.

I put the notepad away and tried two or three of George’s ‘special’ phone numbers. The cleaner—the local doctor—some female called Mrs Spur(?)—but nobody answered and the phone, too, seemed to be playing up, the dialling and ringing tones fluctuated. Had George forgotten to pay the bill?

On the ordinary rota of our evenings, he and I would part company about nine to ten. But I didn’t want to linger longer in the empty flat. It felt impertinent. The place too had begun to demonstrate uncomfortable sounds—shiftings, creakings—and curious odours—dog-hair, talcum powder, even cannabis—none of which I’d ever noted there before, and that might anyway be permeating upward from the shop below.

I put the undrunk wine back in the fridge, shades of Vanessa, and left George a note apologising for having to leave at six-thirty. I asked him to call me at my home number, as I was sorry to have missed him.

When I let myself out I shut the door.

Naturally I felt I might have done the wrong thing. But to institute a police search seemed premature, and he would never forgive me if all the while my visit had just slipped his mind.

I would call him later. Or tomorrow. Then I could act. If I had to.

By then I was very hungry. But I went to a pub near the station rather than the Chinese restaurant. I