Quiet Neighbors Read Online Free PDF Page B

once, with its high ceiling and flagged floor. She could imagine a cook in an apron and a little hat, bossing maids and garden boys around. But someone had ruined it with units in walnut veneer, lights under the top cupboards, and little quarter-circle shelves at the ends of the rows, finished off with tiny fences to safeguard the decorative jugs and tureens that were meant to be displayed there. What was displayed there, or shoved there anyway, was envelopes rucked open by someone’s thumb, yellowed fliers, faded seed packets with clothes-pegs holding them shut, FedEx packets with their rip-strips hanging in ringlets. Jude turned to face the other way, where bottles of oil and sauce and cooking sherry sat along the back of the hob, grease-spattered and dust-furred, a single charred oven glove stuffed behind them.
    â€œI’m not here,” she said, sipping her coffee.
    Then Lowell was back, hair combed and chin smooth, in a different though identical shirt and the same trousers.
    â€œHow long have you lived here?” she asked him.
    â€œBorn here,” he said. “I went away to school and university, travelled a bit, but, dear me, yes, more or less always, I suppose you’d say.”
    â€œIt’s got that feel about it,” said Jude. “Solid.”
    Lowell wrinkled his nose. “My mother wrecked this room,” he said. “When I was a little boy, Mrs. Dawson used to bathe me in the big sink and warm my nightshirt on a rail above the range. And in my father’s day, there was a pump in the middle of the floor. All very swish. No going out to the yard for water. He remembered his mother saying it would spoil the maids. Turn them soft, you know.”
    â€œYour father was born here too?”
    â€œHe was the doctor,” said Lowell, nodding. “The young doctor. My grandfather was the doctor and then the old doctor, and my father was supposed to become the old doctor in turn, because of me.” His face fell and he tried to hide it by taking a bite of his toast and chewing it thoroughly.
    â€œThat’s not fair,” said Jude. “That’s too much to ask.”
    â€œOf someone who faints at the sight of a cut finger, certainly!” Lowell said.
    â€œWhat about your sisters?” said Jude. “Were they press-ganged too?”
    â€œNo sisters,” said Lowell. “Or brothers. Only me.” He took another bite of toast and looked fixedly at Jude until he had swallowed. “I shouldn’t have grabbed that lifeline you threw regarding the bath-water. I don’t have the wits to see it through.” Then he opened his eyes very wide. “Sorry!” he said. “Unforgivable! Forcing you to pity me. You must forgi—Oh dear.” He took a draught of coffee and tried again. “And what line of … It’s quite all right to ask this of a young lady these days, isn’t it? What line of work are you in, ah, ah … ”
    â€œJude.”
    He closed his eyes, pained again by his failings. “What does your family run to, Jude ? Butchers, bakers, candlestick makers?”
    â€œWell,” said Jude, “before they died—”
    Lowell groaned and passed a hand over his eyes. “I am the biggest—” he began, but Jude stopped him.
    â€œNo,” she said. “I want to talk about them. My dad was a foreman at the Swallow’s Works until it closed down, and then it was backshift at B&Q, and my mum had her own hairdressers until the works closed, then she went mobile. They retired last year. My dad got his lump sum—he’d deferred it till he was sixty-five—and they were all set.”
    Lowell tutted. “What happened?”
    â€œThey got one of those big … like a caravan but with an engine? I can never remember the name.”
    â€œWinnebago,” said Lowell. “It comes up in crosswords.”
    â€œThat’s it,” Jude said. “They were going to