Selected Stories

And Vera smiles and says of course it’s all right. There is a Danish pastry, she says, an apricot Danish pastry, bought yesterday so she’ll heat it up.

‘Thanks, Vera.’

‘There’s Father, waking now.’

Lace Cap is the colour chosen. Sidney pours it into the roller dish and rolls it on to the ceiling, beginning at the centre, which a paint-shop man advised him once was the best way to go about it. The colour seems white but he knows it isn’t. It will dry out a shade darker. A satin finish, suitable for a bathroom.

‘The tiling,’ Mr Schele says in the doorway when Sidney has already begun on the walls. ‘Maybe the tiling.’

Clearing away his things – his toothbrush and his razor – Mr Schele noticed the tiling around the washbasin and the bath. In places the tiling is not good, he says. In places the tiles are perhaps a little loose, and a few are cracked. You hardly notice, but they are cracked when you look slowly, taking time to look. And the rubber filler around the bath is discoloured. Grubby, Mr Schele says.

‘Yes, I’ll do all that.’

‘Not the tiling before the paint, heh? Not finish the tiling first maybe?’

Sidney knows the old man is right. The tile replacement and the rubber should be done first because of the mess. That is the usual way. Not that Sidney is an expert, not that he decorates many bathrooms, but it stands to reason.

‘It’ll be all right, Mr Schele. The tiling’s not much, two or three to put in.’

While the undercoat on the woodwork is drying he’ll slip the new tiles in. He’ll cut away the rubber and squeeze in more of it, a tricky business, which he doesn’t like. He has done it only once before, behind the sink in the kitchen. While it’s settling he’ll gloss the woodwork.

‘You’re a good man, Sidney.’

He works all afternoon. When Vera brings the Danish pastry and tea, and two different kinds of biscuits, she doesn’t linger because he’s busy. Sidney isn’t paid for what he does, as he is for all his other work – the club, delivering the leaflets or handing them out on the street, depending on what’s required. He manages on what he gets; he doesn’t need much because there is no rent to pay. Just enough for food, and the gas he cooks it on. The electricity he doesn’t have to pay for; clothes come from the charity shop.

They let him live above the club because there’s a room. At night he takes the ticket money, protected in his kiosk by Alfie and Harry at the door; in the daytime he cleans up after the night before and takes the phone messages. All the club’s facilities are his to make use of, which he appreciates. Sidney is thirty-four now, thirty-four and one week and two days. He had just turned twenty when he first helped Vera.

In Mr Schele’s house they do not ever mention that. They do not talk about a time that was distressing for Vera, and for Mr Schele too. But when Sidney’s not in the house, when he’s private and on his own, in his room above the club, he talks to himself about it. ‘Shining armour,’ he repeats because it said that in the paper; still says it if he wants to look. Knight in Shining Armour, all across the page. Sometimes, when he’s trying to get to sleep, he lies there polishing the armour, laying all the pieces out, unfolding cloths, setting out the Duraglit and the Goddard’s.

‘Sidney, you stay with us for supper tonight?’ There is enough, Vera assures him. Another cup of rice will make it enough, and she recites this Saturday’s menu: chicken cooked her way and her good salad, strudel and just a little cream. Then Casualty on the TV, five past eight.

It is a plea, occasionally made when Sidney is in the house as late as this. Vera begs for company with her invitation, Sidney finds himself reflecting; for another presence besides her elderly father. Vera would have been glad when he didn’t come in the morning because he’d have finished earlier, too long before supper, and staying to lunch is never the same.

‘I should be getting on.’

‘Oh, do stay with us.’

And Sidney does. He sits with Mr Schele in the sitting-room and there’s an appetizer, salty little pretzels Vera has bought. No drink accompanies these. Mr Schele talks about his childhood.

‘The big rosebush has blown down,’ Sidney interrupts, standing by the window now. ‘This wind has taken it.’

Mr Schele comes to look and sorrowfully shakes his head. ‘Maybe the roots are holding,’ he suggests. ‘Maybe a little can be done.’

Sidney goes through the kitchen to the garden. ‘No,’ he says when they all three sit down to eat: the roots have snapped in the fall. The news upsets Mr Schele, who remembers the rose being planted, when Vera was a child. He’ll not see another rose grown to that size in the garden, he predicts. He blames himself, but Vera says no and Sidney points out that even roses come to an end.