Selected Stories

Moving the saucepan to one side of the gas jet, Mr Schele accepts that when he is gone Vera will have no one. Going out with chaps – and there used to be quite a few – has been a thing of the past since the trouble. Vera will be alone for the rest of her days: he understands that, although the subject is never mentioned. He understands that her luck might even change for a while, before some new chap she makes friends with has second thoughts, even though at the time she walked away without a stain. That is how things happen, Mr Schele knows, and knows that Vera has worked it out too. Sidney is different because of coming forward, and in a sense he has been coming forward ever since, as good a friend to Vera as he was at the time, a saviour really: in Mr Schele’s opinion that word is not too strong. It took time for the opinion to form, as naturally it would in a father, the circumstances as they were.

‘It’s good of Sidney. Just because that rose blew down.’

‘Yes, it is.’

Vera nods, saying that, lending the words a little emphasis. Her father knows what other people know, no more. He came in at his usual time, just after half past six. He saw the white police cars outside and was in a state before he passed through the porch. ‘You sit down now,’ she said, and told him, and the policewoman brought him tea. ‘It can’t be,’ he kept saying. Later on, she had kippers to boil in the bag, but they didn’t want them. She folded up the wheelchair and put it in the cupboard under the stairs, not wanting to look at it. Best to get it out of the house, she decided when everything quietened down, a month gone by, and they got a fair price for it.

‘You take your chances, Vera.’

She knows what he means, but Sidney’s not going to propose marriage, this morning or any other time, because marriage isn’t on the cards and never has been. The intruder would not have guessed there was anyone in that room because when he’d watched the house he’d only ever seen two people coming and going: the policemen explained all that. An intruder always sussed a place, they explained, he didn’t just come barging in. Her father out all day from eight-fifteen on, and the villain would have followed her to the cinema and seen her safely in. Cinemas, funerals, weddings: your house-thief loves all that. ‘Oh no, that’s crazy,’ her father kept muttering when they changed their minds, suddenly taking a different line. He had always thought it was crazy, their groundless probing, as he put it. He had always believed their case would fall to bits because it didn’t make sense.

‘You know what I’m saying, Vera? You take your chances.’

She nods. Changing her slippers for shoes because Sidney had come, she decided as well to change her drab Sunday skirt for her dog-tooth. She stood in front of the long wardrobe looking-glass the way she used to in the old days. She liked to be smart in the old days and she still does now. Sometimes a man looks at her in a supermarket or on the street. And Sidney does, when he thinks she isn’t noticing. She heats the milk again and is ready to make fresh coffee.

‘You like an egg, Sidney?’ she offers when Sidney comes in. ‘Poached egg? Maybe scrambled?’

‘No, honestly. Thanks, Vera.’ It’s too windy to risk burning the rosebush, he says, but he has clipped it up, ready for a calmer day.

There’s a leaf in his hair, and Vera draws his attention to it. ‘You just sit down.’

‘Only a cup of coffee, Vera.’

That morning Sidney woke when it was half past six, the light just beginning. He thought at once about Vera, although it had been a particularly rough night in the club and usually that comes into his mind first thing. Harry and Alfie had had to separate youths who began to fight, one of them with a knife. Later, after two, a girl who was a stranger in the club collapsed. But in spite of the intervention of that excitement, this morning it was Vera he woke up to, her face as it was when her hair was blonde. Fleshy you’d have called her face then, soft was what he’d thought when he first saw the photograph, in the Evening Standard someone had left behind in the club. It doesn’t matter that Vera is leaner now, it doesn’t matter that her hair is different. Vera’s the same, no way she isn’t.

‘Dried out a lovely shade,’ Mr Schele says. ‘The bathroom.’

‘There’s half that tin left for touching up.’ The coffee cup is warm in Sidney’s cold hands. He likes that skirt. He’d like to see it folded on a chair and Vera standing in her slip, her jersey still on. The jersey’s buttons are at the top, along one shoulder, four red buttons to match the wool. In the photograph it was a jacket, and white dots on her shirt. A loving sister, the paper said.

‘Anything on the News, Sidney?’

He shakes his head, unable to answer the question because this morning he didn’t turn the radio on. Some expedition reached a mountain top, Vera says.