The Second Post

She stood at her French doors at half past one with her coat already on and watched the white stripe along the shadow of the house refuse to go green. The rest of the lawn had given in by eleven. The north side held out on principle, stiff and silver, and every blade of grass along it had been starched. Beyond it the beech trees on the boundary stood bare against a sky the colour of a tin plate, and a pair of rooks were arguing on the kitchen-garden wall about something that had clearly been going on since the autumn.

It was the third Tuesday in January. Iris was seventy-one, and she had a new left knee.

Mr Griffiths had fitted it on the nineteenth of November at Cheltenham General, which would make it nine weeks old tomorrow. He had told her in clinic that it was a very good knee, and he had said it with the tenderness other men reserved for vintage cars. Iris had told him she would reserve judgement until it had done a year’s work. The walking stick they’d sent her home with stood by her front door, where she could see it and it could do no harm.

She collected her handbag, her writing case and the letter she’d finished to her sister Marion the night before, and walked to the common room without it.

❦

The common room at Larkspur House was the best room in the building in winter, and everyone knew it, which was why the letter-writing circle had to arrive early to keep the table by the window. By two o’clock the fire had been lit for an hour and had got the measure of the chimney. In the chairs nearest it sat residents who had brought books and would not read them. The bridge tables were folded against the wall until Monday. The windows looked out over the striped lawn and the terrace, and on a clear day you could see as far as the orangery glass, which today was frosted at the corners like a Christmas card.

Harold Nesbit was already at the table. He was always already at the table. On a clean tea towel spread in front of him he was taking apart a travelling alarm clock that belonged to Mrs Pettigrew, laying out its pieces in a row like cutlery at a formal dinner. His flat cap was tipped back, which meant he was concentrating. He looked up when Iris sat down, and nodded once, which meant good afternoon, how is the knee, and it’s going to be a cold one, in roughly that order.

‘It’s thirty-one days late,’ he said, of the clock. ‘She wants it by Friday.’

‘Can you make it?’

‘Clock can. Not sure about her.’

Cecil Braithwaite arrived at two exactly, in three-piece tweed and half-moon spectacles, carrying a box of cream Conqueror laid paper under one arm with the solemnity of a man bringing the regimental colours into church. At seventy-eight he was still the tallest person in any room he entered, and he had never once in his life used it to be friendly. He set the box down, squared it with the edge of the table, and sat.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I have a letter to answer from a man in chambers who has taken up the ukulele. I intend to discourage him.’

‘How many pages?’ Iris asked.

‘Six, I should think. He wrote three.’

Since the summer his son Julian had telephoned every Sunday evening, at six, to ask how he was and to be told about the gravel on the drive. Cecil regarded this as progress, and described it as a nuisance.

Vera Okafor came in at five past, because Vera believed an entrance was wasted on an empty room. Today she was wearing a camel coat she did not take off and a scarf the colour of a ripe plum, knotted at the throat with a carelessness that had taken her four minutes in front of a mirror. For thirty years she had dressed actors in the West End, and she still walked into a room like a woman checking the lighting. She kissed the air beside Iris’s cheek, sat down, and put a paperback copy of The Importance of Being Earnest on the table with its spine broken at Act One.

‘Mrs Pettigrew,’ she announced, ‘has decided that Lady Bracknell should be played as a woman with a grievance against the entire railway network.’

Harold looked up from the alarm clock.

‘Not you, darling. The Brighton line specifically. She says “a handbag” as if the handbag had been left there by the chairman of the company.’ Vera opened the book at random and shut it again. ‘It’s working, which is the most annoying part.’

The fifth chair was taken at a quarter past two by Mrs Hargreaves, who had arrived at Larkspur House last June in a temper and had not yet entirely unpacked it. At sixty-six she had short grey hair and the forearms of a woman who had lifted heavier loads than letters. She lived in Flat 12 on the first floor, which had been Sylvia Marsh’s flat. On her first day she had been told this by Mrs Pettigrew, in a whisper that could have carried to Stroud, and had said, ‘Well, I hope she was tidy,’ and then gone quietly to her bedroom and sat down for a while. Iris had liked her from then on. She had been careful not to say so.

Mrs Hargreaves did not play bridge. She played cribbage, with Harold, on a board he had made her for Christmas out of a piece of old oak from the stable yard, and she beat him more often than he let anyone see. As far as she was concerned, she was not a member of the letter-writing circle. She had said so, often, most recently last Tuesday.

‘I’m not in your club,’ she said now, sitting down. ‘I like the table.’

‘Nobody has asked you to be in anything,’ Cecil said.

‘Good. Keep it that way.’ She took out a pad of blue airmail paper and a pen that said GLOUCESTERSHIRE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST down the side, and began a letter to her daughter in Toronto. Her first name was Lorraine. Iris knew this because she had seen it on an envelope. She had not yet been invited to use it, and she had once, in the course of a very good cause, invented an entire firm of Cheltenham solicitors under the same surname. Neither fact could be raised gracefully.

❦

A year ago, none of them had been sitting at this table.

A year ago Iris had been behind the counter of the post office at Nether Wilmslow, twelve miles away, where she had worked for forty-one years, the last thirty-one of them as postmistress. Then her son had put a brochure on the counter, and in late March she had come to Larkspur House with one van of furniture and a mahogany bureau, and within four days the only resident who had been kind to her was dead in a wicker chair in the orangery.

The death had been certified as heart failure. It had not been heart failure. Sylvia Marsh had found out that the contract every resident signed contained a clause which let the estate keep a whole year’s fees, and sell the flat again, if the resident happened to die before the anniversary of moving in. Four residents over three years had happened to die just in time. Sylvia had done the arithmetic in a school exercise book and posted her proof to a firm of solicitors who no longer existed, and she had been killed before anyone read it.

Four residents of Larkspur House had read it for her. They had met on Tuesdays at two, under the cover of a letter-writing circle, and they had proved it. The clause had killed five people. It had been struck out of every contract in the building last June, in red, and initialled.

Christine Fellowes, who had been the deputy manager, and Graham Aldworth, the solicitor who had drafted the clause, were waiting for their trial. It was listed at Bristol Crown Court for the first of June. In November the Crown Prosecution Service had added a charge of murder to the ones Christine Fellowes already faced. The Cotswold Journal had given it a paragraph: the prosecution would say that Sylvia Marsh had been suffocated in her chair, and Christine Fellowes denied it. Iris had cut the paragraph out and put it in the bureau. She had not read it again.

The estate had been taken in hand by the Charity Commission, which had appointed a board of three non-executive directors and a new firm of solicitors in Cirencester. Nigel Prue was still the manager. He had new letterhead and a darker suit and crossed the entrance hall faster than he used to, like a man who expected to be stopped and asked about the orangery. The new deputy manager, Sarah McAllister, wore flat shoes, carried no clipboard, and had noticed on her first day that the pigeonholes were labelled in a different order from the flats. Iris had resolved in June not to trust her for six months. The six months had run out at Christmas, and Iris had marked the occasion with a card, the first she had ever written to a member of staff. Sarah had pinned it above her desk, where Iris could see it every time she passed.

There was one more item from last June, and it was in the first drawer on the right of the bureau, under the stationery, where Iris kept business that was not finished. It had arrived in her pigeonhole on the same afternoon Mrs Hargreaves arrived at the circle: a plain white envelope, typed, with no return address. She had opened it that evening in Harold’s workshop with her letter knife, because a postmistress does not leave post unopened. Inside was a single typed sheet, unsigned, asking whether she remembered something from her early years at the counter at Nether Wilmslow. It gave no names. It gave no year. Iris had read it twice, put it back in its envelope and put the envelope in the drawer. Of all the letters she had ever received, it was the only one she had not answered. It had been waiting seven months. It was good at waiting.

❦

The other change at Larkspur was across the service yard.

On the second of January, with a ribbon, a man from the district council and a photographer from the Cotswold Journal, the estate had opened the Mews. Built on the old stable yard behind the house, it was a single-storey horseshoe of honey stone and new glass around a courtyard garden, with twelve suites for residents who needed more help than a flat could give them. It had been planned before the scandal, to make money. The new board had finished it to make amends, and had brought in an outside company to run it, and had written its good intentions into the contract in such large letters that you could read them from the drive.

The company was Candlewick Care Partners. Their leaflets were lilac and used the phrase person-centred eleven times. Their promise to the board, printed on every leaflet, was the reform the chair was proudest of, and she had given it a name: the Larkspur Standard. Two carers on duty in the Mews every night. Every night, without exception. Never again one tired pair of hands between the residents and the dark.

‘Two on nights,’ Mrs Hargreaves said, when Vera read the leaflet aloud. ‘They said that at the Royal for thirty-one years.’

‘And?’

‘And I worked there thirty-one years.’

Tom Marsh came in at twenty to three with a tin of shortbread from a bakery in Clifton and snow on his shoulders from the car park. He was twenty-six, Sylvia’s grandson, and he drove over from Bristol most Tuesdays, sat in on the circle, brought better biscuits than Nigel had ever authorised, and wrote nothing at all. What he came for, he said, was the company. Iris believed him about half of the time. The other half, she thought he came because his grandmother had sat at tables like this one, and this was the nearest he could get to visiting her.

‘The bursary’s gone to a girl who wants a cello,’ he told them. ‘The school rang last week. Nine years old. She wrote Gran a thank-you letter. The head teacher had to explain.’

‘What did the child say?’ Cecil asked.

‘She said she’d write it anyway.’

Cecil took off his spectacles and polished them on his handkerchief, and put them back on, and returned to his letter about the ukulele without comment.

❦

Sol came at a quarter to three, as she did most Tuesdays, on her break.

She came through the common room door fast and then slowed down, like a woman who had been on her feet since eight and had decided that nobody in this room was going to see her hurry. Small and quick, forty-seven, she had her black hair pinned up and a biro stuck through the knot. She wore the plum tunic that all the Candlewick carers wore, with the navy piping of a senior carer, a fob watch pinned upside down on her chest, and a pocket notebook buttoned into her left breast pocket, which gave her a slight lopsidedness that she carried as if it were deliberate.

She went to the fireplace before she came to the table and held her hands out to it, turning them over.

‘Cold hands,’ she said to the room. ‘Nobody wants cold hands.’

Iris had been at the other end of those hands for a fortnight in November. Marisol Bautista, whom everybody called Sol, had been the carer Candlewick sent twice a day for Iris’s first two weeks home from hospital, and she had warmed her hands under the hot tap every single time before she touched a stocking or a dressing, and when Iris had asked why, she had said, ‘Because it’s your leg, Mrs Iris, not mine.’ She had also made Iris do every one of her exercises, twice a day, with a smiling persistence that Iris had last encountered in a Royal Mail regional inspector. No cheating, Mrs Iris. Iris had not cheated. Nobody had ever caught her trying.

‘You’re walking without the stick,’ Sol said now, at the table, pleased and accusing at once.

‘It’s by the door.’

‘Where it can’t help you.’

‘Where it can’t trip anyone up.’

Sol laughed and sat down in the space Harold made for her without looking up from the alarm clock. Iris took out the envelope she had brought.

In it were the special stamps. Sol’s son Miguel, whom she called Migo, was twelve years old and lived with his grandmother in San Fernando, in the Philippines, seven thousand miles from the Mews, and he collected British stamps. Not the ordinary ones with the King’s head on them, which he considered dull and which Sol used for everything else, but the special issues, the ones Royal Mail printed a few times a year with pictures. Sol sent him a picture postcard every week, and the stamps on the postcard were his real present, and Iris had found out about this in November and been unable to leave it alone. She had bought, from the post office in Bourton, the last strip of the Christmas specials, which had robins on them, and a set from the autumn with lighthouses.