Tirra Lirra by the River Read Free

stuck in your mind. A tree or something.’
    ‘Yes,’ I say. There is no need for him to go on. Things are turning out so badly that I am filled again with my perverse contentment.
    ‘Something that died.’
    Naturally! If it were a source of delight it
would
have died! Nodding and smiling, I turn back into the room and look about me in the clearer light. On one of the little leggy tables stands a vase of yellow daisies. The vase is too big for them, and they have slipped down to water level with their poor little faces upraised, like drowning people crying for help. But all the same, someone has taken the trouble to put them there.
    I touch the vase. ‘What pretty flowers.’
    ‘The wife put them there.’
    ‘How kind. Do thank her.’
    ‘I will, Mrs Roche. Sorry, Porteous. It’s that I’m so used to hearing you called Nora Roche. Grace, now, Grace was Grace Chiddy because she went on living here after she was married. But you, round here you still go by your maiden name.’
    I have shut my eyes out of sheer weariness, and in one of my sudden severances of attention (accompanied as usual by an expansion in the head) I find myself earnestly pondering the derivation of the term ‘maiden name’. ‘The name,’ I want to say to someone, ‘I had when I was a maiden.’ I very nearly whisper the words. I open my eyes in fright. Did I in fact whisper them?
    No. The man’s face is unchanged.
    All the same, unless I have a warm bath very soon, and lie down, something regrettable is bound to happen. I take off my hat.
    ‘Well,’ I say, ‘thank you very much.’ And in lieu of his name I add, ‘for everything.’
    ‘No trouble. No trouble at all. What kind of a job do you reckon they made of the cleaning?’
    ‘Very good.’
    ‘It was one of those cleaning teams did it.’ He bends with his hands on his knees and looks at the legs of a chair. ‘Bit of dust there. But generally speaking, they didn’t make too bad a fist of it. Not too bad at all. Peter rang, you know. He rang STD and asked me to get one of those professional teams in. So I did.’
    Peter is Peter Chiddy, my nephew in Sydney. I wish I could recall the name of this man, but I am too tired, and too ashamed of my discourtesy in having forgotten it, to ask him to repeat it. I don’t even know why he met me at the railway station. In the meantime I shall just have to assume that all these services were arranged by my nephew. I can’t be bothered reconciling them with his written instructions (lost) to take a taxi to such and such a number in the old street, where I would find this good neighbour (named in the lost instructions) who had the keys, and would let me in.
    Now he is saying, ‘Oh, and before I forget, the wife thought, the wife said, would you like to come along tonight, and have a bite to eat with us?’
    I manage to smile. ‘So kind, and do thank her. But I’m much too tired.’
    ‘Fair enough. She thought you might be. So she left a bit of tucker in the kitchen, just in case. And she said she’ll be along in the morning to say hello.’
    ‘That will be lovely. And now, what I would like most in the world is a big warm bath.’
    ‘Fair enough. I’ll just get that airlines bag, and those books and things, then I’ll push off.’
    ‘Thank you, Mr …’ And now I am forced to say, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’
    ‘Cust.’
    ‘Cust. Well, thank you, Mr Cust.’
    But now he says, ‘You don’t remember me, do you, Mrs Porteous?’
    I shake my head.
    ‘You don’t remember the Custs at all?’ he asks incredulously. ‘The Custs, in the corner house, the big white one, with the poinciana trees?’
    And now, remembering, I look fixedly at the wall beyond his head. ‘There were some Custs,’ I say with difficulty, like a medium at a séance, ‘who had the newsagency.’
    ‘That’s me! That’s us!’ Then he says, ‘Or was.’
    Still in my trance, I say, ‘I worked there for a few months.’
    ‘Right. I