No-one would claim that Princess Row was the best street in town. Situated as it was between Queen=s Road up the hill to the west, Marlborough
Place down the hill to the east, Trafalgar Street to the north and,
paradoxically, North Road to the south (towards the sea), it was in the heart
of what had become known as the North Laine.
North Laine lacked the feeling of spaciousness one had in, say, Dyke
Road Avenue, and it had none of the grandeur of the Regency terraces and
squares of Kemp Town in their uniform of cream rendering with shiny black doors
and Juliet balconies. But despite these
shortcomings, or maybe because of them, it had developed into the arty, some
would say bohemian part of Brighton with its specialist shops and funny little
back alleys known as twittens.
And if no-one would claim Princess Row as the
best street in town, likewise no-one would claim number 2 as the best house in
Princess Row. It was virtually
indistinguishable from its neighbours, number 1 on the left and number 3 on the
right. Of course, mused its current owner
and sole occupier, whether number 1 was on the left and number 3 on the right
or vice versa depended entirely upon one’s point of view. If one stood in the street and looked towards
the houses, number 3 was on the left. On
the other hand, if one stood in the house and looked towards the street, number
3 was on the right.
This was a deeply philosophical thought for Tom
Finch. Tom was not a man given to much
philosophical thought, or indeed much thought of any sort. Ask any person to describe the average man
and the description would fit Tom to a T.
He was fifty-something, maybe getting on for sixty, of average height
and average build. His hair, which was
starting to thin a little on the top, was a mid-brown, and his eyes were an
indeterminate colour, sometimes grey, sometimes blue, sometimes even seeming to
be almost but not quite brown. All in
all, one would find it difficult to pick him out in a crowd.
Tom had lived at 2 Princess Row all his
life. Well, nearly all his life, he
would say. The first week of his life
had been spent in the old maternity hospital in Buckingham Place, but after his
mother had been discharged and had proudly brought him back to Princess Row, he
had lived nowhere else. If he thought
about it, which he never did, he would realise that he had no wish to live
anywhere else. Princess Row suited him
very well. What need did he have of more
than two bedrooms, a front room and a kitchen?
Most people would find it inconvenient to have the bathroom situated on
the ground floor beyond the kitchen, but this didn’t bother Tom at all; he was
used to it, and had been for all his fifty-something years. If he cast his mind back, he had vague
memories of baths with a clockwork submarine, and his mother wrapping him in a
large towel before he could get cold. In
his memory, the towel was always blue, but then again, it might have been
green.
His mother had always been very proud of
Tom. At least, she had always said she
was, although she often felt there was something niggling away at the back of
her mind telling her that her pride was possibly just a little misplaced. She had felt, when reading Tom=s school reports, that he could have done
better if only he could have been bothered to use his mind. She had felt, when he received the very
mediocre results of his last school examinations, that those results could have
been better. She had felt, when he found
a job as a caretaker at the Polytechnic, that perhaps, if she had encouraged
him to use his mind a little more while at school, he could have done better
for himself.
But Tom was, if not happy, at least not unhappy
with his life as it was. To tell the
truth, he never bothered wondering if he was happy or not. Life was as it was and there was no point
bothering about whether one was happy or unhappy. He rose at six o=clock every morning, drank a cup of tea and
walked down the hill to St. Peter=s church, buying his daily paper on the
way. He had always read the Daily
Mirror because that was the paper his father had bought, and which his
mother had continued to buy after her husband=s
death. As he had done now for almost
forty years, at St. Peter=s he caught a bus along the Lewes Road to the
University of Brighton, which had been the Poly until its promotion. Here he performed his duties methodically,
even conscientiously, but never imaginatively.
Tom was not blessed, or cursed, with much imagination.
That was not something that could be said about
his next-door neighbour. On the same
Sunday afternoon that Tom stood idly gazing out of his window and had his
deeply philosophical thought about whether 3 Princess Row was to the left or
right of number 2, his neighbour at number 3 was thinking about him. Irena Kastelevich was not her real name,
although nobody living in Princess Row was aware of that. Some might have assumed this to be the case,
since it was unusual, to say the least, for somebody with such an exotic name
to speak with an accent that was not quite Lancashire and not quite
Birmingham. Fifty-eight years earlier,
Irena Kastelevich had been born in the Cheshire town of Nantwich, in whose
Saint Mary=s church she had been baptised Mavis Muriel,
the family name being Oldthorpe. It was
not long after starting school that Mavis Muriel Oldthorpe developed an intense
dislike of her name, all three parts of it.
Even in those days, Mavis and Muriel were distinctly unfashionable
names, and as for Oldthorpe, well, the less said the better.
Irena could only just about recall how she
started in the fortune-telling business.
Her early ambition was to be an actress, the chief attraction of the
career being that it would give her every opportunity to change her name. After all, whoever heard of a name like Mavis
Muriel Oldthorpe being up in lights in the West End of London? Skegness Pier, maybe, but the West End? Never!
Unfortunately, although Mavis was not lacking in self-confidence, she
did not have the ability to take even Skegness by storm, let alone the West
End. Somehow she had just seemed to
drift into reading tea leaves and gazing into a crystal ball before taking up
fortune-telling as a full-time occupation.
But telling fortunes did give her a chance to lose the Mavis and the
Muriel and even the Oldthorpe.
Fifteen years before, Irena had been working in
the resort of Great Yarmouth, having steadily worked her way southwards down
the east coast, when she spotted an advertisement in a trade magazine. The resident fortune teller on Brighton=s Palace Pier was offering her concession for
sale. Like so many others before her,
Irena had a vision of Brighton as a glorious, cosmopolitan town with a somewhat
racy, perhaps even seedy, reputation.
She wasted no time in responding to the advertisement, and the very next
season the Palace Pier was the working home of Irena Kastelevich, the Hungarian
gypsy. It didn’t strike her as odd that
a Hungarian gypsy should speak English with a Cheshire accent, or that her hair
should be a bright ginger, even though this latter owed more to the supermarket
shelf than it did to nature. After a few
years she even managed to persuade the local paper to pay her for a weekly
horoscope column, not that she knew anything about astrology. The editor would have been horrified if he
had ever discovered that Irena was simply copying the previous week=s horoscope from the Carlisle weekly paper for
which she had a special order with a friendly newsagent.
Irena=s thoughts had not been about Tom at first. She was standing behind her net curtains idly
looking at the house across the street and wishing that she could persuade her
landlord to paint the exterior of her house in similar way to number 72, the
house opposite. It was owned by a couple
called Carstairs who spent Monday to Friday each week in London, driving down
to Brighton early on Friday evening.
Their house was painted a pale lilac, and the door and window frames
gleamed white. She thought that, if only
she owned her house instead of renting it, she would paint it primrose yellow
with royal blue woodwork.
It was from this point that her thoughts
drifted to her next-door neighbour, Tom.
He owned number 2, and Irena couldn’t work out if she was irritated by
Tom=s refusal to paint his house or if she was
envious of him because he could have done so had he wished.
She shook herself and went to put the kettle
on.
While the kettle boiled and the tea brewed B Irena was a stickler for a four-minute brew
and always used loose tea, never tea bags B she turned to considering her future. She had already decided that the forthcoming
season would be her last on the pier. >After all,= she said to herself, >an actress can’t go on repeating the same lines
from the same play on the same stage every night for years on end without
becoming stale.= And she
was an actress, wasn=t she?
Well, a sort of actress, anyway.
Either way, she knew that the time was approaching when she would need a
change.
But if she stopped working, there would be the
problem of paying the rent. During her
early working life she had travelled the country with a funfair, and after that
there was nowhere she had stayed long enough to put down roots until she came
to Brighton. Even if she had stayed
anywhere long enough, there would have been no chance of buying a house. Her income had always been seasonal and on
more than one occasion in the winter months she had been reduced to living
pretty much on the breadline before Easter.
Her financial situation was less precarious now, especially with the
weekly newspaper column, but no-one could justly accuse her of being wealthy.
Tom, on the other hand, must have money. He owned his house and she couldn’t see that
he spent much of his wages, so he must have some savings, which was more than
Irena had. So what if his wasn=t the most sparkling personality in town? At least he was steady and dependable, which
was more than she could say for that Guy Carstairs at number 72. It would be Christmas in a few days. Perhaps she should invite Tom round for
lunch.
Irena liked to claim that she wasn=t one to let the grass grow under her feet, so
as soon as she had drunk her second cup of tea, she put on her coat and went
next door. The bell still wasn=t working.
>When will be get round to buying a new battery?= she wondered.
>It must be nearly six months now since that
bell was working.= She
rapped on the door with her knuckles.
>What number is your house?= asked Tom as he stepped back to let her in.
>Number 3, of course,= replied Irena, puzzled.
>And what=s the number of the house opposite?=
Where on earth could this be leading? >That=s number 72.=
>So if you add those together, what number do
you get?=
>75?=
>You=ve got it!=
>Have I?
What have I got?= Irena
was beginning to get slightly alarmed.
Maybe this wasn=t such a good idea after all.
>My house is number 2, and the house opposite is
73, and that makes 75. It’s the same all
the way down the street B if you add up the numbers of the houses
opposite each other, they all come to 75.
Do you know, I=ve lived in this house all my life and I=ve never noticed that before.=
Irena decided to ignore this. >Now,= she asked in business-like tones, >what are you doing for Christmas?=
The change of subject took Tom by surprise.
>I hadn=t thought.
I suppose I=ll buy a couple of drumsticks like I usually
do.=
>How about having lunch with me this year? I=ll get a small bird and do some roast potatoes
and all the trimmings. You can get the
wine. White, I should think. I like a sweetish one. I’m sure Mr Malik at the shop in Trafalgar
Street will have something suitable.
Come round just before one.=
There really was not much Tom could do in the
face of this onslaught. He just stood
there as Irena bustled out, his mouth opening and closing.
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