‘Don’t worry,’ she says quickly before he can reply. ‘We’re going to stay there overnight.’
Asante tries to keep the relief out of his voice. He loves his parents and – rarer – he admires them, but he really doesn’t want them staying here. If she’d pushed it, he’d have said he hasn’t got round to buying a spare bed (which also happens to be true), but he’s grateful, not for the first time, for his mother’s ability to work these things out for herself.
‘There are plenty of undergraduate rooms available,’ she’s saying now. ‘We may not have had gargoyles or boys, but one thing EL always did have was space.’
‘How about The Perch?’ he says. ‘For lunch? Dad’s always liked it there.’
‘Perfect,’ she says. ‘Though we’d better book – it’s bound to be packed in this weather. Especially at the weekend.’
‘OK, I’ll sort that out. Leave it with me.’
‘We’re so looking forward to seeing your new place, Anthony – are you sure you don’t want us to bring anything? We’ve loads of spare furniture – the loft is practically bursting –’
Asante smiles, but not unkindly. Anything that suits his parents’ stucco-fronted Holland Park town house is really not going to fit in here.
‘It’s fine, Mum, I really don’t need anything.’
He finishes the call and wanders through to the kitchen, where the side of the castle mound rises cliff-like only a few feet from the window. His neighbour’s black-and-white cat is halfway up the path, prowling for mice. He has one eye and extravagant moustaches, making him look dashingly piratical. The Mound is one of the main reasons Asante bought the place. For some people, the main attraction would have been the bars and coffee shops of the now-chic prison quarter only a few hundred yards away; for others, the five-minute walk from the station. But Asante likes the sheer improbability of the Mound, a thousand-year-old man-made hillock right in the heart of the city. He likes the old brewery and the converted malthouse, and he likes the evocative street names – Paradise Street, Quaking Bridge, Beef Lane. There was a horse hospital round here, in the nineteenth century, and a marmalade factory in the twentieth. The place is not very well known, eclectic and unexpected; rather like Asante himself.
He pours himself a glass of water and pushes the kitchen window open a little further. They do Shakespeare productions in the castle courtyard in the summer, and he can see the edge of the stage and the steps where the audience sit. He’s been to a couple of productions now, including a Henry V with only four actors that hadn’t sounded very promising but turned out to be a wonder. At night, when it’s quieter and the trees at the top are flood-lit, he can sit on his balcony and listen to the entire show. It was Titus Andronicus last night. Not a play he knew, but the gaggle of schoolkids were clearly lapping it up. Cannibalism, revenge and rape – what’s not to like, if you’re fifteen.
* * *
Ten miles away as the crow flies, Ev is getting in a quick early visit to her dad. He’s only been in the care home for a couple of months and it’s taken time to get him used to the place, never mind accept it. She’d been almost as reluctant to agree to it as he was, but after a fall that nearly left him with a broken hip she knew she no longer had a choice. The doctor said so, the manager of the home said so, even Fawley said so. But none of that makes her father’s reproachful stare any easier to take, or his simmering self-pity any easier to hear.
She’s visited every weekend since, but this is the first time when they haven’t had the heating on. Every mobile resident is outside in the garden, which Ev hasn’t ventured into before and turns out to be much nicer than she’d expected. Beds of roses, marigolds, petunias – the sort of flowers her father’s generation grew up with. But, of course, he still found something to criticize (‘the gardener’s one of those greenies, but he won’t get rid of blackfly like that with bloody Fairy Liquid’). Still, at least he had a bit of colour in his cheeks when she helped him back into his armchair. And then there was tea and soggy garibaldis, and more daytime TV with its demoralizing adverts for funeral plans and denture fixative and, that euphemism of the decade, ‘sensitive bladder’. Ev is uncomfortably aware that the same sort of advertising has started turning up on her Facebook feed – just how old do those people think she is? By half past ten she’s had enough, and decides she’s earned a decent coffee in the peace and quiet of her own sitting room. She gets to her feet, mumbling something about feeding Hector, only for her father to bark out that his only daughter ‘cares more about her bloody cat than she does about me’ at foghorn volume. A couple of other visitors turn to stare as she leaves, but one gives her a sympathetic look that says, Don’t worry, I’ve been there.
She’s picking up speed as she crosses the lobby, the open front door already in sight, when she hears her name.
‘Miss Everett?’
She turns. It’s Elaine Baylis, the manager. Ev’s heart sinks. Another half-hour between her and that coffee. And that’s at best.
‘I thought it was you – could I have a quick word?’ Baylis must have seen the look on Ev’s face because her own hardens a little. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t keep you long.’
Baylis can’t be much older than Ev, but the combination of a studiously dreary wardrobe and a sanctimonious professional manner gives her the aura of
