On Monday morning three men arrived with stepladders, dust sheets and enough masking tape to suggest the ground floor was being prepared for major surgery. By lunchtime, the corridor between reception and the lounge smelled of fresh paint, six doors carried WET PAINT notices, and the shortest route to the dining room had been sealed off with red-and-white tape.
Mr Patel assured us the disruption would be minimal.
At Oakmere, minimal disruption meant that whatever normally took five minutes would take fifteen, and somebody would eventually move a chair.
The first chair belonged to Margaret Ellis. It stood outside her flat every afternoon so that she could sit by the window at the end of the corridor and watch for Trevor, to whom she'd been engaged since 1963. On Monday, it was moved about eight feet to let a decorator paint the skirting board. Margaret found it within fifteen minutes and moved it back. The decorator moved it again, and by teatime, the chair had crossed the corridor four times, and neither participant had met the other.
Arthur had difficulty with the tape. He understood that the corridor was closed but couldn't remember which side of the barrier he was supposed to be on. Twice, Shanice retrieved him from amongst the dust sheets, and on the third occasion one of the decorators caught him looking at an uncapped tin of paint. "You're not supposed to be in here, mate."
Arthur nodded. "I know."
"Why did you come through, then?"
Arthur looked behind him at the tape. "Did I come through?"
The decorator let him out.
I liked the smell of the fresh paint. It reminded me of moving house, although after eighteen months at Oakmere I’d learned not to say things like that aloud. People had a habit of asking whether I was thinking of leaving, then about assessments, support packages, and whether I'd discussed it with my family. I wasn't thinking of leaving. I just liked the smell of paint, so I kept it to myself.
By Tuesday, plastic sheeting covered part of the lift entrance, two artificial plants had disappeared from reception, and a man called Darren had become sufficiently established in the dining room that Doreen asked whether he wanted his usual.
The decorators were remarkably cheerful considering they were trying to paint a building containing ninety-one people who regarded every closed corridor as a personal challenge.
By Wednesday morning, the decorators had reached Willow Walk, and the leg had reached my flat.
Mr Patel had decided that a prosthetic limb protruding from a cardboard box behind reception wasn't the impression Oakmere wanted for prospective residents, so it had been returned to Number 30, where the courier had apparently intended it to go.
I had a fairly good idea who it belonged to. Lorna had lost a leg, which reduced the field of likely owners considerably, so I'd sent her a photograph with the message IS THIS YOURS? She hadn't replied. That was two days ago, so the leg now stood beside my desk, wrapped in white packing material, while I tried not to think about why my former wife could mislay an artificial limb and remain unavailable for comment. At half past ten, I went downstairs for coffee.
When I returned, there was a cat on my bed. I didn't own a cat, but this one appeared unaware of that. He was large, elderly and mostly black, though age had introduced grey around his face and ears. He lay across the bottom of my duvet, spread out like an animal who felt he had full access to the accommodation and was considering increasing his share.
"Hello," I said.
The cat opened one eye.
"How did you get in?"
He closed it again.
My door had been shut when I left, but I'd lived at Oakmere long enough to know that this didn't mean anything. Every flat had a spare key in a tiny wall safe outside the door. Staff knew the number for emergencies, which meant that, over the years, a lot of people had learned everyone else's. Arthur once spent ten minutes in my bathroom before realising he lived on another floor.
I went closer, and that was when I noticed the slipper, lying beside the cat's front paws. Blue, quilted and considerably too small for me. Then I noticed a woollen glove beneath the chair. I looked at the cat, and he opened his eyes again.
"Are those yours?" I asked. His expression suggested that ownership was a concept for people far below his intellect. I picked up the slipper.
The cat stretched, sniffed the slipper in my hand and looked faintly disdainful that I might want it. Then, without any apparent urgency, he jumped from the bed and walked towards my open door.
"Hang on." He didn't, so I followed him into the corridor carrying the slipper and the glove. He made it approximately twenty yards before forgetting whatever he'd intended to do and settled himself on the windowsill.
That was where Irene Fletcher found us. "Monty."
The cat didn't move.
Irene did. She was small, somewhere between eighty-five and ninety, with soft white hair and the slightly stooped posture of someone who had spent much of her life leaning over things. I'd seen her hundreds of times: at breakfast; in the lounge; waiting for the lift. She lived somewhere along Willow Walk, though until that moment I couldn't have told you which door was hers.
She looked at the slipper and glove I was holding. "Oh, bugger."
"Is he yours?"
"Unfortunately."
"He was asleep on my bed."
"Yes, he does that."
"He had this." I held up the slipper.
"He's a thief. Likes warm things."
"Warm things?"
"Things people have just taken off. Slippers, gloves, scarves. Once they go cold, he loses interest."
As Irene picked him up, I remembered the lost-property basket that had sat beside reception for several weeks, containing a single slipper nobody had claimed, a television remote and a pair of spectacles.
Then I remembered the bra, an enormous beige construction labelled 50H which I'd examined only closely enough to establish that bras apparently reached dimensions I'd previously associated with television screens. “Only warm things? Recently worn?”
“Usually.”
I looked at Monty.
Monty looked at me.
Until that moment, I'd regarded him as a rather elderly cat with poor impulse control. I began to reassess him.
Irene lived four doors away. For eighteen months I'd passed her flat several times a day and accumulated enough familiarity to say good morning whenever we met, but I hadn't known her name until five minutes earlier.
I offered to return the slipper and glove, but Irene said there was little point. Margaret's slipper was apparently on its third journey that week, and she would put them both outside reception for Oakmere's established systems to deal with.
Monty remained in her arms as far as Number 26, then dropped to the floor and disappeared through the open door before either of us reached it. "Coffee?" she called out.
I nearly said no. At Oakmere, accepting a cup of coffee could turn into a significant commitment. Bernard once trapped me for forty minutes with a council-tax complaint that had begun in 1997. But I'd spent eighteen months saying good morning to Irene Fletcher without knowing anything about her. Now I'd discovered that she owned a cat with an unhealthy interest in recently removed clothing. That seemed a poor basis for continuing the relationship.
"Go on, then," I said, surprising myself.
Her flat was the same shape as mine but felt entirely different. Mine contained too much of the life Lorna and I had brought to Oakmere, along with several possessions she'd since decided I could keep. Irene's was quieter. Books, plants, framed photographs, and an old wooden sewing box sat beside the armchair. Nothing matched particularly well, but everything looked as though it had been there long enough to earn its place. Monty was already asleep on the sofa.
Irene went into the kitchen, so I wandered towards the window. A photograph on the sill showed her perhaps sixty years younger, standing beside a tall dark-haired man in shirtsleeves. They were outside somewhere, both squinting into the sun, and he had one arm around her waist while she appeared to be laughing at something beyond the camera. Beside it stood another photograph of the same man many years later, grey-haired and heavier, holding a pint.
I might not have noticed the plasterwork if Monty hadn't chosen that moment to stretch.
It hung on the wall above him, a circular piece perhaps eighteen inches across, white against the pale green paint. At first, I assumed it was some kind of reproduction, bought from a stately-home gift shop or one of those places where everything has been distressed before you purchase it. Then I moved closer.
The flowers weren't quite right.
Not badly made. The opposite. They were too convincing to be decorative flowers. One petal curled backwards while another folded underneath itself. A leaf had a slight twist, showing its underside, and the two main flowers were similar without being identical. Whoever had made them seemed to have understood that plants were under no obligation to arrange themselves neatly for human beings.
Irene returned with the coffee and found me looking at it. "Frank made that."
I glanced towards the photographs. "Your husband?"
She nodded and handed me a mug.
That's how I learned Frank Fletcher had spent most of his working life as an ornamental plasterer. Not the sort who arrived with a bag of finishing plaster and made a bad wall smooth, as Irene was quick to point out, but a modeller and craftsman who restored cornices, ceiling roses, friezes and decorative mouldings in old houses and public buildings. In later years, people called for him when something had been damaged and nobody could work out how the original craftsman had made it.
"He must have been very good."
"He was."
There was no false modesty on Frank's behalf. Irene said it with the same certainty someone uses to state their height.
As Irene talked, I noticed her hands. They had been still around the coffee mug when we'd sat down. Now they were moving. She traced an invisible curve on the table with a finger while explaining how a length of plaster decoration repeated, then shaped both hands around something that hadn't been there when she described the mould Frank would have made. The stoop hadn't disappeared, and she hadn't become younger, but there was suddenly nothing frail about her. She knew exactly what she was talking about.
"Did you go with him to the houses?"
"Sometimes."
I looked at the plasterwork again. There was something odd about the way she'd described it. Frank had made it.
"Who decided what the flowers looked like?"
Irene stopped with her mug halfway to her mouth. Then she put it down. "I did."
Frank, she explained, had been capable of turning almost anything into plaster, but drawing defeated him. He could understand depth, undercuts, moulds and the practical business of making something survive on a ceiling for the next hundred years, yet give him a pencil and ask him to draw a rose, and it came out looking, in Irene's words, "like a cabbage somebody had sat on." So, she drew them.
Not everything. Existing patterns and damaged originals had to be copied exactly, but when a job required something new, the drawings often began with Irene. She said this without suggesting I ought to be impressed.
But I was. "Did people know?"
"Frank did." It wasn't quite an answer, and Irene knew it. She looked towards the photographs on the windowsill. "We were married. It was work. I drew things, he made them. We didn't sit about deciding whose name went underneath." There was no resentment in her voice. If anything, the idea seemed faintly ridiculous to her. Then she pointed towards the plasterwork. "He changed that, though."
I followed her finger to one of the flowers. "Which bit?"
"The rose. He wanted that petal straight." The offending petal curled backwards from the flower, exposing the shape beneath it.
"Why?"
"Because the one opposite was straight. Frank liked things to match."
"And you didn't?"
"I liked flowers." She smiled. Irene drew them from real ones whenever she could, and Frank complained that nature was unnecessarily complicated. Nobody standing twenty feet below a ceiling, he told her, would know whether a petal curled the right way.
Irene had always given him the same answer. "I would."
I looked at the flower again. "So who won?"
She gave me a look. "The bloody petal's still curled, isn't it?" And for the first time since I'd entered the flat, she laughed.
Monty raised his head, decided nothing required stealing, and went back to sleep.
I asked whether she still had any of the drawings.
That changed her more than anything else had. She didn't answer immediately. She looked at me for a few seconds, perhaps deciding whether I was being polite or whether I genuinely wanted to see them. Then she put down her coffee, crossed to a cupboard beside the television and began moving things from the bottom shelf. "Course I've still got them." The first folder she brought out was large, battered and tied with faded green ribbon. She laid it carefully on the table, then went back for another. And another. By the time she'd finished, there were four. "How long have you got?"
I looked at the folders. "How long do I need?"
Irene smiled, and that was the moment I realised I'd asked the right question.
Irene untied the first ribbon carefully, although the folder itself had long since given up any pretence of being precious. One corner was crushed, the cardboard had faded unevenly, and somebody had reinforced the spine with brown parcel tape that was now almost the same colour as the folder. Inside were drawings.
There were dozens of them, some on thick cream paper, others on tracing paper so thin I could see several designs at once until Irene separated them. Flowers, leaves, scrolls and elaborate arrangements of things I couldn't name appeared in pencil, ink and occasionally watercolour. Some were finished carefully enough to frame. Others had measurements scribbled around them, arrows pointing to particular leaves and notes in two different handwritings.
I recognised Irene's almost immediately. It was neat and flowing, with the confidence of someone who knew where a line was going before she started it. Frank's writing was heavier and tended to arrive in capital letters.
Irene turned one sheet towards me.
A spray of leaves curved around three flowers, the largest of them only partly drawn. Across one corner Frank had written:
TOO DEEP FOR MOULD
Underneath, in Irene's handwriting:
THEN MAKE A BETTER MOULD.
I looked at her.
"He did," she said, and smiled. There was considerable satisfaction in that.
Some of the drawings carried building names, but many didn't. A few had dates. Others had nothing except measurements and Frank's instructions, tea stains, fingerprints, and, on one elaborate arrangement of leaves, a shopping list written down the side.
Bread
Milk
Potatoes
Washing powder
Frank's blades
Food for Alfred.
“Who’s Alfred?”
She rubbed her face. “Our cat. Two before Monty.”
"You did these at home?"
"Where else would I do them?"
There had been a drawing board, Irene explained, but it lived at one end of the dining table and surrendered part of its territory at mealtimes. She drew after the washing-up, at weekends and sometimes late into the evening when Frank needed something for the following morning, often while their children did homework at the other end. The work I was holding had been produced while she was raising a family. That seemed more remarkable to me than if Irene had told me she'd created it in a studio.
She found a photograph of one of the finished ceilings. It was black and white, slightly curled at the edges, and showed a room grand enough to make Oakmere's lounge look like a waiting area. The plasterwork travelled around the ceiling in an elaborate border of leaves and flowers before meeting a large centrepiece above a chandelier.
Irene pointed to one corner. "That’s mine."
I couldn't tell which part she meant.
She moved closer, her shoulder almost touching mine, and traced the route without touching the photograph. Once she showed me, I could follow it. A branch curved away from the main pattern, carrying smaller flowers into the corner before disappearing behind another layer of leaves. "Frank hated doing that."
"Why?"
She tried to explain why, then said after a moment, "You haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, have you?"
"Not really."
"Never mind," and she carried on.
I didn't mind either.
By then we'd been sitting together for nearly an hour. Our coffee had gone cold, but Irene didn't seem to notice. Each drawing opened another part of her life. Frank appeared throughout it, sometimes brilliant, sometimes stubborn, occasionally infuriating. He could reproduce a damaged leaf from a fragment no bigger than a thumbnail but apparently couldn't put his socks in the laundry basket.
"He was a perfectionist?"
"God, no. He was a miserable bugger." She smiled as she said it. The man in the photographs was becoming clearer. So was Irene.
I'd thought, when she first opened the folders, that I was looking at things she remembered. Gradually I realised that wasn't quite what was happening. She was remembering them as we went. A name she couldn't recall arrived halfway through another story; a tiny pencil mark brought back an argument with Frank from more than fifty years earlier.
At one point she stopped talking altogether. She was holding a drawing of a single rose.
It wasn't particularly elaborate compared with some of the others. There were no scrolls or borders, just the flower itself, viewed slightly from one side. Several petals were open, one folded underneath and another curled backwards.
I recognised it. "That's the one on the wall."
Irene looked over at the plaster piece. "First version."
The paper had yellowed, and a faint circular stain sat near one corner where somebody had once set down a cup.
"Frank still wanted to straighten it?"
"Till the day he made the mould."
"Why didn't you let him?"
She considered that for a moment. "Because I'd drawn what was there." Irene touched the edge of the paper. "People think flowers are symmetrical because they don't look at them properly. They're not. Something's always been eaten, or bent, or didn't open properly. That's what makes one different from another." She looked at the plaster rose above the sofa. "Frank wanted a perfect flower."
"And you didn't."
"I wanted that one."
There wasn't anything to add to that.
Monty eventually ended the afternoon by waking, stretching and walking across the drawings.
Irene moved faster than I'd seen her move all day. "Get your bloody paws off those."
Monty was lifted bodily from the table and deposited on the carpet. He looked genuinely affronted, as he’d been under the impression that everything in the flat belonged to him.
I helped Irene put the drawings away.
She retied the faded ribbons and returned three folders to the cupboard but kept the first one out. "You can come back and see the others if you want."
"I'd like that."
She nodded as though we'd made an entirely ordinary arrangement.
When I reached the door, she called after me. "Colin."
I turned.
"Thanks for asking."
I wasn't sure whether she meant about the drawings, Frank, or the curled petal. Perhaps she wasn't sure either.
Outside, Willow Walk still smelled of fresh paint, and Arthur was once again standing on the wrong side of the red-and-white tape.
Nothing at Oakmere had changed while I'd been inside Number 26. But Irene Fletcher had. At least to me.
By Friday they'd finished most of the corridors and moved into the lounge, where the disruption was becoming harder to describe as minimal. Half the lounge furniture had migrated into the dining room, and the television had been disconnected, causing three residents who normally complained that it was too loud to complain that it wasn't on. Darren had acquired an audience of his own, but seemed remarkably tolerant of people watching him work.
I was returning from lunch when Irene came out of the lift. She was carrying Monty at arm's length. There was paint on him. A broad streak of pale green ran along one side of his back, with another smaller patch above his tail. One black front paw was now white. Irene looked furious. Monty looked magnificent.
"What happened?"
"Little sod's been somewhere he shouldn't."
This didn't narrow it down.
She put him on the floor and examined the white paw. The paint appeared to be drying, and Monty immediately tried to lick it. "Don't!" He tried again, so Irene picked him up.
"Is it paint?" I asked.
"No, Colin. He's changing colour for winter."
I’d asked for that.
We found Darren kneeling beside an open tin of pale green emulsion. He took one look at Monty and identified the streak along his back as Oakmere's newly painted lounge doorway.
"That's all right. I'll touch it in."
Irene turned Monty around. "What about the white?"
Darren examined his paw. "Not ours. We finished with the white two days ago."
Darren knew where the white might have come from. A specialist plasterer had arrived that morning to repair some damaged ornamental moulding above an old doorway beyond the lounge.
"He's down there now," he said, pointing along the corridor.
I looked at Irene.
Something had changed in her face. "Ornamental plaster?"
Darren shrugged. "Flowers and stuff."
Irene handed me Monty and started walking.
The taped-off doorway led into a small room I'd always assumed was storage. With the furniture removed, I could see it had once been part of something larger. The ceiling was higher than the corridor outside, and around its edge ran a decorative plaster border I'd probably passed a hundred times without noticing. Leaves curled around small flowers before disappearing beneath decades of white paint. Above the doorway, a section perhaps two feet long had been exposed. Part of the pattern was missing.
A man stood on a low platform beneath it, wearing work trousers and a grey sweatshirt dusted white across the chest. On a folding table beside him were tools, several small pieces of plaster and an open book. Irene stopped just inside the room.
The man looked down. "You all right, love?"
"My cat's been in here."
He looked at Monty, who was still hanging from my arms with one white paw. "Ah, yes. He was."
Apparently, Monty had stepped onto a board carrying some wet plaster before investigating the man's lunch.
"Did he damage anything?" Irene asked.
"No. Nearly had my ham sandwich, though."
Monty shifted in my arms.
The man climbed down and took the board away before Monty could reconsider visiting it again. On the table were tiny modelling tools, brushes, pieces of rubber mould and several fragments of the damaged decoration laid out in order.
Irene had stopped looking at Monty. She was looking at the ceiling, frowning. "That's not original," she said.
The plasterer glanced up. "Yes, most of it is."
"Not that leaf."
He followed her gaze, then he smiled. "No. That's a later repair."
"Bad one."
His eyebrows lifted. "Very." That seemed to settle something between them.
I put Monty down before my arms gave way. He immediately sat on my foot.
Irene moved closer. "How are you doing the flowers?"
It was not the sort of question I'd have known to ask. He showed her, and within minutes they were discussing moulds, surviving fragments and how much of the missing pattern could safely be reconstructed. Irene disagreed with him about one leaf, changed her mind when he showed her the fragment, then asked what he intended to use for the missing flower.
The plasterer pointed to the open book. "Probably something like that."
Irene looked down. Then she stopped. I was standing behind her, so I couldn't see the page at first. I only saw her hand go to the edge of the table. The book was large and old enough to have been consulted by more than one generation of craftsmen. Across the two open pages were photographs of ornamental plasterwork from different buildings. Some showed complete ceilings. Others concentrated on individual details: leaves, fruit, scrolls, flowers. One photograph bore a slip of paper. It showed a rose, with several petals open. One folded underneath, and another curled backwards. I recognised it before I recognised the name printed beneath the photograph.
F. FLETCHER.
I looked at Irene. She was staring at the page, though the plasterer hadn't noticed.
"I like that one," he said. "Most of the examples are too perfect."
Irene touched the photograph with one finger. "Are they?"
"Too symmetrical. They look manufactured. This one's got something about it." He pointed to the curled petal. "Especially that."
Irene stared at the photograph for several seconds. "Frank didn't design that." She tapped the name beneath the photograph. "Frank Fletcher was my husband."
The plasterer glanced at the book again. "Did you work with him?"
"I was the one who designed it."
That made him look at her properly. I had half expected surprise, perhaps even the kind of exaggerated admiration people sometimes produce when an elderly person reveals that they once did something more interesting than become elderly. Instead, he turned the book around and studied the photograph again. "You drew the flower?"
"Yes."
"From something?"
"A rose."
He nodded, still studying the photograph. "How did Frank mould that curl?"
Irene moved closer. She asked how he intended to mould the replacement, listened to his answer and told him it wouldn't work.
Instead of taking offence, he asked why.
Within thirty seconds they'd lost me. They talked about undercuts and dividing lines until Irene took something from his toolbox and showed him where the problem would be. He disagreed, so she showed him again, and this time he went quiet.
"All right," he said. "I see it."
There was something rather pleasing about being unnecessary. Irene didn't need me to explain who she was or what she'd done, and the plasterer didn't need persuading that she knew what she was talking about. Five minutes earlier they had been strangers. Now they were leaning over the same table discussing how to persuade a plaster petal to come out of a mould without losing its edge.
Eventually he returned to the photograph. "I've been looking through these for something I could adapt. Most of them aren't right for what's up there." He pointed towards the damaged moulding, then back to Irene's flower. "This one is."
"Why?"
"Because it looks as though it grew that way."
Irene looked at him.
I remembered what she'd told me the previous afternoon. People thought flowers were symmetrical because they didn't look closely.
The plasterer had looked.
"Frank wanted that petal straight," I said.
Irene glanced at me. "Frank was wrong."
The plasterer smiled. "Good."
Irene took a pencil from his workbench, turned over a piece of scrap paper and began to draw. The plasterer leaned closer as a series of curves and dividing lines appeared, asked another question, and Irene added something I didn't understand.
By the time she finally put the pencil down, there was plaster dust on the side of her hand and a small collection of diagrams spread across the table.
The plasterer picked up the last one and studied it. "Can I keep this?"
Irene looked almost puzzled. "What for?"
"So I can make it."
She looked at him for a moment, then at the drawing. "Course you can."
The plasterer looked at the drawing again, then towards the damaged section above the doorway. "I'll make the model this afternoon. If you're around tomorrow, you could have a look before I take the mould."
Irene seemed surprised by the invitation. "You want me to check it?"
"I'd rather you told me it's wrong before I've made six of them."
She considered this perfectly reasonable. "What time?"
By half past ten the following morning, Irene was back in the little room beyond the lounge. I found her there with Monty sitting beside her chair and the plasterer at the worktable. The decorators had moved on to another part of Oakmere, leaving behind the smell of drying paint and a collection of residents who had already begun returning furniture to places it had never occupied before.
On the table was a flower. It was larger than I'd expected, modelled in a pale material soft enough to carry the marks of the tools that had shaped it. I recognised Irene's rose immediately, although the plasterer had adapted it to sit amongst the surviving leaves above the doorway. Irene walked slowly around the table.
The plasterer waited.
"That one's wrong."
He followed her finger. "The petal?"
"Too neat."
He bent closer. "I thought you'd say that."
"Then why did you do it?"
"To see if you'd notice."
Irene looked at him.
He smiled. "All right. I didn't."
He picked up one of his tools and worked at the edge of the petal, taking away almost nothing that I could see. Irene watched until he stopped, then leaned closer.
"Better."
Coming from Irene, this appeared to satisfy him.
Monty sat beneath the table washing one paw, apparently uninterested in plaster, flowers or the preservation of traditional craftsmanship. That lasted until the plasterer turned away, then he jumped onto the chair, from the chair to the edge of the table, and before any of us could stop him, pressed his nose into the flower to smell it.
Irene shouted his name.
Monty sprang away, scattering two pencils and a modelling tool before disappearing beneath the chair. The entire incident lasted perhaps three seconds.
The plasterer stared at the flower.
Near the outside edge of one petal was a small, nose-shaped indentation.
"Oh, for God's sake." He reached for a tool.
"Leave it," Irene said, eyes wide with excitement.
He looked at her. "What?"
"Leave it."
"But he's put his nose in it."
"I can see that."
The plasterer bent over the mark. "It'll be in the mould."
"Good."
He looked at Irene, then at Monty, who was now rubbing at the offending nose beneath the chair. "You seriously want me to leave a cat's nose in it?"
Irene examined the mark more closely. It wasn't deep, merely the impression of the nose tip and the faintest suggestion of whiskers. Unless you knew it was there, I doubted anybody would ever notice it. "Why not?" she said.
"Because it shouldn't be there."
Irene straightened. "Neither should half the things that happen to anything that's been around long enough."
The plasterer smiled, but Irene wasn't finished. "People knock things. They mend them. Somebody puts a thumb where they shouldn't. Somebody else paints over it. That's how old things get old."
He looked back at the flower. "So I leave it?"
"Yes."
"What do I tell them if anyone asks?"
Irene glanced beneath the chair, where Monty had finished cleaning his nose and was now contemplating the plasterer's bag. "Tell them it's Monty's heritage."
The plasterer laughed. He left it.
A week later, the scaffolding, tools and plastic sheeting had gone. The restored section above the doorway had been painted to match the rest, and Oakmere's lounge had returned to normal. Nobody seemed particularly interested in the flowers above their heads.
I stood underneath them with Irene.
"Which one is it?" I asked.
She pointed.
Even knowing where to look, it took me a few seconds to find the tiny mark.
I wondered how long it would remain there. Fifty years, perhaps. A hundred, if Oakmere survived and nobody decided ornamental plasterwork was an unnecessary maintenance expense. By then, somebody might examine that little indentation and wonder whether the craftsman had put it there deliberately.
I decided it was probably better if nobody left an explanation.
Irene was still looking up. "Frank would've hated that," she said.
"The nose print?"
"The whole bloody thing."
She smiled. "He liked things to match."
Monty appeared in the doorway carrying a slipper. Irene looked at him. "Is that warm?"
Monty turned and disappeared into the corridor. Irene sighed and went after him.
I stayed beneath the flower for another moment, looking at the curled petal and the tiny mark beside it, then I followed them.
