Feng Shui by Lucy Deedes
Philip was a widowed friend of my father’s. He sounded cheerful enough on the telephone but I thought I’d see how he really was.
He was in his sitting room, sunk in an armchair by the window. This room had been full of pictures and precious china, dogs on the chairs, silken Turkish rugs, books up to the ceiling and low pools of lamplight. Today the walls were almost bare; the lamps and the side tables and most of the books gone. It looked like a dentist’s waiting room.
‘Hello!’ he flung out an arm as if he were hailing me across a field.
I stooped and dropped a kiss on his forehead.
‘It’s a treat to see you,’ he said, pushing himself up out of the chair. ‘Tea?’
We went into the kitchen together and he slowly opened cupboards and assembled mugs, tea and some dusty-looking biscuits. I carried the tray back through the hall and he sat down with a sigh. I looked for somewhere to sit and pulled up a footstool.
‘It’s got very spacious in here,’ I said. ‘Are you planning a party?’
A toothy smile. ‘That would be splendid! No, we’ve just had a bit of a clear out, you know how it is, you collect so much clobber and I don’t want the grandchildren being bothered with it.’
‘Why should they be bothered? This is your house. It was cosy and interesting.’
He looked around him at the wooden floor and the faded patches on the wall.
‘Well, when I drop off the twig someone has to clear it all up. My grandson Simon suggested we make a start.’
How very officious of Simon. ‘Was he the clever one?’
‘Sharp as a tack. Married now.’
‘Nice girl?’
He leaned over, poured tea into two mugs and leaned back in his chair. ‘Amanda. Don’t get me wrong, she’s full of energy, always making plans…’ His hand hovered over the biscuit tin and then dropped to his side.
‘So they made some plans for you?’
‘Very sweet of them, really, to bother. Amanda knew someone to come and look at the pictures for me.’
‘And take them away?’
He gestured at the bare walls. I could see a small patch of stubble on his cheek that he’d missed.
‘You’ve been collecting all your life! You loved your art.’
‘Well, I can’t take it with me.’
‘What about the dogs?’
Philip looked across at the worn velvet sofa and the hollows on the cushions. ‘One had to go, poor fellow, and that just left old Bertie. Amanda thought the fur and the dust was making my chest bad, so we let him go too.’
I took Philip’s hand in mine and he patted it. ‘Deadly quiet without them.’
I would find him a kitten.
‘And I suppose Amanda was afraid you might trip on the valuable rugs?’
‘She knows a man at Bonhams.’
I hugged him goodbye. A spanking new Range Rover swished into the drive as I left.
Really subtle piece, with a good example of the EITR. I did wonder whether the old man was fully aware of what is going on (I think he was) and if he had simply regarded it as the bargain one makes with those who ‘look after you’.
This is a fine, subtle example of the power in things left unsaid. We don’t know much about the narrator, but she’s clearly a caring person. The visit to the old man is on her initiative, although he’s only ‘a widowed friend of my father’s’. And she has the thought of getting him a kitten to offset his loneliness. The old man himself is well described with only a few small details… his ‘toothy smile’, the ‘small patch of stubble on his cheek’ that he’s missed while shaving. We don’t need more; we can fill in the rest. The old man’s manner is also telling. He is of the generation who don’t complain. Since becoming a widower, he’s been managing on his own, though the ‘dusty-looking biscuits’ are a bit of a giveaway. In terms of the brief, ‘the elephant in the room’ is very well placed. Neither character spells it out, but the narrator – and, of course, the reader – is left in no doubt that the old man’s being shafted by his grandson Simon (always a good name for a dubious factor), who is ‘sharp as a tack’. And you get the feeling that, since he’s married Amanda, the pair of them have become even sharper – and more acquisitive. Where did the money come from for the ‘spanking new Range Rover’ which provides such a good punchline? It’s a sad little story, bearing out the principle that, in all writing, less is more.