Departures by Jennifer Cornell Read Free Book Online Page A

and told me she never paid them. My father looked up with the air of a man who had just discovered that something he had believed to be settled was still a matter for debate.
    â€œNo, and I will not, either,” she said defiantly, more to him than to me. “Why should I pay for what I don’t want? I didn’t vote for them; let them pay that did.”
    My father, who had struggled unguided through Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes, dropped his head into his hands.
    â€œWe’re all citizens of the same state, Maddy,” he said, “and if that state provides—”
    â€œNo,” she said. “When I get what I vote for that’s when I’ll pay.”
    My father was convinced that she would have liked the house in Park View Terrace. Long ago the Woodvale had been a posh place to live, and some vestiges of that respectability had yet to disappear. Most of the residents were pensioners with small private incomes who kept fairly much to themselves. Even next-door neighbours who had known each other since childhood confined their contact to a polite nod in passing or a brief, amicable exchange of words. Almost everyone was a self-professed Christian, and though my father all his life preferred to worship God not in His house but in His fields, he had respect for commmitted churchgoers. Be kind to the Christian, he once told me, and God may be kind to you.
    â€œBut it doesn’t matter if you’re not a Christian,” I’d told him smartly. “If you’re not a Christian, you just won’t be saved.”
    It was the night of All Saints, and on the other side of the room my mother knelt with pins in her mouth preparing my sister and brother for the evening’s masquerade. Her fine brows were knit with annoyance, directed not at the children but at the stubborn fabric which defied her fingers and seemed bent on wasting her time. My father watched her for a moment, silently deploring her impatience but observing her determination with an admiring eye; then he turned back to me.
    â€œDon’t you believe it,” he answered. “God knows who they are that love Him best.”
    The short row of buildings of which the house he chose was one sat at the junction of Bray, Broom, and Enfield Streets. None of these was used frequently despite the proximity of a popular Chinese take-away, which every evening from four o’clock on caused the aroma of chips and fried onions to hang heavily on the air. It appeared that my father’s quest for domestic isolation had at last come to an end, for there was only one other house in the strip which was not empty, and the occupant of that house was Harry.
    Although he was not a helpless man, Harry was effectively deaf. He was also crippled with arthritis and had been pronounced legally blind. After eighty-three years of remembering to do a great many things, his memory had at last begun to fail. On occasion he forgot to take his pills or to carry his spectacles, or insert his hearing aid and his teeth. My father, who had vetted the area fully before deciding to move in, produced his assessment that Harry would be a quiet, unobtrusive neighbour. He listened to his wartime records with the earphones pluged in as he couldn’t hear them any other way, and he did the same with the radio and the TV. He spent most of his time brewing tea the way his wife had taught him, with loose leaves and water just boiled, and when it was made he sat in his front room in an armchair by the window with a plate of biscuits and read the paper. In all the time my father had his hopeful eye on the Terrace, Harry had received only one visitor, a small, fat man with quick, impatient gestures and a high-pitched voice. This, my father had discovered, was Harry’s nephew, George.
    Geordie Bellam was known locally and by his own definition as a small businessman; the diminutive suited himwell. He owned a fifty-pence shop at the bottom of the Shankill