THE FORTY EIGHTS

There was nothing more to say, the odd couple had squashed themselves down to a singular, introverted modus operandi. And even as they toned their two children down from colourful birth palettes to muddy nothings through an almost abusive indifference, they went on collecting.

It must be said however that they had a good feel for the rare and elegant. She’d said more than once to her husband, that ‘no one could deny their exceptional collector’s instinct’. Trouble is, no one knew. But then, that’s how they wanted it.

They lived opposite us at number forty eight McGuire Rd and so we called them the Forty Eights. The place was a dump. Streaked across by weather, window glass like ice and a front garden consisting of a worn out lawn and a single rose, battered by the wind. In thirty-two years I never saw anyone play on that lawn except for the year of the big snow. Forty eight’s neighbours had friends to stay who made a snowman, threw snowballs and ran across the lawn, busting up colour and laughter until they caught the two blurry faces in the ice glass and in that instant the snowball carnival popped and died.

I went over to the house once when Mrs Forty Eight’s mother died. Mrs Forty Eight opened the door, walked off into the kitchen, leaned back with her butt against the sink and just looked at me. I offered my sympathy. ‘None required.' All the while she slowly rubbed her palms back and forth along the stainless steel edge. Her face reflected the angles of the kitchen and the way her dress lay and her palms stroked the stainless steel aroused me, but when I got back home all I felt was a fatigue.

There was hardly ever a light on at forty eight, even in winter, but most nights you could see a soft glow from under the door of the double extended garage. Life for Mr and Mrs Forty Eight was aloof, yet relentless. They plodded on in their solitary way year after year to some internal rhythm, they didn’t appear to age and never missed a beat, even when their kids left home and I never saw those kids come back and visit.

They both worked in the bowels of local government and it was like no one knew they were there, and yet they were, silent and relentless in their metronomic lives and their only deviation from this silky routine, a once a year trip to Europe, usually Vienna, always at the same pension. On the outbound to Europe they squeezed in a cold, heartless visit to the son and inbound a similar visit to the girl. I don’t think the offspring liked them and there was no encouragement for them or the grandchildren to return the annual burden and the auctioneers in Vienna didn’t particularly like them either, but they bought expensive antiques, which helped keep the auctioneers in comfort and good wine so who were they to grumble.

And so, in the temperature-controlled, double extended garage, catalogued in intricate detail, was an exquisite, exhaustive, expensive collection of décor, fine art, furniture, statuettes and paintings, all wrapped in acres of brown paper, nestled in acrid tea chests, lining shelves, or standing silent under white linen dust sheets. The Forty Eights’ existence seemed to have almost totally erased the fact they had offspring, centring entirely on collecting antiques, and their unannounced conflict with the locals was, that while the locals trampled about in a sort of greasy warm chaos, the Forty Eights had risen above them into the clean, breathable air that discipline and focus allows and the sufferance they bore, completely selflessly, was the isolation incontrovertibly linked to the slightly superior position that the clean, breathable air of discipline and focus had foisted upon them.

Silently, and in secret from the clans of the greasy warm chaos, they secured a plot of land overlooking the sea at Morgan Bay. Their whole lives had been focused on a grand dream. To live in architectural splendour, with style, surrounded by sumptuous décor and separated from the mob by a meandering mile and a sea breeze. And now, at last, with monies paid, architects engaged, the diggers began ripping up the fresh rich earth along Morgan Bay heights. While the house was being built they made the habit of only visiting it on Sunday evenings to coincide with the soaps and Evensong, thereby lowering the statistical chances of banging into anyone who may know them.

One morning, not long after the Forty Eights had retired I woke to the hiss and rumble of two large removal vans parking across the road. By the time I left for work, five men were busy packing crates into the trucks and by six that evening when I got home they were gone. The only indication of their departure was the solitary rose, now snapped off and trampled into the lawn.

Their new house was the talk of the town and even appeared in Elegant Homes with Mr and Mrs Forty Eight looking bored, posed on a Jacobean chaise longue. The article carried photographs of a superb dining table no-one would ever sit at, laid with the most exquisite cutlery and crystal no one would ever use. Rare paintings, intricately carved ornaments, the wild seamless view, and guarding the sweeping stairs, her favourite pieces, two six foot ebony statues, a man and a woman, nude, black and perfect.

They had been there just over a year when Mr Forty Eight’s heart stopped. It was a dull afternoon and he died, quietly seething about life, in a Macintosh chair with a mug of Bovril.

She didn't tell the offspring he’d died. She saw in them and their unruly kids a direct link to the greasy clans and couldn't bear the thought of them turning up and plonking themselves onto the furniture. She stiffened at the idea of her daughter Cheryl's smoker husband, meandering about the house looking for an ashtray, or crouching along an outside wall, back to the wind, trying to light one. Or dull Peter, as she called her son, and his angular wife Tracy, a woman who had dared accuse her of the psychological abuse of her children. She didn’t like the thought of those two looking at her and Tracy rubbing Peter’s tight, high shoulders.

But, after a while, without Mr Forty Eight to balance the act she began to wobble. Guilt, a little ping in the brain, an occasional tightening of the skin around the ears. She started writing letters to the offspring on the last Sunday of every month on a cheap pad kept specially. An explanation? Still, she never told them Mr Forty Eight had gone. As the months wore on she began to sense the house closing in. The smell of furniture oils, the awful stillness. Rattling about the house, she began to hear distant snippets of the children's voices, wind in a cave. Several times she opened the address book on the escritoire to call them and even lifted the phone, but she never quite found the nerve to go through with it.

Things slowly declined until, on a stormy, equinoxial evening, she unlatched the heavy front door to answer some ghostly knocking in her head, only to be thrown back by the howling gale. The impact caused a gilt framed mirror to crash down from the wall. In one of the shards of glass, she could see reflected back from the dining room, a small photograph of the boy and girl, much diminished by a grotesque lead frame, the offspring once again, as in childhood, overshadowed by competing collectibles.

Mrs Forty Eight died in the early morning, her thin dress crackling about in the icy gale, her face crumpled, her eyes staring. She was surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of fine art and elegance that did nothing to protect her. She lasted much longer than she should have according to the coroner. Kept warm by a boiling guilt maybe, watched over by the cold ebony statues and the little reflected photograph of the boy and girl who, it seems, had been unable to reach out to her on her darkest night. Unable to reach out because of the enormous weight in their lives. A weight the Forty Eights had unwittingly gifted them through their chillingly exquisite indifference.