Clifton Road, by Joan Whitlock
An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.
The cupboard under the stairs was Hazel’s best place. It smelled of shoe polish and the gas meter, and if she curled up behind the carpet sweeper nobody could see her even with the door open. She was eleven, and she had learned more about the house on Clifton Road from that cupboard than from anywhere else.
That was where she was on the Sunday evening when the man in the brown suit came.
She heard her father let him in. She heard them go into the front room, which was never used except at Christmas, and she heard the door close, which was stranger still. Hazel crept out of the cupboard in her socks and knelt by the front room door with her eye to the gap beneath it, where she could see two pairs of shoes: her father’s, polished for chapel, and the stranger’s, which were cracked across the toes.
‘Thursday, then,’ the stranger said. ‘Nine sharp. Don’t be late, and don’t bring anybody.’
‘I won’t.’
‘And you’ve told no one? Not your wife?’
There was a pause so long that Hazel held her breath.
‘No,’ said her father. ‘She’s not to know. Not till it’s done.’
Hazel went back to the cupboard and sat there in the dark for a long time. She thought of all the films she had seen at the Gaumont, the men in hats who met in rooms with the door shut and said things like Thursday, nine sharp. She thought of the brown envelope she had seen her father put in the bureau the week before, and the way he had locked the bureau afterwards, which he never did.
All week she watched him. He was quieter than usual. He did not whistle when he shaved. On Wednesday night she heard him walking about downstairs long after everybody should have been asleep, and when she crept to the landing she saw him standing in the kitchen in the dark, looking out at the garden, with one hand pressed flat against his side.
On Thursday morning he left the house at half past eight in his good coat, and Hazel, who was supposed to be at school, followed him.
He did not go to a bank, or a public house, or any of the places she had imagined. He walked to the end of Clifton Road and caught the number eight bus, and she caught it too, upstairs at the back, and when he got off she got off, and she stood across the road and watched him go up the stone steps of the General Hospital, slowly, like a much older man.
The man in the brown suit was waiting at the top. He wore a white coat over it now. He shook her father’s hand and put the other hand on his shoulder, and they went in together.
Hazel stood on the pavement until the doors had stopped swinging. Then she walked home, the whole three miles, and she let herself in and went into the kitchen where her mother was peeling potatoes and humming, and she said nothing at all.
“Hazel’s father is presented as a secretive and dishonest man.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.