After Isabella Read online

  Sally settled two old ladies into armchairs and then bustled into the kitchen to make tea. Esther, unsure what to do, followed her. The Formica kitchen table was the same one she remembered from teatimes when she was nine. The chairs were the same too, although the seat covers were now faded and stained and the arched chrome backs and legs were spotted with rust. Sally clicked on the kettle and started taking cling-film off plates of sandwiches. She seemed to have made enough for twenty or thirty people, and there was also a large, bought chocolate cake and several platefuls of biscuits.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll need all these,’ said Esther. ‘Maybe pop some in the fridge for later.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sally smiled faintly. ‘I always worry there won’t be enough, so I tend to over-cater.’

  She bent to get the milk out of the fridge, and Esther noted how broad she looked from behind. She was even heavier than Esther had first thought. She knew that carers often put on weight – it was a sedentary occupation, and often boring and disheartening. One couldn’t judge someone for self-medicating with the odd packet of ginger nuts, but it was a worry.

  She helped Sally to carry the plates and cups through, then sat on the edge of the sofa, trying to make small talk with the two old ladies. They were much more interested in the sandwiches and cakes, piling their plates high and calling Sally to bring more tea. Esther couldn’t help feeling they didn’t seem very grief-stricken, and it turned out they were in fact two of Sally and Joan’s neighbours. They both freely admitted they hadn’t seen Joan for some years.

  ‘Since she went doolally,’ one of them said, ‘I didn’t see much point in coming to see her. She never knew who I was. And I’m sure five minutes after I left she’d forgotten I’d been here.’

  ‘Memory like a goldfish,’ said the other, helping herself to another slice of cake.

  Esther wondered if they were there out of neither grief nor duty but simply because it gave them a day out, a free meal and possibly a chance to snoop inside the house. Sure enough, once they’d both had their fill of tea, they took turns to go to the toilet, obviously having a good look into all the rooms on their way to and from the bathroom. Then they said their goodbyes and left, walking up the road together, their heads almost touching as they exchanged gossip. To their credit, they didn’t promise to come back and visit Sally again.

  Sally smiled rather weakly, then heaved herself out of her armchair and began clearing the plates. Esther leapt up to help her, but there was very little to do. She would have loved to have gone too, but it seemed brutal to leave Sally alone after the sad insufficiency of this goodbye to her mother. Esther glanced at her watch.

  ‘I think this might call for something stronger than tea,’ she said. ‘Have you got any wine, or shall I nip out and get some?’

  ‘Oh…’ Sally dithered, clutching a dishtowel in both hands. ‘I don’t usually… I’ve got nothing in the house…’

  ‘You don’t usually, but do you drink at all?’

  ‘Well, I used to… The odd glass…’

  ‘Red or white?’

  ‘Oh, white. Never could see the point of red.’

  ‘I’ll be back in two minutes,’ said Esther, heading for the door as she spoke. ‘Dust off some glasses.’

  She had walked the few hundred yards from that front door to the corner shop more times than she could remember. She and Isabella had gone there for sweets and crisps when they were little, then for magazines and fizzy drinks. From the age of about fifteen, they had lurked outside, yearning for bottles of Lambrini. Occasionally they’d been able to persuade someone’s big brother to go in and buy some, and then they would take it to the park and pretend to be tipsier than they really were.

  Now she could walk right in and peruse the wine shelf. She wasn’t even going to be asked for ID. The old Indian couple who had run the shop for decades had obviously sold up and left, and it was now a chain mini-supermarket. There were a number of two-for-one special offers on well-known wines, but, rather incongruously, there was a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the chiller, and Esther grabbed it. It was expensive, but somehow she knew it was the right thing to buy. She also picked up a couple of bottles of Californian Sauvignon Blanc and went to pay.

  Back at the house, Sally gasped and giggled when she saw the champagne.

  ‘Let’s give your mum a proper send-off,’ said Esther, peeling the foil off the cork.

  Sally fussed around and found a dingy ice bucket and they took the bottle and their glasses into the living room and sat down. They toasted Joan, and Sally took a small sip and then a bigger one. Her cheeks instantly flushed pink, and she appeared to relax a little.

  ‘So,’ Esther said, ‘how are you bearing up?’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Sally. ‘Oh, I’m all right. It’s lovely to see you. Have a catch-up. It seems we only get to chat when someone in my family dies.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Esther uncomfortably. ‘I should have called. Been around more…’

  ‘Nonsense, why should you? You were Isabella’s friend.’

  ‘It looks like…’ Esther said carefully. ‘It looks like the last few years might have been pretty hard for you. And lonely.’

  ‘Well, yes, and yes,’ said Sally. ‘Dementia is very ugly. Or at least the kind Mother had was. She was very distrustful. And rude. It wasn’t nice for people to come round here, because she’d insult them. Or do something awful… Break things, or hide her face and refuse to talk. And I couldn’t risk taking her out, because she’d wander off, or sit down on the pavement and refuse to move. I couldn’t get her up and shift her if she did.’

  ‘That sounds awful. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t so bad.’ Sally managed a smile. ‘As long as I kept the routine absolutely rigid – meals at the same time every day, the same food, the same TV programmes – she was mostly all right.’

  ‘And did you not have any help?’

  ‘We had carers in every day, or most days – I couldn’t manage to bathe her alone. And they’d sometimes come and sit with her for an hour or so, so I could get a bit of shopping in.’

  Esther was stunned into silence. It seemed Sally had barely left the house for eight years. No wonder she had aged. It sounded like prison. There was no point in asking her about friends, boyfriends, her job. It was clear that she had been denied all of these. She refilled Sally’s glass, and her own, which mysteriously seemed to be empty.

  ‘So what have you been up to?’ asked Sally.

  ‘Oh, you know. I joined the university as a junior lecturer in English literature, and I’m still there. Still teaching Dickens and Austen.’

  ‘Not a junior lecturer anymore though.’

  ‘No,’ said Esther. ‘I’m, er… a professor now. And currently also head of the English Department.’

  ‘Oh my.’

  ‘Sounds more impressive than it is. Everyone in the department gets a go at being head for a few years, then they get tired of the administration and the meetings and want to go back to teaching and research. Then someone else has a pop at it.’

  Sally nodded. Esther had a feeling she might as well have been speaking Chinese. Her world and her life would make no sense at all to a woman who hadn’t been able to work for more than a decade.

  ‘And your husband? Stephen, is it?’ said Sally. As she spoke, she glanced at Esther’s left hand and Esther saw her regret the question.

  ‘We split up.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s all very amicable. He’s remarried and lives in Manchester now.’

  ‘And Lucie?’

  ‘She’s twelve. She’s amazing. Very together. Very confident and articulate. Much more so than I was at her age.’

  ‘Isabella was her godmother.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucky,’ said Sally, and Esther wasn’t sure if she meant Lucie was lucky, or Isabella, or Esther herself.

  Much later, woozy from too much wine, Esther wandered back out to her
car. It felt like midnight, although it was only late afternoon. She was in no state to drive, so she made sure the car was locked and wasn’t going to get a fine, and then walked on towards the Tube station. What a depressing day. She’d come back the next day to pick up the car, and she’d never ever have to come to this miserable corner of town again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘That’s the saddest story I ever heard,’ said Lucie later, sitting at the dining room table, leaning forward and fixing Esther with her clear gaze. ‘It’s like she never really lived.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Is she very sad?’

  ‘Well, she’s sad her mum died,’ said Esther, but as she spoke, she wondered if Sally really was sad. She would have lost Joan, the Joan she knew, years ago. This final break might have been a relief. ‘She’s doing her best to be cheerful.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘People should be able to be sad. Especially when someone’s died. They should have friends to care for them so they can be as sad as they like. It’s awful to have to be cheerful for other people.’

  Esther marvelled, not for the first time, at her daughter’s emotional intelligence. She was compassionate to a fault, forever giving her pocket money to charitable causes and making friends with the least appealing children at school. If Esther hadn’t been allergic, she had no doubt Lucie would be out rescuing stray animals too.

  ‘Well, we need to invite her over,’ said Lucie firmly.

  ‘What? Oh, darling, that’s lovely of you, but it’s not as if she was ever really my friend. Isabella was.’

  ‘Isabella was, and she was Isabella’s sister.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isabella was my godmother, which means if you died, she was supposed to look after me.’

  Esther’s heart sank. She could see where this was going. She had no doubt that Lucie was destined for a career in law. She had the argument all worked out.

  Sure enough, Lucie said, ‘And so, in return, you should look after Isabella’s nearest and dearest… Now she’s dead.’

  ‘You’re right. I know you’re right. It’s just…’

  ‘Just what?’ Lucie fixed her with her steady, dark gaze, so like Esther’s own. So like Isabella’s.

  ‘Well, we don’t really have anything in common. She… Well, she never went to university, she hasn’t worked in years… What would we talk about?’

  ‘Mother!’ said Lucie, shocked. ‘Are you being a snob? And judgemental? All the things you nag me not to be?’

  Esther dropped her head on her folded arms. ‘I am, I am. You’re right. How hard can it be to make a little space in our lives for someone who’s lonely? I’ll ring her this evening and ask her over for tea.’

  ‘Dinner.’

  ‘All right. For dinner.’

  Lucie nodded, satisfied. Her sense of right and justice had been appeased. And Esther knew she would not be allowed conveniently to ‘forget’ to call. Lucie would ask insistently until she did it. So she might as well get it out of the way.

  She didn’t have a mobile or landline number for Sally. She could try Directory Enquiries (when had she last rung them? Ten years ago?), but it might just be worth ringing the old house number, the one she had indelibly committed to memory from years of ringing Isabella when they were children.

  She dialled it and it rang for a long time. She was beginning to think it had probably been changed or disconnected, when Sally’s voice, fuzzy and blurred with sleep, or sleep and wine, answered. Esther checked her watch. It was not quite nine o’clock. Not an unconscionably late hour to ring.

  ‘Sally, it’s Esther,’ she said briskly.

  ‘Esther. Oh, hello! What a lovely surprise!’

  Lucie had been right. Sally’s forced cheeriness was heartbreaking.

  ‘I just wanted to… say thanks for today, and check you were all right,’ she said carefully.

  ‘Oh, I’m okay,’ Sally replied, and Esther could hear the wide smile in her voice. ‘Right as rain. Just dozed off in front of the telly. Not used to the wine, you know. But thank you so much for that. So lovely of you.’

  ‘Well, I was just chatting to my daughter,’ Esther said, ‘and we wondered if you might be free for dinner sometime soon? Maybe Friday evening?’

  ‘Dinner? Oh my,’ said Sally, as if it was not a meal she was familiar with. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, but…’

  ‘Nothing fancy,’ said Esther, trying to keep her voice gentle, listening to Sally flutter anxiously on the other end of the line. ‘Just you, me and Lucie, here at home. I’ll make us some pasta or something. Now the evenings are nicer, we might even be able to sit outside.’

  ‘Where are you? I mean, where do you live?’ Sally sounded genuinely anxious now.

  ‘Not far from you.’ Esther gave the address. ‘I pass near you on my way home from work. I could stop by and pick you up in the car.’

  ‘Well, that would be nice…’

  ‘I’ll drop you back too,’ said Esther, and that seemed to reassure Sally. How very small her world must be. She probably hadn’t left the borough she lived in for years. She didn’t drive, and navigating the complexities of London public transport would be very scary if you weren’t used to it, especially at night.

  Lucie was satisfied with the arrangements and announced that she would bake a cake for dessert. On the Thursday evening Esther prepared a lasagne and put it in the fridge, ready to be cooked on their return the following evening. She checked they had salad ingredients and a bottle of chilled white wine as well as the usual selection of soft drinks.

  Esther wasn’t quite sure why she was dreading the dinner so much. She wasn’t unkind by nature, or ungenerous. It was just… Sally was from a different part of her life. A long-ago time. Her split from Stephen had made her wary of looking back. She had reinvented herself, and she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be reminded of the Esther that had been. She had worked so hard to look forward, to build a new life for herself and Lucie. She had taken her half of the proceeds from the sale of the family home and bought a neat, new-build, two-bedroomed townhouse. She had furnished it with new things, except for Lucie’s room, which still contained her old white-painted bed and her collection of soft toys.

  As much as Esther tried to shed her past, Lucie seemed determined to hang onto hers. Many of her friends had chucked out their Barbie duvet covers and Sylvanian Families collections, replacing them with posters of boy bands and rejecting outright all that was pink and princessy. But Lucie’s room was still determinedly the bedroom of a little girl. Esther knew better than to argue; Lucie had lost enough in the divorce. If she wanted to hang onto her My Little Ponies for a few more years, that was fine by her.

  For herself, however, she loved the clean, blank newness of their home – the pale sofa and carpets she could never have had when Lucie was a toddler, the framed prints which held no memories of other walls. She had bought them all together, in a single morning, from a faceless, upmarket poster shop. She found the townhouse calming and peaceful, an expression of the person she had worked so hard to become. She wasn’t sure how she felt about sad, dowdy Sally, with all her associations with Isabella, coming into the space.

  Esther had her open-door office hours on Friday afternoons, between two and five. However, if she had finished seeing students and no one new arrived by 4.45, she often shut up shop in order to get home a little early. Today was such a day, and at twenty to she turned off her computer, tidied her desk and switched off the light. Traffic was unusually light for a Friday and she was outside Sally’s house by just after five. It was a little earlier than they had arranged. She spent a few minutes checking her email on her phone and then squared her shoulders and went to ring the doorbell.

  Sally answered almost immediately. She had her bag in her hand and her coat on and buttoned up. She still spent ten minutes fussing, going back to check the kitchen windows were locked and the correct lights had been swi
tched off or left on. She dithered by the front door for a few minutes, wondering if she should take her umbrella until Esther, with barely concealed impatience, pointed out that the sky was clear and she would be going directly from house to car to house and was unlikely to be caught in an unseasonable and unexpected downpour.

  It was like managing a frail and elderly lady who was leaving the house for the first time in years. Esther had to remind herself that Sally was in fact six years her junior. Her uncertain behaviour, frumpy clothes and bulky physique added decades to her age. Eventually, she got Sally out of the house, but only after she’d locked, unlocked, double-locked and double-checked the front door. She would have gone back in one more time to check the windows were all closed if Esther hadn’t practically shoved her into the car.

  Esther took a moment to text Lucie, who would already be home from school, and ask her to turn the oven on. Meanwhile, Sally fussed and settled herself in the passenger seat, taking an age to find a place for her handbag at her feet, then pulling the seatbelt across. She couldn’t seem to find the clasp to fasten it, so after feeling about for it, she simply held the seatbelt across herself. Esther couldn’t help smiling – she remembered her grandma doing the same thing, as if presenting the appearance of wearing a seatbelt was what counted, rather than actually being safe. She reached over gently and took the belt from Sally’s hand, pulling it down and clipping it into the buckle. It was odd to touch her, and Esther couldn’t help thinking that Sally probably didn’t get touched a lot. That said, she could hardly talk. She hadn’t had any physical intimacy since her divorce, and her experience of touch was limited to cheek kisses from friends and hugs from Lucie.

  She pulled out into the traffic and headed for home. Sally seemed fascinated by everything around her, looking avidly out of the window. Once they’d got more than a mile or so from her house, she began reading the names of shops aloud. ‘Magic Kebab!’ she said happily, as if she had never seen a kebab shop before. ‘Paddy Power. My, there are a lot of betting shops, aren’t there?’