‘And your mother – I know she wasn’t well, that she didn’t leave the house. But did she join in? Did she play with you?’
‘She did. She had long hennaed hair and she liked Faith to put it in pigtails.’
Ailsa wrinkled her nose. ‘That sounds very jolly.’
In that moment, I was acutely aware of the reality of it, how the refusal to admit anything emotionally unpleasant had created its own burden, how the jolliness was its own form of darkness. It had suppressed anything raw or real, disappointment or frustration or sadness, like a chlorophyll-soaked cloth across the mouth. I thought that that was why Faith had left – choosing to cut hair, an act of violent rebellion, and I thought about the years in which I’d lived with it, and how next to the ulcers, and the headaches and the sensitivity to light that kept the curtains drawn, hardest to bear of all was the suffocation.
‘It was,’ I said.
‘You really haven’t seen Faith since the day of your mother’s funeral?’
I’d been putting a lid back on a pen and for some reason I couldn’t get this lid to fit.
I stabbed the point of the pen into the soft part of my thumb. ‘Well, I saw her immediately after – as I said, she came back here and we argued but I haven’t spoken to her since.’
‘What was the row about? Was it this?’ She widened her arms, raised her hands to the walls. Her expression said she wouldn’t have blamed Faith if it was.
I didn’t answer for a few seconds. I put the pen down and rubbed my hands up and down the front of my thighs, and then the back of them, squeezing the flesh above the knees. I allowed myself to picture Faith standing in the hall, the disgust on her face. The image was like a wound. ‘Yes. No. She knew it was like this, though she hadn’t been here much in the years leading up to Mother’s death. She started poking about, talking about selling. Trying to go into rooms. I had to stop her, put my foot down. It all got too much for both of us. When she left, she said she was never coming back.’
She searched my face. ‘Neither of you have tried to build bridges since?’
I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, the ridge of the windowsill hard against my skull. I put the box of pens to one side and laid my hands flat on the carpet. It glittered with tiny particles of dust. ‘Not really,’ I said. I wrinkled my nose. I could feel a sharp prickle at the top of it. I closed my eyes to stop them hurting.
Ailsa stood up then, and came over to sit next to me. She was wearing black trousers and a pair of those French elasticated plimsolls that have two rows of holes, but no laces.
‘It’s not surprising you’ve hunkered down a bit,’ she said softly. ‘You lost your mother and then fell out with your sister. And let’s not even start on your father walking out on you when you were tiny. It’s understandable if you have abandonment issues.’
I read somewhere that our personalities are shaped, more than by genes or parental influence or life experience, by our relationship with our siblings. In my case, Faith, the pretty, bubbly one, did the talking, while I weighed my words carefully, or not at all. Wisdom counts for nothing in the face of effervescence. It was irrelevant how ‘clever’ I was; she was the one who got to give a shape to our existence, to define it and record it.
I realised it didn’t matter if I answered Ailsa or not.
‘Abandonment issues,’ I repeated eventually, enunciating carefully.
She flexed her feet. She wasn’t wearing socks and I could see she had recently shaved, but had missed a few stray hairs on the soft patch of skin above the bones of her ankles.
I’m trying to recall if it was that afternoon or the next when she came across the postcard from Adrian Curtis. Possibly it was the next, because I remember she was tetchy, and she had been kind to me the day we talked about Faith. By then, you see, it was no longer my humours we trod around, but hers. Perhaps it’s human nature; perhaps the moment I accepted her help this was inevitable. I was mindful of how far she was putting herself out on my behalf, so was acutely aware of every shift in her mood. I began to worry that my presence irritated her, to notice how often she tried to get rid of me. She’d send me on errands – more bin bags, more Mr Muscle – and if I came back too quickly, she would be in a different part of the house. I’d locked Faith’s door – when I passed it, I felt the presence of what was inside – but I might hear her footsteps in Mother’s room. It would be at the front of my mind to ask what she was doing, but somehow when she came down again, brushing a cobweb from her hair, or releasing a ‘pouf’ of exhaustion, it felt rude to do so, not my place. ‘For God’s sake, chuck,’ she would explode. ‘Chuck, chuck, chuck.’ Desperate to appease her, I became cloying, reiterating endless expressions of gratitude: ‘I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.’ The first time I said this, as she was loading the boot of her car, she hugged me and said, ‘It’s what we do for our friends.’ So I suppose that’s why, the following day, I said it again, for positive re-enforcement. Only she didn’t hug me the second time, and in fact on the third utterance, her tone was clipped and she said, ‘I’m sure you’ll find a way.’
Was it then I began to think about money? Or was it when she mentioned how much the house was worth, how, ‘Now one could see the bare bones’, it might be worth getting it valued. I think she used the word ‘goldmine’, or perhaps that was the visit she scrubbed down the mantelpiece and stood back to admire it. ‘Lovely old marble,’ she said. ‘Verity! Who knew? What else have you got hidden here? The fireplace alone is probably worth a fortune.’
It was the first time I realised that, of course, I was not entirely without means, and that maybe there was a way I could show my gratitude.
I remember now: it was a Wednesday the day she found Adrian’s note. I’d taken Maudie next door to spend an hour or two to help Max with his homework and that was nearly always a Wednesday.
When I’d left she’d been up a ladder cleaning the picture rail, but on my return, I found her sitting on the sofa. Her crossed feet were resting on my mother’s needlework stool, and next to her was the plastic crate containing some of my correspondence. She was leaning back into the cushions, elbow resting on the arm, as if she owned the place.
It’s odd, looking back, that I wasn’t cross. The crate contained personal letters, birthday cards and the like; I would get to it in my own time. I had told her that. And yet, I didn’t see it as an incursion. I had already begun to cede my independence to her.
She looked up when she saw me in the doorway and held up a postcard. Across the front of it was written ‘Six Wonders of the Isle of Wight’. A smile played about her lips. ‘Adrian! Who’s Adrian?’
I unclipped Maudie’s lead. ‘Adrian Curtis. The man I met at the council. I told you about him.’
‘Tell me again.’
I stood in the doorway. ‘He worked in the planning office and we got chatting in the canteen – he asked me to pass the salt and then we both moaned about how hard it was to get anything out of the shaker. He asked me out for a drink and then I suppose in modern parlance we dated for a bit.’
‘What went wrong?’ I noticed again the points of her cheekbones, the upward turn of her eyes. She fanned the postcard, as if drying the ink. It was one of those multi-photo cards, depicting six famous Isle of Wight landmarks: the Needles, Tennyson Down, Newport High Street. ‘He says he’s missing you, looking forward to Wednesday, with three exclamation marks.’
I thought back to the night I’d spent in his room in the tower block above Southside shopping centre, the stale smell, the overly soft texture of his sheets, and for some reason, I remembered the tea he had brought me in the morning; the white scum that floated on the top of it as if he hadn’t let the kettle properly boil. I thought about his pale narrow chest, his lashed eyes, fish-like, without his glasses and then I thought about a conversation I’d had in the early days with Ailsa, how worldly I had tried to sound, with my ‘when you know you know’.
‘It didn’t really work out,’ I said.
‘ “It didn’t work out”?’ There was something mocking in her repetition, as if how couldn’t it have worked out? A man was interested in me. What more did I want?
‘He wasn’t for me.’
‘Verity Ann Baxter, are you by any chance a little too fussy for your own good?’
She wasn’t listening or engaging. I felt a surge of irritation then. I’d had enough of her teasing. Just because I lived like this, as she put it, didn’t mean my responses weren’t valid. My back teeth felt as if they were glued together. I tried to speak without dislodging them. ‘It was a horrible time,’ I said. ‘I hated working at the council. I hated everything about it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’ She took the necessary steps to reach me at the door and she put her arms out. ‘What am I like?’ she said.
The realisation came like an explosion in the chest, painful and yet glorious. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed before.
My sister, I thought. My sister.
Chapter Thirteen
Karrimor Grey and Blue Waterproof Hiking Trainers, size 6
Surreptitious, adjective. Taken, used, done, etc by
stealth, secretly, or ‘on the sly’; secret and
unauthorised; clandestine.
Two things.
Yesterday, during a perfectly nice supper, Ailsa suddenly put down her knife and fork and said she’d had enough of ‘this ready meal three-for-two shit’. She’d go to the supermarket herself, she said, and pick out some nice vegetables. ‘What’s in season? God, I don’t even know. Where are we?’ It’s the second week of October and I told her as much.
‘Runner beans, still. Maybe. Leeks. Squash. I’ll go tomorrow.’
I picked up her plate and put it in the sink. She’s been different since her meeting with the QC. She’s more alert, as if she’s planning something. It’s making me uneasy. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ I said, running the cold tap over it, watching the red-tinged Chinese noodles swirl down the drain.
She didn’t answer, and when I turned round, I saw she had opened the ‘notes’ app on her phone and was writing a list.
I’ve started getting up early to work and this morning she came in, a couple of hours before I expected to see her. I’ve been sent a new batch of words, ‘wick’ and ‘wicked’ and ‘wicker’, and was looking through the file of original slips – the quotations from novels, newspapers, etc, sent in to the OED by readers for the first edition – when she came and sat next to me and started asking me questions.
At first I was touched, pleased she was showing an interest.
I showed her how the adjective ‘wicked’ in its first documented appearance, ‘wickede’, referred exclusively to the devil; how this expanded over the centuries to include the supernatural, and then evil, as in unnatural, and then more recently it came to be used as an intensifier.
‘When do you think was its earliest use to mean cool, or excellent?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. The 1980s?’
‘Aha.’ I showed her the slip on which, in the original reader’s spidery writing, was written the quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘This Side of Paradise’: ‘Phoebe and I are going to share a wicked calf.’
‘That’s taken you by surprise, hasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Published in 1920!’
Her eyes darted to the door, and that’s when I noticed the white envelope in her hand.
She said, with what sounded like pointed composure, ‘I’m going to walk down to the post office. I’ve written to the children asking them again to meet me. I thought if I wrote to them directly, without going through Tom’s bitch of a mother, it might actually happen this time. If I go now, I’ll catch the first post.’
I am glad she’s focused and trying again with the children. But at moments like this, an image flashes into my mind: her departure from Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court. I’d watched from the pavement as they dragged her down the steps, her head flicking from side to side, feet kicking out at her escorts. It was a struggle to get her into the van; one arm free for a moment, she pulled away and banged her head repeatedly against the doors.
So yes, I’m glad she has a project. But I wish I knew her motives. This – after yesterday’s shopping list. It’s best to stay on the safe side. Standling and Grainger’s application for bail made a big play on the fact that, as a mother, a pillar of the community, she was not going to make a run for it.
She rattled the latch for a minute before she realised it was locked. We had words, but I think she came to understand my position. In the end, I went to the post office for her. I don’t want to take any risks, that’s all.
I didn’t see much of Tom while Ailsa was helping me with the house. He was busy, either at the office, or at various social commitments – Henley, Hurlingham, Ascot, events for which he had to ‘fork out’. (Even in this day and age, apparently, a certain sort of business is to be conducted, or courted, over the equivalent of a round of golf.)
I wonder how hard Ailsa had to work to keep him away from me.
When I think back to my state of mind at this point, I admit that, rightly or wrongly, I was obsessively vigilant. Listening at the wall, I learnt to distinguish their different treads: Melissa’s fast, a headlong dash; Bea’s quiet and light; Max’s uneven, clumsy, accompanied more often than not by the scrape of an elbow along the paper. Tom’s steps were the heaviest, his presence the noisiest. His mood deteriorated over this period, noticeably so. The success or not of his day was obvious in his moment of re-entry. A hefty push of the door and a shout hello: all would be well. The tinkle of the key on the shelf, the click of the door closing, his steps were silent then. I imagined him creeping along the hall, edging down the stairs into the basement, to catch someone out – Ailsa or a child, doing something they shouldn’t: watching TV, or playing video games, or internet shopping. My ear pressed, I’d hear raised voices then, tears, a fight, usually with Max. I noticed Tom often repeated the same phrases. ‘You’re banned. I told you on Saturday. You should have listened. You’re banned, as I told you on Saturday.’ The same words in circles. On the third repeat you’d begin to feel bludgeoned.
One evening, Ailsa and I were standing on my doorstep, tussling, if I remember rightly, over an old cat basket. I looked up and there was a figure on the pavement, behind the hedge between our houses, a shadow emerging from between the timber resting against my fence. Sunglasses. Blue jeans. White shirt.
‘The front door is wide open,’ he said.
‘You’re home early.’ She was trying to sound cheerful.
‘I said, the front door is wide open.’ He repeated himself in the same flat, reasonable tone. ‘It’s wide open.’
‘Max has only just gone in.’
‘So he’s decided to leave our house open to anyone who wants to help themselves to anything they can get their hands on?’ He pulled at the hedge, privet bunching out of his knuckles.
‘Seconds ago,’ she said. ‘I’m almost there. It’s been seconds.’
‘I don’t care how long it’s been,’ he said. ‘It needs to be shut at all times. The door can’t be left wide open for anyone to walk in. I’d have thought that was obvious to anyone who wasn’t a fucking moron.’
Ailsa was looking at me, her eyes narrowed, anxious but smiling, as if it were all a bit of a joke, and I was either so scared of him or so in thrall to her, I smiled back. I colluded. I don’t know which of us felt more ashamed.
The date of their summer party crept up without me really noticing. She mentioned it a few times – who was coming, who was doing ‘the nibbles’, how annoying Delilah was being about the flowers – but I didn’t pay that much attention. Until the last minute, I wasn’t even sure I was invited. In fact, I don’t think my attendance was intended. It was accidental.
The day before the date in question, a Friday, a man came to my door. He was wearing a black suit, his hair slightly damp; under his arm he was carrying
a small brown attaché case. ‘Miss Baxter,’ he said in a tone that was both profoundly serious and cheerful, almost skittish. ‘If I may. I’ve just come from a meeting round the corner with your neighbours, the Swinsons – do you know them? No? And I said to myself Pete, it would be remiss not to check in with Miss Baxter, so here I am, just wondering whether you had time to think any more about my proposal?’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘We met once before, do you remember? Peter Caxton from Equity Release Freedom dot com?’
He must have seen something in my expression, a hesitation, because he snapped open his attaché case and, balancing it on one knee, started handing me pieces of documentation on which figures were printed in neat lines. I took them. He was talking still, listing the reasons why it was a good idea, how beneficial it would be at this point in my life, how I would maximise my advantage, my profit, how I would be realising my assets.
He must have come to the house in the weeks when I was first here alone; it was all quite a blur. You lose your brain a bit after a bereavement; things drop through the holes.
I could see from the leaflet in my hand that he was offering something called ‘a home reversion scheme’. I’d get a lump sum; they’d get the house, though I could live in it ‘for my lifetime’. He was still talking, spinning his spiel, and words and phrases reached my brain: ‘ready cash’, ‘an opportunity to do something for oneself’. And I had started thinking. ‘An extremely viable proposition’: yes, maybe it was. In Ailsa’s hands, the house no longer felt as safe as it had. Perhaps I could leave it behind me. I could travel. Not a cruise, as he was suggesting. But there were places in the UK I’d always wanted to visit. The Lake District. I could go on one of those organised hikes Fred was always advocating. Hell, maybe I could even apply for a passport and join Sue and Maeve on one of their antique-buying trips to France.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 14