Two Metres From You

by Heidi Stephens

  After relaxing the cleanliness standards a little at university (although her friends and housemates still called her Mary Poppins), the move to Aunt Laura’s second home in Pimlico got her back in the domestic groove. She didn’t pay rent, but she was required to cover the bills and keep it clean and well maintained. Aunt Laura wasn’t as exacting as Gemma’s mother, but it felt only right and natural that she should look after somewhere so lovely. There weren’t many twenty-one-year-olds lucky enough to live rent-free in a mews house in London, so she seized the opportunity and taught herself to cook, do basic DIY and maintain the pots and window boxes to a standard Aunt Laura found acceptable, which mostly involved not letting them die.

  The first six years in Warwick Mews had been a happy time for Gemma, while she built up her reputation as a freelance journalist and supplemented her paltry income by working as a copywriter for Caro’s ad agency, writing adverts for organic baby food, retirement homes and breakfast cereals. She established a reliable circle of friends and entertained the occasional boyfriend, including Johannes, who played the French horn for a second-rate orchestra and had lasted two whole years without them ever contemplating living together. Aunt Laura would often come to stay in London for the weekend to do some shopping, and take the opportunity to treat Gemma to dinner, a trip to the theatre or a spa treatment. Gemma had adored her, which made the loss so much harder to bear.

  It was Gemma who first noticed how confused and forgetful Aunt Laura had become, but after months of her aunt dismissing it as nothing more than the menopause, Gemma felt she had no choice but to mention it to her mother during their weekly phone call. The family machine kicked into gear in its usual military fashion, and in a matter of weeks Aunt Laura had a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. She had just turned fifty-six, but her decline was rapid; within a couple of years she had sold the Norfolk house to cover the cost of living in a specialist private care home, and her four-year-old dog Mabel was relocated to live with Gemma in London.

  It surprised none of Gemma’s family to learn that the Norfolk house had been mortgaged to the hilt and the money from Clive’s estate was long gone; Aunt Laura’s spendthrift habits were legendary. Just over two years later Warwick Mews had to be sold too; at that point Gemma had only been dating Fraser for six months, and yet it had seemed natural that they would move in together. But within two months her aunt was gone, her relationship was heading south and everything Gemma cared about felt like it was slipping away. The only upside was moving south of the river, which meant she was much closer to Joe and Caro – Fraser’s flat in Bermondsey was a twenty-minute walk from Joe’s place in Camberwell, and even closer to Caro’s near Borough Market. The two of them had kept her going for the past six months, long after Fraser had checked out of their relationship and presumably into the Mystery Brunette.

  Aside from a few personal items, the bulk of Aunt Laura’s diminished estate was left to the theatre in Norwich which had enjoyed her patronage for over twenty years, provided they name it after her. Gemma had been delighted by the self-indulgent grandiosity of this; it was SO Aunt Laura. But Gemma’s mother was less impressed; she took it as a personal affront that Gemma hadn’t been ‘looked after’, even though Gemma hadn’t cared a jot – she’d had nearly two decades of Aunt Laura’s unwavering love and generosity, there was nothing else she needed.

  As Gemma picked through the memories of Aunt Laura’s home in Norfolk, she was reminded of a painting she had done on one of the first weekends she’d stayed there. She must have been fourteen. Aunt Laura liked the idea of expressing herself in retirement through the medium of oil and canvas and turned the garage into a peaceful, airy studio. Sadly, she had no talent for it whatsoever, and Gemma had never seen a finished painting emerge. But Aunt Laura didn’t mind Gemma messing around with the paints provided she left everything as she found it, so one day Gemma spent a couple of hours carefully copying an outline of the house from a photograph and writing ‘you feel like home’ across the bottom in elaborate cursive. She signed it self-consciously and left it on Aunt Laura’s bed before she returned to boarding school, then immediately forgot about it for fifteen years until she saw it mounted in a frame on a chest of drawers in Aunt Laura’s care home. It sat alongside a selection of childhood photographs in silver frames; laughing black-and-white shots of Laura and her sister with their parents that Gemma had never seen before.

  Gemma had been visiting Fraser’s family near Glasgow when Aunt Laura died, and by the time she had made it back to Norfolk a couple of days later, Aunt Laura’s room at the care home had been stripped of her clothes and personal effects and prepared for the next resident. Gemma presumed her drawing had been thrown away with anything else that hadn’t been claimed by the executors or the family.

  She was still furious at her mother for not saving more of Aunt Laura’s stuff for her, although sometimes it felt like she’d been furious at Barbara Lockwood for thirty years. Gemma had once written a poem that started ‘I see the world in colour, but for her it’s black and white,’ then thrown it away before she died of embarrassment. But the sentiment was true – Gemma and her mother had never been close the way mothers and daughters are supposed to be. Growing up, Barbara had seemed to find her daughter’s daydreaming and wandering imagination suspicious, telling Gemma she needed to keep her feet on the ground. In turn, Gemma found her mother cold and unfeeling, and had pointed out more than once that it was hard to keep your feet on the ground when you never stopped moving house.

  She hadn’t been able to bring herself to confront her mother over the missing picture, and things had been even more strained than usual between them during a brief trip home at Christmas. If Louise hadn’t been back from Cyprus, Gemma probably wouldn’t have gone at all.

  As Gemma stood back to look at the magic wand she had waved over West Cottage, she thought about how both her mother and Aunt Laura would have approved – despite their chalk and cheese personalities, they aligned on the importance of order and cleanliness. By 8.30 p.m. she was starving again, so she headed into the kitchen to make a stir fry with the ingredients she’d picked up in the shop earlier. Twenty minutes later she poured herself a glass of wine and happily ate her dinner leaning against the kitchen counter, Mabel lying hopefully at her feet. She had a clean house, food, wine and a happy dog. Life could definitely be worse.

  The gentle knock on the kitchen door made her jump, and it took her a moment to realise that Matthew’s face was pressed against the small pane of glass. He pointed and gestured at one of the drawers until she found the key, then stepped into the kitchen with a blast of cool air. His brow was furrowed with concern.

  ‘I just came to check you were all right. I thought you might be in a bit of a stress.’

  Gemma immediately bridled. ‘Why wouldn’t I be all right? I’m not a child, I’ve lived alone for years.’

  Matthew paused, momentarily taken aback. ‘You have seen the news, right?’

  The blank look on Gemma’s face told him she had not. ‘I’ve got no WiFi and no phone signal. There’s no TV. I’ve seen nothing. What’s happened?’ She put her bowl in the sink, her heart beginning to race. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  ‘Gemma, we’re in lockdown for three weeks, starting now. We can’t leave our homes, other than for a few specific things. If you want to get back to London, you need to leave now.’

  Ten minutes later, Gemma was up to date on the news and heavily into her second glass of wine. Matthew refused her offer, presumably in case he needed to drive her somewhere. The government had announced a ‘Stay at Home’ policy for three weeks, which meant only essential travel was allowed.

  There was no suggestion that Gemma couldn’t travel back to London tonight or tomorrow morning. But of course, the big question was . . . where would she go? She didn’t have a home in London any more, and none of the letting agencies would be open for viewings. All her friends had tiny flats or a houseful of kids; she definitely didn’t want to sleep on a lumpy s
ofa at Joe’s for three weeks, nor did she want to share a bathroom with Dressage Tony. Going back to her parents in Norfolk was out of the question, and her sister Louise was in Cyprus with her husband Jamie and their two kids. And obviously she wasn’t going back to Fraser under any circumstances.

  Whichever way she looked at it, the least worst option was to stay in West Cottage for the next three weeks. The thought was initially horrifying; she didn’t want to be trapped in a village of strangers right now, and the world felt too scary to be so far away from everyone she loved. But halfway down wine glass number three she realised that she really didn’t have any choice, and she was no stranger to living alone in someone else’s house.

  Matthew had remained silent as Gemma had prowled around the kitchen, occasionally muttering ‘fuck’ and topping up her wine glass. Eventually she remembered he was there and brought him up to speed on her plan to stay for the time being. He nodded, clearly relieved that he wasn’t going to have to do a mercy dash to the train station. Before he left, he scribbled ‘MPBarn7500Q’ on the kitchen chalkboard. ‘It’s the code for my WiFi, help yourself. If you use your phone or laptop at the back of the house or in the garden you should be able to pick it up. Caroline has used it before; there’s a booster plug in the drawer.’ He smiled thinly and closed the door quietly behind him.

  Gemma took a deep breath, the silence of the house settling around her. She felt oddly disconnected from everything, like it was all a bad movie. With immediate effect, schools were closed, non-essential shops were closed, bars and restaurants were closed, even children’s playgrounds. She thought about the mums and kids in the park earlier; they couldn’t possibly have known that they were playing on the swings for the last time in weeks. The café in the village that didn’t open on Mondays wouldn’t open on Tuesday either. How strange that must feel to whoever owned it; they probably had a fridge full of cakes and sandwiches ready to go for tomorrow.

  Gemma quelled the bubbles of anxiety – she was safe, she was healthy, and everything else was well beyond her control right now. People had been talking about lockdown happening for weeks – the spread of the virus in other countries had shown the UK what the future held, and the general consensus was that the UK had dragged their feet, hoping vague directions about social distancing and hand washing would suffice. But Gemma hadn’t expected the lockdown to come into force without any notice; she thought she’d have time to get her head round the idea, talk to her family, make decisions.

  But what difference would that have made? A couple of days’ notice didn’t change her circumstances, and she still had nowhere else to go. Right now, staying put made the most sense.

  It was only three weeks; it would be fine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Thursday, 26 March

  To Do

  More domestic goddess shit

  Clapping thing 8 p.m.

  In the three days since the lockdown was announced, and in the absence of any stimulus or excitement whatsoever, Gemma had settled into the daily routine of an Edwardian housemaid. The weather had been mostly mild and dry, so she’d committed to getting up early, putting on her oldest, most sacrificial clothes, wrapping her hair in a headscarf and spending the morning deep cleaning at least one room every day. She’d started on Tuesday with the loft bedroom and the en-suite, and yesterday had tackled the first-floor bathroom, expelling the final vestiges of ripe cheese in favour of citrus and pine and beeswax. Today was all about the first-floor bedrooms, and (barring unexpected excitement or an uncontrollable need to spend the day on the sofa with a good book and a tube of Pringles), she was hopeful of getting both done since they were entirely empty. The Henry vacuum cleaner that Gemma had found under the stairs wasn’t really up to the job, but it was better than nothing and, thanks to a bumper box of spare bags she’d found in the same cupboard, she was gradually waging war on years of accumulated dust and dead insects. Henry’s smiling red face was the closest thing she had to company right now; she felt like a domestic servant version of Tom Hanks in Castaway.

  By lunchtime Gemma had transformed both rooms, sucking away a thick layer of grey dust to reveal the wheat-coloured woven carpets beneath. She wiped the skirting boards and the window frames, vacuumed dead flies out of the casements, and ran the crevice tool along the edge of the carpet to remove hundreds of dead woodlice that rattled up the vacuum cleaner tube like plastic beads. The fireplaces were wiped down and de-spidered, and the light fittings bashed with a feather duster to dislodge a cloud of dust and dead moths that brought on a sneezing fit. She planned to tackle the windows another day, so left the murky glass panes and, instead, braved the built-in wardrobe to see whether it was home to dead mice, as she’d discovered in the cupboards built into the eaves upstairs, or just more woodlice. Her years living in foreign countries had made her hardy to crawly things – their house in

  Cyprus had been riddled with cockroaches. Gemma was less keen on flying bugs – she’d rather deal with a fat spider than a daddy-long-legs any day.

  The cleaning was tiring work, and by lunchtime Gemma’s muscles ached and her hands were raw from abrasive cleaning products and anti-bacterial soap. The government advised that everyone wash their hands more often, so Gemma made sure she scrubbed them before and after leaving the house for her one period of government-mandated exercise, which was an extended midday walk with Mabel. She’d started to explore more of the countryside around the village, heading in a different direction each day and following public footpath signs across fields and through woodlands, discovering tiny clusters of pretty houses and remote farms. On a sunny day it was hard to beat England in spring, but the West Country felt very different to the walks she’d done with Aunt Laura in Norfolk. The landscape here was more fertile and undulating, the hedgerows more abundant, the trees bigger and more magnificent. When Gemma was a teenager Aunt Laura used to point out every hedgerow tree and wildflower they passed on their country walks, testing Gemma to see if she could recall the names. Eighteen years on she still remembered them – blackthorn, hazel, elder, beech, stitchwort, rose campion, forget-me-not.

  Today Gemma ended her walk by the 4G refuge of the churchyard, in the hope of getting hold of Louise – she had been itching to talk to her sister all week, but Louise had just been assigned to a task force that was implementing lockdown rules on the military bases in Cyprus. All they’d managed was a few WhatsApp messages, so it took her by surprise when Louise actually answered the phone.

  ‘I have exactly ninety seconds before my next meeting. Tell me something fun.’

  Gemma laughed. ‘Sorry, sis. I’m in a village in the arse end of nowhere and the world’s gone mad. No fun to be had.’

  ‘But you’re OK, right?’ Gemma could hear the concern in Louise’s voice, and it made her heart hurt.

  ‘I’m fine, I promise.’

  ‘Not pining for the cheating fuckhead?’

  ‘Definitely not. I have Mabel and we’re safe. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, but I have to go and do my duty or some other bollocks. I’ll call you at the weekend. Text me a joke.’

  Gemma smiled. She and Louise had been texting each other terrible dad jokes since they were kids and got their first mobile phones.

  ‘I will. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too, Gummer.’ Louise had called Gemma this when she was little, unable to get her toddler mouth around the soft ‘g’. Even though they were 2,000 miles apart, some things never changed.

  Gemma hung up, then sat and thought for a couple of minutes before opening up WhatsApp and starting a new message to her sister.

  How do you stop your car from driving into a pig?

  There was a short pause, before ‘Don’t know’ and a laughing emoji appeared on the screen. Gemma typed in ‘USE THE HAMBRAKE’ before heading home with a new spring in her step.

  Gemma spent the remainder of the afternoon catching up on emails and pitching for work, and by 7 p.m. she was done in. She heated up the remains of
last night’s pesto pasta and curled up on the sofa, Mabel on her feet, with a glass of wine and the day’s news highlights on her phone. Everything read like a dystopian movie; they were starting to set up Covid-19 hospitals, converting the Excel Exhibition Centre in London into a specialist unit with the potential for thousands of ventilated beds. There were nearly half a million cases worldwide now, with all eyes on the USA, which already had a thousand deaths and rising. President Trump was determined that everything would be open again by Easter, but anyone with half a brain could see that wasn’t going to happen. Gemma felt detached from everything and frustrated that she couldn’t help – part of her longed to be in London, supporting her friends and volunteering to help. But then she reminded herself of the realities – nowhere to live, how worried her parents would be, the increased risk of her getting ill, or, perhaps more terrifying, being asymptomatic and spreading it to others unknowingly. It made far more sense for her to be here, at least for the time being.

  She turned off her phone and breathed deeply, taking in the nooks and crannies of the lounge, her task for tomorrow. Aside from feeling calmer and more in control in a clean house, Gemma’s efforts were mostly about showing her appreciation to Caro for letting her stay. She had called her on Monday night after the lockdown announcement, and Caro had been entirely laid-back about Gemma living in West Cottage for as long as she liked. She didn’t want rent, but they agreed Gemma would cover the bills and put some time and TLC into the cottage and the garden while she was there. It seemed like the least she could do, and time was something Gemma had plenty of right now, because work was already drying up. Many of her usual newspaper and magazine commissions were being picked up by staffers or not written at all, as advertising revenues plummeted and the media tightened its belt along with everyone else. Caro’s ad agency was struggling too – half the staff were being furloughed on the government’s Job Retention Scheme and it could be months before any copywriting work came Gemma’s way.