Her mouth formed half a smile. “Bored? Never,” Sophie said with fragile lightness. “I love gratitude. Bring it on.” Louis’s smile widened, and Sophie was sure that the oxygen levels in the room depleted.
“Well then. Thank you again,” he said, and without warning he bridged the remaining space between them in one swift move and left the remnants of a soft, warm kiss on her cheek almost before she knew what had happened.
“Right then,” Sophie said, her voice a decibel higher than usual. “Bedtime for me. See you in the morning. Night then!” And she closed Louis’s door behind her before she had finished the last word.
She stood for a moment in the hallway and studied the endlessly swirling pattern of the carpeted floor as she considered the phenomena she had just experienced. Taking a brief audit of her sexual history, Sophie worked out that she had had three lovers in her lifetime, one a boyfriend with whom she’d had the most sex to date. She was fairly certain she had been in love with him, which automatically made sex better according to popular belief. She and Alex had had all kinds of sex, all over her flat and his, which meant it must have been good sex, because everybody knows that sex that’s not in a bed is good sex. They had done at least three positions, and there had been orgasms. Alex had not always been there, but nevertheless, orgasms had been had while she had been seeing him. Whenever Eve had joked about her near-virginal frigidity, Sophie had confidently scoffed, remembering those orgasms. And as for Carrie’s schoolgirl-crude exclamations of what it meant to be truly turned on, Sophie had just laughingly agreed and secretly decided that that degree of sexual pleasure was merely fictional, the sort of thing that women’s magazines and slushy novels go on about all the time but that nobody really ever experiences. And nothing, not even Alex, had ever led her to change her opinion on that subject.
Until about two minutes ago, when her dead best friend’s husband had kissed her innocently on the cheek, and for the first time in her life, Sophie had felt something that she really could describe only as her knickers. Fizzing.
“Bollocks,” Sophie said.
She crept into the room she was sharing with Louis the irresponsible cheek kisser’s daughters and, undressing quickly, climbed into her single bed without even bothering to clean her teeth. “Damn,” Sophie cursed once more under her breath and yanked the bedspread over her head. She had been really looking forward to a good night’s sleep in an actual bed, and now when she finally had the prospect of one, she wouldn’t have time to do any sleeping. But it looked like the way Louis made her feel was more than just her usual safe, unrequited crushes. It was hot, intense, and very real.
No, she wouldn’t have any sleep tonight. She’d have to spend all night lying awake and worrying.
Twenty-two
We have all been on a long journey,” Izzy said with a fair amount of mysticism considering her age. “Haven’t we?”
“Yes, we have,” Sophie said in her I’m-not-really-listening-to-you-but-I’ll-agree-with-everything-you-say voice. She smiled and nodded as Izzy chattered and fiddled anxiously with her napkin. The three of them had been in the breakfast room since seven, the earliest hour permitted, and would have been there a good hour earlier if only they could have got away with it. Izzy had reveled in the cereal selection, and Bella had picked at the edges of fried egg on toast for almost forty minutes. Louis had still not come down, a fact about which Sophie did not know whether she should be relieved or annoyed. On the one hand, she hadn’t yet had to endure any embarrassing flashback incidents. But on the other, it struck her as highly ironic that she was the one up at five o’clock with the children while their natural father slumbered blissfully unaware, just a few inches of brick and some insulating material away. To be fair, Sophie conceded, she could have sent Izzy into his bedroom to practice circus trampolining on his bed while he was in it, but that would have resulted in her coming face-to-face with him and having to endure even sooner the inevitable embarrassing flashbacks.
Sophie swore at herself. She had to be the only woman since the demise of the great Victorian novel to get so flustered over a totally lame, not remotely special and sexy kiss on the cheek. Maybe if he had grabbed her in his arms and cried “Damn convention, damn propriety—I simply must have you or die!” then flung her on the bed and ravaged her, maybe then her total flakiness would have been fair enough. But he hadn’t—the thought had never crossed his mind. Furthermore, she would never have allowed herself to get turned on by Carrie’s husband—ex or not—while Carrie had been alive, and to do so now when she was dead? Well, put it this way, if Sophie’s Catholicism had not lapsed and she’d happened to mention some of last night’s wilder thoughts in confession, she was fairly sure that no amount of Hail Marys would have saved her from a specially reserved spot in Hell. But instead of hightailing it to church in search of redemption, she told herself it was all nonsense and silliness and probably just a figment of her wrung-out imagination. When she’d finally got a decent night’s sleep and all this emotional wrangling was over and she had her normal life back, she’d realize that she hadn’t had fizzy knickers at all. It was probably cystitis.
“Daddy’s fab-li-us, isn’t he?” Izzy said.
“Yes, he is,” Sophie agreed absently just as Louis appeared in the doorway, still damp from the shower and clean-shaven.
“Thanks,” he said to Sophie with a broad grin. “You’re pretty wonderful yourself. I’m sorry I took so long coming down. I thought I’d better shower and shave before people start mistaking me for a stinky old tramp again.” He winked at Bella, who looked studiously unimpressed. “I thought that later on you could have a couple of hours to yourself while I did a solo shift?”
Sophie looked at him. “Lovely,” she said, wondering if Mrs. Alexander had any cranberry juice—wasn’t that supposed to be good for cystitis?
“What are we doing here?” Bella demanded, pushing her plate away from her. She fixed her gaze on Sophie. “Are you going to leave us here with him?”
Sophie looked at her pale, pinched face. She and Louis had told the girls the day before yesterday that they were bringing them down to St. Ives for a visit. She had expected them to be thrilled to be going home, but instead Izzy had questioned her relentlessly about the mode of transportation and how long it would take to get there, and Bella, seeing yet another upheaval in her already tumultuous life, had said nothing at all.
The night she’d tucked the girls in before they left, Sophie had knelt beside the bed, brushed Bella’s bangs out of her eyes, and whispered, “Aren’t you glad to be going back home? I thought you missed it?”
Bella had turned onto her side, so that most of her face fell into shadow. “It won’t be going home, though, will it? Because Mummy’s not there. And going back now means the end of living here with you and the beginning of living with him, doesn’t it?”
Sophie had searched the shadows of Bella’s face for her eyes and fixed on the two tiny points of reflected light. “Yes, it does,” she’d said simply, knowing that any lie, even a white one, would not help Bella. “But I thought you were starting feeling better about that? Better about your dad?”
She had expected more questions from Bella, but instead the two points of light had blinked out for a moment, and then Bella had whispered, “I’m going to sleep now.”
She hadn’t questioned the trip further until this moment. Sophie looked at Louis, who nodded, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a set of keys, which he laid on the table. Bella and Izzy looked at the keys which were tied together on a faded bit of what was once multicolored ribbon to which was also attached a faded pink troll, its hair matted and sticky.
Bella looked up at Sophie. “Mummy’s keys,” she said quietly. “He’s got Mummy’s keys.”
“Trollee!” Izzy cried, picking up the key ring and kissing the creature attached to it. “But I mustn’t lose you, must I? ’Cos Mummy will be very cross.” She said the words like an automatic mantra, before furrowing her brow and placin
g the keys back down on the table. “But Mummy’s not here, so—Well, I’d better not play with you.”
All four of them stared at the keys as if they were some kind of talisman, or the way to unlock a secret door to the past. Quickly, before the moment could be filled with any more meaning, Sophie picked up the keys and jangled them as if she could shake all of the significance out of them.
“We’re going back to look at the house,” she said briskly, as Louis seemed unable to. “Things happened very quickly when you first went to stay with your gran, so we’re going back there to get any of your things you might want. And to check that the house is okay before…”
Bella frowned. “Before what?” she said.
“Well—” Sophie began out of recently acquired habit, but Louis interrupted her.
“When Mummy died she gave us the house. It belongs to us now, all three of us.”
“Mummy gave the house to you?” Bella sounded incredulous, and Louis realized his mistake. Bella was not the sort of child to fall for adult half-truths.
“Well, half of the house belonged to me to begin with, from when I lived there with you, Bella, and then when Mummy died, the other half became mine because Mummy and I were still married.”
“You weren’t married,” Bella said. “Married people live together.”
Louis reached out for her hand, which she withdrew and held under the table.
“Yes, I know,” he said, resting his hand on the flowery tablecloth instead. “But in the eyes of the law we were still married, and…anyway, the house belongs to all of us now, you, me, and Izzy. We’re going back there to look at it and decide what we want to do with it.”
Bella released one hand and snaked it through Sophie’s arm. “What do you mean, do with it?” she said uncertainly.
“Well, we could sell it,” Louis said carefully. “Or we could live it in it. You, me, and Izzy.”
Carrie’s house was in the middle of Virgin Street, a steep terrace that marched down the hillside toward the town’s harbor. It was a narrow, whitewashed house, its two front window frames painted bright blue along with the door. As they had walked down the steep road to its front door, Sophie had been able to pick it out without needing to look at the numbers. It was the only one of the row of houses to have a roof glittering with frost in the bright cold morning. A cold, empty house at the heart of a row of warm, busy lives, slotted side by side around the place that had once been Carrie’s pride and joy. It hadn’t been completely neglected, Louis had told Sophie, who had to admit she hadn’t even thought about the house, as if it and all of the physical remnants of Carrie’s life would have somehow vanished the moment she died. A neighbor, Louis explained, checked in on it regularly. Turned lights on and off, picked up the junk mail that continued to arrive long after any meaningful correspondence had dried up, and made sure it didn’t get so cold that the water pipes burst. In fact, when Louis had spoken to the solicitor who posted him the house keys, he’d discovered that there was something else the neighbor had been doing too, but he wanted to keep that a secret for now.
The four of them stood opposite the house and looked at it.
“Is Mummy in there too?” Izzy said, and it was hard to shake the sensation that she might be. That Carrie might be about to open the front door and ask them where they had all been. “Shall I ring the bell?” Izzy asked, pulling at Sophie’s sleeve. “For Mummy to let us in?”
“Mummy’s not in there, stupid,” Bella said rather harshly. It was the first thing she had said since Louis’s announcement at the breakfast table.
Izzy’s bottom lip began to wobble. “I’m not stupid,” she protested softly. “Mummy’s in the sky and the stars and the sea and the trees, isn’t she, Aunty Sophie?” Sophie nodded, wincing internally as she realized exactly where Izzy’s train of thought was going. “So she could be in the house too, couldn’t she?”
It was her fault for agreeing with Izzy every time she asked her, Is Mummy in the lamppost, or the rain?
“Um, the thing is—” Sophie began, before Louis interrupted her, kneeling beside Izzy and hooking an arm around her shoulders.
“Mummy is sort of in the house,” he said, trying to hide the strain in his own voice. “Memories of Mummy will be there, things that remind us of her and make us think about her. But Mummy won’t be there. She’s gone, Izzy.”
Izzy buried her face for a moment in Louis’s jacket, and Sophie saw Bella watching them intently, emotions racing across her heart-shaped face like clouds across the sun. After a moment Bella put a hand on Izzy’s shoulder. “It’s all right, baby,” she said, using the word as an endearment instead of her usual insult, with Carrie’s warmth and intonation in every syllable. “Don’t be upset.”
Izzy emerged from Louis’s embrace and took Bella’s gloved hand.
“Right,” Louis said, straightening up, one hand still on Izzy’s shoulder. “Let’s get out of this cold.”
For a minute or so, nobody said anything as they looked around the small front room. After a while Louis turned on the light and, going to the foot of the stairs, turned up the thermostat. There was an audible click, and the radiator under the windowsill began to creak.
“Everything’s still working,” he said, glancing around the room. “Nothing’s really changed.”
For a second Sophie had to ask him what on earth could have changed in a vacant house over six months, but then she realized; this was the first time Louis had set foot in the house in over three years, and who knew—except for him and possibly Bella—under what circumstances he had left it. He continued to look around the room without moving his feet, and then, in one quick stride, he crossed the living room and picked up a framed photo from the mantelpiece. It was a picture of him and Carrie on their wedding day.
Then, as Louis studied the photo, his profile hidden by his hair, Sophie felt herself take a deep, sharp, reflexive breath, and in that moment she knew. Carrie was really gone.
It was being here, so nearly close to her, almost engulfed in the space her absence made that brought the truth home to her.
She really was dead, because if she wasn’t here in this house, in this life that Sophie had subconsciously imagined for her even when she didn’t give a second thought from day to day, if she wasn’t here, then she wasn’t anywhere.
Sophie felt her chest tighten and her eyes sting. “I’ll just…,” she said as she hurried through the kitchen to the bathroom, hoping everyone else was so lost in their own thoughts that they hadn’t really heard or noticed her. She pulled open the sliding door that concealed the apricot bathroom suite. It had always made Carrie laugh because it came complete with a bidet.
Sophie closed the toilet lid and sat on it. She took deep and steady breaths, and tried to focus her mind, but still the tears came, slow and hot. Her shoulders shook and her breath juddered, and she felt Carrie’s death keenly in the center of her chest, like a small but vital part of herself had been ripped out.
“Don’t you dare cry,” she whispered to herself. “Not now.” Furiously, Sophie brushed the tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand, repeating the process after every blink, but still they did not stop. Somehow, as if crying had improved her vision, she saw everything in the bathroom with startling clarity. A pair of gold hoop earrings gleaming in the soap dish, an opened box of Tampax half-concealed by the side of the lavatory. A bra, once hand-washed and long ago hung across the shower curtain rail to drip dry, now stiff and dusty. Sophie wept even harder.
She hadn’t anticipated this. She had expected to be the strong one, the emotional prop for the others, who had all suffered far more deeply than she. She had expected to be there to support the children, and even Louis if he needed it. But here she was weeping, crying like she never had for Carrie since the moment she had known that she was dead. It had been so long that Sophie had begun to believe she would never grieve like this for her friend. But instead she’d picked the worst time of all to crumble, crying for Carrie bu
t also crying for herself.
Sophie cried because she missed her friend. But she also cried for all the things she had lost before Carrie’s death. Her father, her childhood. Her friendship with her mother. Her sense of self. Her courage and adventurous spirit. The things that losing Carrie had somehow seemed to give back to her, one by one.
She had fallen in love with two children who should never have been hers to love. Somehow this complicated whirlpool of events had woken her up, and now she wanted what Carrie had had and would never have again. And that made Sophie cry all the harder, because if that was true, wasn’t she trying to steal Carrie’s life? And if she was, she knew she would be hopeless at living it. She could never have a tenth of the energy, audacity, and verve that Carrie had brought to every day. That was the woman whom Louis and his daughters loved and missed so much. Just as Sophie feared she might never pull herself together, there was a knock on the door.
“Aunty Sophie?” It was Izzy. “I need a wee.” Sophie took a deep breath, dried her face with her palms, and arranged her mouth into a smile before pulling open the door and ushering Izzy in. Izzy pulled down her trousers and underpants and, lifting the toilet lid, edged her way onto the seat. She examined Sophie’s face as she passed water.
“Your eyes have gone all black,” she observed. She cocked her head to one side, stretched out both her arms, and said, “Don’t worry, baby. Don’t be upset.”
If just over a month ago anyone had told Sophie that very soon she would be openly weeping in the embrace of a three-year-old girl, who comforted her as she sat on the loo, Sophie would have laughed in her face. But now Izzy’s arms around her neck, her hot breath on her cheek were exactly the sensations Sophie needed to feel calm again. Izzy patted her on the back several times as Sophie knelt before her, and after a while Sophie broke the embrace, cupped Izzy’s face in one hand, and kissed her forehead. “You’re a lovely little girl, aren’t you?” she said, realizing she wasn’t going to cry anymore. At last she felt connected to the world again, for the first time since that freezing day at the crematorium she stood up, knowing that the first tears she had shed for Carrie wouldn’t be her last, but for now at least, she felt lighter and stronger. Strong enough to give the support she had intended. As Izzy concentrated on her business, Sophie looked in the cabinet mirror and washed her face in cold water until all traces of tears and makeup were gone. Her skin remained burnished, but her eyes looked fairly clear, as long as no one looked into them too deeply.
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