by Elaine Chong
“There must be some mistake.”
“It isn’t a mistake. I’m just sorry that he’s treated you and Julia in such a shabby way. I know things weren’t good between the two of you, but frankly I’m more shocked he’d do this to Julia. The only reason I’m telling you any of this is because there may be nothing left for you ... at the end.”
“I really don’t care about that, Mum,” I said, and I meant it. “I just want to know who this person is. Have you told the police? It could be important.”
She breathed an impatient sigh. “The police did door-to-door interviews in the road where he was found. Several people recognised him from the photograph I gave them. They know all about her and her mother. This Miriam is just a child, Richard.”
I was still unconvinced. “Are you absolutely certain that she’s his daughter?”
“Yes! She’s been living with her mother in a house right there where…where it happened. Your father was a regular visitor by all accounts, but I suppose he would be.”
It was strange, hearing my mother speak about him in that way – almost as though he were little more than a family friend. Of course, now I know their marriage had long dissolved into mutual indifference with my father in possession of the upper hand because my mother was financially dependent on him. Still, at the time it was hard to take on-board the fact that he had another family, and it must have been an even greater shock for her – the ultimate betrayal.
“You don’t think she could have been responsible for his death – this other woman?” I asked her. “The police have interviewed her, surely?”
I heard my mother draw a long, shuddering sigh. “I think what happened to your father was just a terrible accident. This other woman ... she’d taken the little girl to visit her grandparents, so they weren’t even in the country. According to my police liaison officer, she claims she knows nothing about the will, and they won’t be coming back here.”
“But that doesn’t change anything,” I insisted. “The girl’s still going to inherit our family home at some point in the future.”
“Well, so be it,” my mother replied in a tremulous voice. “Perhaps some good may come out of this ... this horrible, horrible mess.”
I argued with her over and over again, but she was adamant that all she wanted to do was move on; she still had a lovely home and money in the bank; she would be fine, I would be fine, and Julia didn’t need to know about any of it – quite yet.
I knew she was wrong. I knew from painful, personal experience that even closely guarded secrets eventually reveal themselves, but as the weeks gave way to months and months to years, I pushed it all to the back of my mind and got on with my life.
I continue to mull over my problems until I finally pull onto the driveway of the house after a wearying and frustrating battle with the early morning traffic on the busy A12 road. I still the engine, glance out of the side window and see that the curtains have been drawn, which means that, being a Monday morning, Maggie has already arrived.
As I climb out of the car, I suddenly notice that the driveway is sown with weeds. They push through the pale, yellow stones at close, regular intervals, leaving the expanse of gravel looking more like a building site than the golden, yellow beach my mother once told me it was supposed to represent. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before, and the creeping wildness of the place strikes me with such force that I fall back onto the seat. When did it get like this? I think to myself.
I cast my eyes over the exterior of the house and there’s less evidence here of deliberate neglect. The windows are shiny clean, thanks to Maggie’s sterling efforts, but a long streak of mould draws my eye to where the guttering has been leaking, and the front door could certainly use a new coat of paint. The place definitely looks its age though overall Hillcrest is a fine example of 1930s architecture with its red clay tile roof, herringbone brickwork and diamond leaded pane windows. For my father, it represented the pinnacle of his success, which I suppose goes some way to explain its importance to him.
I’m still running my eyes over the flaking, wooden window frames when the front door opens unexpectedly. Maggie walks out onto the front step, smiles and then beckons me inside. I follow her into the house, which in contrast to the garden is neat and clean. I explain about the briefcase.
“Oh, I saw that,” she says. “I put it on the desk in your dad’s study.”
The fact that my father died nearly fifteen years ago seems to have had little impact on either the order or the running of the house – though perhaps the garden tells a different story. I push my head around the door and feel a familiar nervousness, a tremor in my hand as it grips the handle. I hear my father’s voice – For God’s sake, Richard. You’re hanging onto that bloody doorknob like a baby with a dummy. Just get in here!
Everything in the study is exactly as he left it, more or less. I don’t understand why my mother hasn’t cleared it out, but perhaps she senses the same atmosphere of ownership that I do: this was my father’s private space and no one – including my mother – was allowed to enter it without his permission. When he went away, he locked the door.
I hurriedly retrieve my briefcase and carry it into the kitchen where Maggie is already preparing to leave.
“I’ve had a quick dust and vacuum in the rooms downstairs,” she says. “As soon as I know when Mrs Oakley’s coming home, I’ll put fresh sheets on the bed. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine,” I tell her. “I’m expecting Julia to come back here at some point, so could you get her old room ready? I had a quick look in there last night and it was freezing. We might need to get someone in to check the heating.”
Something changes in Maggie’s warm, welcoming smile – just a fraction, just a brief stiffening of her full, pink lips and something that looks like apprehension in her bright blue eyes. She recovers quickly. “I can do that, of course, I can. But maybe she might like to have the guest room? It’s a double bed, that’s all.”
“No en suite, though.”
“The bathroom’s next door.”
“Is there a problem? I mean, with the room,” I ask her. “If it’s too much work, you only have to say.”
“No, no, it’s not that...” She leaves the sentence unfinished, collects her handbag from the kitchen counter and walks out into the hallway.
I follow her and tentatively put my hand on her arm. She’s been working for my mother for more years than I can remember, and I don’t want to upset her. “I really appreciate you looking after Mum the way you have been, Maggie. I can get someone in to give you a hand if it’s too much.” She hesitates, turns her head ever so slightly away from me, and I can see that her attention has moved to the staircase in the middle of the hallway. I follow her gaze, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. She suddenly straightens her shoulders and moves with speed to the front door. “Maggie?”
She pauses, glances back over her shoulder. “Maybe you should ask your Mum about that room, you know, when she’s feeling better.”
“Julia’s bedroom?”
“It’s just a thought,” she says, and she grabs her jacket from the rack and leaves, pulling the door firmly shut behind her.
Lenora
Even behind closed lids my eyes communicate to my fogged brain that I’m not in my bedroom – too much harsh, white, artificial light, and the curtains in my bedroom are rose pink; they lend the room a gentle, early morning glow.
But I remember now – at least, I remember going to sleep in a hospital bed, though I can’t quite remember why.
There’s an area of flesh around my left hip, which throbs painfully. I try to slide my hand under the cover, but I quickly discover that I’m attached to something mechanical through a needle in the back of my hand. Within seconds, the monitor next to my bed beeps a critical alert and strong hands lift my arm back onto the top of the sheet.
Someone says, “Are you awake, Lenora? Do want some breakfast?”
I want to wake up, but I can feel s
leep stealing back into my brain and it’s hard to resist.
“Lenora, I’ve got some porridge here for you and some nice apple puree. Are you going to wake up and eat something, love?”
Aggie’s voice is in my head, urging me to keep my eyes closed, but why?
And then it comes to me: the apple-guessing game. I would keep my eyes tightly shut and Aggie would push a piece of apple into my mouth. When I bit into it, the juice ran down my chin. The taste was sweet and aromatic, and I was always certain that I recognised the flavour.
That day in the farm shop, that was the first time I caught a glimpse of something dark and destructive in her…
“Cox’s Orange Pippin,” I said.
“Wrong!”
“Laxton Fortune?”
“Wrong again!”
I was always reluctant to admit defeat, but I said, “Okay, I give up,”
“Cornish Gilliflower.”
I opened my eyes and saw Aggie grinning back at me. The apple guessing game was supposed to be fun, but sometimes it didn’t feel like fun.
We’d both become ladies of leisure – the kind of people who have time to visit small, independent retailers in out of the way places. They call themselves ‘farm shops’, which would have made my mother smile. She sold eggs and fruit and vegetables from our farm, whatever was in season, but she had just a chair, a faded beach umbrella and a battered table on the side of the road. This shop offered customers the opportunity to ‘taste before you buy’ and Aggie had taken to sampling the produce like a professional wine taster.
“Now, it’s my turn,” she said, and she closed her eyes.
Playing ‘Guess the Apple’ was a bit like playing scrabble with Aggie: she always won. Growing up an only child, her parents had kept her entertained on wet afternoons with endless board games, so she was really good at that sort of thing. I’d grown up with three older brothers who beat me at everything, so I was a really sore loser and Aggie’s apple game had quickly lost its appeal.
I remember that one time well. The fruit was heaped in baskets around us shiny and bright: beautiful, autumnal shades of red and orange and pink. It was really hard to choose.
“Hurry up!” Aggie said. “If I stand here much longer with my eyes closed, I’m going to get dizzy and fall over.”
I glanced at the labels then reached for a piece of fruit. It was called Pearmaine… and then something I couldn’t read properly without my glasses, but the name sounded familiar. It was an odd shape for an apple, but I used the knife on the wooden block to cut off a small slice and I popped it into Aggie’s open mouth.
She chewed it thoughtfully. “I think this must be a new variety,” she said.
Hope swelled in my chest. “Are you giving up?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Give me another slice.”
I cut another, larger piece of apple and pushed it into her mouth.
She opened her eyes. “This isn’t an apple.”
“Yes, it is. It’s one of these,” I said, and I handed her the label.
“‘Pears – Maine, US Imported,’” she read out loud then she carefully selected one of the pieces of fruit from the basket and held it up in front of my face. “Does this look like an apple?”
I screwed up my eyes and peered at the fruit. “It could be. It’s very dark in here and I’m not wearing my reading glasses.”
“This is not shaped like an apple,” she said. “This is pear-shaped.”
I was so tempted to tell her that, if nothing else, it was an accurate description of her apple guessing game, but I bit my tongue instead and said, “It was a genuine mistake.”
She smiled suddenly and looked smug “It’s fine. And I win.”
“How did you win? It’s an apple-guessing game.”
“I guessed it wasn’t an apple and it wasn’t.”
I was set to battle it out with her, but a man in a white coat suddenly loomed in the doorway. His mouth was set in a thin line. “Are you going to buy something?” he asked in a loud voice.
Even in the subdued light of the old barn I could see Aggie’s face change from pink-cheeked triumph to pale-faced shock and then to red-faced anger. I quickly reached for her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze then I turned to the man. “It says ‘Try before you buy’.”
“Well, now you’ve tried,” he said hotly, “so make sure you buy something.”
I looped Aggie’s arm through mine, prised the pear from her hand and dropped it into a brown paper bag. “We’ll take this one.”
I remembered, when I was a child, if there was a glut of apples and pears, we used to sell them to the greengrocer in the high street. We had an orchard at the bottom of the garden and when it was time to pick the fruit, everyone was expected to help. There was no such thing as mechanisation back then, just hard labour. When the soft fruit was ready to be picked, my mother worked through the night bottling and jarring everything – blackberries, raspberries and plump, yellow gooseberries. They were all grown under nets, so the birds didn’t get to eat them before we did. I always made jam in a large cauldron the way my mother taught me. It tasted better than anything you could buy in a shop, but I was still interested to see what they had.
Unsurprisingly Aggie wanted to leave at once, but I wanted to take a look around, even with the eyes of the man in the white coat boring into the back of my head. “Let’s take a look at the ‘fine preserves’,” I said to her, and I pulled her with me to the far side of the shop.
“Do we have to?”
“Yes, we do.”
The man in the white coat continued to watch us from behind the baskets of apples and pears as though we were a couple of teenage tearaways, intent on stealing something when his back was turned.
I rummaged through my bag to find my reading glasses so that I could read the labels properly.
“You have a cupboard full of homemade jam at home,” Aggie said. “Why would you want to buy any of this?”
“I don’t. I’m shopping for ideas.”
All the preserves appeared to have been made by elderly ladies with old-fashioned names like me and Aggie, though perhaps not quite like us judging by the computer-generated labels on the front of the jars. My jam got a circle of wax paper and a lid, and I found out what was in it when I ate it. There were some interesting combinations of flavours though: pear with vanilla, rhubarb with ginger and a wide variety of fruits combined with alcohol.
I ignored the piece of paper pinned to the shelf, which warned that breakages had to be paid for, and began to lift down one jar at a time and study the list of ingredients. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun round and found myself looking up at the man in the white coat.
“Can’t you read you the sign?” he said. He peered down at me, stony-faced and unsmiling.
I think he was trying to appear intimidating, but I could have told him that he was wasting his time. “Do you mean the one that says, ‘Try before you buy’?” I asked. “Because I was thinking of trying, but I can’t get the lids off.” I offered him the jar I was holding because I was certain that this attempt at humour would help to lighten the mood, but I’d misjudged him.
Without saying another word, he took the jar from me and carefully placed it back on the shelf. I saw his hand snake towards me again, reaching for my elbow, his intention no doubt to escort me to the till, but Aggie stepped between us. She slapped his hand away.
He was visibly shocked. “I think you should leave,” he said.
“I think you should keep your hands to yourself,” Aggie hissed back at him. She grabbed the brown paper bag from my hand and removed the single pear. I had no idea what she intended to do with it, but her face was suffused with rage. She passed the empty bag back to me.
It was one of those moments when you know in your gut that something bad is going to happen, but there isn’t anything you can do to prevent it.
Aggie held up the pear with one hand. With the other hand she very slowly squeezed it till it
broke apart between her bony fingers then she shook the pieces from her hand onto the floor.
A different man might have seen some humour in the situation – I think. But this man had suddenly staked his reputation on upholding the warning signs he’d posted around the shop. “You’re still going to have to pay for that,” he said.
I took out my purse. “I’ll pay for it. Aggie, go and wait for me in the car.” I pushed the keys into her hand now slick with pear juice. She mumbled something incoherent and quickly walked away towards the exit. “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I don’t know what came over her.”
He pointed to the till at the far end of the shop. “You can pay there.” He began to move away then stopped, glanced back at me, and I could see that he was utterly confounded by what had just happened but then so was I. At last he said, “Don’t come back. Please.”
When I got outside, I could see Aggie sitting in the passenger seat with her eyes closed. “What on earth happened in there?” I yelled at her when I got into the car. “This was supposed to fun, Aggie. Remember? Guess the apple? We can never, ever come back here. They’ve probably got the whole thing on CCTV.”
She opened her eyes. “He was a bully,” she said simply in response. “I hate bullies.”
Julia
I wake early, extricate myself from the tangle of sheets and slide onto the cool, tiled floor of the bedroom, taking special care not to wake Colin.
Last night Haziq drove us back to our apartment in River Valley Road and the mood in the chilled interior of the car was one of pleasant companionship. We held hands and spoke of our plans to redecorate the dining room – something I’ve been simply itching to do for months but I’ve been held back from hiring a designer while Colin negotiates an extension of our lease.
Siti was waiting for us at the door and had already prepared the cheese on toast. As a consequence, the bread was soggy and the cheese greasy. I took one look at it and told her to take it away. Colin grabbed the plate from her hands and told me not to be an ungrateful bitch. This has become our life: a word, a look, a shake of the head, and the uneasy truce between us is broken.