THIRTY-FOUR
“RIGHT THEN, MY FLOWER,” she said. Norah giggled. “I’ve seen the kitchen and I’m going to say two things. One: don’t make porridge—it’s obviously not your strong point. And two: would you like some toast and a cup of tea?”
“Toast and tea,” said Norah. “Yum-mee.”
“You are very low maintenance in your way, Norah Fossett,” said Opal. “If we ignore the oatmeal you’ve got welded to the cooker, anyway.”
Once she was installed in the chair in the morning room with her plate of jammy toast and Billy Smart’s fireworks exploding over the screen, Opal made her way upstairs. She had thought about taking a duster and a can of polish with her in case Shelley turned up. But who was she kidding? Shelley wouldn’t fall for a duster and polish; she’d be more likely to think Opal was trying to hide something than if Opal offered no excuse at all. Besides, it was Sunday lunchtime; Opal reckoned Shelley fitted Miss Fossett in around her family—she wouldn’t be doing spot checks and sneak raids on a Sunday.
On the landing, she stood and looked around, wondering if the other half of Norah’s bed would be in the attic or in one of the other rooms. Try the rooms first. She opened a door opposite the head of the stairs and looked in.
It was stuffed with furniture. Good dark mahogany, from what Billy and Tony had taught her. Two enormous tables with marble tops and arrangements of mirrors that looked like something from the front of a church instead of somebody’s bedroom. A chest of drawers with at least eight drawers in it, higher than Opal’s shoulders, and a mirror, full-length, standing on dumpy legs carved out of wood to look like bird’s feet clutching gold balls. There were even two bedside tables of the same dark mahogany, with glassed over tops to stop teacups leaving rings on the wood. What wasn’t there was a bed. There was just a space on the floor between the two nightstands and a brighter, darker oblong where the bed had protected the carpet from the sun.
“Bugger me,” said Opal.
She went back down to the morning room and stood behind Norah’s chair. That had worked better the last time than confronting her head on.
“Norah, love?” she said in a soft voice. Norah kept watching the horses, but she took her thumb out of her mouth—Opal noticed that it was stuck here and there with little morsels of chewed toast—and made a small sound. “Where’s the bed from the room with the big mirror?” She had to hope there wasn’t a big mirror in every room. “The mirror with the bird feet.”
“Ball and claw,” said Norah. “Mother’s room.”
“Really?” said Opal. “Okay. Well, where’s your mother’s bed, love?”
“They took it back,” said Norah. “When she died.”
Opal suppressed a sigh. Not them again. She was sick of them.
“Did they?” she said, keeping her voice very light. “Where did they take it back to?”
“To the hospital,” Norah said.
Opal rolled her eyes, looking down at Miss Fossett’s pink parting. Maybe she wasn’t going to get any sense out of her today. Then she blinked and thought again. Maybe Norah was talking the whole plain truth. “They” brought Norah’s dinners and did her personal care. And maybe the same “they”—roughly—really had come for the bed her mum had died in to take it back to the hospital again. She crossed her fingers.
“Not the hospital bed,” she said. “The one before she was ill. Where did you put it when the hospital bed came?”
“In the attic,” said Norah. “Men came. Look, she’s going to stand up on his back now.” On the screen, a woman with thighs like a gladiator had scrambled up to stand on the back of a black horse, one hand holding onto a long rein and the other hand high above her head. Miss Fossett raised her own hand getting just the same flourish into her fingers, bringing the thumb with its little lumps of chewed toast very close to Opal.
“Is it still up there?” said Opal. Miss Fossett put her arm down. She said nothing.
“Norah? Is your mum’s bed still in the attic?”
“Mm-hmm,” said Miss Fossett. She had put her thumb back in her mouth again.
“And where’s the hatch?”
“Hatch?”
“The way into the attic.”
“I’m not allowed up there.”
Opal laughed and ruffled her hair. Norah turned round and gave her a smile so surprised and so sweet that Opal could have hugged her.
“And it’s definitely still up there?” Opal said and got only a frown. Norah had forgotten what they were talking about again. “Your mother’s big bed? It’s in the attic?” Norah nodded and turned back round to face the television screen. She spoke so softly that, if Opal hadn’t been bending to kiss her, she might have missed it.
“Half of it is,” she said and then in went her thumb and she sat back to enjoy the show.
Opal raced back upstairs, scanned the landing and, seeing no hatch there, started opening one door after another. She knew there was no real rush, but she couldn’t help herself. The thought that it was so close! One of the doors was locked, but all the others revealed rooms with smooth, bare, plaster ceilings. She checked above the highest shelf in the linen cupboard, piled to the top with crumpled sheets and stinking of mothballs. She took a good long look at the panels in the one white-tiled, cold-floored bathroom with a wooden cistern high up on the wall and a smell a long way worse than mothballs.
When she had been right round she sat down on the top step of the stairs, frowning at that one locked door, absently pulling at the matted clumps of cobweb in the fretwork of the banisters. How could Norah not know what a hatch was? What else would you call it? A trap door?
Then Opal got a flash in her mind from some old black-and-white film or something, of a white-haired housekeeper in a long white nightie and a candle in her hand, opening a door and going up a set of creaking stairs. Of course! A house like this wouldn’t have a hatch in the ceiling and a ladder. It would have a proper attic staircase, room to spare.
So where was it? She looked again at the only locked door and went to squint through the keyhole. It wasn’t a dark stairway behind there. It was another broad, sunny bedroom, at least twenty feet to the bay window where the daylight was pouring through.
So where the hell was it? Think, Opal. In one of the bedroom cupboards? But it couldn’t be because if there was a staircase behind a false cupboard door, the next room along would have a crooked ceiling, like her kitchen, and none of the rooms in the hou—
She slapped her head and made her way along the landing to the turn in the corridor where the carpet turned into lino, to Norah’s little room. Of course, if someone was going to be bothered with people shoving suitcases up and down into the attic, it would be the maid, not the bosses. (No matter what Norah had said about her little place being the nursery, Opal was sure that it had started out its time as the maid’s room way back when.)
And there it was. Opposite the door, half-covered over by the dressing chest, there was another door and above it the ceiling was boxed in around the stairs the door led to. Opal dragged the chest out of the way, stopped and dragged the little bedside table out of the way a bit too to make more room, and finally got the door free and clear. It was locked, but the key was in it and it turned fairly smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that Opal took it out and wiped it on her palm to check. Yep, there was fresh oil there. Feeling worried, she trotted up the narrow stairs into the dim heat of the attic.
There was just one skylight, small and dusty, and Opal would have loved to find a bulb to switch on. This place was seriously creepy. It had little off-shoots and corners, dead-ends and unexpected spaces. She couldn’t work out at first why a big square house would have such a complicated attic with all these bends and turns, until she thought a little harder and realized it was the bedroom chimneys that made it into such a maze.
But that wasn’t the only reason she hated being up here. Worse than the thought of getting lost, there was the fact that everything was … shrouded. That was the only wor
d for it. Anonymous shapes stood around or lay on the floor, all wrapped in brown sacking. Trunks and cupboards, she assured herself, and—Oh, help! A tailor’s dummy—but she couldn’t stop the sweat beginning to trickle down her neck as she imagined a hand lifting up from the side of one of the bundles and plucking the sacking away.
She took a few deep breaths to calm herself and flapped her hands in front of her face to try to cool herself down, then she started, trying to be as methodical as she could, to look for a mound of sacking the right shape and size. When she had been right round twice and was absolutely melting, sweat coursing down the insides of her bare arms and darkening her back, when her hair was itchy and must be as frizzed as it had been in the photograph of the girl on the step, when her nostrils and eyes and even her mouth felt full of little needlelike fibres of sacking—she was forced to conclude that Norah was having her on. The damn thing wasn’t here, wasn’t anywhere. She lifted her top and wiped her head with it, then she tutted—she had probably just put a dirty smear on it. She held it out, this way and that, trying to see, but she was standing in a deep shadow. She looked up to see what was causing it, and that’s when she saw what she’d been looking for.
It had been shoved up over the beams and balanced there. About four or five feet wide and at least as tall. The only part of it that she could see sticking out of its sackcloth wrapping was the legs—two bulbous legs, thicker than her own thighs with little brass casters on the ends.
“Gotcha!” Opal said. “Hah! At bloody last. Right then.”
She couldn’t even dream of getting it down, but then she didn’t really want to. Oh, she would tell Billy and Tony that she had found it and then if they wanted to try to talk it out of Miss Fossett, getting it down would be their problem. All she wanted to do was get up there with it, unscrew the orbs and get the two missing parts of Norah’s prayer.
She could reach the beams with a bit of a jump, even get her hands round one and swing, but she wasn’t a commando; there was no way she could haul herself up there. She looked around again for something light that she could drag over, and settled on a wicker hamper about the size of a washing machine lying on its side that trundled over the floor easily enough and took her weight with just a bit of creaking when she clambered up onto it. Now she could get her elbows over the beam and, ignoring the rough scrape of the wood against her chest and armpit, she managed to drag herself up until she was pivoting at the waist and she could swing one of her legs up and over. She straddled it, gripping as hard as she could with her thighs, and glanced over to where the headboard rested, wrapped in its sacking. It looked really far away—she had chosen to come up a couple of beams over so she had space to move around, but now she was regretting it. She shuffled up until she was opposite and then, swearing softly, she got very carefully up on her hands and knees and crawled over, not letting her breath go until she was safely straddling a beam again, holding on tighter than ever.
She took hold of the sacking and pulled. Nothing. Which she supposed was better than the whole thing moving and crashing to the floor but wasn’t exactly ideal. She gripped harder and pulled again. Absolutely nothing. At this side, the sacking was tucked under with the join at the bottom, the whole weight of the headboard holding it in place. She should have gone downstairs for a pair of scissors or a knife as soon as she saw it was wrapped, but too late now.
And anyway, at the other side, there was a flap of sacking on the top. If she could get over there, she could just push it back and once the unwrapping was started, surely she could find away to uncover as much as she had to. So, cursing herself and hating every second of it, freezing with every squeak and creak, wondering if she was only imagining that the beams were moving underneath her, she crawled onto the flat side of the wrapped headboard and made her away to its far edge and the flap of loose wrapping. It flipped back without protest—Opal had had a flash of worry that it might be stitched up—and there was the elaborate carving she had grown so used to seeing every day. She hauled at it a little more and felt it begin to slip away from the top of the post, revealing the bulges and baubles and feathery pennants there.
THIRTY-FIVE
“FUCK!” SAID OPAL. THEN again. “Fuck it to buggery.” The words were absorbed into the muffled sacking womb of the attic, not as if she had shouted them at all.
What she had found, what was she was sitting on, what she had worked so hard to uncover, was the bloody footboard to match her bloody headboard. It was the wrong half of the wrong bed. She had forgotten there even was such a thing.
She flipped the sacking back over and, all fear of heights gone in her anger, she slithered down to hang from her hands and then dropped lightly onto the floor.
Of course she looked around the rest of the attic, peering up at the beams, but there was nothing. And so she made her way back down the stairs to Norah’s little white bedroom, and closed and locked the door.
It was when she was dragging the dressing chest back into place that she realized just how filthy she was. She saw the brown marks her hands left on the white-painted wood and then looked at herself in the mirror and laughed. She looked like the creature from the Black Lagoon, her hair and face coated with dust and sacking fibres and her top smeared all over with it too and sticking to her with sweat. So she left Norah’s room, went into that cavernous, rank bathroom, and scrubbed her face and hands, leaving some of the smears all over Norah’s grubby little hand towel.
When she opened the door again to go back and finish shifting the furniture, though, she heard something that made her turn to stone.
“Woo-hoo,” came a voice from downstairs. “Sorry, I’m late, but wait to see what I’ve brought you.”
Bloody Shelley! Opal retreated into the bathroom doorway. But the head she saw go past the foot of the stairs wasn’t Shelley’s straightened and highlighted one; this head had dark hair held up in a long comb and the walk was wrong too, bouncing and a bit flustered.
Would Norah say there was someone upstairs? Would she even remember? Should Opal just go into one of these rooms and wait for whoever that was to leave again? Not the bathroom—that was the one place a visitor was most likely to go—but one of the bedrooms, maybe.
Only … what if Norah said that her friend was upstairs and that woman came to check. Or if she said someone was upstairs but she didn’t know who it was or what they were doing. Opal made a decision. She went over to the big cistern and pulled the chain. Then she turned her vest-top inside out—cleaner, even if it meant her label was showing—and went downstairs in her best carefree saunter.
“Thanks, Miss Foss—” she was saying as she opened the morning room door, then: “Oh! Sorry. I didn’t hear you. Did you knock? I was at the toilet.”
“Who are you?” said the woman. She was standing in front of Norah’s chair with one hand in her shoulder bag, frozen mid-
rummage.
Norah turned round and beamed at Opal. “Hello, my pretty flo-
wer,” she said.
The woman opened her eyes very wide and then she smiled too. “Well, whoever you are, Auntie Norah seems to like you! I’m Sarah Fossett.”
“Norah’s niece!” said Opal. “Of course.”
“Well, great-niece, whatever. But I’ve always just called her Auntie Norah.”
“I’m Opal Jones. I’m … it’s hard to explain. We met one day, out on the street, and I brought your auntie home and then I popped in again and … one thing led to another.”
“That’s nice,” said Sarah. “Neighbor, are you?”
“No, you’re thinking of Shelley,” Opal said, but Sarah frowned.
“Oh no, I know Shelley,” she said.
“Shelley!” said Norah. “Shelley had a party and I went.”
“Yes, nobody escapes Shelley,” Sarah said. Opal raised her eyebrows, and Sarah went on. “I shouldn’t. She’s very good but … you know. We all better eat our vegetables.” This was such a good summary of everything Opal had ever thought about S
helley that she burst out laughing. Norah started laughing too and clapped her hands, and Sarah finally managed to find what she was fishing in her bag for and produced it. “Tah-dah!” Norah put out her hands and took it, inspecting it very closely. It was a DVD. Moscow State Circus.
“A different one?” Norah said, turning troubled eyes up to Sarah and Opal.
“A new one,” Sarah said. “We can watch it together, and if you like it, I’ll leave it for you. If you don’t like it, I’ll take it away.”
“All right,” said Norah, still frowning but nodding too, turning the shiny case over and over in her hands.
“And now, a cup of tea!” said Sarah. “Opal, is it, did you say? Do you want to help me?”
Opal followed her down the hall to the kitchen.
“That was really great, the way you handled her there,” she said.
“Practise, love,” said Sarah. “I’m a geriatric nurse. So Auntie Norah is just what I need on my day off!”
“It’s Alzheimer’s she got, innit?” said Opal. She watched Sarah attacking the porridge pan Opal herself had decided to leave soaking. Sarah looked up and see-sawed her head this way and that before she answered.
“A touch,” she said. “Probably. But … I dunno. I think Auntie Norah has always been a bit strange.”
“You think?” said Opal. “Haven’t you always been close then?”
Sarah shook her head.
“Didn’t know anything about her until my dad started doing the family tree,” she said. “That was about, oh, fifteen years ago.”
“So your dad’s not her brother?” Opal said, telling herself it wasn’t likely, hoping she wasn’t going to have to tell this woman—so friendly—that her dad had been … whatever Martin Fossett was.
As She Left It: A Novel Page 21