As She Left It: A Novel

by Catriona McPherson

  “No,” Sarah said. “Norah’s brother died yonks ago. So Dad said. Died young.”

  “Your granddad?”

  “No,” Sarah said again. “To be honest”—the kettle had boiled and she broke off to swirl out a teapot with hot water and dash it down the sink before she went on—“I never saw the family tree Dad was at. I think there was some kind of tale he didn’t want told. Years ago and everyone dead and gone, but Dad still buried it.” Opal nodded. “I lost touch with Auntie Norah again after that. Well, I was getting married and had a family to run about after. You know how it is, or you will soon enough.” She twinkled at Opal, and Opal tried very hard to smile back, not to let her face freeze the way it wanted to. “Then when I got divorced, I came round to see Auntie Norah and I was shocked to see the change in her, the state she was living in. Felt ashamed of myself for leaving her on her own for years, knowing she’s got no one else.”

  “So … you don’t have brothers and sisters?” said Opal.

  “One sister in the states,” Sarah said. “Been there years.”

  “Only Miss Fossett said she had a nephew.”

  “She says a lot of things!” said Sarah. “No, there’s just me and Norah. Two Miss Fossetts. I took my maiden name again.” She shook her head. “Norah’s funny about men. Men in the family anyway.”

  “You can say that again,” said Opal, softly.

  Sarah put three cups and saucers on a tray then stopped and looked out of the window into the wall of the tunnel three feet away.

  “Ooh, I hate that stupid walkway,” she said. “Why would anyone put that right through their back garden? You know what it makes me think of? The secure ambulance drop for Ward Four. Locked ward, you know.” Opal nodded. From what Shelley had said about Norah’s life, it wasn’t too far from the truth.

  “It could be a new lease of life for Auntie Norah, getting out of this place at long last.” Opal nodded again. “You could put your tuppenceworth in,” said Sarah. “She might listen to you.” She was looking round the kitchen, shaking her head. “If I could finish getting this place cleared and sell it, she’d be in the best of private nursing homes for the next twenty years.” Opal nodded but she couldn’t help her eyes narrowing. “Oh, don’t you start!” Sarah said, but she was smiling.

  “Sorry,” said Opal. “You just hear … ”

  “You do,” said Sarah. “But I don’t want this place and I don’t want the money from selling it either. I’ve got my home and my kids and my job—I’m quite happy. I don’t even play the lottery, me. I just don’t want to be lying my bed every night worrying about her. I’d move in if it didn’t mean shifting the kids’ school, and they’ve had enough upheaval with the divorce and everything.”

  Opal believed her, but something she’d said before was niggling away and she had to check it, couldn’t just leave it dangling.

  “So you’re clearing the place, yeah?”

  “Started,” said Sarah.

  “Only … that stuff in the morning room … ”

  “Oh my God,” Sarah said. “But hasn’t Norah told you? That’s not hers. That’s theirs!”

  “Oh, yeah, them!” said Opal. “I know them.”

  “And you know what? I don’t think that’s Alzheimer’s at all,” Sarah said, not really laughing now. “I think, like I said, that’s just Norah. ‘It’s not mine. I’ve never been away. I didn’t do that. I didn’t make the cocoa—it was them’.” She sighed. “So I’m clearing out very gradually, starting with the attic, not moving anything Norah’s going to miss, you know. I’ll do a bit more today if I can settle her.”

  “The attic?” Opal hoped that her eyes hadn’t flashed when the panic flared up in her. Norah’s bedroom was still messed up from when Opal had been up there. Sarah lifted the tray and, edging round the table past Opal, left the kitchen.

  Outside the morning room door, though, she turned.

  “Can you take this in, love, while I nip upstairs?”

  “To the attic?” said Opal.

  Sarah gave her a look and spoke to her in the voice Opal supposed she used at work to her geriatric patients. “To the toilet,” she said.

  Opal grappled the heavy tray into her hands and watched Sarah bound up the stairs to the first floor. She went into the bathroom—Opal could hear the bolt shoot across as she locked the door. What an idiot! Sarah was hardly going to go up the attic stairs right now, with a cup of tea waiting for her down here. She put her shoulder against the morning room door.

  “Magnificent men on the flying trapeze,” Norah sang, which didn’t sound quite right to Opal, although she couldn’t work out where it was wrong.

  “Nothing’s ever exactly what it should be with you, Norah,” she said. “I found the bed. In the attic.”

  “Mother’s bed,” Norah said.

  “Yeah. That’s not the one I was after, though. I want the one with the roses and chrysanthemums. The one with the plume things.”

  “Fleur de lis,” said Norah, and Opal’s heart leapt.

  “Could be, could be,” she said. The name sounded familiar, although she’d have to ask Billy and Tony to be sure. “Where’s that, then?”

  “Gone,” Norah said. “Half of it anyway.” Opal’s heart leapt like a fish, but she tried to keep watching the circus and talking in the same soft way.

  “Half of it gone, eh?”

  “Ohhhhh,” said Norah, along with the crowd, as the man torpedoed through the air, spinning like a bobbin, and was caught by his partner on the other swing. “Martin got too tall and Father took the footboard off and put it away.”

  “Riiiiight,” said Opal, thinking yes, yes, yes! It was Martin’s bed. The footboard went in the attic, and Sarah sold it. She crossed her fingers. “So where’s the headboard, Norah my flower?”

  “Martin’s room,” said Norah.

  “And where’s Martin’s room?”

  “Next to mine.” Opal frowned.

  “Your little room?” she said. “Or your big room?” Norah said nothing. Surely, Opal thought, trying to picture it, the locked room—the only locked room—was next to the empty room Norah had pointed to through the banisters on Friday. Is that what Norah was saying? The missing headboard with the secret compartments and the other two halves of the note were in that locked room up there?

  “Norah?” she said. “Answer me. Is your brother’s room next to your big bedroom with the green tiles round the fire?”

  “No!” said Norah. “I didn’t. I’m sorry. I never. I haven’t got a brother, I never had a brother, I don’t want a brother.”

  “Sh-sh-sh,” said Opal. She had heard the cistern gurgling. “Hush now. Woooo—look at the clever men on the trapeze, Norah. Sh-sh-sh.” And both of them were watching the two men, listening to the snare drums rattle and the cymbals crash, joining in with the gasps of the crowd, when Sarah came back into the room.

  “I’d best be off,” Opal said when she had drunk enough of the tea to be polite, scalding her mouth, gulping it down. “See you soon, Miss Fossett. Nice to meet you, Miss other Fossett!” Sarah laughed but groaned a little too.

  “Maybe I should be Ms.,” she said, “but I don’t know—Ms., eh?”

  Opal looked down at her hand and frowned. “I must have … Did you see a ring lying on the washbasin? I must have left it up there.”

  “Didn’t spot it,” said Sarah.

  “I’ll check on my way out,” Opal said. She sped up the stairs and crept along the passage to the back, into Norah’s little room, where she finished dragging the chest over and repositioned the bedside table too. She wondered how fussy Norah was about where her prayer book sat. Had Opal knocked it out of place? She moved it more to the middle and frowned, wondering if that looked better or worse, if it mattered anyway.

  Then something about the whole morning seemed to settle like a weight on her neck. What was she doing running around like some lame girl hero from a storybook? Upsetting Norah, conning Sarah Fossett, who couldn’t have been nicer.
She had left sweaty finger marks on Norah’s book too. She picked it up to wipe it and it flopped open, showing a dedication on the inside cover and a bookmark embroidered with a cross and doves in a ray of sunshine. Given to me, Norah Anne Fossett, on my birthday by my father who loves me very much, 17 July 1938 said the dedication in thin spidery writing that had faded to a shade of brown just darker than the yellowed paper it was written on. Opal stared at it, troubled but unable to say what it was about the message that was troubling her. Then, thinking that she couldn’t spin out looking for a ring any longer, she left the room and softly closed the door.

  She took just one peek through the keyhole of the locked bedroom on her way past, but all she could see was the panelling under the window opposite and a shadow, which might have been cast by a chair or a bed or anything, and then she clattered back down the stairs.

  “Found it,” she called out. “See ya!” and she left by the kitchen door.

  Sarah’s right about this tunnel, she thought, hurrying along it. It was beyond weird and she was glad to get back out into the lane between the row of garages, even gladder to get back on the main street, under the green shade of the trees. That creepy feeling in Norah’s bedroom wasn’t guilt because she shouldn’t be meddling; it was the heebie-jeebies because she absolutely should. There was something wrong in that house. She looked back over her shoulder at the mouth of the lane, and something moved in the corner of her vision. She turned round even farther to see what it could be, then whipped her head back to face the front again.

  Franz Ferdi from next door was standing half-hidden behind one of the trees, watching her.

  THIRTY-SIX

  HAD HE SEEN HER notice him? She quickened her pace until she reached the corner and then, out of sight, she broke into a run. He’d followed her! He’d followed her to a dead-end lane and then waited over an hour for her to come out again. She risked a look behind. No sign of him, but she didn’t stop running.

  So was it him who put the photo through her door? Must have been. And how did he have it? She couldn’t bring herself to think about that one. Still no sign of him at the next corner and now she was on a busy street with plenty people. She slowed down to a fast walk and kept on, putting another meter and another meter of distance between him and her, trying not to think about when she was home again and all that separated them was one layer of bricks that he could huff and puff and blow right down, at least with that whistling hammer of his anyway.

  She didn’t see the upside until she was almost home. Then, imagining what everyone would think if they saw her panting and ragged, fleeing up Mote Street and fumbling for her key, she realized that if it was Franz Ferdi who was threatening her, she didn’t need to worry what Margaret and Denny, Pep and Fishbo, any one of the Joshis, or even Mrs. Pickess saw. Maybe she should even tell one of them, tell everything she knew, and she was still trying to decide who to talk to first when she rounded the corner of the street and ground to a halt there. There was an ambulance parked in the middle of the road right in front of her with its back doors open.

  “Opal, my soul!” Margaret had spotted her and came shuffling down the pavement on her worn-out slippers to clamp Opal hard against her. She hadn’t taken her cigarette out of her mouth and Opal heard a few strands of her hair fizz and snap as it singed them. She pushed Margaret back to arm’s length.

  “Denny?”

  “Fishbo!” Margaret said, with her lip trembling. Opal took the cigarette out from between her lips and threw it on the ground.

  “And still you’re at these filthy things! Is he … ?”

  “He’s hanging on,” Margaret said. Two tears, magnified by her glasses, swelled and fell onto her cheeks where they hit the first of her many deep wrinkles, and ran away towards her hair. “No one’s nagged me about smoking since Karen stopped coming,” she said. “Oh, Opal. The colour of him. Pep asked me in to see should he call the doctor, and the colour of him was like nothing on this earth I’ve seen.”

  “He was bad enough yesterday,” Opal said. “Kind of grey.”

  “Purple he was this morning and turning himself inside out with the coughing.” They both turned at the sound of feet in the open corridor and saw two ambulance men carrying a stretcher towards the door. On it, Fishbo lay strapped under a green blanket. At least, his head was there at the top of the stretcher. If not, you’d have sworn there was only the blanket under the strapping; his body made no bulge in it at all. He had a plastic mask held to his face and his eyes were closed and fluttering. Pep came trotting out after him, carrying a pair of slippers and a collection of prescription boxes.

  “I shouldn’t have bathed him,” he said. “I thought I was helping.”

  “Now, Mr. Kendal,” said one of the ambulance men. “We told you. This is pneumonia, proper pneumonia. Nothing to do with a hot bath.”

  “It was cool,” said Pep, dropping one of the pill boxes, hardly noticing. “I thought it would refresh him.”

  “It probably did,” said the ambulance man. “It’s pneumonia. If anything made it worse than it was always going to be, I’d say it was chemical irritants. His bed smelled like a branch of Boots, that’s what got him coughing.”

  Opal whimpered, but no one heard her. Pep was putting the armload of boxes into a plastic sack the driver gave him and climbing into the back, telling Margaret about the keys and asking her to phone the rest of the boys. It wasn’t until they had pulled away that she managed to speak.

  “It was me, Margaret,” she said. “I put Shake-n-Vac on his mattress when I was changing his bed and I forgot to hoover it out again. And I squirted everything in the room with—”

  “Away and get off,” Margaret said. “Chemical irritants!” But of course a woman who went around in a cloud of bleach and Elnet would say that.

  “The paramedic said,” Opal insisted.

  “He’s a van driver,” said Margaret. “What would he know? The man has pneumonia from the germs in that dirty trumpet of his. I’ve seen him empty it out—makes me heave.”

  “That’s condensati—”

  “And you’ll have done him a power of good cleaning his room for him, Opal. They’re a dirty lot, men on their own. But I should be struck down for my hard heart. Talking that way when one’s at death’s door and one’s heartsick with worry.” She patted her pocket but then took her hand away quickly and looked to see if Opal had seen her. “I can’t pack up smoking today, when I’m all upset,” she said. “But I’ll wait a while before I have one.”

  “I tell you what would help,” Opal said. She was disgusted with herself for how quickly she’d thought of it. “Instead of just locking up why don’t you and me go in and give the place a right good going over. When you see what it’s done to the paint you’ll not be so quick to light up again.”

  “That’ll be the best thing we could do for them,” said Margaret, nodding. “And I love to have a clean at something good and manky.”

  Opal couldn’t help putting her arm round Margaret’s skinny little shoulders and hugging her.

  “Just us two though?” she said, nodding at Mrs. Pickess’s door. “Where is she, in fact? Not like her to miss something.”

  “Church,” said Margaret. “Where we should all be.”

  “I didn’t know Mrs. Pickess was one for church,” Opal said. “Mind you, she dresses like it and she’s a big enough misery.”

  “She’s been going ten years,” Margaret said.

  “Ten years, eh?” said Opal.

  “I took it she went to pray for Craig when she started,” Margaret said. “I never talked to her about it, but I’ll own it touched me. I should be kinder to her really. On her knees, praying for my little lost boy.”

  Opal said nothing. She could believe that Craig disappearing might have had something to do with Vonnie Pickess getting religion, but she wasn’t so sure it was Craig and Karen, Margaret and Denny, that Mrs. Pickess was praying for. (Except, if it was Franz Ferdi threatening Opal with old photos and follo
wing her, what did Vonnie Pickess have to pray for?)

  “Margaret?” Denny’s voice came through the open window. “Are you ever coming in here and tell me how he’s doing?”

  “I’ll get my vac and stuff and meet you in there,” Opal said and, by hurrying, by throwing into her mop bucket everything she could possibly need and wearing the mop across her shoulders like she was a milkmaid, she did it in one trip and was in Fishbo’s bedroom with the wardrobe pulled half over the door before Margaret arrived. Because no matter what Margaret said about trumpet spit, the paramedic—he wasn’t a van driver; he had a stethoscope on—had said “chemical irritant,” and Opal owed it to Fishbo now more than ever to do something good for him in the time he had left, however little that might be. And now she was sure that Pep hadn’t warned her off with that photograph through her door, there was nothing to stop her.

  “I’ve shifted the furniture,” she called through the door at Margaret’s timid shouting of her name. “I want to get this place done first, and then we can divvy up the rest of it after.”

  “Okay, my soul,” Margaret called back. “I’ve just seen the bathroom anyway, dear God in heaven, so I’ve plenty to keep me busy.”

  Opal unwrapped the tissue from the frame on top of the pile. It was a photograph; she had known it would be. A posed studio portrait of a very beautiful young girl, with the hairdo of a film star in old black-and-white movie times, if there had been black film stars back then. She was smiling broadly, just short of grinning, and there was a light in her eyes that seemed to suggest she wasn’t far from laughing out loud. Opal studied her, her painted-on eyebrows, her cupid’s bow mouth (also painted on, and a good quarter-inch inside the real edges of her mouth, the rest of her lips covered with makeup and powdered down). Fishbo’s childhood sweetheart, most likely. Or it could be his sister, she supposed, but why would a sister be twinkling and giggling that way? She turned the picture over but there was nothing written on the back of it, so she laid it aside and unwrapped another.