by Barbara Vine
I don't say anything to her because I think she'd be shocked. The world she's lived in hadn't room in it for love affairs, I suppose I'd better say adulterous love affairs. Stella is the most refined person I've ever come across. ‘Dainty’ is the word my nan would use to describe her. It's almost as if she's not quite flesh and blood but a porcelain doll, if they ever make dolls that don't look like little girls but like old women. She covers her mouth when she coughs and wipes her lips with a tissue with rosebuds printed on it. And yet none of that seems to go with those long crimson fingernails of hers. When I look at them they give me a shock. It's such an odd picture: the wavy white hair, the touch of face powder and blusher, pearls round her neck, the floral silk dress, and lying in her lap those gnarled old hands with sapphire-and-diamond rings and blood-red nails.
Then there's the gin she drinks and the cigarettes she smokes when she gets the chance. She's often told me about her smoking, how she'd smoked forty a day since forever, she'd started when she was seventeen. Somehow it went with the red nails, though not with the sweet voice and the blue eyes. I've seen enough old Hollywood films on video to know just what she must have looked like in the forties, with her blonde hair in long curls and a cigarette in a holder. But I was a good bit taken aback by what she said.
‘That's why I've got lung cancer now, but they didn't know it was bad for you then. Everyone smoked. And the few that didn't – well, they were the greenhorns.’
I had to ask her what that meant.
‘Ninnies. Silly people. Not sophisticated.’
I was clearing up her breakfast things and I came round to the bedside table for the cup she'd had her morning tea in, when I saw the long envelope containing the will. It was pushed inside the book she'd been reading. I was wondering where the will was, if maybe she'd had a solicitor come while I was away on my day off, I was hoping it had gone and we'd heard the last of it. The next time she spoke it was so softly I had to ask her to repeat what she'd said.
‘I said that I don't regret smoking. I enjoyed it. I don't know how I'd have got through some things without a cigarette.’
There wasn't much I could say, so I just smiled and opened the french windows for her.
‘If I had my time all over again I'd smoke again, even knowing what I know.’
‘It's just as well you do feel like that, isn't it?’ I said.
She gave me one of her very direct looks. ‘No, I don't regret it. There are some things in my life I regret, some things I regret very bitterly, but not that.’
‘Is Richard coming to see you today?’ I said. It was a bit of a stupid remark but I reckon what I was doing was veering away from dangerous ground. And anyway, he often came on a Monday.
‘I hope so. Perhaps this afternoon. I've had a postcard from Marianne in Corfu. It's by my bed, have a look at it.’ Talk about lulling me into a false sense of security! ‘And while you're over there, would you pass me that envelope, please, Genevieve? The one inside the book.’
I passed it. What choice did I have?
‘I'd better get on,’ I said. ‘Arthur wants wheeling outside, it's such a nice day.’
‘Someone else can wheel him,’ she said and she took the long envelope in her hands. ‘Sit down a minute, Genevieve.’
Out came the long folded-up sheets of paper again. I was thinking I probably didn't have the strength to say no, to say, please don't leave me anything, for I thought as I always do of Ned and me and how money surely would somehow help us.
Stella held up the paper and said, ‘Do you know what this is?’
I said gruffly, ‘Is it your will?’
‘My will? Good heavens, no. Have a look. These are the deeds of a house.’
It was a relief. Temptation had come and I had faced it. I'd known I couldn't have resisted, but I was glad not to have to try. I put my hand up to the thorn charm and held it for a moment. She must have thought me stupid because I didn't know what the deeds of a house were and the first one she handed me meant nothing. It was done in sloping handwriting with loops and flourishes, a bit the way my grandad used to write. I started reading it aloud.
“This conveyance is made the twenty-ninth day of July, one thousand nine hundred and forty-nine, between Thomas Archibald Wainwright of Palings, Hemingford Grey in the County of Huntingdon, Royal Navy (hereinafter called ‘the Vendor’), of the one part and William John Rogerson, of…”
She interrupted me. ‘Yes, I've read it. Have a look at this one.’
It was typed and looked a lot more modern, though the date was only fifteen years later. Stella didn't seem to want to hear it so I read it, or part of it, to myself. On the outside it said: W. J. Rogerson Esq. to Mrs S. M. Newland, and under that, ‘Conveyance of freehold property known as Molucca and situate at Thelmarsh in the County of Norfolk.’ Inside was much the same stuff as I'd read aloud, only this time ‘the Vendor’ was this William John Rogerson and ‘the Purchaser’ was Stella.
‘It's a house I bought in 1964,’ she said, and her voice had suddenly become serious and quite heavy. She might have been talking about some very important step she had taken, one of the most important of her life. Perhaps she was. She raised her eyes from the other papers she was holding, looked at me and looked away. ‘This is just between you and me, Genevieve. It's not…’ she hesitated and seemed to be looking for the right word ‘… common knowledge.’
What was I supposed to say to that? I handed back the deeds. She put them into the envelope with the others. ‘Would you come upstairs with me?’
‘Pardon?’ I said.
‘I want to show you something.’
Stella can walk quite well. She can't go fast because she gets breathless, but there's nothing wrong with her legs, she's not arthritic like Maud or Gracie. I offered her my arm but she shook her head. The main staircase at Middleton Hall is wide and quite shallow, but difficult to climb because the treads are made of polished wood and there's no carpet. It used to puzzle me why there wasn't a carpet and then I realized it's because Lena doesn't want the old people nipping up and down stairs. It suits her better to have them go slowly, clinging on to the banisters, or, preferably, staying in their rooms or the lounge so she knows where they are. Stella kept to the side and held the banister. Seeing that old hand of hers with the young girl's red nails clutching on to the slippery wood made me feel sorry for her again. And I felt angry with Lena for not having a chair lift. Considering what they all pay, surely she could find a few hundreds for one of those.
Stella had to stand still at the top to get her breath. I hadn't had the faintest idea where she was taking me because I'd forgotten that it wasn't all residents’ rooms up here. But at the end of the passage is a room that's called the upstairs lounge. The trouble is that no one in the upstairs rooms ever seems to use it. They're either too decrepit to leave their rooms or else they prefer to risk the danger of the stairs twice a day for the company on the ground floor.
The upstairs lounge is quite small, with a three-piece suite in it and a few odd chairs all facing the telly. But the telly's black-and-white and the picture jumps about. The best thing about the upstairs lounge is the view: you can see for miles. Stella led me over to the window and we stood there looking out across the meadows and the fen, as far as the Little Ouse that becomes the River Waveney at that point and is the county boundary, with Suffolk on the other side. It was a warm day but clear, and you could see the horizon, it wasn't blurred with mist as it often is, or blackened by smoke as it used to be at this time of the year. The sky was a pale blue with a lot of high cloud and the landscape out there was the way it always is in late summer, fields of green where the beet grows and fields the colour of blond hair where the corn has been cut and fields which look full of white sails fluttering that are the goose farms. The hedges are rows of dark tufts separating the meadows but the fen beyond looks blue, a soft cloudy blue.
‘D'you remember,’ I said, ‘how they used to burn the fields at this time of year? Sometimes y
ou could hardly see the sky for the clouds of smoke. And the air was full of black bits.’
She looked at me, a blank look as if she didn't understand.
‘The farmers,’ I said, ‘after the corn was cut, they set the fields on fire. They first started doing it just after World War II, my grandad told me. They were asked to leave a six-foot break between the straw and the hedge, but they didn't have to and lots of them burnt the hedges too. It's stopped now, this is the first year they're not allowed to do it.’
Her head was turned away. I don't think she'd been listening. ‘Now look straight ahead,’ she said. ‘Do you see that church tower, the square tower?’
‘That's St John's, Breckenhall,’ I said.
‘I don't know about that, Genevieve, but I'm sure you're right. Now look to the left of the church tower, Breckenhall Church as you say, and come down a bit and you'll see a white house. It looks just like a plain white square. Do you see it? Go to the left a bit more and you can just make out something brown with a red roof.’
‘I can see it,’ I said. I was going to say that I could see it clearly, not just make it out, and then I realized the difference was in the age of our eyes. ‘A square house with a red roof. That must be on the Curton road.’
‘It is. That's my house.’
“A freehold property,” I said, “situate at Thelmarsh in the County of Norfolk.”
‘That's it.’
‘Did you come to Middleton Hall because you could see your house from here?’
‘Rather the reverse. I mean, if I had known, perhaps I wouldn't have come.’ She laughed, a little nervous laugh. ‘Even though you were here…’ The laugh again, embarrassed maybe, or just shy, anyway, not happy, ‘I came into this room one day, I don't remember why – oh, yes, someone said there was a bookcase with books in it, only there wasn't – and I looked out of the window and I… I thought it was my house, you understand. Then I asked Richard to bring me in a map, the appropriate sheet of the Ordnance Survey.’
She talks like that, very precise and correct. I don't suppose she's made a grammatical error in all her life. Sometimes it's as if she's reading what's already written down.
‘Of course, I told him I wanted it just to get my bearings. He has no idea I've ever been here in this part of the country before, and nor has Marianne. They know absolutely nothing about it.’
She was leaning on the windowsill, gazing out at where her house was. Her shoulders lifted and seemed to shiver just a little, though maybe I imagined that. I asked her if she'd like to stay alone there for a while. I had to get on, I really did, and I thought she might like to be alone. With memories. With something. She turned and it seemed to me that her face had aged.
‘Perhaps I will. For a little while,’ she said, but when I got to the door, as I opened it, she changed her mind. ‘No, I'll come. I'm just wasting time, I haven't got much, and I can't say looking at this view gives me a great deal of pleasure.’
This time she took my arm. From her expression, uneasy or perhaps just indecisive, I thought that she was going to say something startling, something that would really astonish me, make some statement about this house with the red roof out on the Curton road. But all she did was ask me why I had mentioned the stubble burning and when I explained seemed dissatisfied with my answer. We made our way along the passage, necessarily walking slowly, Stella clinging to my arm. I felt her nails dig into the muscle, I'd be bruised there later, but I didn't say anything, she didn't know she was doing it. Then she shocked me because what she said was so unexpected, though I should have been used to the way she suddenly changed the subject.
‘There was some music I liked on my radio this morning, Genevieve, and I thought what a pity I can't manage to hear that again. Do you think there's some way I could record music that I like?’
I said of course she could, she could get a tape recorder. You could get little ones, it didn't have to take up a lot of space. She nodded. She would ask Richard or Marianne. And another thing she wanted was a reading stand, a frame that would hold a book when she was sitting up in bed. She talked about how her arms got tired and her hands got cold if she had to keep them outside the covers. It was ridiculous, she said, she knew that, to have cold hands in August, and a hot August at that. We came round the corner to the top of the stairs where there's a gallery and you can look into the hall below. Richard was down there, talking to Lena's husband Stanley. It looked as if he had just come in. Their backs were to us and they hadn't seen us. Richard is lanky and six feet tall and Stanley's one of the fattest little men I've ever seen, so together they were quite a sight.
Stella is usually delighted to see her children. She calls them ‘darling’ and is very welcoming, so I was surprised when she didn't call out to him but clutched my arm even tighter. She whispered to me, ‘Genevieve, not a word to Richard about my house.’
I just looked at her.
‘He doesn't know, you understand. He doesn't know and Marianne doesn't know I own that house.’
‘I won't say anything,’ I said, and I felt a bit stunned.
She'd tell me but not them? To tell you the truth, I did wonder for a moment if she'd started wandering in her mind. It's sad when that happens but it does happen to cancer patients if the malignancy gets into the brain as well. On the other hand, I had the evidence of the deeds, and anyone could see she was totally compos mentis (as Lena always says) when she went up to Richard and gave him a hug and told him how well he was looking.
Richard isn't a bit like his sister except in being tall and thin. He's very fair, the sort of person whose hair would have been white when he was a child, and he's got blue eyes. Stella told me he's a doctor, a GP in a group practice in Norwich. He wears the kind of glasses that have no rims and they give him a studious look, but his face is quite boyish and when he smiles he looks eighteen. He's lovely with Stella and he makes me think, if I ever have a son and if I ever get old I hope my boy will be as nice to me.
He'd brought her pink lilies and gypsophila. I found a pink china jug to put them in and when I took them along to her room she and Richard were sitting talking, he was holding her hand, and the deeds in the envelope that she'd left on the desk were nowhere to be seen. Sharon took their coffee in, I had to see to Gracie, my new old lady, so I didn't have a chance to check out where those deeds might be, but I kept thinking about what she'd said. That her children didn't know she owned that house, that it was a secret. And then I remembered the date on the last deed; 1964. She'd owned a house and kept it a secret for thirty years?
Gracie's not like Stella. She's an old grey lady, heavy and sad. A stroke has pulled her face down on one side so that her plate doesn't fit properly any more and she's very self-conscious about it, won't talk if she can help it and hardly eats. She's always pointing to her mouth to excuse herself. If she's got any children, or even a niece or nephew, I haven't seen them yet. Nobody thought of making an appointment with a dentist for her to get her plate fixed, so I did that on her own phone in her room and I've arranged to drive her into Diss on Friday. Lena didn't like that, it was taking too much on myself, she said, but she wasn't going to cancel the appointment I'd made, she's too much in awe of doctors and dentists to do that. She calls Richard ‘Doctor’ every other word.
Off and on throughout the day my mind kept going back to that house of Stella's and once I went up to the upstairs lounge to take a look at it from the window. In front of it was a field full of the white shifting shapes of geese and behind it the darkness of the fen. Ned and I had been there once, to that bit of fen I mean, and walked in deep among the dogwood and the meadowsweet, I remembered it now, exactly where the house was. I think we'd even remarked on it as we passed, that it looked forlorn, as if no one had lived in it for years.
Richard came out just before Sharon took Stella's lunch in. He asked me how I thought his mother was and I said, fine, as well as she could possibly be in her condition.
‘Is there anything I should be gett
ing for her, Jenny, that I've forgotten or she doesn't like to ask for?’
He's a very nice man. He's thoughtful, like a woman. Well, some women.
‘She said something about a tape recorder,’ I said.
‘To record some music? Yes, she does love music. Chamber music, you know, small delicate stuff.’ I like the way he understands that I do know, that just because I'm a carer in a nursing home I'm not an utter moron. ‘I should have thought of that,’ he said. ‘I've got a little recording device she could have. But no, on second thoughts, it would be best to buy her a combined recorder and player, wouldn't it?’
It would really, I said, and to bring her some tapes of that stuff she liked.
‘I'll remember. She's not a great telly addict, is she?’
‘She likes a good play,’ I said, ‘and she's like me, she likes the old movies.’
‘All the best people do,’ he said. And he thanked me for my suggestion and said goodbye very nicely, so that for a moment I thought never mind what Stella asked me, I ought to tell him. I ought to run after him and tell him. There might be something all wrong there somewhere, and if Stella died, if Stella died tonight, which could easily happen, there'd be those deeds and that house and no one knowing anything… But I didn't. I watched his car go, a surprisingly low-slung sporty car for a doctor, but he drove it gently, not with a spurt and a surge and a leap forward like Lena would have.
I was due to go off at four. Ned was coming from Norwich and I was meeting him at seven, and when that's going to happen I can't think about much else. He fills my mind and if I didn't watch it I'd go about in a dream. But I usually try to spend the last half-hour of my stint with Stella, in her room talking to her, or in the lounge if she's in a lounge mood.
Arthur was having his nap and I'd found a quiz show on the telly for Gracie and they'd both had their tea, so I tapped on Stella's door at twenty past three, but she wasn't there. I found her in the lounge all on her own and if you'd seen her there as I saw her without her seeing me, you'd never have thought she was some poor old thing dying of cancer. I'll tell you what she looked like, she looked like a lady waiting for her lady friends to come to tea. She was sitting in an armchair with a magazine on her lap but she wasn't looking at it, she was looking out of the window at the green garden and the butterflies on the buddle bush. Her chin was resting in one of her hands and the other held her wrist so that the blood had run down out of those veins and the hands looked smooth and young. The hairdresser had been round and given her a shampoo and set and she was wearing the dress I liked best, blue silk with cream-coloured coin spots. The very pale stockings she always wears that would turn some women's legs into tree trunks were fine on hers that are smooth and shapely.