The Last Day

by Claire Dyer

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Robert Seatter, ‘Afterwards’, The Book of Snow

  Vita

  Honey

  Vita

  Boyd

  The last day

  Honey

  The last day

  Vita

  Boyd

  Honey

  Vita

  Boyd

  Honey

  Vita

  Boyd

  Vita

  Honey

  Vita

  Honey

  Vita

  The last day

  Honey

  Vita

  Honey

  Boyd

  Vita

  Honey

  Boyd

  Honey

  Vita

  The last day

  Boyd

  Honey

  Vita

  Honey

  Boyd

  Vita

  Boyd

  Vita

  Honey

  Boyd

  Honey

  The last day

  Vita

  Trixie

  Boyd

  Trixie

  Boyd

  Vita

  This Time Last Week

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  THE LAST DAY

  Claire Dyer

  For Dad & Elaine

  Though we covered it, over

  and over with the snow

  of the years, one day,

  another life later, it surprises us

  Robert Seatter, ‘Afterwards’, The Book of Snow

  Vita

  It’s late April. The light in the studio today has been flat and constant and perfect – the kind of light we’d hoped its north-facing windows and its clear view of the sky would give us.

  I’ve been working for hours and I’m tired. A bit earlier I’d had some lunch in the house and gone for a walk around the block, down Albert Terrace, along the perimeter of the park to the footpath, then through the gate into the garden and back to the studio.

  Classic FM’s on the radio and the picture’s going well, for a change. I’m normally in the throes of despair by now, but this one’s behaving itself and for that I’m grateful.

  I’m just starting to wash out my brushes when my phone rings.

  It’s Boyd.

  I see his name flash across the screen and for a second I wonder where he is, why he’s calling. We’ve haven’t talked for a month or two, which is fine, of course: there’s been nothing to say. I’m planning on sending him a birthday card on the 27th like I normally do, but we haven’t actually spoken to one another since Christmas.

  The ringtone burbles and his name is still on the screen, but for some reason I can’t answer it and so I let the call go to voicemail, telling myself I’m busy with my brushes, telling myself it’s fine for me to wait, it doesn’t matter – nothing matters, not now.

  I finish with my brushes, cover the easel, switch off the heater and the radio and lock the studio door behind me. The light is fading and there is a slight chill in the air; I wrap my shawl around me. My phone is a weight in the pocket of my jeans.

  Inside the house I put the kettle on and pick up today’s crossword. Two across is ‘Business Baron’ and the second letter is Z; it’s been puzzling me all day.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ I say out loud as I throw the paper down onto the sofa at the back of the kitchen extension.

  My fingers are itching, the back of my throat is dry; I know I’ll have to listen to Boyd’s message but I can’t bring myself to do it. Taking the phone out of my pocket, I stare at it for a long minute. There’s a text saying ‘Voicemail has 1 new message. Please dial 121.’

  The kettle has finished boiling; the noise of it subsides into the quiet. The only other sounds are the distant growl of traffic and the drum of my pulse in my ears.

  ‘Bloody stupid woman,’ I say, out loud again.

  But there is no one to hear me.

  And so eventually I dial 121 and there’s his voice once more, the low rumble of it.

  ‘Vita?’ he says. ‘It’s Boyd.’

  Well that’s bloody obvious, I think. Who else would it be?

  ‘Um …’ There’s a pause and, in the background, I can hear people talking and distant music. ‘Um …’ he says again. ‘Hope you’re well. I’m fine and Mum’s OK too. Not sure why I said that, but anyway she is.’

  He clears his throat.

  ‘Look,’ he continues, ‘I was wondering if we could meet up. There’s a favour I’d like to ask you. It’s a bit awkward so I don’t really want to talk about it on the phone. So, could we meet do you think? I could come round to the house, or we could grab a coffee, or a drink, or something. Anyway, it would be nice to see you. It’s been too long …’

  Another pause, and then, ‘Let me know, Vita? As I say, it would be nice to see you.’

  Nice? I let the phone drop onto the counter, snort, whip off my glasses and start cleaning them with the hem of my shawl.

  I know I will have to reply and will need to do it quickly before I lose my nerve. Not that it matters; it doesn’t matter whether I see him or if I don’t, but I guess I am curious. It must be the puzzle solver in me. I decide not to call him but to send a text instead, so I type, ‘Got your message. Am in this evening if that’s convenient. Any time from 7.’ I don’t say, ‘Love, Vita’ because I don’t love him and he doesn’t love me and that’s all perfectly fine.

  I pick up the paper again and stare at the crossword. Second letter Z? What the fuck can the answer be?

  He texts straight back. The message says, ‘Thanks. Will be with you around 7.30 if that’s OK. Shall I bring some supper?’

  I send a reply: ‘OK.’ It’s up to him to decide whether I’m saying OK to the time or the supper, or both. I really can’t be bothered.

  By six-thirty I’ve had a shower and put on my black linen trousers and a sweater which Boyd once said was the colour of an aubergine and, standing in front of the mirror in our bedroom the first time I’d worn it, I’d said to him, ‘I’m not sure where you buy your aubergines, Boyd, but to me it’s taupe.’

  ‘Taupe?’ He’d laughed then, and added, ‘That’s a real Farrow & Ball word! I’d expected better of you.’

  ‘Sod off,’ I’d replied and as I turned around he’d cupped my chin with his right hand and kissed me lightly on the nose.

  ‘Love you too,’ he’d said and had gone downstairs where he’d turned on the radio and started to empty the dishwasher.

  It had been a normal day.

  Just before seven-thirty I hear his car pull up outside and busy myself plumping up the cushions on the chairs in the lounge. I gaze about me, at my furniture, at the spaces and the calm I live among and in. It has taken a long time for me to learn to live alone, not to miss the hum of being part of something bigger than myself, but I’ve done it and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

  * * *

  He knocks on the door. I let him in.

  ‘Vita,’ he says.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine, thank you. How are you?’

  ‘I’m well, thank you.’ He hands me a carrier bag. ‘I bought us some supper.’

  I want to scream.

  We move through to the kitchen and I start unpacking the bag. He’s bought soup, pâté, a farmhouse loaf, a bottle of Merlot. He’s also brought a bunch of late daffodils; I will have to put them in a vase when he’s gone.

  ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ he asks as he rummages in a drawer for the corkscrew.

  ‘I’ve moved it.’

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘The corkscrew. It’s in that
jug.’ I point along the counter.

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  He walks behind me and plucks the corkscrew out; I can smell his aftershave. If I closed my eyes I could pretend he’d never left. I stare at the soup: minted pea and ham hock. The bloody man has only gone and bought one of my favourites. And flowers? Why on earth would he bring me flowers? I take the lid off the soup, tip it into a saucepan and stir it vigorously, impatient for it to come to the boil.

  ‘Here,’ he puts a glass of wine down next to me. ‘I’ll join you but better not have more than one glass as I’m driving.’

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  As I heat the soup he wanders around, picking things up, putting them down again. He moves over to the sofa, studies the newspaper, and the crossword. ‘It’s Czar,’ he says. ‘Two across. It’s Czar.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I reply, getting two bowls out of the cupboard.

  Bloody man. I would have got it in time.

  We sit at the dining table and he cuts the bread and pours me another glass of wine. The soup is hot and delicious; I hadn’t realised how hungry I was.

  ‘So, what are you working on now?’ he asks again.

  ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ I reply. ‘But that’s not why you’re here. What’s this favour you want my help with?’

  Boyd is a big man: tall and broad with a shock of grey hair and big brown eyes. He used to fit this house, but recently it and I have got used to him not being here. I have filled the space he left with other people, other things.

  ‘Um,’ he says, moving a knife and then picking up the salt cellar and twisting it around in his hands. ‘Um, I’ve got myself into a bit of a pickle.’

  ‘What sort of pickle?’

  For some inexplicable reason my heart is thundering in my chest. Stop it, woman, I say to myself. Whatever it is won’t matter, can’t touch you, not now.

  ‘There’s someone else.’ He blurts it out. ‘Someone at work.’

  ‘Trixie?’ I ask, incredulous.

  ‘No, not Trixie. Her name’s Honey. We took her on a while ago, as a sort of a junior.’

  ‘Junior? How old is she then?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  ‘Oh, Boyd,’ I say and I’m thinking, Honey? What sort of fucking stupid name is that?

  ‘But that’s not it. That’s not the problem.’

  Isn’t it? What is then? I take another mouthful of wine. I notice he hasn’t touched his.

  ‘I’ve miscalculated the tax bill …’

  ‘What about Anthony? Didn’t he warn you?’

  Boyd looks at his bowl. He’s put down the salt cellar, the soup is still steaming. There are crumbs scattered over the table top.

  ‘Yes, he did. But I didn’t listen.’

  ‘Oh, Boyd,’ I say again. ‘What does it mean? How much do you owe? What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘It’s a fair sum; I’m going to have to rent out the flat to help cover the costs and obviously tighten my belt.’

  He looks down at his stomach and then lifts his head and gives me one of his lopsided grins, his left eyebrow raised just a little. Bloody man, I think. Bloody, bloody man.

  ‘So where will you live?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing.’ He passes me the pâté, I shake my head. ‘I was wondering if I could move back in here in the summer, just for a while. A few months, that’s all.’

  What can I say? The house is still half his. He has every right to ask.

  ‘Um …’ I say.

  ‘Before you answer though,’ he reaches out a hand and touches my arm, ‘when I say “I”, I mean “we”, I mean Honey and me. Could Honey and I move in? We’ve …’ he hesitates, swallows, ‘… been living together for a few months now. She gave up her lease for me, hasn’t anywhere else to go. Would there be room?’

  I look at him; I see him; I know him. It doesn’t matter to me either way, does it?

  ‘Of course,’ I say brightly. ‘Of course you can.’

  * * *

  And of course I’m watching.

  They’re not expecting me to be there but I am. I’ve hidden my bicycle behind the horse chestnut tree at the end of the cul-de-sac; each leaf on it is the size of a man’s hand. It’s sunny, it’s hot; it’s been a bitch of a day.

  I’m standing in the shade and am at enough of a distance that they won’t be able to see me unless they look carefully. I doubt very much that they will; they’ll be too busy.

  I take my glasses off and clean the lenses with the hem of my smock. Without them everything is satisfyingly blurry; if only life could always be like this, I think.

  Boyd’s car pulls up as I’m putting them back on. He turns to say something to the girl in the passenger seat but I avoid looking directly at her. He parks the car and they get out. He’s wearing suit trousers, a blue and white striped shirt, no tie. She is graceful, willowy, blonde; her walk reminds me of a cheetah’s. As they approach the house, he leans into her and says something, resting the palm of his hand on her lower back. I shiver involuntarily and this surprises me because enough water has passed under enough bridges by now for this not to matter. Boyd and I are friends, always have been. And I’m fine with this. I really am.

  As they go through the gate, he takes her hand in one of his. He unlocks the door and they step inside. I can only imagine what she’s thinking. Not Boyd, though, I know exactly how his mind works, just as I know my own. And I am fine, I know I am. This is all going to work out perfectly, because I’m over him – I’ve told myself enough times that I am. I am immune; nothing can touch me now.

  Honey

  Boyd takes her hand as the gate closes behind them with a squeak and a click. She imagines he’s heard it do so a thousand times before. The house looks smaller than she thought it would be. When he’s spoken about it, he’s always made it out to be something other, something bigger.

  The path they’re on leads to a blue-painted door, the kind of navy worn by school girls and matrons in hospitals. Around the door a Virginia creeper has spread like a tapestry; it will look amazing come autumn. The front garden is a rainbow of summer flowers: stocks, mallows, delphiniums, poppies. To the left of the door is a sash window on the ground floor and another one above it on the first floor. The glass in the windows is, Honey notices, very clean.

  To the left of the house are trees: youthful horse chestnuts, full-leafed and jaunty. They border a park. There is a brick wall and a pathway separating the trees and the park from the house. He’s told her that Vita wheels her bicycle out of the gate at the bottom of the garden and up this path when she goes out.

  Next door, on the right of Boyd’s house, is another house, the mirror image of this one. Boyd’s also told her that the terrace was named after Prince Albert and Honey likes this sense of continuity, of history. For someone like her who has so little of it, it is pleasing.

  Boyd squeezes her hand. ‘She won’t be here. You know that, don’t you?’

  Honey nods her head. Boyd gets a key out of his pocket.

  ‘You’ve still got a key?’ she asks. She wants her voice to sound normal, but it comes out as a croak.

  In the horse chestnut trees pigeons are making the sounds pigeons make: hoo follows hoo, reminding her – bizarrely – of a ship’s horn. Then they beat their wings in amongst the leaves, a sound like gunfire which blooms and settles into quiet once more.

  ‘It’s still my house,’ Boyd says. ‘Well, half of it is anyway.’

  He’s a large man and the house is small; he looks like a giant going into a dolls’ house as he ducks before entering the front door. Boyd is big and solid and warm and wonderful and Honey loves him with all of her heart even when he’s wrong. And he’d been wrong when he said Vita wouldn’t be here because she is, everything about the house shouts her presence.

  In Honey’s bag is the end of an old loaf of bread and the salt cellar from the flat. They step into the front room; she turns and sprinkles some salt on the threshold. She truly believes both the bread a
nd the salt will keep the evil spirits away.

  The room is crowded with furniture: two chintz-covered chairs; a tall, dark, Victorian fireplace; and a small, squishy sofa under the window. The walls are bare apart from a huge, abstract oil painting above the fireplace. There is a vase of summer phlox on the mantelpiece and Vita’s left a newspaper on the arm of one of the chairs, the crossword half done. It’s mid-afternoon and the house is stuffy with captured heat.

  ‘Shall I show you around first?’ Boyd asks, his left eyebrow raised in its quirky way.

  It’s as though her feet are glued to the carpet. She wants to move but can’t. ‘Shouldn’t we open some windows first?’ she says. ‘It’s hot in here.’

  She watches as Boyd undoes the catches on the front window and lifts it up. Then he strides into the back of the house and does the same with another window. Another key turns in a lock and there’s a puff of fresher air. He must have opened the back door.

  ‘Come on then, slowcoach,’ he calls.

  She peels her shoes from the floor and takes a step, then another and another until she’s walking past the staircase which runs up to her left between the front and back rooms. She glances up; the upstairs of the house is silent and waiting.

  In the dining room there’s a battered oak table with a bowl of fruit on it and four mismatched chairs around it, another fireplace, and the window that Boyd has opened which looks out at a small passageway between the kitchen and the side wall. In the distance there is a long, narrow garden, the borders of which practically meet in the middle. He’s told her that Vita’s studio is at the bottom of the garden, behind the apple tree and that it’s not visible from the house. It’s where she works and keeps her bicycle. ‘She’s crazily independent,’ he’s said on a number of occasions.

  Boyd’s standing in the kitchen, one large hand resting on the counter top. The units are new, white and shiny; the floor is wooden. To the right of the back door is a small extension in which there’s a battered, leather, two-seater sofa with a low table in front of it. There are more flowers in a vase on it, an open magazine and some junk mail. On the wall behind it is a mirror. Honey can see the back of Boyd’s head in it.

  The house is homely and lived-in. It appears that it barely has room for them and the stuff they’ve brought from the flat in the boxes and bags that are in Boyd’s car on the road out front.