The Last Day

by Claire Dyer

  Honey’s just saying, ‘That’s good to hear,’ when Elizabeth tips her head to one side and screws up her face as if concentrating on something out of sight. She holds up a hand to stop Honey from saying anything more. Elizabeth’s mouth twitches and she nods.

  ‘There aren’t many here,’ she says. ‘I would have expected more.’

  Honey stays silent; her previous feeling of peacefulness has gone. Her hands are knotted in her lap, they are shaking; her breaths are sharp and shallow.

  ‘OK,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I’ll tell her.’

  Honey wants to remain sceptical because she’s afraid now of what Elizabeth’s going to say. Who is it who’s there? What is she going to be told? She can feel her heart getting ready to fall and when it falls she knows she will believe everything she’s told.

  ‘There’s a woman here,’ Elizabeth says. ‘She’s tall, thin, has the same colour eyes as you. She wants you to know her. She says she is your mother.’

  Honey snorts, her heart inches closer to the edge. Elizabeth could say anything about her mother and she wouldn’t know if it was true or not because she never knew her. She wants to tell Elizabeth this but the words are stuck in her mouth.

  ‘Did she pass before her time?’ Elizabeth asks her.

  She shakes her head. ‘I never knew her,’ Honey says.

  Again, Elizabeth tips her head and frowns; Honey can’t tell who she’s listening to, the presence who is purporting to be her mother, or her.

  ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I see.’

  Then she says, ‘She’s telling me she’s sorry for what she did.’

  ‘What did she do?’ Honey asks.

  The air in the room seems heavy now. Whatever is happening outside the window is happening in slow motion.

  ‘She says, she left you. Gave you up and that she shouldn’t have. She really believed you’d have a better life without her.’

  There is an agonising pause. Again Elizabeth holds up a hand to stop Honey from saying anything. Honey’s heart has fallen completely now. It is in her lap with her hands; she can feel it as a wet hammering thing, the consistency of liver.

  More silence. There are so many questions Honey wants to ask but she’s paralysed with a mixture of fear and wonder.

  ‘But,’ Elizabeth says next, ‘she knows now that you didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what?’ Honey manages to say.

  ‘Didn’t have a better life without her.’

  This makes Honey angry. ‘How dare she say that? How does she know?’

  ‘She says she’s been watching you.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ she says. ‘You mean she knows everything?’

  Another pause, then Elizabeth says, ‘Yes, but it’s OK. She understands.’

  ‘That’s good of her.’ Honey doesn’t mean it. She wants whoever it is who’s talking to Elizabeth to have flesh and bones. She wants this woman to hold her, let her rest her head on her shoulder. She wants to be able to smell her; she’s never had this. And she wants to be able to punish her, she’s never had the chance to do this either.

  Honey has imagined what her mother would’ve been like; she asked foster carer after foster carer until she was eighteen and then, when she had the chance to find out for herself, she chickened out. She convinced herself it wouldn’t do her any good and now it’s too late anyway because whoever her mother was is now on the other side. There is absolutely no chance of Honey ever knowing her now.

  Honey wants to weep and it must be obvious that she does because Elizabeth says, ‘It’s OK to cry. Let it out, my dear.’

  But, no, Honey tells herself; you’re not going to. She doesn’t want to waste her minutes here. Elizabeth may have more to tell.

  ‘I can see a child,’ Elizabeth says now. ‘She’s holding a child. It can’t be you though. The vision is weak. Pardon?’ She turns her head and looks out of the window.

  Honey follows her gaze, sees nothing but the tops of the garden trees, a slice of sky, the vapour trail of a plane.

  ‘She says she has three things she needs to say.’ Again Elizabeth holds up a hand to stop Honey from interrupting. ‘There is the child. She wants you to know about him. But I can’t quite see … You will fall, she’s saying. Be careful of the step. I can’t see the step, but that’s what she’s saying. I wish I could tell you where it is.’

  Another pause. ‘Really?’ she says. ‘She also wants me to warn you: he will find you, you are not safe.’

  ‘Who? Who will find me?’ Honey asks the question, although she already knows the answer.

  ‘She isn’t saying.’

  ‘But, I have to know.’

  She knows, of course she does. Not a day goes past when she doesn’t see his face reflected in a shop window, or feel his shadow following her. He is always limping, a slight limp, nothing too noticeable. But she knows he is there and she knows why. The dreams may have stopped for now, but that night on the boat is there; she will never be free of it. Whatever semblance of safety she feels now is an illusion.

  ‘Fuck,’ she says under her breath.

  ‘She’s sorry,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Sorry that she can’t give you more, better news. But she …’

  ‘How did she die?’ Honey asks. This, now, is the most important thing she needs to know. The rest she can think about later.

  ‘A stupid accident,’ Elizabeth says. ‘She’s telling me it should never have happened. She should have come back for you and then it wouldn’t have. I can see a road and a lorry and there’s a rattling noise, but it’s not all that clear I’m afraid.’

  Honey doesn’t feel like herself. She has no idea who she is. Why is she swearing? The new her doesn’t swear, not like this. There is a child. Is it hers? There is a step. Where is this step? He will come back and he will find her. She wishes she’d never come here. She wishes Boyd had never bought her this gift. It is no gift. It is a burden and she doesn’t want it. She doesn’t fucking want it.

  ‘She’s going,’ Elizabeth says now.

  ‘Good riddance,’ Honey mutters under her breath.

  Honey looks down at her lap, at her imagined heart beating inside her closed, shaking hands. She imagines slipping it back into her chest and walking out of this room, and she also imagines throwing it down on the floor and stamping on it. She really has no idea what to do with it. It seems a useless, redundant thing.

  And now she cries. Huge wracking sobs. Elizabeth leans back and picks up a box of tissues Honey hadn’t spotted when she came in. She offers her the box. They are man size tissues. She’s obviously needed them before. Honey takes one and holds it to her face. She shuts her eyes but can still hear Elizabeth’s voice, can still feel another presence in the room. It’s a faint echo of the woman who had been her mother. It is too much; it is not nearly enough.

  ‘Stay as long as you like,’ Elizabeth says. ‘You don’t have to go until you’re ready.’

  Honey wants to say, ‘I guess you’ve seen this many times before. There’s nothing new in this, is there?’ But all she can manage is, ‘OK.’

  Elizabeth stands and quietly moves towards the door. ‘I’ll pop back in a bit,’ she says. ‘See how you’re doing.’

  When Elizabeth’s gone, Honey concentrates very hard but the echoes are getting fainter and fainter until there’s absolutely nothing left. She’s had so few certainties in her life that believing in her horoscope and living in the gridlines of her superstitions has always given her comfort and a semblance of control. There is, however, part of her now that wishes she didn’t. And yet she can’t escape them. What’s been said can’t be unsaid, what she knows now can’t be unknown.

  Again, she thinks about what Elizabeth told her and tries to make sense of it. She’s always really known that she can’t escape her past, that this life she’s living with Boyd can’t last. For the first time she’s found somewhere she wants to stay and it is wonderful, and she will try and make it last, make it as wonderful as she can, for as long as she can. But now, here, this aftern
oon she realises that one day, once again, she will have to leave.

  She has the urge to put her hand on something, so leans across and touches the flowers on the duvet cover.

  Elizabeth taps on the door and pops her head around it. ‘You OK?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes. I’ll go now if that’s all right.’

  ‘Sure. And, come back whenever you wish. I’m always here.’

  Somehow Honey doesn’t think she will go back.

  She gives Elizabeth her empty glass and follows her downstairs, past the dolls. David’s jazz is still playing in the back of the house.

  ‘Him and his music,’ Elizabeth says lovingly.

  They say goodbye on the doorstep. Honey is careful of the step. She has been warned after all.

  She’s glad now that she agreed with Boyd that she’d walk home. She needs the time to process what’s just happened. All around her, other people’s evenings are starting: kids are watching TV or playing computer games, dads are mowing lawns, food is being cooked, barmen are wiping down the tables in pubs, dogs are being walked when their owners get in from work. On the surface of this world, all is ordinary, calm.

  And yet her heart, now it’s back inside her chest, is fluttering. She feels nauseous. She tries to focus on her feet: one step, then another. She walks past houses and shops, past bus stops and parked cars. She glances at garden gates and garages, hears voices and car engines, sees late hydrangeas bow their massive heads, counts from one to twenty and then from twenty back to one again.

  Eventually she reaches Albert Terrace. Vita is out, as Boyd said she would be. He’s sitting on the battered leather sofa in the alcove watching TV. He mutes it as Honey walks towards him and raises his head. He smiles at her.

  ‘So,’ he asks, ‘how did it go?’

  ‘Wonderful,’ she says. ‘All good news. She told me that I was being watched over and cared for and that I’ll have a long and happy life.’

  He beams. ‘I’m so pleased,’ he says. ‘Dinner’s almost ready by the way.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Suddenly, Honey is starving.

  ‘Did she say anything else?’ he asks. ‘About children, or anything like that?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replies. ‘Plenty of kids in the picture too. It was, as I say, all good news.’

  Vita

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ I say, leaning forwards a fraction, offering my champagne glass to the bamboo-thin waiter. I’ve had enough to drink, but one more won’t hurt. He pours me another. He has dreadlocks piled on top of his head in some old lady bun and this makes him look taller and even thinner. But he’s got kind eyes and a nice smile.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he replies before moving on through the crowd.

  I hate these sorts of occasions and have no idea why I said I’d come. I hope it wasn’t to impress Boyd and Honey. What need have I of their good opinion, or of being thought ‘with it’ in the art scene? I barely know this artist and he must have copied and pasted his whole address book into the invite email to have included me.

  The gallery is suitably impressive: all white walls, chrome fittings and clever lighting. The art is bold and aggressive but I do admire its courage. The room is full of impossibly beautiful people wearing designer clothes, who have probably come here en route to somewhere much grander. They remind me of bees; they flitter and settle and suck the sweetness from the room before lifting, often in pairs, and flying off somewhere else.

  The evening outside is one of those soft September ones when London, and particularly this part of Mayfair, practically gleams. The shops are stocked with elegant things, people laugh as they stand outside bars, the light falls in ribbons.

  I had once hoped for something like this for myself, something to prove my parents wrong.

  I know I’m a disappointment to them. Always have been, apart from that brief moment when I’d had the picture of Boyd in the RA Summer Exhibition and it looked like my career might be going somewhere. But then it all went quiet and I went back to doing pet portraits for local ladies with blue rinse in their hair and bunions on their feet.

  My parents had always wanted me to take risks, live large, live light. I’d been a flower-power baby after all. They’d worn kaftans and looked practically the same with their long flowing hair and androgynous gaits. They’d lived in a commune on a smallholding in Scotland with four other couples and an assortment of children from an assortment of couplings and had commended themselves on their self-sufficiency and how they’d turned their backs on the trappings, both moral and practical, of the modern world. But two things didn’t sit quite right with me. Firstly, contrary to the philosophy of the commune they’d always insisted they’d been faithful to one another and that I was the outcome of their exclusive relationship and, secondly, my father was now on Facebook, worked as a storeman for B&Q and ordered his groceries online.

  They named me after Vita Sackville-West, had hopes that the commune would have the same Bloomsbury air of free-thinking and risky elegance as she had but, in the photo of my parents in my bedroom, my mother is sitting on a stool, shelling peas into a bowl on her lap, her long hair tied in a plait down her back and she’s wearing a pair of large dark glasses which are hiding her eyes. She has always seemed disappointed with her lot.

  And Dad? He’s sitting in a deck chair next to her, a copy of the Socialist Worker on the ground at his feet. He’s a tall man, my dad, has something of a crane about him – the bird, not the piece of equipment used on large construction sites. But here he’s crumpled, like someone has cut his strings and he’s folded in on himself, his long arms and legs encased in hand-knitted woollens and too-short, second-hand trousers.

  Neither of them looks particularly happy and, since the picture was taken, the commune has kind of imploded. Two out of the other eight who were not ‘officially’ together at the start have gone off with one another, bought a bungalow in Worthing and taken up ballroom dancing. Another died a slow and fractious death, always wishing he could do it without medical intervention, relying instead on herbs and positive thoughts, but succumbing in the end and dying, morphine-riddled, but pain free. It had, Mother said, been a mercy in the end. The rest – my parents, the deserted partners of the couple in Worthing, the widow of the dead man – carry on, just about. Very few of the assortment of children who are the result of this failed social experiment ever visit and neither do I.

  Since I split from Boyd, I’ve been keeping myself to myself, making an OK living, enjoying the company of a few, select friends and more recently, enjoying both my evenings out with Colin doing cultural stuff and my evenings in with him doing sex stuff.

  I tell myself on a daily basis that none of what’s gone before has the power to hurt me, not any more. And nothing that may happen next can hurt me either; I’ve become adept at believing that the face I show the world is the real me.

  I sometimes wonder if everyone does this to a certain extent and that underneath our calm exteriors, the looks we give people on the bus, the ‘Thank you’ smiles we give shop keepers and the ladies who hand back our clothes in plastic bags at the dry cleaners, we are all a boiling mass of doubt, regret and yearning. What if we actually answered truthfully when someone says, ‘So, how are you?’ Would we, could we, say, ‘Well, actually, my heart is broken and it feels as though I’m carrying a ten tonne weight about in my chest. Oh, and by the way, I’ve always hated the way my right foot turns in a fraction when I walk’?

  We spend so many wasted moments convincing ourselves that we don’t mind about the things we think we cannot change but, now I’m here, at this preview, I know for sure that I really did want this for myself too. I wanted the white walls, the chrome, the clever lighting, the beautiful people, the bold art.

  Of course, I know it’s a lot to do with connections and meeting the right people at the right time. I hadn’t had a patron and Boyd and I had perhaps been too insular when we were younger; we hadn’t played the game.

  He’d alwa
ys had a healthy disregard for the politics of it all. Take this evening for example. He’d have come along, spoken loudly, laughed a lot, shaken critics’ small hands in his big hand and steered me out of the door at the end of the evening, his fingers resting on the stem of my neck. It would have been like oil on water to him and we would have talked of insignificant things on the way home.

  Not Colin, though. Colin is in the room somewhere now. He’s asking intelligent and well-phrased questions and subtly promoting me wherever he goes. I know this, but can’t see him in the crowd. Boyd always used to stand out; a head taller than everybody else.

  A man is approaching. I don’t recognise him but he’s definitely coming my way. He’s wearing a loud poncho over a pair of white jeans, has a string of beads around his neck and espadrilles on his feet. He is completely bald. Next to him, in my simple shift dress and leggings, my hair tied in its customary plait and wearing my red glasses, I feel like his grandmother.

  ‘My dear,’ he says, chinking his glass against mine. ‘How lovely to see you. It’s been simply ages.’

  I’m not in the mood for small talk. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Do we know each other?’

  He baulks and takes a step back. This is not accepted behaviour. At times like this, one dissembles. There will, after all, be some kind of connection between the two of us. Not least of which will be the artist in question.

  ‘Um,’ he says. ‘I’m Barney Makepeace. You’re Vita, right? We were at college together, shared that space in Fulham until the sodding landlord sold it from under us. Remember?’

  Oh, yes, I remember. And now, of course, I remember Barney.

  ‘My God,’ I say. ‘It is you. Sorry for not recognising you. It’s been a while.’

  And during this time, I say to myself, you’ve lost your hair, put on weight, changed. You used to wear tight black jeans and black t-shirts, you were never seen without a roll-up or a can of lager in your hand. You used to paint the most spectacular landscapes.

  ‘So,’ I continue, ‘what are you up to now?’