After Everything

by Suellen Dainty

  ‘It’s not true,’ he lied. ‘It’s a set-up. A scam. I’ve already called my lawyer. Someone is out to get me. It’s all innuendo. They’d have named me otherwise. We’re going to sue, get that website down. It’s outrageous that people can make these kind of false accusations, that no one ever thinks to talk to the other side first. A load of scumbags.’

  There was silence. When Rosie spoke, she no longer sounded hard and remote, but tired. ‘Look again. Your name is on the website. I’ve got about a dozen emails already.’

  ‘It’s a set-up, I told you. Don’t believe it.’

  ‘One of the emails was from Sally Harvey. Remember her? From school? I always wondered why she never wanted to stay at our house. Now I know. She said you came into our bathroom when she was about thirteen. She said you wouldn’t leave and when she began to scream, you told her to keep quiet, otherwise you’d cancel her bursary. I thought she must be lying, but then I remembered you were on the board of governors. You must have known they had no money.’

  ‘She’s lying!’ he shouted. ‘Why would I do anything like that?’

  ‘You tell me, Dad.’ There was a pause. ‘Actually, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.’ There was a click, and then nothing.

  emily.ellison@gmail.com

  To: penny.ellison2@gmail.com

  Hi Mum,

  You keep asking what I’m doing over here and when I’m going to come back and start my real life. You ask about jobs, a career, all that, as if it’s the only thing that matters. It’s not and it shouldn’t be. And yes, I see the irony that if Dad hadn’t had some sort of career, then I wouldn’t have had the expensive education and the nice house and all that. But perhaps while I’m grateful for having had it in my childhood, I don’t want it in my adult life. You need to try to understand that. I’m looking for something I’ll never find in England. I’m looking for peace and some kind of truth about how I live. I can’t do what you want me to do anymore. And please don’t take this the wrong way, but isn’t that exactly what you’re doing in France? Aren’t you looking for your own peace too? So how can you criticise and question what I’m doing?

  You say you’re worried about ‘this Rosheme person’. If you’re so interested, you could look him up. He has a website. Everything is very transparent. I haven’t met him, because he’s been in a silent retreat for a year and won’t finish for another two. But I study his readings and I follow his teaching, as much as I can. He makes sense to me, more than anything else in the world.

  I’m not trying to lure Matt away. I just want him to get away from all that London stupidity and the drugs. He can’t handle it. You must know that. He’s much more sensitive than you think. Did you know when we were little, he used to creep into my room and lie on the floor next to my bed, when Dad was away all the time and you were crying into the wine bottle in the basement? It’s probably not something you want to hear, but it happened for too long. He’s not tough like me. He’s more like you, fragile. He gets hurt too easily. But you survived and he’ll survive. The shit makes you strong as they say. You need to have more faith in me and Matt, more faith in the way you were as a mother to us. We’re okay, you’re okay. Wasn’t there a book called that?

  As for Dad, I know what he’s like, I know he hurt you. But he is my father and I’d rather have some relationship with him than none at all. Can you understand that? I hope so. It’ll be a bit odd having him here, but it will be good to see him. It’s been too long and too strained. And everyone deserves another chance. I can’t tell you when I’ll be back. I don’t know. I just know I’m happy. I feel good and I’m not about to let it go. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.

  Xxe

  Chapter 35

  Sunday morning. Every surface had been painted, polished and dusted. Every stone had been swept, every weed pulled out, every seedling checked and every pot plant watered to the brim. Penny checked the tracking information on her computer again. The Grosvenor doll’s house had arrived in Calais from Yorkshire with admirable speed, but appeared to be languishing there for reasons unknown.

  The waste of a day stretched in front of her, a gloomy prospect. She needed something to stop her fretting about Emily. Penny had waded through Rosheme’s website and watched countless video clips of a rotund and beaming middle-aged man, but was not much wiser. He appeared to talk in riddles that Emily understood and she didn’t. She also worried if Matthew could stay drug-free. She both feared and envied the family reunion that excluded her.

  She decided to drive to the second-hand market in Bergerac. There was a man there who sold old linen sheets, embroidered with elaborate monograms. He claimed they were the forgotten trousseaus of nineteenth-century spinsters, but some of the sheets were double length and of such a coarse weave that Penny always suspected they were shrouds. Most were creamy and thick, of a weight and weft more comforting than high thread counts. They smelled of dust and dried lavender and were thick and shiny with old-fashioned starch, often with small holes in them.

  As Penny mended them, she would think of her mother and grandmother, the laundry basket between them, darning socks and pillowcases with their small neat stitches, companionable in the early evening. So peaceful, those mending sessions, even after her father picked up his coat and left home forever, sometime after the incident with the scarf, which was all her fault, because at the age of seven or eight she was old enough to know she shouldn’t go through people’s pockets. But often at night, when he came home and hung his coat in the hall, she couldn’t resist sneaking out of the kitchen every now and then and staring at his coat pockets, particularly when they were bulging with something that might be for her, an early present for her birthday, or chocolates for doing well at school.

  One night after supper, as her father watched the evening news, she sidled out of the kitchen and tiptoed to the coat of Harris tweed, the same tweed her father said that George Mallory had worn climbing Mount Everest. She stood enveloped in its folds for a minute or two. The newsreader was going on about striking miners.

  The coat smelled different. Mixed with the smell of damp wool, cigarette smoke and beer, there was a scent of something sweet and strong. She reached into the pocket and pulled out a women’s silk scarf, patterned in bright yellow and blue. She had never felt anything so smooth. Wrapped inside was one pearl earring. She clipped it onto her ear and held up the scarf, its perfume rising above her head.

  Penny was so sure he had left it for her, a surprise for her dressing-up basket. She rushed in to her father and her mother, waving the scarf, giggling with delight. Her mother sat up abruptly while her father rustled the paper, then walked out of the room. She knew she had done something wrong, but it took many hours of eavesdropping during the mending sessions before she knew what it was.

  The adult Penny noted the irony of the loving attention these two celibate women, her grandmother widowed, her mother deserted, gave to their bed linen, the starched and pressed sheets so evocative of the sex and intimacy that was absent in their lives; and that she, also celibate, was doing exactly the same, even folding the sheets and towels the identical way her mother had done, arranging them in neat piles in the cupboard.

  But it was learned behaviour, not something encoded in her DNA, she thought as she scooped her car keys into her bag and locked the doors. Driving down the mountain, carefully braking at each curve, she told herself again that she was not becoming her mother, that her mother would never have left England and begun a new life in France. Most definitely, her mother would not be interested in mending a dead person’s sheets or going to a market where every item once belonged to someone else.

  She joined the main road, and immediately switched to the slow lane, happy to cruise behind an enormous Winnebago festooned with bicycles and a canoe, as she planned the rest of her day. Also at the market was a stall with enormous piles of wooden fruit boxes that Penny used as shelves. They were cheap and strong and she liked to see her books resting against bare woo
d. She could have lunch in one of the restaurants in the town square and, by the time she got back, the day would have been dealt with. There would just be the evening then, reading in front of the fire. Alone and, she hoped, content again.

  Before the breakin, if she had felt old anxieties and depressions rising, she had only to contemplate her garden and her house for them to disappear. Morning sun could lift her from gloomy dreams. A vase of budding willow stems placed on a table provided a centre of calm.

  A state of physical contentment was her earthly sense of heaven and of late it was moving away from her. She was worried about herself, as well as her children. She was beginning to wake in the middle of the night, caressing her breasts and reaching between her legs to discover herself engorged and wet. What was happening? Was she becoming some kind of late-middle-aged sex fiend, addicted to masturbation to feed a craving for sex that she wasn’t going to get?

  She wanted to be free of all that. Sex had unbalanced her in the past, made her lose reason like a bitch in heat, glassy-eyed, flicking its tail to one side, gagging for penetration. When she’d first met Sandy, she’d lie in bed gazing at his sleeping form, willing him to wake and make love to her.

  There had been no one since the divorce, although she could not say the same about Sandy, even in his present state. Men always moved on so quickly. Even Frieda, who refused to recognise sexual stereotypes, agreed with her on that.

  Penny didn’t want anyone else’s company. There were other physical pleasures she had taught herself to enjoy here: hot scented water, a breeze on her skin, the sun on her head. All things she could control. She did not want to lose herself again. It had taken her so long to discover at least part of who she was, who she might be.

  After the robbery, Nigel had suggested that she move into town. ‘It’s too lonely for you up here, all by yourself,’ he said when he dropped in for coffee one afternoon.

  ‘But that’s the reason I came here,’ she said, looking across at the mountains, hazed blue and mauve. ‘I want to be on my own. It suits me.’

  They were sitting in the courtyard, the flags still warm. Valerian and erigeron sprouted their blooms from between the cracks.

  ‘It didn’t suit you when the house was ransacked,’ said Nigel. ‘What happened with the police enquiry?’

  Penny inspected a trail of ants and their cargo of crumbs. ‘They know it’s some kind of local gang, kids. But they were smart enough not to leave any fingerprints. The things they took were not incredibly valuable, so the police are onto the next case. I can’t blame them. I’ve changed the locks, added more security lights. The police said they won’t come back. They never do. So I’m okay.’

  ‘And what’s happening with Robert?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘He left a message. I haven’t got back to him yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Penny hadn’t wanted to elaborate on what she termed her post-menopausal flush of lust. Keep moving, she told herself as she negotiated the bends down to Sarlat, and joined the road to Bergerac. It had worked for her mother. She could never remember her sitting down, or sleeping late. Each day was to be attacked with a list of tasks to be ticked off, battles to be fought against dust and fingermarks. No time was to be wasted. Penny still felt indolent by comparison.

  She wandered through the market, idly searching for bargains. But keener shoppers than her had already swept through. All that was left were pots without lids, rickety stools and rusted bed heads, as well as the occasional tarnished suit of headless armour. She walked back to the linen stall and carefully examined each sheet in the pile, before deciding on one with scrolled embroidery at the top and a large hole at the bottom. She negotiated her price and then bought two fruit boxes.

  As she heaved her purchases to a carrying position, Robert emerged from behind a stall selling old shovels, nearly tripping her over.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, disliking her immediate worry that her hair was particularly unkempt and that she was wearing her baggiest trousers.

  ‘Hi,’ he replied with a wide smile. His teeth really were wonderfully white, his skin so deliciously olive.

  ‘You’re all loaded up. Let me give you a hand.’

  Before she could reply, the boxes were in his arms and he was walking alongside her towards the car park.

  ‘How have you been?’ he asked and then, without waiting for her reply, ‘I called, thought you might like to go for a hike, but I guess you were out.’ He shrugged and smiled. Not a matter of great concern to him then.

  ‘How’s life with Montaigne?’ she asked.

  ‘He was the most amazing guy,’ said Robert, jiggling the boxes in his enthusiasm. ‘If he was alive now, he’d give any Eastern mystic or Western theologian a run for his money. He was into the living well, living in the moment thing. And he didn’t go in for major reflections. He let his thoughts lie where they fell. But hey, what thoughts.’

  ‘My daughter, Emily, always talks about living in the moment. She’s in India right now, with her brother. And their father has joined them for a bit.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Robert.

  ‘What? Living in the moment or their father joining them?’

  ‘Both, I guess.’ Robert shifted the boxes from one arm to another. ‘Montaigne might say it’d matter more to their father than to them, because things matter more as we get older.’

  ‘I was rather hoping they’d matter less.’ Penny smiled.

  ‘I don’t like your chances,’ he said. ‘Montaigne says as we get older, we’ve got the opportunity to recognise that we’re fallible. If we understand that age doesn’t make you wise, then that’s kind of a wisdom all of its own.’

  Penny pointed out her car. Robert stowed her purchases in the boot and stretched out his arms.

  ‘Those boxes were heavier than they looked.’

  ‘Sorry about that. But thank you.’ She fumbled in her bag for the key.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Are you busy this week?’

  Her stomach contracted while she considered her reply. It would be so easy to tell him she was going away. Easier still to make a date and then cancel it at the last minute. Migraine or back problems were always good excuses.

  Or she could say no, she wasn’t busy. She might even ask him to dinner at her house, cook a daube or a roast chicken. Nothing too elaborate. It was still too chilly to eat in the courtyard at night, but the kitchen was fine. Even better perhaps, with no possibility of a romantic evening in a candlelit restaurant. She shook her head and waited.

  ‘It’s just that I have a friend coming to join me for a while and I wondered if we could have lunch together,’ said Robert. ‘She’d like to meet you. She used to live in London. You’d have lots to talk about.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Penny very quickly. The embroidered sheet slipped in her hand and she grabbed a fold of it. ‘Name your day. I’m as free as the proverbial bird.’

  She got in the car and drove home. Just as well, all things considered. There were a few more meaningless phrases she could have dredged up, but she decided not to bother. As she swung into her lane, her old companion, self-pity, slipped into the seat beside her. So unfair, the whisper came, to be driving home alone, to continue her predictable expatriate existence while a man she didn’t want to find attractive, but did, waited for his partner to join him, and her children and ex-husband explored a far more exotic country than the one she had chosen to live in.

  Chapter 36

  Sandy thought the bus would be a bit of an adventure, a little road trip to see India. The concierge, a different one from last night, thought otherwise.

  ‘Sir is going where?’ he asked. He tugged the hairs of his bristling moustache when Sandy told him. ‘Usually that town is more popular with young people,’ he said.

  The implication was clear. Sandy should be booking a luxury tour of the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, not a bus ticket to a place reeling with gurus and mystics, with as many ashrams as hotels. Under the fulsome moustach
e, the concierge’s lips pursed. ‘We will organise a car,’ he said.

  Sandy held firm. Did he look so incompetent that he couldn’t manage a bus trip on his own? He did feel off-balance, but that was because of the changed time zones and temperatures, not because he was too stupid to find a bus stop.

  ‘Bus,’ the concierge repeated. ‘From the terminal? In Old Delhi?’ His brow knotted and he chewed at some wayward moustache fibres.

  ‘Well then, we will organise a taxi to take you there.’ He looked disappointed.

  Sandy shouldered his backpack and paid his bill. The taxi driver steered through elegant Lutyens avenues, sighing as he left them behind for the narrow teeming streets of Old Delhi and the bus terminal. The air smelled of spices, ripe fruit, fried food and under that, a whiff of dank sewage. He wouldn’t have known where to go without the driver’s help, who steered him onto the right bus, then hoisted his backpack onto the overhead rack. He tipped him and bagged a window seat at the back, grateful for the driver’s help, but also glad to be on his own at last.

  The bus was crammed full of weary-looking Indians returning to their villages and groups of raucous Western teenagers shouting to each other about dysentery and drugs. Sandy tried to ignore the pain in his back as the bus juddered across the ruts and potholes that passed for a road once the city was left behind. He recalled the advice given by his friends before leaving London.

  Ignore hawkers, said Tim, who’d been to Kerala twenty years ago and never returned. So when the bus stopped to refuel, Sandy buried his head in his guidebook as children jiggled crude woodcarvings against the window. Leave your bourgeois judgements at home, advised Peter, who’d travelled to Goa once or twice in the seventies. So when Sandy walked to the toilets, he ignored the men who goaded their chained monkeys to turn lethargic somersaults and peered up at the temple domes curving like plump breasts against the sky. It seemed the only safe place to look.

  As the bus began to climb the hills, the driver, in between shouting into his mobile phone, slowed to a crawl along the straight sections, then accelerated around sharp bends, skidding and spinning gravel down into steep cedar-covered valleys.