by Hilary Boyd
‘Charles! We can’t. This is crazy!’
‘Is it?’ He looked surprised, as if she’d brought him round from a trance. ‘Why?’
She stroked his cheek; his blue eyes were still bright with desire.
‘Because it would be revenge sex, that’s why.’
‘Revenge? Revenge on whom?’
‘On Richard, for a start, who I’m convinced is having an affair. On Louisa, perhaps, for being such a pain about Daniel.’
He sighed, looking disappointed, but gallantly got off the bed and put on his dressing gown.
‘Not sure what it’s got to do with anyone else.’ He sat down beside her. ‘My fault. Sorry, Annie, got a bit carried away there.’
‘It wasn’t just your fault,’ she said shakily, getting up and attempting to dress herself, pulling at her buttons, straightening her skirt, trying to smooth her ruffled hair. Her lips felt bruised and on fire, her body as if it were coming down off a high. Then she sat down hard on the bed next to him, unable to do any more.
Charles looked as let down as she felt. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘since meeting you again, and knowing about the boy, I’ve felt quite strange.’ He frowned, his expression puzzled. ‘I keep wondering how it would have been … if you’d told me back then. Would we have made a go of it, d’you think?’
Annie shook her head.
‘It’s fantasy, Charles … a fantasy that negates our other families, our real lives.’
‘Oh, I know, I know … but I still find you very attractive.’ He shot her a boyish grin.
‘You had your chance,’ she replied tartly. Just take thirty-five years to let me know you fancy me, why don’t you, she thought. For a second she had a flashback of her eighteen-year-old self, waiting, waiting for him to ring. When she didn’t hear from him the day after their night together, she told herself he was busy getting ready to go away. It was inconceivable to her that he wouldn’t call. Then, when she realised he must have gone without phoning her, she told herself he would call from the French house. And when August dragged on and there was no phone call, she thought perhaps he would be waiting to see her when he got back at the end of the month. That August was the longest month of her life. September dragged by in an increasing miasma of despair. She wondered if her mother had forgotten to give her messages, but she knew that any contact from Charles Carnegie would be greeted with a fanfare by Eleanor. She would look for him when she was out, terrified she would bump into him on the Knightsbridge streets with his arm round another girl. That summer night had meant so much to her, and in her innocence she couldn’t believe he hadn’t cared too. It did not occur to her for a single second that she was already carrying his baby. Sitting on the bed next to him now, she felt again the agony of that teenage rejection.
‘You won’t let this silly mistake come between us, will you?’ Charles was still bent, dishevelled, on the bed. He looked up, brushing his hair back off his face in a gesture reminiscent of Daniel.
‘Better stick to the Ritz in future,’ she replied, as casually as she could manage, and he chuckled.
‘The Ritz … perfect. You’re so sensible, Annie. I love that about you.’
She almost ran down the worn, red-carpeted stairs from Charles’s flat. She was lightheaded and slightly nauseous from too much wine. All she wanted was to get home and stand under a powerful stream of hot water, to wash away her foolishness. How could she have done that to Richard? However bad things are between us, he doesn’t deserve that, she told herself. The thought of him knowing made her feel ill.
She hailed a taxi at the bottom of Queen’s Gate, and immediately got out a mirror to check her face. She saw the taxi driver glance at her in his rear-view mirror. He knows what I’ve been up to. I look so wrecked and guilty. She reached in the bottom of her bag for her mobile. Three missed calls in the last hour, two from her mother’s number and one from Richard. She didn’t bother to listen to the message from him, he could wait. What does Mother want? She listened to the first voicemail. But it wasn’t her mother’s voice.
‘Mrs Delancey … iss Mercedes … please come quick … iss your mother.’
The Spanish housekeeper sounded frantic. Annie felt her stomach turn over. She listened to the next one, also from Mercedes, which said exactly the same thing. This wasn’t Mercedes being ‘Mediterranean’ – this sounded serious. Had her mother had a fall? She shouted through the glass to the taxi driver to take her to Cadogan Gardens as quickly as he could.
She checked to see when Mercedes had called; it was only fifteen minutes ago. She dialled Eleanor’s number repeatedly as the taxi changed direction, but it was always engaged. The taxi driver, despite her desperate exhortations, seemed incapable of going more than three miles an hour. It was a ten-minute journey at most, but the lights were all against them and Pelham Street had a massive queue leading up to the junction at Brompton Cross. By the time she got to the flat she was almost fainting with anxiety.
The buzzer let her into the building without anyone answering the intercom. She flew upstairs. Dr Graham opened the door.
‘Annie, come in.’
‘Mother … what’s happened?’ she gasped, breathless.
The doctor didn’t say anything at first, just drew her through to the drawing room. Mercedes was nowhere to be seen, but she thought she heard her talking hysterically in Spanish in the far reaches of the large flat.
‘Where is she? What’s happened?’
‘Annie, sit down. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. Your mother … I think she must have had a heart attack.’
‘Where have they taken her? Which hospital is she in?’
‘She, er, I’m afraid she didn’t come round,’ the doctor said slowly, looking anxiously at her face. She stared at him. She’d always thought Rob Graham looked uncannily like Colin Firth. He had the same soulful, hesitant look in his brown eyes. He’d been her mother’s doctor for a decade, and Annie was convinced Eleanor was a little in love with him.
‘Didn’t come round? I don’t understand …’ She jumped up. ‘I must go to her.’
Dr Graham put a restraining hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Annie. Your mother died about an hour ago. I’m so sorry.’
‘Died? Mother can’t have died,’ she said stubbornly, and pulled herself free from the doctor’s hand. ‘She had a new bed yesterday.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Rob Graham repeated.
‘Where is she?’ She wasn’t sure she was understanding any of what the doctor was telling her.
‘She’s in the bedroom.’
Annie almost ran down the passage. Her mother’s room was at the end of the L-shaped flat. She passed Mercedes’ door, and the housekeeper, red-eyed, poked her head out nervously, as if she’d been listening out for her.
‘Ah, Mrs Annie … su madre, iss terribile, terribile … I very sorry … I call you, but you no answer.’
She patted the housekeeper’s arm, but kept on going. The bedroom was very silent. Her mother lay propped against the puffy goose-down pillows on the brand-spanking-new, queen-size Vi-Spring divan. She was fully clothed, covered to her chin by the turquoise-blue patchwork quilt. Her eyes were closed, her hands by her sides. Annie stood silently looking down at her. Eleanor Westbury had gone, that much was clear. The face looked blank, empty; strangely, indefinably devoid of life. She reached out and laid her hand on her mother’s cheek. It was still powdery, but cool, with the coldness of death. She heard Dr Graham behind her.
‘What happened?’ she asked, turning to the doctor. Her heart felt slow and heavy, as if it were having trouble pumping blood around her body. She wanted to sit down, but she couldn’t move.
‘From what I can gather, Mercedes went out to the supermarket, as she always does, while your mother was having her afternoon nap. When she came back, Eleanor wasn’t up, which was unusual apparently. At first she thought she might have gone out, but your mother always told her what she was doing, so after a while she tiptoed to the bedroom to see if she was
alright, and that was when she found her. She says she was already dead.’
‘But why? There wasn’t anything wrong with her heart, was there?’
Rob Graham shook his head. ‘Not that I was aware. She hadn’t been to see me for some time, so I don’t know, but perhaps there was some underlying health problem that caused her heart to fail.’
Annie felt exasperated. ‘I saw her only yesterday. This is a new bed, new sheets, new pillows. All new. We made it up and I lay next to her. Right there. She was fine, really happy. Surely I’d have known if she was so ill.’ She was talking almost to herself.
‘Heart problems don’t always show up.’ He paused, then said gently, ‘Annie, I’m afraid there will have to be a postmortem.’
‘NO … no, you can’t cut my mother up!’
Rob put his head on one side, his brown eyes full of pity. ‘We don’t have a choice. It’s the law. If someone dies unexpectedly, then the cause of death has to be established. I have to refer it to the coroner.’
‘But don’t you need my consent for that?’
‘No, unfortunately not. Annie, we need to know why Eleanor died. You don’t think so now, but you will want to know eventually. These things are important.’
She nodded slowly, acknowledging that the doctor was right. Her mobile phone, which she realised she was still clutching in her left hand, began to buzz. She didn’t even look to see who it was, just answered it automatically.
‘Annie … thank God I’ve got you. Listen, I got a call …’
‘I’m here,’ Annie replied dully. ‘I know. Mother’s dead, Richard.’
‘I’m on my way. I should be at the flat in about ten minutes,’ her husband said. ‘Is Dr Graham still there?’
‘Yes. Hurry, please hurry,’ she begged, then burst into tears.
18
Richard was stalwart. So kind and supportive. All the tensions between them had been put aside in her hour of need, but guilt sat like a lowering backdrop to the much greater distress about her mother. I don’t deserve him. Now he lay against her back in bed, his arm warm and protective round her body. She was very still, almost not wanting to breathe, because breath meant life, which meant thought, and she couldn’t bear to think. There had been so many times over the years when she had wished her mother was not her mother, times when she almost wished her dead, definitely imagining, on occasion, that she would be relieved when she was gone. She’s dead, she thought. She’s really dead, and I’ll never see her again. She was very far from feeling relieved.
‘I should have known there was something wrong,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe if I hadn’t been so wound up in my own problems …’
‘People have heart attacks out of the blue all the time, Annie. Someone at work, much younger than your mother, had one last year. Peter. Remember? I told you. He seemed fine until he wasn’t.’
She sat up in bed. ‘It just seems impossible that she could die that quickly. And she was in such a good mood about her bed.’ She looked down at her husband. ‘Can you believe she’s dead?’
‘Not really.’
‘She had such spirit. She was so tough. It doesn’t seem possible that she’s gone.’
‘She was eighty-two,’ Richard pointed out.
‘That’s not old these days … if I’d got there more quickly.’
‘She was already dead, Annie, when Mercedes found her.’
They talked on for a while, until Richard’s responses became more monosyllabic and in the end stopped altogether, and Annie heard his breathing take on the slower rhythms of sleep. But she doubted she would sleep. Her heart seemed to have sped up and taken over her whole body with its hammering. Her brain was on a relentless loop: she was dying and I was naked in bed with Charles Carnegie. That moment, the moment when I came to my senses … was that the moment she died? she asked herself. Was Mother warning me to stop, in a last act of unusual kindness … or disapproval? Had she needed Annie in extremis? Was she frightened, knowing she was about to die? The questions tormented her thoughts.
*
‘What do you think we should do?’ Marsha asked Ed as they walked away from the house. ‘I feel so helpless, seeing Mum like this.’
‘Me too. I don’t know … I suppose with death you just have to go through it. She was pretty old.’
‘Yeah. But maybe that doesn’t count when it’s your mother. And Mum seems to blame herself.’
‘That’s dumb. She wasn’t there.’
‘It’s weird, thinking Grandma’s dead.’
Ed didn’t reply for a moment. ‘I do feel upset, but she wasn’t really the sort of person who allowed you to be close. I always felt she was judging me a bit,’ Ed said.
‘She wasn’t warm and fuzzy, I grant you. But I never felt judged.’
‘Yeah, but you were her favourite, Mash. You and Dad. You could do no wrong.’
It pained Marsha that Ed, once again, was feeling second best.
‘Mum definitely felt judged.’ Marsha turned to look at him. ‘I don’t think they had such a great relationship.’
‘She seems pretty cut up about her dying though. She must have loved her.’
They walked in silence for a while. It was beginning to rain, and Marsha stepped up the pace.
‘You can love someone and still not like them very much,’ Marsha commented.
‘I know that,’ Ed muttered, and Marsha wondered who he was referring to.
‘So is Emms staying with you forever?’
‘Not sure … she doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere yet.’
He turned and saw the question in his sister’s eyes, but he said no more.
‘At least Grandma’s death has meant you and Mum have made it up a bit.’
Ed nodded. ‘Puts things into perspective.’ Or at least shook him and Emma off the obsessive track they’d found themselves on since the night of the party. Thank God she’s stopped crying, he thought. But nothing had been resolved about Daniel.
‘I was right, it was a heart attack.’ Dr Graham’s voice on the phone was gentle. ‘Her arteries were in a bad way, I’m surprised she didn’t have any symptoms.’
‘She never was very keen on vegetables – she always told Mercedes they gave her wind,’ Annie told him sadly. She was sitting at her desk at home. She’d said to Jodie that she would not be in for a few days, there was so much to organise: the funeral, Mercedes’ future, the flat, probate. ‘If you’d known, could you have done anything?’
‘At her age, probably not a lot. The last time I saw her was over a year ago, and her blood pressure was up a bit, but that’s natural at eighty-plus.’ He paused. ‘She was lucky in a way, to go like that … peacefully.’
‘It’s just she seemed so well the day before.’ She spoke almost to herself, repeating the same sentence for maybe the fiftieth time since her mother died. She still couldn’t believe she was not still sitting there in her wing-back chair, wearing her padded navy hairband and silk poloneck. ‘Do you think it was quick, when she went?’
‘I expect so,’ said Rob cautiously.
‘And she wasn’t in pain?’
‘Perhaps for a moment or two,’ the doctor said, honestly. ‘But it wouldn’t have been for long.’
As she stood in the front pew of Chelsea Old Church, the coffin within arm’s reach, Marsha felt shock rather than sadness. Shock that inside that panelled oak casket, a single wreath of white roses resting on its polished surface, was the dead body of her grandmother.
She’d never been to a funeral before. Her father’s mother had died when she was only five – she hardly remembered her. And Gramps’s funeral happened the week of her GCSEs. He lived in Lancaster and they hadn’t let her go.
She clutched her mother’s arm with one hand, the crumpled paper containing her eulogy in the other. The church was packed – Grandma was obviously a bit of a hit with her Chelsea set – the smart, black-clad congregation mostly over seventy-five. She felt sick with anxiety at having to talk in front of all t
hese people. Lucy, leaning across her mother, gave her an encouraging nudge. ‘OK?’ she mouthed.
Marsha’s nod was hesitant. She glanced sideways at Ed, solemn and silent between Dad and Mercedes, who was kitted out in an impressive black mantilla, her face puffy from prolonged weeping. Poor Mercedes.
They began the first hymn, chosen by her grandmother in the detailed plan for her own funeral. Marsha still couldn’t get her head around the idea of planning your own funeral and found herself stumbling through the half-familiar words. Church had been a sporadic thing when she was young. Dad keen, Mum not so keen.
‘Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more; Feed me till I want no more.’ The voices swelled behind her. These people certainly knew their hymns.
She checked on her mother, who was standing in total silence, and squeezed her hand tight. Marsha hadn’t seen her cry yet, and that worried her. Maybe she did it in private – her mother wasn’t given to displays of emotion – but it didn’t seem quite normal to be dry-eyed in front of your mother’s coffin.
The vicar, a portly man with the plummy drone she associated with religious discourse, was signalling to her. She felt her stomach flutter. She got up and went to the lectern, smoothing out the piece of paper in front of her. A sea of curious faces, pale against the uniform black funeral weeds, stared back at her.
‘My grandmother,’ she began, hearing the shake in her voice, ‘was not someone to be messed with.’ She heard the laughter with relief. ‘But to me she was everything a grandmother should be …’
She felt as if she was talking forever, and skipped a couple of paragraphs of her typed sheet. When she came to the end, she looked over at her mother. She felt tears welling behind her eyes, but not so much for her grandmother, more for the desolate, lonely figure of her mum. She looks so bereft, she thought, as she made her way back to the pew. Her mother reached to kiss her gently on the cheek as she sat down.
‘Are you OK?’ Marsha whispered. But her mother didn’t reply, just clutched Marsha’s hand, holding tight to Lucy’s on the other side.