by Noel Virtue
Aunt Dizzy was nowhere to be seen. She was not in the kitchen where she sometimes sat once she’d descended from her room, sipping mugs of lemon or herbal tea and contemplating the plastic containers of vitamin and mineral tablets she carried about with her inside a leather toiletries bag. She had started offering tablets to everyone – everyone except Ivan – but rarely getting takers. Jean checked the front reception room and Freida’s room. Both were empty. She did not hurry up the stairs, imagining Aunt Dizzy to be asleep still or possibly soaking in the bath, which she often did now in the mornings, to cool herself, she had said.
The bathroom was empty. Several pairs of Christopher’s stylish designer-label underpants lay drying on the electric wall heater. Jean picked them up, folding them, switching off the heater. The door leading from the bathroom into Aunt Dizzy’s room was locked when she tried to open it. She knocked.
Auntie?’ she called. There was no reply. Jean passed through the other door – almost always left open – into Christopher’s bedroom and laid the underwear on his neatly made bed. The house was too quiet, she thought suddenly. It seems to be holding its breath. Christopher had told her that he believed Acacia Road was a living, breathing entity so many times she found herself, at odd moments when distracted, thinking as though she believed him.
Aunt Dizzy’s door from the hall was closed but unlocked. Jean opened the door slowly and peered in. The curtains were still drawn. The room smelt fusty. For a second she let her eyes adjust to the gloom.
Auntie?’
On the floor beside her bed Aunt Dizzy lay on her side with one arm thrown out, clutching a bottle of vitamin E tablets. Jean found herself staring at the bottle for what must have been thirty seconds before she pushed the door fully open and stepped inside.
‘There you are,’ Jean whispered. ‘It’s gone eleven o’clock, Auntie. Time to get dressed. This won’t do, will it?’
Moving slowly across the room, Jean knelt down at Aunt Dizzy’s side. Without thinking, she removed the bottle of tablets from Aunt Dizzy’s hand and held the bottle up to her chest.
Gazing down at the open, vacant eyes staring upwards, Jean’s eyes were filled with love and with the overwhelmingly painful understanding that had come to her as soon as she’d stepped into the room, that Elizabeth had gone away and would never be coming back.
SIXTEEN
After the funeral everyone except Jean and Anthony walked back to Acacia Road, where Freida had organized drinks and sandwiches. Anthony took Jean by taxi to his apartment, where she suddenly wished to be alone with him. It had been a quiet, non-religious service at the local church in the high street. A little impersonal but civilized and calm. Jean insisted that the others sit with her, around her, to be close. There had only been about twelve people in the church. Two or three had come from the Mayfair hotel and an elderly couple Aunt Dizzy had known drove up from Hampshire. It shocked Jean that so few had been there. Cedric Hyde, Aunt Dizzy’s sometime paramour, sat behind her and wept but spoke only briefly before and after. Several days before, Jean had telephoned a contact number in California and left a message, asking for Elizabeth’s son to call back immediately. He hadn’t called, nor appeared, but had sent an enormous, ostentatious wreath, so large it took three men to carry it from the hearse. When he had not returned her call Jean had telephoned a second time, again leaving a message, that Rupert Barrie’s mother had passed away. Aunt Dizzy, while she’d been alive, had not heard from him for two decades.
There was an enormous number of flowers and wreaths. One shaped like a cross from Mr Alder at the hotel which would have, Jean knew, made Aunt Dizzy laugh or produce one of her pointed comments. Mr Alder did not put in an appearance. Flowers had arrived at the house from all over the country and New York. Jean also telephoned William but had not spoken to him for long. He said nothing at all about his father nor asked after him. William had offered to fly across – ‘I could possibly find a day’s window, but things are hectic over here, Jean,’ he’d said – and she’d responded coldly, rudely, suggesting he not put himself out, that flowers would be more suitable anyway. She told him little. There was, in fact, little to tell. Elizabeth had apparently suffered several seizures during the night. The last one had ended her life. She would not have suffered unduly, Jean was earnestly informed by her GP. Aunt Dizzy’s face, when Jean found her, had been composed and peaceful. It was almost as though Aunt Dizzy had simply lain down on the floor to sleep. Jean sat beside her for more than half an hour before going downstairs.
Christopher wept bitterly at the news and continued to do so off and on for several days. He spent most of that time not with Fergus but with his father, walking in Regent’s Park. Fergus came and went from the house with a genuinely doleful expression, dressed in a variety of black suits and ties. He sat beside Christopher at the funeral, Mr Harcourt on the other side. Both of them held Christopher’s hands. Jean sat with her eyes closed throughout. She was not praying as others thought she might be but remembering Aunt Dizzy as she would always remember her, and sometimes she smiled and let out small sounds of recollected humour which she managed to disguise by coughing delicately into a handkerchief. When the service was concluded, the coffin was driven to a crematorium, attended only by employees of the funeral parlour, where Aunt Dizzy’s remains were cremated. She had left strict, explicit instructions in her will that this was to be done, not explaining why. Almost all of her money and possessions she left to Jean. There was a late addition, made to her will only a few weeks before, that five thousand pounds be given to Christopher Harcourt.
Once she and Anthony arrived at his apartment Jean immediately began to drink heavily. He said nothing but stood leaning against the frame of the kitchen door watching her. She sat on a high stool at his breakfast bar and rapidly downed one straight gin after another, recalling in her mind the last night of the Albert Hall concerts and the half-bottle of gin Aunt Dizzy had taken with her, wrapped in several layers of brown paper. She had guarded the gin as if it was priceless, was so secretive about it and at every opportunity when they were alone urged Jean to take a few sips. To fortify her, she said. Jean obstinately refusing, as she rarely drank anything but bottled water before a performance.
‘You’re no fun,’ Aunt Dizzy had complained. ‘You’re no fun at all.’ She began to drink the gin herself and fell asleep twice, sitting with the children in the second row while Jean was on stage.
‘She didn’t want to go,’ Jean suddenly said into the silence of the kitchen. Anthony did not respond. For Jean spoke as if she was talking aloud to herself, not even glancing his way.
‘She refused, afterwards, just refused point-blank. I am not being dragged down to bloody Wales, Jean, she said. The first time she had ever sworn in my hearing. The gin, probably. And that was that. She didn’t come. I was so angry at her. I was angry at her and angry at William because he couldn’t even be bothered to be there at all. Bastard. Prick. But I took the others. I drove them all down there, to …’
She stopped. Her hands began to shake uncontrollably and the glass slipped from her and fell to the polished wooden floor, shattering into several pieces. Jean pushed herself off the stool and stood there, bent down, staring at the glass. ‘It was me, it was me,’ she muttered. She started to slap at her face, then laughed. Anthony swiftly crossed the room and took hold of her, steadying her as she straightened. Taking both her hands he led her from the kitchen down the short hallway to the bedroom. He undressed her, helping her on to the bed and enfolding the duvet around her. The room was air-conditioned and cool. He half lay beside her but did not touch her. Jean lay back against the pillows and stared at him with a puzzled expression as if she was not certain who he was.
In a few minutes she was deeply asleep.
She slept for almost half an hour but woke suddenly, crying out, immediately bursting into tears and as suddenly stopping and gazing about her, drawing up her hands to rub at her face. She started to whisper, then to mutter something angr
ily, but he could not hear what she was saying. Tears began to course down her face, gathering at the base of her chin.
‘Talk to me,’ he said. Talk to me, Jean. Please.’
Jean shuddered. Anthony waited, gazing with gentleness at her face. She would not look at him. She turned away her head and stared at the wall.
‘She didn’t wish to go and that saved her life,’ Jean whispered.
And as she continued her voice gathered strength. Her voice grew louder, yet she spoke in a flat, unemotional tone as though she was still talking to herself, as if she were alone in the room.
Jean had pleaded with Aunt Dizzy to join her, Jared, Gemma and their grandparents that night, to drive down to the cottage in Wales directly after the final concert at the Albert Hall. Jean had decided to go, just as she made all her decisions, impulsively and refused to be persuaded otherwise. Isobelle, Jean’s mother, had been totally against the idea. She’d thought it preposterous. Jean wasn’t in her right mind. It was too far. It was too cold. Despite the euphoria that Jean was overwhelmed by, drunk from the success she knew she’d created, she had shouted at Isobelle, eventually, before they’d even joined the motorway. Jean’s father tried to intervene and Jared began clapping and shouting for them to shut the hell up, and for several miles, as Jean continued to drive, bitter argument and recrimination cut back and forth and the concert was not mentioned once, and no one even congratulated her. So Jean drove. She drove furiously, singing to herself in the long silences that eventuated until Isobelle began again, then again to try to change Jean’s mind so she would turn back. The night was clear and cold and there was to be a heavy frost before dawn – that would have nothing to do with what was to happen. Jean’s mind was filled with sounds of applause and people down in front of her standing to their feet, faces smiling, and there were some who’d cried out and others who did not wish her to leave the stage, back to the dressing-room and to Aunt Dizzy who was there flourishing her almost empty bottle of gin. And Jean had thought, as she stood still on the stage: I shall take them all down to Wales, to where I played and ran and sang as a child and grandfather taught me how to fish. I want to be there with them, with Mother and Father and the children. Just us. Damn William for not being with us. Damn Aunt Dizzy.
Isobelle had grown resigned and almost calm by the time they stopped to eat, and of course the family were never less than loving in public. The second part of the journey was warily peaceful. Yet still no one, not even Jared, mentioned the concert. He and Gemma both fell asleep. Jean’s father Edward joined her in the front and sat there occasionally chatting about nothing in particular and making certain she took the correct motorway turn-off.
Isobelle had also fallen asleep when Jean took a wrong turning and they were lost, for a while, during which time Jean and her father giggled like children, imagining what Isobelle would say if she were awake and knowing Jean had got them lost after refusing to turn back. And Edward, her dear, beloved, worshipped father, had begun to tell her in his hesitant way that it had been the proudest moment of his long and happy life to witness his only daughter there in front of that distinguished audience. To have seen her, he’d said, being applauded with such huge emotion and respect had touched his heart more deeply than anything else he could remember. He was quite happy to return to the cottage just for a day or two. He understood, he had told her, why. He understood that it was a place Jean had also been gloriously happy in as a child, where he, too had spent so many special times when he was young. It was fitting.
Sometime, while he was speaking, Jean’s mother had woken from her nap. Eventually, as she must have heard most of her husband’s unrehearsed speech, she leant forward and awkwardly kissed Jean on the side of her head, yet at the same time warning her not to take her eyes off the road. Then she sat for the duration of the journey mostly in silence, yet sometimes commenting that she recognized this or that out the window, then worrying aloud that none of them had brought toothbrushes and the bed-linen in the cottage would need to be aired and they would have to use the gas cylinders stored in the basement. There’d be no electricity until they could telephone someone the following morning. Gemma and Jared remained asleep. Isobelle laughed when Gemma started to snore; Gemma had once sworn that she never snored. Jean hummed to herself and drove more slowly now that Isobelle was awake and did not get them lost again, exchanging small secretive smiles with her father.
Jean dropped them off at the top of the track, which wound down through dense woodland to the cottage. She wanted to drive on for a while, she told her father, to calm herself or she would never sleep. He had the keys and could let the others in. Isobelle was not happy at the prospect of having to walk down the track but said little in protest. Jean watched them in the rear-view mirror as she drove off. Gemma was hugging her grandmother, saying something to her which made Isobelle laugh. Jared was beating his arms against himself. Their breath frosted in the cold air. Jared was to turn nineteen that year. Gemma was two years younger.
Her father was waving as Jean turned a corner and then they were gone from sight. She was never to see them alive again.
She drove for several miles, recognizing, even in the dark that was lightened by a half-moon, places she had been to as a child. Houses and small neglected farm dwellings she had gazed at, walked past, were still there. Picnic areas. A stream where she and her father had first fished and where she had fallen in and ruined a dress she’d hated. It was an isolated area and still was. She drove slowly, savouring the night, encountering little other traffic, for it was by then the early hours of the morning. It was a time Jean enjoyed, being awake when the world around her was resting. Eventually, suddenly tired and heavy-headed, she pulled into the gravelled car park of a hotel she did not recognize, which looked newly built or even unfinished. Lights shone inside. There were several other cars and a van parked across the forecourt. After a few minutes she rested her head against the side window, closing her eyes, the stream of smiling faces and waving arms and the cries of appreciation that had been reverberating inside her head now slowly fading. She would rest for five minutes, she thought, and then return to the cottage. Exhaustion rolled over her.
She was woken by the sound of someone tapping on the window glass and she immediately sat upright in fright, having slipped down into the seat. A woman was staring in at her, a homely face, her head covered by a scarf. It was still dark. Jean had slept for more than an hour.
‘I’m sorry! Are you all right, love?’ the woman called. Jean wound down the window. ‘You must be freezing out here. Look, the hotel isn’t open yet, but we’ve been having an early breakfast. Late night last night, but none of us slept for long. Just noticed you out here! Are you sure you’re OK?’
Once Jean had opened her door and stepped out, the woman, short, wide-hipped, plain-featured and concerned, asked her in for some hot soup or coffee. ‘You look as if you need something,’ she said. ‘Travelled far?’
Jean found herself following the woman into the hotel, where various people were lounging about on plastic-film-covered armchairs and sofas. A baby was asleep inside a modern plastic carrycot on the deep-pile carpeted floor. No one took a great deal of notice at first, except to nod greetings, apart from a woman who stared rudely, her mouth dropping open. She then nudged the man sitting beside her, whispering to him. The man began to stare. Both grinned. The woman had several teeth missing.
‘Never mind this lot,’ the woman who’d invited her in said cheerfully. ‘I’m Gracie. After Gracie Fields. We’re all from up north, just come down yesterday. Had this place built to make our fortune. We’re all too wacked right now to care!’ and she laughed so loudly Jean involuntarily winced. She was still only half awake. The main reception room, where everyone sat, was warm. There was a large open fireplace piled with glowing, flaming logs and a strong odour of coffee and frying bacon.
‘It’s so kind of you,’ Jean said, rather ineffectually. ‘I’m Jean.’
‘Sit over by the fire,
Jean. Coffee?’ Then she added, ‘Neville, get your fat arse up off that chair and come and help. You did bugger all yesterday.’
Forgetting the time, Jean had stayed until almost dawn. The hotel owners were a family, a large, extended family, she was told. The men are all lazy buggers and us women do all the slogging,’ Gracie told her, laughing. Jean was treated as if she was to be their very first guest. She was soon given a plate piled high with fried eggs and sausages and tomatoes, most of which she left. She kept being offered coffee or tea and was fussed over. Each of them included her in idle chat, smiling and laughing. The large imposing Gracie appeared to be in charge. She reminded Jean of Peggy Mount. Jean gave little thought to her own family, probably worrying about her back at the cottage – or not, as she guessed they would have all gone to bed, as utterly exhausted as she was now beginning to feel. She sat basking in the easy-going comfort the others displayed. The woman who had openly stared was Gracie’s sister. Jean had been there only twenty minutes before she sidled over and stood nervously fidgeting with a lock of her hair and gazing down at Jean in a slightly disturbing way. Then she said, too rapidly, ‘I hope you won’t mind, but aren’t you Jean Barrie?’ and then looked stricken, glancing back into the room.
‘I am. For all my sins,’ Jean said and smiled as warmly as she could manage to, glancing back at the fire, suddenly embarrassed. Everyone in the room stared at her with varying degrees of interest.
‘I knew it! I said to Mervyn as soon as you walked in, that’s Lady Jean! Oh, look, I’m such a fan as you wouldn’t believe. Got all your records, every one. You signed one for me once. You won’t remember.’ She turned her head and called, ‘It is her, Merv, I told you!’