When he had arrived back the following evening, he carried a large bundle of excuses. He had missed his plane. He had checked in at an airport hotel. He hadn’t wanted to wake her. Then he had spent the next day waiting for a flight that had a seat for him. He couldn’t get the airport phones to work. He had misplaced his phone card. And so it went on until she had broken into his disjointed narrative and said, ‘You’re cheating on me.’
There must have been something fierce in her face, because he didn’t deny it for very long. He tried instead to make a half-hearted joke of it, had even put his arms around her. She had shrugged him off and said softly, no anger in her tone, ‘You’ve been at it for a long time. And now you can take your bag and go off to another hotel. I don’t want any tawdry confessions.’
She realized that she meant it. It wasn’t a ploy. She didn’t want the fetid heat of the confessional. The prurience. She could imagine his faint air of boasting. The shame that would come with it. Her own. What she suddenly knew she wanted above all to was to maintain her dignity. And not to harm Becca. She had managed both. It was he who had railed, so loudly that he had woken the girl. She had given her father a tight hug and obediently gone back to bed. And then Jeff had begun to rail again, a long complicated monologue not unlike his more colourful lectures on Tennessee Williams at the Movies. She hadn’t been able to listen, but she had picked up some of his descriptions of her: stupid, cold, unfeeling, uncaring, a castrating bitch.
This last had toppled her over the edge - as if until then, she had been walking a tightrope on which she could still turn, even if with difficulty, and go back. No longer.
‘Obviously I didn’t cut enough,’ she said.
She had taken his bag and dumped it outside the front door.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. He hadn’t left then. He had slept in the study. She had refused to speak to him, had carried on the war of silence for weeks except in Becca’s presence. Her only words to him were, ‘We’ll talk once you’ve moved out.’ And she wanted him out. His dramatic features, the heaviness of his eyes, the slight oiliness round his cheeks, his lips moving over food, his habit of chewing too slowly, all had begun to disgust her.
Finally he had indeed packed his bags and left.
Leo gazed at the photos of Isabel which she had unwittingly lined up so that they covered the entirety of the table, like a many-decked game of solitaire. Why wouldn’t these snapped moments of Isabel’s life talk to her? The only thing the vibrant face seemed to convey was that short of being bound and gagged, Isabel, unlike Jeff, would never willingly betray her. And judging from past performance, she would communicate her whereabouts if she could.
Rapidly Leo dialled Manhattan to check her answering machine. Her mother’s voice came on, bemoaning the fact that Leo hadn’t left her a contact number. Then a message from her editor, telling her the last of the strips was great; could they have more along the same line. And then nothing. Nothing from Isabel. All these modes of instant global communication and still nothing.
She plugged in her computer and sent a message to Becca, then took her bag into the guestroom in the front side of the loft. Everything here was neat too, the double bed made up as if Isabel had been half-expecting her visit. She hung her clothes in the small closet. Isabel’s cases were stored in here, a large one and a smaller wheeled green one. Was there a middle-sized one missing that Isabel might have packed and taken with her. Leo didn’t know. She didn’t, she suddenly felt, know anything.
Fighting back tears, she stripped and raced for the shower. The hot, even stream felt good, easing the strains of the day, biting into her back like a proficient masseuse. She rubbed herself down, avoiding the glare of Isabel’s floor to ceiling mirror. It wasn’t the time for confrontation with a body she no longer liked to look at. Instead, she pulled on the white towelling robe that hung there and stretched out on the bed. Sleep, she felt, was a long way away. To shut her eyes meant to release a stream of terrible images, as if her imagination could only focus on the dire events her conscious mind held at bay. After a second, she got up and made sure all the windows in the loft were securely locked. Then she picked up the book on the bedside table: Buddhism - A Guide to Awakening. Isabel, as far as she knew had no religious interests of any kind. Curious. A visitor must have left the volume behind. Inside it there was a slim brochure. She leafed through pages describing an idyllic setting in the countryside which offered retreats, meditation, counselling, a variety of what sounded like psychic therapies. The language reverberated with new age terminology. Could Isabel have developed a recent interest in all this?
Restlessly Leo got up again and made her way to Isabel’s study.
With a speed that made her realize that she had been intending to do this all evening, she rifled through the pile of open post in the silver mesh tray. There were letters from various charities pleading for funds: women’s refuges, Ethiopian hospitals, Indian villages, shelters for the homeless. There were bills for gas and electricity and telephone, all of which seemed to have been paid. There were three invites to art exhibits, long gone and several to book launches. Amidst it all, there was a bill from a Harley street practitioner and one for a Dr. D. Lukas at an address in N.6. Highgate, Leo remembered, where she and Jeff and Becca had lived during their year in London. She extracted these two from the pile. Both of them were reminders for overdue payments. The second had the word stamped on it in thick threatening black.
She placed both carefully at the centre of the desk. As she did so, it came to her that when she was last here, this was where Isabel’s computer had sat, a new Mac laptop. Becca had put a happy face sticker on the bag, so that Isabel could identify it at a glance. And they had all compared notes on the competing virtues of PC’s and Mac’s. Isabel had been vociferous about the superiority of hers, saying she would never support Bill Gates’s imperialism again.
Leo looked round the room. Isabel’s laptop was nowhere to be seen which meant she could only have taken it with her and she was working. On what? That’s what everything kept coming back to. If only computers had never been invented, Isabel would have left a stack of papers around, copious notes, interviews.
Interviews. Leo scoured the room for tapes and found a boxful of tiny, one inch cassettes. Where to begin? And where was the relevant tape-recorder? With Isabel no doubt, since there was no sign of it here and the labels on the tapes bore only numbers - probably referring to some filing system that Isabel held within her computer. For a woman who had, in the past at least, been so chaotic in her household habits, it never ceased to amaze Leo how meticulous Isabel was in the organisation of her work.
Leo’s favourite teacher at her boarding school in Cambridge had been like that. She had told Isabel about her once when they were narrating those past lives which had so little and yet so much in common. The woman, Miss Henderson, was large with a doughy face oblivious to make-up and a blunt potato of a nose beneath faded, lashless eyes and shaggy brows. The basket on her bicycle was always full to overflowing and inevitably, when she pulled up, her shapeless brown coat and straggly scarf got caught up with books or groceries or bag or box of slides so that one of the girls would have to run up and disentangle objects from person and carry stray vegetables into the school for her. Miss Henderson seemed to notice none of this clumsiness. There was a blithe insouciance about her; an innocence, too. She treated everyone, girls large and small, other teachers, headmistress or ground staff in exactly the same way. To Leo, her soft blurry voice was the instrument of kindness itself. And when she lectured, puffing over to the screen to point to details of old master paintings, translating pigments and brush strokes and lives into soaring language, she was magnificent. They all felt as if a benign aunt had transported them to a dazzling party in the Elysian fields and introduced them to her fast friends, Leonardo and Delacroix, Michelangelo and David.
Once, when Leo had gone to Miss Henderson’s rooms for an individual tutorial, she had pulled out three black
bound notebooks with a red stripe down their spines. The books opened on columns of tiny calligraphic script which were neatness incarnate. Each entry contained a coded cross-reference to slide or books on one of Miss Henderson’s bulging shelves - and within moments, the paintings Leo most wanted to see appeared magically before her. Leo had thought then that she wanted to grow old like Miss Henderson, certainly not like her mother who paraded round in jeans and T-shirts or clinging party dresses pretending to be far younger than her years.
She shook herself back into the present. She would look Miss Henderson up one of these days. She should still be alive. It was only from the vantage point of youth that she had seemed as ancient as her subject matter.
The shelves at the very top of Isabel’s study caught her gaze. They held a series of boxfiles, not so unlike some of Miss Henderson’s. Tomorrow she would set to work on those. Not now. She was beginning to feel bleary, her eyes smarting after too many disturbed nights, topped by hours on the plane.
As she lay on crisp sheets, she nourished the fantasy that had come to her over these last years, always laced with a tantalising sense of deep, as yet unobtainable, peace. She and Isabel, old ladies now, but straight-backed and clear-eyed, sharing a house together in some gentle countryside, far from the fray. Removed from the welter of passion and the stifling coils of worry. There were paint brushes and canvases and books and comfortable silences, interspersed by the pleasures of conversation. And beauty - the gleam of sunlight on a dewy slope, a smooth, plump jug stuffed with flowers, Isabel’s face, lowered in concentration, the mysteries of her life etched in its fine lines.
Thinking she wouldn’t sleep at all, she slept unexpectedly well and woke to pale lemon streaks criss-crossing her bed. She wondered at them and gradually worked out where she was. In her initial well-being, she imagined that Isabel too was here, just a few steps away in the far bedroom. And then it all came back to her.
She leapt from the bed and pulled up the blinds. A lone man, carrying a newspaper, was making his way into the offices across the road. She glanced at the clock. 7.45. She switched on the radio and heard the comforting voices of the Today team, one of the few pleasures to attend her arrival, and then busied herself. There was everything to do today. She switched on the kettle to make herself another cup of the vile instant coffee Isabel must have purchased in a moment of deranged efficiency. She twisted open the jar of marmalade and spread two spoonfuls on a slice of crispbread she discovered in a package at the top of the cabinet. Her mouth blazed awake at the bittersweet taste.
With a glance at her watch, she pulled out her address book and began to ring the smattering of Isabel’s friends for whom she had numbers. Some she had already contacted from New York, but an up-date wouldn’t hurt. She interrogated the ones she found at home, only to hear once again that Isabel was meant to be in the States. She left messages with others and set up two dates for the weekend, hoping she might garner some clues from face-to-face meetings.
Phone calls done, she carried a step-ladder from the doorside closet and perched on it, to reach down the first two of the boxfiles from the shelf of her office.
One of these was labelled ‘Cards 95-97’. Leo opened the box to find an assortment of Christmas and picture cards. She whisked through them. Few of the names meant anything to her and she didn’t bother to note the ones with last names, since they would be relative strangers and know little of Isabel’s doings. One card was signed, ‘your mother’. She paused at this. Isabel’s mother had died earlier this year and Isabel had flown back to Australia to attend her funeral. She hadn’t stayed long and her only e-mail comment to Leo had been something like, ‘I didn’t miss her when she was alive and though I guess I should miss her now and have some kind of breakdown about our never having come to terms, I just can’t find it in myself. Unnatural daughter. She used to call me that. Oh well. Guess I am. Another subject for our travels. G’day.’
Leo turned the word ‘breakdown’ over in her mind as she looked at the spindly writing on the card. ‘Best prospects for the new year,’ it read. It was all so formal compared to her own mother who used to lavish love on paper, if not as often in person.
Isabel had always described hers as a cold, bloodless woman. A woman who had shuttled her off to her aunt’s as soon as Isabel’s father had died and then placed her in one boarding school after another because she was too unmanageable to keep at home. Her unruliness was confirmed by the progression of schools. When Isabel talked about these schools, Leo had visions of nineteenth century establishments to rival Jane Eyre’s in harshness of discipline and puritan purpose.
She stopped over another card because the writing was so familiar. Jeff. For some reason, the recognition made her flush, but she read the message, despite herself. ‘Hi longlegs. How’s life treating you? Always yours, whatever the season.’
When had he written this? Was it before or after their separation? It didn’t matter. It meant nothing. Jeff was always bantering, fancying himself as Bogey, the irresistible outsider whose existential morality meant he could break all the rules. She slammed the box shut. Enough of that. She was learning nothing useful.
The next boxfile had an odd label. ‘Dreams,’ it read. Leo opened it cautiously. It contained sheets of varying sizes, lined and unlined, scraps and post-its - all in Isabel’s writing. Not her best writing either, but a scrawl which edged into indecipherability, as if the notes had been made in great haste. Isabel picked one at random.
I am lying on a deck chair. The sea is beneath me. A dark, turbulent sea. There is no sun. I don’t know why I am naked. I look at my toe. An insect is gnawing at it, a shiny beetle. I can see it clearly. But there is no sensation. I try to move my leg. I can’t. For some reason I don’t care. I laugh.
Leo shivered. She read through a number of dreams with growing absorption, feeling an unknown, unimagined Isabel beginning to displace her friend. She was about to stop and replace the sheets when her own name leapt out at her.
Leo and I have arrived at a site of indescribable calm. She is wearing her sweet-serious smile, the one that casts the world in her own composed glow. The air is perfectly still. We are sitting on the deck of a clapboard house. Around us, there are several more, clustered into the bowl of the valley. It must be dawn because the morning star appears through the dissolving mist on the hills. They are not like hills I have ever seen before. Their curves and ledges have a greeny-charcoal tinge. Birds chirrup with a startling clarity. I know we have landed in a sanctuary. A mysterious tranquility enfolds me.
A man comes slowly, regally, towards us, white-haired. Like a Michelangelo deity, stirring life, he raises his hand in an arc and I rise. I walk towards him. I am tempted to call, ‘Father’, but I don’t want to rupture the peace.
Leo read the dream twice. Tears clutched at her eyes. The hills above Taos floated into her mind. They would not go there. Not now.
Clumsily, she arranged the sheets back into the box. Her eyes fell on the two bills she had placed at the centre of the desk last night. The pile of still unopened post lay beside them. With an effort, she picked up the top letter and forced herself to tear it open. She was breaking one of her cardinal rules. She had never opened anyone else’s letters. Not Jeff’s, not even Becca’s. She had never forgiven her mother’s cavalier invasion of her own post. Now she asked Isabel to forgive her.
Dear Miss Morgan,
Thank you for your enquiry of 12 March.
Our laboratories have a policy of not permitting any of our staff to be shadowed. Neither by anthropologists, nor work experience students, nor, I’m afraid, journalists. The reason is that in the past this has always proved disruptive to ongoing work. Should you wish to arrange an interview with Dr. Grant, this can certainly be done. I warn you, however, that he is a very busy man and would only be able to fit you in after 20th June.
Yours sincerely
M. Higgins
The letterhead read Geogen Ltd, Poole, Dorset. Leo felt a small glo
w of triumph. She had been right about Isabel’s Monsanto diatribe. She was certainly up to something to do with the new agricultural technologies.
She ripped open the next envelope with greater assurance. A letterhead she knew instantly came into view. Another bill from Dr. D. Lukas. She gazed at it, compared it to the last. Still £360 overdue. Isabel’s shrink was pursuing her for payment. What could that mean? With sudden urgency, Leo raced into the guest room and picked up her bag. She extracted her notepad. Nine-forty, the clock said. Not too early.
She picked up the telephone, punched out the number the police had given her and asked to speak to Sergeant Drew.
‘One moment please,’ a twangy voice replied, then came back a few seconds later to report that Sergeant Drew would not be in until this afternoon. ‘Can anyone else help?’
Leo thought quickly. ‘No. no. Could you have her ring me as soon as she gets there. It’s urgent.’ She left her name and number. As she replaced the receiver, she could feel her energy draining away. Before she lost her nerve, she picked up the phone again and dialled Dr. Lukas’s number.
An answering machine responded. The voice was modulated, low. It elicited messages as if they might really be of significance.
Leo banged the receiver into place. Not yet. The queries would carry more weight if they came from the police.
She ripped open the rest of the letters. There was another from a biochemical firm, repeating almost verbatim what the first had said. There were more charity letters, junk mail offering credit cards and loans, another invoice, this time from a clinic in Marylebone. Leo stared at the bill. £120 pounds were due, it stated. Not overdue. Could Isabel, despite her dislike of private medicine, have been driven by some unknown ailment to a hasty consultation with specialists. Could she be lying ill somewhere, too wary of other’s pity to confide? Before she lost her nerve, Leo dialled the clinic number. Posing as Isabel’s assistant, she asked for clarification on the bill. A harassed woman told her it was for a breast scan, that the results had been forwarded to Dr. Holmes. Remembering the name, Leo found the invoice which bore the Harley Street practitioner’s number. This time her query met with a rebuff. The results of Ms Morgan’s scan were confidential. They had been forwarded to her.
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