The Woman at Number 24 Read online

  ‘Darling!’ Leo was out of breath. ‘We haven’t got long, my sweet. Helena’s gone for a massage.’ He passed her, rushing to the bedroom. ‘You know what I’m here for!’

  Sarah handed him a paint roller. After Leo’s no-show at Claridge’s, Sarah had refused to meet outside number twenty-four. It felt risky and wrong, in a way that it couldn’t possibly do inside Flat A. Inside their flat. She felt it embrace them, breathe easier, as the old status quo was restored. For an hour at a time.

  It had taken a while to convince Leo that Sarah only wanted him there to paint and grout and varnish.

  ‘You’re not bloody serious?’ Leo had been shocked the first time he climbed the stairs after their tryst in the Old Church. ‘Darling, Helena won’t be back for hours. We can swing from the sodding chandeliers if we feel like it!’

  Sarah had reminded him that she didn’t have any chandeliers. ‘If you really want to help, stay. But if you’re here for a quick leg-over, off you trot.’ She’d been trembling, and hoped Leo couldn’t see. ‘I want you to stay, Leo. But for the right reasons.’

  He’d stayed.

  ‘I do loathe white walls,’ he complained, as he moved the stepladder, dust sheets coiled around his feet like loyal dogs. ‘No personality.’

  ‘It’s not supposed to have personality. It has to appeal to as many buyers as possible.’ Sarah imagined these prospective buyers as an invading horde, with daggers between their teeth. ‘Shut up and paint, Leo.’

  He chuckled.

  If my life was a play, thought Sarah, it’d be a farce.

  Worse, if it was a film, it’d be a Carry On. Leo scampered up to Flat A whenever Helena turned her back; the rendezvous were secret again, even though they were chaste. Whiter than white. As white as the walls.

  On his best behaviour, Leo did exactly as Sarah asked. He painted, he scraped, he varnished. Touch was confined to a hug on leaving; if that embrace lasted a fraction too long Sarah pulled away.

  The wanting him hadn’t diminished, but it was on her terms. A little distance from Leo had given her perspective. She hadn’t noticed his selfishness when they were married; now it was undeniable. If I let him turn me into a bit of slap and tickle on the side, he’ll never leave Helena.

  It was obvious that Helena had played a clever game; Sarah took tips from the master. Or should that be mistress? Physical intimacy was ruled out, but emotional intimacy was a different matter.

  ‘Your hair’s getting very long.’ Sarah eyed Leo as they stood side by side, claiming the wall, stroke by stroke. ‘Are you going for the Greek god look?’

  ‘Mock all you like.’ Leo lifted his chin, his face imperious. ‘I’m making the most of it before the bald patch takes over.’

  ‘You don’t have a – oh.’ Sarah saw the coin-sized pink shape as Leo ducked to show it off. ‘It’s tiny,’ she said encouragingly. This banal sign of ageing sent a chill through Sarah. There were many landmarks in Leo’s future that she might not be privy to. They used to joke about her pushing him around the supermarket in a wheelchair; it was crazy to regret she’d never get to wipe his wrinkled bum, but Sarah managed it. ‘Your dad’s still got a wonderful head of hair at eighty.’

  ‘My mother, though,’ sighed Leo, ‘was as bald as a coot.’

  Sarah giggled and shoved him.

  It was hard to imagine her successor being playful. Helena possibly emerged from the womb in high heels. In the old days, the Harrisons had satirised their neighbour for her haughtiness and her salon hair. Leo dubbed her decorating style ‘Empress Josephine meets Miss Piggy’, and they’d both smirked when Helena explained that the apartment was a showcase for her interiors brand.

  ‘Do you remember how we used to hang over the bannisters watching Helena’s guests arrive?’ Sarah put a hand to the small of her back; she’d woken up with a gnawing tummy ache and it was getting worse. ‘You’d nudge me when you spotted a celeb.’

  ‘We almost got caught a couple of times,’ said Leo.

  ‘Speaking of celebs . . .’ Sarah had seen a well-known actress going into Flat B the evening before. ‘What’s she like? They say she’s a—’

  ‘Sarah, darling.’ Leo held up one hand, like a magistrate. ‘She’s a mate. It wouldn’t be fair to gossip about her.’

  Leo was too chivalrous to dish the dirt on a soap actress, yet he’d jumped into Helena’s bed (canopied, of course) without a thought for his wife on the floor above. ‘Remember when . . .’ Sarah paused; so many of her sentences began that way with Leo. As if all they had left was the past. ‘Remember when you saw Hugh Jackman in Tesco?’ It might be timely to remind Leo of his old star-struck self. ‘You were hysterical. I thought you’d been mugged.’ She landed the killer blow. ‘And it wasn’t even him.’

  ‘He really looked like Hugh Jackman.’ Leo flexed his fingers and put down his brush, strolling over to the window. Leo was a stroller; nothing made him change speed; he would stroll out of a burning building.

  Following him, Sarah persisted. ‘He had a squint, Leo.’

  ‘Funnily enough, Helena’s remodelling Hugh Jackman’s London place. We’re having dinner with him next week.’

  ‘Let me know if the food’s from Tesco.’

  Leo giggled, one of his burbling grunts that shook his shoulders. ‘What is it, darling?’ he asked as Sarah grimaced, bending forward slightly.

  ‘Ouch.’ Sarah held her tummy. ‘I feel a bit . . .’ She grasped backwards for a chair and sat on it heavily. Her head swimming, she felt bile rise in her throat.

  ‘Women’s problems?’ Leo sketched quotation marks in the air. ‘You girls and your mysterious insides.’

  ‘Don’t.’ Sarah grimaced as a pain shot through the centre of her.

  ‘Only joking.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’ Perspective had also shortened Sarah’s patience with Leo’s sexism. ‘Our mysterious insides, as you call them, keep the human race going.’

  ‘Yes, they do.’ Leo was sorry. Comically so.

  Sarah, the pain passing, had to laugh, and he laughed with her, until they were laughing just because they were laughing, the original joke forgotten. He was still her lighthouse, the beacon that meant home. Sarah still steered her little boat towards him.

  ‘Admit it,’ said Sarah, standing back to survey the finished job. ‘The white looks good.’

  ‘Never.’ Leo wiped his hands on a rag, shaking his head.

  He loved shadows and antiquity; Sarah loved him for being different to her. It would be so easy to sidle up to him, nudge her way into his arms.

  The loud knock on the door startled her out of her what-if’s. ‘Una,’ they said together. The little girl now laboriously climbed up her three flights to collect Sarah for their sessions; a small act of independence.

  Sarah opened the door, surprised to see Una sitting on a huge, squashy wing chair.

  ‘Bloody hell, that’s very pink,’ said Leo.

  Upholstered in fuchsia velvet, trimmed with turquoise braid, fluorescent yellow buttons punched into its back, the chair was bright on the dim landing. Una bounced, giving it a clear six-year-old seal of approval.

  ‘Where’s it from?’ Leo circled it.

  ‘It’s the one I bought on eBay. Tom must have reupholstered it.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Leo’s mouth turned down. ‘Not my cup of tea.’

  Sarah allowed Una to lead her downstairs, shedding Leo outside his flat. On the bottom level, Una tapped at Mavis’s door, and the old lady emerged as quickly as if her wide-fit sandals were oiled. Una had overcome her dislike; Mavis was a new favourite, and was always invited out to the garden during Una’s therapy sessions. Mavis was aware of the immense honour conveyed on her.

  This trust had been won, partly by bribery – Una’s fondness for Nobbly Bobbly lollies was an easily exploited Achilles’ heel – and partly because Mavis was patient and calm and desperately keen to be friends. Mavis, with her candyfloss hair and laddered tights, would never rival her sister for elegance, but Sarah
wished Zelda was there to see how hard Mavis was working to overhaul her life. Perversely, Sarah felt as if she knew Zelda from what Mavis didn’t say. The dead are present so long as anybody who loved them is still alive; just like Sarah’s father would always be her companion, so Zelda was still a force in Mavis’s second stab at living.

  ‘Silly mare!’ shrieked Peck as the trio invaded the lawn, the sun on their faces like a blessing.

  Una dragged Sarah towards Tom: her hero, her champion, saviour of one-eyed hoglets. He stood up, eyes alight, arms open.

  Tom had accepted he was part of Una’s therapy. In a taut discussion, Sarah had explained how, for good or ill, they’d become a model of coupledom for Una. ‘We can’t disintegrate like her parents.’

  ‘No problem.’ Tom had been breezy, as if the showdown in Covent Garden had never happened.

  In the present, in the sunny garden, Tom said, ‘Today’s the day, Una.’

  The thriving hedgehog had outgrown his cardboard box. Robust, handsome – probably, it was hard to tell – Mikey’s spines had darkened, leaving them white at the tip. He was groomed to perfection; his weekly bath was a spectacle, as he lay on his back revolving slowly in the suds, his face distracted and dreamy. (Or so Sarah chose to think; Mikey had just the one expression for all occasions.)

  Tom had hammered and sawed and created a deluxe hedgehog new-build. Sarah had watched, unable to ask questions, as he built what amounted to a squat wooden crate. Mikey was ready to re-enter the garden, but there would be no roughing it. His new home boasted a sloping roof and a gangplank and wall-to-wall moss carpeting.

  Slow on the uptake, and contrary to boot, Mikey turned his back when Tom set him down in front of the wooden house, ambling off in the wrong direction. With some encouragement and a stern look from Una, he finally tottered up the drawbridge.

  ‘It’s built on legs to keep him safe.’ Tom pointed out the design features to Una and Mavis. Sarah, his demeanour suggested, just happened to be there and could listen if she wanted to. ‘It’s dry, cool, and he’ll sleep there during the day. Do you like it?’

  He’d forgotten the cardinal rule. Una ignored the question, but her pink excited face gave Tom his answer.

  ‘It’s a masterpiece.’ Mavis ran her hands over the sanded roof. ‘Quite, quite perfect. Does this mean the rota is no more?’

  ‘Yes,’ laughed Tom. He bent down to Una. ‘Let’s leave him to settle in.’ The maturing Mikey didn’t appreciate being handled as much as he had in his youth. They set off on a tour of the garden, another part of the ritual Una insisted on. For somebody who never spoke, she was a stern taskmistress.

  ‘Tom . . .’ The name was cumbersome on Sarah’s lips. ‘Thank you.’ She was awkward. He was awkward. She rushed on. ‘For the chair.’ She hadn’t wanted it, she’d never sit in it, but she couldn’t ignore it.

  ‘No worries.’ Tom waved her thanks away, as if a gift that had taken many hours to create was nothing at all.

  The sunflowers swayed, magnificent. Tom and Una weeded them together, Sarah taking a seat beside Mavis on the deckchairs. Mavis closed her eyes, tilting her face to the sun.

  What a shame, thought Sarah, that the garden wasn’t like this when Smith was ill.

  Sarah and Smith had been confined to quarters last summer, as the astrocytoma stole Smith’s brain, cell by precious cell.

  As it grew, so had the fund to send Smith to Dr Vera’s clinic. Pound by pound, fitfully, the total increased. There would be weeks of inactivity and then some generous soul would send a three-figure sum. Finally, after months of banking, creating receipts, filling in paperwork, and adjudicating a meatball-eating competition, the target had been reached.

  It was an anticlimax. No hurrahs, no ticker-tape parade, just the jagged realisation that it was crunch time. Dr Sebastian Vera’s radical treatment might cure Smith, or merely prolong her life for a few extra listless months. It might make no difference whatsoever.

  Sarah and Smith had stared at the total on the screen. They’d hugged, Smith’s shoulder blades sticking out like knives. By then things were different between them.

  Sarah had pretended to herself that she and Smith had been tight until Smith left for Chile.

  A deadline helps to concentrate the mind. With only five weeks left in her sanctuary, Sarah confronted the truth, and the truth was this: by the time Smith drove away from number twenty-four, the friendship was stretched to translucency. Sarah had dismissed it as the inevitable narrowing of focus as Smith prepared for the intensive treatment; Smith joked that when Death stares you in the face it’s only polite to stare back.

  A gnarly suspicion had lurked for some time. Perhaps, on some level, Smith resented my fundraising efforts, the way I threw myself into it. If that were true, then Smith’s behaviour on the last day made sense.

  Four days after a strange, subdued Christmas – the two of them pulling a cracker in front of an Only Fools and Horses repeat – the air was cold, brittle.

  Suitcases around her feet, the cab tooting its horn at the gate, Smith had said, tearfully, as if the words were ripped from her, ‘You’re my guardian angel, Sarah.’

  ‘Save it for the departure gate.’ Sarah had tugged on her jacket, double-checking that the passport and boarding card and pesos were all safely stowed in the plastic wallet she’d bought. She had bored Smith with the instructions to hand the bank transfer for the scarily large amount to Dr Vera as soon as she arrived. The fact that the clinic didn’t accept payment until they’d assessed each patient had helped calm Sarah’s fears about the possibility that this famous doctor – the man Smith pinned all her hopes on – was a sham.

  ‘I don’t want you to come to the airport.’ Smith held Sarah’s eyes. ‘I feel . . . suffocated.’ Her eyes were huge and hunted in her wasted face. ‘Nobody can walk this last mile with me, Sarah. Do you understand?’

  Sarah nodded. She did understand, on one level. On another, she felt shut out by the person whose illness had put such a strain on her marriage that it had snapped. Suddenly superfluous after months of a double act, Sarah kissed her friend and held her tight, her tears blotting the lapels of Smith’s charity-shop coat. ‘Don’t forget to come home,’ she managed.

  ‘I’ll email the minute I get there and I’ll blog on the site.’ Smith pursed her lips then blurted, ‘Sarah, my landlord’s selling the flat. I’m not coming back to number twenty-four.’

  That sounded like a dare to the universe. ‘Shush!’ Sarah had laid a finger against Smith’s lips, tinted scarlet as ever. ‘You are coming back. You can stay at mine for as long as you like. Just get well, yeah? For me.’

  One last snap in the back of the cab, and Sarah had gone back indoors. From the top window, Smith looked breakable, too small to be out on her own. Sarah dashed down the steps, reaching the kerb just as the cabbie indicated to pull out.

  ‘Here!’ She’d thrust an envelope through the open window. ‘Take this. It’ll help. Bring it home to me,’ she said, with meaning.

  The cab pulled away, Smith obscured by the sharp December sunlight glinting off the cab windows.

  Smith knew how much the letter meant. It was all Sarah had left of her father. His words were a powerful talisman that would protect Smith; the responsibility of returning the letter to Sarah would drag her through her treatment and bring her home again.

  Sarah had shivered as she went back inside. She felt two losses now: her friend and her father’s letter. Both had sustained her. Both told her she was good enough at a time when she didn’t feel that way.

  There’d been a text from the departure gate, then a photo of an inedible in-flight meal, followed by a blurred video of the panelled reception area of Dr Vera’s clinic.

  The void left by Smith’s departure allowed the soundtrack from Leo and Helena’s flat to seep in; Sarah refreshed smithlifeline.co.uk constantly over the next couple of days. Not your average holiday snaps, there were no sunsets, but there was a close-up of a cannula in a bone-white hand. ‘H
ere goes nothing!’ was Smith’s caption. Image followed image: the sterile cafeteria was followed by Smith lying back on starchy white sheets. She’d looked brave, even cheerful, but Sarah saw fear in her gaunt face.

  Or did I project that onto her? Sarah second-guessed herself, revising history, realising how much of it she’d bent to suit herself.

  There’d been a close-up of spare ribs above Smith’s jaunty ‘Guys, Chilean hospital food is NOTHING like NHS din-dins!!!!’ Sarah had known that Smith would only manage half the hefty portion, but she hadn’t known it was the last snap Smith would ever send.

  New Year’s Eve was an endurance test. The flat was quiet as fireworks boomed and house parties staggered into the small hours. When Sarah logged on the next day, hungry for news to start the new year, she read Dr Vera’s stark one-liner.

  ‘With regret, I must tell you that my patient Karen Smith passed away peacefully last night.’

  Smith’s death daubed a blood-red full stop to nine months of blogging and research and worry. It had no effect on the loving.

  The funeral, announced on Smith’s Facebook page, would be in her home town, up in the Midlands, ‘family only’. Smith had often told Sarah, ‘You’re my family now!’ but blood turned out to be thicker than water after all.

  Sometimes when Sarah was assailed by memory, she fretted that the journey to Santiago had been too much for Smith. Should I have discouraged her?

  Maybe Leo and her mother had been right. ‘It’s always about you, really,’ her mother used to sigh. ‘You’re as selfish as your father.’

  In quick succession, Sarah had lost Leo, Smith, and her dad’s letter.

  But one of them had come back. Smith had kept the letter safe. She’d – unusually for Smith – thought ahead. Her family had respected her wishes in the end, and sent it to Sarah.

  The return of the letter was a small event, but the smallest gestures can have huge repercussions. Sarah had pined for it, even though she knew it by heart. Her father’s expressive handwriting, the impatient jagged edge where he’d torn the page from a diary, the folds, the ink blots, made it a charm stronger than any rabbit’s foot. It was suffused with love. It breathed. It whispered.