The Woman at Number 24 Read online

  Sarah had no legacy from her dad. Her mother had excised him like a gangrenous limb, refusing to look through his possessions after his death. Father and daughter had been forcibly estranged; Sarah’s mother was a gatekeeper who used access to their child as a weapon.

  The letter was the only heirloom, written days before he died – his last act of love. Smith knew that. The friendship had been strong, beneath the tension.

  It was the last good deed Smith did for Sarah, but it wasn’t the only one. The other residents had seen only the nonconformist side of Smith, but Sarah had been warmed by her generosity. There were times when Smith didn’t want to play the fool, but she switched on that side of her to lift Sarah out of a dark mood brought on by a setback with a child, or, increasingly towards the end, problems with Leo. Sarah had brought balance and structure to Smith’s life, but it was only after Smith died that Sarah realised how much plain old good times Smith had brought to Sarah’s.

  Sarah closed her eyes, mimicking Mavis, but she wasn’t sun-worshipping. She was remembering her friend, and wondering when she’d stop missing her so keenly. There was no schedule to bereavement; everybody follows their own grey star. It was what . . . coming up to seven months since Smith died. It felt like yesterday; it felt like a hundred years.

  Two small cool hands were laid on Sarah’s cheeks. She opened her eyes and looked into Una’s grave eyes. The child was comforting her; Sarah took the hands and held them. ‘I think somebody would like to look through my handbag.’

  Una never tired of sifting through the lipsticks and pens and stray Polo mints, examining each of them like a scholar.

  Above her head, Sarah talked in a low, smooth, monotonous voice. ‘Secrets,’ she said, as if wondering aloud. ‘We all have secrets, Una. Sometimes we don’t mention things because we know we’ll get told off.’

  ‘They’re bad for the health,’ said Mavis, her eyes still closed.

  ‘Especially if other people ask us to keep their secrets for them.’

  Una’s hand paused for a millisecond over Sarah’s purse. Sarah had hit a nerve; this was the slow nature of her medicine. Una kept Graham’s secret for him, at the expense of her own peace of mind.

  Una carefully set down all Sarah’s cards on the grass. Her debit card. Her credit card. A loyalty card for a bookshop. A gift card that harboured twenty pounds to spend in a shop Sarah never visited. She sorted them sedately, following some mystical order, before putting them back in their slots. They meant nothing to Una beyond their colour; money and debt and the struggle to survive that consumed Lisa was meaningless to her.

  Sarah envied her innocence. The drop in pay from St Chad’s had bitten. She said casually, ‘If one of my friends – you, for example, Una – shared a secret with me, maybe I could say “hang on, this isn’t your secret at all” and throw it over my shoulder. It would have no power over my friend at all. She’d be set free.’

  A shadow fell over Sarah and Una.

  ‘Sounds simple,’ said Tom.

  ‘It is.’ Sarah ignored him until he walked away. A surge of discomfort flowered in her belly, and she put a hand to it, happy that Una didn’t notice. She frowned and did some arithmetic, the ancient sort that women do each month.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Notting Hill, W11

  This calendar is FREE to valued customers!

  Tuesday 26th July, 2016

  TO LISTEN WELL IS ESSENTIAL TO ALL CONVERSATION

  In a fug of cigarette smoke and Radio 1, the decorators had painted the downstairs hall a curd yellow, which helped to lift the Ghost Train vibe a little. Until, that is, Mavis opened her door and Sarah entered sunless Flat E to Peck’s discouraging welcome.

  ‘Ugly!’ declared the bird, his barrel chest puffed out. ‘Ugly old cow!’

  ‘Nice to see you at lunchtime, for a change,’ said Mavis.

  As a receptionist, Sarah had one afternoon off a month. She’d felt guilty clocking off while St Chad’s was still buzzing. Keeley had passed her with a nodded ‘goodbye’, holding a small boy by the hand. The child looked ready to cry and Keeley looked overworked; now that she kept the diary Sarah knew that Keeley had no space for another client.

  Sarah’s feet had slowed. She’d stood for a moment, feeling the pull exerted on her by the boy’s face. By his need. She’d walked on; the children were the priority, and she couldn’t offer him what he needed. There was still a pane of cold glass between her and the children who came to St Chad’s.

  Lunch was a roast chicken salad, as delicious and light as Sarah had come to expect. Mavis’s personal rehabilitation inched forward, but there was no change in her surroundings. In a pinafore dress with its hem coming down, she was a chameleon perfectly in tune with her habitat; only Mavis’s mind shone in this vault.

  The light that came from Mavis only seemed to shine on Sarah; the rest of the house – apart from wise little Una – still thought of her as a vicious crone. Sarah felt chosen, which was nice; she also felt frustrated, which was not at all nice. She was a missionary, desperate to spread the word: Praise the Lord! Mavis has a heart!

  ‘Will Leo be lending a hand today?’ asked Mavis. When Sarah didn’t answer, she went on, ‘When there’s already so much unavoidable pain in life, why are you sleepwalking into a firing range, dear?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’ Sarah felt her tongue fork. There was a part of her that hoped it was exactly ‘like that’; she was waiting for Leo to lift his head and realise his terrible mistake. ‘I’ve made it clear there’ll be no monkey business.’

  ‘You can say “sex” in front of me.’ Mavis lifted one unruly eyebrow. ‘I may be ancient but I remember how it feels to want a man.’

  Sarah enjoyed hearing that red blood beat in those varicose veins. Perhaps Mavis carried around a broken heart under her terrible clothes.

  ‘Just because your liaisons aren’t physical,’ said Mavis, ‘doesn’t mean they’re innocent. This is a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they’re true: if you play with fire, you get burned.’

  ‘What if,’ said Sarah hesitantly, ‘I don’t mind getting burned? If the pain proves I’m alive?’

  Mavis gazed at Sarah’s face, her eyes searchlights seeking out all Sarah’s raw truths. ‘Oh my dear,’ she said, and it was enough.

  Sarah felt comforted. So comforted she wanted to cry, so instead, in true Sarah fashion, she changed the subject and ploughed on. ‘I’m getting somewhere with Una. I can sense it.’

  ‘Your job is as much about the heart as the head,’ suggested Mavis, as Peck executed a perfect fart noise which they ignored.

  ‘I certainly know the drill for dealing with elective mutism,’ said Sarah darkly.

  ‘The mute child you described to Una was you, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ The focus was sharply back on Sarah. She wanted to resist, to say Let’s talk about you, but she found herself describing the events of almost thirty summers ago, when her parents had sprung apart like an overwound elastic band.

  ‘Your mother,’ said Mavis, after listening for a while, ‘sounds like a difficult woman.’

  ‘One way of putting it.’ Sarah went further; Mavis deserved more than her stock supply of wry one-liners. ‘My mother finds it hard to love.’

  ‘That’s more common than people think.’

  Are we talking about you, now? Sarah remembered the Sunday Times article, and Zelda’s take on this woman.

  ‘Mum did, does, love me. I hope.’ Sarah couldn’t be certain; she’d set sail into adult life without this vital component in place.

  ‘What about your father?’ asked Mavis in a canny way, as if expecting the change that came over Sarah. The softening. The relief.

  ‘Daddy adored me.’ Sarah made a small ‘O’ with her mouth. ‘I haven’t called him that in years. Since he died. You’d have liked him.’

  Mavis smiled at the compliment. ‘What sort of man was he?’

  ‘He was my saviour.’ Sarah’s vocabulary was rusty from under
use; she rarely discussed her summer of silence, when she’d had a ringside seat at her parents’ brawls. She’d seen their separation coming and tried to fend it off by being extra good and avoiding the cracks in the pavement.

  Somehow this powerful voodoo failed.

  Peeking through the bannisters, she watched her father stand at the front door and blow her a kiss. He was crying. Dad never cried; Sarah felt the open-tread stairs shift beneath her bare feet.

  After that, Sarah’s mother had only one volume: too loud. She threw her grievances around like Zeus flinging thunderbolts. They ricocheted off the walls around her small daughter, who was head down, playing with her dolls.

  Crash! ‘That bastard!’ Zap! ‘He doesn’t care about us!’ Bang! ‘It was all fine until YOU!’

  ‘According to Mum,’ said Sarah, ‘I didn’t only spoil her figure when I was born. I ruined Mum and Dad’s marriage. She’d grab me and say, “I know he loves you more than he loves me!” Sarah could feel her mother’s breath hot on her face. ‘Then she’d ask me . . .’ Sarah shivered at the memory, wrapping her arms around her torso to reassure herself she was no longer nine and at her mother’s mercy. ‘She’d ask, “But you love me best, don’t you?” When I stammered out yes, she’d call me a liar and send me to bed.’

  ‘Did you love your father more?’ asked Mavis.

  ‘I didn’t love either of them more. They just “were”, like the weather. I preferred being with Dad, because he was kind and he gave me room to breathe, but I do love my mum.’ Sarah stopped dead, looking at Mavis in amazement. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever said that before. Loving her has never been enough – to prove it, I wasn’t allowed to love Dad. All the love in our house had to go in my mother’s direction.’

  ‘To blame you for alienating her husband is cruel.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Like a jolt of adrenaline, the common sense was exhilarating. Perhaps her mother was wrong about the selfishness that Sarah had apparently inherited from her father; she still fretted about her real self bursting out, like an evil alter ego. ‘Obviously having a baby changed things for Mum, but surely that’s why people have them.’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you, dear.’ Mavis shifted on her chair. ‘It never happened for me.’

  Sarah felt her stomach. It was tender and heavy, as if she’d eaten a bowling ball for dessert. ‘I know Dad had affairs. So, Mavis, I do listen when you warn me of consequences.’

  ‘Why did you stop talking?’

  ‘The one bright spot was my weekly night at Dad’s new place. I thought it was so modern and swish, but really he was living in a whitewashed box because he couldn’t afford anything more. He let me stay up way past eight o’clock and we had McDonald’s for dinner. Dad was making up for what happened the rest of the week. He saw.’

  ‘What did he see?’ Mavis’s voice was low, like a hypnotist’s.

  ‘Mum was never what you’d call stable. She saw conspiracies everywhere, forever falling out with friends who let her down, according to her.’ Sarah hesitated; self-pity wasn’t a good colour on her. ‘He saw what Mum did. That she took it out on me.’

  When her father found a new partner – younger of course; her dad was a man, after all – Sarah liked her. ‘She gave us space when I visited. She plaited my hair.’ Sarah smiled at how easily children are pleased. ‘When I got home, Mum would bombard me with questions. “Is she prettier than me, your father’s whore? Can the slut cook?” I’d tell her no, she wasn’t half as pretty. One time I slipped up and told Mum about the lovely shepherd’s pie I’d eaten.’ Sarah remembered the killer question, the stiletto knife that slid in so easily Sarah hadn’t felt a thing. ‘Mum asked me if I liked this new girlfriend and I said, chattily, “Yeah, she’s great. We’re friends.”’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mavis.

  ‘She broke every plate in the house. She packed a case for me. “Go and live with her if you love her so much!” The adult me can see that Mum was afraid, that she felt as if everything was being wrenched away from her . . .’

  ‘Your answers to her questions caused trouble so you stopped speaking.’ Mavis sat back and contemplated that for a moment. ‘Makes perfect sense. You needed some control, dear.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Sarah had luxuriated in the quiet while her mother thrashed about on the other side of it. ‘I was dragged off to doctors, who prescribed vegetables and fresh air. Mum shouted, cajoled, cried.’ For the first time it occurred to Sarah to feel sorry for her mother; everything Lisa’s going through, Mum went through too.

  That was sobering: in Sarah’s memories her mother rarely emerged as a person. A force of nature, yes, or a freakish storm system. But not a woman, like any other.

  Like me. In Lynch family mythology, Sarah wasn’t allowed to resemble her mother; she was her egotistical father all over again. Proving that she wasn’t narcissistic, that she was a builder not a destroyer, was one of the reasons she’d gone into a healing profession.

  ‘What was the breakthrough?’ prompted Mavis.

  ‘A holiday.’ Sarah slowed. ‘Dad took me away, just me and him, to Spain. I still don’t know how he got Mum to agree to it. Have you ever . . .’ Sarah remembered just in time Mavis’s allergy to questions. ‘Empty beaches. Campfires. Weird food. Dad laughing at my face when I tried calamari for the first time.’ The fortnight was washed pink by sunsets and scented with coffee. Her father was relaxed in the snapshots her brain had stored. Looking ten years younger, his shirt unbuttoned, eyes dark in his tanned face. ‘Dad didn’t ask one single question. Not even what I wanted for breakfast. He kept up a commentary the whole time. Like background music. Silly thoughts, daft jokes.’ She remembered drifting, eyes shut, on a lilo in the pool, bobbing, secure. ‘Then, in a dusty backstreet, we were walking, he had my hand, and a tiny creature darted across our path. I said . . .’ She swallowed. ‘Look, Daddy, a lizard.’

  ‘Look, Daddy, a lizard,’ repeated Mavis approvingly.

  ‘He didn’t miss a beat. Didn’t mention it. He acted like it was totally normal when I chattered for the rest of the trip. We got home and Mum was amazed.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Not just amazed, she was annoyed.’ Sarah shook her head, still confounded decades later. ‘As if she was angry because I’d recovered with him and not her. So she stopped me seeing him. There was a different excuse every time. She wouldn’t pass the phone to me when he called, said I was “tired”. So he wrote to me and luckily I got to the post before Mum that morning.’ Sarah leaned sideways in her chair, reaching for her bag. ‘This letter.’ She handed it over, and Mavis read it aloud.

  ‘If I can’t see you then I have to write to you! I have no news, no nothing except some advice which you must take to heart. Promise? Be yourself, because, my sweet Sarah, you are more than good enough. And always find the beauty in everybody, because that’s the magic formula to make everything A-OK.’

  Folding the letter back into its original creases, Mavis said, ‘He was contradicting your mother’s cynical take on life. On you.’

  ‘He absolved me. Said none of it was my fault. He saved me.’

  Seeming to understand that Sarah needed to pause, Mavis rose and left her at the table as she cleared the tea things. Sarah’s fingers moved over her father’s words as if they were braille.

  ‘Thank you,’ called Sarah into the kitchenette. She rarely spoke about her maligned father, the roué who’d abandoned her and her mother, and she never got to paint him as a white knight. ‘For listening and for being, well, kind.’ Such an underrated commodity, one that Sarah valued highly. There was no reply. Sarah stole over to see Mavis standing at the worktop, her hands still tightly gripped around the tray, her eyes staring into the middle distance. ‘Mavis?’ she said softly.

  Mavis continued to gaze at nothing, certainly not the wall outside the window.

  ‘Mavis,’ said Sarah, a little louder.

  Mavis shrank, startled to find Sarah so close. ‘I drifted away for a moment.’ Mav
is put the plates in the sink. ‘I can feel you gawping at me, Sarah.’

  They’d hit one of those hairpin corners again. Mavis was rigid, robotic.

  Either courageous or foolhardy, or both, Sarah said, ‘Mavis, if anything was wrong, if you were . . . unwell, you could tell me.’

  The memory lapses – asking if Sarah had a partner, forgetting that Smith was a woman, not recognising Lisa in the corner shop – meant little on their own, but together they made a pattern. Dementia had many guises and titles: frontotemporal dementia had blighted Mavis’s grandmother. ‘You can tell me anything. We’re friends.’

  ‘Friendship has its limits,’ said Mavis. ‘Let’s not test ours.’

  ‘Test me, go on,’ laughed Sarah, careful not to push too hard in case she summoned up the old, evil Mavis. ‘You once said there was something I didn’t know about you, but we glossed over it.’ This was marshy ground: when Mavis had hinted that Sarah would walk away if she knew all about her, it had ushered in a cold war. ‘It sounded important.’

  ‘Oh that.’ Mavis batted the air with one hand. ‘I have a peculiar sense of humour.’

  ‘Mavis, it’s a sin to lie.’ Sarah thought she’d said it tongue-in-cheek but Mavis’s reaction told her different.

  Wrinkled cheeks flushed, Mavis said, ‘I’m familiar with every one of my sins, thank you.’

  ‘I know your bad bits, Mavis, and I still like you.’ Sarah smiled. ‘So there.’

  ‘You’re wrong. You don’t know my worst bits.’ Mavis refused to be light-hearted.

  Trespassing on a roped-off area, Sarah said, ‘Perhaps you buried them with Zelda. No, hear me out,’ she begged, as Mavis pushed past her, back into the sitting room. ‘Death tosses the ones left behind in the air, and we land with a bump somewhere new. It can make us bitter. It can make us fearful.’ Sarah recognised herself in that description. ‘Or it can bring out our inner sweetness. That’s what happened with you. All is forgiven, Mavis.’