Page 73

Chapter 73

September 2011

The house is quiet.

Tess wanders around, tidying books, dusting mantelpieces.

‘I’ve forgotten what it’s like to live alone,’ she says to the silent rooms.

The first postcard had arrived from Stan the day after Georgia left, and then on the third day, another was delivered.

His handwriting is precise.

It does not fit with the man who was dancing about in the kitchen while his wife is in a hospice, she thinks.

She has seen postcards arrive regularly ever since she moved to Library Terrace.

It’s impossible not to sneak a peek at the words if she is the first to collect the mail landing on the doormat.

The cards are often plain, with a diagram on one side, a circle, filled in with green dots and squiggles, and fireworks of coloured arrows leading to unfamiliar Latin names in tiny lettering.

Georgia had once found Tess studying the design on one of the cards.

‘He was a roundabout designer, before he retired. You wouldn’t think a roundabout was something that needed to be designed, but he won prizes for his work.

And an international award, I believe.

’ And she had snatched the postcard away and stomped up the hall in a mood.

After that, Tess only looked at the cards when Georgia was out; she never intended to pry, but her curious streak always got the better of her.

And anyway, if he wanted privacy he would send a letter, she reasoned.

There was always news of Hazel, and the cards were signed ‘Love, Stan x’.

This did not sit well with Tess at all.

*

There are no more cards after the third day, but on Monday a familiar grey envelope takes their place and lands on the tiled vestibule floor.

Baxter is asleep upstairs on Tess’s bed; a lost cause.

She can feel her heart racing and she doesn’t look at the address, but takes the letter to the kitchen and sets it on the table, face down, beside her coffee.

Fiona had assured her there would be nothing more to worry about, but now this has arrived.

She retrieves the largest knife from the drawer and sets about slicing the flap open, resting her hand on the envelope to stop it moving away from her.

She pushes the folded paper into her pocket and takes it up the garden to the plum tree, a habit she has adopted from seeing Georgia do it.

‘What has happened now?’ she says, as she unfolds the letter.

Dearest Georgia,

She reads Stan’s handwriting without making the conscious decision to do it.

In contrast to the precision of the postcards, his fountain-penned words sprawl in royal blue ink across the page.

I wanted to write to you and not telephone because what I have to say bears the effort of pen and ink.

My sister is gone now.

She slipped from this life to whatever does or does not come next, last night.

Tess reads on, entirely missing the most important piece of information.

She did not want a funeral of any description, there is really only me here that knew her, it was where we came on holiday every year when we were young.

But this is where she wanted to die, and more importantly it is where she wanted to be scattered, in the sea, where we played in the waves as children, shouting and splashing, and learning to swim with black tyre inner tubes around our waists.

I agreed to her wishes.

There will be a cremation very quickly, on Tuesday.

Tess gasps; this means either tomorrow or next week.

After that she asked that I let her drift away in the waves.

Just me and her in the sea together for one final time.

You were a good friend to her and I know she would want me to let you know.

There is one last thing, and I am writing it here but I do not want to speak of it, unless you are of a similar mind.

I was not free until now, to say these things, and I will not give voice to them with breath unless your answer is positive, so please do not tell me that you would like to discuss it.

This is a yes or no.

Hazel was widowed, as you know, and she was the only family I had left here.

My wife has been gone for nearly twenty years, and our children are spread across the continents.

David is in New Zealand and Hannah and her family are in Uruguay.

I would like to spend my last years with you, Georgia.

But if you are not interested then all you need to do is stay silent.

I will not mention it again.

Hannah has bought me a ticket to Montevideo and I leave in a week’s time.

I can delay the trip, but if your answer is no, simply do not reply, and I will go and spend the winter in the Southern Hemisphere in the sun, with my grandchildren.

I would never want to embarrass you.

I am sorry I could not come to France with you, but I hope it went well and was a comfort.

Yours ever,

Stan

Tess folds the sheet of paper back up.

This is not her letter to read.

And yet.

Something niggles at the edge of her mind.

She unfolds it and reads it a second time.

There it is, staring her in the face.

My sister is gone now

Stan was not Hazel’s husband; he was her brother .

There is no date anywhere on the page.

Cursing herself under her breath, she rushes down the garden, back into the house and puts the letter down on the table.

That’ll teach me not to make assumptions, she thinks.

Not about people, and not about grey envelopes.

She examines the postmark but it’s smudged and unclear and no help at all.

Still furious with herself, she leans across the table to pick up her abandoned coffee.

A vase of garden flowers is beside the mug and, in her haste, she nudges it.

The vase wobbles like a child’s toy, and falls onto its side and, as though in slow motion, it begins to roll across the table.

Tess reaches out to catch it just as it falls off the edge, but she doesn’t have a good enough grip and it slips from her hand, lands, and smashes.

Shards of glass and water and bent flower stems are strewn across the floor.

She had cut a fresh selection of pink cosmos from near the herb circle just an hour ago and filled the vase almost to the top with water.

The same water which is now running across the floor, spreading out into a small lake as she watches.

She shuts the door to the hall to stop Baxter wandering through and hurries to the scullery to get a mop and bucket, and two copies of the Evening News from the fire-lighting pile.

It takes a good fifteen minutes to pick up all the tiny pieces of glass and then to mop up all the water, and another five to rinse the mop thoroughly and make sure the tiny glitters are gone.

She turns her attention back to the table.

The water has coursed across Stan’s letter.

The sheet of paper upon which he had poured out his heart is a puddle of pooling ink, and getting more and more soggy by the minute.

There is no paper kitchen roll in the house because Georgia sees it as a waste of trees, and right at this moment Tess curses her landlady’s eco credentials.

She grabs the only alternative and lays a clean tea towel gently over the paper.

Both ink and water soak into the white linen and Tess can barely bring herself to peel back the fabric, but knows she has to.

Some words remain. The salutation ‘Dearest Georgia’ and the first paragraph have survived but after ‘she did not want a funeral’ only snippets are left.

Tess opens the door again so Baxter can find her and sits down on one of the kitchen chairs, all of a lump.

She counts the problems off on her fingers.

‘Georgia is in France. She does not have her phone. That means she also won’t have email unless she happens to be staying in a hotel with internet access.

She told me she doesn’t want to be disturbed.

She said it was an opportunity to get to know her grandfather, and that not having her phone was a sort of blessing.

’ She runs out of fingers.

‘I can’t even quote from the letter.

’ She looks at the narrow staircase that leads off the kitchen, up to Georgia’s office, and for a moment she finds herself grumping like an obstreperous teenager.

‘It’s not as if it’s any of my business anyway.

’ But she already knows the answer.

For as long as she has lived in the house, there have been postcards.

Every few days, another postcard came through the letterbox; sometimes they had the annotated circles drawn on one side, and other times there were views of the mountains of the north-west of Scotland, somewhere beyond Ullapool.

She had judged him. Judged them.

Tess is furious with herself.

‘I am such an idiot! Georgia even said something about Stan having terrible phone reception when the pipe burst in the kitchen and she needed his advice.’ She sighs.

‘All the clues were right there in front of me and I’ve been so obsessed with my own nonsense I haven’t been paying attention.

’ She sits down at the table and picks up the soggy sheet of paper by one corner.

‘Fat chance of deciphering this now. If Georgia sent postcards as well, there wouldn’t have been enough room to tell him where she was going.

Not in any detail anyway.

’

She takes a deep breath.

This isn’t going to be easy.

Over the last few weeks she has started to use a computer at the library.

It’s not that she can’t do it, she has discovered, she just prefers not to.

In many ways Stan is the person she has become.

Doesn’t like the internet.

Prefers paper and pen.

The difference is that he has probably always been this way and she hasn’t.

Among the three of them, Georgia is the exception: internet banking, emails, messages to the neighbourhood WhatsApp, booking tickets for concerts and ordering books.

In administration terms, her life is organised online.

Tess walks over to the staircase which leads to the office and puts her foot on the first step.

The uncarpeted stairs are steep and narrow, and painted chocolate brown; it looks as though they haven’t had any attention for many, many years.

Her feet clatter on the bare wood.

It would have been impossible, she thinks, for a bone-tired servant to nip up the stairs quietly and grab a few minutes to herself.

There would have been no privacy in her daily life at all.

She gets to the top and turns the brass doorknob.

A long bench, made from what looks like sanded scaffolding planks, runs along one wall below the window.

Beneath it is a pair of utilitarian two-drawer filing cabinets.

The room is above the scullery with its sinks and stone floor and seems to have no heating at all apart from a small electric blow heater.

She tries to imagine what it would have been like to be the maid here.

The cream wallpaper is speckled with brown, and near the ceiling is a paper border that runs all around the room.

Cream and mint and coffee.

‘Very 1930s,’ she says out loud.

At the end of the room is a wall of photographs.

Each one shows a young woman, standing beside Georgia; they have all been taken in the garden with the scullery door as a backdrop.

Judging by the clothes, they span from the 1960s to a few years ago.

These, Tess realises, are her predecessors: Georgia’s lodgers.

She leans closer to look at them.

I wonder where they are now, she thinks, sent off into the world with unexpected funds to make a new start.

She finds Fiona, a nervous-looking girl, squinting into the sunlight of a summer day.

Did they remember Georgia with fondness, she wonders, or was she just a footnote, a passing acquaintance?

The last photo is of a tall girl, looking confident, smiling into the camera.

‘Is this you, Nicola?’ she says.

She drags herself away from the photographs, and turns to look at the workbench, and the Apple computer with its pristine white keyboard and equally white mouse set out neatly, ready to use.

‘A fruitarian to your core, Georgia, of course you are. Granny Smith all the way.’