Page 28 of We Live Here Now

27

Emily

Willow Lane House could easily pass for a quiet spa hotel with its long drive, manicured lawns, and ivy-covered Cotswold stone wall. Whatever else happened in Mrs. Carmichael’s life after Larkin Lodge, she definitely didn’t go broke, because this is not a beleaguered NHS residential home. I rang ahead and explained that I’d bought a house Mrs. Carmichael had lived in and was now exploring the history of the building and would love to meet her as she used to be a friend of my grandmother’s. The receptionist didn’t give me much in terms of response but told me to ask for Mrs. Marshall when I arrived, which I duly do and smile at the young woman at the desk, whose voice tells me she’s the one I spoke to on the phone barely thirty minutes earlier. She doesn’t smile back.

I wait in the reception area, a beautiful open space with bright, light windows, and hear laughter as two nurses walk by wheeling chairs into the garden. No, definitely no poverty here.

“Emily Bennett?”

I turn to see a woman maybe in her fifties in a trim trouser suit, clearly a manager or administrator, coming toward me.

“Mrs. Marshall?”

I lean on my stick, and I see her instant shift to sympathy. I may hate this stick and everything it represents, but it brings out the best in other people.

“Thank you so much for letting me visit. I know it’s probably unusual for someone to want to spend time with a stranger.”

“You’d be surprised.” She smiles and nods at me to follow her. “Since the boom in those Who Do You Think You Are? –style programs, people are finding relatives they’ve never heard of before in homes across the country.” She leans in slightly as she waits for me to catch up. “I expect most of them are hoping for some lost inheritance.”

“Well, I’m certainly not after anything like that.”

“So I gather. You said your mother was a friend of hers?”

“My grandmother actually. They worked in the same theater for a while. And now my husband and I have bought the house Fortuna lived in when she was in Devon.”

“Oh, how wonderful. The circle of life. And yet it happens often, I guess. So many people travel away and then return home, don’t they? Even after all those years in London, Fortuna and her beloved Gerald moved back to the southwest when he was sick.”

“I saw his gravestone in the local church.”

“Cancer, sadly. Left it too late to get checked out. You know how men are. Always stick their head in the sand. Fortuna was brokenhearted, poor thing, when she moved in here.” She slows her pace down to let me hobble alongside her more easily. “Anyway, she doesn’t get any visitors these days apart from staff. We try to keep her in good spirits, but she’s very elderly and starting to have some muddled moments and gets anxiety attacks very easily. So don’t expect too much. And probably twenty or thirty minutes will be enough. She gets tired quickly.”

We come to a stop outside a room, and Mrs. Marshall pushes the door open and sweeps in, introducing me loudly to the neatly dressed elderly woman seated in an armchair by a set of patio doors.