I could tell it was late as soon as I opened my eyes. There was mid-morning sunshine streaming in through the window, and Florence was in the doorway, only her skirt and ankles visible under that big pile of laundry I’d left yesterday.
‘Ten o’clock, Miss E.,’ she said. Then, kindly, ‘Thought you should sleep through.’
I sat up guiltily. ‘How’s Mother today?’ I asked.
‘Got a visitor.’
By the time I’d dressed and run a comb through my hair and got to Mother’s room, Aunt Mildred was getting wheezily to her feet, ready to go.
She eyed me with disfavour. ‘Up late, I see,’ was all she said. Mother, sitting up against her pillows, sighed.
‘Let me see you out, Aunt Mildred,’ I said hastily, eager to make amends. I leaned over and kissed Mother’s cheek, miserably aware of her faint movement away from me.
Aunt Mildred sailed down the corridor in her summer grey, ominous as a battleship. I hastened after her, bobbing in her wake. We were at the door, and I was fussing around finding the parasol she said she’d come in with but which neither of us could see, before she cleared her throat and said, ‘I’m assuming you do know that your mother has been feeling unwell?’
I straightened up and stepped out of the closet, full of sudden dread. ‘Yes,’ I said, and I could hear my voice sounded thin.
She shook her head. ‘Well, I think she would have appreciated just a little concern and care,’ she said grimly.
‘But …’ I stammered with a last flicker of self-defence, ‘I have …’
My proof: hadn’t she and Mother been sitting together in the healing rose fragrance that my white flowers, so lustrously fresh and perfect, were sending out into the room?
‘She’s hardly seen you, she says.’
I hung my head. The rest of what she said washed over me: the ‘children can be so unthinking’s, and the ‘of course their own lives seem so much more interesting’s.
‘It doesn’t do a girl’s reputation any good, you know,’ Aunt Mildred added, more severely still, and the force of whatever else she and Mother had also been discussing made it sound as though every word she said were capitalized, ‘What You’ve Been Doing.’
Whatever That Is, I told myself with inner defiance, though ‘going out till all hours drinking cocktails’, ‘keeping company with disreputable young men’ and ‘letting communists disturb the neighbourhood’ possibly had something to do with it.
‘My parasol is there,’ she added in a different voice.
Wordlessly, I passed it out.
She gave me a challenging stare. ‘I don’t need to say any more, do I?’ she finished.
I shook my head.
‘I can only say it’s a good thing you’re all coming to the island from tomorrow,’ she added, opening the door herself. ‘We’ll have some good behaviour there, at least.’
The door clicked shut.
In my room, where the bright sunshine through the windows now seemed to be mocking me, I looked at the books still in the bottom of my trunk. They didn’t seem to be in quite the same places I remembered. I couldn’t see the French poetry book with the bundle of extra bits of paper, including the torn-out ad for Plevitskaya, the so-called Nightingale, whom I’d met last night, and the photo of Grandmother, folded inside the cover. I turned the whole box out. It wasn’t anywhere.
I went to the kitchen. There were noises from the washroom behind.
‘Are we really going to the island tomorrow?’ I asked Florence.
Florence, half-submerged in a sudsy tub, looked up at me sympathetically.
‘That’s why I’m washing everything today,’ she said carefully. ‘Though how all this will ever get dry in time God only knows.’
Then she scrunched up her face in that sympathetic, I-know-more-than-I’m-admitting way she had, and added, ‘Nothing for it but to say yes, Miss E. Just like I do.’
‘But for how long?’ I asked, ignoring her advice. ‘Did she say?’
She shook her head.
I turned away. ‘Did you move any of my books?’ I asked, half out of the door. ‘The ones in the trunk? While you were getting the washing?’
She shook her head again. I could see the kindness in her eyes. And of course I’d known the answer already.
I didn’t knock on the way into Mother’s room. She was lying in bed, reading the paper.
‘A little better,’ she murmured, turning her eyes to the wall. ‘Aunt Mildred … so kind …’
I stood by her bed, looking down at her. She shifted her shoulder a little further towards the wall.
Looking round, I saw that one of the big pots of orchids from the window was on her bedside chest this morning – its blooms white and smooth. Unnatural-looking, parasitic things, I thought, suddenly disgusted by them: half-flower, half-fungus.
‘That’s a pretty orchid,’ I said brightly. ‘Did Aunt Mildred bring it?’
A tiny frown appeared on her face, as if pain might be returning. ‘No, it’s always been there …’
‘Well, yesterday, for instance, there were some white roses there. I bought them for you myself, and put them in a vase right here,’ I said, keeping my voice as steady and reasonable as I could. ‘I had to move all the pictures on to the window to fit the vase on to the chest. Don’t you remember?’
Yet the pictures were in their usual place now – the whole shiny array, dusted, in tidy rows around the orchid pot. For a yawning moment, looking at them, I wondered whether I hadn’t just imagined, dreamed, the white roses …
And then Mother’s eyes flickered. ‘Oh,’ she said, looking down at her hands, ‘those. They died.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said.
In the silence that followed, a whirring, chattering, pounding-red interior monologue began inside me.
What time had she had to get up this morning, that voice was asking, to make sure my flowers were disposed of and the orchids in place instead and the pictures dusted and arranged, all before Aunt Mildred’s early call? Had she known, beforehand, that she’d want my roses gone so she could complain about my selfishness more freely? And, if she was so sick, where had she found the strength to heave that heavy orchid pot into place?
‘But, oh look,’ I went on, with bright, false concern, ‘I think you must have dropped one or two of the pictures you had here yesterday?’
Mother put one hand to her forehead, and shook her head.
‘Both the ones of Grandmother …?’ I went on, pronouncing the taboo word with the greatest possible precision. ‘Because they’ve gone.’
Her frown deepened. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘Grandmother,’ I repeated sweetly. ‘Yesterday you had her wedding picture here, and also that recent one she sent from Paris. The one from my poetry book. Would you like me to look and see if they’ve fallen under your bed?’
Silence.
‘Your mother,’ I prompted, after a moment, but I could already feel that brief flush of heat and anger fading inside me. ‘Constance.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Inconstancy, more like,’ she whispered.
‘Grandmother then,’ I prodded. ‘Shall I look for the photographs?’ I moved towards her bed.
‘I don’t know what you mean about pictures,’ Mother suddenly snapped in a much stronger voice. ‘There are no pictures of her here.’
I straightened, smiling down at the floor. ‘Ah, well, perhaps I imagined them,’ I said with what insouciance I could still manage. With the last vestiges of my brave anger, I told myself: So she’s put the pictures somewhere else, that’s all that means.
‘I need to rest,’ she said.
I got almost all the way to the door before she whispered at my back, ‘Did Aunt Mildred tell you she’s asked us all to the island from tomorrow evening?’
I turned, submissively. The darkness had gone from her face. She was almost smiling.
‘I’ve asked Florence to get your clothes ready.’
I nodded again. I so wanted to trust that hint of warmth. My mind was leaping ahead, showing me wishful-thinking pictures of sunlight on the water, and us all laughing together – but such pictures, I knew even as I imagined them, were only illusions.
As soon as I’d left her room I went straight to the telephone in the hall.
‘Eliza?’ I whispered, when she came to the phone. ‘What was the name of the ship to Europe the man was talking about last night?’