It had all begun with her falling down the stairs.
A Thursday afternoon in February, dull and heavy-skied. Irene had been at home for what had felt like forever: months, years, decades. The pandemic had played havoc with time: she didn’t even wear her watch any more, and when the batteries in the kitchen clock had failed she hadn’t bothered to replace them.
Irene had never much minded solitude – she’d chosen it over marriage, after all, though that had not felt like so much of a choice at the time – but this had been different. She’d spent Christmas alone (Peter and Chloe had got her an iPad, but she loathed the thing). The closest she’d come to any of her family in months had been to stand on the doorstep waving while they shouted at her from the garden gate. An absurd carry-on, necessary though everyone insisted it was; death didn’t faze her, not really, not when she was already so close. But she’d had the vaccines by then – there were some perks, at least, to being ancient. Just a couple more weeks and she’d be able to see them all again. Peter and Chloe (Laura, too, perhaps, though the divorce naturally made things difficult); Richard and Katie and the boys.
All the more ironic that it had happened then, when Irene had been almost at the finish line. Three o’clock, or thereabouts; she’d been sitting in her armchair in the living room, dozing a little after lunch. The radio on: she’d woken to Chopin – one of the Preludes – and sat there for a while in the murky semi-darkness, unable to muster the energy even to get up and turn on a lamp. There had seemed no point to it; suddenly, there had seemed no point to anything. Irene might have closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep, and never woken again: this had seemed preferable, in that moment, to lifting herself painfully from her chair. Then Chopin had given way to Bach, whom Irene loved above all – the Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould – and this had roused her, shaken her out of her stupor. This was no good at all; she’d better get up, turn on a light, find something to do. Her book was in the bedroom; she’d go and find it, make a cup of tea, sit here and read. Anything to flush away the darkness of another lonely winter afternoon.
Irene had gone upstairs, found the book – and it was then, on the landing, that it had happened. Well, two things had. The first was that she’d seen Ken: clear as anything, unmistakable, the bulk of him, standing outlined in the doorway of what had once been the boys’ room.
For a moment she’d done nothing – just stared at him, not daring even to breathe. He’d stared back. Said nothing. Not moved an inch. His eyes were on her, though: she felt them, the cruelty in them, the dislike. And so she’d moved, turned and fled, landing awkwardly on the second stair. Her ankle gave way, and she fell.
She’d come to in the ambulance, staring into the kind blue eyes of a paramedic. No pain yet – they must have given her something – but she could tell that there was something wrong with her leg. The paramedic asked what had happened, and Irene told her that she’d lost her footing; it was a dull, dark day and she hadn’t bothered to turn on the light. Lucky, the woman said, that she’d been wearing her alert button, otherwise who knew what might have happened? That blasted thing: her sons had got it for her, mostly she forgot to wear it. Yes, Irene agreed, she’d been lucky. She said nothing about Ken.
Irene had rationalised the moment away. She couldn’t have seen him – he was in Australia, wasn’t he, had been for years. And anyway, the Ken she’d seen was not the age he would be now – ninety-five, or would it be ninety-six? He’d been younger, standing there, staring at her – fifty or so. The age he’d been when he’d left.
Clearly, she was losing her mind: this was the end. But it hadn’t been – she’d only broken her leg; it was a bad fracture, painful, but it would heal. She might have been home again in a couple of weeks if it hadn’t been for the chest infection. And then that had turned into pneumonia and she really had nearly died; and Irene did wonder, sometimes, if it might have been better if she had.
Nothing was the same now: she was weak, pathetically so, couldn’t even get herself in and out of the bath, and her leg hadn’t fused properly. There was a lot of pain, managed with a kitbag of drugs, and her independence and dignity had been dispensed with overnight. Nurses to wash her and feed her and wipe her bottom; doctors to issue the pills and godlike pronouncements on her progress. Her sons taking charge, talking about a ‘home’ (that euphemism – there was surely nothing remotely homelike about such a place). For God’s sake, no. She’d put up a fight about that, the fight of her life, and won the battle, if not the war.
Nelson Street sold. This flat, God’s waiting room. The carers who came and went each day, washing and wiping and bringing microwaveable meals Irene mostly threw in the bin uneaten: she didn’t have much of an appetite, never had. At least she could still get out and about a bit, with her stick and her trolley, even if it took her an age just to get to the end of the close. At least Peter was close by now, and Chloe, too, for a while. At least she hadn’t, yet, seen Ken again.
‘How is the temperature, Irene?’
‘Good. It’s good.’ Irene lowered herself gently into the bath, gripping the handrail. Immersed, she leant back, closed her eyes; the temperature really was good, perfect in fact, and Alina had filled the tub right up, even added a slick of the rose bubble bath Katie and Richard had got her for her birthday. None of the other carers took such trouble: her bath, with them, was an inch or two of tepid water, the briefest of soakings. A rough towel-dry, and off they went, with barely a goodbye.
Alina was different. Irene had known it from the first moment she’d arrived, five months ago now: small, rather elegant – ‘gamine’ was the word that had sprung to Irene’s mind, with her cropped dark hair and dainty features, like those actresses from 1960s French films, the ones who’d worn striped tops and had complicated love affairs.
Her English was lightly accented, precise. ‘Hello, Mrs Newton. My name is Alina Florescu. I am here to take care of you.’
Irene had felt self-conscious undressing that first time, as she always did before strangers, aware of the ugliness of her body, its puckers and tucks, the long seam just below her knicker-line (Peter had been born by Caesarean) and the other, secret scars. None of the legions of people who had seen her naked in the months since her fall – the nurses, the doctors, the other carers – had said anything about these, but Alina, gently helping her to remove her pyjama top, had traced the longest one, across her upper back, with her hand, and said, ‘A man did this to you. Yes?’
Irene had flinched, and Alina, colouring, had drawn the towel around Irene’s chest, knotted it, then laid the pyjama top carefully on the bed. ‘I am very sorry, Mrs Newton. I should not have touched you. I should not have said this.’
‘It’s all right.’ It was. ‘Yes. A man did do that. But it was a very long time ago.’
That first day, once Irene was washed and dressed, Alina had offered to make her a cup of tea; and then, at Irene’s insistence, she had made one for herself too and stayed to drink it, the two of them sitting in the kitchen at the pine table, the radio that had become Irene’s constant companion turned down low. ‘Bartók,’ Alina had said, and Irene had smiled and said, ‘Yes. You like classical music?’
Alina had shrugged, looked away. ‘I did. I do.’
Irene didn’t know how Alina managed it; the others were never there for longer than fifteen minutes, but that first time, and every other time since (Alina came five mornings a week), she had stayed for an hour. Presumably she was late for her other appointments: she had admitted, a few weeks later, that her supervisors were angry with her, that she had been disciplined for taking too long. Alina’s dark eyes had narrowed, then: there was a fierceness there, one Irene respected, understood. ‘It’s ridiculous. You cannot care for someone, not properly, in fifteen minutes.’
‘No,’ Irene had said. ‘It’s true. You can’t.’
Now, months later, they had slipped into an easy routine: undressing, bathing, drying, dressing again. Alina helped Irene to dry her hair, apply her make-up: she wasn’t as steady with her lipstick as she had once been. Then she made them both tea, and they sat and drank it, and they talked: about not very much at first – the weather, the news, how and where Alina had learnt English – and then, gradually, about the things that mattered. The medical degree Alina had been halfway through when she’d left Bucharest and could not now afford to take up again. Her two boys, Mihai and Gabriel, who were seven and five; her sister Daniela, who was married to a local man. ‘Eddy,’ she said. ‘He’s a mechanic. A good man.’ Irene, listening, had understood that there was another man Alina was referring to, in the spaces between her words – one who was not so good. But she had not enquired further; she would not pry.
There had been something about Alina that had seemed familiar to Irene. She had puzzled over this; wondered, for a long while, if they might somehow have met before, or seen each other around town. It was possible: Alina had been in Lenbourne for three years now. Her brother-in-law, Eddy, owned Valley Motors, where Irene had her car serviced. Daniela did the books, so Irene might have seen Alina there, dropping in on her sister, but this seemed unlikely; perhaps it had been Daniela whom Irene had noticed, though Alina swore that they didn’t look at all alike. Daniela was tall, blonde, well built, ‘a Viking,’ Alina said, ‘not like the rest of us at all. My father used to joke that my mother must have had a secret lover. A man from Sweden.’
And then, gradually, Irene had realised what it was, this familiarity: a sense of recognition that was not literal, that somehow transcended words. She’d felt it before, with a couple of friends, and with strangers, even: a woman at the checkout in Tesco, the lady in the post office who could never quite meet her eye. A kinship; an instinctive understanding that they were living as she once had, that they knew what she knew, and that they carried the weight of this knowledge with them, through each night, each day. The knowledge that the man they lived with hated them, though he might call it love. The knowledge that they were not safe and might never feel so again, not truly; even if the man was gone, even if he had been on the other side of the world for forty years.
Peter had suggested that Irene buy her Christmas presents online this year: she had the iPad, and Chloe had set her up with an Amazon account and something called PayPal.
The internet really was a remarkable invention – Irene had ordered a CD of Bach cantatas one afternoon, and it had arrived the next day – but there was something about the ease of online shopping that unsettled her. It was almost too convenient, she felt. No shop, surely, online or otherwise, could supply everything, and not be cutting corners somewhere along the line. And anyway, if everyone bought everything they needed there, then what would happen to towns like Lenbourne? All the shops would close – too many of them already had – and we’d be back to where we were in the 1970s. Irene remembered it clearly: the empty storefronts, the derelict dance halls and cinemas, everyone driving off to the out-of-town supermarkets and shopping centres, thinking they were cruising towards a better, brighter future.
‘If we’re not careful,’ she’d told Peter, ‘we’ll end up like America. Cars everywhere. No pavements. Nowhere to walk.’
Peter had eyed her cautiously. They did that these days, all of them: looked at her as if she were made of china, as if she might be about to break. All of them except Chloe and Alina.
‘It’s not like that everywhere in America, Mum,’ he said. ‘And anyway, how would you know? You’ve never been.’
‘I wanted to go. Still would, given half a chance. Boston. New York. The Chicago Symphony.’
He’d smiled. He was looking tired, her younger son: tired and sad and worn out. What was he now: fifty-five, fifty-six? In her mind he was still five, that quiet, watchful boy, with his wooden train set and the stuffed rabbit he’d carried with him everywhere, greying and threadbare – for comfort, of course. He’d seen too much, they both had, her boys, though she’d done her best to shield them.
‘Maybe one day, Mum,’ he’d said.
Irene had allowed the lie to stand. Anyway, Peter was right: it would be too much for her to get round the shops this year. She’d give everybody money for Christmas; there wasn’t much left since Nelson Street had been sold, the flat paid for, the carers and alarm systems and all the rest of it, but there was something. She’d still get a few small gifts – things she could wrap – for Chloe and the boys. And for Alina. Yes, she would get something for Alina, too.
Irene ventured out on a fine afternoon, frosty and crisp. She wore the mink – it didn’t get out much these days either, and hang anyone who disapproved; that wasn’t going to bring the poor creatures back to life, was it? – and a hat she’d bought herself a decade or so ago which Chloe said made her look Russian. ‘A glamorous Russian, Gran,’ she’d added, and Irene had thought of Lara in Dr Zhivago: Julie Christie, blonde and smouldering under grey rabbit fur. Perhaps there had once been a resemblance.
‘A babushka, more like,’ she’d said to Chloe; but still, the compliment had pleased her. Irene always had been too susceptible to flattery: it was, she’d decided (she’d had a great deal of time, over the years, to consider this, to weigh one defect against another, and each virtue too), her fatal flaw.
‘You’re exquisite,’ Ken had said to her the first time they met: a Friday evening at the Odeon in Canterbury, full skirts and shirt-waisters, a big band, still a few years to go before the arrival of rock’n’roll. Irene was twenty-two, blonde and slender, a dead ringer for Grace Kelly, everyone said so, and almost as elegant, though her dad was a bus driver, her mum a housewife and they lived in a bungalow in Wincheap. She was an apprentice seamstress in a city-centre boutique, tailoring affordable replicas of the latest fashions from Paris and America; Irene cut the patterns, was learning to sew seams and sleeves, and modelled prototypes for the customers. She’d been as stupid and empty-headed, it seemed to Irene now, as it had been possible for a girl to be; she’d had boyfriends, queues of them, but not one of them as tall and broad and definite as Ken Newton. A man, not a boy; she’d felt tiny in his arms, and he’d had to bend almost in two to whisper in her ear. ‘Exquisite’; nobody had called her this before. Oh, Ken had known how to work her, right from the moment they’d met.
It was a short walk from the flat to Market Square. Irene took her time, leaning on her trolley, her stick inside it, just for back-up. Passed a few people she knew – Margaret Curran, who’d worked with Ken at Williams and Jenkins, years ago; Ron Armstrong, who was a lay preacher at St Michael’s these days. Ron stopped, asked her how she was doing, said he’d heard she’d moved into sheltered accommodation. He was a kind man, always had been; a few years her junior, and not unattractive. There might have been something between them once, but he was married, of course; they’d all been married, by the time she wasn’t any more.
‘Haven’t seen you at church for a while,’ Ron said. ‘Will you be coming to midnight Mass?’
‘Perhaps. It’s not so easy these days, you know …’
He smiled. ‘Of course. Well, Irene, it’s good to see you looking so well.’
Did she? Was he just sparing her the truth? She caught a glimpse of herself in the window of the butcher’s: an old lady, pushing a shopping trolley, swathed absurdly in layers of fur, wearing a hat that was frankly ridiculous. She stopped, deflated; stood and stared at the trays of glistening flesh, the plump chicken breasts and rib-eyes and strings of sausages. The queue was spilling out on to the pavement; the butchers, in their white coats, were busy, dispensing bacon and pigs in blankets, hams and stuffing, and turkeys in cardboard carriers, like pets from the store.
They’d had a kitten once, when the boys were small; Ivy, Ken had called her – he’d brought her back from the pet shop in just such a box, a box with holes in the lid. He’d meant well, Irene supposed, though the name had been too much, too painful: it had been twelve years since they’d lost her – the other Ivy – but it was still as raw as if it had only happened the day before. And the kitten, when she grew into a cat, had got on Ken’s nerves. Irene had come home one day with the boys to find that he’d got rid of her, given her away to a friend of his, a drinking buddy who lived on the other side of town. Richard and Peter had been inconsolable. ‘Don’t see what all the fuss is about,’ Ken had said. ‘I bought the bloody thing, didn’t I? So I get to decide what happens to it.’
Ken. The shape of him, standing there on the landing, blocking out the light.
‘Are you all right?’ A woman, middle-aged, blonde – smart in her black padded coat, her diamond earrings – was staring at her from the queue.
‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ Irene said. But she wasn’t: her leg was hurting, her brain had clouded, she’d forgotten to take her tablets. Irene turned, pushed herself and the trolley away from the blonde woman, from the butcher’s shop, from all that nauseating uncooked meat and dived into the nearest open door. Boots. Strip-lighting. Calm. Tinny pop music, a woman not wanting much for Christmas, only you. Which was, surely, the world.
Oh, Irene was tired. So tired. She could lie down right there, on the linoleum floor, and go to sleep. But Alina: she’d wanted to buy something for Alina. Alina, with her kindness, and her sadness, and the silences between her words. Irene reached for the closest shelf – smelly stuff, lotions and potions. Picked one at random, in a box made to look like a Christmas cracker. It would do, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t much, perhaps, but it would have to do.
That night, Irene saw him for the second time.
She’d woken in the small hours – she didn’t sleep well; hadn’t for years – and lain for a while, as she often did, her eyes closed, counting her breaths, the rise and fall of her chest, in the way Peter had taught her. One. Two. Three. It was no good: her mind was overactive at this time, alert and skittish. And the room was stuffy: the flats were heated from a central boiler, as if residents couldn’t be trusted to monitor their own body temperature, and in winter they kept the radiators on all night. She’d get up, open a window, have a drink and a cigarette, maybe read a little. Her insomniac ritual.
It was in the living room, then, that Irene saw him. She was moving slowly round the room, stick in one hand, glass of vermouth in the other, turning on the lamp, the tree. She sensed movement at the limit of her vision – the briefest flash, an animal’s quick, darting silhouette – and turned, and Ken was there, standing outlined against the open door. Younger than the last time: in his thirties, his hair still dark and thick. She stared at his shoes – those polished brogues he’d worn to the office every day; they’d bought them together, on a day trip to London, along with a new suit for his new job. An open-top bus ride; ice creams in St James’s Park. Perhaps he’d been happy, then – perhaps they both had. Before Ivy. Before.
Finally, she lifted her eyes to his face. He was staring at her again, those black eyes fixed on hers, but his expression was different this time, filled not with dislike but with something softer, more diffuse. Irene blinked, looked again, and saw that he was crying; and she understood it then, knew with a certainty that she couldn’t even try to explain – she wouldn’t know how to begin to explain it, even to herself – that he was gone, as Ivy was gone, and that, on some level, he was sorry.
‘My son Peter brought mince pies,’ Irene said. ‘Will you have one?’
Alina nodded. She was standing by the kettle in her blue tunic, the mugs, milk and teabags already arranged on the counter. ‘I got such a shock, the first time I had Christmas here. Eddy said there was this lovely cake I needed to try, this English tradition. He gave me one, and when I bit into it he told me what it was called – “mince pie”. I spat it out at once. I thought it was mince, you know – like beef.’
Irene laughed. ‘English can be so confusing, can’t it?’
‘It can.’ The kettle clicked; Alina poured water into the mugs. ‘Where are they, these pies? I will get them for you.’
‘In that cupboard there – the one where the sugar is.’ Alina opened the cupboard, drew out the box. ‘Oh, and Alina – could you do one other thing for me, if you don’t mind?’
‘Of course.’
‘Go into the living room, please, and have a look under the tree.’ Irene shifted her gaze to the table, to the gnarled landscape of her hand, spread out against the wood. ‘There’s something there for you.’
Alina slipped from the room. She returned carrying her gift in its silver paper, her cheeks pink. ‘You did not need to do this, Irene. Really, you did not.’
‘I know I didn’t. I wanted to.’
‘You are very kind.’ Alina set the present down on the table, together with the mugs of tea, and two cold mince pies on a plate. Irene would have preferred hers warm, with cream, but she said nothing. Alina’s dark head dipped below the table; she was rummaging in her handbag, a huge black plastic-leather thing that Irene suspected weighed a ton. She didn’t know how such a small woman could manage, lugging such a thing around all day; it was incredible, really, the things that women carried around.
When Alina raised her head again, she was smiling. ‘It is good that I got something for you too, Irene, or I would have felt very bad. Very guilty.’
Alina laid a second gift on the table: this one was small, square, soft-looking – some kind of fabric, perhaps? A tea towel? It was wrapped in shiny red paper, printed with small green holly leaves and tied with gold ribbon. The label – Irene picked up the present, held it in her hand – read, To Irene, my favourite patient and, I hope, my friend. Love, Alina X.
‘It’s only a small thing,’ Alina said, and Irene swallowed, laid the gift back down and said, ‘Thank you. Really. I think of you as a friend, too.’
‘Well, then. We are lucky, I think.’
‘Yes. We are.’
They drank their tea, they ate the pies. Irene’s was a little dry – perhaps it was longer since Peter had brought them than she’d thought – but Alina ate hers quickly, neatly, holding the foil case below her mouth to catch the crumbs.
The things that Irene had thought about telling Alina sat heavily in her mind. That she’d seen her ex-husband twice, though such a thing was impossible; that she was sure, absolutely sure, that he was dead. Not that she’d seen his ghost, exactly – she wasn’t as crazy as all that – but some sort of after-image, some type of transmitted knowledge that was beyond reason, beyond science. Such things happened: her mother had told a story about a friend who’d gone for lunch with her fiancé during wartime, held him in her arms to say goodbye, and received a telegram later that day saying that his plane had been shot down over Dieppe two days before.
Hours she’d spent on the iPad during the night, typing his name into Google: there were plenty of Kenneth Newtons in Australia – an orthodontist in Adelaide; a landscape gardener in Wollongong – but none of them was him, at least as far as she could tell. Even this hadn’t made the slightest dent in Irene’s certainty; perhaps he’d changed his name. She felt she ought to tell the boys – men, of course: they were fifty-six and sixty years old – but she didn’t know where to begin. Your father is dead, I know he is, and I know because I saw him, twice, with my own eyes. They’d think she’d finally gone round the bend, when she had never felt more lucid about anything in her life.
And the rest of it, too – the other burden she carried, that they both had, she and Ken. Ivy. Their firstborn. The small weight of her, in her arms; Irene had insisted on holding her, though they hadn’t wanted her to, the midwives, they’d wanted to wrap her in the sheet and carry her away. Ken hadn’t seen her; he’d gone back outside to the corridor as soon as he’d heard the word, its ugliness, its blunt finality. Stillborn. When he’d come back in and seen Irene’s arms empty – for they had carried Ivy away in the end, they’d had to, she hadn’t been able to stop them – he’d seemed different, somehow. Tougher, harder-edged. Perhaps it had always been there, his capacity for cruelty, but it was this that had loosened it, set it free. Ken had blamed her, Irene knew he had; he’d blamed her, as surely as she’d blamed herself.
All this she had thought about telling Alina – offering it to her as she had offered it to no one before, watching her listen, her brown eyes steady, calm. But now the words lodged in her throat; it seemed absurd to her now, in the cool light of a December morning, to speak of such things, to expose all that violence and loss to the air. She drank her tea and said, ‘You can open your present, if you like. Or would you rather wait?’
Alina smiled. ‘I’ll open it, if you’ll open yours.’
‘All right.’
She watched Alina unwrap her gift; it seemed meagre, a sorry token, just a couple of bottles of smelly stuff swathed in plastic. But Alina seemed to like it; she took out the bottles, opened them, passed them to Irene to smell. ‘Delicious,’ Alina said, the word rolling around her mouth like a marble. ‘It smells of summer. Sunshine in a bottle.’
Irene smiled. ‘As long as you like it.’
‘Really, I do. Thank you. A treat. Now it’s your turn.’
Irene reached for the square packet in its red wrapping, opened it carefully, making sure not to tear the paper. Inside she found an apron: white, with black halter and ties, printed with the image of a black cat, stirring what looked like a mug of tea with its paw. Below it, in bold capitals, were the words I Do What I Want.
‘It’s not much,’ Alina said. ‘I hope it is not too – what is the word? – tacky.’
‘No.’ Perhaps it was, a little, but no matter. ‘I like it. Thank you. Put it on me. Go on – I want to wear it now.’
Alina got up from her chair. Irene stood too, feeling the creak and strain of her muscles, her ligaments, her old bones. Alina slipped the apron over her head, drew the ties together at her waist. Irene turned to face her, and Alina said, ‘There. It looks good on you, I think. It’s silly, I know, but I like what it says. The message. I think you are very independent, Irene. Very strong.’
‘Thank you.’ She stood facing Alina, looking at her; Alina met her gaze. Neither woman spoke. After a moment, Irene reached for Alina’s hand, held it for one second, two, three. ‘It’s lovely. It really is.’