47

Hera, Now

A cloud of melon vape hangs like the ghost of a fruit salad in the hall. I flap it away with my hands. “What is that dreadful stuff? I preferred it when you smoked like a power station, Edie.”

“Darling, you think I don’t? But times have changed. And so have I.” Edie stuffs the vape machine—it looks unsettlingly like a pistol—into her handbag. “Thanks for an impeccable cup of Earl Grey. Better shoot. On a deadline.”

I eye my aunt dubiously, suspecting she’s making excuses to leave and escape the conversation and all my angsting. “Really? You haven’t got your deadline face on.”

Brow furrowed. Bottom lip bitten. The metallic clatter of typewriter keys. I grew up with all of that. Edie was preoccupied a lot of the time. She’d ask me and Teddy about our homework but wouldn’t listen to our answers—she was thinking about her writing. “The rabbit did it for me,” I said once, as a test, and she said absently, “Great work, darling,” and banged out another line of copy. But when the article was finished, she’d always bundle us on to the top of a bus for ice-cream sundaes in Hyde Park or lunch in Piccadilly. We loved those days. But I haven’t tasted ice cream for over twenty years. Or taken the bus in five. Or the tube. Not when the city grows more violent by the day. The flu strains more virulent. And the panic attacks that started after my husband died—and I lost my last buffer against the past—became harder to disguise. Without him, I feel peeled, shucked, vulnerable to every shove and cough. Since the latest family drama kicked off—I mean, when will it end?—I can feel the rev of panic again, the fear that I might unravel like my mother.

“Well, not a deadline exactly. But I’m extremely busy.” Edie looks worryingly pleased with herself and waits for me to ask about the source of her latest busyness.

“What with?” I ask, dutifully playing along.

Her lips twitch into a smile. “Setting up an Instagram account.”

“Heavens. What on earth about?”

“My newsmag years. Feminism. Fashion. I’m going to turn myself into a national treasure.” She grins and rattles the chunky resin bangles on her wrist. “Hell, why not?”

I stare at her for a moment, my tiny withered bright-eyed aunt, framed against the Colefax and Fowler foliate wallpaper, like an exotic bird. “I’m going to put that on your gravestone. Here lies Edie Harrington, who looked at the world and asked, ‘Hell, why not?’”

She giggles. “I doubt it. Since I’ll outlive you, vaping my melon sorbet. Now if you don’t mind . . .” She brushes past me, trailing the sharp citric men’s cologne she’s always worn.

I feel a mix of affection and neediness, as I always do when she leaves, and an urge to hug her, which I never act upon. Most people I’ve hugged in my life have either died or disappeared. But Edie and I understand each other, and that’s enough. She knows she saved my life.

The leukemia knocked at our door with no warning. Mother was dead two weeks after diagnosis, four months after coming home from The Lawns. The young, bored nanny who’d replaced Rita upped and left, saying the job was too difficult. Daddy tried to be Mother, but he couldn’t boil an egg and had business abroad. So Edie gave up her rented apartment and foreign post and moved in to look after us. Nobody could believe it or expected it to work. She couldn’t boil an egg, either, but knew where to eat out. She got an editorial job in London, on a magazine, and filled the house with hacks and artists and people who needed a bed for the night. It was a revelation. The conventions and anxieties that had governed my parents’ lives simply didn’t apply to Edie. She never married. She had a job and a million friends instead. And us. She was the first and only person in my life to say, “Don’t worry what other people think, be who you want to be. Hell, why not, Hera?” So I did. I reinvented myself. Years later, I even took a photograph of Mother to a plastic surgeon and said, “Can you fix me a nose like hers?” I still look nothing like her.

When Mother was discharged from The Lawns, she didn’t resemble herself much, either. She had lost so much weight, and her dark hair had turned white and started to fall out in clumps. But she was delighted to be home, which was, by then, a house in Bloomsbury, smaller and scruffier, far away from the gossips of Primrose Hill. She and Daddy had separate bedrooms with an interlinked door that I think Daddy hoped would one day be unlocked. (It never was.) In a funny way, we were the closest we’d ever been in that house. Everything felt tender and quiet but hopeful, like after surgery.

Edie said to me, “Only the trees know what went on in the woods that night.” My father wouldn’t speak of it, or of Don. They never discussed the case in front of me. I’d later learn it had fallen apart. Father sold the mine and company shares to pay for the lawyers. I once tentatively asked Mother if she’d really shot Don, and she’d hesitated, her face a cross-stitch of feelings I couldn’t read, her eyes full of tears, then replied, “It wasn’t you. You mustn’t ever think it was you, Hera. That’s all that matters.” But a part of me did. A part of me still does. I’d shot something that night. And although I didn’t try to kill Don, I’d wished him scrubbed from the face of the earth so many times.

Officers would occasionally still come round, and my parents would quickly usher us upstairs. Teddy and I would sit, terrified, huddled together, in case they took Mother away again. Lawyers appeared. Doctors. Newspaper reporters would knock on our front door, and we’d be told to duck from the windows and pull the curtains shut. I’ve never lost the sense that the world might shoulder-barge into my life again and take away someone I love. I still feel comfortable in my house only with the blinds shut. So Edie’s new enthusiasm unnerves me. “Don’t put any photos of me on social media, Edie, will you?”

“Cripes, I wouldn’t dare, darling.” Edie opens the front door and grins at the city, the cars and people swimming past. She winks. “You’d break the interweb.”

“Internet. It’s called the internet, Edie.” I touch her sleeve lightly. “Before you go, tell me what to do, Edie. Please.” There’s only one opinion that counts.

“I’ve never told you what to do.” She purses her lips together, so that all the old smoker’s lines ray out. “I don’t believe in it.” A police helicopter whirs overhead.

“I’ve tried throwing money at the problem. I’ve tried reason.”

She turns to face me, more sternly. “Have you tried giving up?”

“What?” I laugh, the idea preposterous.

“It’s out of your hands, darling. So you either give in fighting. Or you give in with grace and kindness.” Edie smiles at me, slightly exasperated. “You’ll make yourself ill if you go on like this.” She squints down the street. “When’s the next number 22 due?”

“God invented taxis for a reason.” To save us from crowds and crime and norovirus and me breaking into a cold sweat, unable to breathe.

“Well, you’re missing out. The conversations on buses, my goodness. I take notes!”

“You would.”

“Good luck.” Her clawlike hand squeezes mine. “Let me know how it goes, Hera.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Oops. The ancient mind slips, darling. Sorry.” She doesn’t look very sorry. My aunt is constitutionally incapable of regret. But she’s kind. “You’ll always be Hera to me, my dear plump mad Hera.”

“For goodness sake.” I shake my head.

“Well, at my age . . .”

“Edie, I’ve been called Helen Latham for thirty-three bloody years.” I flick a bit of lint from her navy jacket collar. “And I weigh one hundred and ten pounds. Thank you very much.”