I am, once again, a refugee from my home. When I go downstairs in the morning, I am assailed by the high garlicky reek of leftover pepperoni pizza, mingled with the gritty undertones of unemptied ashtrays. I have a choice of fight or flight: I can go and thunder on bedroom doors and demand that they get their idle overprivileged arses out of bed and downstairs to clear everything up or I can spend the day going to see my mother in London and clear the whole lot up myself if they haven’t done it by the time I return. Choose the former, and the friends will gaze at me in wounded disbelief at my unkindness and Annie never speak to me again; choose the latter and my mother will be annoyed and ungrateful but I shall bask in my own virtue and self-restraint. The former would be more fun but life can’t be all fun and I am determined on martyrdom.
Avoiding an encounter with the kitchen and its dubious sink, I cycle off to the station without breakfast, allowing myself the indulgence of a coffee and a Danish off the station stall. I also find, at the tiny bookstall, among the John Grishams, Jilly Coopers and Stephen Kings, a gardening book which my mother might just like. I can’t be sure, but it’s better than a bunch of station flowers, which she would certainly despise.
By the time the train has chugged its way to London with special Sunday slowness, stopping at every available station and a number of arbitrary spots in between, it’s midday and I think I had better go into M&S Food at St Pancras and buy a couple of salads in case my mother has nothing in for lunch. I am beginning to tire of deli food; I need to get my kitchen back.
The tube journey to New Cross is pretty unsavoury and some of my fellow passengers look as though they haven’t been to bed – and certainly haven’t washed – since they were partying last night, so it’s a relief to be out in the street, even though the air is hardly fresh and the sky is sullenly overcast. It is a twenty-minute walk to my mother’s flat so I opt for a taxi and the driver is mercifully taciturn.
I ring my mother’s doorbell and get no reply, so I find my key and let myself in. I can hear the radio in the sitting room but my mother is slumped in her chair with her eyes closed. For a moment I think she might be dead, but as I put down my bags she opens an eye.
‘What?’ she asks. ‘Why?’
‘A surprise visit,’ I say, feeling foolish. Why didn’t I ring to warn her? Because she would have told me not to come, and she probably would have meant it.
‘What for?’ she asks, rousing herself.
I would like to say, ‘Because I was worried about you’, but she won’t like that, so I say, ‘Because Annie and her friends have invaded my house and I needed an outing.’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I don’t know that there’s any food.’
‘I brought some salads. There’s plenty. Would you like some?’
‘Oh, I’m not hungry. I was going to make myself some toast.’
‘I’ll do it.’ I hand her the gardening book. ‘I thought you might like this. Amuse yourself while I get some lunch.’
The kitchen is immaculately tidy and aroma-free in a way that suggests that little cooking has been going on here. I find a fairly fresh loaf, though, and I put together a tray of toast and tea. As I’m looking for milk in the fridge, I notice a tub of anchovy paste. I put my head into the sitting room. ‘Anchovy paste on your toast, I ask?’
‘Yes,’ she says. She is holding the book in her lap and looking at its front cover but I’m not sure that she has opened it.
I put the tray in front of her on the coffee table and settle myself opposite her with my salads. She eats her way dutifully through a slice of toast; I munch unenthusiastically at borlotti beans and coleslaw. I attempt conversation but she is no more forthcoming about what she has been doing than she was on the phone, so I end up prattling about my life: Annie and the Edinburgh play, Ellie, Freda and Nico, Much Ado About Nothing, the murders of Karen and Lara Brody.
This last stirs her slightly.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she says, ‘that you’ve got yourself involved in that.’
‘Absolutely not,’ I say. ‘David has made it crystal clear that there is no place for me in his investigation.’
‘Well, that must be a great relief to you,’ she says, and just for a moment I see the glimmer of a smile, a hint of her usual self.
‘He has a very able assistant in DS Paula Powell,’ I say, packing up my plastic salad tubs with every appearance, I believe, of nonchalance. ‘They seem to get on very well.’
I go out to the kitchen to throw them away and she calls after me, ‘Don’t underestimate him. He strikes me as a man of hidden depths.’
‘Well, he’s certainly keeping them hidden from me,’ I call back. I return to take her tray. ‘Of course, hidden shallows are more dangerous, aren’t they? They’re what you run aground on. I suspect Paula Powell of hidden shallows.’
She picks up her book and starts leafing through it; I go and wash up. After that, I do a few jobs: a curtain has come off its runner so I get up on a chair to fix it. ‘While you’re up there,’ she says, ‘that bulb needs changing.’ So I do that too, and I notice that the handle on the sitting room door is loose so I go rummaging in a kitchen drawer where I’m fairly sure she has a screwdriver and I find a pile of unopened mail. The dates I’m able to read are all within the last two weeks, so this squirrelling has, at least, not been going on for long. I take the letters into the sitting room and brandish them.
‘What are all these?’ I ask. ‘Why haven’t you opened them?’
A look crosses her face, and it’s a look I remember from childhood, a look so close to dislike that I tried very hard not to provoke it.
‘Nothing to do with you,’ she says shortly. ‘Put them back where you found them.’
I was intending to ask her outright if she’s not well but after this contretemps I can see that I shan’t get anywhere. There seems to be little point now in hanging around, although I shall have a long wait at St Pancras for one of the infrequent trains home. I leave her with exhortations to eat and promises to return soon. As I‘m closing the front door behind me, the door of the flat opposite opens and her neighbour, Margaret, comes out.
‘Gina,’ she says, ‘I thought I heard you arrive. Have you got a moment?’ I follow her into her flat, which is stuffed, as retirement flats inevitably are, with too much furniture. It is also very pink and floral, in contrast to the austerity of my mother’s décor. Margaret is quite pink too, a large, comfortable woman, a former dental nurse, with a powerful Welsh accent, undimmed by forty years of living in Greenwich. She and her husband have lived in this flat for about ten years and she has been a godsend in keeping an eye on my mother.
‘Cup of tea?’ she asks, and I decline on the grounds that I’ve just had one with my mother.
‘Well, at least she’s drinking her tea,’ she says darkly. ‘That’s something.’
‘Is she not eating, Margaret?’ I ask, sinking into the rosy depths of an armchair. ‘It didn’t look as though she was.’
‘She hasn’t said then?’
‘Said what?’
‘I wanted to ring you but she said not to. She’d tell you herself, she said. Of course, I should have known she wouldn’t, knowing her like I do.’
‘Tell me what, Margaret?’
She gets up and goes to the telephone. ‘I wrote it down here,’ she says, picking up the phone message pad. She squints at it. ‘TIAs,’ she says, ‘transient ischaemic attacks. At least three of them she’s had in the last three weeks. The first time I called the doctor, but she wouldn’t let me after that. Said it was nothing to worry about, just her brain being short of blood for a bit. But they leave her confused, and she’s lost all her go, if you know what I mean.’
‘I do. Exactly. So when was the first one? Can you remember?’
‘Yes, I can. Because it was our little grandson’s birthday – our Sammy – and I called in after to see your mum and take her a piece of birthday cake. Well she didn’t answer the door when I rang, so I used my key and I found her sitting there and she looked at me as if she didn’t know me. I spoke to her but she didn’t say anything, so I called Harold to come and have a look and he said, “Call the doctor, Margaret,” so I did and then I waited with her till the doctor came. She’d come to a bit by the time he got here and told him it was all a fuss about nothing but he had a look at her and “You’ve had a TIA,” he said to her. “I’d like to get you admitted for some tests,” but she was having none of it. And she wouldn’t have you told either.’
‘And then there have been two more?’
‘As far as I know. Once I knew what it was, I wasn’t so alarmed, you know, but we looked up TIA on NHS Direct, you know, and I saw it’s a kind of stroke.’
‘I’ve heard of it,’ I say. ‘I know someone who’s had one. They’re quite scary, though you get over it afterwards. I think she’s scared but she’s not admitting it. And she’s not opening her post.’
‘Oh, I wondered,’ she says. ‘Couple of times I’ve gone in in the afternoon and the letters are still on the mat. “Can’t be bothered with them,” she says. “None of it’s important.” So I put them in the kitchen. Thought she’d find them when she went to make her supper – only I don’t think she’s cooking much these days.’
I return to my mother’s front door, unlock it without ringing the bell and walk rapidly down the hall to the sitting room. I want to shout ‘ischaemic attacks’ at her and shock her into confession but I can see that this might not be the best thing for an elderly woman in questionable health. I pause at the door, take a deep breath, slip in and sit down. Her eyes are closed but she knows I’m there.
‘Haven’t you gone?’ she asks.
‘Ischaemic attacks,’ I say, quietly. ‘What can you tell me about those, Dr Sidwell?’
She doesn’t open her eyes. ‘You’ve been talking to Margaret,’ she says.
‘I’ve been talking to Margaret, who seems to know a lot more about your recent medical history than I do.’
Her eyes snap open and she sits up straight. ‘Ischaemic attacks are nothing to worry about,’ she says. ‘They’re frightening for patients if they don’t know what’s happening but they’re really nothing.’
‘And for you?’ I ask. ‘How are they for you?’
‘They are—’ She stops and waves a hand dismissively. ‘Margaret fusses,’ she says.
‘Of course she fusses. You’re not yourself. Anyone can see that.’
‘Of course I’m myself. I’m just my eighty-nine-year-old self, that’s all.’
‘I think you’re giving up.’
She gives me a long, hard look but I won’t look away. Then she hauls herself to her feet. ‘Wait here,’ she says and goes off into the bedroom. She comes back with an envelope and hands it to me. It has Virginia Gray written on it. ‘To be opened when I’m dead,’ she says, ‘and not before. If you can’t curb your curiosity – and you never could – please don’t ask me to discuss it with you.’ Then, quite unexpectedly, she leans forward to give me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Go and catch your train,’ she says.
*
Funnily enough, I’m not tempted to open my letter; I am quite content to sit on the train with it tucked into my bag because all the time it is unopened I can believe that my mother’s last message to me is to tell me that she loves me and is proud of me. Opening it can only be a disappointment.
When my phone rings a short way out of St Pancras, I scrabble for it with the conviction that it is Margaret ringing to tell me that my mother has taken a turn for the worse, and this will of course be my fault. I am amazed to find that it is my colleague, Malcolm, calling. I didn’t know that he even had my mobile number. ‘Annie gave it to me,’ he explains.
He sounds flustered and takes a while to get to the point. ‘The conversation we had the other day,’ he says, ’about the deaths on the Eastgate estate – Karen Brody and her daughter. Now they’re saying Karen was murdered, there are some things I think the police ought to know, but I can’t go to them directly. Samaritan confidentiality, you know. I wondered if I could talk to you about it and we might go through unofficial channels.’
‘To David, you mean?’
‘Well, yes.’
I am alight with curiosity, of course, but this is not the place for the conversation. ‘I’m on a train, Malcolm,’ I say. ‘We need to talk face to face, don’t we? I wasn’t going to be on campus tomorrow but I’ll come in first thing and we can have a proper talk.’
‘All right,’ he says, and I can tell that he’s disappointed; he wanted to offload his awkward knowledge right away.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say. ‘I’m sure we can sort something out,’ and I devote the rest of my journey to speculation.