THE CALL CAME AT THREE IN THE MORNING, JOLTING Isabelle Feebes from the sleep she’d just managed, at last, to fall into. Her heart beat too fast as she searched for the phone by her bedside. The phone kept playing ‘Diamonds’ by Rihanna. She picked it up, dropped it with a dull thud, felt for it on the floor. The phone kept playing the damned song. At last she grabbed it, the screen lit up, and she breathed out a sigh of relief.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘What is it!’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Feebes. Is it late over there?’
‘It’s three in the morning, you tit.’
‘I see. Apologies. It’s Dr Steinmeier, Miss Feebes—’
‘I know who you are!’ Isabelle said. ‘What is it, Dr Steinmeier?’
She reached for the switch, turned on the bedside lamp. So much for sleeping. There was a box of pills and a bottle of mineral water on the bedside table. She popped open the cap, palmed one pill and swallowed as she swigged water.
‘It’s about your mother. I’m afraid it’s not long now, Miss Feebes. I really am very sorry.’
‘This couldn’t wait?’ Isabelle said. She got up, opened the blinds, stared out of the dark window. A quiet street in Kensington, a fox regarded her from the bushes, its eyes reflecting the light from the street lamp. Isabelle usually liked the foxes, but she found this one disconcerting. ‘Only this is the third time this month,’ she said.
Her cigarettes. Where were her cigarettes? She remembered she quit, cursed silently, then remembered she still had a pack (for emergencies only) in the pocket of a vintage Steve McQueen-style leather jacket she’d found second-hand in a charity shop in Primrose Hill (now hanging in the wardrobe).
‘It really is not long now, Miss Feebes. Again, I am terribly sorry. You should—’
Ah, there they were. She felt in the pocket, pulled out the cigarettes (Marlboro Lights) and a Bic lighter she picked up who-knew-where. She fumbled with the pack, extracted one crumpled cigarette and lit it. The rush of her first drag almost knocked her off her feet. It felt good. She said, ‘Come to New York?’
‘Exactly, Miss Feebes,’ Dr Steinmeier said.
She stared out at the empty street. The clock by the bedside flashed 03:05.
‘I have too much keeping me here,’ Isabelle said.
‘Miss Feebes…’
Isabelle sighed.
‘Fine,’ she said, defeated.
‘Goodnight, Miss Feebes.’
‘Goodnight, Dr Steinmeier.’
Shit, Isabelle thought. Shit, shit!
She went downstairs. Put on all the lights, the house (one of many owned by the House of Feebes) blazing out illumination. That should put off the foxes, she thought. There were bars she knew of still open at this hour. They’d let her in. She had memberships to half the private clubs in London for just such an eventuality. But going out would mean other people. She went to the fridge, got the bottle of vodka from the freezer. A row of frosted shot glasses stared at her from the fridge at eye level. She picked one, filled it up, drank.
Her head cleared. Things came back into focus. She took a drag on the cigarette, couldn’t find an ashtray, dumped it into a half-empty mug of cold coffee. It made a satisfying little hisss when it hit the water.
New York, she thought. She didn’t want to go to New York.
Isabelle Feebes, twenty-five, rich, with the best that private education could provide (a boarding school in Switzerland, another in Italy and a third and final one in England, all terminated by mutual agreement, then a year at King’s College, Cambridge, also terminated by mutual agreement, then most of a degree in London at the Royal College of Art), had managed, for most of the past two years, to avoid dealing with the vexing issue of her mother.
The Honourable Henrietta Feebes had long since retired across the pond to her apartments on the Upper West Side in New York, from which she could gaze out upon the world from a suitable height without having to go out into it too often. From time to time she’d venture forth. A private jet to Northolt, then a limousine. She would arrive, unannounced and inevitably at the worst possible moment, whenever Isabelle had just managed to relax her shoulders a little; she would fuss over Isabelle, and take her out to dinner at some expensive place only very old, very rich people went to, where the chefs were inevitably French, the views inevitably panoramic, and where Isabelle and her mother would inevitably proceed to have a blazing row.
What they fought about, or over, was never of much importance. Over the past few years of relative stability for Isabelle in London, it was the ritual itself, more than anything else, that mattered; that became almost a sort of comfort in the end. Henrietta needed – wanted – love. She demanded it. Isabelle, in her turn, craved a love her mother seemed unable to give or even understand. It was a source of constant incomprehension between them, for though they did love each other, they could yet never seem to express it in a way the other would understand.
Then came the cancer, as inevitable as a shovel shovels shit (a saying of Henrietta’s she was fond of repeating after a couple of martinis). Henrietta remained in New York, where she underwent treatment. Isabelle stayed in London, where she ran a small boutique art gallery in rapidly gentrifying Shoreditch. She went over to the States twice in those two years, where her mother drifted from room to room like a Hamlet played by Frances de la Tour at the Half Moon Theatre in Limehouse, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The first time, they went to Katz’s and her mother wore a headscarf and they fought over a corned beef sandwich and matzo ball soup. The second time, her mother wore a wig and they dined at a private reception at MoMA, to which Henrietta had just given a donation to establish a new Feebes Wing.
‘I am getting sentimental in my old age, darling,’ she said. That time there was no fight left in either of them, and when they returned, sitting in the back of the car that Carl, the old chauffeur, was driving, Isabelle saw her mother’s hands tremble in her lap, when she thought Isabelle wasn’t looking, and the skin was thin and almost translucent, and Isabelle was afraid.
She ran back to London like a coward, making excuses about work and the gallery no one, neither her mother nor herself, remotely believed, but if Henrietta was hurt by this decamping she didn’t show it. When they spoke on the phone both were cordial; the treatments were working well; work at the gallery was going well; the weather was fine, and there was talk of some rain; they must see each other soon, just as soon as things ease up; ‘Well, goodbye then’ – ‘Goodbye.’
Somehow, the fox was still out there, still watching Isabelle. She wondered if it was an emissary of the netherworld, sent to watch her, or if it was just lost. She watched the fox. The fox watched Isabelle. Somehow her shot glass was full again and then empty again. A pleasant lightness suffused her now.
‘Damn you, Mother,’ she said.
Then she started to cry, out of nowhere and startling herself. Big ugly sobs wracked her, her body shaking as she tried to hold down nausea. The fox watched her through the window, and then it scuttled off, and she was all alone.
*
When Isabelle was seven years old, Henrietta took her little orphan, as she sometimes called Isabelle back then, on a walk to Madison Square Park, across from the Flatiron Building where some subsidiary of a German firm was in the book business. Isabelle wasn’t sure what a ‘subsidiary’ was, and didn’t know anything about the book business, but she liked the little park, where mothers pushed babies in prams, men walked little dogs around on a leash, and where she saw a squirrel for the first time. Henrietta bought them both hotdogs.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Henrietta asked her. They sat on a bench and people-watched.
‘I like to draw,’ Isabelle said. She had got some mustard on her nose and tried to lick it off without success.
‘Drawing isn’t a career,’ Henrietta said, not even laughing at the faces Isabelle was pulling.
‘It was for Van Gogh,’ Isabelle said. Henrietta looked momentarily bemused.
‘Where did you learn about Van Gogh?’ she said.
‘You have that painting of a wheat field on the wall in the library room,’ Isabelle said. ‘He made that.’
‘Van Gogh barely ever sold a painting and he died poor,’ Henrietta said.
‘But he was happy, wasn’t he?’ Isabelle said. ‘He got to make beautiful paintings.’
‘I don’t think he was very happy, no,’ Henrietta said. ‘I don’t think art makes many artists happy.’
‘So why do they do it?’ Isabelle said.
‘I don’t know,’ Henrietta said.
‘I like drawing,’ Isabelle said. ‘It makes me happy.’
Henrietta looked like she wanted to say a couple of things about that – grown-up things, if Isabelle was any judge. But then Henrietta just smiled, and it was a nice smile, and the light hit her eyes in a nice way and made them sparkle, and she said, ‘Let’s get ice cream.’
It had been a nice day.
Isabelle, in truth, did not spend a lot of time in New York growing up. Henrietta liked the city, but she had old-fashioned ideas, a crumbling pile of a mansion house back in England, half a lifetime spent in Egypt and Hong Kong, and America seemed a little too democratic to her, its rich a little too rich, its art a little too modern, its poor too poor and its tired too tired, its huddled masses a little too wretched, and its multitudes (here Henrietta switching abruptly from Emma Lazarus to Walt Whitman) containing too many multitudes. New York was fine for Henrietta, but Isabelle needed a proper education, proper manners, proper people, and the sort of accent that opened doors without you having to ask. So Europe it was, for most of the time.
The cigarette was out. Isabelle didn’t feel like lighting another one. The darkness outside pressed on the house. The silence outside pressed on the house. Isabelle would have welcomed the sound of drunks staggering home, of a bottle rolling on the pavement, of a siren screaming as it went past. But even the birds were asleep, and Henrietta was in New York, and she was finally dying. Dr Steinmeier had called twice before, and each time the prognosis was imminent. But this time Isabelle knew it was true.
She had not spoken to Henrietta in over a month. Henrietta wouldn’t take her calls. She did not want Isabelle to come, did not want her ‘To see me like this, darling. You have your life to lead. How is the gallery? How is darling Simon, are you still seeing him? No? Well, no great loss.’ She coughed. It lasted a long while. ‘Don’t call again. Dr Steinmeier will be in touch,’ she said. That was five weeks ago. Nothing since then.
Selfish! It was selfish. Henrietta was a loner for most of her life. Girls’ boarding school, a series of finishing schools, then the family business, but no real family. She had many homes and no permanent one, plenty of acquaintances but no real friends. If she had lovers, affairs, she never did say. She lived in hotels, hung out with barons and bankers and artists and spies. Now she wanted to die alone. As if Isabelle being there was just another inconvenience.
The only thing in Henrietta’s life that never made sense, that was the cause of all their fighting, was Isabelle herself.