ISABELLE COULD REMEMBER PARTS OF HER OLD LIFE. They were hazy and incomplete, broken into fragments. Mama’s smell of sweat and Chanel, how warm her skin was when she snuggled into her. Mama was love, comfort, laughter. Papa was strong hands lifting her up in the air, tossing her high and catching her, laughing. Papa’s smell was cologne and cigarettes, his unshaved cheek tickling, and he made faces at her and made her laugh. Mama’s face she only knew from later, from watching her in the films she had appeared in. But in her memory Mama had no face, she was just there.
Isabelle could remember being happy, which was a strange thing to remember, because happiness was not a feeling that came to her often these days. She was uncomfortable with the idea. Art required misery, or so she told the moneyed clients who came through her gallery, citing Van Gogh with his severed ear, Kahlo with her chronic pain, Dadd’s insanity and fratricide, Caravaggio’s murderous rage, Nazi architects and Fascist fashion designers. Then she tried to flog them a Gilbert & George. In truth the gallery never made any money, the crowd Isabelle hung out with were promising art students with a taste for cheap wine and expensive dope, and she lived in a house that was too big for her as she tried to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
The little girl who liked to draw, who she remembered from that time in Madison Square Park almost with affection, was given the best private tuition and art teachers money could buy. The one thing those kind, well-meaning adults taught her was that she wasn’t good enough. What was once fun became a chore, then a subject of hatred. Henrietta, in her own way, meant well, but as usual, in her own way, had simply taken away Isabelle’s joy in what was once a simple pleasurable activity.
Still, Isabelle liked running the gallery. No point letting all that education go to waste.
Her telephone rang again, Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’ making her jump. She picked up.
‘Yes?’
‘Isabelle? It’s Melanie. So sorry to hear the news, sweetie.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I managed to find you a ready plane with crew in Biggin Hill, I’m sending a car over for you now.’
‘Thanks, Melanie. You’re a dream,’ Isabelle said.
‘I really am so sorry. She was a lovely lady, your mum.’
‘She’s still hanging on, Melanie,’ Isabelle said.
‘Yes, of course. Of course.’
Isabelle had never met Melanie. She knew her only as a voice on the phone, imagined her in some office somewhere, in some woollen skirt and jacket, or maybe tweed, with a view out of the window, but not too good a view, somewhere in Canary Wharf, anyway, with a computer in front of her and that competent voice, and long nails painted burgundy and tapping, always tapping on a keyboard. She was just the sort of person who got things done so you didn’t have to do them yourself.
‘What about Uncle James?’ Isabelle said now.
‘The baron is not well enough to travel, sweetie,’ Melanie said. ‘You know that. He barely knows what day of the week it is.’
Isabelle took a deep breath. ‘I meant, has anyone told him yet?’
‘In the morning, sweetie.’ Melanie’s voice softened. ‘For now, it’s just you.’
It was always just her. Isabelle felt the tears well up again, threaten to come out. She fought them, lit a cigarette instead.
‘You really must give that up, you know,’ Melanie said. ‘It’s not good for you.’
‘Fuck off, Melanie.’
‘Car,’ Melanie said, not in the least perturbed. Isabelle wasn’t sure Melanie ever slept. And she never got ruffled. ‘Plane. Then car again to the apartment. You can manage, right?’
‘Yes… Thanks, Melanie.’
‘Don’t mention it. Condolences again. Call me if you need anything.’
‘I will.’
The line went dead with a click. Isabelle stared at the phone. She swiped aimlessly. Cut The Rope. Fruit Ninja. Angry Birds. She wondered if she had anyone to call. She scrolled through her contacts list. Pressed Simon.
It took eight rings before he answered and he sounded dazed. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ she said.
‘Jesus, Isabelle. It’s four in the fucking morning!’
‘I just wanted to… I don’t know. Did I wake you?’ she said.
‘It’s four in the morning!’
‘I know what time it is!’ Isabelle snapped. ‘Are you alone?’
‘Does it matter?’ Simon said. Then he sighed, said, ‘Yes, I’m alone. I guess you are, too.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is everything all right, Isabelle?’
‘I’m… Not really.’
‘I’m seeing someone, you know,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Well, I am. Look, can this wait until the morning? I have to go to work in three hours.’
‘I just… Yeah,’ Isabelle said. ‘Yeah, it can wait.’
‘All right. Call me tomorrow. I mean later today. Hey. Just… Go back to bed.’
‘Yeah,’ Isabelle said. ‘I will.’ She thought of saying something else but nothing came out. She heard his breathing on the line. Then he hung up.
Why the fuck did she call Simon? She wanted to throw the phone at the wall. They’d met at a book launch, at an Aztec-themed restaurant in Camden. He went to Cambridge, his grandfather was a former ambassador and knighted, his mother was the daughter of a baronet, his uncle was something high up in the BBC. Simon was charming, suave, with beautiful white teeth and blond hair cut carelessly at great expense down to his shoulders. He played acoustic guitar. He worked in investment banking. He went to Glastonbury every year. He always closed the toothpaste tube properly after he brushed his teeth.
Simon was… easy, she thought. Easy to get along with, easy to go out with, easy to stay in with, easy to see friends with. He opened doors for her, he held her hand, he got tickets to see Florence and the Machine, he was…
He was fucking boring, is what he was, but he was so convenient that she stayed. It was like sinking into a warm scented bath of domesticity, luxuriating in that normality of settling, until she almost began to imagine this was her life and her future, until she almost began to imagine the kids (a boy and a girl), the dog (a collie), their house (West London, close to the river and all good schools, a weekend home near the New Forest), until she suffocated in it all and had a one-night stand with a punk band roadie she met in Kentish Town, staggered back to Simon’s apartment at three o’clock in the morning still reeking of sex, and threw up on his carpet. It felt better than leaving a Dear John letter. After that, Simon was reduced to an entry in her contacts list and someone she still saw occasionally at parties.
‘Well, we could still be friends,’ he’d said, and the sheer staggering banality of it threw her so much that she agreed.
Why the hell did she call him now? Well, what’s done was done. It made her feel better, anyway. At least she woke someone else up, to stare into the night. She went upstairs, ran the shower hot, washed. She picked dark jeans, a blazer, a black tee, a pair of Nikes. A black car drove smoothly to the front of the house and stopped. A driver in a suit stepped out and waited by the car. Isabelle grabbed her travel bag and went outside.
‘Morning, miss,’ the driver said.
‘Just take me to the airport,’ she said tiredly.
*
Before the accident, before Henrietta, before she was ever a Feebes or had a notion of what a Feebes was, Isabelle lived in a stone farmhouse in the Italian countryside, with a vineyard that spread out from the back of the house towards the dirt road that led to the village. There was an old donkey called Bianco in a little enclosure, a couple of chickens that ran free and laid eggs, and an Alfa Romeo parked right up front, which her father loved more than he loved anything in the world, or so he sometimes told her.
When they weren’t living in the farmhouse they were in all kinds of other places, that were often busy and confusing, where her mother pretended to be other people and her father yelled at people for not doing things the way he wanted them to.
Since they were very busy people she was most often looked after by a Spanish nanny called Esmeralda, who made funny faces and liked listening to BBC World Service and liked fresh cut flowers from the garden, and sometimes helped Isabelle’s father look for things he lost in the bedroom when Isabelle’s mother wasn’t there.
Isabelle rested her head against the window of the black car. It was the sort of car that was fast and sleek and very, very comfortable, the engine purring, the driver staring ahead, the road quiet at this time of night, dawn not yet near to breaking. Isabelle watched London end and the outer dark begin, the world of woods and hills and giant trucks parked by the wayside where the truckers grabbed a few hours’ sleep. No more foxes, not on the main road. There might still be some foxes in the woods, she thought, though more lived in the city now, joining the squirrels and the rats, west London’s green parakeets and north London’s terrapins, newcomers onto the vibrant urban landscape drawn by the culture, world-class banking facilities and convenient air connections to all points on the globe.
She didn’t want to go to New York. She didn’t want to think about Henrietta. She waited for her phone to ring, for Dr Steinmeier to cough his dry little cough and say, ‘I’m so sorry, but…’
But the phone did not ring, Dr Steinmeier didn’t call, and somewhere in New York, high above Central Park, Henrietta Feebes lay small in her opulent bed, her face wan, as she waited for the end.
Fuck, it was depressing. ‘Can you put on the radio?’ Isabelle said.
‘Sure, miss. Any preference?’
‘Don’t care.’
The driver put on the radio.
‘What the hell is that, jazz?’ Isabelle said.
‘Miss?’
‘Can’t you change it?’
‘Miss.’
The driver pressed the button again. The Lighthouse Family came on with ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’.
‘A bit on the nose,’ Isabelle said.
‘Miss? You want me to change it?’
‘It’s fine. Just drive.’
She remembered Bill Withers singing it on the radio in the kitchen in the farmhouse that day, too. She didn’t know what the song was or who sang it. She only learned the name of it later. But she remembered the music, and the sudden silence outside, and then the sound of a car that wasn’t the Alfa Romeo, of quiet wheels and a German engine, gliding along the dirt track to the house.
Esmeralda had been crying all that day but wouldn’t say why. It had rained, and the air smelled of pine needles and wood smoke, and snails came out after the rain and danced their slow dances outside. When the car came it carelessly drove over two of the snails and crushed them. Isabelle was watching out of the kitchen window. She saw the big black car, and the driver in the peaked cap get out and open the passenger door, and she saw the small, determined woman who stepped out, looked at the house, looked up at the window and saw Isabelle in her turn.
The woman wore black, the sort of black only rich people wore. Esmeralda came out to welcome her. She was still crying. The woman in black said something to Esmeralda and Esmeralda nodded miserably and stepped aside, and the woman in black entered the farmhouse as though she owned it, which Isabelle much later found out that she did.
The woman in black came in and Isabelle stayed at the kitchen window. The driver outside lit a cigarette and smoked it leaning against the car. Isabelle could hear the small woman moving through the house. She heard her enter the kitchen, and there she stopped, but Isabelle didn’t turn around.
The woman said, ‘Isabelle.’
At that Isabelle did finally and reluctantly turn. The sky clouded again outside. It was going to rain.
‘What?’ she said. Something awful took hold of her. The whole day had been wrong. The woman’s appearance was a wrongness too many, and she stared at her in hate, though hate was a strong word. Perhaps it was fear.
‘My name is Henrietta Feebes,’ the woman said. She came closer then, and knelt down to be at Isabelle’s height, and she took Isabelle’s hands in hers as she spoke.
‘Something sad happened,’ Henrietta said.
‘Something sad?’ Isabelle said. ‘Did you do it?’
‘Goodness, no,’ Henrietta said. ‘It’s about your parents, Isabelle. There was an accident.’
‘An accident?’ Isabelle said. ‘Are they all right?’
‘I’m afraid they’re not,’ Henrietta said. Thinking about it later, picturing it over and over in her head, Isabelle was astounded at how badly the conversation went. How uncomfortable Henrietta must have been, how horrified Isabelle herself was. She just knew, without being told. Knew something terrible had happened, that this woman represented it, had brought it down upon Isabelle’s life. And every word Isabelle spoke was a brick, being put up one by one to make a wall, to stop the bad that Henrietta Feebes represented from engulfing Isabelle.
‘What happened to them?’ Isabelle said.
‘They were on a boat,’ Henrietta said. ‘Well, a yacht. They were having a party for a new movie they’d just finished. I knew your mother when she was a young woman, you know. I helped her – well, this is neither here or there. There was a storm.’
‘What sort of storm?’ Isabelle said.
‘A bad one,’ Henrietta said. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to do this. Your parents died. I don’t know what to say. There is nothing I could say that would fix this. I am so sorry.’ She reached out for Isabelle and engulfed her in an awkward hug. Isabelle screamed, the brick wall collapsing, the monster reaching across it to trap her in its tentacles. She pushed Henrietta desperately away.
‘Let me go!’ Isabelle screamed. ‘Let me go!’
She kicked Henrietta in the shin. The woman, startled, pulled away. Isabelle ran, terrified of being chased. She ran down the corridor and out of the door, past the driver who, caught off guard, dropped his cigarette and tried to grab her. She ran as fast as she ever ran, out of the gate, along the dirt track, into the vineyard, trying to lose herself between the hanging vines. She could hear them behind her, calling her name, the driver cursing, Esmeralda crying. Isabelle ran and ran, the blood pounding in her head, until she reached the toolshed and took shelter inside. She hid, in the darkest place she could find, huddling with her arms round her knees and her head down.
None of it seemed real. Mama and Papa were going to come back any minute. The Alfa Romeo’s engine would sound and the car itself would glide into the driveway and they would come out, calling her name, both of them smiling, arms open for a hug. It would all be just like it was. It would all be like it should be.
Silence outside. Birds calling. Isabelle cried. Someone tried the door handle outside and she froze. The door creaked open, soft footsteps came in. Henrietta knelt beside her.
‘I can’t bring your parents back,’ she said. ‘But I can give you a good life, Isabelle. Please. Get up.’
Isabelle looked up. Henrietta’s face, though alien to her, was nevertheless open, sympathetic. It was the only friendly face she’d see. The realisation almost crushed her. Henrietta swept damp hair from Isabelle’s eyes. She took out a handkerchief, embroidered in gold thread with the letters HF. She wiped Isabelle’s tears.
‘Everything will be fine,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. Come along, now.’
She took Isabelle’s hand. Isabelle didn’t resist. Henrietta pulled her to her feet. She didn’t try to hug her again. She held on to Isabelle’s hand and Isabelle followed her, out of the door, through the vineyard, back to the house and the waiting car.