We moved Rita’s and Elena’s things into their apartment on the last day of December, along with two mattresses and a kitchen set we’d picked up at the Sally Ann. The landlord had had the whole place repainted in white; in the blaze of snow-reflected light coming in through the windows the apartment looked charmed, incandescent. We made tentative order and then shared a bottle of cheap sparkling wine on the living-room floor, our New Year’s Eve.
“You did all right for yourselves,” I said.
“Yeah,” Rita said. “Thanks.”
Within a few days the apartment had taken on the rough shape of home. Elena had claimed the front room as her bedroom, Rita the one at the back. It was the first time since they’d lived together that they’d had separate rooms. With the split, their tastes seemed to have veered from one another’s as if the collective aesthetic bred of their years of closeness had suddenly broken down, Elena’s room spare and obsessively ordered, Rita’s girlish and cluttered. Rita’s room had the air of a cottage, with its low ceiling and panelled walls, its windowed view of the still snow-filled back garden.
We stood a moment staring out her window at the snow.
“So how do you like being on your own?”
“I dunno. I keep expecting Mom to come in and make me clean my room.”
The middle room, closed off from the front one by pocket doors, had been arranged as the living room, the television in a corner on top of a plastic milk crate, and a large corduroy sofa, apparently new, positioned to face it.
“Nice sofa.”
“We thought we’d splurge a little from our residence refund,” Elena said.
She seemed to be making a pointed reference to the money that Rita had offered to use to repay what I’d fronted them. It was as if she were marking off territory, downplaying the help I had given.
“It wasn’t very expensive,” Rita said. “There was a sale.”
“Anyway it really sets the room off,” I said, and let the matter drop.
I got into the habit of coming by on weekends or on my way home from classes, to help with little jobs around the apartment at first but then staying on for meals and maybe a couple of hours of TV. There was no explicit invitation for these visits, more an understanding, an instinctive accommodation even on Elena’s part to the notion that we formed a sort of household, one that stood like the inevitable coalescing of the shadowy alliance that had existed among us in childhood. The days, with their cold and snow, their after-Christmas somnolence, gave their apartment the feel of a winter retreat. The heat there was a bone-soothing radiator heat that left a throb in the air like after music had played; when it came on, the rads clicked and clanged the way the steam pipes had in the greenhouses on my father’s farm.
Rita and Elena had worked out a schedule of TV shows they allowed themselves, trashy sitcoms mainly or bad detective dramas like “Charlie’s Angels.” The shows seemed to function like a common language or code between them from the years they’d spent watching them together. Elena would install herself in the old beanbag chair from their childhood with her cigarettes and a can of Coke at her side and a bowl of popcorn or chips in her lap and focus in on these shows like someone in the thrall of a hated rival, looking never more vulnerable than she did then, sitting there in her scruffy house clothes and stockinged feet so obviously at war with herself, so taken in.
“I can’t believe this crap,” she’d say, but there was always the same wordless single-mindedness in her whenever one of the shows from their schedule was coming on.
Sometimes when I came by, Elena would have friends over. These were women she’d apparently met in her classes or in a discussion group she was part of, a few who came by fairly regularly and then a changing roster of others. Some were prankish and loud, full of bravado, punked up in leather and spiky hair or wearing oversized Arrow shirts or rolled-cuffed blazers obviously culled from the Goodwill; others had the same terse, sardonic air as Elena herself, which when joined with hers made everything they said seem part of some ongoing inside joke. Toward me, these women tended to show not so much hostility as a kind of willed indifference, the making a point of excluding me from their conversation. Elena would neither support them in this nor discourage them, allowing me a place of sorts as if I were a roommate passing through but in the same way suggesting I was extraneous, not a part of them.
These women would change the mood of the apartment like some fleeting shift of light, leaving afterwards always the small, not unpleasant bruise of their presence, the dim, background sense of something known and not, never quite put into words. You could almost smell them in the place, their particular energy, the almost cultish air of agreement that bound them in their little circle like a haze of cigarette smoke. I was always aware of their bodies, not so much as sexual things, but more like phrases or words in some unknown language; the word “maternal” kept urging itself on me but it wasn’t right, was perhaps just a way of explaining a physicality that had none of the usual messages or points of reference. I kept wanting to please them in some way, as if in so doing I could gain access to this secret energy, get in on their joke, but it didn’t take long before I’d been put off by the little pools of silence that tended to stretch out around any comment from me.
Rita and I didn’t talk much about these friends, even though their import began to grow less and less mistakable.
“They’re quite the troupe,” I said. “A little forbidding.”
But Rita wouldn’t engage.
“I don’t know. They’re all right.”
“Do you get along with them?”
“Sort of. They’re Elena’s friends, I don’t really know them very well. And then they’re pretty political and all that.”
“So that kind of thing doesn’t interest you?”
“It’s not that. It’s just – they make it seem like I’m a part of them somehow, like I’ll just go along with them. It can get a bit weird sometimes.”
Then one day I came by to find that Elena had had her hair cut, short, her long feminine tresses and curls given way to a kind of homely featurelessness. The change was so dramatic that it seemed she’d switched personalities overnight.
“It’s a pretty big difference,” I said.
“Maybe that’s the point.”
It was as if a whole layer of her had been stripped away to reveal this stranger beneath. Only now did it occur to me that this thing, this difference in her, might have to be dealt with in some way. In Rita, too, there had been a shift: she kept the slightest distance between herself and Elena now as if Elena were charged, electrostatic. I’d make joking references to her about Elena’s “political” friends, trying to break the ice, but always the same screen would get thrown up, the same clouded look would come into her eyes. She had grown up with this woman, traded make-up and clothes, been a sister to her. Perhaps there were things about their relationship she preferred not to know, entanglements she didn’t want to look into. Or perhaps the thing was simpler than that, for her as for all of us, just a matter of what was easiest, safe, what would least disturb the comfortable calm we’d settled into.
Toward the end of February we got the news that Mr. Amherst was ill. Everything happened very fast: the word came that he’d gone into hospital and then a few days later that he’d been transferred up to special care in London.
“The Big C,” Elena said. “Not that Mom would ever come out and say it.”
There was a bitterness in her I couldn’t place, whose object I couldn’t decipher. As a child she’d always been the good one, the well-behaved one, Rita’s foil. But now she never spoke of the Amhersts without this undertone, this air of dismissal.
I drove them down to London. Stretched out in his bed Mr. Amherst looked small as a child, his body just a frugal hieroglyph against the bedsheets. His skin was so jaundiced it looked as if it had been painted up for a gag.
“You cut your hair,” he said to Elena.
“Yeah. For a change.”
“Well I always wanted a boy,” he said.
He had pancreatic cancer. Elena learned this not from Mrs. Amherst but by making enquiries at the nurses’ station, passing the information on to Rita and me when we went down to the cafeteria for a smoke.
“That’s why he’s yellow like that,” she said. “The bile or something.”
But back in his room, where Mrs. Amherst sat in grim, smiling guardianship next to his bed, no one made any reference to his condition.
Rita and Elena stayed on in London through the weekend. But then they’d been back at school only a matter of days before Mr. Amherst died. His death had come so quickly it seemed unreal. It was hard to gauge what it meant to Rita and Elena, who Mr. Amherst had been to them.
“It was stupid of her to send us back to school,” Elena said. “We should have been there.”
“Maybe she thought he was getting better,” Rita said.
“Right. She could have looked it up in a medical book, for Christ’s sake. He was lucky he lasted as long as he did.”
We drove back to Mersea for the funeral. There was a viewing the night before at the funeral home, Mrs. Amherst sitting in stony composure between Rita and Elena in the receiving line yet seeming afflicted beyond words. The casket was open but they’d been unable to hide the jaundice in Mr. Amherst’s skin. It felt indiscreet somehow to see him like that, shrivelled and yellowed like a dried reed, so much slighter in death than he’d been even in life.
When I went by the house after the funeral the next day, Mrs. Amherst’s breath reeked of liquor.
“It was very kind of you to come,” she said, her face drawn up in false self-control like a mask.
When other visitors came it was Rita who covered for her, taking coats and offering coffee, Elena meanwhile hovering gloomily in the background seeming at once angered and humiliated, not only by her mother’s drunkenness but by her father’s death, by the sordidness of it, the intractability. In the small-town domesticity of the Amhersts’ house she looked like a foreign species, someone who’d walked in by mistake. For a while she stood pretending to look through a bookshelf against one wall of the living room. I could see some of the guests smiling nervously in her direction, trying to work up the resolve to approach her, then finally turning away.
Rita was wearing the same dark dress suit she had worn to my own father’s funeral less than a year before.
“You don’t have to stay,” she said. “It must be awkward for you.”
“It’s all right.”
Coming out of the bathroom upstairs I slipped into a little room whose shelves and glass-coloured cabinets held Mr. Amherst’s collection of toys. Things his great-grandfather had made, mainly, a wooden train set, a tiny village complete with people and houses and trees, but also others, old jack-in-the-boxes, yellowing painted-cheeked dolls, that had obviously been bought. I had seen the collection only once before, when I’d stumbled on it by chance during one of my Sunday visits years earlier. It struck me as odd suddenly how it had been sequestered away here all these years like some shameful secret. It looked even more forlorn now than it had when I’d first seen it, as if something in Mr. Amherst, some passion or sense of wonder, had remained forever closed up here, had never found any expression outside this roomful of yellowing, unused toys.
The day after the funeral Rita called me at my aunt’s to say she and Elena would be ready to leave the following morning.
“I thought you’d stay on a while,” I said.
“I don’t know. Mom thinks it’s best.”
Mrs. Amherst came to the door when I arrived for them. She seemed to have managed to pull herself together: there was a sense in the house of some gargantuan effort made, of everything drawn up around her like a cloak.
“There’s no point in their missing any more school than they have to,” she said.
She was wearing rouge on her cheeks, just slightly over-applied. Around her the house sat in calm, quiet orderliness like an extension of her: this was what she had always been to me, these varnished tabletops, these lace doilies, this cut glass; these were the things that had always seemed to hold her in place.
But once we were on the road it came out that she was thinking of selling up and returning to England. There seemed something unconscionable in this, preposterous, that these solidities she had ruled over could be allowed to vanish without a trace.
“But she’s been here for years,” I said.
Rita was staring out through the side window.
“I guess she never really felt she fit in,” she said. “She doesn’t have much to keep her here now.”
There was an emotion in the air I couldn’t place, a sort of inchoate churning of things, the inexpressibility of loss. In a matter of days, the very foundations of Rita’s and Elena’s lives, their whole idea of home, had shifted, fallen away.
“There’s you two,” I said.
“Yeah.” But there wasn’t any anger in this. “Though maybe it’s a question of who’s leaving who.”
It sounded like a confession, the acknowledgement of the need to run, to get past, to start again. No looking back. In the rear seat Elena had stretched out and closed her eyes as if nursing a headache.
“Thank god it’s over,” she said, and then we were on the highway again, counting the miles across a desolate February landscape.