Chapter Six

SIX

In the armchair in her front room, her favored reading spot, Irene waited for Laura, who was late. The armchair, once part of a pair, although its partner had long since been consigned to the dump, was pushed right up against the window of the front room. It was the spot that trapped the sun for most of the morning and well into the afternoon too, the spot from which Irene could watch the world go by and the world going by could, in turn, watch her, fulfilling their expectations of the aged: sitting in a chair in a room, alone, musing on the past, on former glory, on missed opportunities, on the way things used to be. On dead people.

Which Irene wasn’t doing at all. Well, not exclusively, in any case. Mostly, she was waiting for Laura to turn up to fetch her weekly groceries, and in the meantime, she was sorting through one of the three boxes of musty-smelling books that Carla Myerson had left for her. The books had belonged to a dead person—Angela. Carla’s sister and Irene’s neighbor, also Irene’s dearest friend.

“They’re not worth anything,” Carla had told Irene when she dropped them off sometime last week, “just paperbacks. I was going to take them to the charity shop, but then I thought . . .” She’d given Irene’s living room a quick once-over, a wrinkle appearing at the bridge of her nose as she said: “I thought they might be to your taste.”

A veiled insult, Irene supposed. Not that she cared, particularly. Carla was the sort of woman who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Not worth anything? Showed what she knew.

It was true that when Irene opened up some of the more ancient Penguins, their bright orange covers tattered and worn, their pages began to crumble beneath her fingertips. Succumbing already to slow fire, the acidification of the paper destroying it from within, eating away at the pages, making them brittle and breakable. It was terribly sad when you thought about it, all those words, all those stories slowly disappearing. Those books, in any case, she’d have to throw out. But as for the rest of them—they were very much to her taste, so much so that she’d already read quite a few of them. She and Angela used to swap books all the time; they shared a predilection for the best sort of crime novels (not the bloody ones; the clever ones, like Barbara Vine, or P. D. James) and for the sort of book club fiction at which the likes of Carla Myerson no doubt turned up their noses.

The fact that Irene had read most of them was beside the point. The important thing—the thing that Carla probably didn’t know, even though this was her own sister they were talking about—was that Angela was a vandal when it came to books: a cracker of spines, a dog-earer of pages, a scribbler in margins. So, when you leafed through Angela Sutherland’s copy of The Haunting of Hill House, for example, you might notice that she’d underscored certain lines (the poor girl was hated to death; she hanged herself, by the way); when you turned the pages of Angela’s well-thumbed A Dark-Adapted Eye, you discovered how strongly she sympathized with Vera’s feelings toward her sister: exactly this! she had scrawled in the margin next to the line that told us Nothing kills like contempt, and contempt for her came upon me in a hot flood. Every now and again, you might even come across some little scrap of Angela’s past—a bookmark, say, or a train ticket, or a scrap of paper with a shopping list on it: cigarettes, milk, pasta. In No Country for Old Men, there was a postcard purchased at the V&A, a photograph of a house with a white picket fence; in In the Woods, there was a scrap of paper with a drawing on it, two children holding hands. In The Cement Garden, she found a birthday card, blue and white with a picture of a boat on it, the paper creased, worn thin with handling. To darling Daniel, the message read, with all my love on your tenth birthday, kisses, Auntie Carla.

Not worth anything? Showed what Carla knew. The truth was that when you read a book that had previously been owned and read by Angela Sutherland, you became part of a conversation. And since, tragically, there were never to be any more actual conversations with Angela, that, to Irene, was valuable. That was invaluable.

If it weren’t for the nagging worry of the whereabouts of Laura, Irene might have been quite contented, basking like a lizard in the morning sunlight, sorting through the books, watching the office workers and the mums with their children hurrying past in the lane outside.

Irene’s little two-up, two-down house sat on one side of Hayward’s Place, a narrow lane in the heart of the city. Not much more than a footpath cutting through between two larger roads, Hayward’s Place was flanked on one side by five small identical houses (Irene’s was number two), and on the other by the site of the Red Bull Theatre (which may or may not have burned down in the Great Fire of London and which had now been developed into an uninspiring office space). It offered a convenient shortcut and was, on weekdays at least, busy day and night.

Where was Laura? They had said Tuesday, hadn’t they? She usually came on a Tuesday, because on Tuesdays she had a later start at the launderette. Was today a Tuesday? Irene thought that it was, but she was starting to doubt herself. She pulled herself up out of her chair, gingerly—she’d not long ago twisted an ankle, which was one of the reasons she needed help with the shopping in the first place—and with effort circumvented the little piles of books on the floor, the read and unread, the favored and the destined-for-the-Oxfam-shop. She pottered across her living room, furnished simply with her chair and a small sofa, a dresser on which sat an unfashionably small and rarely watched television set, and a bookcase atop which perched her radio. She turned the radio on.

At ten o’clock, the newsreader confirmed that it was indeed a Tuesday—Tuesday the thirteenth of March, to be precise. The newsreader went on to say that Prime Minister Theresa May had given the Russian premier until midnight to explain how a former spy was poisoned in Salisbury; he said that a Labor MP had denied slapping a female constituent on the buttocks; he said that a young woman was being questioned in connection with the murder of Daniel Sutherland, the twenty-three-year-old man found dead on a narrowboat on the Regent’s Canal on Sunday. The newsreader went on to say a number of other things too, but Irene couldn’t hear him over the sound of blood rushing in her ears.

She was imagining things. She must be. Daniel Sutherland? It couldn’t be. Her hands trembling, Irene turned the radio off and then back on again, but the newsreader had moved on now; he was talking about something else, about the weather, about a cold front moving in.

Perhaps it was a different Daniel Sutherland? How many Daniel Sutherlands were there? She hadn’t bought the newspaper that morning, she hardly ever did anymore, so she couldn’t check that. She’d heard it was possible to find anything on a mobile phone these days, but she wasn’t entirely sure she knew how, and in any case, she couldn’t quite remember where she’d seen the phone last. Upstairs somewhere, probably. Battery dead as a dodo, probably.

No, she’d just have to do things the old-fashioned way; she’d have to go around to the newsagent to get the paper. She needed milk and bread, in any case, if Laura wasn’t coming. In the hallway, she shrugged on her coat and picked up her bag and house key, noticing just as she was about to open the front door, just in time, that she was still wearing her slippers. She went back into the living room to change her shoes.

She was forgetful, that was all. Funny, though, how nervous she felt when she left the house these days—she used to be out and about all the time, shopping, going to the library, volunteering at the Red Cross shop on the high street, but you fell out of the habit quickly, after a period of being housebound. She needed to watch that. She didn’t want to end up being one of those old people, too frightened to walk out their old front door.

She was, she had to admit, happy to avoid the supermarket—so full of the impatient, unthinking, distracted young. Not that she didn’t like young people. She didn’t want to become one of those sorts of elderly either—the bitter sort, closed-off and self-satisfied in their beige senior citizen sandals ordered from the back pages of the Sunday supplements. Irene wore blue-and-orange New Balance trainers with a Velcro strap. They were a Christmas present from Angela. Irene had nothing against the young; she’d even been young herself once. Only young people made assumptions, didn’t they? Some young people. They assumed you were deaf, blind, weak. Some of these things might be true (and some not—Irene had the hearing of a bat; she often wished, in fact, given the paper-thin walls of her house, that her hearing wasn’t so acute). Nevertheless, it was the assumption that rankled.

Back home from the shops, she found nothing in the newspaper about Daniel Sutherland (and not only that but she realized she’d forgotten to buy marmalade to have on her toast, so the trip was a bust). She did eventually locate her phone (in the bathroom), but its battery was (as she’d predicted) flat, and she couldn’t for the life of her remember where she’d put the charger.

Infuriating.

But she wasn’t losing her marbles. It wasn’t dementia. That was the conclusion to which people jumped when you were old and forgot things, as though the young didn’t also misplace their keys or forget the odd thing off their shopping list. Irene was certain it wasn’t dementia. She did not, after all, say toaster when she meant tablecloth, she didn’t get lost on the way home from the supermarket. She didn’t (often) lose the thread of a conversation, she didn’t put the remote control in the fridge.

She did have turns. But it definitely wasn’t dementia; her doctor had told her so. It was just that if she let herself get run-down, if she forgot to drink enough water and eat regularly, she became tired and then she became confused and before she knew it, she’d quite lost herself. Your resources are depleted, Mrs. Barnes, the doctor told her the last time this had happened. Severely depleted. You have to take better care of yourself, you have to eat well, you have to stay hydrated. If you don’t, of course you will find yourself confused and dizzy! And you might have another fall. And we don’t want that, do we?

How to explain to him, this kind (if ever so slightly condescending) young man with his soft voice and his watery blue eyes, that sometimes she wanted to lose herself in confusion? How on earth to make clear to him that while it was frightening, the feeling could also be, on occasion, thrilling? That she allowed herself, from time to time, to skip meals, hoping it would come back to her, that feeling that someone was missing, and that if she waited patiently, they’d come back?

Because in those moments she’d forget that William, the man she had loved, whose bed she’d shared for more than forty years, was dead. She could forget that he’d been gone for six years and she could lose herself in the fantasy that he’d just gone out to work, or to meet a friend at the pub. And eventually she’d again hear his familiar whistle out in the lane, and she’d straighten her dress and pat her hair down, and in a minute, just a minute, she’d hear his key in the door.

Irene had been waiting for William the first time she met Laura. The day they found Angela’s body.

---

It was terribly cold. Irene had been worried, because she’d woken up and William wasn’t there, and she couldn’t understand where he’d got to. Why hadn’t he come home? She took herself downstairs and put on her dressing gown, she went outside and oh, it was freezing, and there was no sign of him. No sign of anyone out in the lane. Where was everyone? Irene turned to go back inside only to find that the door had swung shut, but that was all right because she knew better than to go out without a key in her pocket; she wouldn’t make that mistake again, not after last time. But then—and this was the ridiculous thing—she just couldn’t get the key into the lock. Her hands were frozen into claws, and she just could not do it, she kept dropping the key, and it was so silly, but she found herself in tears. It was so cold, and she was alone, and she’d no idea where William was. She cried out, but nobody came, and then she remembered Angie! Angela would be next door, wouldn’t she? And if she knocked softly, she wouldn’t wake the boy up.

So she did, she opened the gate and she knocked softly on the front door, calling out, “Angela! It’s me. It’s Irene. I can’t get back in. I can’t open the door. Could you help me?”

There was no reply, and so she knocked again, and still no reply. She fumbled for her key again, but how her fingers ached! Her breath was white in front of her face, and her feet were numb, and as she turned she stumbled against the gate, banging her hip and crying out, tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Are you all right? God, you’re not all right, course you’re not. Here, here, it’s okay, let me help you.” There was a girl there. A strange girl wearing strange clothes, trousers with a flowery pattern, a bulky silver jacket. She was small and thin, with white-blond hair and a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and she had the most enormous blue eyes, her pupils like black holes. “Fucking hell, mate, you’re freezing.” She had both of Irene’s hands in her own; she was rubbing them gently. “Oh, you’re so cold, aren’t you? Is this your place? Have you locked yourself out?” Irene could smell alcohol on the girl’s breath; she wasn’t sure she looked old enough to drink, but you never knew these days. “Is there someone in? Oi!” she yelled, banging on Angela’s door. “Oi! Let us in!”

“Oh, not too loud,” Irene said. “It’s ever so late; I wouldn’t want to wake the little boy.”

The girl gave her an odd look. “It’s six thirty in the morning,” she said. “If they’ve got kids, they should be awake by now.”

“Oh . . . no,” Irene said. That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be six thirty in the morning. That would mean William hadn’t come home at all, that he’d been out all night. “Oh,” she said, her freezing fingers raised to her mouth. “Where is he? Where is William?”

The girl looked stricken. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know,” she said. She took a crumpled Kleenex from her pocket and dabbed at Irene’s face. “We’ll sort it out, all right? We will. But first I’ve got to get you inside; you’re ice cold, you are.”

The girl let go of Irene’s hands, turned back toward Angela’s front door and banged hard with the side of her fist, then she crouched down, picking up a pebble and hurling it against the window.

“Oh dear,” Irene said.

The girl ignored her. She was kneeling now, pressing her fingers against the flap of the letter slot, pushing it open. “Oi!” she yelled, and then all of a sudden she jumped backward, flailing in the air for a second before landing heavily on the flagstones on her bony bottom. “Oh, fucking hell,” she said, looking up at Irene, her eyes impossibly wide. “Jesus Christ, is this your house? How long . . . Jesus Christ. Who is that?” She was scrabbling to her feet, grabbing Irene’s hands again, roughly this time. “Who is that in there?”

“It’s not my house, it’s Angela’s,” Irene said, quite perturbed by the girl’s odd behavior.

“Where do you live?”

“Well, obviously I live next door,” Irene said, and she held out the key.

“Why the fuck would that be obvious?” the girl said, but she took the key anyway and unlocked the door without a problem. She put her arm around Irene’s shoulders and guided her inside. “Come on then, you go in, I’ll get you a cup of tea in a minute. Wrap yourself up in a blanket or something, yeah? You need to warm up.” Irene went into the living room, she sat down in her usual chair, she waited for the girl to bring her a cup of tea, like she said she would, but it didn’t come. Instead, she could hear sounds from the hall: the girl was making a call from her phone in the hallway.

“Are you calling William?” Irene asked her.

“I’m calling the police,” the girl said.

Irene sat in her favorite armchair, and she heard the girl saying, “Yeah, there’s someone in there,” and “No, no, no chance, it’s way beyond that, definitely, one hundred percent. You can smell it.”

Then she ran off. Not right away—first, she brought Irene a cup of tea with a couple of sugars in it. She knelt at Irene’s feet, took Irene’s hands in her own, and told her to sit tight until the police came. “When they get here, tell them to go next door, all right? Don’t you go yourself. Okay? And then they can help you find William, all right? Just . . . don’t go outside again, okay, you promise me?” She scrambled back to her feet. “I’ve gotta scarper, I’m sorry, but I’ll come back.” She crouched down again. “My name’s Laura. I’ll come see you later. Okay? You stay golden, yeah?”

---

•   •   •By the time the police arrived, two young women in uniforms, Irene had forgotten the girl’s name. It didn’t seem to matter, terribly, because the police weren’t interested in her; all they were interested in was whatever was going on next door. Irene watched from her own doorway as they crouched down, calling out as the girl had done, and then starting back, just as she had done. They spoke into their little radios, they coaxed Irene back into her own home, one of them put the kettle on, fetched a blanket from upstairs. A while later, a young man appeared, wearing a brightly colored jacket. He took her temperature and gently pinched her skin, he asked her lots of questions, like when she’d last eaten and what day it was and who was prime minister.

She knew the last one. “Oh, that awful May woman,” she said tartly. “I’m not a fan. You’re not a fan either are you?” The man smiled, shaking his head. “No, I’d imagine not, what with you being from India.”

“I’m from Woking,” the young man said.

“Ah, well.” Irene wasn’t sure what to say to that. She was feeling a bit flustered, and very confused, and it didn’t help that the young man was handsome, very handsome, with dark eyes and the longest lashes, and his hands were soft, and so gentle, and when he touched her wrist, she could feel herself blush. He had a beautiful smile and a kind manner, even when he admonished her gently for not taking care of herself, telling her she was very dehydrated and that she needed to drink lots of water with electrolytes in it, which was exactly what her GP had told her.

The handsome man left, and Irene did as she was told; she ate a piece of toast with some honey on it and drank two large glasses of water without electrolytes because she didn’t have any of those, and was at last starting to feel a little more like herself when she heard the most terrible crash from outside, a terrifying sound and, heart racing, hurried to the window in the living room. There were men out there, men in uniforms using a sort of metal battering ram to smash Angie’s door down. “Oh dear,” Irene said out loud, thinking—stupidly—that Angela wasn’t going to be pleased about that at all.

Somehow, still, the penny had not dropped, that Angela would never be pleased by anything ever again, and it wasn’t until another police officer, a different woman, not in uniform, came round and sat her down and explained that Angela was dead, that she’d fallen down the stairs and broken her neck, that finally Irene understood.

When the policewoman told Irene that Angela might have been lying there for days, for as much as a whole week, Irene could barely speak for the shame. Poor Angela, lying alone, on the other side of that wall, and Irene—having one of her turns, letting herself slip away into confusion—had not even missed her.

“She didn’t cry out,” Irene said, when at last she found her voice. “I would have heard her. These walls are paper thin.” The policewoman was kind; she told Irene that it was likely that Angela was killed instantly when she fell. “But surely you can tell when it was that she died?” Irene knew a little about forensics, from her reading. But the woman said that the heating had been on, turned up very high, and that Angela’s body had been lying right up against the radiator at the bottom of the stairs, which made it impossible to ascertain her time of death with any accuracy.

No one would ever know, not really, what had happened. The police said it was an accident, and Irene accepted that, though the whole thing felt wrong to her, too hastily concluded. There was conflict in Angela’s life, plenty of it: she argued with her sister, she argued with her son—or rather, it seemed to Irene, one or the other of them came by to harangue her, leaving her upset, setting her off on a binge. Irene mentioned the arguments—over money, over Daniel—to the police, but they didn’t seem interested. Angela was an alcoholic. She drank too much, she fell, she broke her neck. “It happens more often than you’d think,” the kind policewoman said. “But if you think of anything else, anything that might be relevant,” she said, handing Irene a card with a telephone number on it, “feel free to give me a call.”

“I saw her with a man,” Irene said, suddenly, just as the woman was leaving.

“Okay,” the woman said carefully. “And when was this?”

Irene couldn’t say. She couldn’t remember. Her mind was a blank. No, not a blank, it was fogged. There were things in there, memories, important ones, only everything was shifting about, hazily; she couldn’t fix on anything. “Two weeks ago, perhaps?” she ventured, hopefully.

The woman pursed her lips. “Okay. Can you remember anything else about this man? Could you describe him, or . . .”

“They were talking out there, in the lane,” Irene said. “Something was wrong; Angela was crying.”

“She was crying?”

“She was. Although . . .” Irene paused, caught between resistance to disloyalty and an urge to tell the truth. “She’s quite often tearful when she has a little too much to drink; she gets . . . melancholic.”

“Right.” The woman nodded, smiled; she was ready for the off. “You don’t remember what this man looked like, do you? Tall, short, fat, thin . . .”

Irene shook her head. He was just . . . normal; he was average. “He had a dog!” she said at last. “A little dog. Black and tan. An Airedale, perhaps? No, an Airedale’s bigger, isn’t it? Maybe a fox terrier?”

---

That was eight weeks ago. First Angela had died, and now her son too. Irene had no idea whether the police had ever inquired about the man she’d seen outside with Angela; if they had, it came to nothing, because her death was recorded as accidental. Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart?

In fiction, that would never stand.