Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Margaret Forster
Title Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Copyright
Dame’s Delight
Georgy Girl
The Bogeyman
The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff
The Park
Miss Owen-Owen is At Home
Fenella Phizackery
Mr Bone’s Retreat
The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury
Mother Can You Hear Me?
The Bride of Lowther Fell
Marital Rites
Private Papers
Have the Men Had Enough?
Lady’s Maid
The Battle for Christabel
Mothers’ Boys
Shadow Baby
The Memory Box
Diary of an Ordinary Woman
Is There Anything You Want?
Keeping the World Away
Over
Isa & May
The Unknown Bridesmaid
The Rash Adventurer
William Makepeace Thackeray
Significant Sisters
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Daphne du Maurier
Hidden Lives
Rich Desserts & Captain’s Thin
Precious Lives
Good Wives?
My Life in Houses
Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (editor)
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Epub ISBN: 9781473523845
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VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Chatto & Windus is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Margaret Forster 2016
Margaret Forster has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Chatto & Windus in 2016
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781784740665
THE FIRST DAY, free. She walked in a public park, her legs heavy, and yet she felt untethered, floating, waiting for a wind to blow her along. All the green of the trees ahead made her eyes feel muzzy. She blinked constantly, to clear the shimmering. There were groups of people about, sitting on the grass having picnics, or sauntering along the pathways in the full sun. She came to a pond. She took in a woman throwing sticks for a dog, and another, watched by a child in a buggy, feeding ducks. She swayed slightly, and wondered which path she should take. Then she registered a man, all in black, standing on a hillock above the pond. He had a phone held to his ear, and was talking, though he was too far away for her to hear any words. She turned, and began to go up a hill opposite the pond, up a path with no one on it. Suddenly, halfway up, she realised someone was walking in step with her, saying something.
His voice was quiet. He was now so absolutely in step with her that she couldn’t see him properly.
‘Are you her?’ he said.
Calm, she told herself, calm. She didn’t reply. This was mid-afternoon in a public park, plenty of people about.
‘Are you her?’ he asked again.
He still had the phone pressed to his ear though this ear was covered by the flap of a hat, the sort pilots used to wear. She decided to turn and walk back the way she had come. He turned with her.
‘Who are you then?’ he said, voice still soft. ‘If you aren’t that bitch, who are you?’
She quickened her pace. He quickened his. He might follow her out of the park. Panic made her stumble. He took hold of her arm.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said. ‘Eh? What’s wrong? You dozy bitch.’
All this time, his voice remained low. No one passing would be able to hear it. Common sense told her he was either merely eccentric or else harmlessly mad, but her body was reacting differently. She was trembling. He was talking again, but she couldn’t take in what he was saying. It was ten years ago. He couldn’t possibly have recognised her. She took a deep breath. Probably this was some sort of game he regularly played. ‘Are you her?’ meant nothing. It was merely an opening gambit. She was nearly out of the park and into the road. She turned left, towards the bus stop, and he turned and went back into the park.
She sat down at the bus stop, flushed and sweating, and closed her eyes. She would have to leave London. They had told her it would be advisable, but she hadn’t listened. London was full of weird people. Once, that had been part of the thrill of living here, but not now.
Where should she go?
She bought a map of the British Isles and opened it out flat on the floor of the room they’d given her. Somewhere north would be best, but she didn’t know anything about the North, or even the Midlands. She took out a clip from her hair and, closing her eyes, she jabbed it on the map. It had landed on a blue shaded area of sea, somewhere between Wales and Ireland. She turned the map round and shut her eyes again. This time the point of the clip hit land, just south of a town she saw was called Workington, near the sea. She liked the idea of being on the coast and she liked the name of the town. Workington – a working town, honest, straightforward. It appealed to her. Did Workington, too, have deranged people wandering in parks? Surely not in the way London did. Nowhere was safe, but for her, this Workington might be safer than London.
She would have to ask if she could move there. That was one of the conditions. There would probably be objections, all of them justified, all made with her welfare in mind, as she would repeatedly be told. It made her tired, just thinking of the meetings there would have to be, all the reasoning she would have to listen to, how ‘good’ she would have to be. She wouldn’t dare tell them that she wanted to go to this northern town because she’d hit on it with the point of a hairclip pressed on to a map. With her eyes shut. She would have to invent some reason, some connection, however vague. Well, invention was her forte. It shouldn’t be too difficult. A great-grandmother, perhaps, now dead? But they were suspicious enough to go to the bother of checking that. Oh, never mind, she’d think of something.
She made the necessary phone call.
At first, Nancy couldn’t be absolutely sure that someone had moved into Amy’s old house. No removal van had arrived. Nobody had been seen unloading a van or car or getting out of a minicab laden with suitcases. But the upstairs curtain wasn’t right. Nancy was quite shocked to realise it had taken her twenty-four hours to notice this. ‘I must be slipping,’ she said to herself, aloud. (Talking to yourself was fine so long as you knew you were doing it.)
The little terraced house had been empty a whole year, ever since Amy went into hospital and then a nursing home and then died and was buried in that awful cemetery full of miners, the last place she would have wanted to end up. There were cemeteries and cemeteries and this wasn’t one of them. No tidy graves, everything overgrown and ugly. No white marble angels or crosses, only ugly black lumps of some granite-like substance with the lettering on them barely discernible. No flowers. Nobody came to this cemetery to put flowers on the neglected graves. It was a scandal that Amy had been bunged in there. The nephew said it was a family grave. That’s what he told Nancy.
‘Family?’ Nancy said, knowing she was laying on the sarcasm heavily. ‘Family? Don’t make me laugh.’ And she shut the door in his face.
A mistake, really. She always acknowledged her own mistakes afterwards, when it was much too late. She could have said nothing. It would have been quite enough to raise her eyebrows, and stare. But she’d spoken her mind, though by no means all of it, and she’d shut the door on the nephew. The obvious consequence was that she wasn’t told what was going to happen to Amy’s house. It wasn’t rented. Amy owned it, definitely. Most of the houses in their street, either side, were rented, but Amy and Nancy both owned theirs. It was a link between them. They were householders, and they were widows, and they were both childless. Nancy had made her will as soon as her husband died. She wanted no disputes over who was to get her house. But had Amy made hers? Was the nephew to inherit it?
He’d been in and out of the house several times but that wasn’t necessarily significant. First thing he did was close the curtains in Amy’s old bedroom, the room directly facing Nancy’s. It annoyed her. There was no need to do this. There was already a net curtain decorously draping the window, and nobody except Nancy could see into that room anyway. But the nephew had closed the other, thicker red velour curtains over it, and they stayed closed. Every night, closing her own curtains, it upset Nancy to look out on that dark square opposite. She tried not to mind, but she did mind, and she minded most of all not knowing why she minded. It was silly, she was silly. There were all kinds of trivial things like this that made her feel silly, a feeling to which she objected but failed to do anything to correct.
One of the red curtains had been pulled aside. Only one. Did this mean there was someone now in residence? Or had the nephew been in, looking round, and had he opened the curtains to get a better view of the room and then forgotten to close both afterwards? Nancy contemplated going to knock on the door. Where would the harm be in that? Suppose burglars had got in. It would look bad if she’d noticed the curtains, but had done nothing. Was that being a responsible citizen? No, it was not. And if someone had moved in, then it would be proper to welcome them to the street, to introduce herself. What was the worst that could happen? Only that she could have the door shut in her face. Well, if so, she would know where she stood. Definitely.
The rent was cheap. She hadn’t yet adjusted to the prices of things but even she could tell it was cheap, so cheap she thought she’d misheard. But once she was inside the house, she understood why. There was no central heating. In the living room, there was an electric fire, and that was it. The kitchen, described as ‘basic’, was primitive, but that didn’t upset her. She hardly needed a kitchen. She didn’t mind the small size of the rooms either, or the lack of light. The house came furnished and the furniture was shabby, ugly and uncomfortable. Except for the bed in the front bedroom. It didn’t fit in with everything else. It seemed new, one of those divans with a deep mattress. How odd, to find such a bed here. She lay down on it, relishing the comfort. So important, a good bed, something she hadn’t enjoyed for a long time. There were no sheets on it, no duvet or blankets. It had been stripped. Everything else left untouched, but the bed stripped.
One of the red velour curtains was pulled back. She got up, and stood looking out of the window, though not directly in front of it. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a street of houses quite like this one. The bricks were all blackened, a long, tight-fitting terrace of squashed houses, only the doors distinguishing one from another. The bright blue of two of them spoke of valiant attempts to brighten the street up, but they failed, only emphasising its general dreariness. The door of the house she was in hadn’t been painted for many years. It was a brown colour almost as dark as the blackened bricks either side.
She had a job all fixed up for her. It was a humble one, but she knew she was lucky to have it, this being an area, and a time, when there was fierce competition for any job. In fact, especially for mundane jobs that anyone could do. She was to have an induction day, and then she would be issued with an overall, which it would be up to her to wash at the end of every week. Getting to work would involve taking a bus from the end of her street, and then a ten-minute walk. That would suit her fine. She thought she might walk the whole way. It would take maybe as long as an hour, she hadn’t tried it yet, it was just an estimate. But she was an early riser now, after all the years of being forced to rise early, and she could leave for work at seven in the morning. Coming back, if she were tired, as she expected to be after spending most of the day on her feet, might be different. She might get the bus then.
There was someone opposite peering out of the window. It was only a shape, but it was there. Well, she had anticipated having to face up to neighbours. She’d been advised what to do, how to handle inevitable interest. She must not be evasive or hostile, but neither must she attempt to be too friendly. Polite, distant, but wanting to keep herself to herself. That should be easy.
The town helped, the house helped, the dreadful furniture helped, but the job didn’t. She would have to stick it out, though. For the time being.
For the time being, for the time being … being what? The bus windows were steamed up. She rubbed a circle on the glass but she still couldn’t see out clearly. The bus was packed, people standing in the aisle. The coughing was like barking, deep rattling coughs.
‘Germs,’ the woman next to her muttered.
Was there any need to reply to that one word? To be safe, she made an ‘mm’ sound. The woman was large, her thighs bulging over her share of the double seat. She had a large plastic shopping bag on her knee and another between her feet. She was a smoker, the smell clinging to her clothes, her fingers discernibly yellow. This bus would be an ordeal for her. What smokers had to endure these days, now the comfort of a fag was denied to them. Rightly, of course. Rightly. The law was right. It always was. She’d heard a great deal about how the law, or laws, was, or were, right.
‘You all right?’ the woman asked. The word seemed to echo, right, right …
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Only you’re shaking. Cold, eh? Nowt like it will be though.’
She tried to smile. This only encouraged the woman. She was saying something about the cost of heating her flat, how she dreaded winter and wouldn’t be able to pay her bills, but if there was one thing she couldn’t face it was being cold in her own home and … On and on she droned, not seeming to care that she was getting no response. People like her just want to speak aloud, get rid of all the ranting in their head. The bus stopped. Two people got off, four got on. So many stops, and they were only halfway to hers. Long before it was reached she’d have to disturb this woman next to her and start edging her way to the exit doors or else she’d never get there in time. At every stop, there were shouts of ‘Here! I want off!’ and sometimes the driver ignored them. Once, he shouted back, ‘You had yer chance.’ She thought there would be a riot, but no, this subdued people, though at the next stop there was a rush, and a lot of swearing in the driver’s direction.
‘Excuse me,’ she said.
The woman groaned. ‘You’ll have to hold this, pet,’ she said, and passed over the bag on her knee. It was very heavy. Once the woman was on her feet, she slipped it on to the vacant seat. The woman was now in the aisle, the standing passengers protesting as she picked up her other bag from the floor and swung it carelessly round. Eventually, the manoeuvre was complete. Someone sat down beside the woman and a conversation was immediately begun. The voices thickened, the accents strengthened, and she could hardly make out a word. Did she herself talk posh? It was a constant worry. To sound ‘southern’, or even ‘cockney’, or ‘Essex’ was OK, but not posh, not here. The way round this was to talk very little at all.
The relief to be off the bus! She stood for a minute, in the rain, staring at a puddle she’d stepped into, an oily swirl on its surface. Somewhere in her bag she had a small collapsible umbrella, but she didn’t think she’d get it out and put it up. She’d just get wet. There was a certain curious pleasure in feeling the rain quickly beginning to drip down the neck of her coat, running in a steady trickle down her spine. She had no hat or scarf. Her hair was soon plastered to her head, and her ungloved hands and poorly shod feet were soon cold. But hadn’t she, not so long ago, longed to be out like this in the rain? They were never allowed out in the rain, not in a downpour like this.
She walked past her own front door twice. The number, 18, was not visible anywhere, and with the exception of one or two brightly painted doors, they all looked the same. There were probably other distinguishing features but she hadn’t learned them yet, and had to work out which was number 18 by counting from a clearly marked 22, white numbers on a slate at the side. Inside, she went straight to the kettle and put it on. Her cold, wet hands shook as she fumbled for a teabag and dropped it into a mug. She was shivering, knowing she should get out of her sodden clothes but incapable of moving until the tea was ready and she had something hot to cling on to. After the first sip, she held the mug up to her cheek, pressing it against her skin.
Twice today she’d forgotten her name. It still meant nothing to her.
‘Like a drowned rat,’ Nancy said to herself (but, as ever, aloud). ‘Not a hat to her name, not a decent pair of shoes, not an umbrella in sight. In the name of God, didn’t even know her own house.’ Oh, the entertainment was there in plenty. ‘Some folk have no sense,’ she went on. ‘What did the weather forecast say? Rain, heavy rain, this afternoon and all night. Some folk …’ The sooner she went over there the better, but she delayed, not wanting to seem pushy. There was being welcoming and friendly, and there was being nosy, and she wanted no confusion. There’d been talk at the pensioners’ club that afternoon but she’d kept schtum. Rumours flew around like wasps, each with its sting. This new neighbour was a widow/divorcee/from London/Manchester, renting/buying/job at Tesco’s/at Morrisons.
‘She’s in number eighteen, Nancy,’ someone said, ‘opposite you. Have you seen her, eh?’
‘Of course I’ve seen her,’ Nancy said scornfully.
‘Did that lad of Amy’s tell you she was coming?’
‘I’m not saying,’ Nancy said which was correctly interpreted as a ‘no’. After that, interest in the newcomer waned. For the moment.
It annoyed Nancy that the nephew was referred to as ‘Amy’s lad’. He was not her lad. He was not even a proper nephew, not a blood relative. The nephew was the stepson of Amy’s brother, who lived in Carlisle. The brother and his wife, and her son by her first marriage, hardly ever visited but when they did Amy made a big fuss. It had taken many years for Nancy to find out that this ‘nephew’, this golden boy (in Amy’s opinion), was not in fact properly related. Amy adored him. Photographs of him were all over her house, the ones taken annually at school and sent to her in their grey cardboard frames. She’d told Nancy she intended to leave him everything she had. Nancy expected she’d told the nephew that too. It kept him visiting, if infrequently, once he was grown up. He was at the funeral, of course, with his stepfather (his mother didn’t bother). Very appropriately dressed in dark suit, white shirt, black tie, well-polished black shoes. He had at least shown respect. The service was disgracefully brief. No hymns, not one. A prayer so hastily mumbled by the vicar that there might as well not have been one. The mourners who weren’t family were not mourners. Nancy recognised them all, women who scanned the local paper and turned up for the show, hoping for a sight of some genuine grief. They would be disappointed this time, except for the treat of the dead woman being buried, a real hole dug and the coffin lowered in. Rare, these days, with folk mostly whipped off to be cremated after the church service. And the nephew did throw a white rose in which would have cost him, it being winter.
There was no funeral tea, or if there was Nancy was not invited, and if there was it wasn’t held in Amy’s house or at any of the venues well known locally for hosting such events. The nephew and his father shook hands with the vicar, got into their car, and drove off. Nancy walked home thinking how thoughtless some people were. No consideration. No speck of kindness. No thanks for all she’d done for Amy Taylor. She’d worked herself up into such a rage about the nephew and his father’s lack of appreciation by the time she reached her own door that she knew she was red in the face. There was a plant pot on the doorstep, enclosed in cellophane. She opened her front door without disturbing it, then cautiously nudged it inside using the toe of her shoe. It toppled over. She picked it up by the cellophane wrapper, dislodging a card. The handwritten message said, ‘With thanks to Mrs Armstrong for the help given to our beloved sister and aunt.’ Beloved! Beloved!
Left on her doorstep. Not given to her, properly. Just left. And only a chrysanthemum, bright yellow and slightly wilted. She would rather have had a pot of bulbs. For a moment, she wondered if she could change it. She knew the shop. Even if she hadn’t known it, the address was on the card. Could she go straight away into town and say she was allergic to chrysanths and would like to change this plant for something of similar value, preferably a pot of daffodil bulbs (not hyacinths – she couldn’t abide the smell)? It made her agitated, this idea. Backwards and forwards she walked in her little house, her coat and hat still on, the chrysanthemum in her arms. She badly wanted to act on her idea of an exchange, especially as it would mean that she’d find out how much the nephew had spent. What had he reckoned she was worth?
She didn’t go. She had a better idea. As soon as she calmed down and had a cup of tea, she’d give it to the woman who’d moved into Amy’s house – a welcome present. Then, if the nephew came again, as he was surely bound to if, as reliable rumour had it, the house was rented, not sold, then he would see the plant and get the message. Nancy wasn’t sure quite what this message said, but it amounted to a slap in the face.
‘A slap in the face!’ she said (out loud).
The rain had stopped. There was a sudden lightening of the sky, a pale whiteness edging out from under the black clouds. Standing at the bedroom window, she saw the chimney pots opposite outlined against this whiteness. Smoke came from a few of them, gently curling upwards, pale grey against the white. Pretty. She’d never thought to see anything pretty here. Her hands were on the red curtains, to draw them shut, when she saw the door of the house opposite open. An old woman stood there, contemplating a puddle in the road, watching it intently. She was clad in a curious assortment of clothes and was holding a plant pot. Over her head, which already wore a hat, she had a plastic scarf, tied under her chin. Her maroon overcoat had a belt round it, and she had a black bag with a long strap worn diagonally across her chest with the belt, going round her waist, on top of it. She looked to right and then left and waited, though there was no traffic, and then she skirted the deep puddle and walked across the road. The knock was loud.
There was no possibility of ignoring it. Too risky, too certain to provoke the very curiosity which should not be encouraged. Tara practised saying, ‘My name is Sarah Scott.’ She’d wanted it to be Smith, but Smith was rejected, being too obvious. She’d thought it might be clever to be obvious, a sort of double bluff, but no, Smith would not do. Sarah was fine. A common name, everyone knew a Sarah, and it transcended age and class. It was safe, readily agreed to.
‘Hello,’ she practised again, as she went down the stairs, ‘my name is Sarah Scott.’ But she wouldn’t be asked for her name. Never volunteer more than is asked for. Hello would be sufficient. Would keeping this neighbour on the doorstep be sufficient? Was it a test? Would she be expecting to be asked in? Hello. Then wait. Let her visitor dictate what should happen next. Listen to what she says and take your cue from it. Maybe just ‘hello’, and then, if the plant was a gift, ‘thank you’, and a smile. And close the door.
The woman was somehow inside and the front door closed before Tara realised what was happening.
‘Wet, out,’ the woman said, wiping her feet energetically on the threadbare mat. The narrow, dark passageway – it wasn’t a hall – was full of her. ‘Brought you this,’ she said, thrusting the plant pot at her.
‘Oh,’ said Tara, ‘thank you.’
‘I live across the way, number nineteen,’ the woman said. ‘Been there near fifty years.’
Tara found herself nodding, as though she’d always known this. They were standing so close together, confined in the small space, that she could see every line on her neighbour’s face. It was embarrassing. She hadn’t yet said, ‘My name is Sarah Scott,’ but the visitor hadn’t given her name either. They couldn’t go on standing there. ‘Come in,’ Tara said, her voice weak, the invitation unconvincing. She started to lead the way into the living room, but was not followed.
‘I’m not stopping,’ the woman said, and opened the front door. ‘I’ll be seeing you, I expect.’
And she was gone. The wretched plant pot slipped out of Tara’s hands, the yellow petals fluttering to the floor at her feet. Picking it up, her hands slipping on the wet cellophane wrapping, she felt dizzy, and let herself slide down. She’d done everything wrong. Hadn’t she? Had she? She went over what her neighbour had said and what she herself had said and she couldn’t decide. She’d given nothing away. That was surely good. She’d said ‘thank you’. That was good, polite. It was the visitor who had dictated the short interchange. She was the one in control.
She put the plant pot on the table in front of the living-room window so that it could be seen.
The first meeting was in Morrisons café. There were no introductions. They both knew the drill, identified in each other’s appearances what they had expected to identify. Tara had tea, the Man had a cappuccino. It looked rather too full of froth, but since he hardly touched it, just played with the froth, it probably didn’t matter.
‘Well, Sarah,’ he said, emphasising the name, ‘how’s things?’
‘Fine,’ she said, maybe a little too quickly.
‘Settled in?’
‘Yes.’
‘No problems?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
He was looking at her carefully. She knew he would note that she’d made an effort but not so that she stood out. Her clothes were the ones provided, which he would almost certainly know about, but she had added a scarf she’d bought the day before. Cheap but colourful, the blue background calling attention to the blue of her eyes. They were not the sort of clothes she had been used to wearing, but then those would have been hopelessly dated. Her shoes were her own, though. Extraordinary to think they had been kept. She had almost wept when she slipped them on and they fitted so beautifully, so comfortably, just as they always had. Even now, when they were becoming so worn, literally down-at-heel, she loved them.
‘Friends?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Neighbours?’
She hesitated. ‘One woman, she lives across from me, an elderly woman. She brought me a plant.’
‘That was kind. Did she ask your name, where you were from, where you worked – anything like that?’
‘No. She just gave me the plant. A chrysanthemum.’
‘Not a nosy neighbour, then.’
‘No.’
She thought that if he messed up the froth on his coffee one more time she’d scream. She should be meeting his eyes, but she wasn’t. Her eyes were either lowered, or else she was looking over his shoulder at the queue for food. Evasive, she was being evasive. Evasive was bad. And there were silences, long silences, while he studied her and played with his coffee. Should she be trying to fill them? Should she initiate conversation? Wasn’t that his job? Resentment built up in her mind, the feeling that whatever she said, however she acted, tiny things that were completely insignificant would be pounced on and interpreted to her disadvantage.
‘There is a letter,’ he said, ‘but you don’t have to receive it.’
This made her look at him properly, trying to read his expression. His voice gave nothing away. Flat, imparting the information but nothing more. He waited, raised his eyebrows slightly. She should ask who this letter was from, did he know, and to which address it had been sent. But she didn’t. She was being offered a letter and it could only, she thought, be from one of three people, so she wanted it. She hadn’t had a letter for years, except for official communications which, though they came in envelopes, hardly seemed letters, or what she judged to be letters. Personal, handwritten, private.
‘It can be sent to your new address,’ he was saying. ‘Just say the word.’
He smiled slightly and she hated his smile. It was the kind of patronising smile she’d seen too often on the faces of people like him. There was even, within it, a trace of enjoying his power over her. He’d probably read this letter, or someone had. It would look unopened when it came to her but it would not have been. Already, it was spoiled, but she told him that of course she would like it. She did not add ‘please’.
He nodded, said he or a colleague would see her in three months’ time, but that he hoped she knew she could contact him at any time. She need never feel she had to manage on her own; she had support. It was her turn to nod. She wasn’t going to say ‘thank you’, or how grateful she was, or how she appreciated this ‘support’. She stayed at the table while he walked away through the crowded café, wondering how far he’d come. She could have asked him that, but she’d asked nothing. Had that been clever of her? Or had it made her seem hostile? She was so tired of constantly wondering how she looked and sounded, aware that in trying so hard to be anonymous she was presenting herself as odd, a strange, nervous, bland woman who was Sarah Scott.
It went on and on in her head, a desperate litany repeated so that it could become second nature, but it never did. She didn’t recognise this woman’s life except for the few bits that matched her own.
I am Sarah Scott.
I am forty-three years old.
I am divorced, with no living children.
I am from Canterbury originally.
I have no siblings alive.
I trained as a nurse but retired through ill health.
My mother is dead.
My father is dead.
I like to read, mainly non-fiction.
I am nine stone four pounds.
I am five foot six inches.
There was more, lots more. She was bound to have forgotten half of it. Did it matter? It might, they’d said.
The new neighbour was a creature of regular habits. A creature of rigorously regular habits herself, Nancy gave her credit for that. Left her house at 7.00 in the morning on the dot, returned between 5.45 and 6.10, which suggested the time depended on getting either the 5.20 bus or, if she missed it, or it was too crowded to board, the next one. She never put the light on in the hall. Nancy herself automatically snapped the light on as she entered. Everyone did. The hallways were dark even on the sunniest days, what with the front doors being solid wood with no glass panels and no fanlights above. This woman entered her house in the dark and put no light on for a full ten minutes or more. How did she manage to see her way round? Nancy couldn’t understand it. When a light did go on, it was always in the bedroom. The curtains, the thick red curtains, remained open even though the light was on. Nancy, standing well back from her own bedroom window, and with only the staircase light on, could see straight in. It was not her fault.
The woman, who she had learned was called Sarah Scott, lay on the bed, on Amy’s practically new, expensive bed which she had hardly had time to enjoy. Nancy knew it was Amy’s bed because she had enquired after its fate when the nephew came round. This news pleased her. It would have been shocking if the brand new, costly bed had been carted off to a sale room, or even taken off by one of those house-clearance people. But the bed stayed, and this Scott woman obviously appreciated its comforts. She lay on it, every evening, for at least half an hour. Nancy couldn’t see if her eyes were closed, but she certainly gave the appearance of being asleep, lying, as she did, so very still. Odd, though, to have the light on if she was sleeping. She must come in extremely tired, to have to go and lie down like that. Her job must be exhausting, but what could it be? Nancy had not yet found out, though it would emerge through the usual channels. She’d hear soon enough. Meanwhile, she was content to know her neighbour’s name before anyone else. The postman told her. He was young and careless, and if she had had any letters sent to her, beyond bills, Nancy would not have trusted him to deliver them. He put letters through her own letter box which were quite clearly addressed to number 29 and not 19, and she had reprimanded him for it, making him take them back the next day and redeliver them to number 29. He laughed and said, ‘Righto, missus.’
He had a red cart he pulled along. So lazy. Nancy saw no need for it. He was big and strong as well as young and could quite easily have carried a sack as postmen had done all her life. So lazy. And the way he left the cart at one end of their long street while he carried a bundle of letters for the first twenty houses was irresponsible. Anyone could pilfer from it in the time it took him to return. But he had told her the name of the woman who now lived opposite her. She hadn’t asked, she would never have asked. He’d delivered just one letter to her but nevertheless had noted her name. That, in Nancy’s opinion, was fishy, but she could hardly complain considering he had passed the information on to her which he most certainly had no right to do. She’d badly wanted to ask was it Miss or Mrs Sarah Scott, but of course she hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. It was the novelty value, she supposed. New people hardly ever moved into their street. It was not that sort of street. He liked having a new name, he said. Made delivering more interesting. What nonsense. He made it sound like something special when it was a job any fool could do, just sticking stuff through letter boxes.
Sarah Scott: Nancy quite liked the name. Sort of posh, she thought, though she knew plenty of very ordinary, decidedly unposh Sarahs. Scott was not a local name. It wasn’t, she reckoned, any kind of local name, even if it must have originated, she supposed, in Scotland, surely. Sarah Scott wasn’t Scottish, though. The two words she’d spoken when the plant was given to her proved that. She was from away. Away? Nancy realised ‘away’ was a very vague term. She decided that what she meant was that Sarah Scott was not Cumbrian, or even northern. So what had brought her here? And on her own. No visitors in six weeks. Was she to be temporary? Someone drafted here for a limited amount of time to do some particular job? Nancy didn’t think so. Sarah Scott didn’t look important enough. She didn’t look as if she did any sort of work that might rate her being sent for specially.
One day, sooner or later, she would need help of some sort. This knowledge was a great comfort to Nancy. It didn’t matter how stand-offish or reclusive people were, the time always came when they couldn’t manage on their own. It was a rule of life, one she’d learned over many years of acute observation. Sarah Scott’s time would come.
Tara waited for the promised letter with a mixture of apprehension – though she didn’t know what she was apprehensive about – and something that was near to excitement. She suspected it might be from Claire. Claire had written once. She hadn’t replied to this letter, resenting, as she did, its tone. Neither Liz nor Molly had written at all. They’d never been letter-writers. They were phone people, regular calls, which in Molly’s case were liable to go on a long time. If they had made calls, she never heard about them. Who would they have called, anyway? They didn’t visit either. None of the three. She’d been surprised by that, but got used to it. There would be reasons, she expected, though this realisation hadn’t stopped her being resentful. She knew how she would have responded.
She tired herself to the point of numbness, thinking about this letter. All day, standing at the conveyor belt, her hands automatically lifting, pressing down, she shook slightly with all this absurd agitation about its arrival. Repetitive jobs, she’d already learned, needed attentive minds. Such a simple action she was performing, so easy it could be done, surely, in her sleep. But it couldn’t, that was the shock. To think she’d been educated for this. Nobody would believe it. She didn’t believe it herself. Tara couldn’t be doing this, not with her talents, her qualifications. It was Sarah Scott doing it, stupid Sarah Scott, silent Sarah Scott. She talked to no one, except for the obvious pleasantries, the polite good mornings, the comments on the weather. Her silence didn’t seem to bother the women she worked with. One or two of them, in the brief breaks, made an attempt at communicating but nobody asked direct questions. They were all tired, as she was herself. They wanted their shifts over, and then home as quickly as possible.