‘Nice flat, too,’ he says. ‘Shady. I like that. It can get hot, at this time of year. Burim says he liked your décor, by the way. Very Mediterranean, he said. All that turquoise.’
There’s sweat trickling between her breasts. She’s had the window shut all night, after that doomsayer Thomas cursed her sleep with it open, and the room is like a sauna. In Barcelona, even away from the front where she lived, there was always a movement of air off the sea, and shutters that kept the light and burglars out but let through the sea breeze. This room is close and smelly. Sometimes she thinks that the smell is coming in through the airbrick where the fireplace used to be, but it’s just as likely that her predecessor’s hygiene skills were not of the best, and she’s not got round to buying new bedclothes, despite her resolve on the day she arrived.
Ah, Tony, if you could see me now, she thinks. You’d probably walk straight past me in the street without blinking.
‘So isn’t it about time you gave it up?’ he asks. ‘Haven’t you had enough, yet? We only want to talk to you, you know.’
Chapter Twelve
Did I forget? Did I? Am I losing my mind? It’s too early for dementia, isn’t it? That door has been open all summer. Maybe I was just too excited about my holiday to remember to lock it…
She goes again to look at the back door, as though the mystery of how it came to be hanging open, unbroken, will somehow reveal itself if she stares for long enough. All my life, she thinks, I’ve made the safe choices. I’ve never taken a risk, always stuck to the featureless lowlands. It seemed like such a good thing, a secure lease at twenty-seven, but now… now it feels like I was putting myself in prison. I should have got up and gone, when Mum and Dad died, not stayed on here because it was all I’d ever known. What sort of life is this?
Each time Vesta sits down to rest, she starts to shake, so she carries on cleaning, powered by ibuprofen and PG Tips, trying to wipe away the traces of whoever it is who’s been here. Her home, barely changed since her parents’ passing, genteelly threadbare with decades of respectable dusting, feels suddenly changed, now some stranger has torn through it like a tornado. The day-after-day, the making do, the blind eyes turned to wear and tear because it was easier than confronting the Landlord, or his grabby old aunt before him, and stirring up their resentment of the sitting tenant. When did my expectations get so small? she wonders. While everybody else got caught up in the self-improvement race, while they found themselves and stretched their worlds and travelled, I stayed in the 1930s, in the decade before I was even born, living by my parents’ values, knowing my place.
She stretches her aching back and catches sight of her expression – the face she used to pull when dosed with cod liver oil from a teaspoon as a child – in the mirror above the mantelpiece. She’s been seeing her face in this carved wood frame for the whole of her life. Still feels a sense of profound shock every time she glances into it and sees an almost-seventy-year-old woman staring back. Where did it all go? Did I really do so little, that I’m still living here, surrounded by reminders of my parents’ tenancy before me – the Waterford vase, Mum’s collection of ceramic cottages, the framed photos of long-dead ancestors on the tallboy, The Crying Boy in his frame on the wall, Nan’s good teaset behind the glass of the display cabinet – with hardly a mark of my own life added on top?
Her own death looms large in her mind these days. She looks around her living room, and suddenly sees it through the contemptuous eyes of the outsider who has treated it with such gleeful disrespect. She’s made the occasional attempt to stamp her own personality on the place, with the frugal resources of a spinster dinner lady. The upright suite with its lace-edged antimacassars has been replaced by a flower-pattern settee and a tub armchair, her mother’s fussy wallpaper painted over in neutral colours, but most of the things this stranger has destroyed come from a time before she was even thought of – the plates, glasses, books, pictures, the occasional table, the Coronation plate that used to hang on the wall and the Murano bird brought back by her dad after the war ended. Even my bits of jewellery that came from Mum, she thinks. And when I go, what will I leave behind? And who, anyway, is there to leave it to?
Vesta has lived her whole life in this cave beneath Beulah Grove, in the basement half-light, never knowing what the weather was like without opening the back door. She has seen the neighbourhood go from genteel lower-middle to Irish-rough to Caribbean poor and, over recent years, swing gradually into the hands of people who sound like they should be running a village fete. She was born here, in what is now her bedroom, and is beginning to suspect that she might die here, too. Grew up in her own little nook, walled off by her father in plyboard and woodchip, in a corner of the lounge, has eaten nearly every meal of her life at the little gateleg table by the back wall, nursed her elderly parents as, one by one, time took them, and took over the tenancy when her mother died, in 1971, back in the days when tenants still had rights. She’s seen off three landlords and, from the look of this one lately, might well see off a fourth. But Londoners are meant to be adventurers, she thinks. You’re not meant to come from here. You’re meant to come to here.