The Last Words of Madeleine Anderson

by Helen Kitson

  He gazed at me quizzically. ‘Never? You never wrote anything again?’

  I shrugged and stared into my coffee. ‘I won a couple of minor competitions with short stories, but I couldn’t seem to come up with a single idea that could be dragged out to the length of a novel.’

  ‘Didn’t mean to open up old wounds.’

  I shook my head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Are you going to tell me what you’re writing? Don’t if you don’t want to.’

  He dragged his fingers through his hair. ‘It’s hard to describe. I kind of want to go a bit experimental, but it’s hard to pull off without sounding pretentious. Maybe when I’ve written a bit more I’ll discuss it with you – if you don’t mind, that is. You might be able to help. One of my characters is a guy who’s cheating on his wife. He’s based loosely on my dad.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘He’ll never recognise himself, too much of a narcissist. The thing is, I want it to sound credible. I don’t want to make the character totally unsympathetic.’

  ‘Your dad—’

  ‘I’ve seen him with other women. He’s not particularly discreet. I can’t stand men like that, but I guess no one is totally bad. That’s what they tell you in books about creative writing. Always give your worst characters a redeeming feature, even if it’s only that they love their pet Jack Russell or never kill spiders.’

  ‘I’m not sure you can write effectively about someone you don’t like,’ I said. Did he despise his father’s mistresses? Did he despise me for having taken up with a married man? He was young enough to conflate me with those women his father knocked around with; to see us all as home wreckers, the enemy.

  ‘It’s weakness I can’t stand,’ he said. ‘If he’d had enough of being married and walked out, or filed for divorce, that would have been honest. Instead he sneaks around, doing all the lame stuff your Russell probably did. Telling his wife he’s working late at the office, listing his girlfriend under a bloke’s name in his contacts list, spraying the car with air freshener to disguise the smell of her Miss Dior.’

  God, he was brutal. And accurate. Of course it was a sordid business, and in Simon’s eyes there was no room for tenderness, for human frailty.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, but he didn’t sound it.

  That same day, Mr Latham also wanted to know what Simon was working on.

  ‘I shouldn’t pry,’ he told me. ‘He’s a very personable young man, isn’t he?’ He adjusted the napkin and knife on his tray. ‘Always a treat to speak to someone who knows the work of Mary Webb.’

  ‘I don’t really know what he’s working on. A novel of some sort, but I don’t know what it’s about.’ I didn’t even know if he could write. The letters he’d written to me had been chatty, bookish, but far from literary. ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’

  ‘No, that’s fine. I’ll let you know how I get on with the sandwich.’ He’d expressed a fancy for a half-baguette filled with sliced Brie and white grapes. For Mr Latham this was cutting-edge stuff. I think he worried that I would get bored serving him endless poached eggs and ham salads.

  ‘If you like it,’ I couldn’t resist saying, ‘perhaps we might branch out into paninis and ciabatta.’

  He chuckled, for he was not without a sense of humour, albeit rather a simple one. ‘Quite so, quite so. I’m afraid I’ve never been terribly adventurous in the food line. Taste buds killed by all those dreadful meals at boarding school.’

  ‘I never knew you went to boarding school.’

  ‘Not a very good one. Rather a brutal sort of place. If I had a child, I most certainly wouldn’t send it away to school. Character-forming, they call it. Not a phrase I should use.’

  He interested me when he spoke about himself and his life, and I rather wished he’d do so more often.

  ‘Tell me, Miss Price—’

  ‘Gabrielle. Please call me Gabrielle.’

  He smiled. ‘A beautiful name. Thank you.’

  ‘I interrupted you.’

  ‘I was simply going to ask if you felt able to provide the catering and waitressing for a small festive gathering I’m having on the twenty-second. Please feel free to say no if you have other plans.’

  ‘What sort of food would you want?’

  ‘It will be mostly rather elderly clerical men – not famous for pushing the culinary boat out, I’m afraid. Sandwiches, salad, perhaps a quiche or two and some sort of dessert.’

  ‘I should be delighted.’

  ‘God, that’s too precious!’ Simon said when I told him of the vicar’s request. ‘Please say I can come – I’ve worked as a waiter. I’d love to hear what a bunch of priests talk about.’

  I flicked his wrist with a magazine. ‘You’re certainly not coming if you’re going to gloat. And I don’t want you gossiping about them, either.’

  ‘I wouldn’t, I promise, but you must let me come!’

  ‘Maybe. I’ll think about it. But only if you swear to behave.’

  That evening, Simon insisted on cooking dinner.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘No reason. Does there have to be one? I like cooking. Call it a general thank-you for letting me stay and being so considerate and everything.’

  ‘I’m not aware I have been, particularly.’

  ‘You’ve made me feel welcome. You don’t mind the racket of my typing. You don’t want to know every detail about my life.’

  ‘Maybe I do, I just haven’t asked.’

  ‘Comes to the same thing. I think you would ask if there was something you especially wanted to know.’

  That wasn’t true. I’d brushed aside as irrelevant, as none of my business, the things I most wanted to know: what sort of girls did he fancy? Did his friends and family wonder where he was? What did he really want from me?

  He nipped out to buy the extra ingredients he needed to make his meal, refusing to let me see the contents of the carrier bag when he returned.

  ‘No fun unless it’s a surprise,’ he said with a grin. So I let him get on with it, torn between expecting burnt offerings or something worthy of MasterChef.

  ‘Go and change into something spectacular,’ he called out.

  Spectacular? I had a couple of good dresses I’d bought in the days when I was described as a “breakthrough fresh voice” with “gifts that will ensure her books are read for many years to come”. Classic dresses that fashion couldn’t harm, they had the stale, bored look of clothes that had been left undisturbed on their hangers for too long.

  I even slapped on a bit of make-up, something I rarely bothered with these days. I put on the bracelet I still thought of as Madeleine’s, the one I’d bought her for Christmas but never given to her. It was no good, I felt like a thief, or worse; stealing from the dead. I removed it and put it away in my jewellery box. Perhaps I should have thrown it into her grave, but such grand gestures have always struck me as affected, even rather tasteless.

  ‘You can come down now!’

  He’d laid the table and set it with a candle and a small vase filled with sprigs of holly.

  ‘I might have to move the vase,’ he said. ‘The table’s not really big enough.’

  ‘This is very nice.’ Nice? Romantic, surely?

  Of course not!

  I’m not enough of a foodie to go into ecstasies over the details of the meal. Steamed artichoke with melted butter for the starter – a dish that wouldn’t tax even the most kitchen-phobic cook. The main course a rather more complex ricotta and walnut ravioli with sage butter. For a student he clearly knew his way around a kitchen; or my cookery books, at least. Dessert, passion fruit fool with hazelnut biscuits. His constant need for reassurance (‘Is it okay? Really okay? You’re not just saying that?’) rather spoilt things.

  ‘Do relax,’ I told him. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  ‘All right, let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘How is your book coming along? Mr Latham was asking me about it earlier, wanted to know what it
was about. I had to say I had no idea.’

  ‘Do you ever talk to him about your book? Has he read it, do you know?’

  ‘He’s never said. And no, we don’t talk about it. It’s the elephant in the room sometimes, but it all happened so long ago it seems largely irrelevant.’

  ‘To you? Or to other people?’

  ‘To everyone. It’s old news.’

  After we’d eaten, Simon cleared the table, washed up and opened another bottle of wine.

  ‘I really do like your house,’ he said, wandering around the room, touching things. ‘Lots of books. Lots of mad ornaments.’

  They weren’t mad and I hadn’t chosen them. My grandmother had spent the last few years of her life trawling auctions for pottery and glass. She wasn’t interested in collecting valuable pieces, only things she found pretty: Japanese eggshell china, Mason ware jugs, Willow pattern plates.

  ‘You’ve got style,’ he said.

  ‘I’m old enough not to care what anyone thinks of me, that’s all.’

  ‘No, it’s more than that.’ He sat next to me on the sofa, his knee gently bumping against mine as he spoke. ‘It’s a quality some people just have. You can’t fake it.’

  ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were flattering me for some nefarious purpose I can’t guess at.’

  He chuckled, swirling the wine in his glass. ‘I hope I’m not that predictable.’ He pulled a small hexagonal table towards him, placed his wine glass on it, then took mine and put it next to his. Then he turned to me, laid a hand gently against my cheek and softly pressed his lips to mine. It wasn’t a passionate kiss; neither was it a platonic one. I’d imagined what it would be like to feel his mouth on mine, and now that it had happened it had been too unexpected, too fleeting for me to capture it.

  ‘What was that for?’ I asked.

  ‘Does there have to be a reason?’

  ‘There usually is.’

  He handed me my glass of wine. If he noticed that my hands trembled, he didn’t mention it. His were perfectly steady.

  ‘I thought it would be nice, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  I nodded, too overcome, too bereft to speak. I wanted more. I wanted too much. I wanted all of him.

  Don’t spoil the moment, I told myself. Accept it for what it is: a pleasant moment, a lovely gift. That’s all it was, all it could be.

  But gifts are never entirely free, are they? One rarely gives without expecting something in return.

  Chapter Ten

  Things didn’t improve for Madeleine during the remainder of her second year at uni, and when she came home for the summer break she announced her intention to take a year out.

  ‘And do what?’ I asked.

  She sighed and leaned back in the armchair while I took the typing chair. My parents had moved my bed into the box room to give me more space in what was now my personal sitting room.

  ‘I think I’ll travel,’ she said. ‘Work my way around Europe – isn’t that what students do?’ She pulled strands of hair from her ponytail, twisting them between thumb and forefinger. She’d never had so much as a paper round, so I wasn’t sure how she thought she’d find work, but maybe the kind of places she had in mind weren’t that fussy.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘You hate your job and you must have saved a bit of money by now.’

  I was half-heartedly saving towards the deposit on a flat, my grandmother having offered to give me half the sum I needed for my twenty-first birthday. Madeleine snorted when I told her this.

  ‘Is that what life’s about? Saving up for a poky flat that’ll keep you trapped in a dull job you need to pay the mortgage?’

  ‘It’s what life is about for most people,’ I said. ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Yes – what?’ She gazed out of the open window, thumb and forefinger stroking the gold heart-shaped locket she always now wore, at a not very picturesque view of the backs of other semis and their pocket-handkerchief gardens.

  I still wrote in my spare time, but once I’d started work my dreams had shrivelled. A couple of my poems had been published in small magazines, but the money I earned from these was never going to buy me a mansion: a fiver in one case, nothing except three complimentary copies of the magazine in another.

  ‘Isn’t that the point of going to university?’ I asked her. ‘Getting a degree so you can go after the interesting jobs?’

  ‘Plenty of graduates end up in dead-end jobs. It’s not as if I’m studying anything useful like medicine. English grads are ten a penny. I’d like to get into publishing, but I don’t think it’s that well paid and it’s jammed with people called Tristan and Cressida. My face wouldn’t fit.’

  ‘It can’t all be like that, surely.’

  ‘I bet most of it is.’

  ‘You’ll be all right, then. You’ve got a posh name.’

  She chuckled softly. ‘So have you, come to that. Wanna start up a publishing firm with me?’

  I managed a weak smile. ‘I could be your secretary.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘You never did know how to aim high, did you?’

  She was more than likely right, but until you’ve walked in someone else’s shoes…

  ‘So that’s your great plan, is it? Work in a few Spanish bars, soak up the sun, smoke a few joints, then go back to uni?’

  ‘Why not? If I go back in October I’ll resent it. I’m burnt out, Gabs.’

  ‘Maybe shagging a lecturer didn’t help.’ Below the belt, certainly, but wasn’t it true? Hadn’t she made everything a whole lot harder for herself by getting involved with him, whoever he was?

  ‘Ouch, the pain,’ she muttered. ‘All right, but who’s to say I would have had a better time going out with another student? I didn’t plan any of this.’

  ‘So are you still together?’

  She glanced away. ‘I suppose not. I told him to choose. I guess he chose.’

  She brushed away tears. I reached out to her, but she shrank away.

  ‘I’ve never been much use to you, have I?’ I said.

  ‘No, but that’s my fault, not yours. I didn’t want you involved in this stupid mess with Hugo – yes, that’s his name, don’t laugh.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. How old is he, anyway?’

  She shrugged, examining her chewed fingernails. ‘Not that old; thirty-six maybe. Doesn’t matter, does it? He’s married and that’s that. I wanted to keep you out of it; I didn’t want to… well, it sounds daft, but I feel like you’re clean, innocent. I didn’t want you knowing about all the shit I went through with him.’

  I crouched at her feet, my arm resting on her knee. ‘I’d rather have known, if I could have been any help – just someone to talk to, I mean.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  I moved away from her. I could feel how tense her muscles were. She didn’t want me to touch her. Sometimes I wondered if she liked me at all.

  ‘Is it because of him that you don’t want to go back to uni?’

  ‘I shall go back eventually, but I need to be away from him for a long time. I want a break from it all.’ She pushed her fingers through her hair, dislodging her ponytail completely. ‘I don’t see the point of any of it.’

  I sympathised. Over the following weeks I let her talk, I let her sulk, I bought her drinks; but there’s a limit to how far you can push anyone. About me she never asked, beyond sniping at the little I’d settled for. She had the luxury of being able to do what she wanted for a year, knowing she could walk straight back into university and, more likely than not, sail through her final year.

  Her dramas felt real and tragic to her, of course they did, but by the end of August I wasn’t sorry to see her go. How far she would actually have to slum it on her travels I wasn’t sure, but I hoped it would do her some good to learn how to budget, and walk instead of relying on people to give her lifts. I suppose I hoped it would help her to grow up a bit, to realise that not everyone had options, and there’s no point in whi
ning and bitching and wringing your hands if life doesn’t turn out the way you want it to.

  I heard from her very little during her year out. Postcards bearing foreign stamps fell through the letterbox during the first couple of months. From these I gathered that Barcelona was awesome, Paris was littered with bearded men who wanted to read Rimbaud to her, and Amsterdam had the best nightlife. And then nothing. Complete silence. She didn’t even come home for Christmas.

  ‘Not worth it, she said,’ her father told me when I went to the Andersons’ on Christmas Eve. They’d invited me and my parents round for drinks and mince pies, but it proved a gloomy occasion.

  ‘Not worth it, my foot,’ her mother muttered, ripping her Christmas cracker hat from her head. ‘We would have paid her airfare.’

  ‘Not that we know which country she’s in,’ her father added.

  ‘They’ve reached that age, I suppose, when they want to do their own thing,’ my mum said.

  ‘I don’t see your Gabrielle gallivanting off around the world when she ought to be at home with her family.’ Mrs Anderson scrunched the orange paper hat in her hand. ‘It’s too bad of her, it really is.’

  ‘Doesn’t she tell you what she’s doing?’ Mr Anderson asked me.

  ‘All I’ve had from her is a few postcards.’

  ‘She didn’t even send us a Christmas card.’ This from Mrs Anderson, squeezing the paper hat like a stress ball. ‘We’ve never interfered in her life. We gave her everything she wanted, within reason. I don’t understand why she’s chosen to ignore us.’

  Mr Anderson held a plate of mince pies under my nose. I shook my head. If Madeleine had been there, we would have played charades and Trivial Pursuit. There would have been music and laughter. Even the tree seemed to have lost heart, a mound of dropped needles scattered around the pot in which it sat.

  My parents made their excuses, saying they still had a lot to prepare for “the big day”, although it would just be the three of us, and they didn’t even bother with a turkey since I’d turned vegetarian. I followed along a few paces behind them on the short walk home.