An article in the Observer at the weekend suggested you need eighty hours of contact to grow a friendship. It didn’t go into details. I don’t know, for example, whether you need to be continually talking for the hour to count or whether companionable silence also works. Jail time, for example – those long stretches of enforced togetherness – would that be applicable?
It’s hard to know exactly how and when Ailsa and I clocked them up but I am confident that we did.
When I look back on this period, I think about greenery, the changing view out of my bedroom window, the houses that backed on to me obscured a little bit more every day. I think about white blossom, sudden bursts of perfume, and the birds – the air manic with different song, how I hadn’t noticed they were gone over winter, until now they were back. I think about her garden, too. I could see it if I craned my neck, through the crossed branches of my trees: the tips pushing up through the earth, blossom bursting against a blue sky, that pretty little bush she had planted on my side, the buds unfurling, deep pink and white flesh breaking out of their furry cases.
There were cold days, too; suddenly bitter days that looked the same through the window as the warm ones – the sky blue; the leaves acid green. It was only when you left the house bare-armed, the chill wind penetrating your cotton layers, that you discovered they were only pretending to be nice. Aggressive mimicry; you find it everywhere in nature. Spiders that look like the ants on which they feed, death’s-head hawkmoths that emit the smell of bees so they can sneak into the hive unnoticed and steal their honey, weeds that spring up next to almost identical cultured plants, strangling them and draining the goodness from the earth . . . The world is full of predators or parasites gaining advantage by their resemblance to a soften third party.
I continued to tutor every Wednesday, still unpaid, and sometimes I’d even do an extra session if Max had homework he found difficult. I should have mentioned money, but it was awkward. She talked so much about being broke and, while I clearly had less to live on than she did, I got by. At some point I told myself, she would press a thick envelope into my hand and in the meantime I was so much more than just a tutor – part of the family almost. We’d always have a coffee, or a Rooibes tea, and a chat after a session and she began to knock on my door, too. The first time was to ask again about the trees at the back: ‘Any movement on that?’ But the next time, she’d made a big batch of chocolate brownies, and really they didn’t need them all: Tom didn’t like too many sweet things in the house. Or she’d drop round an Amazon package they’d taken in for me – I got a lot of Amazon packages, didn’t I? Another book? Wow! – and while she was about it, had I walked the dog? She’d love an excuse to stretch her legs – and maybe grab a coffee. And I’d abandon my computer and put Maudie on the lead, and off we’d trot, regardless of whether I had already taken her out that day or not.
I know, looking back, that it seems an unlikely friendship. It’s hard not to wonder about her motives. Pity definitely came into it. I’d be deluded to think otherwise. She felt sorry for me and thought of herself as taking me under her wing. But she was used to being around misfits: she’d spent a lot of time in hospitals and, as I’ve said, her mother clearly had difficulties. But I also genuinely believe she enjoyed my company. I’m a good listener and she intrigued me: already at that first lunch our conversation had roved into interesting areas. It had an exponential effect, too. The more we hung out, the more relaxed she felt, and the more she was drawn back. It’s true of friendship in general: we all find security in the familiar.
I also think she was lonely.
I want to say we walked on hundreds of occasions, but it was probably five or six. It just seemed more: the novelty for me was dizzying. And walking can be oddly intense; the lack of eye contact often leads to easy disclosure. We talked a lot about Max. I’d fill her in on how I thought he was doing and she’d tell me what his teachers had said at school (upward improvement, definitely). She moaned about Melissa, how moody she was, and about Bea’s new obsession with make-up and Instagram. Often, she was caught between Tom and the kids: he could be hard on them, particularly Max. ‘It’s projection. He sees himself in him, and he takes what he does personally.’ She deeply regretted not having tried harder at school herself. Her parents had given her anything she’d wanted, but she was never pushed. Tom’s parents looked down on her lack of education – she was never good enough for him – but in truth she herself also wished she’d gone to university. ‘Not fair, really.’
It wasn’t all one-sided. She was intrigued by my own life as a student: the days, I suppose, in which I almost got away. It fascinated her that I had lived more than fifty years in one house; it boggled her imagination. She wanted to know how the area had changed, but also what we had done all day, holed up, the three of us. I told her about the long afternoons Faith and I used to spend together, when we were still close, watching films, or listening to albums on the old gramophone – soundtracks mainly, Oliver! and The Sound of Music and something called Jumbo Hits, how we would dress up in our mother’s clothes and dance, how we made a little camp under her bed and it became our refuge. I told her our mother was scared of the outside world, of germs and strangers, and how we learnt to keep anything bad to ourselves. I touched only lightly on Faith’s decision to move out, but I told her about the dullness of the two long decades as sole carer, how I would look ahead at the hours, the days, the months, that stretched beyond and it would seem inconceivable that they would be filled, with just this, just that, nothing interesting at all. And how I would also look back at the hours, days, months that had passed and think the same; the impossibility that all that time had gone by, and I was still there and nothing had changed.
I also unburdened myself about my mother’s physical decline: the thinness of her face and arms, the swollen flesh of her legs and abdomen, how she had resisted hospital, and how hard it had been making decisions on my own. Should I call an ambulance? Could I get in touch once again with the out-of-hours GP?
I remember exactly what she said because she jumped in: ‘Brutal, Verity,’ she said. ‘Fucking brutal.’ They were words that made no etymological sense and yet absolute sense; they landed on my wounds like a salve.
‘And where was Faith when this was going on?’
‘By then she hated coming to the house. Mother developed an ulcer on her leg that needed regular dressing and her headaches had made her sensitive to light so we kept the curtains drawn. I don’t blame Faith. Honestly, I really don’t. I can understand why she had had enough, why she wanted a new life.’
‘And her new life is, where?’
‘Brighton.’
‘Still?’
I nodded.
‘Do you go down and visit her? Does she come up?’
Out of nowhere I felt a pressing in my chest, in my whole body. ‘Not lately.’
We were walking on the path along the railway line and I waited for a train to pass, to strobe behind the railings. I waited until I could no longer hear it. ‘We rather fell out after the funeral,’ I said, ‘the crem. I thought she would come back to live with me, now Mother was gone, but she had other plans. We had words. And that was that.’ I didn’t elaborate and Ailsa didn’t ask. ‘You poor love,’ she said eventually, which was, as Chris Tarrant used to say, the right answer. Faith had always loved Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
So, no, I didn’t tell her everything – far from it.
Some of the time we just had a laugh. We chatted about silly, trivial things: rare in my life. ‘Botox?’ she’d say as we parted from one of her friends, and I’d give a thumbs up or thumbs down, regardless of the fact that I’ve never been quite sure what the effects of ‘Botox’ actually are. She’d ask me what I’d had for supper, and seemed gripped by the answer. ‘Baked beans on toast. With cheese? Delicious.’
On one occasion, we bumped into the mother who had found me so suspicious the day she’d dropped Bea home. She was introduced to me as Trish. ‘Of co
urse, you know Verity,’ Ailsa said. ‘She’s the one you almost called the police on that time.’ We had a giggle after she’d scurried off. ‘Fillers no?’ Ailsa said, and I nodded energetically. Another occasion, we met a tall woman wearing, as was later explained to me, ‘invisible’ braces on her front teeth, who told us in three different ways how proud she was of her daughter, ‘dear Soph’, who had scaled some academic pinnacle despite setbacks – bullying by people jealous of her? – along the way. As we walked off, Ailsa said, ‘She always makes me feel bad about myself. Am I a terrible person?’ I told her I thought she wasn’t. ‘Do you think I’m jealous of Soph’s achievements?’
‘No, I think she wants us to feel that, and maybe we should feel sorry for her for wanting it so badly. To be honest,’ I added, to Ailsa’s delight, ‘she can fuck right off.’
Was there something I missed? Clues? I don’t recall her talking directly about her marriage – the omission is itself telling – though she talked almost obsessively about her friends, often anguished by small slights. Someone had a coffee morning and didn’t invite her. Delilah had put her down in front of Tom. ‘She referred to having designed our garden, and I said, “It’s a collaboration,” and she said, “Yes babe, of course,” but it was just the way she said it, the way she looked at him? You know? It’s so typical. She always has to have one over on me. It’s always him and her against the world.’
We can’t all afford to sweat the small stuff, but I found it touching that she did. I enjoyed the novelty of involvement in that kind of trivially emotional nitty-gritty. It didn’t occur to me this might have concealed something darker and more troubling.
There were moments when her responses were slightly off – ‘Oh, sweetheart!’ she might say, drawing the words out with an unnatural emphasis as if her mind was elsewhere. She’d told me more about Wilson’s, how one of the effects was anxiety, and, though it was managed with medication, her mental health was something she referred to darkly now and then. I knew, of course (though she didn’t know I knew), about the self-help literature by her bed (Bit Sad Today), the evening primrose, the black onion oil and the prescription pills. The primrose and the black onion were reported to be good for anxiety and depression (I’d Googled); the pills were Cuprimine (for the Wilson’s) and citalopram, an SSRI.
One conversation in particular sticks in my mind. We were having coffee in one of the cafes facing the common when she told me she had conceived Melissa very easily, ‘too easily’, but that later when it was time to ‘extend the family’ (an odd phrase, I thought at the time), it had become difficult. She had longed ‘achingly’ for another child and, in the end, had taken the fertility drug Clomid, and ‘to my delight’ discovered she was pregnant with twins. It wasn’t that I thought her revelation wasn’t genuine. I was sure it was. I just had the sense it was oft repeated, that her telling of it had become pat. Even the final sentence seemed loaded with cliché. ‘The morning after they were born, I remember holding both of them in my arms, these tiny weightless bundles, and feeling complete. You know?’
I put my cup down on the table. The milk had separated and I’d noticed a yellow globule of oil on the surface. The sight reached inside me, revolved in my stomach.
‘Oh God, sorry,’ Ailsa said. ‘It’s boring for you, isn’t it?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I mean I make it sound so glorious, but it didn’t last.’ She sounded genuine again. ‘What I haven’t mentioned was how traumatic the births were.’
‘Traumatic? You mean premature?’
‘Actually, only a little bit early – twins usually are, but nothing too dramatic. Why do you ask?’
‘No reason.’ I pulled myself together.
‘You know, I’d great plans for a water birth and whale music – the whole shebang. But it was so long and difficult and painful, and the epidural came so late, and they had to use forceps – I think we were all traumatised by the time Bea – she came first – finally struggled into the world.’ She began to recite the rest like a list: ‘She was OK, but Max didn’t feed, and I got engorged and then I was crying all the time and he started losing weight, and Tom was working such long hours and I found it so hard having twins with a toddler already . . .’ She broke off and wrinkled her nose, embarrassed.
I felt myself stiffen, the old dragging in my limbs, but I tried to smile normally.
‘Basically I got a form of postnatal depression. If you ask Tom, he’d say I had a mental breakdown, the complete psychotic full-on craziness, but that’s not true. It’s chemical with me. The pills help – though I’ve stopped taking them. They make me feel blurry.’
Perhaps I should have focused on the delicacy of her mental state, not his response to it. Perhaps it was foolish not to have probed deeper.
This morning, as I watched Delilah walk away, into my head came a memory of an incident earlier this year. I had been in Ailsa’s kitchen helping Max with his homework while she was trying to find someone to collect Melissa from a hockey match. No one had picked up her texts or answered her calls; she was getting increasingly anxious and tense. Finally she rang a parent she hardly knew. ‘Could you . . . OK. Never mind at all. Thanks so much, babe, another time.’ Her voice was sweetness and light; you’d have had no idea how angry she was if you hadn’t then seen her hurl the phone on the table and scream: ‘Fucking unhelpful bitch.’
Chapter Seven
Four 10g sachets of Heinz Tartare Sauce
Neologism, noun. A word or phrase which is new to
the language, one which is newly coined.
I saw little of Tom during this period, though I was aware of him. Our walls are quite thin. He was loud in the morning, the first up for a shower, his voice echoing over the gush of the water in their en-suite, his laugh – a guffaw, almost like a shout – particularly penetrative. Once or twice, I felt his presence. I’d be in the kitchen and I’d see thrashing in the undergrowth outside the window. Not squirrels, as I first thought (Mother’s Squirrel Nutkin having a play), but Tom Tilson on the other side of the fence, tugging violently at the ivy, trying to see what he could yank down.
Sue told me at the pub quiz she’d seen him having a row with Gav, a local care in the community, who is often out asking ‘for a couple of quid for a cup of tea’. Tom, she said, was laying into him, telling him he was going to call the police if he didn’t clear off. We didn’t like that, me and Sue. He was a bully, we told each other, the kind of person who was threatened by anyone who was different. But I saw him myself once from Mother’s window, in a scene in which I was forced to feel sympathy. He was in the street with an elderly couple who must have been his parents. Both were smartly dressed, the woman blonde and pearled, the man tall, with the sharp bend between his shoulders that suggests scoliosis. ‘This is us,’ I heard Tom say, and his tone was both declamatory and hopeful. He was seeking approbation and, despite myself, I found this grown man’s need for approval touching. I winced when I heard his mother’s reply, sharp and querulous: ‘Busy road.’
It wasn’t until the end of May that I spent any time with him. He had been away – Cannes, for the festival. Just a few days before, Ailsa had asked if I would be an angel and tidy up my front garden while he was gone, ‘to keep him off my back’. I’m afraid to say I put it off, and it wasn’t until the Sunday that I found myself out there, having a little go. Ineffectual, I’m afraid. I’m not very good at getting down to things.
I heard them, but didn’t see them due to the height of the hedge. Tom was first through the front door, clearly back from his trip. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ he called back into the house. ‘Do it later. It’s not the end of the world.’ Ailsa’s voice next: ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Other snippets: ‘For God’s sake, what’s going on now?’ And then: ‘At last.’
They were in the process of having their drive-in turntable thing installed and their off-street area was closed off behind a corrugated-iron hoarding. Otherwise, they’d have got in the c
ar and driven away without seeing me. But as it was, they walked out onto the pavement, the five of them, on their way to where they were having to park the Chelsea tractor on a neighbouring street.
‘Oh, Verity,’ Tom said, seeing me bending over. ‘This is a turn-up for the books.’
‘Nice to see you, Tom.’
He was tanned, tiny white crinkle lines at the sides of his eyes, which looked very blue. He tapped the top of the gate. ‘Good,’ he said, about nothing in particular, nodding.
Behind him, his family stood waiting. Ailsa was wearing too many clothes: black tights, a calf-length denim skirt, and her usual long-sleeved layers. ‘We’re going for a pub lunch,’ she said. ‘It’s such a lovely day. We could all do with blowing away some cobwebs.’
‘How lovely.’
‘The Black Sheep on Wimbledon Common,’ Ailsa said.
‘I’ve always fancied Wimbledon Common; it’s on my list, but I’ve never ventured.’
‘You’ve never been to Wimbledon Common?’ Tom reared back in mock alarm. ‘It’s so close.’
‘It’s not that close,’ Melissa said. Her face wore traces of make-up that had been roughly removed – ashy streaks under her lower lashes, bloodshot eyes – and while I recognised the bottom of a clingy black T-shirt dress as one she had worn to go out in on a recent Saturday, the top of it was covered up by a big grey sweatshirt, the word ‘Baggage’ jaggedly scrawled across it in graffiti-style letters. She looked sulky, as if there might have been a row.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 7
