The Woman at Number 24

by Juliet Ashton

  Praise for Juliet Ashton:

  ‘Funny, original and wise’ Katie Fforde

  ‘Cecelia Ahern fans will love this poignant yet witty romance’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘You’ll laugh and cry your way through this original and touching love story’ Closer

  ‘It’s a gorgeous ride with a hell of a final shock’ Star Magazine

  ‘A fast paced story with a most unexpected twist’ Image Magazine

  This book is for Michael and Alison Anderson, with my love and awe

  Prologue

  Notting Hill, W11

  This calendar is FREE to valued customers!

  Friday 15th January, 2016

  BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE THAN CURSE THE DARKNESS

  Sarah tried to leave straight after the registry office ceremony, but Leo wouldn’t hear of it. He persuaded her to wait for the speeches back at the flat, then insisted she stay for the cutting of the cake. ‘We’ll have a boogie later,’ he’d laughed as the music began.

  No boogie had been had. Leo offered only scraps; a consolation prize that underlined what Sarah had lost. When she finally slipped away, Leo was engrossed in his bride. He didn’t notice her leave, and nobody else tried to stop her; mostly they marvelled that she was there at all.

  Out on the landing the bass banged in Sarah’s ears as she eased off her shoes and rubbed her complaining toes. It was time to go home. Bed was all she wanted. Her chaste bed, no longer rumpled by the long legs of her man.

  At least I don’t need to call an Uber.

  A flight of stairs was all that separated the wedding party in Flat B from Sarah’s nest at the top of number twenty-four Merrion Road. The elegantly winding stairway sat like a spine at the centre of the house, the flats fanning out from it, one on each storey, except for the basement where heartless developers had crammed in two dwellings.

  The bannister, polished smooth by two hundred years of use, was cool beneath Sarah’s hands. The ascent seemed longer than usual, as if extra stairs had been stealthily added. She climbed with the careful weariness of an invalid, despite looking the picture of health in her tightly fitted, especially bought red dress. The bouquet in her hand drooped, splashing petals on the floor.

  Had the bride thrown it directly at her? Sarah had had no option but to catch the flesh-coloured roses that flew at her face. There were shouts of ‘You’ll be next!’ as the bridegroom gave her a complicated look. Sarah had been careful to look ecstatic; she’d acted her part well, but now the mask ate into her face and her bed beckoned from the top of the house.

  ‘About time, missy!’ A small spry figure of unguessable age barred the door to Sarah’s flat.

  ‘Hello, Mavis,’ sighed Sarah.

  ‘What are you all done up for? Don’t tell me you went to the wedding?’ Mavis was aghast, but delighted too, like a rubbernecker slowing to pass a road accident.

  ‘Did you want something?’ Sarah halted, fearing her legs might not reboot. She felt as though she’d aged three decades on the stairs, the day’s anguish eating into her bones and putting her on a par with her elderly neighbour.

  ‘I’ve been knocking and knocking.’ In her dusty dress Mavis was petulant, taking Sarah’s absence personally. ‘I had to sign for this letter while you were gallivanting.’ She thrust an envelope at Sarah, in much the same way as the bride had propelled the posy. ‘I do have a life of my own, you know.’ Mavis’s accent was from another age, imperious and entitled. ‘I’m not a servant.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sarah didn’t ask why Mavis hadn’t simply pushed it under the door. Past experience had taught her never to rise to the bait; Mavis drew nourishment from arguments, and right now Sarah needed peace.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Sarah almost laughed at such naked nosiness. ‘I’ve had a long day, Mavis.’

  ‘No need to snap, dear,’ snapped Mavis. She stepped closer, peering into Sarah’s eyes, which were carefully made up, their grey enhanced and their lashes lengthened.

  The maquillage, the formal outfit, the new pashmina that kept slipping off Sarah’s shoulders, were armour; she flinched as the wrinkled little woman’s preternaturally bright eyes bored through her shield.

  ‘You’ve been crying.’ Mavis didn’t ask why. Perhaps because it was obvious.

  ‘Mavis!’ A voice, clear high and bright, sounded from below.

  ‘Keep your hair on!’ shouted Mavis. She growled at Sarah: ‘Bloody family. They think they own you.’

  Inquisitive, Sarah leant over the bannister as Mavis plodded downwards.

  Far below, a pale oval shone in the dark of the hallway. It was a woman’s upturned face, austere and direct, whose eyes met Sarah’s briefly before their owner stepped back into the shadows.

  She was old, that much was clear even at such a distance, but she was beautiful in a timeless way, like a goddess from pagan times, whose gaze could save or destroy. She was familiar . . .

  Recognition landed, and Sarah stirred with the almost sexual excitement that fame generates. ‘Mavis! Isn’t that—?’

  ‘I’ll tell you who that is, dear,’ said Mavis, feet slapping on each step. ‘None of your business. That’s who that is.’

  Fragile from the day’s events, Sarah craved gentleness and comfort, proof that there was kindness in the world. Mavis was the opposite of what she needed so Sarah said nothing in response to the trademark rudeness and let herself into her own four walls.

  Flat A was dark. The muted whoops and cheers bleeding up through the floorboards underlined its stale loneliness. Sarah imagined Leo down there, beneath her bare feet, showing off his new bride, agreeing that, yes, he truly was a lucky dog.

  Peeling off the dress, Sarah exhaled gratefully. If the statistics were right and 42 per cent of modern marriages ended in divorce, she surely wasn’t the first woman to attend her ex-husband’s wedding. Sarah didn’t feel modern; she felt like a child left at home on her own. She shook her lacquered hair, and confetti rained down around her.

  With the lights off, the flat passed as normal. Darkness camouflaged the holes gouged in the walls and the wallpaper that peeled like leprous skin. The disarray accused Sarah, reminding her how behind she was with the plan to refurbish, sell up, and move on. It wasn’t her plan. It was Leo’s. I agreed, she reminded herself. A countdown ticked constantly beneath all her conversations, beneath every film she watched or book she tried to read. It was ominous, growing louder as it raced towards her deadline. August. Sarah had until the end of August to renovate the flat.

  The moonlight glanced off the cheap glossy paper of the calendar tacked to the wall. The staff at Confucius, a Chinese takeaway near enough to trot to in slippers, had handed over the calendar with reverence; Sarah had felt mildly embarrassed at being one of their best customers. She reached out and tore off the top page, glad to see the back of a date that had lain in wait for her.

  Littered with paint cans and stepladders, the bedroom felt abandoned, as if Sarah had moved out with Leo.

  ‘But I’m still here!’ said Sarah, defiantly tugging on her towelling dressing gown and pulling its soft collar to her chin. When she switched on her lamp, the room remained obstinately dark. She thought of the Post-it note reminding her to buy bulbs lying somewhere in the rubble. Finding a candle under the kitchen sink, she remembered the quote on the calendar and agreed that, yes, it was better to light a candle than curse the darkness. She climbed into bed, the walls wobbling around her in the flickering light.

  In the candle’s chivalrous glow, she couldn’t see the half-sanded floorboards or the drooping curtain pole. On the bedside table, it prettily illuminated the Registered letter that Mavis had given her. Wondering what could be so important tha
t it needed a signature, Sarah ripped it open.

  The folded page was brittle, as befits a letter from a ghost.

  Chapter One

  Notting Hill, W11

  This calendar is FREE to valued customers!

  Thursday 9th June

  YOU CANNOT PREVENT THE BIRDS OF SADNESS FROM FLYING OVER YOUR HEAD, BUT YOU CAN PREVENT THEM MAKING A NEST IN YOUR HAIR

  The removals van and the hearse jammed the narrow street, both drivers refusing to give way. This was a busy day for number twenty-four; one couple moving in, another occupant very much moving out.

  Double-fronted, strictly symmetrical, the Georgian house shimmered in summer’s arms. Painted a pale blue, it belonged on a whimsical lane by the sea, not a traffic-choked side street in Notting Hill. The façade had seen better days.

  Haven’t we all? thought Sarah, staring down at the stand-off from her top-floor window. Hopefully, Mavis was still indoors, unaware that her sister’s coffin was involved in a road-rage incident. Even the corpse’s celebrity status couldn’t protect it from this final indignity.

  The only black jacket in Sarah’s wardrobe was too wintry to wear. Forecasters promised – or threatened – ever higher temperatures as summer hit its stride. Number twenty-four, a veteran of every season, withstood the heat with insouciance, standing tall and still in the heavy air.

  ‘You’ll do.’ Sarah snatched a navy sundress from the clothes rail she’d bought as a temporary alternative to a wardrobe two years ago. The last funeral Sarah had attended was her father’s, and she recalled her mother’s defiantly white coat. Sarah had been in black, the colour of crows and bad dreams. She’d avoided it ever since.

  Adjusting a borrowed black hat in the pitted mirror propped against the pitted wall, Sarah tucked up her brownish blondish hair and pronounced herself ready. Confucius was worrying himself over nothing; the birds of sadness would never dare nest in such an untidy up-do. Sarah’s childhood had knocked any physical vanity out of her. Today of all days it seemed disrespectful to fuss over her appearance.

  One hand on the balustrade, Sarah picked her way downstairs in heels that were probably too high for such a solemn occasion. She hurried past Flat B, its glossy front door leaking classical music. Down at street level, the scuffed door to Flat C was wedged open by a pile of boxes. Bulky new furniture stood around like tongue-tied guests in the sitting room Sarah knew so well.

  Framed prints, bold and colourful, were stacked against a shipwrecked sofa. A framed wedding photograph was at the forefront. In de rigueur black and white, the house’s new couple smiled out at Sarah, having so much honest-to-goodness fun they were slightly out of focus.

  Lovebirds.

  Sarah hated how her lip curled but was powerless to stop it. The glowing pair weren’t to know that Sarah’s relationship with Flat C’s previous tenant had helped kill her marriage. Smith had taken off in a black cab six months ago, but Sarah still managed to forget some days, to expect the familiar tread on the stair and the raucous laugh in the small hours.

  The letter sent by Smith had arrived with exquisite timing, salvaging the black, bleak day of Leo’s wedding. Sarah had it with her now; it went everywhere with her, even gate-crashing a funeral.

  Pausing at the front door, as if at the border of a foreign land, Sarah’s fingers delved in her handbag and found the letter.

  There was no salutation, no signing off, just a few scrawled lines on a page torn from a diary. Sarah had committed every word to memory, like a poem from her schooldays.

  If I can’t see you then I have to write to you! I have no news, no nothing except some advice which you must take to heart. Promise? Be yourself, because, my sweet Sarah, you are more than good enough. And always find the beauty in everybody, because that’s the magic formula to make everything A-OK.

  He didn’t sign it ‘Love from’ because he didn’t have to.

  The magic formula was trickier than it sounded. Finding the beauty in people could be mistaken for schmaltz, but Sarah noted that it was ‘everybody’. Not just the beauty in the people she liked – that was easy – but the beauty in curmudgeons and trolls.

  Speaking of which . . . alone at the kerb, Mavis was all in black, her moth-eaten winter stockings cocking a snook at the warm weather. She constituted Sarah’s biggest challenge yet to invoking the magic formula.

  As Sarah edged into the old lady’s line of vision, Mavis’s headscarf turned a fraction. No eye contact, of course: a little thing like death wouldn’t change Mavis. But even an infamous harridan shouldn’t go to a funeral alone, so Sarah took Mavis’s loud sniff as an invitation to join her laying her only sister, the celebrated novelist Zelda Bennison CBE, in the earth.

  Alongside the others at the graveside in black linen and swooping hats, Mavis looked like a charlady in her chain-store coat and face brutally bare. In accordance with Zelda’s wishes, only a handful of mourners were present, each of them in deep shock. When Death visits, the reactions are the same, whether his victims are chic and moneyed, like Zelda’s friends, or downright Dickensian, like Zelda’s sister.

  According to articles in the broadsheets, the novelist told nobody about the diagnosis of fast-acting motor neurone disease, not even Ramon, her husband of two years. Zelda had arrived to visit her sister at number twenty-four and never gone home, passing quietly away in the basement a few months later. Sarah had seen Zelda coming and going for the first few weeks, but after that Zelda kept indoors as her health deteriorated.

  Aloof from the others, Mavis stared into the grave. The small slice of face visible beneath her scarf looked not grief-stricken but angry, as if she wanted to claw up the fresh mud and give Zelda a good telling-off.

  On the far side of the mound of earth, a handsome dark-skinned man who pulsed with charisma dabbed at his eyes. ‘That’s the husband,’ whispered a woman behind Sarah. The widower was thirty something years his wife’s junior. From the tsk, Sarah deduced she wasn’t the only one unconvinced by the eye dabbing.

  Mavis was in a bleak world of her own as the coffin was lowered. She took no notice of the elegant assemblage, and hadn’t greeted her brother-in-law. Edging forward, Sarah stood shoulder to shoulder with the bristling woman, even though Mavis’s body language screamed Keep away! Sarah didn’t need her qualifications in psychology to diagnose Mavis. Sarah was an expert in loss; she knew what it looked like close up.

  The letter backed her up silently from the depths of her bag, urging her to see past the hostility to the humanity.

  At the end of the short ceremony the small party turned as one. Sarah took Mavis’s arm on the hard, uneven ground. Mavis shook her off and picked her way, head down, through the gravestones.

  When they arrived at number twenty-four the mourners tailed Mavis up the stone steps, across the black and white chequered floor of the communal hall, and down a short flight of stairs to the gloomy basement level. Sarah saw the door of Flat D open a crack, then slam; a quiet civil war raged between the subterranean neighbours.

  As if to underline how very alive they were, the handful of people murmured about a good cup of tea or a stiff drink. As Mavis searched for her key, a powerful communal hunger overtook them all – an affirmation on a macabre day.

  With quiet optimism, Sarah anticipated a vol-au-vent, a retro classic which had lost its cachet apart from, she hoped, at funeral teas.

  The widower had disappeared without a word. The guest who’d tutted said to whoever was listening, ‘At least Ramon had the decency not to take over the funeral.’

  ‘I should have been with Zelda when she died,’ said another mourner, a small woman with a querulous face. ‘We should all have been there. Why did she keep her illness secret? Why choose to die here?’

  A rumble of agreement ran through the group, who all seemed surprised to find themselves in such humble surroundings.

  ‘She came home to her family,’ said Sarah, hoping Mavis was too engrossed in undoing the six locks on her door to hear the exchange. ‘It�
�s only natural.’

  Which made Sarah unnatural. She couldn’t imagine a situation so dire that she’d flee to her one remaining family member.

  Another woman stage-whispered, ‘Accidental overdose, my eye. The Zelda I know . . .’ She faltered, recovered. ‘The Zelda I knew was fastidious. She did nothing by accident.’

  Mavis let herself into her dark flat, closing the door behind her with a surly clunk. Sarah looked uncertainly at the others, who looked uncertainly back.

  The great Zelda Bennison’s funeral was over.

  Chapter Two

  Notting Hill, W11

  This calendar is FREE to valued customers!

  Friday, 10th June, 2016

  TO MAKE A NEW FRIEND, NEVER BREAK WITH THE OLD

  Cinema-goers the world over feel as if they know Notting Hill. The place has a distinct sense of self. Dotted with trees despite the exhaust fumes, it’s a borough of extremes: poverty and wealth; Cool Britannia and unemployment; carnival and riot.

  The imposing houses built for olde-worlde society families fell into disrepair over the centuries, their grand salons carved into bedsits. After waiting patiently for the tide of gentrification to turn and snatch them back from renting singletons, their dazzling façades were now restored. But turn a corner and you were in the concrete tundra of a housing estate, or a mews that once housed horses but now housed advertising executives happy to forgo a garden for a W11 postcode.

  Notting Hill catered for all tastes and pockets; within minutes of Sarah’s front door she could buy – if she wanted to – vintage fashion, mind mind-altering drugs, and Pringles. Perfectly embodying this split personality, number twenty-four was a magnificent example of Regency architecture, but the glorious blue of its exterior was in need of a touch-up, and the windows reflected the differing fortunes of the residents.

  Sarah’s own windows were painted shut. Flat B’s tasteful double glazing glittered in the sunshine, bespoke blinds standing to attention. Another floor down, Flat C’s frames were rotten; Smith hadn’t prioritised home improvements.