The Woman at Number 24

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘Have you ever—’ began Sarah.

  ‘Sad about that little girl, Una. Do you think there’s hope for her speaking again?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘The child cowers from me. I snarled at her, before . . .’ Mavis sounded small. ‘I’ve burned a lot of bridges.’

  ‘They can be rebuilt.’ Busy hammering her own rickety bridge to the past, Sarah wanted to believe this. ‘Look at me and Leo.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Mavis, the old model reaching out a claw from beneath the new plumage. ‘How complicated we make our lives. Everybody in this house has a unique set of circumstances, their own complexities. And the house next door will be just the same. And the one the far side of that.’

  ‘Do you include yourself in that analysis?’ Time to push a little at Mavis’s cast-iron borders.

  ‘If you mean, am I human, absolutely.’

  ‘I meant, have you made your life complicated, Mavis?’ Sarah thought of the schism between the Bennison sisters, the socialite writer and the bad-tempered mole.

  ‘I wish . . .’ Mavis felt her way, taking bite-sized pieces. ‘I wish . . . I hadn’t . . . I mean, I wish . . . my sister . . .’ She stopped. ‘You tricked me into talking about Zelda.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Not sorry.

  ‘The answer’s yes, I’ve made a spectacular mess of my life. My sister’s death . . .’

  ‘Is none of my business.’ Sarah touched Mavis’s fingers.

  Pulling her hand away as if Sarah was red-hot, Mavis said, ‘It is your business, because you’ve shown me kindness. All these years living here, pushing people away, makes it difficult to surface.’ Mavis mimed swimming upwards, her white hair thrown back, her face troubled and yearning. Sitting back in her chair, she said, ‘You’re a lifesaver, Sarah.’

  ‘What if we’re pulling each other back to shore?’

  ‘Saving each other’s lives, you mean?’

  ‘This house – well, I don’t need to tell you this, you’ve lived here longer than me – but this house is changing. I’d run up to my flat, lock the door and it was like the rest of number twenty-four didn’t exist, apart from Smith. I nodded at Lisa, ignored Helena, and, frankly, I kept out of your way.’

  Mavis closed her eyes, accepting it.

  ‘Now the house is waking up. Shaking itself. I’m waking up, too, and you’re part of that.’ The evening had been fun. More fun than dinner with an elderly sourpuss had any right to be.

  ‘I have so much to atone for.’

  ‘Stop dragging around your past, Mavis.’ Sarah didn’t know what had happened to make Mavis so cynical, but she knew what had brought her to her senses. ‘Zelda’s death was a crossroads, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It changed everything.’

  ‘Death steals the wrong people.’ Sarah thought of her father’s face, frozen in time on her mantelpiece. Crazy that she’d never know what kind of old man he’d make.

  ‘This time it certainly did,’ said Mavis.

  ‘You nursed Zelda until the very end. She must have been so grateful to have a sister like you.’

  Mavis went so quiet that the room seemed to close down around them. Even Peck stopped grumbling. ‘You’d be surprised what Zelda might have to say about me. And my nursing skills.’

  ‘Survivor guilt. You did your best.’

  ‘It was she who banished me, you know. My sister never loved me or anybody else.’

  Staying very still, Sarah listened. It was a skill she called on daily in her job. She listened not only with her ears, but with her brain and, crucially, her heart.

  ‘I couldn’t help loving Zelda, even though she told people I’d forsaken her. The truth is, when she died I should have died with her.’

  ‘I for one am thankful you’re still here.’ Sarah meant it. ‘Let’s swim to shore together, Mavis.’

  The words rustling like dead leaves, Mavis said, ‘I’d only drag you down. I . . .’ Mavis took a breath, started again. ‘There are aspects of . . .’ Something was tunnelling its way out of her. ‘If you knew all about me, Sarah, you’d run for the door.’

  ‘Get lost, bum face!’ hollered Peck.

  ‘For once,’ said Mavis, ‘he’s right. I mustn’t keep you.’

  They were on the verge of a meaningful breakthrough, a possible end to Mavis’s self-imposed exile in the belly of number twenty-four. ‘You were about to tell me something.’

  ‘Nothing interesting, I assure you.’ The atmosphere lost its poignancy. They were just two women in a dingy room.

  ‘What if,’ said Sarah impulsively as they reached the front door, ‘I was to help you sort out the flat? Or maybe style your hair? You’d look wonderful with it all swept up—’ The hand she reached out was slapped away.

  ‘Excuse me? I need a haircut? The flat needs sorting out?’ Mavis held the phrase between two fingers as if it was dirty.

  Peck whistled low.

  ‘That came out all wrong.’ Sarah backed away. ‘Thanks for the lovely food.’

  ‘Perhaps you could show me how to cook it better?’

  ‘Bugger orf!’ yelled Peck.

  Chapter Six

  Notting Hill, W11

  This calendar is FREE to valued customers!

  Wednesday 22nd June, 2016

  THE ERROR OF ONE MOMENT BECOMES THE SORROW OF AN ENTIRE LIFE

  Pembridge Road was a row of eccentrically disordered shops, the antithesis of the bland British high street, so it was perfect for an individual who wanted to lose themselves in trivia, to pull together their scattered fibres. That Wednesday lunchtime it was perfect for Sarah, who’d awarded herself time off from scraping and painting and breaking her nails.

  The colours and fabrics in the window of Retro Woman were sensory passports to another time. Even though the shell-pink slip had been sewn long before Sarah was born, it sparked nostalgia in her, as did the narrow satin shoes and the moulting boas. The colours were faded, subtle, difficult to pin down; were those suede gloves pinky beige or beigey pink?

  The price tags were clear enough. Notting Hill repackaged the olden days at very modern prices.

  Spending time with Leo gave Sarah a hangover. An urge to rush about and clear the air of its charged atmosphere. All they’d done the evening before, after Sarah’s dinner with Mavis, was smooth Polyfilla over the dents in the sitting-room wall, but Sarah felt like a fallen woman.

  The snatched half-hours were a mixed blessing. Leo incited a tingle of excitement and guilt, plus dismay; after all, his help made it more likely she’d meet the deadline. At the end of August Sarah would run out of road.

  Jane had begun showing her listings. Airy maisonettes. A spacious doer-upper. A shoebox with a bed that came down from the wall. None of them looked like home.

  ‘Look!’ said a woman to Sarah’s left, in the sing-song voice adults use with children. ‘Pretty!’ Lisa was pointing to a rainbow-coloured dress but Una ignored her, her earnest face tilted towards Sarah. ‘Oh. You,’ said Lisa, noticing her neighbour.

  ‘Hello!’ Sarah compensated for the woman’s blank rudeness. ‘And hello you.’ She bent down to Una.

  ‘No point. She doesn’t—’

  ‘You told me.’ Perpetually reiterating Una’s muteness over her head underlined it. ‘Maybe, just maybe, if I point at the lovely bits and pieces in this window, Una will smile when I get to her favourite.’

  ‘I’m telling you, no point,’ repeated Lisa.

  ‘The bag. The shoes.’ Sarah wondered which of the window’s bounty would appeal to a child. ‘The red shoes with the polka dot bow.’

  A smile, small but boisterous, couldn’t be contained.

  ‘A-ha!’ said Sarah.

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Lisa gawped. ‘How’d you manage that?’

  Her rule about not discussing children in their earshot was one Sarah never broke. ‘The garden’s looking better, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sarah. The two women had much in common,
both of them making the best of abandonment, but they had no conversation at all. Lisa was as barricaded in as her little girl. ‘So, anyway.’ Sarah backed away, shoulders hunched, a cheerily faux goodbye! grin pasted on her face. ‘Gotta dash.’

  The rooms were naked, echoing.

  ‘There’s something special about empty houses.’ Sarah spun in the middle of the floorboards, arms flung out, taking in the enormous salon. ‘All that potential. And history.’ The bare space awoke memories of her father showing her around his bachelor pad, calling it ‘our flat’ to soften the blow of his leaving. She could almost, not quite, feel how small her hand seemed in his; the knowledge of him, physically, came and went, like stuttering Wi-Fi.

  ‘It’s the smell of plaster and paint that does it for me.’ Jane sniffed the air. She’d turned up, tooting the horn, in St Chad’s car park at the end of Sarah’s working day, begging for company as she checked out a couple of grand properties. ‘If I didn’t do this for a living I’d have to break in and wander around empty houses at night.’

  ‘D’you think your clients will like this?’ Sarah crossed to the tall window. ‘They’d be crazy not to. Stucco exterior: tick. Cantilevered staircase: tick. Original elm floors: tick. Plus a space-age kitchen that would spark sexual fantasies in all right-thinking women.’ The house was waiting, already haunted by its future inhabitants. ‘I’d love to live here.’

  ‘Maybe. But you’re not the wife of a Russian billionaire who has three hundred pairs of shoes to accommodate.’

  Sarah had eight pairs of shoes, all past their prime, only six of which fitted her. She peeked through a doorway which led onto another doorway. The house unfolded neatly, the way life should but rarely does. The emptiness begged to be filled: Sarah felt the same. A thought she usually held at bay stole through her defences: will I ever live in a house with a man to call my own and children around my feet?

  ‘Plus she doesn’t do stairs, and I can’t see where to put a lift.’ Jane made a tsk noise with her tongue and scribbled on a clipboard. Work-Jane was subtly different to home-Jane: twinkle intact, but sharp with it. Attractive in the literal sense of the word, she was a blurred point of activity in any room, a colourful scrawl lit from within.

  The basement was no subterranean Mavis-style lair: it had been dug out and transformed into a swimming pool. Empty of water, its pearly tiles glistened. Jane ran a hand along the walls. ‘Patchy finishing.’ Disappointed, she made a note on her clipboard. ‘Leo scuttled off pretty quick when I nipped up to yours last night.’

  ‘He didn’t scuttle.’

  Jane peered at the lighting panel. ‘It was a classic scuttle. As if I’d caught you doing something naughty.’

  ‘Nothing naughty about D.I.Y.’ Sarah turned away. Anything she did with Leo, no matter how chaste, could be classified as ‘naughty’, simply because she’d begun to daydream about the ex-Mrs Harrison becoming the third Mrs Harrison. The current Mrs Harrison might have something to say about this fantasy; Helena wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  Locking up the vast front door, Jane wouldn’t drop the subject. ‘Leo’s face was a picture. He’s after you, Sarah.’

  ‘He left me, remember? I’m the one he doesn’t want, to paraphrase Olivia Newton-John.’

  ‘Perhaps cheating turns him on.’ Jane led the way to her car out in the mews. ‘Hop in, missus, and stop blushing.’

  ‘I’m not blushing.’ Sarah buckled up and pulled down the mirror on the sun visor. ‘Oh.’ She was the colour of the tomatoes that sprouted as and when the fancy took them on her windowsill.

  ‘What do you, did you see in Leo, exactly?’ The car rolled out through electric gates that delivered them from the ease of wealth to the noise of the street.

  ‘He’s . . .’ Sarah didn’t understand the question. Surely every woman fancied Leo? Wasn’t he catnip, with his wry face and his just-fallen-out-of-somebody’s-bed allure?

  ‘I get the upper-class thing, although I prefer a bit of rough myself.’ Jane leaned forward, pushing through the traffic. ‘But the paunch and the cigar habit . . . Leo looks as if he’d conk out if he had to run a hundred yards. Whereas you . . .’ Jane sighed. ‘You think Leo’s the prize, but it’s you, you fool.’

  ‘Leo and me, it’s complicated.’ Sarah held on to the seat belt as they found a stretch of clear road and the car barrelled along as if they were making a getaway.

  ‘Nothing’s complicated.’ Jane peered over the steering wheel as she zipped through some lights. ‘We all know when we’re being reckless. We just don’t acknowledge it. Before I got married my love life was a soap opera. I chose the wrong guy, over and over, like somebody who keeps ordering the same dish on the menu, thinking this time it’ll taste better. But,’ said Jane philosophically, as she cut up a lorry on a roundabout, ‘eggs Benedict is always eggs Benedict. And I hate eggs Benedict.’

  ‘Then you met Mr Right?’

  ‘I grabbed Mr Right. Poor sod had no choice in the matter. My days of eggs Benedict are over.’ Jane’s smile needed an extra face to do it justice. ‘Oh, Sarah, it was so perfect. I knew immediately. I almost scared him off. I was all—’ She took her hands off the wheel and waved them maniacally, screaming for extra effect. ‘In the end, he gave in. As I tell him every day, it’s the best decision he ever made.’

  ‘You give me hope.’

  ‘Why do you need hope?’ Jane was warmly scornful. ‘You could jump out of this car and nab a bloke before you reached the end of the road.’

  ‘What if I don’t want this hypothetical bloke?’ In any way that truly mattered, Sarah was still married.

  ‘Then you go on to the next one. And so on and so forth,’ said Jane loftily, ‘until you find the one that floats your boat, rings your bell, et cetera, et cetera. Then you snog off into the sunset and settle down and have babies and all that shit.’ They idled at a red light. ‘If you want babies, that is. Not everybody does.’

  ‘Leo and I never got round to it. I wanted to establish myself at St Chad’s. Perhaps I should have . . .’ Sarah blew out her cheeks. ‘I thought we had all the time in the world.’

  Jane darted concerned looks at Sarah.

  ‘It feels like a door slammed. The idea of having a child with somebody else . . .’ Sarah shuddered. She couldn’t even picture herself naked with A.N.Other, as if her body was jointly owned by herself and Leo in the same way as Flat A. ‘Maybe I should have let nature take its course. I would have coped, somehow, with work and a child. And now I’d have something to love.’ Something of Leo’s.

  ‘You have me!’ Jane beeped the horn at a jaywalker. Her eye caught something and she rolled down her window. ‘Oi! Yes you! Hop in.’ Settling back, she said, ‘You don’t mind a hitchhiker, do you?’

  Tom stood on the far pavement, raising a broad palm in greeting. As he watched the cars for a break in their ranks, Sarah said, ‘How about you, Jane? Are babies on the agenda?’

  Tom saw his chance and took it, sprinting towards them.

  ‘Depends. There are . . . oh, it’s boring, but my womb’s a bit uncooperative. Dull medical shizzle.’

  ‘I see.’ Sarah regretted asking so blithely.

  Tom swung into the back seat, slinging his rucksack ahead of him and bringing the mercury scent of the street.

  ‘And besides,’ said Jane, ‘you need to have sex to make babies and that doesn’t happen very often.’

  Glancing behind her, Sarah checked whether Tom had heard.

  Pulling on his seat belt, shimmying into a comfortable position, he laughed ‘What?’ when he saw Sarah’s stricken face. He looked out of the window, and Sarah found his profile in the driver’s mirror, studying him without his knowledge as Jane chattered.

  The feelings Tom invoked weren’t entirely new but they’d been absent for so long that Sarah had to dust them off and examine them a little more closely before deciding exactly what they were.

  Not exactly desire. But not not desire, either.

  She noticed details.
How his nose looked daintily broken. The stubble that broke through on his chin. The clever straightness of his eyebrows. Like a virus, it raged through her, this not not desire, this interest.

  ‘Are we headed home?’ asked Tom.

  ‘We’re going for ice cream.’

  ‘Why?’

  Jane was scandalised. ‘Surely you mean why not?’

  With Tom and Jane jousting about which radio station to listen to, Sarah felt as if they were all off on a jaunt, like normal people. In Sarah’s new regime, ‘other’ people went on holiday; she hadn’t slept a night away from her peeling, creaking flat since the great upheavals began.

  ‘Sarah’s been at it again,’ said Jane.

  From the back, Tom asked what ‘it’ was, but guessed before anybody answered. ‘Why do you hang out with Leo? I don’t get it.’

  ‘She loves him,’ said Jane, matter-of-fact. ‘Even after what he did. Don’t you, Sarah?’

  ‘Don’t put her on the spot, Janey.’ Tom leaned forward and ruffled Sarah’s hair.

  She almost burst into tears at the touch. Having held herself aloof for months, Tom’s brotherly gesture breached her firewall. ‘Whether I love Leo isn’t the point,’ she said. ‘It’s a step forward. I can’t stay angry with him for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Why not?’ Jane tapped the steering wheel, winking at a cyclist beside them. ‘Chop off his balls and sauté them. He deserves it. Doesn’t he, Tom?’

  ‘I don’t know enough about the situation to—’

  ‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Jane. ‘You should hear him go on about Leo when you’re not here.’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘He does. He thinks the guy’s mad, giving you up for that overdressed slapper. Look, Sarah, I’m not judging you. If you want to grapple Leo back from Helena, fair play.’ She ignored Sarah’s splutterings. ‘But you’ll break your own heart again if it doesn’t work. Even if it does work, you’ll feel like crap, because you, lady, are not cut out to be a mistress. You’re one of nature’s goody-goodies.’

  Goody-goody was unsexy. Goody-goody was the polar opposite of red-hot Helena. But the signs were all there: Sarah was a Waitrose card holder, a picker up of litter, and could be relied on to say ‘Bless you’ after a sneeze. ‘I’ve never done anything really wrong,’ admitted Sarah. So wary of proving her mother’s prophecy right – Just like your father! – she had an exaggerated conscience. The letter, each word revered as holy scripture, exhorted her to be herself, but Sarah’s instincts and her needs were at war. ‘Even though Leo and I don’t even touch each other it feels wrong.’