After Isabella

by Rosie Fiore

  ‘I’ll let people know. But I can’t imagine many of them can drop everything to come to a funeral on the Isle of Wight. This was her place. Her friends were all here, especially at the church. Letting them know should be our priority.’

  ‘I’m sure the priest could help us with that,’ said Michael.

  ‘Father Daniel. Yes, he’s a lovely old fellow, and was obviously very close to her.’

  They talked through a variety of practical concerns – timings, logistics, what was to happen with Laura’s will and her house in the short and longer term. After fifteen minutes or so, Esther glanced over at Lucie, who was slumped in her chair, clearly poleaxed by misery. How could she help her daughter? This was the first time Lucie had experienced the death of someone close to her. And what an awful death. There was no way she wouldn’t find out how Laura had died – someone was bound to let something slip, and Esther knew from what Laura had told her that the island was rife with gossip. It would of course be better if Lucie heard it from her and not via a cruel chance comment made by a stranger. But how should she tell her? Not for the first time, she was struck by how different real parenting was from the fantasy version she’d imagined in her youth. Deep down, she felt no cleverer or wiser than she had when she was a teenager herself, and yet she was expected to have the answers, to know what to do in a crisis, to know how to manage this massive, significant event in her daughter’s life. She didn’t know how to do it. All she knew was that she had to do it alone.

  ‘Do you mind if Lucie and I go for a walk?’ she said, conscious that this would leave her ex-husband and her boyfriend to make small talk with one another. But they were perfectly capable of looking after themselves.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Stephen. ‘I need to go up to the room and make some calls for work.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Michael.

  ‘I don’t want to go for a walk,’ said Lucie miserably.

  ‘Come on,’ said Esther. ‘You’ve been stuck in cars and ferries and now the hotel. Let’s go down to the lake and get some fresh air.’

  The hotel had elegant, groomed lawns which rolled down to the lakeside. The wind whipped around their legs and tangled their hair. Esther took Lucie’s arm and they found a bench, overlooking an expanse of velvety turf.

  She sat down and drew Lucie into the circle of her arm.

  ‘Lucie…’ she began hesitantly.

  ‘Are you going to tell me how Nanny died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘All right…’ said Esther gently. ‘My one worry is that if you don’t hear it from me, you might hear it by accident from someone else, and I think that might be worse.’

  ‘I still don’t want to know.’

  ‘Okay.’ She wasn’t going to fight. She let herself relax just a little. It was so lovely, sitting there with Lucie’s sweet, narrow shoulders in the curve of her arm. With her girl close to her, everything would be all right. But then Lucie spoke again.

  ‘This is our fault.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We should have been looking after her. Lots of people have their grandparents living with them. We hardly ever saw Nanny Laura. You neglected her, and now she’s dead.’

  Esther had to get up and move away. She walked fast down the lawn towards the lake, pulling her cardigan tightly around her. The alternatives – slapping Lucie’s face hard, or weeping uncontrollably, because what she said was true – weren’t open to her. She stood, breathing raggedly, looking out at the water. Eventually, she turned back. Lucie was still sitting on the bench, hunched over, not looking at her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The following morning, Esther wrote an enormous to-do list of things she needed to deal with over the next few days, but every time she tried to do something, someone else seemed to step in and do it more competently. Even though she would happily never have gone back to her mum’s house again, she had to go there to find all the necessary paperwork. Unsurprisingly, it was all in order, neatly filed and easily accessible in shelves above her desk. There were folders marked ‘Will’, ‘Funeral Policy’ (Laura had paid for it in full, including a plot in a woodland cemetery on the island), ‘House’ (this contained all the information relating to the ownership of the house, which was fully paid off), and ‘Finances’ (all her accounts, insurance policies and pension). Esther merely had to hand these over to the named solicitor, who was also the executor of the will. She and Lucie were the main beneficiaries, but there was also a substantial bequest to the church and some smaller ones to local organizations. The solicitors asked her if she wanted to sell the house and said that they would take care of everything.

  She set about trying to organize the funeral. She had no idea what to do about choosing readings and hymns, so Father Daniel came up with a list of suggestions. She started looking for a venue to host the wake, but the church ladies made it clear they wanted to cater it in the church hall. And on the day she decided she would begin the mammoth job of sorting and clearing out Laura’s effects, a group of six women from the church turned up with bags, boxes and labels, ready to help. All Esther had to do was choose the mementoes she wanted to keep – a task made so much harder by the fact that everything seemed tainted by Laura’s illness and death. She didn’t want any of it, but she knew that that was a choice she would come to regret, and besides, it wasn’t fair on Lucie. She forced herself to pick some paintings and jewellery, as well as photo albums and a few other articles, like her mother’s handmade quilts, which were unique and irreplaceable. Beyond that, she was glad to let the ladies get on with it and parcel up everything else to be dispersed to various charities.

  During the packing-up, she checked every nook and cranny in the house – the desk drawers, Laura’s bedside table, the kitchen counters – but there was no note, no letter for her or anyone else to explain why Laura had done what she did.

  It took all her courage to lift the key off the wall and make her way across the little courtyard to the garage. Perhaps Laura had left something in the car. The hardest thing was walking through the door and seeing Laura’s dusty red Ford. The driver’s door still stood ajar, and the pipe she had run from the exhaust was lying on the garage floor. The dust on the floor was scuffed with the marks of many feet, and there were a few discarded packets from medical paraphernalia, which must have been left there by the ambulance crew.

  Esther could see that the locking bar that ran across the up- and-over garage door was twisted and bent. The door had been pulled closed but was unfastened and could no longer be locked. The emergency services must have forced it open to get inside. She walked slowly around the car, looking in each of the windows, and could see nothing on any of the seats. After a long while, she tried the passenger door and it opened. She checked the glove compartment and under all of the seats. No note. Nothing.

  Perhaps the police had taken something away; but if they had, surely they would have told her? She decided to go and see the next-door neighbour – the one who had found Laura in the garage – to ask if she had seen anything in the car.

  She had met the neighbour, a Mrs Hardy, a few times before. Laura hadn’t particularly liked her, finding her to be a fussy busybody who had an opinion on everything in the street. She always had something to say about the way people parked their cars, put their bins out or kept their front gardens. She had a detailed knowledge of everyone’s comings and goings and seemed to disapprove of most of them.

  She was a short, thickset, grey-haired woman with heavy-lidded eyes that made her look like a squat bird of prey. She answered the door and when she saw Esther, nodded for her to follow, then walked back into her living room. In layout, her house was the mirror image of Laura’s, but it could not have been more different. Though Laura’s house had usually been clean and neat, it was also brightly decorated with all of her craft items – tapestries, quilts and rugs; the shelves bulged with books and the walls were full of artwork. Mrs Hardy’s surgical
ly spotless house was decorated in shades of beige and magnolia. There were no paintings on the walls and no books to be seen, just a single pristine-looking copy of the Radio Times on the coffee table.

  She sat down squarely in a chair and indicated that Esther should sit on the sofa opposite.

  ‘Thought you’d have come by before,’ she said, a little sourly.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Esther found herself saying. ‘I should have. This has all been a terrible shock.’

  Mrs Hardy gave a curt nod, as if the apology was merited and, if not accepted, at least acknowledged.

  ‘Thank you so much for… finding her,’ said Esther. ‘And calling the ambulance.’

  ‘I heard the car. Bloody noisy thing. I was out in the front garden, doing some weeding, and the engine just kept rumbling on and on. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t opened the garage door if she was going out. So I went to have a look – there’s that little window in the side wall – and I could see her in the car, leaning back against the headrest. I thought maybe she’d been taken ill, so I called out, but she didn’t answer. The garage door was locked and so was the side gate. So I came back here and dialled 999. You know the rest.’

  Somehow, Esther had imagined Mrs Hardy going into the garage herself, maybe trying to pull Laura out of the car. She hadn’t even been inside. Nevertheless, she had to ask. ‘Was there anything found, do you know? A note? A letter?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Hardy. ‘I don’t think so. I watched them pull her out of the car and put her on the floor to see if she was breathing, and then they got her in the ambulance and off they went. The police came later, but I didn’t see them take anything away.’

  Esther was fairly sure that she would have watched the police like a hawk. She would have noticed them taking something out of the car, or an evidence bag. Mrs Hardy didn’t miss anything.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ she said. ‘And thank you again for what you did. I wish… things had turned out differently.’

  Mrs Hardy showed her to the door, and as Esther was about to step outside, she said abruptly, ‘She fell, you know. Twice.’

  Esther stared at her. Mrs Hardy continued. ‘Once outside her front door, once in the road. The first time, she got up by herself and went inside. Didn’t speak to anyone. The second time, she couldn’t get up. Had to call out to some young feller who was passing by.’

  She didn’t say anything further, but in her bald recounting of these facts, Esther heard an accusation. ‘You should have known. How could you not know?’ Perhaps the accusation was not in Mrs Hardy’s tone but in her own head. She had spent every waking moment since Laura had died thinking about their last few telephone conversations. Was there a clue she had missed? It was impossible to remember if Laura’s speech had been slurred, or different in any way – she hadn’t noticed it or commented on it, that was for sure. And she was sure Laura had sounded cheerful, normal, busy – herself. She might have believed Laura’s death was an accident, or even foul play, if it wasn’t for the ‘neurological issues’ mentioned at the hospital, the Parkinson’s drugs, and the anecdotal evidence of falls and the use of a stick. What had been wrong with Laura? How bad was it and how long had she known? She had no idea if patient confidentiality applied after death, but she had to try. She had to go and speak to the police and Dr Preston.

  She rang the local police station and was passed from person to person until eventually she was given the name of the officer who had been first on the scene. She left a message, asking him to ring her, and half an hour later a man whose voice sounded reedy and young called her on her mobile.

  ‘There was no note in the car,’ he said, slightly defensively. ‘I got there at the same time as the paramedics, and while they were helping the lady, trying to get her to breathe, we checked the car over. If we’d found any evidence, we would have got forensics in.’

  She sensed he was terrified that he had done something wrong and might be in trouble. She was sure he had checked for a note, and she had to conclude that there simply had not been one.

  She made an appointment with Dr Preston’s surgery, explaining who she was. When she went into his consulting room, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see her. ‘Esther,’ he said gently. ‘I’m glad you came.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’re allowed to…’ she began, but her voice wobbled and she couldn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Talk about Laura’s medical history? To be honest, I wasn’t sure, so I’ve consulted a few colleagues and the General Medical Council guidelines. She didn’t ask me not to talk to you, which would have made things tricky. And the general view is that if the facts can help you make sense of her death, I am at liberty, or even encouraged, to share them with you.’

  ‘And the facts are?’

  ‘When she came into the surgery that first time, I didn’t know who she was. She had never been to see me before, although she’d been registered with us for upwards of fifteen years. She had begun to experience some worrying symptoms in November last year. The first time she came to see me, it was because she had fallen in the street and bruised a knee very badly. When I questioned her further, it transpired she’d had some dizziness, bumping into things, falling over, that sort of thing. I suggested we run some tests, and she laughed and said no. But a week later, she was back. She’d had another fall.’

  ‘November?’ said Esther.

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘So she already knew she was ill at Christmas? When we came to see her?’

  ‘She’d had some tests, but we didn’t get anything like a firm diagnosis till the January. I’m sure she didn’t want to worry you.’

  Esther nodded. Dr Preston continued. ‘At first I was pretty sure it was Parkinson’s, but then she started to show some very specific symptoms – she was losing the ability to move her eyes, and she was having trouble swallowing. We did some further investigations and it transpired she had a Parkinson’s-plus syndrome.’

  ‘Parkinson’s-plus?’

  ‘Similar to Parkinson’s but often more rapidly progressive, and with additional symptoms. She had a thing we call progressive supranuclear palsy. PSP.’

  ‘Rapidly progressive?’

  ‘With PSP, we can usually expect a patient to live around seven years, with progressive degeneration over that time. But Laura’s case was severe and moving very fast.’

  ‘And so she just decided to opt out. Without telling me. Without telling anybody who could have helped her.’ Esther was surprised at the venom in her own voice.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Dr Preston gently. ‘All I can say is I had absolutely no inkling that she was planning to do what she did. She asked a great many questions about the disease, and I know she read up on it. We did speak recently about the fact that she would need care as it progressed, and she said that she had a plan in place. That was all. I had an appointment to meet with her this week to discuss it further. I was going to contact social services on her behalf and so on. But…’ He shrugged helplessly.

  A more cynical doctor might have been afraid that Esther would complain to the NHS trust or report him for negligence, but Dr Preston was remarkably open and frank and seemed genuinely distressed by what had happened. Esther had no plans to report him. How could she accuse a doctor of failing to spot her mother’s plan to commit suicide when she had been utterly clueless herself? She hadn’t even known Laura was ill. She thanked Dr Preston for his time and made her way out into the unfeasibly bright sunshine. The funeral was the next day, and she still had so much to organize.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The church was full by the time Esther arrived from the funeral home. Standing in the doorway, she could see a sea of bent, grey heads, all leaning together and talking in urgent undertones. She knew they were gossiping. Well, let them gossip. They couldn’t make her feel worse than she already did. She held her head high and, taking Lucie’s elbow, walked to the front pew and sat down. They were all behind her now. Michael an
d Stephen took their seats separately a little way back – they had been unable to come up with a seating arrangement where they could all sit together without sparking more gossip or unnecessary questions. Esther was hot in her scratchy black wool dress. She hadn’t had anything but jeans in her hastily packed bag, so she had had to go shopping for something to wear. It was an unappealing, plain, black, sack-like dress, but it didn’t matter. She would never wear it again after today.

  Father Daniel conducted the service with warmth and kindness. Lucie did a short Bible reading (she had wanted to do something), and Father Daniel himself gave a lovely, personal eulogy. The service seemed to go on and on, and Esther felt desperate for it to end. Laura’s wicker coffin, woven with flowers, hovered in her peripheral vision. When finally the service was over, she steeled herself for greeting and thanking people. Once they had said hello to everyone, they would accompany the funeral directors out to the cemetery then return to the wake an hour or so later.

  She and Lucie followed the pallbearers to the door of the church and watched them load the coffin into the hearse. Lucie was trembling. She had never been to a funeral before. Esther took her hand and Lucie clutched her fingers tightly. Then they took their places by the door to shake hands with people as they came out. It was slow going – everyone wanted to stop and give their condolences and share a story about Laura. Esther lost count of the number of wrinkled cheeks she kissed and the number of times she said, ‘Thank you so much.’ Michael and Stephen were among the last to leave the church. Stephen gave her a firm hug, and she realized with surprise that it was the first time he had held her in his arms in years – they had stopped touching long before their split and divorce. Then he moved along, curled his arm around Lucie and led her away. Michael came and stood beside her, putting his hand on her back. His warm touch gave her strength to greet the last few people.

  To her astonishment, Paul and Tim were the next people to come out of the church. She hadn’t seen them when she came in. She hugged Paul and felt tears prick her eyes.