After Isabella

by Rosie Fiore

  Like Regina, she considered the alternatives. Every evening, she found herself going over the possibilities in her head, fruitlessly looking through the websites where academic posts were advertised, and drinking glass after glass of wine. On a practical level, she didn’t want to have to move institutions so late in her career. And, quite frankly, there weren’t any opportunities at London universities that suited her. Moving further afield, with Lucie in her third year of secondary school, just wasn’t an option. On top of that, she knew that abandoning what was left of her team for greener pastures would be cowardly and unscrupulous.

  Michael was as kind and sympathetic as he could be but could offer no real solutions beyond suggesting that he move in with her sooner rather than later, so he could contribute to the mortgage and the running of the house. She knew he was doing it for the best and noblest of reasons and that it was a good and practical solution to her financial worries, but it made her feel pressured and desperate.

  He let out his place in Surrey, put his furniture in storage and moved in. His ex-wife, Lisette, agreed to take his cat, as Esther was allergic. He brought all his clothes, boxes and boxes of books and a simply enormous television, which came with multiple speakers for cinema-style sound. It took him days to set it up in the living room, which was where Esther had her desk. As she tried to work in the evening, she had to contend with Michael clambering on the back of the sofa, rotating a speaker a millimetre to the left and then spending an age fiddling with buttons on a bewildering array of remote controls. She had no idea how any of it worked, or how she would operate it if she was ever inclined to see something on television.

  There had been no time to refurbish or install additional storage, so she’d had to clear space in her wardrobes and drawers for Michael’s things. Suddenly the house, which had always seemed quite big and airy for her and Lucie, felt cramped and over-full. She couldn’t imagine how they would manage when Michael’s sons came back from university.

  She had a taste of what it might be like when they came to stay for a weekend shortly after Michael moved in. They were lovely boys – polite, charming and easy-going, and perfectly happy to sleep wherever they fell. She put one on the sofa and one on a fold-out bed that they had bought for Lucie’s friends for sleepovers. But Luke and Oliver were just so big. Esther came down on Saturday morning to make tea and she was struck by a waft of funky, stale air from the living room as she opened the door. The floor was cluttered with the boys’ possessions – clothes strewn around, kit bags gaping open, and their two large bodies sprawled under trailing duvets. One of Oliver’s big bare feet hung over the edge of the sofa. She stood for a moment listening to their deep, sleepy breathing, and backed out. Tea could come later.

  After an hour or so, they got up, and then the whole house seemed full of them – one toasting an unfeasibly large number of slices of bread in the kitchen, the other taking a long, loud shower upstairs. Then there was music blaring through the house, and all three men – Michael and both of his sons – settled themselves out on the deck, their long legs extended, chatting, laughing and dirtying more dishes. Esther told herself she didn’t really mind. It was lovely to see Michael so happy in the company of his sons. They just took up rather a lot of room.

  Lucie came downstairs and regarded them all with ill-disguised grumpiness. ‘Urgh,’ she said to Esther, who was in the kitchen trying to fit a few more cups into an already full dishwasher. ‘There’s too much man out there.’

  ‘There is a lot of testosterone, isn’t there?’

  ‘They’re all lovely,’ said Lucie, trying to be charitable, ‘it’s just a bit much first thing. Can we go out?’

  ‘Well, Sally did invite me for coffee this morning…’ Esther began.

  ‘Good, let’s go. Sally’s house is big and quiet and there are no smelly, hairy-legged boys there.’

  They got to Sally’s promptly at eleven, the appointed time, and Esther was surprised to see that Sally’s car was missing from the driveway. Perhaps it had gone for repairs. She rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. She was walking back to her car, about to text and see if they had got the arrangement wrong, when Sally pulled up. She parked her car and hopped out, grinning broadly, wearing shorts and a bright-green shirt with a Macmillan Cancer Support logo on it. She rushed over and greeted Esther with a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was the first time Esther had seen Sally since her revelation about helping Isabella to die. She had expected Sally to be reticent, perhaps, or awkward, but she seemed to be behaving in her usual cheerful way.

  ‘You brought Lucie too! Fabulous! Sorry I’m late,’ Sally said. She reached back into the car and brought out a shopping bag. ‘I’ve got biccies though!’

  ‘Where have you been?’ Esther asked, as they went towards the house.

  ‘I was just at Waitrose, but I’ve been at the race since six this morning.’

  ‘Race? Did you run a race?’

  ‘Heavens, no!’ Sally laughed. ‘No, I was a volunteer. Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘No. A volunteer what?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking I wanted to do something worthwhile with my time, and so I looked up Macmillan on the internet. I knew I didn’t want to be a charity-tin-shaking collection lady at Sainsbury’s, but they have lots of other things you can do. I’m on a race support team. So I go along if there’s a race, set up a tent for runners who are raising money for us, and offer them drinks and sweeties, and safety pins for their race numbers. Then I cheer them on as they cross the finish line.’ Sally bustled around her kitchen, finding music on the iPod and setting it in its cradle on the speaker, then putting on the kettle and tipping chocolate digestives onto a plate as she talked. She’d let her hair grow a little longer and had scooped it back in a ponytail, which swung merrily as she moved.

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ said Lucie.

  ‘It is! They’re all such lovely people. And I get to look at lots of handsome young men in short shorts with very nice legs.’

  ‘Yuck,’ said Lucie. It was her default response to any suggestion that adults had sexual thoughts.

  Esther was surprised to find her own eyebrows rising. It was the first time, as far as she could remember, that Sally had expressed an interest in a member of the opposite sex. Or in any sex, for that matter. There was no reason why she shouldn’t – she was a single woman in her early forties, free to ogle, or date, or shag or marry as she pleased. But she had never mentioned it before. Esther realized that while she had observed Sally’s outward transformation, she hadn’t really considered how she might have changed inwardly – what might she want that she had never had? Had Sally ever had a boyfriend? Had sex? Esther had no idea.

  ‘Did you see anything you liked?’ she said calmly.

  ‘Plenty!’ Sally giggled. ‘But they were all a bit young for me, I think.’

  ‘What kind of race was it?’

  ‘A ten-kilometre race in Richmond Park.’

  ‘Ah. That will have attracted all the young bucks, trying to show how fast they are. Volunteer at a marathon, or a half-marathon next time. You want to find yourself an older fellow, someone with stamina who can keep going for a long time.’

  ‘Mum!’ gasped Lucie, horrified.

  ‘Running! I meant one who can run for a long time,’ said Esther innocently, and Lucie gazed at her balefully.

  Sally and Esther glanced at one another and burst out laughing. ‘Sorry, Lucie,’ said Sally contritely. ‘It’s me making your mum behave badly.’

  Lucie narrowed her eyes and glared at Sally with mock anger. ‘You also made her laugh though, and I haven’t heard her laugh for months, so I forgive you.’

  They sat at Sally’s kitchen table, eating biscuits and drinking tea, and Sally chattered happily about her volunteering, and the latest production by the amateur theatre group with which she was involved. She was even planning a holiday, she told them – a fortnight on a Greek island.

  ‘I never got to travel when I was young
,’ she said. ‘Not like Isabella did. I think now might just be my time.’

  ‘Full of handsome, dark-eyed men, the Greek islands,’ observed Esther. ‘And they’re rather fond of blonde ladies, I’m told.’

  ‘Are they?’ said Sally demurely. ‘That hadn’t crossed my mind!’

  This time even Lucie giggled, although she was still obliged to say ‘Eeeuw!’ with pre-teen horror.

  Esther leaned back in her chair and sipped her tea. Lucie was right, it was the first time she had smiled or laughed in a very long time. Throughout her life, Esther had been the serious one. She had grown up the gawky only child, had lost her heart to A Tale of Two Cities as soon as she was old enough to read it, and had found her sense of truth and reality between the pages of books ever since. She had been in awe of her mother’s bright, creative spirit, and of Isabella’s mercurial, magnetic personality. She had never learned the knack of lightness.

  And yet here was Sally, once so awkward and dowdy, finding her own grace and sweetness. Sally laughed uproariously at something Lucie had said. How could she be so merry and frivolous? After all she’d been through? Sally had lost years of her life – the possibilities of a career, marriage, children – to the care of Isabella and her mother. And yet here she was, laughing and happy. Esther herself couldn’t imagine a time when the darkness of Laura’s death and the car-crash of her career would lift sufficiently for her to laugh like that. Was it possible that Sally just felt – less?

  Sally got up to put the cups into the sink and wash up, and Esther was suddenly reminded of watching her wash up before – years before, in the last, awful days of Isabella’s illness. She had gone round to see Isabella and found Sally in the kitchen, her face grey with exhaustion, standing at the sink mechanically washing up. Esther had offered to take over, but with an absentminded ‘No, no,’ Sally had begun to scrub and rinse glasses, cups and plates. ‘Isabella doesn’t eat at all,’ she said. ‘But somehow we always seem to have a mountain of dirty dishes.’

  ‘It’s the visitors,’ Esther had said, itching to get at the sink. ‘Cups of tea and whatnot. You need to be less hospitable.’

  ‘Well, there are fewer visitors than there were…’ said Sally, and a cup slipped from her clumsy, tired fingers.

  ‘Sally, please sit down and let me do it. It’s bad enough that people come here and you have to entertain them on top of everything else. You shouldn’t have to clean up as well.’

  ‘If I sit down, I’ll fall asleep,’ said Sally.

  ‘Then fall asleep. Isabella’s sleeping now. If she wakes, I can do anything she needs.’

  ‘She won’t let you.’

  ‘She bloody will. I’ll make sure she does. You’re about to drop. You’ve barely slept for weeks. Go. Rest.’

  ‘She’s due one of the big blue pills at two o’clock,’ said Sally, stepping away from the sink reluctantly and drying her hands. ‘Nothing more until six, I think. Except for the morphine, which she can have whenever, but I measured it out already and it’s on her bedside table.’ A look of alarm crossed her face. ‘Oh, but if she needs moving, or any toilet things…’

  ‘I’ll call you. I promise. Now sleep.’

  Sally went off to her bedroom and, to Esther’s relief, shut the door. She knew Sally had been sleeping in fits and starts, getting up to Isabella ten or more times a night. She must be attuned to the slightest noise. With the door shut, Sally would at least have a chance of getting a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep. Esther finished washing up as quickly and quietly as she could, then dried everything and packed it away behind the milky-white glass of Isabella’s elegant kitchen cabinets. She poured herself a glass of water and, slipping off her shoes, went through to Isabella’s room.

  Isabella’s king-size bed had been replaced with a high hospital one, and she lay, her head awkwardly tilted to one side, asleep. She was thin; that was to be expected. Esther had watched the flesh fall off her in the past six months until she was so tiny, so emaciated, that it seemed impossible for her body to support life at all. Esther had stopped seeing the thinness and looked instead at Isabella’s eyes. Were they lively, or dulled by pain medication?

  Right now, Isabella’s eyes were half-open – Esther had noticed that the morphine tended to make her sleep like that. It was extremely disconcerting; it seemed she was watching you from below half-closed lids. But her regular breathing and the tiny, erratic movements of her fingers which lay on the bed covers told Esther she was indeed fast asleep.

  Esther slipped into the chair which stood beside the bed and very quietly took out her diary and glasses. She needed to take a look at her timetable for the next few weeks and schedule in a few extra conferences with students who were working on their dissertations. With Isabella so ill, she also wanted to make sure there was plenty of leeway in her diary; she might need more time off to spend with her and, inevitably, for the funeral, and—

  ‘Speccy four-eyes.’ Esther jumped. Isabella’s voice was gravelly and hoarse. She had turned her head on the pillow and lay looking at Esther. Her lips were dry and cracked, but her smile was wide and amused.

  Esther snapped her diary shut and forced a smile herself. How could she be sitting beside Isabella’s bed, trying to fit her funeral into a schedule?

  ‘Could you pass me the water?’ Isabella asked. There was a child’s water bottle on the bedside table, one with a built-in bendy straw. Esther gave it to her, noting how Isabella’s hands shook.

  Isabella took a few sips. ‘Thanks,’ she said, passing back the bottle. ‘I know it’s not a champagne flute, but it stops me tipping water all over the sheets.’

  ‘So, how’re you doing?’ Esther asked, slipping her diary back into her bag and taking off her glasses.

  ‘Oh, yadda yadda, dying of cancer, you know. Much the same. More to the point, when did you start wearing spectacles?’

  ‘I got them last week. I realized the other day that I couldn’t read the instructions on my bottle of shampoo.’

  ‘Wash, rinse, repeat. What’s to read?’

  ‘I was musing about whether the repeat was still required. Anyway, I realized I couldn’t read a word, so I asked Stephen if they’d made the print smaller, but he could read it perfectly well. So I went for an eye test.’

  ‘And they said…?’

  ‘That I have elderly eyes. Nothing to be done. I just needed reading specs.’

  ‘Elderly eyes? Bloody hell.’

  Esther was glad to have made her smile. She noticed that Isabella’s own eyes had big, dark shadows beneath them and were especially wide and staring. That was new, a change in the last few days. She looked as if she was gazing at something far away.

  ‘How’s work?’ Isabella asked, and Esther told her a story about a colleague who had done something which had led to an argument about something inconsequential to do with student attendance. She had found herself storing up anecdotes about people Isabella didn’t know, who had done things that were uncontroversial, so they could keep talking in their customary light, dry style.

  Isabella dropped the occasional comment about her condition into conversation, but anytime Esther tried to discuss it with her, she became evasive, made jokes and changed the subject. She didn’t want to talk about her prognosis. She didn’t want to talk about anything serious, and she especially didn’t want to be drawn into reminiscences. From long experience, Esther knew that the last thing Isabella would want would be a mawkish declaration of love and loyalty, as if the years of friendship they had shared could be summed up with platitudes. She didn’t want that either. She also knew that if she opened her heart, she would cry, and that if she started to cry at this screaming injustice, she would not be able to stop. And after all, it wasn’t even her tragedy. She had her health, a husband, a child, a career, a future. Isabella had a bouquet of tumours that were eating her from the inside out.

  ‘Did you bring the newspaper?’ Isabella asked.

  Esther had. Isabella often asked her to pick up a c
opy of the Guardian on her way over. She wasn’t really up to reading herself, but she liked Esther to page through the paper and read her the headlines and the odd article. Esther usually skimmed over the political news and looked for celebrity gossip, of which there wasn’t a great deal, but today Isabella asked her to turn back to the front page. There had been another shooting in America, this time in the Amish community. Esther sighed and made a passing comment about wishing Americans would see sense and tighten up their gun laws.

  ‘Why?’ said Isabella, and Esther looked up, surprised to hear her sounding so aggressive.

  ‘Because things like this keep happening. These senseless shootings…’

  ‘Americans have the right to bear arms enshrined in their constitution,’ said Isabella hotly. ‘They’re a frontier people. It’s in their blood. You are never, ever going to change that.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but they’re going to have to address the ongoing problem of mass shootings and gun violence.’

  ‘That’s very smug of you.’ Isabella’s tone was ugly. ‘I’m sure they’d be thrilled to hear what some English lecturer in London, who’s never held a gun and probably never even seen one, thinks about it.’

  ‘Well, I…’

  ‘What if you were in your home and some crack addict, some crazed lunatic broke in with a gun? Would you say, “Please hold on, my good sir, and let me inform you about how I believe in more stringent gun laws,” while he gunned down Lucie and Stephen?’