4
Kate had forgotten how minuscule Belle Vue was, even by cramped New York apartment standards.
The front door opened straight into the kitchen, with a row of dilapidated dark-brown units, a larder and a downstairs loo. The back door opened onto a courtyard, an open-tread staircase led upstairs to the two bedrooms, and a doorway hung with an orange curtain opened onto the living room. It seemed incredible to think that she and her parents had muddled along together in the tiny space for so many years.
The air smelled musty and dank and stale. Kate threw open the kitchen window to let in the evening breeze. It used to smell of home in here. Of fresh laundry drying on the overhead rack. Of recently baked cakes. Of the thick bar of Imperial Leather that always lay beside the kitchen sink, the familiar label clinging to the soap until it became so tiny it was stuck onto the new bar. And underlying all of that the rich fug of oil from the Aga.
The Aga her mum used to air her pyjamas on every night. And her uniform every morning. They would lie neatly folded on top of the hotplate, a gentle heat permeating through, so Kate would feel warm before she got into bed or set off for school. Inside the Aga there would always be a pot of homemade soup, swarming with vegetables, or a casserole thick with pearl barley.
But tonight the Aga was stone cold. Someone had been in to turn it off, or it had turned itself off, as was its wont, which meant there would be no hot water. Kate opened the door that hid the mysterious workings, lit one of the long matches from the box on the side and held the flame against the wick.
She heard a wump as the flame took hold, breathing life into the house again. Soon the kitchen would be as warm as toast, the water piping hot, and the hotplate would be ready to receive the kettle. Its familiar whistle, increasingly persistent, had been part of the soundtrack of Kate’s youth.
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the Formica-topped table, tracing the flowers with her finger. How many meals had she eaten here? How many times had she done her homework, spreading her books and papers all around her? Or sat with her hand curled around a cup of cocoa, munching flapjacks and talking to her mum?
The house might have been small, but it never seemed to matter. Her friends crowded into the kitchen of an evening, huddled round the radio. Her mum would bustle amongst them, chattering; her dad would just smile and nod benignly on his way to watch the news, his single nightly bottle of Newcastle Brown ale in his hand.
Those days were gone for ever. Kate shivered, knowing that she had to face the pain, that nothing would dull it, that it had to be experienced in its full ferocity, because you couldn’t run away from grief. She wasn’t ready to let it in just yet, though.
She humped her suitcase up the stairs, pausing on the landing. The door to her mother’s room – her parents’ room – was shut. She didn’t want to look inside. She was too tired and cold, fragile and uncertain. A lump came into her throat and she felt an overwhelming need for her mum. Joy had always been relentlessly reassuring. She had taken the fear out of every situation and boosted Kate at every opportunity. Whether it was exam nerves, or falling out with a friend, or being dumped by a boy, her mother had provided advice and comfort: a stout shoulder.
And now, when she needed her most, she wasn’t here. Kate swallowed down the lump as best she could and pushed open the door of her own bedroom. It hadn’t changed, yet it seemed to belong to someone she could barely remember. Someone from a lifetime ago. She remembered her dad doing up her room when she started her A-levels. Remembered the excitement of the pink and grey wallpaper she’d chosen. She had thought it the height of sophistication, but now it looked dreary and cheap, with brown patches where the damp had come through and then dried. They’d bought a white melamine wardrobe with gold trim, and a dressing table, and a mirror that lit up. She knew if she slid open the drawer it would still be crammed with make-up. Maybelline and Rimmel and Number 17. And the wardrobe would be bulging with teenage impulse purchases. Clothes that would hang loose on her now, because she was a good two dress sizes smaller than she had been. She’d never been fat, but far too sturdy for A-list New York. Her clients wouldn’t take any notice of her if she wasn’t the size she was. They wouldn’t take the advice of anyone wider than a pencil.
She looked around, at the pink and grey striped curtains that matched the wallpaper. The lumpy single bed with the pink mirrored bedspread. Scarves, candles, paperbacks, CDs, strings of beads, ornate wooden boxes – all the detritus of her youth still there as if she had just popped out for the evening.
She pulled back the cover and checked the bedding. The sheets were cool to the touch. Kate shivered. The heating would take the chill off, and she could make a hot-water bottle.
She put her case on the floor and opened it, taking out her pyjamas and laying them on the bed. Then she opened her flight bag and searched for the Ziploc bag containing her travel bottles and her sleeping pills.
It wasn’t there.
Heart hammering, she rummaged through the cashmere cardigans, iPad, flight-socks, pashmina, phone chargers, adapters … It still wasn’t there.
The last time she had seen it was in the ladies’ at Heathrow, when she’d applied a layer of moisturiser to her skin to rehydrate after the flight. She could picture it in her mind’s eye, on the shelf next to the sink. She must have left it there. She felt hot panic. She was never going to sleep, not with everything going on in her mind, and the jet lag, and the time difference.
Calm down, she told herself. She could go to the doctor in the morning and get a prescription. There was absolutely nothing else she could do. Were she in New York she could pop out to the twenty-four-hour pharmacy and pick up something to help her, but she knew without looking there would be nowhere open in Pennfleet peddling pharmaceuticals at this time.
She went back down to the kitchen. By now the house was warm, and started to sound a bit more like its old self, the pipes ticking and clunking.
The phone rang, making her jump. She picked up the receiver cautiously.
‘Kate! Thank God. I keep trying your phone but it goes straight to voicemail.’
It was Carlos. Her boss. ‘I told you there was no signal here.’
‘How totally quaint! But you got there, right?’
‘Obviously.’
Carlos never really got sarcasm. Mostly because he didn’t really listen to what anyone else said, so it didn’t register.
Kate regretted giving him her mother’s number. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind. His voice was too intrusive in the confines of her childhood home. But maybe he was just checking she was all right.
Wishful thinking.
‘Honey, we have a big problem. Gloria Westerbrook got done for possession of cocaine last night.’
Kate was immediately on high alert.
‘You’re kidding?’
‘I wish. She’s out on bail. But the papers are going to be all over it.’
Everything else receded in the light of Carlos’s announcement.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘That’s a disaster.’
‘I know, right?’
Gloria was guest of honour at the launch of a new charity for homeless kids that most of the trophy wives in Manhattan were falling over themselves to attend. Kate was organising the launch. Gloria was a hot young actress from New Orleans who had been homeless for two years in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and had seemed the ideal face to front the campaign. But no one likes a known Class A drug user to represent their charity. Even though Kate had seen most of the committee members themselves snorting up lines of coke in the rest rooms. How else did they keep so thin?
She thought through the problem. There wasn’t time to waste. Her mind raced through the implications. She came to a rapid conclusion.
‘OK. We keep her on. We’ll get more publicity that way, and kudos for supporting her. We’ll exploit the story by highlighting the drug issues related to homelessness. If we ditch her, it makes us look bad; we’d have to find someone else and no one wants
to play second fiddle to a coke head. ’
‘This is why I love you, Kate. This is why I need you.’ Carlos paused. ‘Can you do me a press release?’
Kate sighed. ‘Carlos …’
‘I know, honey, but I don’t trust anyone else to do it. It will take you fifteen minutes max.’
This was the problem with New Yorkers. Career took precedence over everything. Even death.
‘OK. But I don’t have any internet.’
‘No internet?’
She might as well have said no oxygen. She supposed she could take her laptop down into the town and find Wi-Fi somewhere, but she was too tired.
‘I’ll have to dictate it.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s this thing they used to do, back in the day. You’ve seen Mad Men, right? I read what I’ve written over the phone, and you take it down. Or get someone else to take it down.’
She could only imagine Carlos’s baffled expression.
‘I’ll get one of the girls to call you. And you are an angel. I’ll make it up to you. Get this done and then you can get a good night’s sleep.’
‘I doubt it. I left my sleeping pills in the bathroom at Heathrow.’
‘Oh my God!’ It was as if she had admitted to forgetting some life-saving medication. ‘Kate. That’s insane.’
No, thought Kate. What was insane was the fact that both her and Carlos’s reaction to losing her pills was so extreme. That it seemed inconceivable for her to function without them. When had she turned into someone who was reliant on prescription drugs to get her through life?
‘It’s fine. I have jet lag. I’m exhausted. And the sea air will knock me out.’
‘Sweetie, you need to get to the doctor in the morning and get a repeat.’
‘Sure. Look, let me get on with this press release. I’ll speak to you anon.’
She put the phone down and went to plug in her laptop. She was surprised to find that despite everything, she could focus. Within ten minutes she had drafted a provisional statement from the charity, expressing their support for Gloria and twisting the situation to suit their message. As she saved the document, she supposed this was what Carlos paid such an astronomical wage for: her clarity and vision together with her organisational skills. Plus the fact that everyone in New York thought she knew Kate Middleton, because they were about the same age.
Before she went to bed, she made a cup of hot chocolate and poured in a slug of cherry brandy from a dusty bottle on the side. Then she settled down in her childhood bed. It was hard and lumpy. She had never noticed when she was young. The duvet was thin and measly. The linen smelled slightly musty. The pillow might as well not have been there, it was so flat. She didn’t want to use her mother’s pillow, so she went down to the living room and lifted some cushions off the sofa. She put the pillow on top of them, but it was still unsatisfactory – too high and not soft enough.
In the end, she drifted off at about three, to wake with a start at six thirty, when the seagulls began a tap dance on the roof over her head – a sound that had once been so familiar, but took her a while to identify.
This was the first time ever she had woken in her own bedroom without her mother peeping round the door with a cup of steaming, deep-brown tea. She would set it down on Kate’s bedside table and pull the curtains, letting in the morning light. Joy firmly believed lying in bed to be a waste of time, and it was one of the habits that Kate had kept, even now. She had never seen the point of a lie-in, much to the mystification of more than one boyfriend.
She stared at the door, willing her mother to open it, hoping that the last two weeks had been a terrible dream, that in fact she was just on a visit and any minute Joy would appear with her brew.
She could tell, though, that apart from her the house was empty. There were no tell-tale sounds of running water or flushing loos or Radio 2 weaving its way up the stairs or the clatter of cups and plates. She put her hands to her face. How was she going to manage? How was she going to get through today?
She was truly on her own, for the first time in her life. It seemed impossible that her mother wasn’t there for a giggle or a gossip or a timely piece of advice. Joy was the least judgemental and most practical person Kate had ever known. It was why their relationship had worked so well – because Joy had never judged her for leaving, for beginning a new life so far away.
‘I know where you are if I need you,’ she had told Kate, ‘and you know where I am. The apron strings can stretch that far.’
And they had. Even though her mother had never managed to embrace the wonders of Skype or Facetime, and telephoned Kate from her landline at vast and unnecessary expense, they spoke at least three times a week. She came out to visit twice a year, and although Joy looked like a fish out of water in New York, she embraced everything it had to offer – the galleries and restaurants and shops.
Kate managed to smile at the memory of her mum in her comfy shoes and elasticated trousers and anorak striding round Bergdorf’s, talking away to the assistants at the jewellery counter, who found her utterly charming even though it was clear she wasn’t a potential customer. The thing about Joy was she was comfortable in her own skin; she needed no embellishment. She genuinely didn’t give a fig what she looked like or wore, and she was all the more beautiful for it.
Kate sometimes wished she had an ounce of her mother’s confidence, for confidence it was. Even in the confines of the most glamorous and expensive sushi restaurant in town, Joy sported a navy-blue round-neck jumper, a denim A-line and flat lace-ups, with no adornment or make-up, yet she beguiled the waiters, who blossomed under her attention: within moments of arrival she had them eating out of her hand – or rather, the other way round, as they sneaked the tastiest morsels from the kitchen for her to try.
Kate was so proud of her funny little mother with her Cornish burr and her twinkling eyes and her ability to talk to anybody on the planet.
She wasn’t here any more. She would never hear her voice again.
She opened the window and leaned out. The air was sharp and cold and delicious on her face. She looked down the street. From up here, she could see nearly all the town that had once been her world, and the road ribboning down to the harbour, dark blue with morning chill. She took in a deep breath as if to gather strength from the slight mist that was still clinging to the rooftops and chimneypots.
Run, shower, breakfast.
Call the doctor.
She should call the undertakers, too, to tell them she had arrived and make sure everything was in hand.
Then change.
Then …
She wasn’t going to think that far ahead. She needed to focus on the now, if she was going to get through it. She pulled on her sweat pants and a T-shirt and laced up her running shoes. She was good to go.
5
At seven o’clock on the morning of her husband’s funeral, Vanessa Knight sat on the cobbled terrace of her house and drank a pot of strong coffee. She loved being up before anyone else. Well, most people; you had to be up very early indeed to beat the Pennfleet fishermen.
She watched their fishing boats setting off for the day, the little white lines they left in their wake cutting through the blue.
She watched the gulls circling, beady eyes vigilant, never missing an opportunity to scavenge.
She watched the early-morning clouds drift away and make way for the sun.
But she didn’t see any of them.
She pinched her arm, to make certain she was actually still there. She wasn’t at all sure what it was she was supposed to be feeling, but she was fairly confident it shouldn’t just be nothing.
Not grief. Not shock. Not distress, or anger, or bewilderment. Or fear.
She didn’t even feel numb.
She felt normal. As if today was just another day, not the day she was burying her husband of seventeen years.
She shivered slightly in the morning freshness. It was as if the weather knew the calendar had chang
ed, for the moment September ended the sun seemed to have shed its warmth on rising, taking longer to heat up. The air smelled different: sharper and sweeter and smoky, and breathing it in brought a sense of change; of new horizons. Gone was the fevered heat of summer. The calmness of autumn was here.
Vanessa relished the quiet, because tonight the house would be bursting at the seams – twelve guests had been the last count reported to her by Mary Mac, who was in charge of the organisation. No one had bothered talking to Vanessa about arrangements, even though she was presumably the head of the house now. They all went through Mary, Spencer’s housekeeper and right-hand woman since long before Vanessa had appeared on the scene. Not that Vanessa minded. She was used to it, and Mary Mac was her greatest ally. Vanessa thought she would have long gone mad if it wasn’t for Mary’s common sense and kindness. And she was the one who would get her through the next twenty-four hours. Since the day Vanessa had been swept down to Pennfleet House by Spencer all those years ago, Mary Mac had done everything to make her feel welcome and looked after from that day onwards.
Consequently, Vanessa had turned to Mary as soon as she heard about Spencer’s massive stroke. They had hugged each other, chastened with shock, unable to believe that the forceful personality who had dominated their lives for so long was gone. The house already felt like a shell, as if it had lost its purpose, like a ship without a captain.
‘Come on,’ Mary said eventually. ‘We can’t fall apart. We’ve got things to do.’
It was Mary’s emotional support Vanessa couldn’t manage without. Never mind that she ran the house like clockwork – Vanessa didn’t much care about gleaming surfaces and freshly ironed sheets and full freezers. She could do all that for herself – not as well, of course, but then Vanessa didn’t have Spencer’s exacting standards. Not that he had ever found that out, because she’d never had to lift a finger.
Lucky, some would say.
Vanessa refilled her coffee cup and stirred in some of the cream she had found in the fridge. It was probably for the pavlova which was going to follow the chicken casserole, also waiting in the fridge, ready to feed the hordes tonight. Spencer’s ex-wife Karina and his children Daniella and Aiden, his brother, his two best friends and their wives. His business partner and his PA. His coterie. His entourage. None of whom ever paid Vanessa much attention. They viewed her as a mild irritation, someone who didn’t quite fit into their picture of how things should be.
High Tide Page 4
