by Tanya Moir
Of course, not everything can be changed. We can’t alter windows or the location of drains. The chimney has to stay where it is, if we want it at all, and the cleverest design in the world won’t gain us an extra square centimetre of floorspace. But within the confines of the shell, we’re free to do as we please.
As was its previous owner, the cousinless orphan spinster Mabel Johanssen, only child of only children, who had the temerity to die without blood in the privacy of her room. She could have been anyone, Mabel. Anyone she wanted to be, anyone she said. Who was there to argue?
I’ve taken out her living room wall. Or rather, Jake has. The proportions are better with the old hallway gone. More relaxed, as if the apartment can finally spread out, stretch its legs after all these years.
We’ve ripped out the little eighties kitchen too, knocked it through to the master bedroom next door so we can put in an en-suite bathroom. I was worried it might be cramped, but now it’s plastered up I can see that everything’s going to fit in nicely.
I’m popping over to see the work most days now. After breakfast, Ella and I bring the boat across, have a run on the beach and take Jake a coffee about ten-thirty. There’s not always that much to see or discuss — he knows what he’s doing, after all — but it’s nice to catch up, just in case. Stay involved with the small stuff. And if I can’t make it — because the weather’s too rough, usually — Jake calls me to check in.
Since I’m passing, I quite often call in at work as well. Ella, despite the crushed scallop shell sand she leaves all over the floor, is a bit of a star with the team, and Gillian is starting to threaten us with an office. Some days I have lunch with Sally, or Andy, or Paul, or all three. More often, I just pick up something for Jake and me, and now it’s getting warm again, we eat out on the terrace. I do my best to avoid the evening traffic, but even so, it can be six o’clock before I make it back to the island.
Looking around the apartment today, I have to say that it looks so good, stripped back like this, all the rubble gone, it’s almost a shame to put anything back. Clutter the old girl up again with fluff and trinkets, when I could leave her clean and white. Empty except for a couple of bento boxes and two deckchairs. But we’re doing the final measure for the new kitchen today — open plan, naturally — and after I’ve seen the joiners, Andy wants to take me shopping for taps and bathroom tiles.
‘Not that you really need me,’ he insisted, over lunch last week. ‘You’re perfectly capable of choosing on your own.’
Which might be true. Maybe it’s something to do with the sound insulation Jake’s put under the floor, or the emptiness, or the double-glazing, but the apartment has a particular kind of quiet now, an acoustic clarity — unaffected by power tools or Afternoons with Jim Mora — in which it seems easy to decide what will work and what won’t, what should stay and what should go. Voices don’t linger longer than they should. There are no echoes to confuse me.
On my final day at Bradbury Street, I go through Maggie’s wardrobe. No skeletons, just jumpers. A woolly montage of old times. The Arran sleeve that grew beside me on the plane to London, knit-one purl-one through thunder clouds in the dark. The Kaffe Fassett coat that took most of the nineties. And tucked away to one end, out of sight, a big double-breasted cable cardie, navy with gold buttons. Six of them, anchor-embossed. I used to play with them when I got home from school — for months they lived, like sweets, in a little white paper sachet inside the knitting bag, along with a picture of a handsome blond man whom my father, even when identically dressed, did not at all resemble.
It’s not that long since the last time I was down here. It was 18 November, to be precise. The day after Maggie’s sixtieth birthday. (We had a quiet dinner at home, in the end. Apparently she’d been celebrating all week — at the paper, the hospital, with the Institute girls — and she was sick of parties.) I remember thinking she looked thinner.
I left her working on her column. Answering a question about tatting, one key at a time, tap, tap, tap, with the rubber end of an HB pencil. On a glorious morning, sharp and gold and blue.
She thought she might do a bit in the garden later on. I told her I’d see her on Christmas Eve. It’s not often that I’m early.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Dr Lily told me, when I got down — she’s had her braces out now and is working Critical Care. ‘The paramedics stabilised her on the way in — there’s no way they could have known.’
Known?
‘About your mother’s DNR, I mean.’ I must have looked at Dr Lily oddly, because she stopped and caught her lip in her straight white teeth. ‘Maggie has said that if anything should happen to her, she doesn’t want us to resuscitate her,’ she explained. ‘I assumed you knew.’
I wasn’t surprised — I’d assumed I’d know too. As it was, I was unreasonably shocked. That’s the danger of assumption. Maggie, perhaps, had assumed she’d be dying of complications related to SCA3, not a heart attack suffered while trying to raise the tulip bulbs. And I didn’t know whether to be pleased for her or sorry.
‘We’ve made her as comfortable as we can,’ Dr Lily went on. ‘Now we’re going to be moving her into another room. You’ll have some privacy there.’ She stopped again, frowned, and looked up at me earnestly. ‘At least this way, you get time to say goodbye.’
Ample time, it turned out. We were in there for three days. Although, in fairness, Maggie didn’t know who I was for a lot of it. She was sinking under a stream of morphine, going down and down. But she kept taking breaths, open-mouthed and ragged-throated.
In, two, three, four.
Out, two, three, four.
Five. Six. Seven.
In.
Those hind-brain neurons pulling themselves together, doing their job just fine. Nobody to help her. I wasn’t brave enough. The others had their hands tied.
Through the night, they became the only sounds in the world, those breaths. And when they stopped, the silence was perfect.
I stayed for a while. I wasn’t sure of the order of things. What stops first. If Maggie was still alive under there, her mind’s eye open, looking up at the light. It was five in the morning, and for some of us, the sun was coming up.
‘At least it’s all over now,’ Dr Lily said.
Grandpa William said the same thing twenty years ago, at Nanny Biggs’ funeral. They were both wrong. It isn’t over. It ends with me.
I’m not sure what to do with all the jumpers. If I knew how, I’d like to take a piece of each one, cut out squares, sew a patchwork Maggie-blanket. Wouldn’t that be nice? Something cosy to remember us by. But I don’t, and I can’t. It has to be all or nothing. And I really don’t have the room.
In the end, I give most of them to Jeannie from Institute. She says they might try and put together a show — a kind of ‘Dear Dinah’ retrospective. I tell her Maggie would have liked that. I think it’s true.
I do keep one or two things. The vest with the rampant stags I envied so much when I was six. Roger Galbraith’s cardie. (I like to think it smells of him, but it doesn’t really — it’s just the embroidered pot-pourri sachets that Maggie had hanging in the wardrobe.) And the Kaffe Fassett coat. I drag it home with me on the plane even though it takes up a whole suitcase. I have no intention of wearing it. But maybe I’ll have it framed, tell my friends it’s textile art — that sort of thing’s hip these days.
Before I go, Dr Lily offers — not for the first time — to test my genes, and I wonder if she and James have finished their paper.
I’ve still got the coat. I never did get round to having it framed. But since I moved to the island, it’s hung from a pair of vintage oars above my stairs. Even after four years, it’s too bright not to notice there — every time I pass it, it makes me smile. My artful mother, paddling at last.
It was the week after Maggie died that I first came across the island. I’d planned to spend that Christmas in Invercargill, you see. But I flew back, excess baggage and all, which is how I came to be in
my apartment browsing the Real Estate Institute database on Christmas Day.
I could have called someone. Sally, or Andy and Paul. They would have set an extra place for me, made room. But I was alone and I wanted to feel it. A test, if you like. Because from now on, it all came down to me — everything, small and large, that had passed, all those years, between Maggie and me, could only be as I remembered it. No one else knew. There could be no correction, no argument. No she didn’t, it wasn’t, you were.
I held — I hold — them all by myself, Maggie and Vivien, Sarah and Will, Ted and Harry and Babs, Joshua and Marguerite and Tobias and Beth and Hal and Marialuisa, a finger’s breadth above the surface of non-existence. They’re going down with me.
But until that day, I want — I wanted, then, five years ago, the summer my mother died — to remember clearly. To keep my dead close. Like the mediaeval monks who set the corpses of their brethren up to putrefy around the dinner table, just in case anyone should forget, as they ate their soup, what was coming to them, lest anyone rot without warning. They got used to eating that way, I dare say, in time. People always do.
On Christmas Day 2006 I made macaroni and cheese for me and the dead. And at some point before evening, I passed the test — or perhaps the test failed — because I found I wasn’t alone enough. Eight floors and a video entry-phone could no longer provide enough distance.
It wouldn’t take much. A thoughtless finger on the entry button. Stepping outside at the wrong moment, letting the door swing shut, forgetting to check over my shoulder. Someone could get in. A foolhardy Girl Guide or pizza menu leafletter, clients in the neighbourhood, Jehovah’s Witnesses, friends’ husbands passing by. A Ben Berkeley or a Roger Galbraith, my Anthony Boucher or Lester Bodgewick. Slipping in like moths at dusk, unnoticed until I turned on the light and they began to flutter. A sliding door left open to the night, that’s all it would take. An unattended flame.
Moths never fly out again — have you noticed that? No matter how many doors and windows you leave open. Once they’re in, they’re with you till they die. However they come to do so.
Actually, I don’t believe flame draws them in — not particularly. Those bodies we find in our cooling candle wax are just coincidence, bad luck, a function of probability and population numbers. If you watch, you’ll see that it’s white light most moths crave. They think it’s a far-off moon, some scientists say, and no matter how many times they bang into it, are incapable of learning from their mistake.
In time they’ll evolve. The moths that don’t batter themselves to death on our bayonet bulbs — those without interest, or faith, in the moon, those that fly by other means — will go on to breed, pass their DNA down. The moths of the future will avoid artificial light. Which will be much better for all concerned, don’t you think? We’re only hastening the happy day, when we leave the porch light on.
But I’m digressing, and I really must move on — Jake’s opening the champagne.
That night, the island appeared on my laptop screen — nothing more than an aerial shot, taken at low tide — as if I’d wished it into being. A gift from the dead, or the gods — or, as it turned out, the administrators of the defunct Shining Spirit. There were no additional pictures to click on. Just that one brusque image from Terranet, with the boundary lines overlaid, the sort you download for ten dollars fifty.
A good agent would have paid for a photographer, had the boatshed shot from the water at high tide, staged a table at sunset with flowers and wine. I checked the listing date. A good agent would have dropped it years ago and stopped wasting their time.
Still, I saw something in that one uninviting photograph, the scruffy rocks and off-putting mud, the arbitrary red lines. Containment, I suppose. So I called, even though it was Christmas Day. And Dion answered.
I must have walked through Emily Place a lot, that summer. Between Queen Street and the office, Quadro and my car. Pausing to drink my coffee, take my calls, reject the vendors’ counter-offers. And all the while, up here in apartment 4C, ninety-three-year-old Mabel Johanssen lay neatly dead in her bed.
Had I known, down there in the park, I would have raised my flat white to Mabel’s success. Her ending lithe as an Esther Williams dive, barely rippling the day. Her very last feelings clean sheets on her skin, the flow of a spring afternoon all around, as she lets her heavy eyelids sink and it goes on without her.
Now, in the open-plan kitchen where her hall used to be, I raise a glass of champagne.
Jake clinks his glass against mine. ‘To Mabel,’ he says.
We’ve kept the old parquet floor, put in marble and black walnut. I like to think she’d approve. And apart from that and her perfectly accomplished death, I refuse to imagine anything about her.
Outside, the evening traffic is dwindling away, the city shutting down. A warm breeze brings the end of the day through the open windows, the sounds of bus brakes and rattling security grilles bouncing off old stone and tall glass and the harbour, stirring the white linen blinds. Close the shutters, and you could forget about all that. Lose the city completely. In here, there’s a heavy, square-edged calm. Soft light and clean white walls. Jake’s done a beautiful job.
We’re holding the first open home tomorrow. The stagers finished this afternoon — there’s a platter of pomegranates and a stack of vintage Architectural Digests on the coffee table just to prove it. We’ve gone for an old-money-New-York style — pared back, not overstuffed — with leather and vintage crystal and campaign chests, thick creamy Berber rugs on the floors. Paul and Andy have even lent me a couple of their Hotere prints to hang on either side of the fire.
I’m almost tempted to live here myself. See what lessons leach out of Mabel’s remaining walls. But I’m beginning to think that history doesn’t repeat itself without a helping hand. And besides, despite the Ralph Lauren knock-off sofa and big gas fire, the park down below, this is no place for a dog.
After I’ve taken Jake out for dinner, we’ll be heading back to the island, Ella and I. That much I can tell you. Barring accidents, at least. As for whether we’ll be alone, who knows?
Ella licks a pomegranate and lies down, with a sigh, on the rug. I follow Jake out onto the terrace, look at the dusk creeping up from the streets. The park is already in shadow, the treetops rowdy with mynah birds, a little gold light, here and there, wavering down from the office blocks. Somewhere, a bar turns up the music.
Jake leans back, elbows on the parapet. He’s looking very smart tonight — the house-stagers might have put him there in his floaty linen shirt and Italian loafers. He looks over my shoulder, back inside, and sips his champagne.
‘So,’ he says. ‘This worked out well.’
‘We don’t know that,’ I warn him. ‘Not yet.’
‘Come on, you don’t think it’ll sell? Look at the place. You’ve got it just right.’
I turn and lean beside him. I have to say that it does look right.
‘We should do another one,’ he says.
Maybe we should.
‘Have you thought,’ Jake continues, ‘about what you might do next?’
Maybe I’ll turn into my mother. Maybe I’ll put too many logs on the fire one day. Maybe I’ll be too busy closing the sale of Emily Place to notice the ambulance coming down Queen Street.
I smile. ‘You know, I really have no idea.’ My arm, as I rest my glass on the balustrade, brushes his. I allow it to remain there. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’
Maybe I’ll go swimming.
Acknowledgements
Descriptions of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp drew on the eyewitness accounts contained in Ben Shephard’s After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, as well as Bill Close’s memoir, A View from the Turret: a history of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment in the Second World War, which also provided much background information on the period. Robert Capa’s wonderful Slightly Out of Focus was an inspiration and a source on Second World War photography and photographers, as were imag
es contained in the collections of the Imperial War Museums and the Steven Spielberg Film & Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The BBC WW2 People’s War archive provided a background to life during the Blitz.
Information on court proceedings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, published by HRI Online Publications, part of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield. The Huguenots and French Opinion 1685–1787 by Geoffrey Adams was a source on that period and provided the story of a bank proposed by elements within the French government to draw on the funds of Huguenot refugees in return for greater tolerance in France.
A big thank you to Creative New Zealand and the Todd Corporation for their generous support, as well as to Harriet Allan and all at Random House, to my editor, Anna Rogers, and to Charlotte Randall, Jane Higgins and Bernadette Hall for their kindness and advice. Also to Eloise Cowie, Mary Harty and Nick Clark for sharing their expertise on various aspects of plot and settings. To Ian, always. To Nicola Feggetter at the Islington Local History Centre and to Elena Payami at the London Fire Brigade Museum for answering my questions; also to Google and the dedicated scientific community of Wikipedians, without which neither this novel nor its plot would have been feasible. And finally, to Jamie Macpherson, who walked with me to an island many years ago.
About the Author
Tanya Moir was born in Invercargill and grew up in rural Southland. She has worked in radio, print and television in New Zealand and as a television promo producer in Rome and London. She now lives on the west coast of Auckland with her husband, Ian. Anticipation is her second novel.
Copyright
A VINTAGE BOOK published by Random House New Zealand,
