Let's Dance (15 page)

Isabel sighed and smiled. He almost smiled back.

‘Don't I know she's cunning? Did she tell you she ate the soap?'

The sound of Serena's radio, swinging from her hand, moved nearer the kitchen and George knew the meaning of reprieve. He forced back into being all the former detestation for Isabel Burley. Nothing had been quite right since she arrived. He had not let intruders in here, she had. Her letters. Her presence. Her bloody stupid kindness. And all those surplus words.

3.15 in the morning

H
ere we are again, Serena Burley said to the frayed and frantic patterns on her drawing-room sofa. Wouldn't I just respect God if only he would concede he was an idiot. Like I am.

She was in love with those firework flames. Things, spitting into the air with all that sound and fury, raining down blessings and hidden messages. She had loved them to pieces, willed them to go on and on delighting her. And she knew that the witching hours grew briefer and less sure, because only an old mad fool would stand here in the dark and cold, craning her neck upwards in the hope that the fires would all start again, or leave a permanent imprint of themselves on the sky. They had blinded her. She wanted them back, missed them and hated them for what they did to her. Reminded her of what it was like to feel transfixed with wonder, taken her eye away from the main chance. Made her want to live. She should have swallowed one of those rockets and have done with it. Eating soap did not work.

Serena hit her shin and recognized the possibility of a bruise. The kitchen was a detestable place and she resented the fact that she seemed destined to spend so much time in here. Mab was the person for kitchens, making jam and other disgusting concoctions. Madame Burley, sometimes
known as memsahib, preferred to be a lily of the field: they sowed not, neither did they spin, and they never fucking cooked.

Serena made her words in the stainless-steel draining board, presently filmed with cleaning fluid. I have changed my mind about Isabel, she wrote. She is secretive and devious. Without quite knowing the whys and wherefores of what she does, she has sanitized this place. That's what she does all day, removing implements like knives and scissors to the nether regions of shelves where I cannot reach.

Serena could not work out if Isabel behaved thus on account of reading all her own messages about wanting to die. She doubted it. The clearest of messages left on windows and tables and paper were cleaned away with daily savagery. Serena stamped her foot. She could not kill herself with a fork; she had not got the strength. She would never die of normal cold. She was far too hardy.

She put her head under the cold tap and found it a nasty experience. The darling daughter lacked insight. She was supposed to give purpose, not take it away. She had the means. Once or twice, the child had flown at her father, flown at Mab and knocked a tooth out. Mab was patient, gloating about what the child had in her. Isabel flies at people and impales herself on them, Serena told the dog. Like a moth with a light.

The draining board was splashed and the words were gone again. Supposing darling Isabel could be made to detest her mother as much as her mother loathed herself? There was always the chance she would indulge in a sort of lethal lashing-out. Then she would have to go, leaving
Serena with darling George and a wider range of choices, unless Serena was dead already. This was all too complicated for mere words. Serena decided she preferred the idea of being able to orchestrate her own demise.

There were grazes on her knees from where she had fallen over in worship of the Catherine wheels. Time to go back to bed with a saucer of milk and a nice strong man. Fading away like the wallpaper.

Moving slowly, swearing softly, kissing the unloved things goodbye.

S
even weeks. Home, sweet home and no one watching.

‘Dear Joe,' Isabel wrote in a letter that would not contain a single exclamation mark, covering a few sheets of paper she would probably never send. The fire spluttered safely behind a guard. Serena liked to sit close in the evening, crowding it, resentfully, otherwise quiet and preoccupied. The television in the corner muttered, creating a kind of absent conversation. A man ran across the screen waving a gun, his mouth yelling an order.

‘I think this was my vision of home,' Isabel continued. ‘A fireside in winter and the thought of not having to leave it and go out in the cold. Sitting by the side of someone comfortable. She's being very good …' Isabel paused. Joe would not want to know this. His notion of home would be warm bed, food, and bugger the fires. Never mind what he might want to know: she was uncomfortably aware that he would have no curiosity about her life at all. She wrote to put things
into words, making a letter out of the words was merely an excuse for writing them and it seemed timely to write. To make something of the time.

‘We are strange here, Joe, and yes, sometimes comfortable, but not often. I can hear people asking, what do they do all day, the way I used to wonder what mothers did when their babies slept all the time. They don't, Joe, not old babies either, and you can't have conversations with them or expect reasonable conduct … You can't even tell them about the dangers they face. (I wish she was not so secretive about the post, hiding the bills.) And the difference with an old baby is that you can't shout or slap, either. I learned the basic rules about don't run in the road from my Aunty Mab, because I was afraid of her. I can't make my mother afraid; I should hate it. And I wasn't ever afraid of her; it was more complicated than that. I was so proud of her. She made everyone else's mother look so drab and fat while she was exotic, did exotic things, lived in exotic places, married an exotic kind of man … which may be why I'm almost content to hole up with her like this, because I don't quite like the idea of anyone else seeing her in a state which is neither proud nor anything like the way she was. Does that make sense?'

Serena coughed loudly, a stagey kind of cough, not exactly a plea for attention, but a preliminary. Isabel had the vision, coming from nowhere, of Mother removing the fireguard and sitting on the coal, squatting on the flames without any sensation of pleasure or pain. Serena's glasses remained dirty, despite a daily
wash. She preferred them that way.

‘I only say strange,' Isabel scribbled, ‘because it is strange to be around someone all the time and not really talk in anything but a kind of baby language. It alters my vision on everything. Did I tell you about taking her to the pub? She wanted chips again, but when she got them, she put half in the top pocket of the man at the next table and smeared him with gravy. Affection, of course, but we won't be welcome back. But I won't let go, Joe, because she loves me, and I need to be loved.'

That sounded pathetic, so she crossed it out. There was another cough. Serena was transfixed by the TV. She raised her hand, pointed two level fingers at the man still running across the urban landscape with his gun and wide open mouth, and shot him, twice.

‘Then there's George, who comes and goes. I don't know who he is, where he comes from, I don't know anything except for the fact he turns up. We've never questioned George, you know: not even Robert demanded his credentials, because he is so useful. Too late now. Even though Robert does nothing, I'm afraid to ask. Two reasons, I suppose. I want to make her better all by myself, with no one else getting the credit. I want to be able to endure it, and be proud of what I've done. And I don't want people seeing in the windows. Looking at her like something from the zoo.'

Serena sat back in her chair, obviously satisfied. She knitted her fingers together and nodded at the screen. The dirty spectacles dropped to the end of her nose.

‘He's dead,' she yelled. ‘That one there. Dead. Shot himself. What a good thing.'

Doc Reilly had given Isabel sleeping pills. He had not specified who should take them.

‘As long as she loves me,' Isabel wrote, ‘as long as she loves me, I can do this. Only I'm beginning to see things which are not here. Perhaps they never were. Perhaps I need glasses.'

R
obert Burley was not without conscience. That was the way he would have stated his ambivalent state of mind apropos his mother, although no one asked him to state anything except a case. Part of the relative ease of his conscience came first from the fact that his mother had tried to crush his daughter, and although he did not believe this was anything other than clumsiness, the lack of malice aforethought did not quite mitigate the crime. Second was the fact that Isabel deserved the burden of looking after her mother because she had led such a feckless life to date. The third factor was that he knew, by comparison with some of his clients, how lucky Serena Burley really was. She had a house to live in, didn't she? A pension and a modicum of health, which was a damn sight more than a lot of other little old ladies.

At the same time he could not quite leave things as they were. He blustered by phone to social workers, without realizing that this long-distance intervention, not discussed with Isabel, created an animus against her for instigating a nuisance and against himself for
hectoring. Discussions were not helped by the fact that Robert no longer really knew what he wanted for his mother. An element of control without effort, a salve to his conscience, one social worker surmised. They quite understood why his mother could not stay with him, nor he with his mother. Indeed they were astonished that he should go to such lengths to explain it when no explanation had been requested. Alzheimer's and the distance between parents and children were both diseases of contemporary life, unlikely to go away. The psychiatric social worker could call upon Mrs Burley and assess the situation, certainly: so could the consultant psychiatrist: indeed, one had done so, at his behest, both before the fire and immediately afterwards, did he not remember? Verdict: she suffered from an affliction of the mind, but could still maintain an independent life with existing support. Now there was a voluntary daughter in residence, there was even less reason to act and besides, what could they do?

‘Mental health orders are for extreme cases of danger. Is she still able to pay her bills? Does she eat and wash? Is she incontinent?'

‘Yes, with help. Yes, yes and no, I don't think so.'

‘You could try and persuade her to come and live in a home nearer yourself …'

‘Get her off your patch, you mean!' he yelled, furious at the dulcet patience of the tones.

‘Mr Burley, I've got a call coming through on the other line.'

A
ctivity was better than inactivity, so Robert was standing in the foyer of a residential home three miles from where he lived, unaccountably nervous. It was all very well to fear death, that was as logical as a dread of pain, but fear of old age had never occurred to him before. Insofar as he considered his own, which was not often, he had envisaged himself as a senior statesman with pipe and slippers, adviser to the neighbourhood, heeded by the young and accorded respect for his wisdom, dying conveniently, as his father had done, before serious infirmity began, his death the object of grief and obeisance to his memory. Indignity did not feature in any of these visions.

‘And this is the lounge, Mr Burley. We have bingo on Wednesdays, the chiropodist once a week, a hairdresser Tuesdays and karaoke on Saturdays. Plenty to do.'

He wanted to say he could not foresee the day when the biggest dose of memory loss would make his mother enjoy bingo or the company of the other women who sat in their chairs lining the walls of the lounge like so many puppets paying disinterested homage to the huge television in the corner. These were images familiar enough to save him from showing his shock, but the view was still dispiriting. These were the sentient beings who watched the screen in the way his baby would watch a moving, glistening object. The thought of karaoke was appalling.

‘And these are the rooms. Some people like to share …'

Dens with single beds and the overpowering presence of the floral. Rose-flavoured air-freshener, chintz bedspreads, everything Serena had despised. Just as she would the antiseptic corridors of polished linoleum, the open doors to bathrooms with pulleys, lavatories with handles set into the walls and, in the distance, the sound of someone howling.

The mentally infirm, the lady told him, live at the back.

She had a face shining with kindness, free of hypocrisy. The proximity of a good heart made him realize that he had not got one.

The overpowering presence of wickedness in the world was not what oppressed him on his way home, but the existence of such reservoirs of kindness with which he could not compete. Saints were so much more irritating than sinners. Especially when they informed him that as long as his mother's wounds were bloodless, the state would bleed her dry. Parents of his mother's generation owed it to their inheritors to die young. And who would look after him when he was old?

The sight of Aunt Mab's Bristol blue glassware, safe inside the cabinet which housed it along with Serena's silverware and her pieces of porcelain which he did not really like, hardly filled him with satisfaction, but not with guilt either. Isabel had not noticed, which was her own fault. Pragmatism had dictated the removal of various items on past visits. One day he would give to his daughter those objects Serena no longer knew she
possessed, and the love of daughter for parent was surely more enduring than that of son. After more introspection, self-justification and righteous anger, Robert decided to leave things as they were.

‘Y
ou were very kind to bring the fireworks,' Isabel said. ‘Very kind. I haven't seen her so happy in ages.'

Andrew had a good telephone voice, echoing the authority of the auctioneer, deep, calm, reassuring. She had liked the smell of his tweedy shoulder when she had cried into it, even though she had withdrawn, wiped her eyes, become a hostess. Whatever it was her mother had told her, with varying degrees of emphasis, about never being a nuisance to men, the dictate had remained as solid as an undeniable memory, like the imprint of men's bodies. They existed to be pleased, but in Isabel's present role the necessity of being pleasant all the time had faded away and she did not have either the energy or the inclination to flatter Andrew Cornell. She owed him nothing. He was not her kind of man, since Isabel's kind of men were rarely so undemanding, and he was not a priority. Besides, after weeks of isolation with her mother and taciturn George, she felt she had lost her knack with men, whatever the knack had been.