The Good Girl (10 page)

‘We spoke to Luke. He’s reined himself in.’

‘Don’t
be ridiculous. He just takes them back to other shag pads. Now, please. Let me listen to my music.’

Ailsa took a hand off the steering wheel and fumbled for the headphones and pinned them down in Romy’s lap.

‘Look, it’s been a tough Christmas, Romy. We’re all trying to find our way without Granny. It’s new territory for everyone. And Grandpa isn’t coping very well without her. We all miss her. I’m sorry I overstepped the mark.’

‘You can’t blame everything on Granny dying.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I even heard Dad tell the Fairports we moved here because she died. It’s not true. You had already sold the house in London. Why do you and Dad keep rewriting history to suit your own version of events?’

Romy put on the headphones. She turned up the volume until it was so loud Ailsa could hear she was listening to Tim Hardin. ‘Reason to Believe’. It was a track written before Ailsa was born.

Their conversation was over but progress had been made. Romy turned away from Ailsa to stare out of the window at the slate-grey sky. Ailsa switched off the radio. She had reached a long flat stretch of coast where an estuary meandered out to the sea across boggy fields. A few sheep were standing under trees blown into strange arthritic contortions by the wind. The sea was raging.

She drove faster, anxious about her father. The road snaked closer to the coast and marshland where she had
grown up. A land with no foreground, her father called it. It was true there were no trees, no gates or railings. It was a land without limits.

Ailsa caught the flash of a rock pool glimmering under the hoary grey sky and knew that beneath its inky surface it would be bubbling with molluscs, crabs and sand shrimps. She passed the turn to a beach where a dead sperm whale had been washed up one summer when they were teenagers. They had gone to see it with their mother and Rachel. She frowned with the effort of recalling all the details. They had walked all the way there. Why hadn’t they gone by car? Then she remembered Georgia couldn’t drive because her arm was in plaster and she couldn’t change gear. Her mother had wiped away discreet tears. Was she crying for herself or for the whale? Rachel had wondered.

When the golden ridge of shingle bank appeared in the distance Ailsa knew she was almost home. Behind lay the beach where she had bunked off school to go swimming on hot summer afternoons. A bird flew over the road. It was a spoonbill. The way he carried his neck drawn back between his shoulders was a dead giveaway.

The presence of her mother was so overwhelming that for a moment Ailsa forgot that she had come to the house to check on her father. Or that Romy was waiting in the car outside. A pile of unopened envelopes addressed to Mrs Georgia Peploe caught her eye on the hall table. Beside it lay one of her mother’s notebooks
with floral covers. Ailsa picked it up and turned to the last entry. There was a carefully handwritten list of guests to be invited to their fiftieth wedding anniversary party. A few names had been struck off, not because they had fallen out of favour but because they had died before the invitations were sent out. ‘The curse of Peploe,’ Adam had joked. Less than a week later Georgia was dead and the list was being used to let the same friends know about funeral plans. Totally unexpected. No flowers. Donations to be made to the British Heart Foundation.

This room was the last place she had seen her mother alive. Ailsa now wished the content of her last conversation with her had been more significant. If she had known she would never see Georgia again, what would she have asked her? She might have asked why she had stuck with their father through the lost years. If there was a point in her life where she felt she could relax and know that everything was sorted. Whether Georgia had any inkling about what had happened the night before Ailsa got married. And if she did, why she had never said anything.

Instead they had a slightly cross conversation about why it was correct in a mobile phone conversation to say a call was breaking up but not that it was breaking down. Since Georgia hardly ever used her mobile phone and rarely switched it on because she was afraid of wasting the battery, it was a particularly futile exchange. But Ailsa knew it was a displacement argument to avoid discussing the end of Rachel’s most recent relationship.

‘Let’s hope Rachel’s break-up doesn’t lead to a
breakdown,’ her mother had said finally, trying to introduce levity back into the conversation.

‘Marriage isn’t the only construct available to forty-something women nowadays, Mum,’ said Ailsa. ‘Rach has a great job, great friends and some pretty exciting relationships. A quarter of women her age don’t have children any more.’

‘What will she do when she’s sixty?’ asked Georgia. ‘She could be living alone for the next third of her life.’

‘She can move in with one of her gay friends.’

Her mother had gone over to the bookshelf that dominated the right side of the room and pulled out a pocket guide to the birds of Britain. She had opened it on a page dedicated to the Arctic tern and excitedly explained that for only the second time in her life she had seen one on the marshes the previous day.

‘It travels over 44,000 miles a year so that it can have two summers. One here and one in the Arctic,’ Georgia marvelled as she showed Ailsa a picture of a bird that was indistinguishable from a seagull apart from its blood-red bill. ‘So it makes the most of everything. That’s how we should all live. And it mates for life. Amazing.’

She went on to say that she was alone when she spotted it and that Adam doubted that she had really seen it at all because only two had been sighted in the past decade.

‘If you knew how to work your phone you could have taken a photo to prove him wrong,’ Ailsa had chided her.

‘I
know what I saw,’ said Georgia. ‘And that’s all that matters. As long as you know the truth, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.’

The cardigan her mother had been wearing that day was still hanging over the back of the armchair from where Georgia used to watch the sun set over the marshes in the evening through the hall window. Ailsa couldn’t help herself: she closed her eyes and lifted the cardigan to her nose and inhaled the scent of her mother. It was a blend of the Anais Anais perfume she had worn for the best part of half a century, the heathery musk of the marshes and smoke from the fire she was tending in the garden when her heart failed her. When Ailsa dropped the cardigan back onto the chair, she felt light-headed with loss.

‘Dad,’ she called out as she went from the hall into the small kitchen at the back of the house. No one answered. The floor was like a hamster cage. There were porridge oats, grains of instant coffee and scabs of burned rice underfoot. Ailsa crunched her way over to the sink. It was full of dirty crockery. On the windowsill she found his pills untouched.

She opened the dishwasher but shut it immediately because the smell of decaying food and rancid milk was overwhelming. Apart from a half-bottle of tonic water and an open tin of baked beans, the fridge was almost empty. The freezer, however, was filled with all the food that Ailsa had made. There were portions of shepherd’s pie, chicken casserole, meatballs, neatly marked with
labels and suggestions about which vegetables might be compatible. None had been used. Ailsa could tell from the empty packets of Weetabix and the bottles lined up by the back door that Adam was probably existing on a diet of breakfast cereal washed down with milk and whisky.

‘Dad,’ she called out again. She went into the sitting room, half prepared to find him slumped in a chair. An old bar heater that had lost its grille glowed red hot in the corner and steam emanated from a pair of underpants that he was drying on an upturned bucket just inches away from the bars. Ailsa tried to remove them from the bucket but they had fused to the melted plastic. A cup of tea was stuck to the surface of the table. Ailsa dipped a finger into the mug. It was stone cold. Feeling anxious, she headed towards the staircase. She ignored the banks of photographs on the wall as she went up, taking the stairs two at a time.

‘Adam,’ she shouted, thinking he might respond to his name. Since Georgia had died he had started taking a nap in the afternoon. He hated getting into bed on his own, he had confessed to Ailsa over Christmas. It took him hours to get to sleep and he woke up as soon as it got light in the morning. Not wanting to frighten him, Ailsa tentatively opened his bedroom door. The bed covers were so crumpled that it took a moment for Ailsa to realize there wasn’t a body beneath.

The back legs of the bed were still broken, and it now sloped at an even steeper angle. Ailsa could see that her
father had tried to prop up the base with a makeshift pile of bricks that had collapsed, leaving a fine coating of red dust over the furniture. The sheets were filthy. He might have been sleeping in his shoes. On the bedside table on the side where her mother used to sleep, nothing had been moved. A book lay face down in the same position as her mother had left it.
Slipstream
by Elizabeth Jane Howard. There was a half-drunk glass of water. Ailsa held it up to the light and could see the faint imprint of her mother’s lipstick around the rim. Georgia’s nightdress was still under the pillow.

He wasn’t here. The bedroom window was open. It was so cold that Ailsa could see her own quickening breath. She looked outside and saw Romy in the car below. She tried to attract her attention, shouting and knocking on the glass, but Romy was wired up to the headphones, oblivious. She looked out towards the marshes, wondering if Adam had gone for a walk. He had slowed down over the past six months, and when the tide was in it was a struggle for him to get beyond the first few small wooden bridges across the mudflats. She couldn’t see him.

Ailsa went back downstairs and out into the back garden and stood for a moment in the exact place where Georgia’s heart had stopped beating, trying to collect her thoughts. Her father was the one who took a cocktail of pills for blood-pressure problems, high cholesterol and palpitations, and it had been an unspoken assumption that he would go first. So there had been no
dress rehearsal for the moment when Adam had phoned to say their mother had gone outside to light a fire in the garden and never come back in.

Most likely sudden cardiac arrest, the paramedics explained to Adam. A loud label for such a silent death, Adam told Ailsa and Rachel when they arrived. He was sitting at the kitchen table in shock. His hands shook so much that the cup of sugary tea made for him by a paramedic slopped onto his trousers. She told him over and over again that there was nothing he could have done. The electrical pulse in Georgia’s heart had catastrophically short-circuited. The blood supply to her lungs and brain had been immediately cut off.

‘We were having an argument,’ Adam said, wiping huge tears from his face with a tea towel. ‘I thought she was ignoring me but she was suffocating like the fish I killed in Canada. She died, gasping for air, while I sat at the kitchen table arguing about how many people to invite to our party.’

‘If arguments killed, Mum would have been dead long ago, Dad,’ said Rachel, trying to be comforting. She was crying too, Ailsa remembered.

‘I can’t believe she’s gone,’ he sobbed.

The first couple of months after she died Ailsa kept seeing Georgia everywhere. Through the window of a train pulling out from Shepherd’s Bush station; walking through the Department of Neuroscience to meet Harry for lunch; and in the sushi restaurant at the
Westfield shopping centre. It was strange, she explained to Rachel, because she thought she saw her in places where Georgia had never gone, and yet when she went up to Norfolk she never had the same sensation. ‘That’s because you can feel her presence there. You don’t need to look for her,’ Rachel had said. It was true. In this house and on the marshes her mother was everywhere.

Now her father had disappeared. Ailsa had read a statistic about how 20 per cent of married couples died within six months of their spouse dying, and Adam was doing his best to conform to this pattern. She headed back to the car, opened the door and removed the headphones from Romy’s ears.

‘He’s not in the house. And I can’t see anyone out on the marshes. Will you come and help look for him?’

Romy wordlessly climbed out. It had started sleeting, and the only coat in the car belonged to Ben. Romy allowed Ailsa to drape it around her shoulders like a cape and they headed onto the road in silence.

‘He’ll be in the graveyard,’ said Romy in a flat, matter-of-fact tone as they walked past a couple of vacant second homes.

‘How do you know?’ asked Ailsa.

‘He told me he goes there to have tea with Granny every afternoon.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘He told me not to tell anyone.’

‘It’s not normal behaviour.’

‘What’s normal when someone dies? I thought it was
sweet. On the Day of the Dead in Mexico people go to eat on the graves of their relatives.’

‘It’s a lot warmer in Mexico.’

Ailsa could see the church from the road. It was built with its back to the sea, up on a hill, protected from the great flood of 1953, ridiculously large even by comparison with other churches built on the spoils of the wool trade. It also faced back to front so that the graveyard overlooked the marshes. They could see Adam sitting on the ground beside the earthy mound where Ailsa’s mother was buried. He was hunched as though the bitter east wind that blew in straight from the Urals had blown him over.

‘Do you think he’s all right?’ asked Romy.

There was a tablecloth spread over the grave and two plates with rain-soaked sandwiches on top. Adam was seated on the edge of the tablecloth, drinking from a hip flask. As they came through the gate into the churchyard, they could hear him talking loudly. Every so often he would pause. At first Ailsa thought he was catching his breath, but as they got closer she realized that he was leaving time for responses.

‘I’m scared, Mum,’ said Romy, slipping her hand into Ailsa’s for the first time in many years. ‘Do you think he’s lost it?’

‘He’s sad and lonely and he can’t cope without Granny,’ said Ailsa. They reached Adam. He looked terrible. He had attempted to shave but there were small
irregular islands of unkempt beard and a series of ugly gashes where he had cut himself with the razor.