Then Vanessa focussed. It was there, like a dream. “Stop, Mary! We’re here!” The old gate, the blue door.
“Miss Henman, you said we were here before.”
But this time she is right. It is the same house. Yes, that is her Aunt Isobel’s house, the house where she has always lived with Uncle Stan. It looks different because the trees have grown up, two great dark yew trees which obscure the windows and make the house look smaller than before. Not that it has ever been a very big house. Vanessa’s village does not have big houses.
Lucy is putting up two of her daughters, so they have to stay with Lucy’s parents. The front door is the same peeling sky-blue it used to be when Vanessa was little. They ring the doorbell. Inside, there is a crash of furniture, and then the slow movement of something living, a shuffle and drag of someone coming to the door, and the minutes exacerbate Vanessa’s nerves, but then the door opens, and there is her aunt, a hundred years older, but wreathed in smiles, her very own aunt, and this is her welcome, she’s enfolded in laughter and soft, solid flesh that smells of lilacs, and something medical.
“Nessa, dearie. How lovely to see you. We’re all at sixes and sevens here. You know Stan’s not well. He sometimes knocks things over…Who’s this?” She peers puzzledly at Mary, then says, “Oh yes, nice to see you, dear, Lucy did say you would be bringing a friend, but she didn’t mention — I see, never mind. Come in, come in. You’re too thin, Vanessa. We’ll have to feed you up. Of course we hoped that young Justin would come—”
So they are swept in, and back in time. To smaller rooms and narrower stairs. To unshaded bulbs and yellowed paintwork, to thin, cheap towels in deck-chair stripes. Here they are still living in the 1950s. Nothing, it seems, has been thrown away, though they do have a huge flat-screen television. “We rent it, actually, we ought to buy it but you know how it is, we never quite have the money.” Uncle Stan watches it most of the time, and his contribution to the lunchtime conversation is a lengthy digest of the plots of the soaps, which he delivers anxiously, in his soft new voice, as if his own life is not good enough.
“It’s the effect of Parkinson’s, the way he talks,” whispers Isobel, in the dark kitchen, which seems like a period film set to Vanessa. Old electric cooker with solid hot plates, enamel bread-bin, little calendar with spaniels, glossy ears drooping over circled dates next to which are pencilled ‘DOCTOR’ or ‘HOSPITAL’. “He’s making a big effort, but he’s very tired. They don’t think he’s got long to go—” And although her aunt speaks matter-of-factly, as if of a race with a gallant jockey, Vanessa realises it’s death she means, death that hovers by the stained formica underneath the wall cupboard with its layers of cream paint. Suddenly that cupboard is very familiar. Was it where her aunt kept homemade ginger biscuits? Sweet and tacky, misshapen as puddles. The taste returns to her, buttery, hot. “—But it’s bound to buck Stan up, seeing you. And your friend. She’s very nice. She seems just like us. You know we’ve never had an African in the house. ”
It is a shock to Vanessa that they are poor. Oddly enough, she had not expected it, as if the wash of prosperity in London would have flooded over and found every village and changed the lives of the people here. In fact, they are no better off than they were. Indeed they must be worse off, since everything’s the same, just older and darker than before. This house has no videos, or dimmer switches, or mixer taps, or bathroom suites. There is the same curved bath, with rusted feet, which they could have sold for a fortune in London, and the separate loo, with its high dark cistern. The chain is mended with ancient string.
“I’ll show you to your room,” Aunt Isobel says, after they’ve drunk cups of sweet milky coffee. “Oh, don’t you take sugar?” she asks, too late, spotting Vanessa’s wince of distaste.
“It’s fine, Aunt Isobel, it’s just that I get toothache. No, never mind, I’m enjoying it.” And she is, in a way. It takes her back in time; her mother used to make the same mild, sweet fluid.
The two of them follow the old lady upstairs, checking themselves at every step as she heaves and pants her way to the top, then turns and smiles at them; one tooth is broken. “Slow and steady wins the day.”
And then Vanessa has her second shock. For she and Mary will be sharing a room. Of course, she should have expected it. The house is small, and there are only two bedrooms, for the one where Lucy and her sister once slept has now been turned into a junk room. Isobel explains this as she opens the door to a small bright room with a double bed.
And so they will be sharing a bed.
There is a vase of roses on the bedside table. “Your Aunt Becky crocheted that bedspread,” says Isobel. “I had to clear their house out after she died. She would have liked to be here to see you.” And then, seeing something stunned in Vanessa’s expression, she says, “Will this room be all right for you? I thought, seeing as the two of you are such friends…In any case, it’s all we’ve got.” And just for a moment there’s a flash of something that Vanessa remembers from when she was younger, when she went to college and her cousins did not, when her aunt thought she’d got above herself, and told her mother, and there was a row. Hurriedly she says, “That’s quite all right.”
“It is very nice,” says Mary, laughing. “I do not mind sleeping with Vanessa. Though sometimes Omar says I kick people.”
Vanessa does not laugh. She takes most of the hangers, and the side of the bed with the bedside table.
In the evening they all go to Lucy’s house, except Uncle Stan, who ‘has a programme to watch’, or so he says, but his wife whispers, “Well, the old boy never goes out.”
Lucy lives in one of the modern houses that have appeared along the lanes. It has an air of recent ruthless tidying; the beds in the garden are freshly dug over, spanking new winter pansies in brilliant islands upon a background of immaculate brown. They are building an extension at the back: it is large and white and nearly finished, with a round conservatory on the end.
Lucy is nervous, but full of laughter. Pretty from a distance, with a cap of yellow curls, close up her fine skin is wreathed in smiling wrinkles, Vanessa is relieved to find, as they kiss. Her blue eyes are kindly, but not the cornflower pools that used to lure Vanessa’s boyfriends away. And I am slimmer than her, thinks Vanessa. And surely I dress decades younger. She begins to feel better, to relax.
Lucy welcomes them into her pink front room, rather too pink, but very bright. There is a rose three·piece suite and a low carved coffee-table covered with a sheet of gleaming glass. It is loaded with things on cocktail sticks, sausage rolls, olives, bijou gherkins. There is a bottle of sparkling wine on the table. The late sun flashes on a set of crystal flutes. Lucy shows them her house with self-deprecating pride: it is light and bright and well-organised, a world away from Aunt Isobel’s (though Vanessa notes there are very few bookshelves, and she would never live in a 1980s house, with cubes of rooms and double-glazed windows). There are sunshine-yellow fitted units in the kitchen, with matching blinds, kettle and toaster. Vanessa says, “Lovely,” but thinks too yellow. “You don’t think it’s too yellow, do you?” asks Lucy. The floor is an eye-popping yellow and white check. Vanessa is determined to be nice to everyone. “Lovely, Lucy. You must clean it every day, how marvellous” (but 1 would be far too busy).