‘You sent it?’
‘Well, really, it’s from Amelia, I suppose. The spirit of her. But I wrote it and signed it. It’s difficult to explain. But it’s all very important, so I’m going to have to try harder, aren’t I? I’ve been waiting for this moment for years, and, forgive me for saying so, but you’re not making it any easier.’
I don’t remember hating her, before, but it would be very easy to start hating her now. She doesn’t even pretend to care. She uses a slightly disappointed tone of voice on me, as if she deserves to. ‘You waited for this? While you were in Bedford?’
‘Bedford? Why on earth would I be in Bedford?’
‘You wrote and said—’
‘Ah.’ She holds up a hand. ‘Arnie. I’m guessing Arnie set that up. I should have realised he’d feed you some lies rather than let you find out what happened for yourself. Always attempting to control the situation, that was Arnie. Too clever for his own good.’
I bite back the instinct to remind her that he’s not dead yet. I dare say she doesn’t actually care. ‘You never wrote any letters to me from Bedford? None?’
‘I couldn’t explain it in a letter. Not then, not now. It’s the kind of thing that has to be done face to face.’
‘So here I am. Better late than never. Perhaps you’d like to get on with it.’
She takes in a breath, as if I’ve shocked her. I’m glad. It makes me feel like her equal. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘It’s like this. Last night you took a declaration made by the founder of this island. So you know she was an amazing woman. I’m here because she asked me to take over the task of caring for this island, and reading aloud to the statue in the basement. I wouldn’t choose to start there, but you saw the door with the four painted squares. You even opened it, didn’t you? So it seems ridiculous to start anywhere else.’
I should feel something, but I can’t conjure an emotion. Too many shocks in one morning, perhaps. ‘You keep the… statue down there?’
‘I go down to it with a pile of newly completed declarations from the week before, and I read the words out loud. Amelia always believed it prefers fresh stories.’
‘So Amelia is dead? And you read to a statue because she asked you to?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Well done. You’ve got the basics.’
I look around the office: the white walls with one framed picture, a Vettriano print of a dancer in a flame-red dress; a traditional grey filing cabinet in the corner next to the window, where the venetian blind has been pulled, leaving the room in grainy semi-darkness.
Would it be better to simply walk away? I wish I had less self-control. Then I wouldn’t have to rein in this instinct. I would leave the room and never talk to her again. But first I would say, no, shout—You let a statue take priority over your child? Over me?
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says, ‘and I certainly wouldn’t have picked that as the first piece of information I’d give to you. Not if you hadn’t read it for yourself. But you did, didn’t you?’ She sits back in her chair.
There’s a light tapping at the door, and the receptionist pokes her head around. ‘I just wanted to check if everything’s okay?’
‘Yes, thanks Carol.’ My mother’s pleasant face is back in place. ‘We won’t be much longer.’
‘There’s tea and coffee making things in the top drawer of the filing cabinet, if you want drinks.’
‘Lovely, that will warm us up. You get on now, I’m fine to make it.’
Carol closes the door, and we’re alone again.
‘She’s wondering what’s going on. It’s a strange day,’ says my mother. She stands up, opens the drawer and brings out a small travel kettle. She checks it for water, then puts it on the carpet next to the skirting board and plugs it in. While it boils she fetches two mugs from the drawer, and shakes instant coffee from a jar into both. I watch her perform these actions as if we sit together this way every day, knowing each other, perhaps working together in this office, comfortable in this sudden silence.
The kettle boils. She pours water into the mugs and hands one to me, not even asking how I take it. She takes a sip of her own and sits backs down, leaving the kettle on the carpet. ‘I came here for a week off,’ she says. ‘To sit around, do nothing, meet other women in unhappy marriages and have a good moan about it. Moaning is therapeutic, did you know that? I’ve seen it work here. A week of dedicated moaning about the sheer awfulness of their husbands, fathers, sons, and they’re quite happy to take the ferry back to it all. I would have been too. I could have gone back to your father and stuck it out for decades. I might still be there now. I really mean that.’
I try to keep up with this monologue. She’s beginning to relax into it, to say things the way she wanted to. We must have hit on how she pictured this meeting – her talking, me hanging on every word, mugs of coffee in hand. ‘Back then, Amelia – Lady Worthington – still lived in the white house. She had built up this collection of rare things, beautiful things, that she loved to show off. I’ll give you the tour, if you’d like. She held drinks twice a week, up at the house. Buying Skein Island from the government, setting it up, that was all her. It was a feminist statement back then, to come to the island. The world’s most intelligent and dynamic women came here to talk to each other, to learn, and to be able to say that they’d been here. She was disappointed with how it ended up. The island became a joke, didn’t it? People laugh about the idea of the place? They poke holes in it. No politics. No reality, I suppose they say.’
She sips her coffee, seems to remember the thread of her story, and her voice lowers once more. ‘So Amelia asked me if I was enjoying the week, and I said yes, and we talked. Mainly small talk. It had been a hot week, and the other women had tans. She asked me why I didn’t, and I remember I told her that nobody ever discovered the meaning of their existence whilst sitting on a sun-lounger. She thought this was hilarious. She never went out in the sun herself. She asked me about Arnie, and I described him. I told her Arnie would have loved to have been in charge of the world, with all his big ideas, and having to be a gardener in a small town outside Swindon was slowly killing him. And that’s why she offered me the job. To be her Personal Assistant.’
It’s as if the story has skipped forward, leaving out a vital piece of information. ‘Sorry, why?’
‘Because I understood what type of man he was, and what type of man he was never going to be,’ she says. ‘It made the whole process easier for Amelia to explain. As soon as she told me, I knew I had to stay, you see. I gradually took over running the whole operation. The island, the statue, the cubes. Amelia told me there are only four types of men in the world: red, blue, green and yellow.’
There is another light tap at the door. Carol appears once more. ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ she says. ‘The coastguard is on the phone again.’
‘No probs, Carol, we’re done here,’ says my mother. She gives me a kind, impersonal smile. ‘Listen, Marianne, I’d love it if you could come to dinner tonight, up at the white house. We can carry on chatting. I really have to take this call, you see.’ My mother stands up, and picks up her coat from the back of her chair.
‘They’re looking for someone,’ says Carol, with an excited squeak in her voice. ‘A man was out fishing yesterday and went overboard.’
‘He won’t wash up here,’ says my mother, throwing Carol a look. ‘The tide will take him on to the rocks further up the coast, past Allcombe. Shall we say five o’clock, Marianne? I’ve got into the habit of eating early. Yes, okay, Carol,’ she says, as the receptionist flaps her hands at the thought of the coastguard waiting on the phone. The two of them bustle out of the office in a tangle of wet coat, leaving me alone.