The night is young.
She floated on a desultory tide of sexual appreciation, tossing her head to deliver perfect smoke rings to the ceiling, her skin alive to the knowledge that more than one pair of eyes glittered with desire for her.
The draught stiffened her bones and the clink of cutlery and glass faded to stillness. Isabel Ramsay stared uncomprehending at empty chairs, the denuded table and broken china strewn over the floorboards.
She drew her shawl around her. Gina said she should wear thick cardigans; really meaning she was too old for bare shoulders. Gina had always been old. The door of the Viennese wall clock had swung open and struggling to her feet she slammed it shut, lacking the courage to rip it off the wall. The fastening was bent and it opened again when the mechanism struck the quarter with a whirr. Gina warned her that unless it was fixed it would lose value; the girl price-tagged everything.
The shaft of light from the hall eclipsed for a moment.
She caught her foot on the bundled tablecloth on her way to the kitchen for her water. The tobacco smoke was fainter. If she told her children, they would take action: sack the cleaner; call the police; bring up the question of shunting her to a home.
She mounted the stairs, the ache at the base of her skull now focused on one place like an accusing finger; she dipped her head in a fruitless effort to avoid the prodding sensation. In each hand she clasped a tumbler of water, the last two glasses from a wedding present of eight. Soon they too would be gone. Gina reprimanded her for not holding on to the banister, more bothered about the Waterford crystal than her mother’s safety. As an incomplete set, the glasses had no resale value, Isabel told her daughter; she didn’t tell Gina about her falls. Last week Isabel had stumbled on to the landing throwing wine in a spray over the carpet; the stain was still there. She would add it to the cleaning list.
Eleanor said all the kids avoided the fifth stair when they crept in from parties. Isabel had never noticed that it creaked. Eleanor had remarked in her particular way that ‘Dad knew’.
Isabel caught her foot in a tear in the carpet. It had been laid in the spring of 1968. Gina wanted to sort out a replacement; Jon could get Axminster at trade price. Mark or someone had refused. Mark probably, keen to accept nothing from his son-in-law.
Falling was nothing to do with age, Isabel told the children, it could happen to any of you.
When she reached the top landing, the lights went out. Power cut. Another one. She had to depend on light slanting in from the windows to find her bedside table and avoid spilling water on the plastic radio from Gina and Jon. She forgot and switched on the anglepoise, and then left it; at least she would know when the electricity came on.
Mark’s bedside cabinet needed sorting: she moved his spectacles case and in the poor light shifted his ever-growing pile of books for space to put his glass. The smell of beeswax reminded her to talk to the cleaner about something.
The bells struck ten or eleven or twelve, she had lost count, she told Hall or whatever he called himself. She shuffled to the window wrapping her shawl around her and peered down.
Unlike many London squares, the park opposite belonged to the council. The land had been purchased in 1915 to stop a proposed development of houses. When the Ramsays moved to St Peter’s Square in 1957, a team of keepers based in a hut at one end had tended the plants and bushes and swept up leaves and litter. They also kept an eye on unattended children. Now the upkeep of the lawns and paths was outsourced to a private company and residents added plants of their choosing to immaculate beds. The keepers’ hut, its windows and door sealed with metal panels, had lost definition beneath a chaos of graffiti.
The lone call of a song thrush in the horse-chestnut tree was amplified in the darkness.
Mark’s arm encircled her. Isabel shifted. He lifted her breast, as if testing its weight. Like a television programme she was not enjoying, Isabel snapped off the picture.
Footsteps came from the church, a chock-chock on the pavement accompanied by a lighter pattering; Isabel tapped her feet in their twinkling slippers in time to the sound and hurriedly smoothed down her hair, flattening a hand over her stomach. Her cotton shawl emphasized bony shoulder blades and a tall spare frame on which a linen skirt exposed still shapely calves and ankles.
The village hall shindig was crammed in to make way for the big day; so much that was petty and pointless had repercussions. What’s more, the bloody place went to rack and ruin; it was all a waste.
A woman with a pushchair and a boy clutching its handle scurried into the pool of lamplight and out again. The lights of other houses winked through the swaying branches. Isabel rubbed her mouth ruminatively: when there was a power cut, surely everything went out?
She batted Mark’s pillow to make an indentation for his head. She held his latest paperback up to the orange lamplight and squinted at the title: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. Mark abhorred fiction and stuck to the truth. She fanned the pages and a shape floated on to the duvet. Patting about on the fabric she found a half-smoked cigarette and sniffed it. The smell made her happy for a fraction of time. She tried to slip the stub back in the book but gave up and climbed into bed, letting it drop to the floor.
Isabel lay on her back, her body so slight that the bed appeared empty. Although she told her cleaner that she was a light sleeper, she did not stir when, some time later, the fifth stair creaked.
6
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
A telephone rang from somewhere beyond the waiting room. Stella skimmed the Daily Mail she had taken from the pile of newspapers and brochures on the smoked-glass table, pondering how the old-fashioned bell was at odds with the modern techniques of dentistry boasted of in the glossy marketing.
It was her phone. She rummaged for it in her rucksack and hastened to the conservatory at the end of the waiting room.
‘Stella, are you there?’
‘Speaking.’
‘No, I mean are you at the dentist?’ It was Jackie, her personal assistant.
‘Yes I’m here,’ she hissed into the handset, stirring toothbrushes displayed in a cane basket on the window sill that resembled the gift sets with soap and baubles of bubble bath nestling in straw she received every Christmas from clients who saw no irony in giving soap to a cleaning company.
‘You’ll feel better.’ With less conviction Jackie added: ‘Good luck.’
At nine that morning Jackie had found Stella at her desk dosed with painkillers that had not masked the hammering in her jaw and, without consulting her, sourced a dentist online and booked the first appointment of the day.
Stella had not divulged her fear of the whining drill, the scraping of metal on ivory and the electric shocks of exposed nerves. Or her revulsion of latex-coated fingers poking around her mouth; never would she admit to feelings or failings.
The pain had started when she got home from her visit to the office last night. On top of Terry’s death, toothache was the last straw; she had ignored it, replied to her emails and designed and priced an oven-cleaning package. The throbbing increased and she decided to stipulate to the undertakers that the funeral would be basic: no cars, no flowers, no music. No mourners.