They’re the single thing about her to become more vivid and not less, after a tipple. Strange little vignettes, fairy tales in miniature, often with a nightmarish tint. They all start with some version of her favourite line: Far away and long ago. That line is not a coincidence. Most of my mother is far away and long ago.
As Charlotte shows us where the musicians will be set up and instructs us not to venture anywhere near her rose garden, with a slight huff, a chilly gust of air whisks past. I shudder, and Richard’s grandmother glances at me, her smile just as chilly.
‘Does it not suit?’ she asks.
‘No, it’s—it’s beautiful.’
Richard shrugs off his coat and puts it around my shoulders. We approach the house from the back. Charlotte’s dog, some ankle-high breed of terrier, is yapping by the door, jumping up and down on all fours like a mechanical toy. Charlotte’s lips are pressed together. Her dog is usually to be found on his living-room cushions, sniffing at a tray of treats. He is not the sort of dog who sneaks out on purpose. He isn’t what most people would even call a dog.
‘Have you slipped him some coffee?’ I joke to Richard. ‘Or some—’
Garlic.
The air is laced with the smell of garlic, carrying further than it otherwise might, perhaps, on that brisk wind. For a second I worry it might be me, having just spent the week at my mother’s, because Mum adds garlic to everything she consumes. Maybe even her drinks. As a teenager, I used to make snide comments: Was there a garlic shortage or something when you were a kid? And she’d laugh like I was being funny, and not like she was pissed.
I was not being funny.
‘Ro? You OK?’ asks Richard.
‘Is it the roses?’ enquires Charlotte. ‘Their scent is peaking.’
‘I’m just cold, I think.’
The dog is still howling and now sounds deranged.
‘I don’t know what could be the matter with him.’ Charlotte places a hand on the brooch pinned to her lapel. ‘Would you go around front, Richie? Someone might have come by.’
I shrink into Richard’s coat. Someone is already there, right there by the back entrance. A visitor who has drawn the rat-dog from his morning nap; who has likely been watching us meander through Charlotte’s garden. A visitor who is often there in Oxford too.
Zoya.
Richard walks off. The dog quiets down, appearing satisfied that the racket has got his message across.
‘I feel that there’s something amiss with you today, Rosie,’ says Charlotte. ‘You’re not altogether yourself.’ She makes a tch sound.
The sound is everything she thinks of me, rolled into a syllable. I don’t know if she envisioned her favourite grandchild ending up with someone like me, but she also probably reckons it could be worse. Tch, tch.
Another tch at me for not replying straightaway. I try to smile at her, but she doesn’t try in return. What does she want, an apology for not being myself? Who is the Rosie who is herself? Rosie, whose name has not always been Rosie? Sometimes there’s a glimmer in Charlotte that makes me wonder if she suspects something to be wrong with my story. But she’s the one who retreated into a remote, rose-growing widowhood far from everyone she knows, from her old married life. Maybe there’s something wrong with her story too.
‘It’s my mother. She’s—she’s unwell,’ I say.
Charlotte draws herself up. ‘Of course. Richard did say. How terribly difficult for your family. Is your mother religious?’
‘She has … her views,’ I say. ‘She believes in the soul.’
Mum was once determined to make me and Zoya believe in it too. She’d try to wear us down, evening after evening, sitting at our bedside, smoothing down that favourite nightgown of hers, the only thing she wears nowadays. Some of her claims about the human soul came with solid moral lessons. Others were bits and bobs of morbid superstition, what schoolkids might circulate in the playground.
I didn’t believe any of it then.
The dog is glacially silent now.
‘No one,’ reports Richard, strolling back towards us. ‘Shall we go in?’
Charlotte bends with impressive flexibility and scoops up her pet. His tail whacks like a metronome against her arm. Before I can follow, the smell of garlic wafts by again, mixed with that of vodka now. A potent combination.
The particular combination that comes off Mum like radioactivity.
My breakfast turns in my stomach, threatens to rise. According to Mum’s folklore, there is only one hard rule: after death, the soul must visit all the different places in which the living person has ever sinned.
Didn’t Zoya commit sins anywhere other than right behind me?
Mum’s neighbour rings from London late in the evening. Mum has died. He brought in her shopping as usual and he could just tell, he says. I want to ask him to check again because Mum’s been passing for dead for a few years now, but I don’t. I crawl into bed and I think about this tiny ivy-slathered house and the moorland all around, wild and empty, extending in every direction, coming from nowhere, belonging to no one.
Moors. Moored. Unmoored.
Back in London, there is no funeral, no ceremony beyond the cremation. Mum had no friends. She didn’t know anyone who wasn’t being paid to know her back. I take her ashes with me in a nondescript urn and I decline Richard’s offer to stay behind to help.
I’ll only be an extra day, I say, because I have to be in Oxford by the weekend.
I try to tidy up her apartment. I start in the kitchen, with her grisly jars of home-pickled vegetables, not one of which I have ever seen her touch. I have a go at the living room next, but the glass eyes of her dolls follow me around like they’re waiting for me to turn my back – so I decide to deal with them next time and I open all the windows instead, to let some of the stale, vodka-soaked air out. To let Mum’s soul out.
I just have no idea what to do with what’s left. Should I put the urn in storage? Or on display?
If I were going to scatter her ashes, it ought to be off the stage at the Bolshoi, over the musicians’ heads, as bravas ring out from every box. Mum was in the corps de ballet before getting married – before my sister and I came along, obliterating any chance she had of being promoted to principal – and she probably always hoped to die onstage, mid-plié. Zoya and I used to tease her as she practised in the mornings. We’d fall over our own feet trying to go en pointe alongside her.
Katerina Ballerina.
Later I swing by to meet her solicitor. He has a smart office and a sympathetic smile. He tells me she’s left me the apartment. It’s mine now. That can’t be right, I say, trying to argue with him. Richard and I have been paying rent on it. We send her a cheque every three months.
I have the mental image of cheques being stashed away, pickled in jars.
Her solicitor feels sorry for me. I can hear it in his voice. He has a posh accent, like Richard’s, the kind that can sand glass. He can show me the deed, he says. Katherine White, a property owner. For a second I think, ah, that’s it. He’s got the wrong person. My mother’s name wasn’t Katherine White. It was Yekaterina Simonova. Katerina Ballerina.
Richard stands in the rain without a brolly, his college scarf around his neck, his hands stuck in his trouser pockets. I step off the coach and look askance at the dark sky, starched and flat over all of Oxford. A raindrop lands on my eyelashes. I used to wonder if Mum chose England because it is so colourless. Because she never wanted it to be able to compete with her old life.
He kisses me lightly on the mouth. ‘You’re back so soon.’
‘I couldn’t stand being there a second longer,’ I say. ‘I’ll sort everything else out another time.’