‘Oh, come on, Peg. We’re grown-ups doing a good job here.’
‘But . . .’
‘Doll won’t ever know, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
Which, of course,
was
what Peg was worrying about.
‘And we don’t have to
do
anything, if that’s your concern. We could just have a couple of nights’ well-earned rest after working our arses off.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re being a bit pathetic, old Peg.’
‘I know.’
When she was dressed, Peg went through to check on Jean. She had decided it would be better to wait until the afternoon to introduce Loz. Jean wasn’t a morning person, and seemed to be in a particularly foul state of mind today. Then she went down to the otherwise empty Internet café and typed out her email to Raymond, grateful that the qualms she knew she had about asking him for money couldn’t really make it out of her wine-fugged brain.
Saying a little prayer, she hit
send
.
‘Done!’ she said, slipping back into the bungalow and marvelling at the kitchen transformation Loz had worked in the hour or so she had been away.
‘It’s so absolutely the right thing to do,’ Loz said, slipping the last piece of washing-up onto a full draining board. ‘Hey, I tracked down that death smell. Did you catch it when we came in last night?’
Peg shook her head.
‘Well, anyway, it was coming from the fridge, so I had a root around and found an old chicken breast on its way to hell, stinking even through its plastic wrapping. It was two months past its sell-by date.’
‘Ew,’ Peg said.
‘So then I went through the whole fridge and almost everything had to go. There was a bottle of milk that was literally solid, and some butter that had this, like, thick orange leathery skin. I got excited for a second, thinking I’d discovered a new ingredient, but after a whiff of it I changed my mind. And there was a pack of fish fingers in the ice box that was twelve years out of date.’
‘She used to buy them for me when I was little.’
‘Oh God, sorry. I threw them out. You didn’t want to hang on to them for a souvenir, did you?’
‘Do you want me to dry this lot up?’ Peg said, taking a fresh tea towel from the newly gleaming row of hooks by the back door.
‘Yes please. But let’s not put away till we’ve tackled the cupboards.’ Loz looked round at her, her eyes gleaming. ‘It’s going to be a challenge all this. I love a challenge!’
‘Yep.’ Peg fiddled with the tea towel, twisting it round her finger.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes you do. What’s the matter?’
‘It’s just, well, this was my world, and I’ve let you in on it.’
‘And that’s a good thing, no?’
‘Yes. Of course it’s a good thing. It’s just that everything’s changing. It’s going to take me a bit of a while to adjust, that’s all, I suppose.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Loz reached out and took Peg’s hands. ‘I’m such a steamroller. I just get a bit carried away, as you know.’
Peg nodded and sniffed. She felt weepy again, like a big lump of a girl.
‘Tell you what,’ Loz said, squeezing her hands. ‘I’m going to try to be a bit more sensitive to your feelings, a bit more delicate. But you’ve got to tell me. If I’m being an arsehole, you’ve got to let me know. Sometimes I can’t see it myself.’
‘Sometimes!’ Peg said, smiling. She bent down to kiss her.
Peg found some rubber gloves and two of the faintly clinical pinnies Doll always wore around the house. Suitably protected, they set to work on the mounds of clothing in the bedroom, textile records of everything Doll had worn over the past couple of years. As the piles had grown, she had maintained that it was easier to find things like that, rather than putting them away. But it had got so out of hand that parts of the room had become impassable and she was reduced to re-using the same few things over and over, until they were stiff with wear.
Added to that were the empty pots of face powder and cold cream, and the boxes and boxes of broken bits of jewellery – twenty-four carat gold mixed with brass, plastic beads tangled round real seed pearls – and more of the ubiquitous piles of old newspapers and bags of scarves, underwear and old shoes.
‘Wow, Loz said, peering into a bag of Commonplace Books. ‘What are these?’ She pulled one out. ‘Some of these have been burned round the edges.’
‘Don’t!’ Peg cried, grabbing the book before Loz could open it. ‘They’re Nan’s Commonplace Books.’
‘Her what?’
‘They’re private. Like a diary.’
‘Can’t we just peep?’
‘No! How would you like it if you kept a diary and I read it?’
‘But I don’t keep a diary. And even if I did, I haven’t got anything to hide.’
‘Nor’s Nan. But these are private. So please don’t look.’
Loz sighed. ‘OK then.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘We’ll just stack them up in the shed, where they should have stayed all along.’
It was incredible how quickly things progressed with Loz and her music around. By midday, they had cleared all the mounds of clothes into three piles on the lino bedroom floor: one to be cleaned, one for the charity shop and one to be thrown away.
‘Should we make a mending pile?’ Peg asked.
Loz just looked at her with one eyebrow raised. She was far more ruthless than Peg, who, every time she picked something up, had Doll in her head, running through the arguments for keeping it.
It was far easier to be an outsider.
Finally, the floors and surfaces were cleared and the bed stood stripped and airing.
‘It looks so bare now,’ Peg said.
‘It’s the lino floor. Weird for a bedroom,’ Loz said.
‘Nan said it was easier to keep clean – back in the days when she did a lot of cleaning. Aunty Joan’s got the same flooring throughout her extension.’
Loz raised her other eyebrow. ‘Shall we get on, then?’
They were bracing themselves to tackle the last area in the bedroom: two large wardrobes.
Peg nodded.
‘Five, four, three, two, one,’ they counted together.
They pulled open both sets of doors and, from Peg’s side, a load of old medical supplies tumbled out.
‘Jesus, there’s enough here to start a hospital,’ Loz said, sifting through the incontinence pads, plastic disposal bags, changing mats, medicated talc, syringes, rubber tubing, latex gloves and disposable sick bowls.
‘All well past their expiry dates,’ Peg said, examining a pack of scalpel blades. ‘She used all this stuff to look after Aunty Jean. She used to be a nurse, you see. Liked to do it properly.’
‘Where did she get it all from?’
‘I don’t know. I think the hospital sent it. There were deliveries every month. The same man, I remember. He used to give me a lolly when I helped him carry the boxes in.’
‘Hey,’ Loz said, rubbing Peg’s shoulder. ‘That’s a clear memory.’
‘I’ve a feeling there’s plenty more like that, just on the verge . . .’
‘It’s all coming together, isn’t it?’
Peg didn’t know about that. It felt more like it was all falling apart. But she nodded and smiled, anyway.
They bagged all the medical stuff up and hauled it out to the back garden.
‘Such a waste,’ Peg said, looking at the mound of rubbish they were going to have to get to a tip.
‘Not if you think that we’re dealing with a lifetime of not throwing anything away. It’s just a bit of catch-up.’
They went back and hauled the clothing from the wardrobes, dumping it in piles on the bed. Doll’s nurse uniform was in there, clean and ready to wear, hanging under a professional cleaner’s filmy plastic bag.
‘I don’t know where to start with all this,’ Peg said.
‘Some of this stuff is pure seventies,’ Loz said, pulling on a salmon-coloured Crimplene coat with navy-blue piping and frogging that fitted her perfectly in her Doll-like tininess. ‘We could set up a stall in Camden. Make a killing.’
‘Or we could put it in the charity pile.’
‘I suppose now we’re going to rake in Daddy’s dough, we don’t need to worry about cash.’
‘It’s for Nan, remember? I don’t want anything to do with it.’ Peg shook out a floral nylon blouse with white stains in the armpits.
‘We’ll stick by your principles, girl. All the way to debtor’s jail.’
‘Oh shut up and get on with it.’
‘Ooh,’ Loz said. ‘Fierce.’
They sorted through the clothes until Doll was left with just five coats of varying weights and ten each of jumpers, skirts and what she would call slacks. The rest were stuffed into bags.
‘Oxfam,’ Peg said.
‘PDSA,’ Loz countered.
‘Really? Pets over people?’
‘Have you seen what people
do
to each other?’
‘I don’t care. It’s Oxfam or nothing.’
‘Whatever. She’s your nan, I suppose.’
‘Yes. She is.’
Peg climbed on a chair and handed down the dust-encrusted boxes piled on top of the wardrobes.
‘Phew,’ Loz said as she set down the final one. ‘How long have they been up there?’
‘Years. Gramps must’ve put them up there. Nan could never manage it. She’s too tiny.’
Look,’ Loz said, blowing the top of the box clean. ‘It says
Raymond
on it.’
‘And this one’s got
Jean
written on the top. And, oh God, this one says
Keith
.’
‘Naomi’s got a box like this for each of us,’ Loz said. ‘Keeps them in the attic.’
Peg checked the other boxes, but there wasn’t one for her. Perhaps back in the Farnham house there was one, made by her mother for her, and left forgotten in a dark corner of the attic.
‘I don’t know if we should open them,’ she said.
‘Course we should,’ Loz said, undoing the Raymond box. Unable to hold back, Peg peered in.
‘Hard to think of him in these,’ she said, holding up a tiny pair of bootees that had probably been crocheted by Doll in the pre-arthritis days. She put them to one side and opened a slim cardboard box to reveal a crispy, papery thing, and something that looked like withered worm. As they met the air, they seemed to sigh and shrivel.
‘Ew. What’s that?’ she said.
Loz bent forward to inspect it. ‘It’s a caul – the skin thing that goes round the foetus in the womb. Some babies are born with it intact, and if you keep it for them, they’ll never drown. And that’s his umbilical cord,’ Loz said, calmly, pointing at the worm thing.
Peg nearly dropped the box. ‘How do you know?’
‘Naomi’s got mine. She showed them to me on my eighteenth birthday.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nah. Honest. And look,’ Loz held her hands out and took a bow. ‘Undrowned! Mum’s also got my little sister, who was stillborn at twenty-two weeks, in a jar.’
‘Is that allowed?’ Peg said.
‘Clearly it is. Although, even if it wasn’t, if Naomi wanted it . . . Well, she knows a few strings and how to pull them.’
Peg shuddered.
‘What else is in there?’ Loz said, peering into the box. Peg pulled out a sheaf of papers – glowing school reports, gymnastics, and school prize and music certificates.
‘He was her golden boy,’ Peg said. ‘She doesn’t talk about him much, but when she does it’s always “My Raymond” this, and “My Raymond” that. He couldn’t do a thing wrong in her eyes.’
‘So sad,’ Loz said.
The next thing to come out of the box was a small tan leather photograph album with whipped edges. There, held on by faded photograph corners, was the baby Raymond in black and white, all fat and dimpled, in a knitted suit, smiling up at the camera as he sat on a checked rug on a sun-dappled lawn. There he was, a little older, with a walking trolley full of bricks and his big sister behind him, her arm encircling his shoulders in a way that reminded Peg of how he had stood by the blonde woman in the torn photographs.
‘And there’s Keith,’ Peg said as she turned the page.
‘If looks could kill,’ Loz murmured as they both studied the picture.
Taken at an early meeting between Doll’s two eldest and her new arrival, it went some way to backing up Jean’s story about the baby and the dock and the stone. Bespectacled and plaited, Jean sat holding her newborn brother, beaming at the camera. Raymond, however, stood a little aside, staring at Keith with a level of malevolence, which, without the benefit of hindsight, must have caused some amusement at the time.
‘The usurped prince,’ Peg said.
‘But then again there’s one of me and Rach, taken in the hospital just hours after Mum had her, and I’m looking at her just like that. But I never killed her.’ Loz shrugged. ‘Never even felt the urge that strongly.’
‘You put things so baldly sometimes.’ Peg turned the pages. There was Raymond, all brushed and smart in his school uniform; there he was in probably his first suit, and there he was older, standing by a white Jag.
‘I just tell it how it is, babe.’ Loz caught a picture as it fell out of the album, the glue on its corners having given up. ‘Who’s that?’ she said, frowning at it.
Peg peered at the picture and frowned. ‘God, it’s that girl. The one whose photos Jean tore up. And that’s Dad next to her, of course. Why’s Nan got that in there?’
‘Let me see,’ Loz said, taking the photograph and holding it to the light. She suddenly shivered.
‘What?’
‘Someone walking over my grave,’ Loz said, smiling at Peg. ‘I thought— oh, nothing.’ She frowned at the picture. ‘Pretty girl, though.’
‘I’d hardly have thought she was your type.’
‘Clearly Raymond’s though. Look at him all Brylcreemed in front of his fancy Jag, his hungry arm round her.’ Loz made a face.
‘Poor girl.’
‘And her in her smart little zigzag coat.’
They both jumped as the sharp sound of Jean’s buzzer cut through from the lounge, followed by her amplified coughing and gasping for air, the click and whoosh of a cigarette lighter, and an impatient exhalation.
‘Meggy? Meggy? You there?’ Jean’s voice boomed, distorted by a ringing feedback. ‘I’ve dropped me book.’
‘It’s time to meet Jean,’ Peg said. ‘Brace yourself.’
Twenty-Four
‘Thank goodness you’re here,’ Jean said. ‘I haven’t seen anyone since the morning.’
‘Hasn’t Julie been in to give you lunch?’ Peg asked.