Before I Met You (4 page)

Betty could hear the chickens stirring and clucking in the back garden of the new-agers up the road. The sun was warming up the leaden darkness of the room. Last night’s vodka and limes were still sloshing about in the pit of her stomach. She felt a wave of nausea and winced at a sugary repeat at the base of her throat.

‘No,’ she said huskily, ‘no. I don’t have any children. I’m only twenty-one.’

‘Quite so,’ said Arlette, her eyes growing heavy again. ‘Quite so. Too young for all that; should be out having fun. What did you say your name was again?’

‘Elizabeth,’ she replied patiently.

‘Like our queen. She is still the Queen, isn’t she?’

Betty nodded.

‘Well, I shall call you Betty. You look like a Betty. Betty Gable. Or was it Grable? Bette Davis. Elizabeths were always called Betty in my day. Where did you say you lived again?’

‘Next door,’ said Betty, ‘I live right next door.’

Arlette’s breathing slowed then and Betty watched her crêpey eyelids flicker and shut. She waited a moment to be sure she was asleep and then she left the room.

The house was waking up. It was almost five. Betty was dehydrated and too awake now to sleep. She headed downstairs, through the empty corridors and towards the kitchen. The debris of the previous night was still there on the kitchen table. Beer cans rammed with cigarette butts, congealing bowls of vegetable curry and rice, ashtrays brimming with fag ends and ring pulls and glitzy crumpled Quality Street wrappers. Someone’s baseball cap sat amidst the carnage and someone else had left a full packet of Marlboro Lights in the middle of the table. Betty groaned and poured herself a glass of water.

Bella had stayed and was sleeping upstairs, in the spare bed in Betty’s room, but everyone else had piled into Mitch’s camper van at some time around one, and disappeared in a puff of Nirvana and raucous laughter.

Arlette was oblivious to the parties that happened almost nightly in her house. She was bedbound now, after her stroke five years earlier, the one that had stricken her the morning after Betty’s sixteenth birthday.

Betty sometimes wheeled her to the terrace at the end of their corridor to feel the sun, but Arlette asked to be taken less and less these days, lived more and more inside her own head and in the endless corridors of her remembered history.

She had a carer now, a woman called Sandra, who turned her and cleaned her and medicated her. There had been talk, of course, of moving Arlette to a home. Jolyon and Alison had moved away last year, at Alison’s insistence, after the heating had packed up for the fifth winter in a row. They lived in a small two-bedroom apartment overlooking the harbour at St Peter Port, clean, new and fitted out with all mod cons. They begged Betty to come and live with them, but Betty just could not find it within herself to leave Arlette in the care of strangers every night. Alison and Jolyon visited most days but Arlette had little idea who they were any more.

Betty had chosen to do an Art diploma here in Guernsey rather than a degree in London. And she had chosen to stay on in this big cold unwelcoming house with a ninety-four-year-old woman rather than find herself a room in a shared house with her friends. She had made these choices willingly and freely, in spite of the seventy-odd years that divided them, in spite of Arlette’s irascibility and her misanthropy and her unshakeably grey-tinted view of the world, because she loved her.

Arlette had lived in this house for seventy years, had given birth in this house, grown old in this house, and Betty was
determined
that she would die in this house, surrounded by all her lovely things. The Alzheimer’s had arrived shortly after the stroke, but Betty didn’t mind the Alzheimer’s. In a strange way it had softened Arlette and made her more palatable.

Betty heaped two teaspoons of instant coffee into a mug and watched the kettle on the Aga slowly bringing itself to a wild and rolling boil.

‘Morning,’ someone croaked behind her. It was Bella. Her long brown hair was two curtains, half drawn across her elfin face. She was fully dressed in last night’s clothes: baggy jeans that sat on her pointy hipbones, cropped marled T-shirt, red hoodie and socks. Her stomach was a slice of toned white flesh between her clothes. Her mascara was smudged around her eyes and she had a scab on her lip where a cold sore was healing. But she was still about the prettiest girl that Betty had ever seen.

‘Nightmares?’ she asked in a husky morning tone, balling her hands up inside the sleeves of her hoodie.

Betty nodded and yawned. ‘Do you want one?’ she asked, gesturing at her freshly poured coffee.

‘Yes. Please.’

They took their coffees out onto the back step and rested the mugs upon their knees, staring out into the new day opening up across the distant gardens.

‘I’m really going to miss this place, you know,’ said Bella.

Betty sighed. ‘Not as much as I’m going to miss you.’ She breathed in deeply against encroaching tears. Everyone was going. Everyone had left, three years ago, gone to get their degrees in more inspiring places and then some of them had come back; back to save a bit of money, help out in family businesses, gird their loins, recharge their batteries, consider their positions. But now the returners were leaving again, peeling off one by one. Including Bella. Off to Bristol for a job as a trainee zookeeper at the zoo. She was to be paid five thousand pounds a year plus free accommodation and subsidised meals. She was
leaving
next month. If it wasn’t for Arlette, Betty would probably be going with her. As it was, she was going nowhere. She wasn’t even in a position to spend a night away from the house, let alone leave the island. Betty felt like the last plum left on the tree, overripe and splitting at the seams.

‘I’ll be back, you know?’ Bella reassured. ‘Any time off I get. And then, you know …’ She trailed off. They both knew what that ‘you know’ meant. It meant:
When she’s dead
.

The longest living resident of Guernsey was currently one hundred and five. The longest living in the island’s history had made it to one hundred and eleven. These statistics filled Betty with cold dread. She was giving away her youth to a woman who often mistook her for a boy.

‘How is she? Generally?’ Bella asked delicately.

‘Yeah,’ Betty smiled stoically. ‘Healthy. Relatively.’ Her smile faltered. ‘It’s fine. It’s good. I’m fine. It’s the only way.’

‘Your time will come,’ said Bella, squeezing Betty’s thigh. ‘You’ll be away from this place without a backward glance and the world won’t know what’s hit it. Seriously.’

The sun was on the horizon now and the sky was blood red. Already the night chill was fading into the warmth of a hot July morning.

‘You know,’ said Bella, ‘nobody would hate you. If you left now. Nobody would blame you.’

Betty shook her head. ‘I can’t explain it,’ she said, ‘and I know nobody really understands. But I have to stay until the end. Leaving her here is not an option.’

It was hard sometimes for Betty not to feel secretly disappointed by Arlette’s continuing state of aliveness. It was hard for her to understand why Arlette was still alive when Freddie Mercury, for example, was dead. There was, as far as she could tell, no real advantage to Arlette’s continued existence. If anything, it brought with it numerous disadvantages, not the least of which was the fact that in order to pay for Arlette’s carer and
the
upkeep of the house, her personal effects and savings were being depleted at an alarmingly fast rate. All her good jewellery had gone. The few pieces of quality furniture, her car and a Wedgwood tea set dating from 1825 were gone. Consequently, Betty had absolutely no financial motivation for caring for Arlette the way she did. She knew the house would go to Jolyon, Arlette had told her that. ‘I suppose there has to be
some
concession to him being my son,’ she’d sighed sadly. There would be trinkets and baubles, she was sure of that, but no, she was not here for the money, she was here because she couldn’t leave until she knew that Arlette no longer needed her, and she knew that Arlette would need her here until she drew her last breath.

Bella squeezed her thigh again. ‘Saint Betty,’ she said. She yawned widely and then blew air through her lips. ‘I’m going back to bed. Wake me up if I’m still there at eleven. Off to Auntie Jill’s for lunch today; promised Mum I wouldn’t be late.’

Betty watched her pale, skinny friend head back into the house, heard her deposit her empty mug back on the kitchen table. And then she sat and watched the sun in the sky floating higher and higher like a big orange helium balloon. When it was high enough to turn the sky blue, she too headed back to bed.

She checked briefly on Arlette before turning in. She lay exactly as she’d left her an hour earlier, neatly upon her back, arms at her sides, face slack in repose, her heavy breathing the only real evidence that she was, in fact, alive and not newly expired and laid out as for a wake.

She was about to turn and leave when she heard Arlette’s sheets rustling. Arlette was awake and she was smiling. ‘Is that you, Betty?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes, Arlette, it’s me.’

She closed her eyes, still smiling, and just before she drifted back to sleep, murmured the words: ‘I love you, very much.’

‘Oh,’ said Betty, her stomach lurching pleasantly at her words, her hand at her heart. ‘I love you too.’

6

1995

THIS Last Will & Testament is made by me ARLETTE FRANÇOISE LAFOLLEY of LAURIERS HOUSE, LAURIERS MOUNT, ST PETER PORT, GUERNSEY, BRITISH ISLES, GY1 3DG on the 22nd day of SEPTEMBER 1988.

I APPOINT as executors and trustees of my will, JOLYON ADAM LAFOLLEY OF LAURIERS HOUSE, LAURIERS MOUNT, ST PETER PORT, GUERNSEY, BRITISH ISLES, GY1 3DG, and ALISON CATHERINE DEAN OF LAURIERS HOUSE, LAURIERS MOUNT, ST PETER PORT, GUERNSEY, BRITISH ISLES, GY1 3DG and should one or more of them fail to or be unable to act I APPOINT to fill any vacancy ELIZABETH JANE DEAN OF LAURIERS HOUSE, LAURIERS MOUNT, ST PETER PORT, GUERNSEY, BRITISH ISLES, GY1 3DG.

I GIVE

(1) My home, Lauriers House, and all its furniture, to my
son
JOLYON ADAM LAFOLLEY.

(2) My MG Midget to my son JOLYON ADAM LAFOLLEY.

(3) All clothes – including in particular my mink coat which, at the time of writing, is on the top shelf of my middle wardrobe – all jewellery, personal effects, ornaments, photographs, books and ornamental furnishings to my son’s stepdaughter, ELIZABETH JANE DEAN OF LAURIERS HOUSE, LAURIERS MOUNT, ST PETER PORT, GUERNSEY, BRITISH ISLES, GY1 3DG. I also give Elizabeth Jane Dean the sum of ONE THOUSAND POUNDS, to be paid to her in CASH and thereafter the sum of ONE HUNDRED POUNDS to be paid to her every year on her birthday, to be spent on champagne, designer dresses and parties.

(4) The rest of my estate, including all accounts held in my name, savings accounts, pensions and bonds, to CLARA TATIANA PICKLE a.k.a. CLARA TATIANA JONES of (last known address) 12 ST ANNE’S COURT, SOHO, LONDON, W1A 2DF. If Ms Pickle/Jones is deceased these monies will revert to her children. If her children are deceased these monies will revert to her grandchildren. If she is deceased and found to have no immediate family these monies will revert to ELIZABETH JANE DEAN. If the executors have been unable to trace Ms Pickle/Jones within a one-year period of my demise, monies will revert to ELIZABETH JANE DEAN.

I WISH my body to be BURIED in the plot reserved for me at St Agnes’ Church, beside my late husband. My son, JOLYON ADAM LAFOLLEY, has already been made aware of my requirements for the style and tone of my internment and subsequent celebration. I have given him written instructions and a sum of money to cover expenses.
What
I would now like to add to these requirements is that I should very much like there to be jazz and dancing.

Signed,

Arlette Lafolley

THE LAWYER LOOKED
from Jolyon to Alison and then to Betty.

‘Clara Pickle?’ said Jolyon, his large neck wobbling back and forth as he shook his head blankly. ‘Who the hell is Clara Pickle?’ He looked at Alison. Alison shrugged. He looked at Betty. Betty shrugged. He looked at the lawyer. The lawyer said; ‘So you don’t know who this woman is?’

‘Do I look like I know who this woman is? Here …’ He put out his hand and the lawyer passed his mother’s last will and testament to him. Jolyon read the document, once, twice, three times.

‘St Anne’s Court …?’ he muttered.

‘That’s in Soho,’ said Betty.

‘Soho? What the …?’

He ran a hand through what remained of his hair and looked perplexed. ‘This is crazy,’ he said.

‘How much money are we talking about?’ Alison asked.

He shrugged. ‘Not much, not any more. Ten thousand, fifteen, tops. Nothing life changing, but – you know – a nice amount. It’s not the money, it’s just, who the hell is this woman? And why am I only just hearing about her? You were with her when she set out this will,’ he said to the lawyer. ‘Did she say anything about this woman?’

The lawyer lowered his gaze to the table and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘she just spelled out the names for me. She made no mention of her identity and I didn’t ask.’

‘I mean, Mummy never even went to London. How could she know someone there?’

Alison and Betty just shook their heads.

‘Are we legally obliged to find this person?’ Jolyon asked. ‘Or can we just wait for the year to elapse and let Betty take the money?’

‘Yes,’ the solicitor said. ‘There is a legal obligation on behalf of the executor to trace this person. She would be able to sue you if it was ever discovered that no effort had been made to trace her.’

‘Yes, but who the hell is she? And how are we supposed to find her?’

‘Well,’ said Betty, ‘we could start by writing to that address.’

The lawyer shook his head. ‘Mrs Lafolley did mention that she had written to that address and been told that the address is no longer residential. It’s now an office for a marketing agency, or something like that. If I recall, she said that it had not been in residential use since the nineteen thirties. So that is rather a dead-end road, if you’ll excuse the pun.’