Keeping the World Away (39 page)

‘Honesty is tiring, it’s a struggle, but it gets easier, once you’ve got into the habit.’

‘And
that’s
irritating.’

‘So, evasive as usual, too frightened to let me see what worries you, why you’re so buttoned up, the perfect little wife and now the noble widow.’

Looking at her sister, Ailsa thought it would be quite easy to
say
that she hated her and never wanted to see her again. She looked, as she always had done, manic, wild, not at all how a social worker should look – there was nothing calm and capable about her. Taller than Ailsa, heavier, with once red and now thick grey curls overwhelming her narrow features, she was alarming. Paul had said she looked madder than some of her mad clients, and the boys thought she looked like a witch. Her clothes added to this impression, always black or dark navy, always shapeless. She was, Paul had decided very early on in his acquaintance with her, ‘one unhappy woman’, and he was sorry for her husband. But Ailsa had spoken the truth when she’d said she envied Fiona’s career – she did. Whatever her sister herself said, however much Paul had mocked her ‘do-gooding’. Ailsa knew Fi was passionate about her job and that she was good at it. Unhappy she might be in her personal life, but she had a sense of direction Ailsa had lacked, and craved to have.

‘Maybe, Fi, I’ll learn to open up, but not today, some other time, I promise.’ Surprisingly, Fiona smiled and said she’d look forward to that, she’d hold her to it.

*

No one else directly challenged her. Her sons never asked a single question about her island life, seeming to regard her months there as an aberration, never to be referred to again. Virginia, who had kept an eye on the house, wanted to know if she had taken any photographs and was disappointed to hear that the answer was no. She’d brought some shells back, though, and gave them to Ryan, who clearly was not impressed, since they were very ordinary shells, not nearly as pretty as those his grandmother had brought back from the Caribbean.

By the time she got rid of them all and went to bed she was exhausted. She’d lost the skill to relate to people and had practically lost the basic skill of conversing at all. Her long silences while she tried to think of how to answer the most straightforward questions puzzled people – she could see them wondering whether she had some kind of illness which made her so slow or whether she was being rude and ignoring them. Every innocent
query
seemed either too simple or too complicated to respond to. She had a blinding headache just from hearing all the voices, and when one by one they ceased, and her family, and Pat and Ryan, left, she could still hear them in her head, one roaring noise. Even when she was at last alone in her bedroom the silence was not complete, it was not the thick silence of the island. The noise of traffic was muted but it was there, and then there were all kinds of other sounds which once she had never noticed and now seemed so loud. The central heating sent a groan through the radiators at regular intervals which alarmed her, and there was a ticking somewhere, like a clock (but there was no clock), which she could not locate. When the telephone rang the shock made her heart race and she rushed to stop the hideous sound, then afterwards detached the instrument from its socket.

Already, there were decisions to be made and her head had begun to whir with alternatives. Cameron thought she should sell the house. It was, he said, too big for her, and she would get a good price for it and could buy a flat and a cottage in the country and still have money left over. James thought selling the house would be a mistake and that instead she should let it out, for a fortune, something he had wanted her to do when she left for the island. Fiona telephoned, wondering if she would like her to move in with her. Her divorce had been fairly recent, she soon would have nowhere to go because her house was to be sold and the money split with her ex-husband. Ailsa didn’t want to have to think about any of this. There was no need. She could take her time, but no one seemed willing to allow her time. It was, she saw, to be the first test of her new self: to tell all these people to leave her alone without offending or alienating them. Thinking about it, she discovered that she did not really care if she did offend them – they, after all, were offending her by being so persistent, so sure that they knew what was best for her.

She hung the painting at the end of her bed, on the wall facing it, where it immediately looked comfortable. This wall was not large – her bedroom was long but not wide and the end walls were narrow – and the pale grey patterned wallpaper suited the
quiet
picture. It did not look awkward, as it had done in the croft, and the light thrown upon it from the side window was flattering. She liked lying and looking at it in the morning, lit by this natural light, and at night the two lamps positioned either side were equally kind to the painting. She had begun to see the point of there being no overt human presence in that room – people were disturbances. It was only possible to be tranquil if there were no people around. But if that were so, in the opinion of the artist, she wondered how any kind of life could be managed unless one withdrew entirely from society. Not even on the island had she done that. Human contact had been minimal, and never meaningful, and perhaps that was the trick – but if so, was not existence rendered barren, loveless?

In the days that followed her return, days she found a great strain, and each one of which ended with her in a state of turmoil over quite trivial matters, she thought ‘loveless’ might be the clue. She was not without love, of varying kinds and degrees, and it was love, bringing with it the need to show concern, that robbed her life of the tranquillity she had experienced on the island. She loved her sons. They were grown men who had long ago moved away from her emotionally, but she was still bound to them by love and could not expel them from her life. Cameron, the elder, in particular, exhausted her with his arguments and persuasion and insistence that she should take his advice. He was especially maddening when he brought his dead father into it. ‘Dad said I was to look after you,’ he told her, ‘see you didn’t get into any financial mess, and I’m telling you, Mum, you have to be sensible and sell the house and invest some money for your old age. It’s the sensible thing to do, trust me.’ She wanted to say to him that it was not a question of trust but of his wanting to take her over and command her as his father had done, and she was not going to have it. She was in charge, of herself, of the house, and would do what she thought fit when she was ready. But she couldn’t speak like that to him. He would be hurt. He wanted her to regard him as wise and responsible and knowledgeable, the very image of how he had seen his father.

He was nothing like his father. She had known that almost from the beginning – even as a baby, he had lacked that unmistakable vigour which James later displayed. Cameron was a dreamer, like her. He was a child who smiled a lot and seemed to want to please, and his very amiability had worried Paul. With James, it was different. She was a puzzle to him and his bafflement over her behaviour since his father had died had made him uneasy in her company. He kept trying to show concern, and then backing off from the implications if there turned out to be any. ‘Are you all right, Mum?’ he kept asking, but there was nothing hesitant about the question, and he clearly expected the answer to be yes. And then, insultingly, though she knew he was unaware of the insult, ‘Maybe you should talk to Melissa, you know, have a chat with her?’ Melissa had done a course in counselling, and James was proud of her caring nature. No, she told him, as gently as possible, she didn’t think she needed to have a word with his wife, she was perfectly all right, he need not worry. ‘But I do,’ he said, in an irritable tone of voice, as though she were being difficult. ‘I can’t stop worrying about you. Melissa says …’ She thought how shocked Melissa would be to know just how far she had moved on, just how swiftly she had come to terms with Paul’s death. This had to remain unspoken.

But she went so far as to say, ‘I’m fine, James. I find I like being on my own.’ He patted her hand, and smiled. She was just a little afraid of James. Even his size – he was over six foot, and powerfully built, like his father – intimidated her. He never looked right in her house, seeming to make chairs too small and rooms too full. His marriage, so young, to Melissa had been a surprise but also a relief – she felt that Melissa, American and clever, took the place she had never adequately filled. If, behind his convincingly mature façade, there lurked a more uncertain James, then Melissa could deal with him. Neither of her sons, she knew, could stand in for their father, and she was glad of it.

*

She wasn’t sure, that first month back in London, whether it was quite true that she liked being on her own in the family house.
It
was, of course, quite different from being alone in the croft on the island. Here, at every turn, there were reminders of that other life, the life she had lived with Paul all those years. Inevitably, they disturbed her. The memories of happier times were sharp and persistent and it puzzled her that they were not also comforting.

The house, which she had always loved, began to get on her nerves. She didn’t fit in any more, she wasn’t a woman who wanted a large sitting room full of furniture, or a kitchen where family feasts could be accommodated. Cameron was right, she must sell it and find somewhere smaller; much smaller. Then, she could get rid of all the belongings which had begun to haunt her with their history. She could choose new things, uninfluenced by Paul’s taste – and everywhere she looked she saw his taste. It always struck people as odd that Paul collected modern art. Such a hobby (though rather more serious and expensive than a hobby) did not fit with his persona as a man of action, ex-army, known to be ruthless in the conduct of business. But Ailsa had seen this other side of Paul from the start and had been convinced it showed the ‘real’ Paul, the true self he did not wish to reveal to others, in case they thought him soft. Sometimes she had heard him lie, telling people that some painting he’d bought had been his wife’s choice. This was especially true if the painting was of a nude woman. She hadn’t minded, but she knew that in fact her own influence was absent so far as their paintings were concerned. Her own taste was only evident in the colour of a pair of curtains or the pattern on a rug (a rug Paul had never liked). It could all go, and Paul’s art collection too. The boys could have what they wanted and the rest could be sold.

First, though, she had to sort through all the many drawers and cupboards and dispose of personal effects. About this, Melissa was right, she had indeed been in denial. She’d gone off to her island leaving everything just as it was, closing the door especially firmly on the room that had been Paul’s study, and into which he had liked to be wheeled even during his last weeks. She thought about asking one of her sons to tackle this room, but feared that what they might find would shatter their image of their father as devoted
husband
. She had to do it herself, and quickly, in a matter-of-fact way. So one dark November day she took into the room a roll of black bin liners and a few large cardboard boxes and set to, starting with the desk. It had six drawers, all crammed with papers, neatly arranged. She saw that in fact there were little labels on the rims of the drawers – ‘Insurance’, ‘Car’, ‘Stocks and Shares’. They could go to Paul’s accountant, she needn’t bother with them. The sixth drawer was locked. She hunted around for a key, but there didn’t appear to be one. She doubted very much whether Paul had opened this drawer in the last year – he couldn’t have managed to bend down that far, nor had he had the strength in his by then almost useless fingers to turn a key. She would have to force the lock. But standing looking at the desk, she remembered that there was another desk Paul had used before this one which looked very much the same.

It had been moved to Cameron’s old room, where he still slept when he stayed with her. Six drawers, exactly the same, and in the sixth, the bottom one, a key was, helpfully, sticking out. She knew it would fit before she even removed it, and returned to Paul’s study. The drawer held letters, all still in their envelopes. They were tied in bundles, with ordinary string or elastic bands. Some were from her. The sight of the pale green envelopes (very expensive these had been, lined with a sort of tissue paper) made her feel slightly nauseous. Only twelve of them, written to Paul in the six months before they became engaged when she had gone back home to Scotland to help nurse her dying father. She didn’t need to read them to remember the contents. Most of these letters had been full of details about her father’s condition, and professions of love for Paul. These had been extravagant, probably embarrassingly so. She’d been so passionately in love, so desperate to be with him, swearing that she couldn’t live without him. She thought she’d burn them, late in the afternoon, in the garden. Nobody would see her.

A small collection of letters from the boys, only nine in all, six from Cameron, three from James, written from school. They might like to have them, though the letters were not of much
interest
. They were addressed to her as well as Paul, but it was Paul who had elected to keep them, which now seemed touching. She was sure that Melissa would read great significance into James’s illiterate scribbles. Another bundle, also slim, from his mother, written from the cruises she was so addicted to. And then the last packet. It was sealed. She opened it: two letters. Plain white envelopes, bold writing. They could only be from Lucasta Jenkinson. The Cornish postmarks were clear.

She thought how, a year ago, she would have grabbed these letters feverishly, with shaking hands, and devoured every word in them even while her vision clouded with hate. She would have wanted to know everything, every last thing that this woman had been saying to her husband. Had she been begging Paul to leave, and come to her? But no, it couldn’t have been like that,
she
had dumped him. Paul would not have lied about that. So why, if she had rejected him, did she write to him at all? Because he had written to her? The answer would be in these letters, or the clues to the answer. She must surely have been responding to letters from Paul. What had he said? Had he begged her to take him back? Had he said he would leave his wife? Holding these two envelopes in her hands, hot with tension, sweaty with it, Ailsa felt the weight of her decision. Was she strong enough to burn these letters too, without reading them? Was she strong enough to read them first? Was there any need? Was there any benefit to be had?