Losing Nicola (20 page)

When I call the cousin, he tells me his father-in-law has Alzheimer's and lives in a home. ‘Poor old boy,' he says. ‘Used to be such an athlete. Now he can't even lift a cup to his lips without slopping the contents all over the place. Forgotten just about everything he ever knew, that's the problem. Anyway, even if he was still on the ball, I doubt if he'd be much use to you. He left Braybrook a good fifteen years ago.'

‘Nonetheless, it might be worth asking, just in case . . .' I imagine lonely Sasha Elias confiding in an older man, telling him of his hopes and ambitions. But it's pointless, I know. I met Sasha myself only ten years ago. I give the man my details, without any expectation.

‘Get back to you if I come up with anything,' he says. ‘But don't hold your breath.'

When I telephone her, Mrs Sheffield sounds efficient and businesslike, not at all like the uncertain woman I used to know. ‘I can't do Tuesday or Wednesday,' she says. ‘Is Thursday all right?

‘Perfect.'

‘Right, then. You'd better come to the house, not my office. So . . . after working hours, okay?' She gives me instructions on how to reach her. She's living half a mile away from my flat. ‘I look forward to seeing you again, Alice. It's been a long time.'

Violet Sheffield, war widow, had seemed old to my twelve year old self, and, despite her brisk telephone manner and the fact that she is speaking from an office, I am expecting to meet someone now ancient, hair pulled back in a neat bun, tissue-paper complexion, with the upright posture instilled by the governess of a gently-bred Victorian miss. An elderly woman, in other words, reduced to mulling over her memories as she faces the ending of her life with dignity and courage.

The woman who opens the door of a Queen Anne house in the town centre is in her late fifties, seems to be clearly engaged with the present and far too busy creating new memories to be wasting time on the old. I realize then when I last saw her, she can't have been much over thirty.

‘Alice . . . How very nice to see you,' she says, holding out her hand then, after peering at me over her rimless half-glasses, pulling me towards her to brush my cheek with hers.

‘And you . . .' She is wearing a short turquoise dress with a long glittery scarf flung around her neck. Her tanned arms are decorated with a number of thick gold bracelets. Her hair is artificially blonde and cut à la garçonne. ‘It's been such a long time. You look fabulous, Mrs Sheffield.'

‘Vi,
please
. We've been through the Sixties. Those dreary bourgeois days when people your age addressed people my age as Mrs are far behind us. Thank God.'

Her metamorphosis is quite extraordinary. ‘Fine.'

She pours me a stiff gin-and-tonic. ‘Forgive me if I sound preoccupied,' she says, ‘but I'm in the middle of a very complicated deal which, if it goes through all right, should net me a very nice profit.'

‘What do you do?' I dimly remember my parents exclaiming in surprise at learning that like Louise Stone, she had bought a house in the North End, which in my childhood was considered little better than a slum, and was doing it up for resale. My father had referred to the project as a disaster.

‘I'm in property development.' The telephone rings and she looks at it, then at me, winks, mouths ‘. . . three, four, five,' then picks up the receiver. ‘Yes?'

From her end of the subsequent conversation, I gather – I have no choice but to listen – that her deal has gone through successfully, and she will be several hundred thousand pounds better off when the papers are completed. Her house certainly emphasizes that she is doing well, full of rich fabrics, heavy drapery, voluptuous sofas, good paintings. A long long way from the genteel poverty of the house on The Beach.

‘Aaah,' she says, sighing happily, running her fingers through her hair, swallowing a large amount from her own glass. She pulls out the quarter of lemon it contains and sucks it. ‘Splendid! Now, Alice, you said you wanted to discuss something. How I can help you?'

In the face of such dynamism, I grow vague. She has moved on at a much faster pace than I have, so much so that I feel as though I have been beached upon the shore of a desert island. ‘Not discuss, exactly. I don't really . . . I just wanted to . . .'

‘You recently bought the first-floor flat in my former house, didn't you?'

‘That's right. And I wanted to . . .'

‘Nothing wrong, is there?' She looks at me hard, focuses for the first time. ‘How old are you, Alice?'

‘Thirty-two.'

‘Not that it's any of my business. But you seem rather . . .
worn,
for someone your age.'

‘I haven't been sleeping well.' I laugh slightly. ‘Not that I came to consult you on sleeping pills or anything.'

‘Are you married?'

‘Divorced.' I shift uneasily, hating the sound of the word, hating being divorced, hating the guy I once went out with, who'd tried to come on to me using the argument that nobody misses a slice off a cut cake. Bastard! I'd poured my drink in his lap and left.

‘What happened?' asks Mrs Sheffield. It's impossible to think of her as Vi.

I shrug. ‘He was American. We drifted apart, I guess. And then he found someone else. It seemed best to come home to England.'

‘How very
insouciante
you sound, Alice. Why did you marry him?'

‘For all the wrong reasons,' I say.

‘Is there anyone else?'

I hesitate. ‘Sort of.'

‘Whose sort of, yours or his?'

I consider. ‘Maybe a bit of both.'

She leans back, crosses her legs. ‘And how is your mother?'

‘She's fine. Living up in Oxford.'

‘She always wanted to move back there. I hope she's happier.'

I would like to explore the possibilities implicit in that comparative. Happier than what, or when? Does she mean happier living in a city instead of beside this inhospitable bit of sea? Or simply that things have changed so much for the better?

Before I can ask, Vi is shaking her head. ‘God, they were hard times, those years after the war, all of us grieving, short of cash, children to bring up, the whole country trying to come to terms with victory and its implications. I suppose at the time, Shale
was as good a place to live as any. All us women, mothers, had to rely on each other in a way that's almost impossible to imagine now.'

‘How is Linda?' I ask belatedly.

‘Very well indeed. Two children and a third on the way,' She laughs. ‘She finds it a bit irritating that I don't do the grandmother bit, babysitting and so on. I've already done that, I tell her, I'm damned if I'm doing it all over again.'

‘Do please say hello from me. And from my brothers.' But I've come about something else. ‘The thing is,' I say, stumbling ridiculously over the words. ‘The thing is . . . the apartment – the flat.'

‘Yes.'

‘You used to have a music teacher living there. I took some piano lessons from him one summer.'

‘Yes, indeed. You and a few others, if I remember rightly. God, I'd almost forgotten him.' She pulls at her drink again, offers me her profile as she stares pensively at the portrait of an officer in naval
uniform which hangs above the fireplace. ‘Poor young man. Poor, poor boy. I felt terribly sorry for him, such a bedraggled sort of creature, so lost and lonely His entire family dying in the concentration camps . . . how do you get over such a thing? How can you possibly?'

‘I don't suppose you ever do,' I say. ‘Do you have any idea where he is now?'

‘None whatsoever,' she says decisively. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘I'd like to try and . . . and track him down, if possible.'

‘Why on earth . . . still that's your business, not mine.'

Some explanation seemed to be called for. ‘It's just . . . he left some music behind, some letters, a kind of diary. I thought he might want them back.'

‘Left them behind?' Mrs Sheffield frowns. ‘Left them where, exactly?'

‘In the piano stool . . . the one that came with the papers. It's the same one as was there when I—'

‘I don't know what papers you mean, but the stool was empty, last time I saw it. I emptied it myself.'

‘Perhaps you're thinking of a different stool. This was one of those with a seat that lifts up—'

‘I know exactly what it looks like. It came from my husband's family, along with the piano. I hate leaving it behind, but . . .' She spreads her hands. ‘. . . I've been moving around such a lot.' She narrows her eyes at me. ‘You look as though you don't believe me.'

‘No, of course I do.'

‘You can ask young Orlando, if you like. I paid him to help me clear the whole place out. Obviously this was long after your piano teacher had left.'

‘But the stool's full of Sasha's stuff,' I blurt out.

‘Sasha?'

‘Mr Elias. There are manuscripts of pieces he composed, letters from people, this diary . . .'

‘I can assure you that between us, Orlando and I took everything out when the place was converted,' she says. ‘I didn't look at it too closely, of course. One wouldn't, after all. But since there was no means of finding him again, I kept them for a while, in case he came looking for them, and then, as I say, it was all thrown out.'

‘But they're all still there,' I say. ‘In the stool.'

She looks irritated at my persistence. ‘They must belong to someone else. The last people to live there, perhaps.' The phone rings again and after another count of five, she picks it up. ‘Yes?' Whoever is on the other end is giving her information she doesn't want to hear. ‘No,' she says firmly. ‘Absolutely not. I already told them the terms on which we'd buy the property and if they don't like it, they'll have to . . . No, Justin, I will
not
call them myself. That's what I employ you to do.' She listens some more. ‘Then you'll just have to
make
time, won't you?' Again she frowns. ‘Look, I've got people here. We can discuss it tomorrow morning. Better come in early, okay?'

Replacing the handset, she turns to me again. ‘I'll bet this is some trick of Orlando's! He's always been a bit of a devil, hasn't he? Why don't you ring and ask him?'

‘I'll do that.'

As I am leaving, she hesitates at the door of her beautiful drawing room. ‘Tell me, Alice, what brought you back here? After the . . . after what happened, I should have thought it was the last place you'd want to . . .' She leans against the door-frame, fussing with her silvery scarf.

‘I . . . I really couldn't tell you.' I shrug. ‘Laying old ghosts to rest, I think. Or trying to.'

‘Can one ever do that, I wonder?' Her expression is regretful. ‘I've hung on here long enough myself. Far too long, probably.'

‘Why?'

‘Because when it came right down to it, I found that I simply couldn't give up all that remained of Freddie, my husband.' She gestures at the portrait on the wall. ‘He was the one and only love of my life, from the very first moment we met, at a Hunt Ball in the Cotswolds, years and years ago. We were both still at school, but we knew immediately that this was it. When they told me he had died, his ship sunk with all hands, I would have killed myself without the slightest hesitation, if it hadn't been for Linda. She was three by then . . . I simply couldn't imagine anyone else raising her but me.' Her voice shakes slightly. ‘Me and my darling Freddie.'

‘Oh, Vi,' I say, catching hold of her hand.

There are tears in her eyes. ‘It's all so long ago now, and yet the pain simply never goes away. I miss him every single day of my life. Silly, isn't it?'

‘I don't think so.'

She gives herself a little shake. ‘Still, one has to move on, doesn't one?'

‘Indeed.'

‘Come and see me again, Alice, if you have time. I shan't be leaving for at least another four weeks.'

‘I'll try.'

She fishes for another slice of lemon from her glass and holds it between manicured fingers. ‘I do hope I'm not making a mistake, leaving, after all these years.'

‘No. No, I'm sure you're not.' It's a generation ago, and yet the war continues to wrap its tentacles around our hearts.

Walking away from her house, I ponder the obvious familiarity with which she speaks of Orlando. There's a very definite sense that this is an ongoing awareness, rather than a reminiscence of the past. I wonder what he is up to, if anything.

I ponder, too, the nature of love. We're told that it is ephemeral and fleeting, its very essence ensures that it is so. Yet here was a woman, a strong and attractive one who must have faced off any number of suitors, still mourning her husband, content to have had their short time together and wanting nothing more.

T
he full moon spills a band of quicksilver light across an anthracite sea. A faint breeze stirs the white gauze of my curtains. It's half-past ten, late enough for the last of the daylight to have gone. I stand there in nothing but a slip, sweat pooling between my breasts and at the base of my neck, wondering whether to gather together a towel and bathing suit and take a late-night swim. Orlando and I had done that occasionally, on just such nights of heat, slipping out of the bedroom we were still young enough to share, running across the green to the beach, sliding down the shingle and into the sea in a wild ecstasy of rebellion and disobedience. We had never been expressly forbidden to get out of bed and go outside late at night, but only because it had never occurred to Fiona that we might want to. I still remember how silky the water had felt along my limbs, and the shadowy swirl of waves around my body.

I remember, too, Fiona's journals, and her description, written in that thick black Indian ink, of skinny-dipping with my father in a reed-fringed pool somewhere up in the Yorkshire Dales. ‘
Breathless we flung us on the windy hill
,' she wrote,
‘laughed in the sun and kissed the lovely grass.'
I'd tried to imagine Fiona casting herself to the earth to kiss grass, but had found it impossible. Once, with Orlando on the cliff-tops, hunting blackberries, I'd thrown myself down and pressed my face to the earth, but felt nothing much.