Barbara stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray on the kitchen table and counted the stubs that lay crushed there already. Eighteen cigarettes she’d smoked since this morning. She had to quit. It was unclean, unhealthy, and disgusting. She lit another.
From her chair, she could see down the corridor all the way to the front door. She could see the stairway to the right, the sitting room to the left. It was impossible to avoid noticing how far along the renovation of the house had moved. The interior was painted. New carpet was laid. Fixtures were repaired or replaced in the bathroom and the kitchen. The stove and oven were cleaner than they had been in twenty years. The linoleum fl oor still needed to be stripped completely and then rewaxed, and wallpaper still waited to be hung. But once those two jobs were taken care of, along with washing or replacing the curtains which hadn’t been touched as far as Barbara knew since her family’s move to the house in her childhood, she could turn her efforts to the exterior.
The back garden was a nightmare. The front garden was nonexistent. And the house itself needed massive effort: There were gutters to replace, woodwork to paint, windows to wash, a front door to refi nish. And while her savings were rapidly dwindling and her own time was limited because of her job, things were still moving slowly forward according to her original plan. If she didn’t do something to slow down the wheels of this entire project — initially taken on to guarantee she would have sufficient funds to keep her mother at Hawthorn Lodge indefi nitely — the time for being on her own would be fast upon her.
Barbara wanted that independence, or so she kept telling herself. She was thirty-three years old, she’d never established a life of her own unattached to her family and their infi nite needs. That she could do so now ought to have been a cause for jubilation at a release from bondage. But somehow it wasn’t and it hadn’t been since the morning she’d driven her mother to Greenford and settled her into a crisp, new life with Mrs. Flo.
Mrs. Flo had prepared for their arrival in a way that should have set every worry to rest. A welcome sign draped over the narrow stairway’s banister, and there were flowers in the entry. Upstairs in her mother’s room a porcelain carousel spun round slowly, playing “The Entertainer” in light chiming notes.
“Oh Barbie, Barbie, look!” her mother had breathed, and she rested her chin on the chest of drawers and watched the tiny horses rise and fall.
There were flowers in the bedroom as well, irises in a tall white vase.
“I thought she might need a special moment,” Mrs. Flo said, smoothing her hands against the bodice of her pin-striped shirtwaister. “Ease her in gentle so she knows we mean to make her welcome. I’ve coffee and poppy seed cakes down below. Bit early for elevenses, isn’t it, but I thought you might have to be off fairly quick.”
Barbara nodded. “I’m working on a case in Cambridge.” She looked round the room. It was so clean, crisp, and warm, with the sunlight falling across the daisy carpet. “Thank you,” she said. She wasn’t referring to the coffee and cakes.
Mrs. Flo patted her hand. “Don’t you worry about Mum. We’ll do right by her, Barbie. May I call you Barbie?”
Barbara wanted to tell her that no one but her parents had ever used that name, that it made her feel childlike and in need of care. She was about to correct her, saying, “It’s Barbara, please,” when she realised that to do so would be to break the illusion that somehow this was home and these women — her mother, Mrs. Flo, Mrs. Salkild, and Mrs. Pendlebury, one of whom was blind and the other another victim of dementia — constituted a family into which she herself was being offered membership if she cared to accept it. And she did.
So it wasn’t so much the prospect of permanently abandoning her mother that caused Barbara to drag her feet from time to time as it became more apparent that her dream of being on her own was about to become reality. It was the prospect of her own abandonment.
For two months now, she had been coming home to an empty house, something she had longed for during the years of her father’s lingering illness, something she had deemed completely indispensable when she found herself left to deal with her mother after his death. For what seemed like ages she had sought a solution to caring for her mother, and now that she had one apparently designed by heaven — God, was there another Mrs. Flo anywhere else on earth? — the focus of her plans had shifted from dealing with an ageing parent to dealing with the house. And when the house offered her nothing more to deal with, she’d be face to face with dealing with herself.
Alone, she would have to start thinking about her isolation. And when the King’s Arms emptied of her colleagues in the eve-ning — when MacPherson went home to his wife and five children, when Hale went to do increasingly dubious battle with the solicitor who was handling his divorce, when Lynley dashed off to have dinner with Helen, and Nkata drifted off to take one of his six squabbling girlfriends to bed — she’d meander slowly to St. James’s Park Station, kicking at rubbish that blew in her path. She’d ride to Waterloo, change to the Northern Line, and hunch on a seat with a copy of
It’s no crime to feel this way, she kept telling herself. You’ve been under someone’s thumb for thirty-three years. What else would you expect to feel when the pressure’s gone? What do prisoners feel when they’re let out of gaol? How about liberated, she answered herself, how about like dancing in the street, like having their hair worked over by one of those posh hairdressers in Knightsbridge who have their windows all draped in black to show off blowup snaps of gorgeous women with geometric haircuts that never grow out scraggly or get blown by the wind.
Anyone else in her position, she decided, would probably be brimming with plans, working feverishly to get this house in shape to sell so that she could start a new life which, no doubt, would begin with a wardrobe change, a body make-over courtesy of a personal trainer who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger with better teeth, a sudden interest in make-up, and a telephone answering machine to keep track of the messages from a score of admirers all waiting to entwine their lives with hers.
But Barbara had always been a bit more practical than that. She knew change came slowly if it came at all. So right now, the move to Chalk Farm represented nothing more than unknown shops to get used to, unknown streets to navigate, unknown neighbours to meet. All of it would be done on her own, with no voice to hear in the morning save her own, no friendly noise of someone puttering about, and especially no sympathetic companion both ready and eager to listen to her assessment of how things had gone on a given day.
Of course, she’d never had a sympathetic companion involved in her life in the past, only her parents who awaited her nightly arrival, not to engage her in avid conversation but to wolf down supper and get back to the telly where they watched a succession of American melodramas.
Still, her parents had been a human presence in her life for thirty-three long and unbroken years. While they hadn’t exactly filled her life with joy and a sense that the future was an unwritten slate, they had been there, needing her. And now no one did.
She realised that she wasn’t so much afraid of being alone as she was of becoming one of the nation’s invisibles, a woman whose presence in anyone’s life had no particular importance. This house in Acton — especially if she brought her mother back to it — would eliminate the chance of her discovering that she was an unnecessary fixture in the world, eating, sleeping, bathing, and eliminating like the rest of mankind, but otherwise expendable. Locking the door, handing over the key to the estate agent, and going on her way meant risking the revelation of her own unimportance. She wanted to avoid that as long as she could.
She crushed out her cigarette, got to her feet, and stretched. Eating Greek food sounded better than did stripping and waxing the kitchen floor. Lamb
It was where she had left it, outside the back door. Barbara was grateful to see that its contents hadn’t managed to climb the evolutionary scale from mould and algae to anything with legs. She hoisted it up and trudged along the weed-sprung path to the rubbish bins. She lowered the bag inside just as the telephone began to ring.
“What d’you know, my date for next New Year’s,” she muttered. And then, “All right, I’m coming,” as if the caller were telegraphing impatience.
She caught it on the eighth double ring, picking it up to hear a man say, “Ah. Good. You’re there. I thought I might have missed you.”
“You mean you don’t miss me?” Barbara asked. “And here I was worried you’d be incapable of sleeping with the two of us so many miles apart.”
Lynley chuckled. “How goes the holiday, Sergeant?”
