pretty much stumped because I had no idea how to use the washing machine, selfish teenager that I was. I’d had to enlist the help of Sally, my sensible friend who lived on the periphery of Haslemere, a five-minute drive from my parents’ house.
‘Are you free?’ I’d rung Sally in a panic. Mum was at work and would be back at six. Louise would be back from school at four-thirty. It was three in the afternoon. Robert had skedaddled, unable to hide his revulsion at how much I had bled all over my bobbly lemon nylon sheets. At least he’d decoded the washing machine’s Masonic symbols for me, though I had no idea how to put it on a spin cycle.
‘Yes, how was the funeral?’
‘Hideous. Can I come and pick you up? Bring your hairdryer.’
‘OK.’ That was why I’d asked her, no tricky questions.
Once back in the kitchen, lugging out the sopping wet sheet from the washing machine, Sally turned to me.
‘You finally did it, then.’
‘How did you know?’
‘I just did, the minute you mentioned the hairdryer.’ We stood in the kitchen, both of us blasting the sheet with two dryers buzzing like wasps, barely making a dent. In the end I slept in a damp bed that night, but at least I was no longer a virgin…
A pompous hymn jolted me away from the Home Counties pine cabinets and mid-eighties periodic terracotta tile splashbacks. It was written in the stars that Louise wouldn’t cope. She wasn’t born to be a widow, or a single mum. She’d always been cosseted by the constant reassuring presence of a boyfriend from the age of twelve and hadn’t had to face the insecurities and nightmarish underworld of puberty alone.
I’d prescribed her some diazepam to knock her out after the initial shock. She needed to sleep. The kids depended on her, but she also deserved a break from her own head. Initially she kept repeating she was being punished, that it was all her fault. Even when she was drugged and lying face down on her super king-sized bed, incoherent mumblings drifted up from her slack mouth: ‘My fault, all my fault.’ Unless she had cut the brakes on his car, she had done nothing wrong.
Mum and Dad had moved in to help initially, but they couldn’t stay for ever. They were getting on and the stairs were too steep and plentiful for Dad’s arthritic hip.
‘Christa, can you stay for a bit?’ Mum had asked the day before the funeral. I’d already guessed they’d ask me that at some point. Louise lived in Forest Hill, not too far from me in East Dulwich, and my surgery was in Nunhead, about a mile and a half away.
‘I can tell you’re not keen to move in,’ she deduced from my silence as we unpacked family-sized bags of crisps, pre-packed cakes and light bites from Sainsbury’s bags for the wake. ‘I know you’ve had a lot of upheaval yourself. And you and Louise had that weird time in the nineties when you didn’t speak. Don’t worry, I’m not probing.’ A dim recollection flickered briefly of Mum trying not to cry down the phone. I’d just told her I was spending Christmas with Mia in Manchester. I didn’t come home for a while… ‘And three kids are a lot to get used to when all you ever have to think about is yourself.’
Was that a dig? Mum didn’t understand why I wasn’t married with children like perfect Louise. She’d come to a reluctant kind of acceptance, my age and current non-relationship status snuffing out future lines of enquiry. I loved Louise’s children but by God, I was glad they weren’t mine. Louise couldn’t go for a poo without one of them following her. She cooked all meals from scratch and refused any kind of domestic help. I admired her in that way you might a martyr for doggedly refusing to give up their beliefs knowing they will kill them in the end.
‘I don’t understand why I need to move in. I can go and help out when I’m not working.’
‘She’s never been on her own in her life.’
That’s not my fault, I wanted to object, but that was churlish and mean. Nigel had only just died in a car crash and she’d been expected to identify his mangled body. I had accompanied her and had actually done the identifying because, to be honest, I’d seen my fair share of dead bodies. I’d taught dissection to students as part