have people? She knew my people were dead, or gone.
She was waiting, fiddling with the ribbons that dangled from the neck of her dress.
‘I don’t,’ I said, understanding at last. ‘I . . .’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t have people here at the moment.’
‘Verity,’ she said. She was looking into my eyes, my small hard eyes, her foot resting on one of my crates of magazines. ‘Verity. Please let me come in.’
It started in the depths of my chest, and it rose, until it was between the back of my throat and my nose and it felt unmanageable, gloriously monumental and yet dreadful.
‘Just let me come in,’ she said. ‘Verity. It’s time. It’ll be OK.’ She took the key out of my hand then and inserted it in the lock and turned it. I felt powerless suddenly, drained. All the force and energy seemed to come from her as she unlocked the door, pushed it back as far as it would go, which was only a crack really, and slipped through.
I didn’t have a choice but to follow.
I bent down first of all to talk to Maudie, who was leaping up, tugging with her paws at my legs. I occupied myself with calming her, which was obviously a displacement activity for calming myself.
Sometimes, when the door is closed on the street, the house seems in contrast very quiet. It wasn’t quiet now. It twitched and rustled. There was a roaring in the walls, a creaking in the beams, a groaning. Ailsa hadn’t spoken.
‘When I said it wasn’t a good time,’ I managed to say, ‘it’s just that I’m having a bit of a clear-out.’
‘Oh, Verity.’
She still hadn’t moved; her eyes were travelling to the floor and up to the ceiling, from place to place, alighting for a moment on one spot and then shifting and alighting on another. I found myself itemising the immediate points of reference: a pile of papers to the side of the mat, comprised of flyers and the free magazines and handwritten notes for missing cats, and a pile of jiffy envelopes and loose packaging and Amazon cardboard sleeves that were waiting to be recycled, and a pile of post I hadn’t yet opened, and a pile of post that I had and which was now waiting to move to the front room to be dealt with or filed. And the piles of miscellaneous kitchen equipment that I hadn’t yet found a place for, and a haphazard heap of boxes that other stuff had come in that were too useful to be thrown away. And plastic bags containing I didn’t remember what, some of them piled up almost to the ceiling, and at the back there, at the bottom of the stairs, some new additions, including two large white picture frames from Ikea, and a Henry vacuum with a broken nozzle, and yesterday’s haul: a fold-up garden chair, an iron, five melamine plates with a sunflower pattern and an old-fashioned child’s tin globe.
Her neck tipped and I saw she was craning to look between the bannisters to the stairs. ‘Books,’ I said. ‘I’ve run out of space in the shelves. Those treads are a useful place for books. It’s not like they’re used for anything else.’
She had brought her hand to her mouth.
‘It’s all got a bit out of hand,’ I said. ‘It’s run away with me rather.’
‘Oh, Verity,’ she said.
The heat in my neck rose. I had an impulse to sink to the floor, to bury my face between the two closest plastic bags and to stay there until I heard her leave. But I could only stand, next to her, alongside everything. ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I just need a chunk of time, and as you know I’ve been very busy recently. It’s hard enough staying on top of my work for the OED.’ I laughed, or it was supposed to be a laugh. Ailsa was very still.
‘How has it got like this?’ she said finally.
Again I tried to laugh. If we could make light of it, it wouldn’t be so bad. ‘It’s just crept up,’ I said.
‘What is all this stuff? Where is it all from?’
I swallowed. ‘Life.’
She bent down and poked into the top of one of the kitchen boxes. Her expression was appalled. ‘I mean – these . . . why?’
‘Takeaway cups,’ I said. ‘They’re always useful.’
She pushed them to the side, picking up something else and dangling it from one finger as if she didn’t want to