getting it valued. I think she used the word ‘goldmine’, or perhaps that was the visit she scrubbed down the mantelpiece and stood back to admire it. ‘Lovely old marble,’ she said. ‘Verity! Who knew? What else have you got hidden here? The fireplace alone is probably worth a fortune.’
It was the first time I realised that, of course, I was not entirely without means, and that maybe there was a way I could show my gratitude.
I remember now: it was a Wednesday the day she found Adrian’s note. I’d taken Maudie next door to spend an hour or two to help Max with his homework and that was nearly always a Wednesday.
When I’d left she’d been up a ladder cleaning the picture rail, but on my return, I found her sitting on the sofa. Her crossed feet were resting on my mother’s needlework stool, and next to her was the plastic crate containing some of my correspondence. She was leaning back into the cushions, elbow resting on the arm, as if she owned the place.
It’s odd, looking back, that I wasn’t cross. The crate contained personal letters, birthday cards and the like; I would get to it in my own time. I had told her that. And yet, I didn’t see it as an incursion. I had already begun to cede my independence to her.
She looked up when she saw me in the doorway and held up a postcard. Across the front of it was written ‘Six Wonders of the Isle of Wight’. A smile played about her lips. ‘Adrian! Who’s Adrian?’
I unclipped Maudie’s lead. ‘Adrian Curtis. The man I met at the council. I told you about him.’
‘Tell me again.’
I stood in the doorway. ‘He worked in the planning office and we got chatting in the canteen – he asked me to pass the salt and then we both moaned about how hard it was to get anything out of the shaker. He asked me out for a drink and then I suppose in modern parlance we dated for a bit.’
‘What went wrong?’ I noticed again the points of her cheekbones, the upward turn of her eyes. She fanned the postcard, as if drying the ink. It was one of those multi-photo cards, depicting six famous Isle of Wight landmarks: the Needles, Tennyson Down, Newport High Street. ‘He says he’s missing you, looking forward to Wednesday, with three exclamation marks.’
I thought back to the night I’d spent in his room in the tower block above Southside shopping centre, the stale smell, the overly soft texture of his sheets, and for some reason, I remembered the tea he had brought me in the morning; the white scum that floated on the top of it as if he hadn’t let the kettle properly boil. I thought about his pale narrow chest, his lashed eyes, fish-like, without his glasses and then I thought about a conversation I’d had in the early days with Ailsa, how worldly I had tried to sound, with my ‘when you know you know’.
‘It didn’t really work out,’ I said.
‘ “It didn’t work out”?’ There was something mocking in her repetition, as if how couldn’t it have worked out? A man was interested in me. What more did I want?
‘He wasn’t for me.’
‘Verity Ann Baxter, are you by any chance a little too fussy for your own good?’
She wasn’t listening or engaging. I felt a surge of irritation then. I’d had enough of her teasing. Just because I lived like this, as she put it, didn’t mean my responses weren’t valid. My back teeth felt as if they were glued together. I tried to speak without dislodging them. ‘It was a horrible time,’ I said. ‘I hated working at the council. I hated everything about it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’ She took the necessary steps to reach me at the door and she put her arms out. ‘What am I like?’ she said.
The realisation came like an explosion in the chest, painful and yet glorious. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed before.
My sister, I thought. My sister.
Chapter Thirteen
Karrimor Grey and Blue Waterproof Hiking Trainers, size 6
Surreptitious, adjective. Taken, used, done, etc by
stealth, secretly, or ‘on the sly’; secret and
unauthorised; clandestine.
Two things.
Yesterday, during a perfectly nice supper, Ailsa suddenly put down her knife and fork and said she’d had enough of ‘this ready meal three-for-two shit’. She’d go to the supermarket herself, she said, and pick out some nice vegetables. ‘What’s in season?