Finders, Keepers - Sabine Durrant Page 0,91

it didn’t matter, that I wasn’t shocked. Good God, no.

I wouldn’t have imagined such a sterile room could feel so cosy but that’s the effect of people, I suppose; that’s what happens when you’re part of a family.

Chapter Nineteen

5 wire coat hangers, tissue attached

Trepidation, noun. Tremulous agitation; confused hurry or alarm; confusion; flurry; perturbation.

Standling rang yesterday to say that, as a consequence of Ailsa’s letters, Cecily Tilson had agreed to a supervised visit with the children. A date has been given at a contact centre in Vauxhall. I watched Ailsa carefully while she took the call; her face went ashen and then quickly red, the colour leaching back in across her cheeks. A blush is made of blood: one forgets that. After hanging up, she bowed her head for so long that, until I’d coaxed out of her what he’d said, I thought something awful had happened, that there had been another death. She was in her spot on the sofa in the front room and she pushed her head back into the cushions, raised her fingers to flick back the lace curtain. Light trickled in.

‘Fuck, Verity,’ she said, finally. ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’

I patted her shoulder. ‘Of course you can. I’ll be there. I’ll look after you. I always do.’

They dragged, the ten days they were still away and I was back in London. I tried to keep busy. I went to the pub quiz but Maeve and Sue had decamped to France for the summer and it was a flaccid affair. Fred usually invites me down to Oxford during his long holiday but there had been no word from him since our picnic at Granary Square. It’s an indication of my state of mind that I didn’t care.

The house reproached me for my absence. Thieves had been into the front garden and stolen the rotary dryer, and a mini-fridge. Also some of my timber and a lawnmower. Inside, the smell was worse – it clawed at the back of your throat, particularly on the upstairs floor. The wallpaper was disintegrating, the wall behind it black and mottled, dirty with mites. Outside the bathroom, a strip had peeled entirely back, and hung over the dado like a filthy stocking. On the bedroom ceiling, dark-yellow drips had started appearing. I put saucepans down and tried to ignore it.

I didn’t feel myself at all. Ailsa was right about the weight. I did seem to have lost a bit recently. A floral Jigsaw skirt from Cancer Research gaped at the waist. I had to fix it with a couple of safety pins. I had less energy than usual and at night my heart would seem to beat alarmingly fast.

It was listlessness that took me into Collard & Wright. The office is above a nail bar on Bellevue Road, and the name is printed in old-fashioned black typeface on the first-floor window. I must have walked past it every day for twenty years. One dull afternoon I found myself ringing the buzzer and walking up the stairs. The son of the founder, Richard Collard, was on a tea break and could see me then and there. It’s very straightforward, making a will. I answered lots of questions and he jotted down the answers in black biro on a foolscap sheet and a few days later, I returned to sign an official typed-up form. In the event of my death, I wanted the cheapest coffin (cardboard) and a quick cremation: no fuss. I bequeathed the fruitwood chest of drawers in Mother’s bedroom to Maeve and Sue, a dark oil painting of a portly gentleman holding a quill pen to Bob, and to Fred I left the books – he’d enjoy sifting through them. Everything else, my share of ‘house and contents’, in recognition of the close bond between us, I gave to Max – to be held, until he attained his majority (in this case twenty-one), by Ailsa.

She deserved it, I thought as I strode home, after everything she had done for me. It would give her financial independence. Freedom. She could leave Tom. How much easier, after the divorce, to live next door, so much less disruptive for the children; a loose form of the arrangement I’ve read about called ‘nesting’. I enjoyed thinking all this. I began to imagine her delight at discovering this good fortune – tempered, of course, by sadness at my passing. My generosity would add a new intensity to her grief, and as the