The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,74

the grill-pan which I was scrubbing with unnecessary force.

Bea stopped drying. She stood next to me, the tea towel limp in her hands. ‘When did you get to see it? At the weekend?’

I hesitated. ‘I haven’t seen it, exactly. Just photos.’

Bea blinked. ‘You’re telling me you’ve put in an offer on a property you haven’t seen? In a place you don’t know? Sorry, but am I missing something here?’

I didn’t answer.

Clara came belting through from the sitting room to hug her mother. ‘Is it time to go?’

‘Just about.’

Anna trailed behind, hanging round the doorframe. ‘Can’t she stay a bit longer, Mum? Please.’

I looked at Bea. ‘If you want. Another five minutes. Okay with you, Clara?’

‘Yaaaaay!’ They turned round and went tearing back to the sitting room together.

Bea waited until they’d gone, then turned back to me. ‘You don’t seem very excited.’

I put the grill pan upside down on the drainer and reached for a greasy oven tray.

‘I am.’ I couldn’t look at her. ‘It’s just, you know, a big change. For both of us.’

‘You can always come back, if it doesn’t work out. You know that, right? You’ve always got a place with us, if you need it.’

I thought of Bea’s cramped flat, already overcrowded with three of them.

‘That’s kind.’ It was too late for regrets. Too late for second thoughts. This was it.

Something in my tone must have alerted her. She took hold of my arm and pulled me round.

‘Hey, what is it?’ She looked me hard in the eye. ‘Don’t go all sad on me. It’s not the big goodbye. We’ll still be friends, right? Wherever you are. Even Bristol.’ She smiled. ‘You can’t get rid of us that easily. We’ll come and visit whenever we can.’

I smiled but my heart wasn’t in it. All I could think was how very wrong she was.

Where Anna and I were going, she’d never find us again.

Forty-Seven

Six weeks later

For weeks, I’d worked flat out, emptying drawers and cupboards, filling sack after sack for the charity shop, then driving just as many more to the dump.

I got rid of all Ralph’s clothes, the bohemian jackets and trousers, the suits, the Noël Coward dressing-gown, his shoes, his books, his old bags and suitcases and the sports equipment in the loft.

Even without him, Anna and I had so much stuff of our own. I filled a whole room with boxes of old toys and almost all our clothes, pre-school children’s books and my recipe books, towels and bed linen. I sent it all to the charity shop. Once we were on the brink of leaving, a team of men came round with a truck and cleared first the kitchen, then the furniture from the rest of the house. What they couldn’t sell or donate, they’d send for disposal, they said.

It was the start of August, and our street – dusty and sticky underfoot with melting tarmac – seemed unnaturally quiet. Everyone was away on holiday. Even Clara was going away, staying with her grandma, Bea’s mum, in Wales for two weeks.

Bea was at work. I wondered how long it would take her to realise that the Bristol address I’d dutifully written out for her was a false one. That my usual mobile number would soon no longer be in service.

Anna, restless and bereft, had hung around as the adults cleared the house. She’d watched the activity with a gloomy expression and tearful eyes.

The previous night, our very last in the house, she’d screamed herself to sleep, her angular body curled into a ball, tight and resolute, even as I lay beside her and tried to relax her with rhythmical strokes and soothing words.

‘It’ll be okay, Anna. It will. It’s always hard leaving a home. I know that. But wait till you see the new one. You’ll love it!’

‘I won’t!’ Her face was swollen with crying. ‘I’m not going. I’m not, Mummy. You can’t make me!’

Now, the charity team had closed up the truck and left and everything was suddenly quiet again. Anna looked exhausted, her small frame hunched as we held hands and walked together on a final tour through the empty rooms to say goodbye.

The house looked alien, the rooms shrunken and without personality now the furniture had gone. Without carpet, our feet echoed on the wooden floors.

I remembered the first time we’d viewed the house, Ralph and I. I was so in love with him and full of optimism about the future. Upstairs, we’d walked into the spare bedroom and he’d snaked