wants revenge, or who wants to impress his mistress, and – whoosh – the foot soldiers move in. The next day, your village is burning down, and because of stupidity, because of sex, there’s a coffin for your bed.’
I couldn’t think how to reply to this. Sex, death, coffins – how many brandies had she had? I didn’t see what this had to do with Lawrie at all. I stared into the electric bars.
Quick leaned forward, and the arms of her chair creaked. ‘Odelle, do you trust me?’
‘Trust you with what?’
She leaned back again, visibly frustrated. ‘You don’t, then. If you did, you would have just said yes.’
‘I’m a cautious person. That’s all.’
‘I trust you, you know. I know you’re someone I can trust.’
I think I was supposed to be grateful, but instead I felt a simmering unease. The bars of the fire were making me hotter and hotter, and I was tired, and she was in a strange mood.
Quick sighed. ‘It’s my fault. For all my conversations with you, I’m probably even more guarded than you are.’
I couldn’t disagree with this, so I didn’t try and persuade her otherwise.
‘I’m not well,’ she said. ‘I’m not very well at all.’
It was cancer, she said. Late stage, pancreatic cancer with an inevitable outcome. My own body ached at these words, which was selfish, but entirely predictable. I assumed that the outrageous fact of her cancer had made Quick want someone at home with her – a desire which had possibly surprised her and made her even more brusque. Quick, who had been alone with her secrets for so many years, no longer wished to be alone. Perhaps submitting my story, and therefore making me obliged to her, was a baroque plan to satisfy her simple need for company? When life is running out, such decisions may not seem so invasive or dramatic, and you willingly commit. This was why she spoke to Edmund Reede with no fear of reprisal; she knew she was soon to be reprised entirely.
I do think, looking back, that Quick perhaps regarded me as the child she never had, as someone who would perpetuate her essence after death. She told me at our first meeting that I reminded her of someone she once knew. I suspect that person was the closest companion she ever had. I’ll never be sure of this, and she never mentioned a name, but her expression when she said those words makes me think that it was so. She looked at me tenderly, mingled with terror, as if to come too close would lose whatever she’d lost all over again.
Sitting in that overheated front room, I realized quite how thin she was, how tired. And although I probably thought it unfair that someone should suffer something like that alone, I don’t imagine I cried. Quick was not someone you would sob in front of unless you absolutely had to, and when it was a question of her own pain and loss, you might feel a monstrous booby to cry when she herself was dry-eyed, dragging on the cigarettes that were helping to kill her. She was a curio, out of her time, not given to standard emotion – and in her presence, you did what Quick did.
‘Well, say something,’ she said.
‘Does Mr Reede know?’ I asked.
Quick snorted. ‘God, no. And he’s not to.’
‘Does anyone else know?’
‘No one else, but don’t worry, I haven’t told you because I want you to be my nursemaid.’
‘Why have you told me?’
Quick reached for the brandy bottle and refilled her glass. ‘Do you know, I got my diagnosis the day you started at the Skelton?’
‘Goodness me,’ I said. I remembered Quick coming up to my desk that first day; her flushed face, the way she batted away the porter’s questions over her absence from work.
‘Indeed,’ she said. ‘A day of ups and downs. Death imminent, followed by Odelle Bastien.’
‘I can’t imagine I was much of a tonic.’
She lit a cigarette, the last of the packet. ‘You have no idea.’
I couldn’t help wondering how long she had left, but I didn’t want to ask if she knew, nor enquire about medications, or anything practical. It seemed too brutal, as if I was asking about her expiration date. She was still here, still vital, still mercurial.
In the silence between us, I reached into my handbag and handed over the art gallery pamphlet. I still wonder why I did it, even though it felt like a betrayal of Lawrie. I think