Make Yourself at Home Page 5

  A bookcase containing the various copies of ‘How to …’ books on the top shelf, the other shelves filled with Mills and Boon books, in alphabetical order by title. Affairs of the Soul. Be Still My Heart. Call the Doctor. Dreaming of You. Every Beat of My Heart …

  A dressing table with tweezers, a pot of Pond’s face cream and a metal comb with one lone grey hair hanging from it.

  A straight-backed Queen Anne armchair.

  A gigantic stuffed panda bear, one eye missing, stuffing sprouting from various tears and rips along ancient seams, the fur hardened by the trudge of years. The bear had been won at a fairground in the summer of 1966, after Pearl’s fiancé correctly guessed the number of marbles in a glass jar.

  One hundred and sixty-three.

  That’s how many marbles had been in the jar.

  He was married to someone else by the following summer.

  ‘Now,’ said Aunt Pearl, when Marianne closed the door behind her, ‘I want to move the bookcase over beside the armchair.’

  ‘Would it not make more sense to move the armchair over to the bookcase?’ Marianne enquired.

  When Pearl shook her head, Marianne could hear the bones in her neck creak. She examined the bookcase, which was a sturdy oak affair. ‘It looks fairly heavy,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we can …’

  ‘We shall remove the books,’ said Pearl.

  ‘But we might get them mixed up,’ said Marianne. ‘It wouldn’t do to have The Keeper of My Heart before Last Lover in Lagos, would it?’

  Aunt Pearl pinned Marianne to the spot with the icy blast of her stare. ‘Are you mocking me, Marianne?’ she asked.

  Marianne straightened her face. ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ Pearl began taking the books off the shelf. ‘I’ve decided to rearrange them anyway. In order of publication date.’

  The job, while tedious, was curiously relaxing, even allowing for Pearl’s thorny presence. It required much concentration and a good working memory, which both women possessed. There was one terrifying moment when Marianne saw herself in forty years’ time, doing the same thing with her collection of natural history encyclopaedias. In her bedroom at Ancaire. She expelled the thought from her head by bearing down on the title of the book she was holding – Passion in Paradise – and making as many words as she could from the letters.

  Dire. Sad. Rip. Noise. Raid. Despair.

  Pearl glanced at her. ‘If the wind changes direction, your face will stay like that, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Dour,’ said Pearl.

  Marianne struggled to think of an uglier word.

  Dour.

  Aunt Pearl set the pile of books she had been sorting on the floor and looked at Marianne. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t easy for Rita. Clearing out the wardr—’

  ‘I can’t find the publication date for this one,’ said Marianne, pushing a well-thumbed copy of Return to Love Island into her hands.

  ‘October 1994,’ Pearl said, barely glancing at the book. She looked instead at Marianne, her eyes like drills boring into her face. When Marianne did not look at her, Pearl reached over and poked her arm.

  Marianne looked up.

  ‘You want to end up like me?’ Pearl said.

  Marianne considered this to be a trick question. It would be rude to say no. But it would also be rude to say yes. In the end, she said nothing, concentrating instead on the pile of books in front of her. After a while, Aunt Pearl did the same. They worked in silence. It was neither companionable nor awkward. It was just there.

  Like the two of them.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Pearl, after a while, even though no one had asked her anything, ‘it’s nonsensical. Rita and Patrick, swimming in these conditions.’ She nodded towards the window where the bare branches of a horse chestnut tree flailed in the gusting wind, their tips scratching at the window like skeletal fingers.

  ‘Is that where Rita is?’

  ‘It’s full tide,’ said Pearl, ‘so I presume so.’

  Marianne looked out of the window. The waves crested high and grey, like prison walls, before crashing onto the shore. ‘Dangerous,’ she said because some word seemed to be expected of her.

  ‘If that boy gets pneumonia again, he’d better not come crying to me,’ said Pearl.

  Marianne picked up another book – Seduction by Numbers, a story of a secretary who starts to temp at the accountancy firm of a powerful man with a tragic past, according to the blurb on the back – and opened it to examine the publication date. ‘I don’t remember Patrick having pneumonia,’ she said.

  ‘You had left for boarding school by then,’ said Aunt Pearl, fondly inspecting the creased cover of Doctor’s Orders, which featured a chiselled-jawed man with lavish hair and intense eyes, pressing a tiny but perfectly formed nurse against his immaculate surgical scrubs. ‘Patrick had been here for four long months. Couldn’t get a word out of him all day and then, oh my goodness, the racket he made at night. Shouting and roaring in his sleep. And Rita insisting they go swimming every day. With no thought to the dangers. Even when the winter started in earnest. No wonder the child got sick. And not a pick on him, no matter how much food Rita made for him.’

  ‘I’m surprised he didn’t get food poisoning,’ said Marianne. ‘As well as pneumonia.’

  ‘That’s not a very Christian thing to say,’ said Aunt Pearl. She inspected her watch. ‘I have to leave now if I’m to be on time for mass.’ She stood up and smoothed her skirt with her hands, which were, Marianne noticed, similar to her own. The same long nail beds with the nails themselves cut short and square; the same long, bony fingers.

  ‘Your mother will probably pick up her motley crew of undesirables after her swim so you’ll have to wait until she gets back if you want to berate her.’

  ‘I don’t want to berate her.’ Marianne’s earlier anger had drained away. She didn’t have the energy to sustain it. To sustain anything. ‘I mostly just want to avoid her.’

  ‘Business as usual then,’ said Aunt Pearl, buttoning herself into a gaberdine mac. ‘Well, there are plenty of places in the house to hide,’ she added, crossing the room and opening the door. ‘At least it’s got that going for it.’

  Chapter 7

  When Aunt Pearl drove away in her old but immaculately maintained Peugeot 106, Marianne wandered the corridors. Ancaire was like an insistent tour guide, pointing out all the wear and tear her memory had managed to plaster over.

  There was the dent in the wainscot where Rita and William, waltzing towards the stairs, had tripped over each other’s feet and crashed into the wall. They hadn’t felt the pain until the next day when twelve-year-old Marianne, bringing the tea and paracetamol they had requested, filled them in. They laughed. Marianne did not.

  There was the crack in the windowpane at the end of the landing, a long crooked line stretching from it but not far enough to shatter the glass. ‘You could have had my eye out with that,’ William had roared at Rita, picking up the lethal stiletto shoe Rita had flung.

  ‘One of your roving eyes,’ Rita had roared back.

  And there was the faded red damask of the chaise longue beneath the window. The love-seat, Rita called it. Spent and slumped now, having borne the weight of the two of them down through the years, draped across each other, just before an argument, or just after.

  Theirs was an explosion of a relationship. The alcohol lit the fuse. Then Rita sobered up and William didn’t and, after a while, he left to pursue his twin hobbies: drinking and women. In both endeavours, he was initially successful, guarding jealously the last vestiges of his rangy swagger, his thick, steel-grey hair and tales of his long-ago travels to India, following which one of his paintings – a watercolour of a be-sandalled pair of dusty feet standing beside a well – was exhibited in the Guggenheim in New York.

  ‘I peaked too early,’ he told Marianne once when he arrived at her apartment in the middle of the night, maudlin with drink. She let him sleep on t
he couch. In the morning, he was gone again.

  He dated a string of women, their ages in ascending order. His last girlfriend – Simone, Marianne thought – was a ballroom dance teacher who openly admitted to being fifty-nine, which meant she was anywhere north of sixty-five.

  Then William had a stroke. Nothing too serious, but serious enough to ward off any further ability on his part to pursue women. He arrived back at Ancaire and persuaded Rita to take him in. Marianne assumed it didn’t take much. She also assumed they’d be a disaster again. Just an older version of the same disaster. The fighting, the yelling, the cheering, the roaring, the rigorous love-making, the flinging, the smashing. Even when they laughed, it was raucous. Like a murder of crows.

  But it didn’t turn out like that. For starters, William became non-verbal after the stroke. The doctors couldn’t work out if he couldn’t speak or just wouldn’t.

  Either way, he never spoke again.

  He kept on drinking, using his left hand instead of his right.

  He spent a few months at Ancaire before the second stroke.

  It was the second stroke that killed him.

  Marianne gripped the brass handrail on one side of the wide, sweeping staircase as she made her way downstairs. She remembered sliding down it as a child, Flo on the other side, the pair of them whooping, and Bruno pounding down the stairs, barking. Marianne always let Flo win. Flo never guessed.

  Marianne wasn’t hungry but she ended up in the kitchen all the same. It was the smell, she presumed. Rita made sure that the smell of her home baking got into every corner, seeped through every crack in every wall. It was like an assault, the smell, an in-your-face-I-told-you-so sort of smell, smug and superior.

  While the kitchen retained some of its period charm, it was definitely more shabby than chic these days. The brass pots and pans that hung from the ceiling near the ancient Aga swayed in the draught above the Belfast sink, chipped and stained from years of service.

  On the counter, wrapped in a damp tea towel, the source of the smell. A cake of soda bread, still warm. Beside it, a dish of butter, creamy and soft and made by Rita in the ancient churn in one of the outhouses.

  The woman who had preferred drinking to eating turned out to be somebody who made her own butter.

  Rita put it down to time. There was so much of it after she stopped drinking. She said she had never realised how long twenty-four hours could feel. How never-ending it could seem.

  In the beginning, she burned everything she cooked. Threw it out. Started again. And again. She kept starting again until she managed not to burn everything. And still, she kept going, until eventually, she managed to produce lemon melts that could floor you with their irresistible aroma and their capacity to melt on your tongue and make you weak with gratitude and coerce you into longing for more.

  Absentmindedly, Marianne cut a thick slice of soda bread, slathered it in butter and ate it on one of the carver chairs at the kitchen table, propping her childhood copy of I Capture the Castle against the milk carton. She enjoyed re-reading novels. She found it comforting, knowing what was going to happen next.

  Marianne stopped when she heard the strained effort of Rita’s Jeep, struggling up the driveway. She picked up a novena Aunt Pearl had cut out from the newspaper. It would do as a bookmark until Marianne eventually got around to unearthing the beautiful fabric ones in her suitcase. She made sure she was out of the kitchen and up the stairs before the Get-Well-Sooners spilled out of the Jeep and Rita found the key in the planter, scraped the muck off it and worked it into the lock.

  Marianne sequestered herself in Rita’s studio. It was at the gable end of the house with floor-to-ceiling windows through which she could see nothing but water so that it felt like she was tossing about on the high seas in a precarious rowing boat. The room still contained an easel, a high stool and a paint-spattered wooden table that accommodated rows and rows of paint tubes, long congealed, and an old ice-cream carton full of paintbrushes, their bristles hard and unyielding. Rita’s paintings, stacked sometimes five deep, faced the wall so the paintings themselves could not be seen. Marianne didn’t inspect them. She knew what they were.

  Self-portraits in the main.

  Rita.

  Over and over again.

  The studio was one of the coldest rooms in the house, the windows single glazed and poorly fitted. However, it was a room that Rita never used any more – she hadn’t painted since that summer when she stopped drinking – so Marianne had thought it safe to settle there, far enough back from the windows so she wouldn’t be spotted by any of the Get-Well-Sooners.

  She could hear them below in the drawing room. Their incessant talking and raucous laughter breached the ancient floorboards and arrived in a dark cloud around Marianne’s head, no matter how tightly she pressed her hands against her ears.

  Then the singing at the end.

  Dear God, the singing.

  Get Well Soon.

  How?

  Don’t drink and sing this tune.

  When?

  Every day, starting today, you’ll

  Get. Well. Soon.

  They had lunch in the kitchen. Marianne knew, because she heard Rita banging on the gong.

  After lunch, the stout crunch of Aunt Pearl’s walking stick as she set off on her afternoon constitutional, carefully plotted so she would meet nobody and would not be obliged to return a pleasantry.

  Later, the cough of Rita’s Jeep. It sounded like the cough of a very old person, incessant and feeble. Rita wrestled with it, stamping on the accelerator with her high heel – not for Rita the sense of changing into a shoe suitable for driving – so that the engine roared before cutting out. It took three attempts to catch and when it did, the Get-Well-Sooners cheered loudly.

  After that, the soft hiss of Patrick’s bicycle as he sailed down the avenue towards the main road, his toolbox strapped onto the back.

  And then Ancaire was silent again. Apart from the shuddering of the windowpanes, the gurgling rattle of water struggling through the pipes, and the ragged moan of the radiators, begging to be bled.

  By the time the doorbell rang, Marianne was already more than halfway through the book. George, lying on the floor by her feet, lifted his head, his ears twitching. Marianne knew that Pearl, Patrick and Rita had keys to the house. She wasn’t expecting anyone else. It was probably some door-to-door salesperson. They would leave eventually.

  She read on.

  The doorbell rang again, this time with greater insistence.

  Marianne looked over the top of her book through the window but from this vantage point, she couldn’t see the front door.

  She could, however, see a bottle-green Jaguar. Not vintage but old enough to warrant the obvious care and attention its owner lavished upon it, the body polished and buffed to a sharp shine and the seats inside reupholstered in distressed brown leather.

  The doorbell rang for a third time.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake …’ Marianne bookmarked her page, set the book aside. She stood up, hesitated.

  She hated answering the door unless she knew for a fact who was there.

  Even then, she wasn’t keen.

  George stood up and barked. ‘Oh, fine,’ said Marianne, marching out of the room and down the landing to the stairs.

  She wrenched open the front door.

  A man stood on the other side. An enormous man wearing a bright green tartan kilt that did nothing to conceal a pair of knobbly knees and sturdy calves, thick orange ankle socks tucked into a pair of massive Doc Martens. His hair was as orange as his socks and just as thick. It fell to his shoulders with a hint of a kink. Marianne had to take a step backwards to take him in, such was the height and breadth of him.

  He grinned at her and his eyes, as garish-green as his kilt, disappeared into slits.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Ah, you must be Rita’s daughter,’ the man said in a Scottish accent as thick as his hair. Thicker. ‘Marianne, isn’t tha
t right?’

  She nodded and he extended a massive hand, and Marianne felt she had no option but to offer hers in response. She braced herself as he shook it but the handshake didn’t have the violent clasp and pump she had anticipated.

  ‘I love what you’ve done with your hair,’ he said when he let go of her hand.

  ‘Are you being facetious?’ Marianne asked icily.

  The man grinned. ‘I am, aye.’

  ‘Well, I hardly think—’

  ‘I’m a hairdresser by trade,’ said the man, as if that somehow excused his rudeness. ‘Hugh McLeod, by the way.’ He rummaged in the leather sporran hanging from a belt around his hips, drew out a business card and thrust it into Marianne’s hand. In the middle of the card, centred and bold, was ‘Happy Hair’ and below it, all italics and exclamation marks: ‘You grow it! We do the rest!’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ Marianne asked.

  ‘Just me and my wee apprentice, Shirley,’ said Hugh. ‘We’ve a salon in Rush. Well, it’s a log cabin in my back garden. Your Patrick built it, as a matter of fact. But “salon” sounds more professional, doesn’t it?’

  Marianne tried to return the card but Hugh shook his head. ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘In case of what?’

  ‘In case of emergency,’ he said, grinning again like he was making fun of her. Marianne waited for his grin to fade. ‘Rita’s not here. She’s dropping off her …’ Marianne wasn’t sure what to call the Get-Well-Sooners so she said, ‘… people’.

  Hugh nodded. ‘I used to be one of her people, did she tell you?’

  Marianne shook her head, hoping to dissuade him from any further revelations.

  ‘Aye,’ he went on. ‘I’m a graduate, I suppose.’ He pushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned at her.