Drowning Rose (13 page)

‘I don’t think that’s the case. I believe it’s all arranged through the council. As part of the care for the elderly.’

‘Have you tried opting out?’

She looked at me. ‘There is no opting out.’

Uncle Ian sat as far back in his seat as was possible, his own back pressed against the back of the chair, the saffron bun in his hand and his gaze fixed on the Munch painting above the fireplace. It was a favourite of his, an original etching, one of only three and made by the artist himself. Two faces, one red and one blue, leaning towards each other. They were the faces of Munch himself and of his mistress, a violinist. The sight of the painting seemed to give Uncle Ian strength and he heaved himself up from his chair. As he did so the throw fell from his knees and his dressing-gown came apart, exposing the gaping flies of his pyjama trousers. I didn’t know what to do. Had anyone else noticed? It was impossible to tell. Katarina seemed to have disappeared again. Then Uncle Ian himself looked down and spotted the gaping flies and the tuft of grey curly hair. His gaze shot back to me and I looked away, pretending not to have noticed.

When I turned round once more Uncle Ian was back in the chair, the dressing-gown and throw wrapped tight around him. His face had no colour; it wasn’t white or pink or even grey. His gaze avoided mine.

The choir sung ‘Hosanna’, their soprano voices singing the harmony and reaching the high notes with ease. I leant back against the doorpost and closed my eyes.

It was almost lunchtime and Uncle Ian, who had retired to his room the moment the Lucia choir had left, still had not appeared. I was in the kitchen with Katarina, helping to prepare lunch.

‘It’s hard when the phone stops ringing,’ she said.

‘But he has friends?’

She shook her head. ‘He had business acquaintances. It was extraordinary – comical almost, the way the phone stopped ringing and the invitations stopped coming practically the day that he gave up his last directorship. Not being asked his opinion, I think is what he finds most difficult. People used to queue up to get his advice and now he can’t give it away for free.’

‘I’ll be his friend. I’ll phone. He doesn’t need to buy me a house. Has he told you about wanting to buy me a house?’

She nodded. ‘And I think it’s a good idea. It’ll give him something to do, something to think about other than the past.’

‘I don’t need him to wave his magic wand, that’s the point. Of course I would love to have more money or to own my own home but not this way. Really not this way.’

‘And is it all about what you want?’

I startled. I frowned. It’s all very well for people to speak their mind but we barely knew each other.

Katarina didn’t seem to notice my surprise or my disapproval; instead, she simply continued frying the meat patties as the kitchen filled with smoke. I wanted her to go on frying until we couldn’t see each other, until I was enveloped in my own little cloud of veal patty haze.

Uncle Ian came downstairs at one o’clock just as Katarina was bringing the food through to the dining room. He had nicked himself shaving but his hair was slicked back and he was wearing a cravat tucked into his Vyella shirt. I wasn’t sure what would be the best thing to do, to refer to the events of the morning or to say nothing and wait for his lead.

In the end I plumped for clueless gushing. ‘What a stroke of luck to be able to experience such a typical Swedish celebration,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘You think so?’

‘I expect they go around the whole neighbourhood.’

‘No, just the old people,’ Uncle Ian said. He gave the word ‘old’ an ironic emphasis that fooled no one.

I said, ‘You’re not old. Look at the Queen Mother.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘There is that,’ I agreed, ‘but I meant before she died. She was over a hundred. So thinking back to when she was your age, well, she would have to go back almost fifteen years. Just imagine. Anyway, age isn’t what it used to be,’ I said, adding to my impressive tally of platitudes.

‘Age is what it’s always been,’ he said.

I pointed to the window. ‘It’s amazing the way the sunshine makes the snow glitter silver. You would have thought gold. The sun being more yellow.’

Katarina had prepared one of Uncle Ian’s favourites, a kind of hamburger named after a Swedish financier and made from prime cuts of veal, minced finely and mixed with egg yolks and thick cream. I could see that if you were tired of life, eating Wallenbergare would be a fine way to go. Katarina served boiled potatoes and peas and low alcohol lager with the Wallenbergare and for a while we ate in silence. I had been known to be a noisy eater so as not to embarrass myself I kept my lips firmly shut between mouthfuls and chewed as if my teeth were scared of meeting. I watched Uncle Ian surreptitiously. He might look all spruce and dapper but I could see in his eyes that he hadn’t recovered from the morning.

Katarina asked if the food was to our liking and Uncle Ian and I both quickly assured her that it was delicious. ‘I asked,’ she said then, ‘because you both look as if you’re chewing cardboard.’

I turned to Uncle Ian, waiting for a response, irritation, a smile, a protest, but he just speared a piece of potato on his fork and raised it to his mouth, concentrating as if he were doing something important.

‘If I phone the estate agent and ask him to email you the details of the house, would you take a look?’ I asked him.

He raised his head and I saw a glint of interest in his faded eyes. ‘Of course.’ He speared another piece of potato and I thought I’d lost him again when he said, ‘Make sure he includes a floor plan as well.’

Did I imagine it or had his voice grown stronger? He reached beneath his sweater for his shirt pocket. ‘Have you got a pen, Katarina?’

Katarina got to her feet and returned with a piece of paper and a biro. Uncle Ian wrote down his email address and passed it on to me before running through a short history of domestic property investment. Maybe I was getting carried away by my imagination but by the time he got to the part where investing in a high-end area if at all possible was always a sound bet, even his sparse hair had begun to look fuller.

Katarina lent me a pair of fur-lined boots and after lunch I walked to the lake. By now the water was frozen solid and, pushed by the wind, the overhanging branches of the trees scratched the ice like fingernails.

We had loved skating, Rose, Portia and I. We hadn’t been any good at it but that had not been the point. The point had been to wear white fur-trimmed skating boots and play at being Christmas card Edwardian young ladies and perchance to stumble helpless into the outstretched arms of Julian and David and – oh I could not recall the names of the others. They had been handsome boys and we had been pretty girls and that had been about the sum of it. Or it should have been. What it should not have been was a matter of life and death.

Fourteen

Sandra/Cassandra

The princesses were actually pretty rubbish at skating but they didn’t know that until they went out on the ice with me. I’d been skating since I was three.

We weren’t supposed to go out on the ice without Miss Jennings.

‘Don’t be pathetic,’ I told them. ‘Anyway, I know these parts as if they were my own pockets.’

‘Oh very Worzel Gummige,’ Portia said.

‘It is a beautiful day,’ Eliza said. ‘C’mon, let’s do it.’

‘Very Mallory Towers,’ Portia said.

‘Oh belt up, Porsche,’ Eliza said.

I turned and gave her a look. Nothing much, not nasty, only as if I were trying to remember who she was and why I should care. She liked to be liked, did Eliza, and I knew I was getting to her. It surprised me, quite frankly, to see how little it took. Not laughing at a joke she made, studying a picture she’d drawn for Art and then not saying anything about it, looking her up and down when she was all dressed up to go off into town then turning away with a tiny smile. Those kinds of things. In fact, I was beginning to think this was better than being her friend.

At first, after that time she talked about me with the others, I had thought of confronting her. To tell her how disappointed I was and that I had believed we were friends. Then I decided on this instead. As I said, she liked to be liked, even by people she didn’t much like herself.

Snow fell across the fields and settled prettily in the hair and lashes of the princesses: Rose the cautious, Portia the waspish, Eliza the enthusiast. The three of them looked like some old-time Christmas card with their rosy cheeks and ridiculously unsuitable clothes. They had started a kind of fashion, rejecting practicality, so instead of wearing the jeans and jumpers and trainers most of us wore for mufti, they were at all times dressed in skirts or dresses and dainty shoes. Actually, Eliza’s shoes could never be described as dainty due to the fact that she wore a size seven but the point seemed to be to wear something uncomfortable that needed polishing. They polished their shoes endlessly.

‘I really don’t think it’s a good idea,’ Rose said.

‘Don’t be so wet.’ Eliza flicked some snow at Rose, who shrieked and jumped to her feet from her perch on a log.

‘It’s only an idea,’ I said. ‘You’ve all been banging on about how much you want to see the boys.’

‘OK,’ Rose said. ‘I’ll come. But if we get caught . . .’

Once we were out on the ice with the shore at a good distance either side and no sign of land behind or ahead, I speeded up. The princesses had been squealing and giggling as they lumbered and tottered out on to the frozen lake in their second-hand skating boots. I couldn’t stand the noise. Part of the glory of being out on the ice was the absence of sound apart from the swish of the blades as you travelled.

I skated past the island, onwards towards the next turn, where I stopped for a minute, hauling some make-up from my bum-bag. I checked my face in the tiny compact mirror. My hair was hopeless, having gone frizzier still from the wet snow, but I had a good colour on my cheeks and no spots. I brushed my lashes with the mascara wand and put on some lipstick. It was the same colour, ‘Pink plum’, that Rose used. I’d always heard that gingers should not wear pink, but when I glanced again at my reflection in the tiny mirror I could see how the shade livened up my skin.

I stuffed the make-up back in my bag and sped off once more. Behind me the princesses were shouting for me to wait. I pretended not to hear, doing a pirouette and skating backwards for a good fifty yards before spinning round. I thought that if my life were lived on skates how different it would be. On skates I was fast and smooth. I was the one the others followed.

The boys weren’t at the jetty when I got there. I had counted on having a few minutes with Julian before Rose came along, a few minutes for him to see me not past me or through me to someone more interesting, but see
me
, but by the time he and the other boys did arrive, sauntering down the snowy verge and out on the jetty, the princesses were already giggling and wobbling their way towards us.

Eliza waved and promptly fell on her bum. Rose clung on to Portia, who ran into Eliza, and then they lay there in a heap of long limbs and glossy hair and Julian skated over to help them up. No one had even noticed I was there.

When they did notice I wished they hadn’t.

‘Oh Sandra-Cassandra you’ve put on some slap,’ Portia said.

I looked round quickly to see if Julian had heard but he was huddled with David and Matt, smoking.

I pulled a face at her. Then Rose asked, ‘Is that my lipstick?’

I shrugged and lit a menthol. ‘How should I know. I got it ages ago.’

I turned and saw that now he, Julian, was looking at me. Still with the cigarette between my lips I jumped back down on to the ice. I skated on for about twenty yards and then I did some pirouettes and some jumps. I just knew they were all looking now. I carried on, smiling to myself, pretending to be in my own world while actually, I was auditioning for a part in theirs. I could hear my blade on the ice as I skated past on one leg, the other in the air, outstretched. Another pirouette and I skated towards them at speed, finishing off with a jump and landing full square and steady right in front of them.

No one said anything and then they all clapped. The princesses clapped, and the boys, and then I heard Julian say, ‘That was so cool.’

I don’t think that I had ever been happier than I was at that moment.

It’s funny how being happy makes you nicer. I even forgave Eliza. The next Wednesday I asked them if they were going into town. Portia looked at the other two. ‘We’re not, actually,’ she said finally.

Rose said, ‘Not with that Greek assignment.’

Eliza muttered something about being broke.

I saw them as they returned. I was sitting on the saggy old sofa in the common room trying to concentrate on
Tristram Shandy
. Eliza and Rose had read it during the Christmas holidays, so they said, although by now – page twenty-four – I was seriously doubting the truth of that. My eyes were wandering from the book to the French windows and back when I saw them ambling along the drive. Eliza was carrying a Miss Selfridges bag and Rose and Portia were pigging out on chips from a Wimpy box. They’d gone into town after all. It was me who had suggested going in the first place so if they’d changed their minds they really should have told me. Then I remembered how uneasy Eliza had looked when she said they weren’t and the way they had exchanged little glances and I realised that they had been planning to go all along, they just hadn’t wanted to go with me. I felt myself go clammy. Nothing was working out the way I had dreamt it would. Instead it was like my old school all over again, only worse, because then it was just about jealousy. I had known I was different from the others at the old place; better, to be honest. For a start I had plans for the future, plans that didn’t include marrying the first acne-ridden loser who asked me and settle down five minutes from where I’d grown up. My parents said I had been like a bright-feathered bird amongst a flock of grey sparrows.