Drowning Rose (27 page)

You had to ask yourself, did this man even care about the future of the planet?

I finished my wine and with a little sigh I went back inside and phoned up Ruth.

‘I’m all right,’ she assured me, before I had had a chance to even ask. ‘It’s only a bruise.’

‘What’s only a bruise?’

‘Olivia didn’t tell you? Oh. I thought that’s why you called.’ She had put her brave voice on.

‘I called because you left a message telling me to. And because I wanted to speak to you, of course. So what’s going on, Ruth?’

‘Nothing. I told you, nothing. Obviously, Olivia didn’t think it was worth telling you about. Anyway, I’m sure he didn’t mean to.’

‘What did who not mean to?’

‘It was an accident, I’m sure of it. Robert’s never been violent before.’

‘Robert hit you?’

‘No, no, of course not. It was more of a shove. As I said, I’m sure he didn’t mean for that to happen.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, did he mean to hurt you or not?’

Ruth began to cry noisily. ‘Don’t shout at me. I can’t stand being shouted at.’

It took ten minutes of apologising and cajoling to calm her down.

‘Where’s Lottie?’

‘She’s gone to Greece with some friends.’

I choked back a sigh and said, in my best games mistress’s voice, ‘Tell you what, why don’t you come over?’

She was there within such a short time I could almost believe she’d been hiding in some nearby shrubbery waiting for the invitation, a ridiculous thought, of course. Apart from a faint bruise on the left cheek she looked fine.

‘Where is Robert?’ I asked as I ushered her inside.

‘Oh, he’s at home playing around on his computer.’

‘But did he hurt you? If he did you have to call the police. Oh, you’ve brought a suitcase?’

‘I’m sorry. I thought that’s what you meant. For me to stay over. But if I’m going to be in the way . . .’ She raised her hand to her cheek.

‘No, no, of course you’re not. It won’t take me a minute to make up a bed. Have you eaten?’ I picked up her case.

She gave me an offended look. ‘I couldn’t eat a thing. Not after what happened. But you go ahead.’

As I cooked I cast little glances at her as she sat, quite calm, at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. I wished I didn’t always harbour a faint suspicion that she was making things up. It wasn’t that I had ever caught her in an outright lie but simply that weird little things always seemed to happen to her. The milkman chasing her round the kitchen table, her mother-in-law paying her cleaner to spy on her, those kinds of things.

I had eaten a couple of mouthfuls of my pasta with broccoli and Gorgonzola cheese when Ruth leant across and picked at the pasta spirals. She had a dainty way of using her fingers, as if they were tweezers.

I put my fork down. ‘Would you like your own plate?’

She gave me a coy little smile. ‘If you insist. But only a teeny amount, mind.’

‘There isn’t that much left so it’ll have to be, I’m afraid.’

As I put the plate down in front of her she looked around the kitchen.

‘Is there something you need? The parmesan is here.’ I shoved the little peony-patterned china bowl with grated cheese towards her.

‘I was just thinking that a small glass of wine might be just the thing.’

I got up. ‘Sorry. I should have offered. Is white OK?’

‘Sure. Unless you’ve got some red.’

I shut the fridge door. ‘I’ll check in the dining room.’

‘Gosh, you have a dining room. Very posh.’

‘I didn’t put us in there tonight because you said you weren’t going to eat.’ I tried watering down the defensiveness in my voice with a smile.

‘I’m so sorry, I’ve put you out. I should have eaten at home before I came but . . .’

‘Goodness, no, of course not. I mean, you were fleeing.’ Even as I said it, it sounded absurd. Robert was a toad but he wasn’t, I was sure of it, a belligerent toad. Yet the consequences of disbelieving Ruth if she were telling the truth would be far worse than believing her even if she were telling fibs.

I returned with a bottle to find Ruth shovelling the food from my plate on to her own. When she saw me she said, cheerfully enough, ‘Waste not want not. I’m so hungry all of a sudden I could eat anything. It must be delayed shock.’

I cut myself some bread and sat down again. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘I can’t talk about it,’ Ruth said.

Only because you’ve got your mouth full, I thought sourly.

‘I really can’t bear to talk about it,’ she said again with an encouraging glance at me.

‘Oh right.’ I did my best to return the encouraging look. ‘Please try.’

‘No, I can’t.’

I stifled a sigh. ‘If Robert is . . .’ I paused. The thought of Robert ever daring to lift his hand against anyone bigger than himself, and Ruth was a good couple of inches taller and at least a stone heavier, seemed increasingly unlikely the more I thought about it. Then my gaze fell on the faint bruise on her cheekbone and I felt sick. Terrible things happened when you failed to take a cry for help seriously. ‘If he’s hurting you, you must go to the police.’

She had stopped looking encouraging and assumed a mulish expression instead. ‘I told you I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘No, no, I’m sorry, but you can’t just come here and tell me your husband hit you and then expect me not to do anything.’

‘Leave it for now,’ she said. ‘Please. We’ll decide what to do in the morning. In fact what I want now is a tour of the house. I can’t believe you’ve been here for two months and I haven’t been allowed a proper inspection.’

‘You saw it just after I bought it.’

Ruth gave me a conspiratorial little smile. ‘After
you
bought it?’ She winked. ‘Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.’

‘You saw it just after Uncle Ian bought it,’ I corrected. ‘The point is, it’s been a building site until recently. Anyway, you must be exhausted. I’ll show you around tomorrow.’

‘I’m not ready to go to bed yet,’ Ruth said. ‘In fact I’ll be surprised if I sleep at all tonight.’

She told me that the inky blue made the dining room look ‘quite dark’.

‘SC 224 from Papers and Paints Traditional Colours collection,’ I told her.

‘You memorise these things? Goodness. It’s an unusual colour but it does sort of work with the rose pink and china blue of the curtains.’

‘The Georgians didn’t really use blue for their dining rooms,’ I said, sounding even to myself as a voice-over for Wikipedia. ‘Green being the more common choice. In fact, blue generally was a rare colour up to the mid-Georgian period because of the cost of producing it, but I just felt this was a blue room.’

Ruth told me she thought the table was lovely.

‘Uncle Ian picked it out online from an auction house catalogue.’

‘God, you are lucky.’

‘Aren’t I just,’ I said. Maybe I didn’t look that lucky just then because Ruth said, ‘I know, I know. Having all of this, being given it by, of all people, Rose’s father, it must make those feelings of guilt worse.’

‘Excuse me for a moment.’ I hurried out into the hall where I waited just long enough to assemble a convincing smile. Then I returned, reminding myself that I had to be nice. Ruth, after all, had just been duffed up by her husband. ‘Let’s go upstairs to the sitting room.’

‘How sweet. Adorable,’ Ruth said standing in the doorway. She stepped inside and looked around some more. ‘You know what, you could probably knock through the wall to get one decent-sized room?’

‘Not allowed to. English Heritage. Great idea, though.’

‘Oh, pity. Still, I do love those sash windows. And that simple wooden mantle is lovely. Is it original?’

I nodded. ‘They didn’t start installing the more ornate projecting chimneypieces in simple homes like this until the end of the nineteenth century.’

‘Simple? Hardly simple.’

‘At that time it was seen as a simple house. It would have been the home of an artisan or possibly even built as servant’s quarters. Of course, I know it isn’t nowadays.’ I was beginning to feel exhausted.

‘You’ve really gone into all this, haven’t you?’

I smiled, genuinely this time. ‘Uncle Ian and I together. I suppose we’re pretty expert by now.’

‘Of course, the rooms will have a cosier feel to them when you get the curtains up.’

‘I’m not having curtains in the sitting room, only the snug,’ I said. ‘Because of the shutters.’

‘Really? You can’t have both?’

‘I could probably but I rather like it like this. I’ll think about it, though,’ I added, not wanting to seem to be turning down all her suggestions out of hand. ‘I’ll live with it as it is for a bit longer then I’ll see how it goes. But you might well be right.’

Ruth gave me a big smile back and there was no hint of martyrdom. ‘I do have quite a good eye, you know.’

‘You do. And thank you for being so interested.’

She shrugged. ‘I love decorating but we don’t have any money to do our place up. This is almost as much fun, though.’

‘Right.’ I was impressed, not for the first time, by the way Ruth had of making me feel like a child with special needs while at the same time maintaining her air of humble diffidence.

‘The early Georgians were very keen on quite dark drab colours,’ I said. ‘But as the period moved on towards Regency the decor got lighter and brighter. Pea green, that is SC271, became a popular alternative to, for example, sage.’ I walked out on to the landing.

‘Let me show you your room.’

Ruth followed me into the bedroom with the look of a person whose hotel didn’t live up to its star marking. ‘I suppose the master bedroom is bigger?’

‘This is the master bedroom. I’m in the smaller room upstairs.’

‘It’s very pretty,’ Ruth said. ‘The whole house is delightful. I just find it extraordinary that they can charge what they did for a place this size. No disrespect intended.’

I shrugged and said, ‘Well,’ in a non-committal way, while wondering how she had found out how much we paid for the house. ‘The bathroom is over here.’ I turned round and pointed to the door opposite on the landing ‘It’s not en suite, I’m afraid.’ I got that in before Ruth did. It was like when you’re small and they go through the football scores on television and you have to get through them before the newsreader does:

Portsmouth1Arsenal3BirminghamCity0ManchesterUnited2 AccringtonStanley0Tottenham7 . . . faster faster as if the words were chased by wolves.

Once Ruth had gone to bed I brought my new laptop up to my room.
Dear Uncle Ian
, I wrote,
I thought you might like to know that my stepsister Ruth is staying with me at the moment. She’s going through a difficult patch in her marriage. I didn’t even have a spare room in my flat so it’s very special to be able to put her up like this.

I couldn’t sleep so I picked up the book on my bedside. I was rereading
Wuthering Heights
. It had been Rose’s favourite novel. She had told me Heathcliff reminded her of Julian. That had made me laugh then and it made me smile now. Julian Dennis had been no more like Heathcliff than a cross kitten was like a tiger. I closed my eyes, suddenly unable to focus on my reading. Rose should be living in this house. She should be here with Julian who had grown up to be her husband and their two adorable little girls who could play with Jenny’s boys next door. It should all be Rose. I wished I could believe Uncle Ian when he said she had come to him. I wished I could believe that she wasn’t angry. I wished she would tell me herself because I was so very tired of feeling bad.

Me: I can’t believe I’m living in this wonderful house and all because you’re dead.

Rose: I can’t believe I’m dead. Especially with you all talking to me the whole time.

Me: I feel so bad.

Rose: How do you think I feel?

Me: You’re supposed to tell me to forgive myself and move on.

Rose: Whoops, sorry. Who’s a bad little corpse, then? I’ll start again. Eliza, do stop beating yourself up about the fact that I’m dead and you are living like a queen off my old father’s money.

Me: You were always so sweet and kind. What’s happened to you?

Rose: What’s happened to me? Let me think. Oh yes. I’m dead. You’d be surprised how that affects one’s mood. I’m sorry but if it’s a comfort corpse you’re after, get someone else.

I got out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen. I heated up some milk in the microwave and then I added some brown sugar. I thought for a moment and then I went to the drinks cupboard and brought out some dark Jamaican rum and added a good slug of that to the sweet milk.

‘You can’t sleep, either?’ It was Ruth, standing in the kitchen doorway in a Victorian-style long white nightdress.

I shook my head.

‘What are you drinking?’

‘Sit down,’ I gestured at a chair. ‘I’ll make you some.’ I moved around my kitchen, enjoying every touch of a surface, every smooth opening of a cupboard and drawer. I thought of previous occupants of my house on the hill, especially my lady painter, Marguerite Stephens, and her sister Anna, who lived here for over forty years during the reign of Queen Victoria. I wondered if they too had comforted themselves with a hot drink and perhaps a slug of rum or brandy on nights when the world seemed dark and wild. Their kitchen would have looked very different of course but behind the layers of paint the walls were the same walls. Their feet would have touched these same dark pine boards as my bare feet were touching now, and years from now when I too was gone, and Ruth and everyone I knew were gone too, some other woman would move around this room, her feet caressing the same warm smooth wood. I couldn’t make my mind up as to whether that was a comforting thought or just very depressing.