2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (41 page)

Canaan House was still on my mind, and I started thinking about the two Naomis, each trying to grab Artem. Had there been sharing and dancing? Or was it a case of theft and nastiness? Would Artem have made a different choice if he’d read Naomi’s letters? Would Ella’s heart have been broken instead? Burning the letters seemed such a monstrously wicked thing to do; yet I couldn’t think of her as a wicked woman. It’s as though love gives you a special licence to do anything you like. In the end death, the ultimate fracture line, split Ella and Artem apart. And Canaan House itself had been part of the dance, too, shared by one couple, then another. But whom did it really belong to? There were still some parts of the story that weren’t clear. There must be a way of finding out.

After lunch—four radishes and half a bagel with a bit of crusty cheese was all I could muster from the fridge—1 nipped up to use the loo, and that’s when I realised the other thing that was wrong with Gina’s Revenge. Men and women—we’re different. Men stand up to pee.

In the afternoon the rain stopped long enough for me to pull on my Bat Woman coat and wing off down to the library on Fielding Street just off Holloway Road. The reference library was up on the top floor, a hushed high-ceilinged room susurrating with the nasal snifflings of damp people and the dry rustle of pages being turned. The wet weather had brought in all the homeless folk, whose moist unwashed smell mingled with the musty odour of books and the municipal aroma of wax and disinfectant. Silent hunched figures eyed each other furtively above the pages. Ms Firestorm would have a field day in here.

“I’m trying to find out the history of a house near where I live. It’s called Canaan House. In Totley Place.”

The woman at the counter raised her eyes from her computer.

“That’s an interesting name. There was quite a fashion in Victorian times, you know, to give places Biblical names. There’s no end of the Bethels and Zions. And there’s a Jordan Close in Richmond. Different Jordan, of course,” she giggled mousily.

“Are there some old maps or anything like that?”

“They’ve moved the local history archive to the Finsbury Library. We’ve just got a small local history section over there on the right.”

Of the twenty or so volumes, the only specifically local book was one called
Walter Sickert’s Highbury
. I flicked through the chapter headings and illustrations. On page 79 was a lithograph of a large house with a tree in front of it—the more I stared, the more sure I was that it was the same house with the same monkey puzzle tree, but much smaller. The caption read: “The Monkey Puzzle House, home of Miss Lydia Hughes, whose portrait he painted in 1929 when he was living in nearby Highbury Place.” Perhaps the name of the house had been changed. I looked in the index and browsed through the chapters, but there was no more information.

Then my eye fell on a slim booklet in a yellow card cover: A History of Christian Witness in Highbury. It was obviously self-published. I took it through to the reading room and sat down at one of the desks. The book was mainly a rather dull list of Anglican and Catholic churches with scratchy line drawings, but the last chapter was devoted to what the author called the ‘sects’: Methodists, Baptists, Congrega-tionalists, Quakers, Unitarians, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Sandemanians, Christadelphians, Swedenborgians, Latter Day Saints, Plymouth Brethren. So many different faiths all waiting, as Ben was, for the Day of Judgement that would bring about a new Heaven and a new Earth—not just over there in that dry, thorny, tortured land, but here in damp, leafy Highbury. Still waiting. Well, let them wait, I thought.

Towards the end of the book was a short entry that read: “A Teresian community was established in the late 19305 in a house in Totley Place. It was evacuated following an air raid in 1941 and the community dispersed.” I felt a rush of excitement—this could be it! But there was no more. The author was a Miss Sylvia Harvey. The book was published in 1977, thirty years ago. I scribbled the details on a piece of paper. The room was so quiet that you could hear the squeak of my pen as I wrote. There was no other sound apart from the snuffling and rustling and an occasional intermittent gurgle of the water cooler, like a dyspeptic gut. It reminded me that Dad’s operation had been due today. I wondered how he’d got on.

Over in the far corner by the magazines and newspapers, a tall heavily built man was wrestling with the
Financial Times
. He was sitting with his back towards me. He had curly grey hair—no, it was blond, streaked with grey. I stared. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but there was no mistaking him. It was Rip. Beside him on the floor were his briefcase and our large blue thermos flask. I wanted to rush up to him and put my hands over his eyes to surprise him, but something held me back—something about the way he was sitting—that sagging posture, staring straight ahead, his big shoulders hunched. He looked defeated. He wasn’t even reading the newspaper, I realised, he was just passing the time. He was passing the time in the library because he didn’t want us to know he wasn’t at work.

I took the book across to the desk.

“How can I trace this author?” I asked in a low voice.

The woman smiled vaguely. “You could try the telephone directory. Or the internet. Would you like me to have a look?”

“No, it’s all right. Thanks for your help.”

I gathered my things together as quietly as I could and tiptoed out through the door.

Smoke circles

I
’d already started cooking dinner when Rip came in just before six o’clock. It was something elaborate involving tofu and lemon grass. Stella was out and Ben was stretched out on the sofa with a book. Since his seizure, he’d been avoiding the computer, and only watched television occasionally.

“D’you want a hand, Mum?” he shouted down to me. His voice sounded deeper, less croaky, than a couple of weeks ago. How quickly he’d changed.

“It’s okay,” I shouted back.

I liked to see him with his nose stuck in a book, as I’d been at his age, though when he came down to eat later on, I saw that the book was
Revenge of the Busty Biker Chicks
.

“Hi, Ben! Hi, Georgie!” Rip called as he came in, then he went straight up into the mezzanine study. I could hear him pottering around in there, playing music. Half an hour later, I stuck my head round the door.

“Dinner’s ready.”

“What’s all this, Georgie?”

He was standing in the middle of the room holding a B&Q carrier bag in his hand.

“Where did you find that?” Then I remembered. I’d shoved it in the cupboard when Mark Diabello came round.

“Are you planning a bit of DIY?” He was looking at me intently, curiously. I could feel myself turning red.

“No, not DIY. Collage.”

“Collage?”

I smiled inwardly at the incredulity in his voice.

“You know—sticking things. It’s a form of art.”

Our eyes met. He grinned. I grinned. We stood grinning at each other across a bridge of lies. I would never tell him that I’d seen him in the library. In all our years together, I’d never before glimpsed his vulnerability. I’d always thought he was the strong one in our relationshjp. I reached out my arms and took a tentative step forward. There was a faint crackle and a smell of scorching, and Ben called from the kitchen: “Come on, you two! The rice’s burning!”

§

Dad always used to say, “I like a bit of burned,” which was just as well, because Mum often obliged. Sometimes she went too far, like the first Sunday lunch Rip had with us at Kippax, when she placed a charred and blackened chicken in front of Dad for him to carve.

“Poor little bugger looks like ‘e’s been cremated,” said Dad.

“Nowt wrong wi’ cremation,” said Mum. “Keeps you regular.”

I hadn’t told Mum yet that Rip had moved back in—1 didn’t want to tempt fate—but I rang her after dinner to find out how Dad’s operation had gone. She was in an ebullient mood.

“They did a biopic. Doctor says it in’t cancer.”

“Oh, that’s good. How’s he feeling?”

“Full of chips. Food were lovely in ‘ospital. Got into a blazing argument with the bloke in the next bed about Iraq. Keir’s coming home, by the way. Did I tell you?”

“No, you didn’t. That’s good news, too.”

It would be good to see Keir again. Since he’d joined the army, our worlds had drifted apart; nowadays all we had in common was our shared childhood, but Mum resolutely held us together like the family glue.

“She sent us some lovely flowers, by the way, your Mrs Sinclair. And a card. Best wishes for your recovery.”

“I didn’t know she knew about Dad.”

“Oh, we keep in touch. She rings up from time to time. Or I ring her.”

“Really?”

This was complete news to me. I tried to imagine what Mum and Mrs Sinclair would talk about. Then I realised they probably talked about us.

I poured another glass of wine and put my feet up on the sofa while Rip and Ben put the rice pan to soak and cleared up in the kitchen. Then the phone rang.

“Georgine, come quick! We heff an invitation!”

Mrs Shapiro’s breathy voice shrilled down the telephone, but I was going nowhere.

“What’ve we been invited to?”

“Wait! Let me see—aha, here it is! We are invited to a funeral!”

My heart lurched. The last thing I needed was bad news.

“Oh, dear. Who is it?”

“Wait! It is here! What is this? I cannot read this name. Looks like Mrs Lily and Brown, ninety-one year old, passes peacefully in the sleep at the Nightmare House.”

So she never did break free, poor thing.

“Who is this Brown Lily?”

“She’s the old lady you made friends with in the hospital. And at Northmere House. You know—who was always asking for cigarettes?”

“This one who got the dead woman slippers? She is not my friend—she is a honker.”

“But it’s nice that you’ve been invited to her funeral. Her family must have remembered you.”

“What is so nice about a funeral?”

“Don’t you want to go?”

“Certainly we must go!”

The crematorium was in Golders Green, miles away beyond Hampstead Heath. I mentioned this to Nathan, and suggested he might like to come along with his Tati.

“He’ll enjoy it,” I said. “There’s sure to be plenty of singing.”

Somehow, the four of us fitted into Nathan’s Morgan, even though it was really a glorified two-seater. Nathan and Mrs Shapiro sat in front. She was wearing a long black coat that smelled pleasantly of mothballs and Chanel N°5—better than the stinky astrakhan—and a chic little black beret with a veil and a feather. Nathan’s Tati squeezed into the back with me. He was wearing a raincoat and a Bogart-style trilby. I was wearing my smart grey jacket and a black scarf. The car struggled under the weight of us all as we crawled up the Finchley Road. It was a Saturday morning in April, the air warm and sparkling in the slanting sunlight. In the residential streets the front gardens were already frothy with cherry blossom.

Nathan’s Tati took Mrs Shapiro’s hand to guide her up the step to the crematorium, and she acknowledged the gesture with a gracious nod. There were only two other people in the chapel when we arrived, a grey wispy-looking woman who introduced herself as Mrs Brown’s niece, Lucille Watkins, and her father, Mrs Brown’s brother. He was tall and lean, with rosy cheeks and a twinkle in his eye—one of those wiry sprightly ninety-somethings who go on for ever.

“Charlie Watkins,” he introduced himself, lingering over Mrs Shapiro’s chipped-varnish fingers which she extended graciously to him. “I think we met at the ‘ospital once. Did you know our Lily well?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nathan’s Tati watch him, bristling with annoyance.

“Not well,” Mrs Shapiro replied, fluttering her eyelids. “Only from smoking. And from slippers. She got the dead-woman slippers.”

“Smokin’ like a kipper!” he chuckled, nodding towards the flower-covered coffin in front of us. “That sounds like our Lily.”

I wasn’t particularly surprised when Ms Baddiel turned up, too, just as the service was about to start.

“It’s always so-o sad when a client passes away,” she murmured, searching in her oversize bag for a packet of tissues.

There was music playing in the chapel, spooky-sounding organ music that made you feel as though you were already halfway into the next world. The coffin with its single wreath of lilies rested on an ornate catafalque to the left of the altar. A plaque on the wall solemnly reminded us
Mors janua vitae
. Death is the gateway to life. Where had I heard that before? Tall leaded ‘windows filtered and chilled the sunshine leaking in from outside, turning it into a cool greenish fluid. It reminded me of the bivalves, clinging on under the sea. We spread out around the pews, trying to make ourselves look like more than seven. Mrs Shapiro sat in the front row, and Nathan’s Tati took up his position beside her. Nathan and Ms Baddiel sat in front on the other side. The niece and her father spread out in the middle, and I sat at the back. How sad, I was thinking, to have just seven people at your funeral, two of whom had never even met you. A thin man in a black suit droned through a short liturgy and disappeared. We all looked around, wondering whether this was all. Then suddenly there was a rustling behind us; the organ music stopped mid-note and gave way to a jolly lilting big-band number. Ba-doop-a-doop-a! Ba-doop-a-doop-a!

You could hear everybody gasp. Charlie Watkins rose to his feet and did a little hip-swing in the pew, then he squeezed out past his daughter and bopped up to the lectern. As the music faded away, he cleared his throat and began.

“Ladies and gen’lemen, we’re ‘ere to celebrate the life of a great lady, and a great dancer, Lily Brown, my sister, who was born Lillian Ellen Watkins in 1916 in Bow. She was the youngest of three sisters and two brothers (he was reading from a sheet of paper he’d fished out of his jacket pocket, modulating his voice like an actor). Now I’m the only one what’s left, and all that past life, the ‘appiness and sorrow, the triumphs and disappoin’ments, is all washed away on the tides of time.” He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief. There was a general shuffling in the pews. This wasn’t at all what we’d expected. He blew his nose and continued. “Even when she was a young gel, our Lily danced like an angel.”