Page 4 of The Women at Ocean's End

It would be kind to describe it as faded, but really crumbling would be closer to the mark. These days, Constance tried to contain her living to just two rooms, the kitchen and a ramshackle sitting room. They were both on the ground floor and so the leaks that grew larger each year were at least one storey up. Her bed was set in an alcove which had once been filled with a grand piano that her mother gifted to the local community centre. It had been a waste having it here when neither of them played and now her bed fitted snugly in the corner. In the mornings, if she pulled herself up high against her pillows, she could watch the sea crash against the cliffs of Mallory Bay in the distance. And always, she thought as she looked at it of her darling husband Oisin and asked herself if he still lay silent and alone beneath the waves.

Even then, when the unthinkable had happened, Constance knew, in some fibres knitted too deeply for her to pick apart, that losing her husband, in that way that she did, was nothing more than just wages for the sins of the past. She sighed deeply now. The past. She needed to wrap it up and put it back where it belonged but dreaming of Heather Banks had somehow unearthed those things that she’d carefully packed away for a long time now.

The sound of the stairs creaking in the hallway stirred her from her memories. How on earth could steps still fall heavily on stairs when no-one had trodden across them in months?

The truth was, Constance hadn’t been brave enough to climb the stairs since early last summer. No reason why she shouldn’t, aside from aches and pains she was trying to appease by staying put. When she’d last gone up there it was to check out a scurrying sound that she feared was rats, or perhaps a badger. It turned out to be a crow’s nest begun on top of a French armoire in what had once been a guest room.

Thankfully, the crows had only managed to get in through an open window and not the roof, which would have been a total disaster. She couldn’t begin to imagine the cost fixing the roof would bring to her door, far more than she could afford, that was for sure. Instead, she shut all the windows on the upper floors even though she knew it probably reeked of stale air; the risk of mould was preferable to sharing her home with a family of cawing crows.

This morning, while she waited for the kettle to boil, the old clock in the hallway rang out the hour. It seemed to lose a minute with each year that passed. The postman would have been already, while she was watching that pilot whale. She was lucky. Jay Larkin called in regularly, if only for a short time. He collected her pension for her and paid her bills when she asked him to and he did both with an easy manner that never made her feel as if he resented it. That was island living – everyone looking out for everyone else.

Just one letter sat on the hall table inside the door, a bill by the looks of it. Jay had long given up leaving her post in the box at the gate to Ocean’s End. What was the point when the door flew open in the gusting winds that surrounded the house for the winter months? So instead he pushed in the unlocked front door and left any letters on the hall table. If he had time, some days he’d sit in the kitchen and have a cup of tea with her, tell her about the football match or whatever big race he was hoping to place a bet on. Constance always made sure to havesomething fresh from the oven that he could take home to the kiddies.You have them spoiled, he’d say before making his way to the next house along the road where two German fishermen had settled a few years ago. They seemed content to live mostly off the rocky garden. In the summer months, they made what money they needed working in the village pub and supermarket. Occasionally, if time had weighed too heavily on Constance’s hands and she’d baked far more than was decent to hand over to Jay, she wrapped up scones or homemade brown bread for her neighbours to enjoy. Two men on their own, she didn’t expect either of them to be up to much when it came to baking, and better to share than endure a lecture from the visiting district nurse about her sugar levels and a fatty liver they couldn’t really prove she had either way.

Constance looked at the letter, feeling that familiar stab of stress bite into her stomach. It was definitely a bill. Not today. She couldn’t face it today. She tucked the letter in behind the vase with faded artificial flowers. Today, she would think only of happy memories with Dotty, not of people wanting things from her that she didn’t have to give. And she definitely wasn’t going to think of the last time she and Dotty spoke. It would be too much to bear to think of that awful time.

2

Heather Banks

Heather Banks had enough money in her current account to be anywhere in the world. The one place she didn’t want to be was here, in her mother’s house, checking out the contents of her mother’s leaking fridge.

She had come as soon as she got the call. When she arrived, her mother’s body was still lying in her bed in the cramped front room that they had turned into a bedroom for her a few years earlier. Heather had made sure her mother had everything she needed in terms of life’s little comforts in the end, but always there remained that unbridgeable gulf between them. Dotty had never wanted a daughter; she’d made that plain too often from the very start.

It was strange, this silence that enveloped her now.

Two paramedics arrived to take her mother away on a stretcher to some part of the local hospital where visitors never went. Closing the door after they left with a soft click, Heather had a feeling this house had never been so still before. Her mother had lived life with a radio constantly blaring in the kitchen and the TV switched to a low hum of endless soaps in the front room.

It wasn’t just the silence that made the house feel out of kilter. There was something else and Heather had been aware of it from the moment she entered the house, but it took a little while to register. She was standing at the window in the front room whenshe realised it. She was staring at her reflection in the glass: an odd thing to see yourself when you least expected it. Time was catching up with her, fine lines etched around her eyes, her dark hair just that little more severe against her skin than when it had held its natural colour. Expensive colourists weren’t always all they were cracked up to be, it turned out.

Then it hit her.

That was it. The windows had been recently cleaned, oh, they weren’t gleaming but they’d been washed around the frames, the glass if not sparkling was grime free. The place was spick and span, as if her mother had been ready to leave, in that way that people tidy up before they go on holidays, making themselves so late they almost miss their flight. Heather stepped back from the window, turned to look around the room.

It wasn’t just the windows either. The small chair was free from the mountain of clothes it typically groaned beneath. The floor was free of the pile of magazines and empty glasses and the obligatory ashtray filled to overflowing. On the bedside table a small tray held six bottles of pills and assorted medicines that she guessed at a glance had something to do with treating either stomach upset, constipation or diarrhoea. There was one glass of water sitting next to them, half drunk.

Water? Since when had her mother ever drunk water? At a push, she might wash down some aspirin with a glass of orange juice, but mostly Dotty Wren exhibited not just a disregard for contraindications but a scornful snub of any notion that she should curb her drinking or indeed her bitterness.

Heather moved to the kitchen, then climbed the stairs, ambling into each of the two bedrooms there and lingering for a while over the dull and faded familiarity of it all. As familiar as it all was – nothing very much had changed here in years – she felt as if she’d missed a step.

She knew what it was, of course she knew what it was, but she walked around the house once more, peering into drawers and cupboards as if to find a missing jigsaw piece that would somehow make the picture real. She even went out into the yard and checked her mother’s bin. But no, not even there – she couldn’t understand it, there wasn’t an empty bottle anywhere to be seen. And suddenly, Heather wasn’t so sure what she felt standing here in this place that was meant to be her home, but had never truly felt like it.

It (her mother’s alcoholism, that thing she was never allowed to mention) had driven a wedge between them years ago. It had broken her marriage to a man who’d been a good father and a long-suffering husband, long after he was legally obliged to be one. Heather thought of her father now.

Bobby Banks was an actor, once. He told Heather he’d fallen for her mother and whatever talent he had took second and eventually third place behind their little family.She’d always been a beauty.But when the hard realities of bills hit with the birth of their daughter, Bobby gave up on dreams of the stage and settled for a factory job, putting aside everything else for his family. Her darling dad had died three years earlier, in a small nursing home, with views of a river and the comfort of knowing he’d been as good as mother and father to a daughter who adored him. Dotty Banks was not a bad woman. She was, Heather had known all along, just a disappointed one who needed a crutch and found one she liked in a bottle. It seemed everything in life came up short for Dotty. Every glass was half empty. Every win was just a fluke and for every diamond she saw mostly the rough.

None of that mattered any more. For better or worse, Dotty Banks was her mother and, even if Heather was staring fifty years of age between the eyes, today it felt as if she needed her as she never had before. Automatically, she sniffed the milk cartonbefore she flicked on the electric kettle for tea. A small note pinned against the fridge door caught her eye. Her mother had a podiatry appointment later today. Heather would have to ring and cancel it before the visiting chiropodist arrived at the front door. At this moment, she couldn’t cope with having to talk to anyone and hear some stranger telling her empty lies that her mother would be missed.

She left a message for the podiatrist, explaining that her mother had died and that she had no need of her services any more. Then she made a cup of tea which unnervingly tasted just as tea had when she was a teenager living in this house. Was her mother still buying the same tea bags? Perhaps the water pipes had so much lead in them that they gave everything a sort of peppery taste.

It didn’t matter. She took the tea to the table and sat there for a while looking out at the back yard. It was a bleak rectangle of crumbling brick and peeling paint. Heather couldn’t remember having seen so much as a robin outside her mother’s kitchen window in all the years she’d lived here. Her mother always said,what bird in their right mind would want to live in Fulham?

It was all so different to the Chelsea flat she’d shared with Philip for most of their marriage. Heather had loved that ground-floor flat. It was her home for twenty years. She’d tended the little back garden lovingly, cultivating not just a sea of flowers in the summer but a year-round haven for city birds that visited from the park nearby.

The flat was sold now. For less than five minutes she had considered buying out Philip’s share, but in the end, as much as she had loved living there, she couldn’t imagine just carrying on alone. Somehow, the idea of it being just her there made how they’d ended up feel even more depressing. For the last few weeks, she’d been staying in a shoebox flat in Battersea. It was meant to be temporary, just somewhere to catch her breath;most of her belongings were in storage at this point. She was drifting, looking for something or somewhere to drop anchor. It was now obvious to her that apart from a mother who hardly wanted her near for longer than it took to say the rosary, there was nothing to keep her in this city any more. The only thing stopping her booking a one-way flight out of it was she had no idea where she wanted to go.

It was while she was thinking about the lack of birds in the garden that her phone rang. Her friend Ruth. Oh, God, she’d forgotten that she’d promised to meet for coffee this morning.

‘Where are you?’ Ruth sounded as if she was already sitting in the coffee shop with tea and croissants waiting for her.

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