“Did she seem OK?”
“Well, yes. I mean, shy. Slightly anxious, edgy, but all young people are like that these days, aren’t they?”
“You’re a young person, Shannon.”
“Not really. Not anymore. I’ll be thirty in eight months.”
“That is young.”
“Yes, but too old to be doing with all that anxiety and whatnot. Just got to get on with it eventually, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Jane agrees heartily. “Yes, you really do.”
“Anyway, I’m free a lot over the summer—I’ve left the spa, going to be focusing more on the dog business from now on, thinking of starting a daycare place. So I’ll be around if you need me, just call me whenever. You know how much I love your boys. And how much I love this house.”
Shannon is obsessed with trashy Victorian literature about rich people in big houses falling on hard times, thus she loves the pandemonium of Rosebery Hall, the peeling wallpaper, broken hall tiles, dusty fireplaces, crumbling ceilings. And she loves Jane’s tragic backstory; the dead parents, the dead brother, the viscount ex-husband with a stately home and half of Gloucestershire to his name. Jane meanwhile craves the clean lines of Shannon’s village apartment, three bedrooms and an open-plan living room above the spa where she sometimes works, lots of windows, a brand-new kitchen, a tiny terrace at the back just big enough for a friend and a bottle of wine. But every time she thinks about the estate agent’s visit last Friday to value Rosebery Hall, Jane’s skin turns clammy, her heart rate picks up. She thinks of the utter essence of herself knitted into every inch of this place and the realization that by selling the house, she will be selling the only thing that remains of what used to be her family, and she will be cast adrift.
“Well, thank you, Shannon. That would be great, actually. My ex Tony, he’s lent me his London place, so I might be away quite a bit over the next couple of weeks. It’d be great if you could stay with the boys.”
“It would be my pleasure,” says Shannon, her face lighting up at the prospect. “Honestly. You barely even need to pay me. Well, obviously, you do need to pay me. But you know what I mean.”
She smiles again at Jane, says goodbye to the dogs, and then Jane is alone, her head a mess of thoughts and feelings and, finally, after a time, the comforting sense that, as Tony so rightly said, there is a job that needs to be done.
There are eight rooms on the ground floor of Jane’s house, but the kitchen and the morning room are the only two that Jane uses. Upstairs she has her parents’ old master suite, a vast twenty-five-square-foot bedroom with William Morris wallpaper, a bay window overlooking the grounds, and an en suite that her grandfather fitted himself that gives Jane the ick every time she uses it; it’s a putrid putty pink, with rusty, leaky taps and a green linoleum that is peeling around the edges. It also smells.
Jane could have used the money from her divorce from Tony to replace the bathroom, but instead she’d given it all to the dog shelter in Spain, washing the decay and humiliation of another failed marriage off her psyche by giving the money away. She’d kept just enough, by her calculations, to live a relatively low-maintenance life until she was ninety. She wishes now she’d kept just a little more. Just enough for a new bathroom, maybe, some new kitchen cabinets. The money from her first husband, the Viscount, she’d spent on saving this stupid house from collapsing. It had gone to scaffolding and girders, breeze blocks, boilers, and roof tiles, and the house had looked exactly the same after spending £400,000 on it as it had before, but less likely to collapse, explode, or flood.
She walks into the grandest of her three living rooms. Even at this pleasant time of year when the last frost of the winter was at least six weeksago, it is cold in this room, cold in its very bones. In here is a portrait that was painted by a friend of her parents’ when she and her brother were about seven or eight. The four of them are posed under a large tree in the front garden, with a dog called Blue whom Jane still feels tearful about when she remembers her death even now, nearly fifty years on. They look like a Hollywood fantasy of a quirky, eccentric British family, with their messy hair, muddy boots, ruddy cheeks, brightly colored knitwear: a Paddington Bear wet dream. But behind the dream were addiction, depression, mental health issues. Behind the dream were bad decisions, dysfunction, and early deaths.
She takes the painting from the wall, blowing away the lace of cobwebs that comes with it. The wallpaper behind is a perfect rectangle of richly colored roses, unfaded by decades of daylight. Jane takes the portrait to the morning room and props it on the sideboard. This, she realizes, is all she needs from Rosebery now. This painting of a moment, which might have been real, but probably wasn’t, and encapsulates everything she thinks she would lose if she sold this house. She would not lose a damp bathroom or a broken ceiling or leaking kitchen tap.
She might just lose herself.
chapter eleven
STUART, TEN YEARS EARLIER
I follow the woman to her child’s school. It’s up a cobbled footpath, behind a church. The tiny playground is set low beneath the path and from the railings outside you can see all the way across London to the shiny skyscrapers of the City: the Shard, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie.
The woman is buzzed into the school building through a small black door. “Hi,” I hear her say, brightly, before the door closes, and I wonder if the school secretary will be able to smell the vodka on her breath, see the glaze on her eyes.
A moment later the woman reappears with a young girl. The girl has dark hair tied into plaits and seems to be about ten years old. She has a bandage around her wrist and looks like she’s been crying.
The girl has, I surmise from listening in to their conversation, sprained her wrist. The girl wants to go to hospital, but the woman says they can’t because she has the dog with her. “We’ll need to go home first.”
“But I want to go to hospital now. It hurts so much.”
“But we can’t, Daisy. Dogs aren’t allowed in the hospital. We have to go home.”
“Why didn’t you take him home first?” The girl called Daisy is crying again.
“Because I was panicking. I didn’t think.”
“You never think,” says the girl through her tears. “You never do.”
“Look, let’s just go home. We can give you some medicine, drop the dog off, and then I’ll get us an Uber to the hospital. OK?”
“Why can’t you drive us?”
