Started Early, Took My Dog (30 page)

Dropped off in front of the telly. She had been watching
Britain’s Got Talent
and then she must have fallen asleep because the next thing Tilly knew she’d woken herself up with her own snoring.
Pnorr, pnorrr, pnorrrgh!
She jerked awake, felt her heart trip. These little evening snoozes were going to be the death of her.

She was confused. What was on the box now seemed real, not television at all. There was Saskia aiming a gun at someone and shouting, ‘Drop it or I’ll shoot!’ but she could hear Saskia moving about upstairs in the bathroom, the sound of running water. She was forever saying how dirty the cottage was and did Tilly actually know how to clean. ‘Filth everywhere,’ she said. For some reason Tilly imagined filth as a person, a man in an old-fashioned brown mackintosh, greasy and stained – a trilby shading his face. He lurked around a corner, waiting to jump out and flash her. Tilly had encountered a few like that in Soho in the old days, hanging round the back of the mucky bookshops and the strip joints. She had been propositioned a couple of times too. Tilly hadn’t been tempted, even when she was hungry for a crust. She knew for a fact that Phoebe, Dame Phoebe, had gone off for a weekend on a yacht with some rich nabob. The man looked like a frog. She came back with diamonds. Draw your own conclusions.

Yesterday Saskia had silently presented Tilly with a mat of soapy hair from the bath plughole. Enough to make a wig from. She was holding the hair on a piece of loo roll as if it was a dangerous spider about to attack her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘maybe you could, um, clear up after yourself ?’

It was just a bit of hair, for heaven’s sake. People were funny about things like that. Phoebe couldn’t abide toenails, her own or other people’s. That woman went for a pedicure every single month, never cut her own toenails, not once! ‘Nanny used to do it for me,’ she said, when they were first living in Soho.

Tilly took the hair reluctantly from Saskia. ‘Oh dear, I appear to be moulting,’ she said, trying to muster some dignity.

And then suddenly Tilly was looking at herself, as if the television were a mirror. A cruel, distorting mirror. She looked terrible. Overweight, mad. That awful Brillo wig. Of course, she was watching
Collier
, she realized that. She hadn’t entirely lost her marbles. Yet.

On screen, she was pottering around a kitchen, putting a roast dinner in front of Vince Collier, telling him he didn’t eat properly, that he needed to settle down with a nice girl. Tilly had never made a roast dinner in her life. ‘Don’t nag, Mum,’ Vince said. ‘You know you’re the only woman for me.’

To be honest, she didn’t look well. Intimations of mortality. Time’s wingèd chariot and all that. She wasn’t ready to die yet. She imagined Phoebe giving the oration at her funeral, talking about her ‘dear friend’, everyone sad for five minutes. She would be a footnote for a few years and then nothing. An unsatisfactory afterlife on Alibi and ITV3. Mind you, she had, apparently, already joined the ranks of the might-be-deads. There was a woman on set the other day, Tilly had no idea who she was, a journalist probably – middle-aged, the gushy sort, wide-eyed and faux-innocent. When she was introduced to Tilly she said, ‘Gosh, I thought you were dead!’ Just like that. How rude.

‘Don’t worry, Till,’ Julia said. ‘I put a nasty curse on her. She’ll be dead long before you.’

Julia was nice, like a normal person. More or less. Knew how to have a conversation, didn’t just talk
at
you, like everyone else seemed to do. And Julia always had something interesting to say, which is more than you could say for poor Saskia who, when it came right down to it, was only interested in herself. Her photo had been in the
Mail
last week, awful rag, on the arm of a man – some rugby player – coming out of a restaurant. ‘
Collier
star Saskia Bligh.’ Showed it to everyone. Twittering on about it. Twitter! Her phone was never out of her hand. She twittered, she said, ‘Do you?’ Showed Tilly on her phone. A technological step too far. Tilly didn’t even know how to turn a computer on, wrong generation, of course. Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing – getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?

‘Tweets,’ Saskia said. Well exactly. Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. People couldn’t cope with empty space any more, they had to fill it up with anything that came to hand. There was a time when people kept their thoughts to themselves. Tilly liked that time. They had a blue budgerigar when she was small. Tweety-pie. It was hard to be fond of a budgerigar. Her father accidentally stood on it. Her mother said she didn’t see how you could stand on a budgerigar. Too late now to get to the bottom of what had really happened. Tilly wanted to bury it but Father put it on the fire. A pyre. She could still see its little body, the feathers flaring. She hadn’t particularly liked the bird but she had felt sorry for it and gave some time over to crying for it. Shame. Tilly didn’t want to be cremated. Thrown on the fire. She should write that down somewhere, make a will, make it clear. She’d had a horror of fire ever since Hull was bombed when she was a child. Although, of course, being buried alive would be no fun either.

Marjorie Collier was knitting now, waiting for Vince to phone her. The camera kept well away from the actual knitting. Tilly had no idea how to knit so she did a lot of sighing and resting of the needles on her lap. She was pleased with how convincing it looked. It was all pretence. Acting was, let’s face it, just plain daft. Everything was daft these days. Everything was pretence. Nothing was real any more. Baseless fabric. And so on.

Came to with a start again and struggled into a sitting position and put the bedside light on. Clambered out of bed, shuffled into her slippers and went downstairs. Sat for a while at the table, she was sure she was looking for something but she couldn’t remember what. There was a fruit bowl on the table, apples and bananas rotting quietly. Saskia never ate and Tilly forgot to. She’d offered Saskia a Polo mint yesterday and she recoiled as if Tilly was peddling heroin.

She was hungry. Fancied something delicious. Douglas used to take her for afternoon tea at the Dorchester sometimes. Lovely.

Surely something could be done about the little suffering children. All of them. Tilly would lead a crusade, the children’s crusade, no, that was something different, wasn’t it? Fighting the infidel. You still saw it, boy soldiers in Africa, she’d seen a programme on the telly. It used to be the Arabs who were the infidels, now it was us. She picked up an apple, the skin was wrinkled and it felt soft in her hand. Decomposing. That was what was happening to her mind. It was decomposing.

‘Jesus, Tilly,’ Saskia said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am baking,’ Tilly announced grandly. ‘In fact, I am making a cake.’

‘You’re covered in flour,’ Saskia said. ‘The kitchen’s covered in flour. Every single pot and pan is out. It looks like a bomb’s gone off in here.’

‘Oh no, I can assure you bombs make much more mess,’Tilly said. ‘I was in Hull, you know, during the war.’

‘Do you know what time it is, Tilly?’

Tilly looked at the kitchen clock. ‘It’s three o’clock,’ she said helpfully. Teatime. A nice pot of tea and a dainty slice of cake would go down a treat. Mother was a good baker, an excellent pastry hand and made lovely sponge cakes, soft as clouds. Mother despaired of Tilly in the kitchen.
You’ll never get a husband if you can’t cook
. Well, she’d show her. Invite her round for tea and—

‘Three in the
morning
, Tilly,’ Saskia said crossly. ‘Three o’clock in the
morning
.’

‘Ah,’ Tilly murmured. ‘I thought it was awfully dark.’ She found that she had tears running down her demented old cheeks. It was the beginning of the end.

He fell asleep and then woke from a nightmare. In the nightmare he was being chased by a torso, the headless, limbless body of a woman, part Venus de Milo, part dressmaker’s dummy. Jackson knew that really it was his sister. It was always his sister. She might be incorporeal now but she lived vividly in his dreams.

Jackson’s sister had been saving up for a dummy when she died. Niamh had made a lot of her own clothes. Jackson could still remember the evening dress she had been making for herself for her firm’s Christmas do. She had come to Leeds to buy the emerald green satin material. The dress was knee-length and she had stood on the kitchen table in the shoes she planned to wear and made Jackson pin up the hem. He had circled around her, measuring from the table-top to her knee, using the smooth triangle of tailor’s chalk from her sewing basket to mark the dress with little crosses.

He had experienced a strange, intimate acquaintance with both the emerald satin and his sister’s legs encased in fine-denier stockings. Their mother, not one given to compliments, never having received any herself, used to comment occasionally on Niamh’s lovely figure and shapely legs. Jackson’s mother, their father said, had legs like bedposts. If their mother hadn’t been dead for six months she would have been the one pinning up the hem. ‘A girl needs her mother,’ Niamh said, and because she was sad he didn’t say, ‘So does a boy.’ And anyway she knew that.

‘This will be easier when I have a dummy,’ she said, twirling around, trying to see the hem. Jackson thought a dummy was something that you sucked. Or one of his brother’s friends. ‘No,’ Niamh laughed, ‘a dressmaker’s dummy. You adjust it so it has your measurements.’

The dress wasn’t finished when she died, the hem still tacked with big white stitches. It hung on the back of her bedroom door, flat and limp without her body to inhabit it, as if she had suddenly been made invisible. Which she had, of course. Jackson’s brother, Francis, said, ‘Shame she didn’t finish it, she would have liked to have been buried in it.’ And then he said, ‘What t’fuck am I talking about, Jackson?
Shame?
What kind of a nancy word is that? Shame she’s dead, more like,’ and he threw the dress on the fire where it burned up so much more quickly than Jackson would have expected. Too quickly, certainly, for him to snatch it back from the flames.

Jackson had gone to view Niamh’s body in the undertakers. She was wearing a shroud like an old-fashioned nightdress. It came right up to her chin so you couldn’t see the marks on her neck where she’d been strangled. Nonetheless her face looked wrong, as if the corpse was pretending to be his sister and not making a very good job of it. The shroud wasn’t something she would have chosen to wear. His sister liked smart, old-fashioned clothes, high heels, soft sweaters, knee-length pencil skirts.

He had had a couple of old photographs in which she didn’t look like herself either, but not in the same way that her corpse had felt alien. He didn’t know what had happened to the photographs. Gone in the fire, he assumed. When he lived in Cambridge, after Josie left him, his house had been destroyed by an explosion. (Again, the résumé of his life more exciting than the extended version.)

Niamh would have looked much nicer buried in that green dress. Nobody would have been able to see that it wasn’t finished.

When he left home a handful of years after her death, the only thing of his sister’s that Jackson still had in his possession was a small pottery wishing well that said, ‘Wishing you Well from Scarborough’. Niamh had been on a day trip with a group of friends and had brought it back for him. Presents were all the more precious for being almost unheard of in his family. The British Museum had intact pots that had survived for thousands of years but not a shard of the wishing well remained now, the explosion having taken care of that too.

He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, knowing that sleep would be a long time returning. He wondered what the woman he slept with last night was doing at that moment. Perhaps she was out on the town again with her gaggle of friends, or, more probably, she was at home with the owner of the skateboard, fast asleep having sorted out packed lunches and school uniforms, preparing for another working day. Jackson felt a stab of guilt that he hadn’t said goodbye, but had slipped away like a fox from a henhouse. Although what difference would it have made? Really?

From the other bed came a companionable kind of canine snoring from his new partner. Let sleeping dogs lie, he thought.

His phone buzzed and he fumbled for the light by the bed.

It was a message from Hope McMaster in tomorrow’s world –
OMG, where did you get that photo?! It’s me, I’m sure of it. HAVE YOU FOUND OUT SOMETHING?? WHO AM I??!!!!

Not yet
, he replied, rather tersely.
Sit tight, don’t get excited
. He didn’t want to be responsible for Hope McMaster going into a premature labour brought on by exclamation marks. Jackson realized, rather late in the day, that perhaps he shouldn’t have drip fed information to her, allowing her anxiety room to bloom as each new mystery revealed itself. Better to have presented the whole thing at the end, tied up with a big red satin ribbon –
Surprise, you are in fact a true descendant of the Romanovs!
(And no, this had never happened to one of Jackson’s clients.) The way things were going, he would never be able to tell Hope McMaster who she was, only who she wasn’t.