The Flavours of Love (7 page)

*

Another office, another person who is uncomfortable, tense, shuffling papers and repeatedly clearing their throat in front of me.

What’s going to happen now? Is this woman going to tell me that Joel’s sixty-six-year-old Aunty Betty is pregnant, too?

Felicia Laureau finally sits back in her big black leather armchair, and faces me properly with a strained smile. Her bobbed hair is like a silver-white curtain across and around her face, she is small, round and distinctly curvy, but dressed well in a form-flattering pale grey suit.

Like the headteacher, she’s nervous about talking to me, not only because of what she’s got to tell me, but because she doesn’t know how to talk to someone like me, the woman whose husband was murdered. I’d imagine this nursing home is filled with widows, women whose husbands died and left them alone, but how many of them were bereaved in the same way as I was? Were any of them forever
saddled with the image of a large kitchen knife entering their husband’s stomach, and him bleeding to death an hour or so later on the side of a road they’d never been down before? If any of them were like me, then this woman would be awful to be around. She’d be uncomfortable, unnerving and most of all, fake.

‘Mrs Mackleroy, it’s good to see you,’ she says brightly.

I sigh. ‘It probably isn’t, is it?’ I sigh again, a deep exasperated sigh. I’ve spent the morning stopping Zane from winding up Phoebe, sitting in the doctor’s office while Phoebe told her GP nothing and then intervening when Phoebe began freaking out at the idea of taking folic acid and going for an early scan. This was followed by driving around the M25, something I avoid wherever possible, to get here. ‘Sorry, but I can’t think of a single, realistic reason why you’d call me to come in at such short notice if it was going to involve good news.’

Mrs Laureau’s features twitch, fluttering as if out of control, especially around the mouth area. With horror, I realise she’s trying to arrange her face into a sympathetic, gentle smile – something that clearly doesn’t come easily to her. ‘You’re right, of course,’ she replies. ‘This isn’t going to be an easy meeting.’

‘Where is she, anyway?’ I ask. I had genuinely expected to find Aunty Betty sitting in a chair in the same position as Phoebe had adopted in the headteacher’s office, waiting to have someone tell me what she’d done. ‘I thought she’d be here.’

‘We thought it best we talk first without her,’ Mrs Laureau says.

‘Why, what did she do?’

‘We’ve tried to make allowances,’ she says gently, ‘since, since the events of … Since your husband … Since …’

I am meant to leap into this sea of discomfort she’s in to rescue her, stop her floundering by supplying
Since my husband died
, but I’m not going to. I’m going to stay where I am, nice and dry, and wait for her to wreak havoc on me as she’s about to do. People like Mrs Laureau never need to see you unless they want more money, or they’re about to screw you over, or sometimes, even, both.

Aunty Betty’s face slowly became an intricate picture of disdain and horror when she had fully digested what Joel had said to her.

‘Live with you?’ she spat in disgust. ‘
Live
with
you
? You don’t smoke, you barely drink, I’m still not certain if you actually ever do the do, even though you have two children. Always wondered if that was turkey-baster-assisted. If I live with you, I might as well get down to the nearest cemetery and start digging my own hole.’ She frowned sternly at Joel, then cast her expression at me. ‘You don’t want me living in your house. I’m selfish, rude and messier than that pink squiggle thing in those children’s books. I wouldn’t wish me on my worst enemy.’

Joel seemed deflated, the worry of the situation rested heavily on his shoulders. He’d thought the best thing would be for Aunty Betty to live with us after her accident. A few days ago she’d slipped in the shower, fallen and knocked herself out. She’d woken up with a hairline fracture to her left hip and, because she’d always lived on her own, had screamed her way through the blinding pain she was in to drag herself out of the bathroom, along the carpeted corridor to the bedroom to get to her phone. She couldn’t live on her own any more. We all knew and accepted that. Joel’s solution was to ask her to live with us.

‘Admit it, you don’t want me living with you, do you, Saff-aron?’ Aunty Betty was appealing to me because she knew I’d be able to convince Joel it was a bad idea.

‘Of course we want you to live with us,’ I replied, because we did. We loved her and wanted her to be safe. Joel and I had both been shaken and tearful at the thought of her being alone and in pain.

She laughed bitterly. Shook her head. ‘You two are out of your tiny minds, you know. I want to get into one of those nursing homes with my own flat, see if I can meet some nice widowers who’ll spend their weekly allowance showing me a good time.’

‘You really want to go to a nursing home?’ I asked.

She grinned and nodded mischievously. I wasn’t sure if Joel could see that despite the smile, despite her rejection of our offer, she was terrified. Of the encroaching years, of having to drag herself naked to get help because of the choices she’d made in her life. The flames of pride burned in her eyes, though. She made no apologies about the way she’d lived her life, you only had to spend a few minutes in her company to realise she’d enjoyed every single second of it, and she wanted that independence for as long as possible. Living with us would be a slow, lingering death by boredom. I could understand that. When you’ve travelled all over the world, when you’ve been one of the first black women to have a starring role in a West End play, when you remind anyone who’ll listen that you’re better-looking than Eartha Kitt ever was, when you’ve told the world every day for sixty-odd years that you’ll do things your way, thank you very much, the last thing you want to do is live in a four-bedroom house in Brighton with Mr and Mrs Boring and their two children. Independent living when there was someone around to help if she needed it let us all pretend that she could still be whoever she wanted to be no matter how old she was.

Over five weekends, Joel and I took it in turns to pack up her flat. We put most of it into storage, and she moved into Rose Bay Manor three months later.

*

‘As I said, Mrs Mackleroy, we’ve tried to be understanding, but we feel it’s time for your aunt to move on,’ Felicia Laureau says. Sandy Fields is the third home she’s been in. The others didn’t ‘work out’.

‘What did she do?’ I ask again as I wonder how much it would cost to make the ‘moving on’ go away. In the last home, she’d got into a fist-fight with another resident because she didn’t like the way the woman had looked at her. Aunty Betty neglected to mention that she’d flouted every single piece of dating etiquette when she moved in. The poor woman who’d punched Aunty Betty had been quietly and carefully working long-term on a widower with cups of
tea, afternoon walks, listening to Radio 4 together. Within days of Aunty Betty moving in, she’d asked him whether he was going to buy her a drink, and had basically been dating him ever since. That had cost us quite a lot of money to make it go away and to suppress potential assault charges even though Aunty Betty was technically only defending herself.

‘Maybe it’d be easier to list what she didn’t do,’ Mrs Laureau says without a shred of humour.

‘I see.’

‘The incident that inspired this call, however, was her being caught having …
intimate relations
with another resident in one of the out-of-bounds areas of the main complex.’

‘Oh, God,’ I sigh.

‘The member of staff who caught them was most upset.’

‘Old people have sex you know,’ I said, channelling, it seems, my inner Aunty Betty, ignoring the fact it would permanently traumatise me if I walked into a room and found two rutting people – whatever their age.

‘Yes, but in private, you would think,’ she replies, as sour as an unripe Granny Smith apple.

‘What’s going to happen next?’

‘We feel … We have no choice but to ask your aunt to leave.’

‘Leave?’ I reply tiredly. ‘Only her, I take it?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘The man she was caught with, is he being chucked out for not doing it in private or is it just my aunt?’

Mrs Laureau’s eyebrows twiddle themselves into position, as she prepares to put me in my place. She probably tried this with Aunty Betty and got a mouthful. We’ve been here, together, for ten minutes, enough time for a people-watcher like Mrs Laureau to realise that I’m most unlikely to ‘do an Aunty Betty’ no matter what she says to me.

‘If it was merely this “incident” we might be able to overlook it. But in the last three months alone, your aunt has managed to set fire to the rug in her apartment three times, she has roped in half a
dozen residents to try hitchhiking to the next village so they can go to the cinema, and has been spotted walking around with only her bikini top and a mini-skirt when she knows we have a dress code. In short, it’s really quite a miracle that we’ve lasted this long.’

My cheeks are puffed up like over-inflated balloons and I blow out slowly as I exhale my biggest sigh yet. ‘When do you need her out?’ I say. A month should give me enough time to find her a new place; a fortnight would work at a push.

‘She’s just saying her goodbyes and then you can take her home with you.’

‘
Excuse me?

‘Her belongings are packed and ready. Anything we can’t fit into your car, we’ll send on to you, at our expense. And we’ve already agreed we’ll refund this and last month’s fee as a gesture of goodwill.’

‘
What?
’

‘I know this must come as a surprise to you, and believe me, we wanted to tell you sooner, but she insisted this was the best way. She said it would be easier on you after all you’ve been through recently.’

‘And you believed her?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ she replies with a victorious look.

That reply and that expression on her face are payback for not helping her out earlier on. I take another gander around her office: the desk has been polished to an unusually high sheen; all the usual accoutrements of a desk – stapler, mouse mat, pen pot, sellotape holder, contacts box – appear to be new. As if they’ve been very recently replaced, as if someone was attempting to remove all traces of something hideous, like a sixty-six-year-old woman who is the bane of your life having sex on your desk. Aunty Betty did it in here, I’m sure of it.

I really hope it was you who caught them in flagrante delicto
, I think at Mrs Laureau.
It would serve you right
.

‘Your aunt has signed all the necessary paperwork so you don’t have to concern yourself with that.’

‘Right, well, I’d better get on with it, hadn’t I?’ I say to her.

*

That’s the worst thing about all of this, you know, Joel?
I say to him in the darkness of our room, staring at where he should be.
No matter how hard it is, because I’ve got children, because I’ve got people who rely on me, I just have to get on with it
.

*

Aunty Betty plugs her seatbelt clip into its holder, having got into the back seat of my car. They have folded down the seats beside her to jam her belongings in. Her stuff has filled the boot, taken up most of the space in the back, and is piled up on the front passenger seat and footwell, too.

‘You can look as defiant as you like,’ I say to her as she sits, regal and silent, truculent and unrepentant, in the back.

In an expression that is pure Phoebe, she curls her pink, glossed upper lip at me, cuts her black-lined eyes and turns to the window to treat those outside to a full smile. The turnout on this April afternoon is incredible, I’ve never seen so many people show up to say goodbye to anyone who isn’t a celebrity, but here, about sixty people, all of various ages and stages of grey, stand, sit in wheelchairs and lean on walking sticks on the gravel driveway, waving Aunty Betty goodbye.

‘Just so we’re clear,’ I add above the crunch of the tyres on the gravel, ‘you’re going to have to talk to me at some point.’

Imogen and her son, Ernest, are leaving as I pull up outside the house.

They’ve obviously dropped Zane back from school because he will have told them that Phoebe wasn’t in school today. Imogen is always polished, unhurried and calm. She’s a full-time homemaker (her title) and so is always suggesting Zane comes over to hers, that she collects him from school and that he stays over. She started her family young so has a twenty-one-year-old son and an eighteen-year-old son as well as ten-year-old Ernest. The last eighteen months or so, she’s been invaluable with Zane. And with me.

I climb out of my car, as they come off the last step and walk down the short, concrete path. We meet outside the black metal gate, pause on the pavement to talk. Without even glancing in his direction I can feel Ernest’s large green-hazel eyes on me. He always stares at me, mute and suspicious. When he and Zane are together in the living room or upstairs in Zane’s bedroom, or even when they’re in the kitchen and I’m busying myself with something, he’ll talk ten to the dozen. As soon as I engage with them, or I come near them, he clams up and becomes a mute, wide-eyed mannequin.

‘
He’s just scared of you
,’ Zane explained blithely when I asked him about it.

‘
Why?
’ I’d asked.

‘
I don’t know, he just is
,’ Zane replied as if that was an answer.

*

‘Oh, hello,’ Imogen says.

‘Hi.’

Aunty Betty is still ensconced in the car, waiting for me to open the door for her. She’s a princess, after all, and she expects people
to run around after her. I often indulge her, but not today. Today she’s crossed the line and her recalcitrant silence on the journey home has done nothing to endear her to me. ‘Thanks for picking up Zane,’ I say to Imogen. Ernest’s stare doesn’t waver, doesn’t change. ‘I really appreciate it.’

‘It was an absolute pleasure, as always.’ Imogen comes closer to me and lowers her voice, for whose benefit I’m not sure since we are alone on the street. ‘Was everything OK at the school the other day? I’ve just asked Phoebe and she was less than forthcoming.’