‘No,’ I replied, pulling out a tray of carrot muffins I’d decided to make. ‘How awful.’
‘She’s been dying for about thirty years. I thought she was already dead.’
Fiona Wilkins; a novelist who was not as good as Connie, but immensely popular and absolutely loaded, thanks to a series of novels based on a nun-detective called Giovanna, battling the Pope and his assassins in sixteenth-century Rome. It had been a long-running TV series. I hadn’t seen the TV version, but I’d loved every one of the books. Fiona Wilkins; who had lived near to Connie, had probably tried to be friends, and clearly failed, miserably.
‘I wish I’d written a nun-detective,’ said Connie. ‘Still, you can’t take your royalties to Heaven. Or maybe you can? Poor Fiona Wilkins. We’re all bloody dying.’
‘You’re not.’
‘I am. Still, she was older than me, at least. Could you make some tea? Did you get yourself a chocolate bar from the tin?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, for god’s sake, Laura.’
‘I don’t like chocolate.’
‘Who doesn’t like chocolate? Did I know this about you?’
‘It wasn’t in the interview,’ I said, and she chuckled.
I turned on the kettle. ‘Do you know she had six children?’ said Connie. She’d finished the Lion bar, and had moved on to a Bounty. I worried briefly about the risk of diabetes. ‘Six fucking children. And where are they now?’
‘Probably at her bedside?’
‘And her husband was useless. No wonder every novel was the same.’
‘I liked them.’
‘What?’
‘I thought they were very readable! And well researched,’ I said. ‘And actually they were all quite different.’
‘The nun solved everything in the end?’
‘Yes.’
‘And got into scrapes, but always made it?’
‘Of course.’
Connie sniffed. ‘Repetition does take talent. Perhaps we should send flowers.’
‘I can organize that,’ I said.
‘All right. You do that.’
Connie sighed. She could be an old lady when she was tired. Almost. Her eyes couldn’t keep their brightness, her caustic wit was quiet. I felt suddenly guilty as to why I had sought her out, the answers I was planning to extract from her. And I wondered: how many books were left inside that mind? I realized I would like to read Connie’s version of Giovanna the nun-detective. It would have been spectacular. But it was probably too late.
‘She wrote that dreadful memoir,’ Connie said. ‘What was it called? Writing My Wrongs, or something. Christ. What’s your take on memoirs?’ she asked. ‘Do you like reading them?’
‘Depends whose memoir it is,’ I said, bringing the mugs of tea to the kitchen table. ‘I don’t like the “long life lived” kind.’ I placed Connie’s steaming mug of tea before her.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Please use coasters. I hate watermarks.’
‘Of course,’ I said, hastily laying out two cork coasters. She hates watermarks, but every mug is tatty as hell, I thought.
‘Aren’t they all dreadfully confessional?’ she said. ‘Self-absorbed?’
‘It’s sort of a requirement that they’re self-absorbed, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Not if they say something to the reader.’
‘I don’t think people would identify with what I’d have to share,’ she said.
I gripped my mug. ‘Why not?’
‘Well. I suppose I don’t really mean that. What I really mean is that I don’t want to share.’
‘I’m sure you’ve been through a lot,’ I said. ‘Met a lot of people.’
Connie narrowed her eyes. ‘I’d never write about it. It’s why I’m writing a novel.’
I hesitated, but decided to speak. ‘I suppose there’s the problem you might get sued if you write from real life. Things could come out of the woodwork.’
‘Oh, that wouldn’t happen to me,’ said Connie. ‘Everyone I want to write about is probably dead.’
A shiver went through my stomach. ‘You’re the last one standing?’ I said.
Connie looked at me. ‘Something like that.’
*
She wanted us to move to the front room, to go through her invoices. Connie did not do Internet banking; unbelievably, she was still sending cheques. I built up a fire – Oh, I haven’t had one of these in over two years! – and it felt practically Dickensian. I enjoyed poring over her purchases, the simple bills she paid as a citizen of the United Kingdom: telephone, water, council, gas. I noted with interest that she gave generously to homelessness charities, literacy programmes and guide-dog training. I tried to divine from these facts some clue about my mother – had Elise been without a home once? Had Connie found her on the streets and taught her how to read? Had my mother then gone blind and found the change untenable? Stop, I said to myself. Patience. Realism. Take your time.
Connie, it seemed, liked good wine and good solid shoes, but she didn’t spend her money much otherwise. I looked at her, her face deep in concentration as she tried her best to do a decent signature in her chequebook, and wondered how on earth this situation was going to play out. Was I actually going to sit and take her dictation, like some sort of clerk from the 1940s? I thought of Zoë’s disappointed face when I told her I was leaving the coffee shop; Joe’s and Kelly’s looks of unease as I told them the details of this new job. The woman who knew your mum? Are you sure that’s a good idea?
Of course I wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea. But I knew that despite the precariousness of my deception, one day in Connie’s house felt more exciting and full of potential than three months’ worth of shifts at a coffee shop. When I stepped into Connie’s house, wasn’t I a woman called Laura Brown – who, once upon a time, had worked in Costa Rica and had dreams of returning there one day? Laura had seen a jaguar, Laura had been to a sloth sanctuary. Laura was going to be energetic, confident, a brilliant baker of carrot muffins. Joe was just being disapproving because for once, I had had the crazy idea, I was the one who had dared to step outside our normal boundaries of behaviour.
*
That first week I hoovered, polished, dusted and cleaned, gaining access to all the other spaces I normally wouldn’t go in. In the drawing room I picked up burnished photo frames, the pictures inside them quaint sepia windows onto another time – a mother in a forties blazer, a sprig pinned to her breast. A father, I supposed, in military garb. Connie as an infant, another small boy by her side. Their eyes soft, their minds unfathomable. In Connie’s bathroom I eyed her masks, the bounty of creams and serums; her expensive mascara and lipstick cases that looked like ammunition in a personal war. One morning, I gently dabbed my own mouth with the shades of Apricot Dream and Harlot’s Red – before wiping away the evidence with a piece of loo roll.
I ran my hands over her bathrobe; silk but nearly worn through in places, which simply added to its charm. Then her jewels, carelessly mounded in a large ceramic dish rimmed with a coiling serpent: beads of coral, Mexican silver, Edwardian gold studded with small rubies, silver earrings in the shape of laurel leaves. I felt as if I had been blind – or deprived of some sort of sense, at least – and was learning to see again, to smell, to touch my way into my mother’s past. Yet I had not come across any photographs of an adult Connie, or another woman, and neither could I find any letters or documentation. I held fast to the hope, or perhaps the belief, that I would eventually find something in this house that would lead me to Elise.