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  ‘What happened to the suggestion that Gaby might offer you—’

  ‘Nothing,’ Stacey said. She turned towards the sink and began washing a saucepan that stood soaking in it.

  ‘But, Stace . . .’

  ‘She wouldn’t talk about it. I don’t know what was going on, but it was a no-no as far as Gaby was concerned. And Melissa’s in a state about something of her own, and I think Beth and Claire are splitting up. All these years together, the house and everything. I don’t know what it’s about and, quite honestly, I’m too bothered and exhausted to involve myself. So, in answer to your question, I haven’t really told them, I haven’t really talked to them, and even if they could help, or wanted to, they can’t, because of their own stuff.’ She banged the washed pan down on the draining board. ‘We’re all on our own in the end, Steve. That’s what it comes down to.’

  Steve’s heart smote him. His Stacey. His adored Stacey with her modest face and manner reduced to this angry travesty who needed a haircut and a reason to respect herself again. He said, unhappily, ‘Sweetheart, please . . .’

  He came up behind her and put his arms around her, holding her against his chest. She looked down at his ironed blue cotton shirtsleeves with their double cuffs and cufflinks, across the folds of her ratty old sweater. And then, yet again, and despising herself for doing it, she began to cry.

  ——

  They gave up the idea of Mum living on the top floor. She had taken, not just to rattling the bolt on the safety gate, but to moaning, in a low steady monotone, like an afflicted cow, which she could keep up for hours. So Stacey summoned the removal company who had shifted Mum’s furniture from the Holloway flat, and they carried all the furniture down to the ground floor, and took the contents of Stacey and Steve’s sitting room up to the top of the house.

  It made a small improvement in Mum’s mood. She would at least sit for periods of time in front of the television, with Bruno beside her, his head heavy on her feet. The nights were now less disturbed with the addition of sleeping pills to the regime, and, at Steve’s insistence, a carer from a local agency came in most days to cajole Mum into the shower. Stacey was persistently reluctant.

  ‘I should be doing it, I should – it’s the least I can do after all she’s done for me.’

  ‘And ruin whatever dignity is left in your relationship? Would she want that? If she was still in her right mind, would she want you to see her like that?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Would you want me to shower you? Would you?’

  ‘No, but I—’

  ‘Think of her pride, Stacey. Think of her.’

  ‘Suppose I want to?’

  He regarded her for a moment and then he said, bravely, ‘But you don’t.’

  She didn’t. She felt terrible about it, but she didn’t. She didn’t want Mum sleeping in her sitting room, or to have her whole house overtaken by this dreadful adversity, so that nobody visited and she was trapped in there despite it having become, almost overnight it seemed, somewhere alien. Sometimes, tiredly washing something or disinfecting something yet again, she wondered what she would have done if Jeff Dodds had readily agreed to her flexible working plan, or if she had not reacted so impulsively, and tried not to think that it would have made the whole Mum tragedy so much more bearable and manageable, because she would have had to leave the house now and then, and she would have had to have professional help from outside. If Jeff Dodds had agreed, she would not, all of a sudden, have become the prisoner of a role and a routine that was, she couldn’t help thinking, seldom required by society of a man.

  It was hard, too, not to now see Steve as a man before she considered him as a human. He had said to her, after the first few shocking days of Mum being with them, that he saw his task as being to support Stacey in every way he could. He was fond of his mother-in-law, and saddened by her condition, but it wasn’t right that he should do more for her than was consistent with their past relationship, and their genders. It was Stacey who concerned him, he said, Stacey who needed not to worry about money, or household administration, or the general maintenance of their lives. He would earn, pay bills, clear the gutters, take out the rubbish, worm the dog. He would sit with Mum so that Stacey could take a shower in peace. He would order takeaways when she was too tired or frazzled to cook. He would collect the dry cleaning and phone the council to say that a rat had been spotted near the empty house next door. But he wouldn’t do a single intimate thing for Mum, and nor should Stacey. She might be shocked by the violent upheaval in her life the last month, but she was not to divert the magnificent energies that had built her career into a wholly mistaken notion of duty and obligation. He was quite clear about it.

  But he could still physically leave. Every morning, showered and wearing a crisply laundered shirt and a suit, he could open the front door and slam it behind him. He was free to stride down Liverpool Road to the bus that would take him to the City, and to an office block with an atrium foyer, a respectful receptionist, silent banks of lifts, and the unutterable luxury of business preoccupations. Once a month, in addition, he could also now enter the boardroom, and sit round a huge blond wood table with eleven other people, to be called upon, now and then, by the chairman, to give his views or express his priorities. When he got home from those meetings, he told Stacey all about them. He asked if she approved of what he had said. He made it plain that he thought her present predicament was only temporary. He was as kind and supportive and encouraging as anyone could reasonably be expected to be, but from where Stacey currently stood, endlessly knocked over by the random waves of Mum’s dementia, she could only battle against her resentment, fight against feelings of injustice and anger, and, most days, worn down by the strain and the shame and the misery, lose.

  ——

  It was just an impulse to ring Beth. It wasn’t the result of thinking that Beth’s academic training might be insightful, or that Beth’s reported relationship problems might make her a fellow traveller in emotional wretchedness, but just an impulse. It had been a bad afternoon, in which the visiting carer had had to give up trying to give Mum a shower, and Bruno had been inexplicably sick, on a rug rather than on a stone floor, and Steve had rung to say he was going to have to take a client out for dinner that evening, and Stacey just found herself, mobile in hand, dialling Beth’s number. The ringtone went straight to voicemail, and as Stacey took a breath to leave some kind of confused message, Beth’s voice cut in.

  ‘Stacey?’

  ‘Oh hi, oh hello, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Stacey,’ Beth said, in quite a different tone, ‘are you OK? No. Scrub that. You are plainly not OK.’

  ‘I am, I am, I’m fine.’

  ‘You sound awful.’

  ‘So do you. Actually.’

  ‘Well, I’m better. Marginally better. On the scale of awfulness, I’ve crept from ten to about eight. Seven on a good day.’

  ‘I’m so glad to hear you,’ Stacey said, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Beth?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m going mad. I think I’m going mad.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not. In fact, that’s part of the trouble.’

  ‘I heard about your trouble. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Can you come?’ Stacey said suddenly.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘When you can. Later. But today.’

  ‘I’m not very good company.’

  Stacey gave a little yelp of laughter. ‘Join the club!’

  ‘I’d love to see you. I really would. I wanted – I wanted to see all of you. But I just somehow couldn’t, not after . . .’

  ‘No. Of course not. But can you come? Can you come later? Can you?’ She could hear Beth thinking. She squeezed her eyes shut. If I don’t breathe till she speaks, she’ll say yes.

  ‘Yes,’ Beth said at last. ‘Of course. I’ll see you later.’

  ——

 
Beth brought a bottle of wine and a bag of plums from the tree they had discovered gallantly continuing to fruit under all the rubbish in the yard behind Wilkes Street. She looked gaunt, Stacey thought, and all of her forty-seven years, with her famously dark hair brushed back severely and wearing a black trouser suit only marginally enlivened by the black and grey striped shirt underneath it. She stepped into the hall, put down the wine and the plums, and took Stacey in her arms for a long embrace. It was only after several moments of this that Stacey realized she was crying.

  ‘I’m sorry I look so awful,’ Stacey said, pulling away just slightly.

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I do, Bethie. I look just as beaten up as I feel.’

  Beth put the backs of her hands against her eyes and sniffed. She said, slightly muffled, ‘Where’s your mother?’

  Stacey indicated the closed sitting-room door. ‘In there. With the dog. He’ll be busting to greet you. But he’s on Mum-sitting duty, which luckily he takes very seriously.’

  Beth gave a wan smile. ‘A useful male, for once, then.’

  ‘The males in my life,’ Stacey said as if needing to assert something, ‘are wonderful.’

  ‘Actually,’ Beth said, finding a tissue in her pocket and blowing her nose, ‘my recent experiences indicate to me that good and bad conduct is more a matter of humanity and genetics than gender.’

  There was a scrabbling at the far side of the sitting-room door. ‘Bruno,’ Stacey said, in explanation.

  She opened the door wide enough for Bruno to squirm through and begin his ecstatic welcome ritual on the floor. Beth bent to greet him, and then straightened to glance beyond him into the room. Mum was hunched in a chair, slightly collapsed sideways, asleep, with the television blaring.

  ‘Oh, Stacey . . .’

  ‘I know. She looks a hundred.’

  ‘But I remember such a different, energetic—’

  ‘I know,’ Stacey repeated. ‘It’s been three months since the diagnosis. Three months from that person to this.’ She was still holding the door. ‘Back you go,’ she said to Bruno. ‘Guard duty, remember?’

  Beth touched Stacey’s arm. ‘You poor thing. You poor, poor thing.’

  Stacey closed the door again behind Bruno and headed for the basement stairs. ‘Let’s open your bottle. I never used to drink except at weekends, then I drank far too much when all this first blew up, then I stopped again in case it was making everything worse. Now, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing about anything.’

  Beth followed her down the stairs to the basement kitchen, with its glass doors at the far end giving on to a patio and steps up to the lawn above. Stacey indicated a sofa in front of a wall-mounted television screen flanked by bookshelves.

  ‘Sit, you. We live down here now that Mum’s got the ground floor. It’s insane, really, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know what is or isn’t insane any more,’ Beth said sadly. ‘I think one knows what is convenient for oneself, but never what works for other people.’

  Stacey came across the room and handed Beth a couple of wine glasses. ‘Hold those while I pull the cork. Steve would congratulate you on bringing wine with a cork. He’s worried about all the cork-tree farmers if we all buy wine with screw tops. Beth, do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘Not really. But thank you.’

  ‘What I meant was, do talk about it if you feel you’d like to. I’m not prying, but I’d love to be distracted.’

  Beth looked at the glasses she held. She said, ‘I don’t think it’s very distracting. It’s too much of a cliché. It all boiled down to my being too old for her, too wrapped up in my work, too materialistic apparently, insufficiently spontaneous and pretty dull. You could have written the script.’

  Stacey wound a corkscrew carefully down into the neck of the bottle, holding it between her knees. ‘Did you see it coming?’

  ‘Not really. I could make a pattern now, of course, with hindsight, but at the time it blew up, all I was trying to do was to get her to tell me why she had withheld something I needed to know.’

  ‘Had she?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beth said. She held out the glasses so Stacey could pour wine into them. ‘For quite a long time.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘The trust thing. You know?’

  ‘That is why,’ Stacey said, setting the bottle down and moving to take a glass from Beth and to sit beside her, ‘I have Mum here. I can’t fault her for being trustworthy. Never could. My greatest champion.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Beth looked down into her wine. ‘It gives you confidence, being trusted.’

  Stacey leaned back and groaned. ‘Oh God, Bethie. Confidence . . .’

  Beth turned to look at her. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I might blub. I blub all the time at the moment. I never used to.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘Is it hormones? The menopause and stuff? It’s awful, whatever it is. It seems to take nothing to set me off. I have never, ever, felt this – helpless.’

  ‘Because you can’t help your mother?’

  ‘No,’ Stacey said uncertainly, ‘not really. I mean, I can’t help her. And that’s terrible in a way, as is watching her distort and disappear as a person, but if I’m honest, if I’m completely, utterly, soul-baringly honest . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s work,’ Stacey said. She turned slowly to look at Beth. ‘I hate, hate, hate not going to work.’

  Beth said quietly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I took it for granted, Beth. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind, from the day I graduated, that I wouldn’t have a job, that I wouldn’t be paid to do something that I was good at, that interested me, that gave me a visibility and an incentive to go on trying. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t get what I’d asked for, a month ago; it never struck me, for a single second, that all those years of work, all the self-belief that my career had given me, could just drop away, vanish, in no time at all. If you’d told me I’d be sitting here with you on a Tuesday evening wearing mum jeans and an old rugby shirt of Steve’s, unemployed, I’d have stared at you as if you’d lost your mind.’

  Beth took a swallow of wine. Then she reached out and briefly squeezed Stacey’s nearest hand. ‘If it’s any consolation, Stace, I don’t feel much more positive than you, and my professional life has probably never been better. It’s a huge salvation, still having work to go to, but it doesn’t stop me feeling old and unattractive and boring and unadventurous and all the things Claire said I was.’

  ‘But if there wasn’t work? If there was just the house, and no Professor Mundy?’

  ‘I’d be desperate. Suicidal, probably.’

  ‘Well,’ Stacey said, ‘I’m not Professor Mundy, but I was Stacey Grant, the reputable, even renowned in some circles, senior partner in private equity.’

  Beth looked directly at her. ‘Of course.’

  ‘For the first couple of weeks, people from work got in touch all the time, texts, emails, calls, everything. Some of them even wanted to get up some kind of protest campaign and involve the board, but I couldn’t let them. I don’t know if it was pride, I don’t know if I didn’t want to risk being pilloried as another woman making a shrill fuss, I don’t know if I was just too shocked and confused to think straight, but I made them all promise not to do anything, to leave me alone, and so they have, bless them, and of course I hate that, too.’

  Beth gestured towards the ceiling, at the still-audible noise of the TV from the room above them, turned up for Mum’s need, these days, to deafening volume. ‘While all this was going on.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stacey said. ‘Yes. And another thing: you and I have never had children, so we’ve never known what it’s like not to feel free. Whatever we’ve done, even if we dressed it up by saying, “I have to do this and that”, has really been the result of choice. Of course choice has consequences that one can’t always control, but we were always able to
choose the job or the post, and then were free to devote ourselves to it, to let our work lives dictate our – our, well, our sort of being, if you like. And now I’m suddenly not free. Two and a half years off fifty and I’m as stuck as a kid with a new baby and no one to help. It’s probably very good for me, if suffering really does any of us any real good. Whatever good is.’

  Beth stretched forward to put her wine glass down on the edge of the nearest bookshelf. ‘This is rather difficult to ask, but might this situation not last all that long?’

  Stacey looked at her. ‘Mum is seventy-one. And her heart is very strong and all her other organs are functioning like those of someone a decade younger at least. So, no, is the short answer.’

  Beth said, ‘I think you should consider part-time work.’

  Stacey closed her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘Yes, you would. None of us have worked this long not to have contacts to call on at times like these.’

  ‘Gaby turned me down,’ Stacey said, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Well, I don’t think it was quite like that.’

  Stacey sat suddenly upright. ‘What do you mean? What do you know about it?’

  ‘Stace, I don’t know any more than that,’ Beth said steadily, spreading out her hands as if to smooth things down physically. ‘But I don’t think she turned you down. I think she couldn’t entertain the idea because her team is complete right now, so she couldn’t—’

  ‘She wouldn’t even see me!’

  Beth looked at her. ‘Did you ask her?’

  ‘What, directly?’

  ‘Yes. Did you ring her and ask her?’

  Stacey looked away. ‘I was – so hoping she would ring me. But she didn’t. So I rang her and it was really difficult. I shouldn’t have had to. She should have rung me.’

  ‘We all tried to,’ Beth said, ‘that dreadful Wednesday. We all tried to get hold of you.’

  ‘I couldn’t speak to anyone. I could barely speak to Steve, especially when he kind of let slip that his promotion to the board wasn’t completely unexpected. I mean, I know about company confidentiality, and I’m really proud of him, but I couldn’t – can’t – help feeling left right out of the loop. I know it isn’t right or logical, but I just keep thinking it isn’t fair.’