Pimlico

The flat in Pimlico was on the top floor of a narrow white house on a side street, with two windows that looked into a quiet square of plane trees and a third that looked into the back gardens of the parallel terrace, and Mrs Wakeham had, since March of the previous year, furnished it in the way of a woman who had been thinking, for forty-two years, about exactly the room in which she would, in the end, choose to be.

The front room had two armchairs — one in green leather, one in soft dove-grey wool — facing a small unlit gas fire. Between them was a small walnut side table on which sat, the afternoon Maeve and Mrs Wakeham came in, a small electric kettle, two cream-coloured cups, a small dish of sugar lumps with a pair of brass tongs, a small jug of milk under a beaded muslin cover, and a small enamel biscuit tin with a print of the Norfolk coast on the lid.

On the mantelpiece over the small unlit gas fire, in a small silver frame, was a single black-and-white square photograph of three girls in St Brigid's blazers — Eleanor in the middle, Cath on the right, and Tessa on the left, with her badly-done French plait over the left shoulder and the small chip in her front tooth.

The photograph had been on the mantelpiece, Maeve later understood, since the morning Mrs Wakeham had signed the lease.

—

Maeve made the tea.

Mrs Wakeham, in the green-leather armchair, sat very still with her hands folded in her lap. She had not, since the taxi had pulled away from the kerb of Eaton Square, said anything. The small green silk pouch from inside the cabinet of the clock was on the small walnut side table, beside the kettle.

Maeve poured. She added milk for Mrs Wakeham. She handed Mrs Wakeham the cup.

Mrs Wakeham took the cup in both hands.

She did not, for a long moment, drink.

She said, in the voice that was not, this afternoon, the voice of her dressmaker — the voice was, for the first time in fifty years, the voice of a sixteen-year-old in a small room at the end of the east corridor at a school in Hampshire in the spring of 1975 —

'Maeve, my darling. I have a small thing in my chest the consultant has been explaining to me on Wednesday afternoons for eleven months. I have known, for some weeks now, that I should not see Christmas. I am telling you, this afternoon, in the front room of a flat I have been furnishing on Wednesdays for the year because I did not, my darling, wish to die in the bed I had shared with him.'

She paused.

She drank, very slowly, from the cup.

She said, 'I have nine weeks, my dear. Perhaps ten. I had wanted, in those nine weeks, the privacy of this room with you in it. I have arranged the rest of the will. The Belgravia townhouse goes to a charity for girls of school age in residential boarding. The Davenport in the south study comes to you. The small green silk pouches you have read this morning are to be transferred, on the second of April every year, to a small reading room of the National Library in Edinburgh that has agreed, in correspondence with my solicitor, to keep them. The flat is yours, my dear. The first of the agency wages I shall make sure get to your bank account on the seventh of each month for the rest of your life is in the small drawer of the side table behind your chair.'

She paused.

She said, 'Will you stay, my darling.'

—

Maeve, in the dove-grey wool armchair, with her own cup of tea in both her hands, looked at Mrs Wakeham.

She looked, in the small particular way Maeve had been looking at her own mother on the last Tuesday of her own mother's life — Maeve, my darling, will you stay tonight, I should rather not be alone — and Maeve, very quietly, very calmly, did not allow her face to do any of the things her face would, by the count of any honest observer, very reasonably have done.

She said, 'Eleanor. Of course I shall stay.'

Mrs Wakeham, in the green-leather armchair, in the small flat in Pimlico that she had been furnishing on Wednesday afternoons for the year, with the small green silk pouch on the side table that contained, in the typed paragraph, the last thing her best friend's daughter had asked of any of them — Mrs Wakeham, very quietly, set the cup down on the small walnut side table.

She turned the handle, by the small particular habit of fifty years, three small degrees back the way it had been pointing before she had picked the cup up.

She left it that way.

Then Mrs Wakeham, for the first time since the spring of 1975, in the careful precise way of a woman who had spent fifty years not being able to, allowed her own face to do the thing that her face had, for fifty years, been carrying.

She wept.

She did not weep loudly. Mrs Wakeham did not weep loudly because Mrs Wakeham, by her own dressmaker, had not been taught how. She wept very quietly, in the way her best friend Cath Brennan had once taught her in 1975 in a small room at the end of the east corridor — the trick, Eleanor, is to do it into something soft so the room never knows it has happened — and she did it, this afternoon, into the soft dove-grey wool of the right sleeve of the dress that, that morning, she had put on for the last time in the bedroom of the Belgravia townhouse.

Maeve, in the dove-grey wool armchair opposite, set her own cup down.

Maeve crossed the small front room of the flat in Pimlico.

Maeve knelt down beside the green-leather armchair, the way Maeve had knelt down at the side of her own mother's bed on the last Tuesday of her own mother's life, and Maeve put her right hand, very gently, on the back of Mrs Wakeham's left hand.

Mrs Wakeham did not, this time, ask her to take her hand off.

Maeve said, in the small precise voice that had risen up in her in the morning room of the Belgravia townhouse three days ago, 'Eleanor. I shall be here. I shall not, for the nine weeks, leave the room. I shall sit with you on the Wednesdays the consultant comes, on the afternoons the man from Bishopsgate may come back with questions, on the evenings my own father — Tessa's father — may, when he hears, telephone. I shall make the tea. I shall make the soup. I shall make the small dish of one half-grapefruit and the small dish of two oatcakes and the small jar of honey and the small linen cloth folded into a flat triangle every morning that you ask. I shall hold your hand on the last morning. I shall, on the last morning, do, my dear, exactly what you ask me to do, and I shall not, on the last morning, leave the room until you have.'

She paused.

She said, 'And after the last morning, I shall — every second of April for the rest of my life — take a small green silk pouch from the Davenport in the south study, and I shall send it to Edinburgh, the way you have arranged. And I shall, on the second of April after my last morning, leave the last pouch in the bottom drawer with a note for the next woman who will, my dear, in her turn, be Tessa's. It will not, then, be your job.'

Mrs Wakeham, in the green-leather armchair of the small flat in Pimlico, lifted her face from the soft dove-grey wool of her own right sleeve, and she looked at Maeve, kneeling, and she said —

'Tessa would have liked you, my darling. Tessa would have liked you so very much.'

Maeve, kneeling on the rug of the small flat in Pimlico, with her right hand still on the back of Mrs Wakeham's left hand, said in the careful neutral voice she had built for three weeks at the agency before she had ever set foot in the Belgravia townhouse —

'Eleanor. I should like to think I would have liked her too.'

Outside the window of the small flat in Pimlico, in the quiet square of plane trees, a black cab went past with its light off.

A delivery bicycle went past with a small wicker box on the back, bouncing.

Somewhere, three streets away, in a small interview room on Bishopsgate, a man whose name was Edwin Wakeham, who had been raised under his stepfather's name as Edwin Hollis, was, in the careful precise voice he had used at the school in 1975, finally being asked the question Tessa Halligan had walked across a quad in the dark to ask him fifty years ago.

He would not, on the asking, answer it.

He would, for the next eleven months, in the careful precise voice he had used at the school in 1975, refuse to.

It would not, in the end, matter.

The typed paragraph in his own stepmother's hand at the foot of the headmaster's note, which Mr Stephen Halligan had handed to the man on Bishopsgate at twenty-eight minutes past five on the Friday afternoon, would, for the man on Bishopsgate, by the morning of the following Monday, be enough.

* * *