‘Then you call me Joan.’
Nina Rawle was making her way carefully to the sofa as Joan left, leaning on her sticks, old before her time. She wore soft, Chinese-style slippers and the plastic soles made the lightest of taps on the floorboards, like a cat’s paws. There were only six years between them but there could have been twenty. Count your blessings, Joan told herself, heading for Bessie; you’ve got a good job and a neat little flat and Rich. She took a quick peek at the photo she kept inside her purse before starting the engine. Mr Marshall had kindly taken a snap of her and Rich with her own Instamatic. When Alice saw it she said they looked like peas in a pod because they both had round faces and Rich’s hair was the same shape, square-cut and layered. He came out quite blond in the photo although when you saw him in person there was a tiny bit of grey at the sides. Joan had warned him, as soon as she had her hands on him she’d tint that out. Mr Marshall laughed when he heard that and said could Joan pop in and do his for him sometime?
Sitting there outside Nina Rawle’s flat Joan thought that you met some good people in this world: Mr Marshall had been kind to Rich and of course Alice had been a brick about the whole thing. On the other hand, Mr Warren, the client she was about to see, was a real moaner; never a please or thank you but always quick to criticise if everything wasn’t just so. She gave Rich a kiss and tucked him away. There were another three days to go before she’d see him again but one of the advantages of having such involving work was that it made time fly.
Joan spent the first week with Nina Rawle helping her to get her flat organised. Nina didn’t want to be taken out anywhere; she said she’d rather concentrate on ridding the place of the stacked cardboard boxes. She could do very little herself. The least exertion tired her. By the time Joan arrived each morning at nine she’d showered but the energy she had expended left her exhausted for an hour afterwards. Her hair never looked quite clean and at times Joan could see a sticky crust of lather on the crown of her head. Joan wondered about offering to help her in the bathroom but Nina had a reserve that made her think better of it.
While Nina sat reading the paper or listening to music or the radio Joan prepared her breakfast. She liked a small bowl of muesli or a poached egg on toast and fresh fruit; a segment of melon or a peeled orange or grapes. Joan had never come across this eating fruit for breakfast before; to her, fruit was for puddings or for when she was watching her weight and then she ate apples. For evening meals Nina requested blended home-made soups, pieces of chicken or fish with steamed vegetables or cheese or tomato soufflé followed by more fruit. She liked two glasses of wine in the evenings, French or Australian red from the rack in the kitchen. She invited Joan to have a glass, too, but it wasn’t to her liking. If Joan drank wine she chose a sparkling sweet variety; Lambrusco was her favourite: those bubbles tingling on her tongue spelled luxury.
At first, Joan found the shopping nerve-wracking. Nina’s list sent her searching for star fruit, lychees, artichokes, smoked applewood and goat’s cheeses, Greek olives, red snapper and lemongrass. Joan had never taken much interest in cooking and, as most of her clients were old, they liked the kinds of dishes her gran had preferred: tinned steak-and-kidney pies with mushy peas, jellied eels, liver and bacon with a thick cornflour gravy, sausage and mash and shepherd’s pie. They were meals she could make with her eyes closed.
She felt anxious for the first few days, examining the produce at the delicatessen counter in the supermarket, but there was a kind, motherly woman there who helped her out. Joan explained that she wasn’t used to this sort of shopping; with me, she said, it’s a quick whip-round for a jar of coffee, a couple of ready dinners, a boxed pizza and a packet of frozen peas. The assistant laughed, tucking a straying hair under her cap and told Joan that she could hardly keep up herself with the new lines they were always introducing. They had to have what was called familiarisation, she revealed; sessions with the section manager where they learned about the product and how to pronounce its name. When she was a young housewife you bought either Cheddar or Leicester cheese. Now it was Italian this and Norwegian that, soft and hard, pasteurised and unpasteurised and were we any the better off for it? Joan was reassured that she wasn’t the only one who’d never come across some of these alien foodstuffs.
It was years since she had been to a proper fishmonger’s. She used to go to the one in the High Street with Gran on Friday mornings to buy slabs of the waxy yellow haddock that she then poached in milk. Gran had stomach ulcers and ate a lot of what she called slop food: junkets, custards and milky sauces. One of her favourite dishes was fresh white bread squares sprinkled with sugar and steeped in warm milk with an egg whipped in. Nourishing, she called it. She used to feed that to Eddie, Joan’s brother, when his chest was bad but she never made it again after he’d gone. Joan couldn’t imagine what Nina Rawle would make of such a concoction. She specified the fish shop where she wanted Joan to buy the red snapper, salmon and trout she liked. The raw smell of the place made Joan gag; give me a boil-in-the-bag kipper any day, she thought, avoiding the staring cod eyes. The assistant who served her had wet chilled hands and his eyes bulged too. The right one had a cast, the pupil pale as if it had been bleached. She hurried in and out of there.
Nina took it for granted that Joan was familiar with all these foods and although this unnerved her it also afforded her a certain pride; she liked to think that she could keep her end up in any situation. When Nina handed her the shopping list Joan glanced at it and nodded. Out in the car she would sit and read through. Unfamiliar items such as Jarlsberg or Prosciutto made her frown but then she headed for the woman on the delicatessen and all was explained. Nina also gave exact instructions about how she wanted things cooked, which was just as well as Joan wouldn’t have known one end of an artichoke from another. She had never come across some of the kitchen utensils but she was quick off the mark with anything practical and worked out how to operate the asparagus steamer and the chicken brick. As she grilled monkfish or turned bean sprouts in a wok moistened with sesame oil she thought that she would serve some of these dishes to Rich and impress him. He’d grown up by the coast in Frinton so she imagined that he might be partial to seafood. He complained about the muck he’d had to eat over the years; there was never enough and it was tasteless, worse than school dinners. Joan wouldn’t try him with the fruit, though. She knew he liked what he called proper puddings: jam roly-polys and treacle sponges with thick custard.
After Nina had eaten her breakfast they got on with the boxes. Joan knelt on the floor and Nina sat by her in her chair, sneezing now and again as dust rose. If there was a spring chill in the air she pulled her old woollen shawl around her shoulders, plaiting the fringes over her knuckles. Sometimes Nina wore dark glasses when the light was particularly bright. She had them attached to a silver chain and they dangled on her chest when she took them off.
She had worked out ways of saving energy and keeping things to hand: there was the CD player clipped to her waist and the headphones around her neck. She also had a leather belt of the kind that Joan had seen carpenters store their tools in where she kept her tablets, eye drops, glucose sweets, tissues, a hip flask and a slim volume of Keats. She sucked glucose constantly, saying that it bucked her up. When Joan mentioned that the sweets might rot her teeth, she said flippantly that she didn’t think she was going to need teeth for that many more years. Joan was shocked, especially by the casual way Nina came out with it. She felt herself colouring up and said something about it being a warm day.
The boxes were mainly full of books, dozens of novels. Some of them were old, creased paperbacks with dark green and orange covers. Two boxloads were in French. Joan recognised the actor with the big nose on the front of one.
‘Goodness,’ she said to Nina, ‘have you really read all of these?’
‘Yes, most of them more than once.’
Joan flicked through one, glancing at the strange words. ‘I’m not much of a reader, although I like a magazine story. The best are those ones with a twist at the end. What language is this?’