The corridor was dark. The shutters closed. It was stranger than she’d imagined, being there alone. No smells of cooking. No vacuuming or absent-minded flower-arranging or kettle boiling. No stray cats purring. No telephone ringing or swearing at the TV, no diary scribbling or wild gesticulations about making no noise and coming to the window to look at what was going on in the street outside.
Nothing, Ava noted as she pushed the door open, just some junk mail on the mat and dusty dried lavender in a vase.
It was empty, unlived in, musty.
She walked straight through to the living room and opened the windows, the air instantly filling with the salty breath of the sea. She stood with her hands on the sill, looking out at the beach, at the rows of bronze-limbed sun-worshippers and children digging holes in the sand. Then she turned her back to the window and took in the familiar sight of a million old Spanish paintings wonkily filling every inch of the magnolia walls. The sofa, threadbare, spilling with cushions. The coffee table stacked high with big art books, stains on the glass from coffee cups. The shelves toppling with family photographs. The desk by the window covered with papers. Everything exactly as she remembered it but coated with a thin layer of sticky dust.
In the kitchen she tore off a bin bag and went through the fridge, chucking everything out. Then did the same in the avocado bathroom, binning the half-used bottles of shampoo, the night creams and the flattened toothpaste tube. The little half-bar of soap by the bathroom sink, heartbreaking but unusable, too closely tied to the once living.
As she looked, Ava did her best to ignore the growing weight pressing down on her, trying not to dwell on the life that had gone. She blinked away the vision of someone finding her own half-bars of soap, immediately glad that she’d chucked everything out for the airbnb tenant.
Her friends were WhatsApping. So jealous of your weather. How’s it going?
She paused in the corridor to reply, leaning up against the cool geometric tiles. Great. Amazing. It’s the kind of heat that makes you have to move slower. So relaxed.
It was sort of true. It was hot, sticky limbs weather.
No one replied. She checked the time. They were all at work, stressed and manic and attempting to double-screen in meetings. All of them jealous of her holiday, not realising that she was a little bit jealous of them.
She looked up and caught sight of the coat hanging by the front door: bright red brocade with a faux leopard fur collar, ankle length, cylindrical. It had swamped Ava as a kid in the same way it swamped Val in old age. She remembered it being tucked around her on the plane as she slept on the way back from visiting her mother in New York. She glanced to the right, almost to check no one was watching, then leant forwards so her nose was just touching the material and inhaled the scent of citrus, sandalwood and juniper. ‘The thing about men, Ava, is that they like the smell of power. Always wear cologne.’
And she realised, suddenly, that there would be no more such skew-whiff wisdom in her life. Unwanted at the time, unbearably poignant in retrospect.
She took a step back, turned and found herself staring up to the bedroom. The open door at the top of the stairs, the big gilt mirror on the wall, the dusky pink walls. Val’s room. The steps creaked as she walked. It was a lethal staircase, a flimsy banister with no spindles, and steps with open risers. As kids they would lie on their backs to slip through the gaps between each step and see how high they could go and still be able to cope with the drop to the floor. When Val caught them she banned the game, which of course didn’t stop them, but, as usual, it was Ava who got hurt when it all went wrong.
Now she paused on the top step, hand on the wobbly banister, and watched the sun battling its way through a gap in the curtain. There were velvet slippers tucked neatly under the bed waiting for feet. Faded ribbons tied on the gold, scrolled bed frame. A huge canvas of a black and white flamenco dancer leant against a shelf above the bedhead next to the window. Whirlpools of sun and dust eddied in the air.
Ava walked inside. She could see her reflection in the mottled mirror of the neat little Victorian wardrobe. She swallowed. She wanted to scoop everything up in her arms and walk holding it forever.
This was her family. Her stability. One of life’s guarantees. Like Christmas at Rory and Claire’s; the Starbucks next to Peregrine’s shop; Louise trying to be funny on WhatsApp. It was safe here. There was love here. Wonky advice and unending gossip, but a home whenever she needed it. And of course, someone who would talk, unendingly, about her mother; hours they had spent together remembering the stage lights, the smell of backstage at the theatre, the heat of the dressing room, the taste of make-up in the air.
Ava’s eyes trailed across to the carved wooden cabinet and a mirror above it draped with jewels; necklaces glimmered in the sunlight, bowls of rings shone on the surface next to a cluster of little ornaments and glass bottles. Shoe boxes snaked ladders up the wall.
Next to the wardrobe there was a door to a room in the eaves that she presumed housed things like the Hoover and ironing board. Walking over the tread-worn Indian rug, the sounds outside of beach playing and bells ringing, she went to turn the handle but the door didn’t open. The paint had almost melted it shut. She tugged a couple of times, about to give up, when it pulled free to the sound of splitting paint.
It wasn’t a room for the Hoover. It was a dressing room. Ava narrowed her eyes but just saw outlines in the darkness. She searched the wall for the light and when she finally found it, a tatty bit of too-short string, she clicked and a million sequins shone as the little ante-room lit up.
‘Bloo-dy hell.’ She put her hand up to her mouth.
A rail, filled with furs and rhinestone jackets, afghan coats and sequinned ballgowns, bowed under the weight. Pairs of shoes – patent, velvet, some with diamanté buckles – were crammed into every nook and cranny. Black-and-white-striped hat boxes were pushed on to too-small shelves next to baskets of silk scarves and belts curled like sleeping snakes. On a peg hung a fox fur, still with its little face and tiny claws, and next to him an open jewellery box filled with sunglasses. Everywhere she looked there was something: a lipstick that had rolled from its basket, a homeless brooch on a ledge, a bulging make-up bag with a zip that wouldn’t close, a teetering stack of glossy programmes.
Ava stared with her hands on both sides of her face. These weren’t her grandmother’s things but her mother’s. Things she had thought lost, gone, given away forever.
The smell in here was different. No more cologne but sweet, dark perfume. Guerlain’s Shalimar. The grooved glass bottle with its golden seal such a familiar sight in her youth. And lipstick, chalky and red. And the remnants of decadence: money and fur, couture still in dry cleaning plastic, expensive shoes once so carefully protected in soft white bags.
Ava could barely breathe.
It all suddenly felt completely different. No longer just the bittersweet task of packing away her grandmother’s long, beautifully lived life, but of being handed back her mother. As though she was standing there in the poky little room with her, hat shading one eye, lips slicked red, selfish, unreachable, magnetic, magnificent.
Ava backed out of the room, her hand gently closing the paint-cracked door. She walked fast, almost a trot, towards the staircase, the hallway and the front door, and seconds later was outside. Out into the bright heat of the sun, out into the noise of the beach and the shimmer of the wide blue sea, out where time kept moving and she could breathe like a normal person again.
Rory was heartbroken.
It had taken less than an hour for the tweet and linking article to go viral.
Executive producer, Bruce Haslen, had arrived in his Range Rover, where they sat, rain hammering the windscreen.
‘I know you didn’t mean it, mate. But it wasn’t one of your brightest ideas.’ Bruce tapped the cream leather steering wheel.
Rory