The therapist is smoothing the palms of her hands across Carol’s collarbone, sweeping them up all the way to her earlobes and back again. It feels good when she pulls firmly at the base of Carol’s neck, easing the muscles gently towards her and then releasing.
‘Oh that’s lovely,’ Carol murmurs.
The therapist laughs lightly.
‘Good. Just relax into it.’
She takes a few deep breaths, trying to concentrate on the pleasurable sensation of the massage while at the same time worrying that her inability to relax means she is not enjoying it enough. She wonders if she could set Vanessa up with somebody. Speed-dating, wasn’t that meant to be the latest thing? Maybe she should suggest it to her. She didn’t want Vanessa to see her as a new project: putting her mother back together again in much the same way as she might renovate one of her flats.
And then, the solution to the problem comes straight into her mind, bubbling up to the surface like a lifebuoy. Alan, she thinks, triumphantly. Her next-door neighbour. He seems nice enough – a bit quiet, but that might just be shyness. Why had she never thought of it before? He’d be good for Vanessa, she is sure of it.
Alan had moved in over a year ago after coming down all the way from Glasgow to make a new life for himself. He’d never been married, he told them when they first met. He was unloading furniture from the back of a rental van at the time. A long-term relationship had just broken up, he explained – even though they hadn’t been prying.
‘Oh I’m sorry,’ Carol said.
He smiled at her, bending his head so that he did not meet her eyes. His cheeks blushed pink.
‘Not to worry,’ he said, his voice accented with a vague burr that she couldn’t place. ‘These things happen.’
He had strong forearms, Carol noticed. She liked arms: it was one of her things. Alan’s forearms, visible beneath a rolled-up sleeve of a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, were tanned and thick veins ran down from his elbow to surprisingly fine-boned wrists. She discovered later, once she’d got to know him a bit, that he was a keen amateur gardener, which explained the tan and the muscle definition. Derek used to tease her about her crush on ‘that fancy-man from next door’ but he didn’t mind. Within a week of Alan moving in, he was giving their new neighbour hydrangea plant cuttings for his flower beds and unwanted advice on the acidic soil content of SW18.
‘You want to watch that, Alan,’ he said one morning, leaning across the garden fence. Alan nodded silently, rubbing the back of his neck, not wishing to be rude because he probably knew it all already. Derek shrugged his shoulders and left him to it.
‘Not a talker,’ he said, on coming back into the house, and that had been that.
How old would Alan be, Carol asks herself as the therapist moves from her neck to her scalp, pressing her fingers down, twisting her hair this way and that so it will probably be an awful mess when she leaves. Mid-forties perhaps? It was so difficult to tell nowadays. He wasn’t a looker, that’s for sure. His face had a pudgy quality, like an uncooked loaf of bread, and his eyes were on the small side. But then looks don’t last, as she was always fond of saying. Vanessa’s at the stage in her life where she should be settling for someone reliable and kind.
Yes, that’s what she’ll do. She’ll invite Alan round for a cup of tea, one of the days that Vanessa just happens to be popping in. With this resolution made, Carol feels happier. For the first time since she stripped down to her knickers and lay on the massage table, she starts, cautiously, to relax – just like she’s been told.
On Monday morning, Beatrice wakes up with a lovely, leaping sensation in her stomach. It is her day off: twenty-four hours of concentrated freedom without a single bed to make or toilet bowl to clean. She smiles at herself in the bathroom mirror as she slicks her hair back with wax and rubs cocoa butter into her elbows, making them soft. Then she catches herself grinning like an idiot and stops abruptly. Her teachers always said she had a happy nature but it seems silly to smile when there’s no one else around.
‘Beatrice always looks on the bright side,’ one of the nuns had written in a school report. She remembers her father had been pleased by that.
‘It’s good to accentuate the positives, Beatrice,’ he said. He was wearing his fancy suit and tie. ‘Life is a big adventure.’
She looked up at him, blinking. She loved her father but was also in awe of him. He was so tall, she thought, that his head almost touched the sky. She was too shy to answer him that day and hid her face in her hands, glimpsing at the retreating shape of him through interlaced fingers. He laughed and walked out of the door, his slim briefcase swinging from one hand. In all of her memories, he is laughing.
He died when she was fifteen of an illness she hadn’t known the name of until she was older. And even then she hadn’t understood. They said it was sexually transmitted, the thing that made him lose weight until his flesh had sunk into his bones, that scarred his conker-smooth skin with scab-sore marks the texture of sandpaper.
AIDS. An odd label for a disease, she always thinks, when, according to her big, red English dictionary, ‘aid’ is a synonym for ‘help’.
Would her father still have loved her had he lived to know the truth of who she was? When the police discovered her and Susan in bed together, tipped off by a surly-faced villager, was her mother right when she said Beatrice had brought disgrace on the family? Would her father have disowned her too?
She will never have the answers. She likes to think he would have understood but people can surprise you. Even the ones you think you know better than anyone. Even the ones who are meant to love you.
She pours a sachet of Mayfair Rotunda instant coffee into a mug of boiled water for breakfast, then gets dressed in deliberately bright colours. After ten days of black uniform, Beatrice is desperate for a change. She picks out a neon-yellow T-shirt from TK Maxx and jeans that she found in a charity shop. They are a bit too tight, but the T-shirt is long enough to cover the slight flabbiness of her stomach. She zips up a red puffa jacket because she knows, even though it is sunny outside, she will still feel the cold. It is one of the things she fears she will never get used to in this country. That and the dark evenings. When she first arrived in London, at the B&B in Manor Park arranged by the trafficker, it had been winter. She did not know what to think when the sun disappeared at 4 p.m. and the temperature dropped. It was as if God had turned off the lights.
It had taken her a long while to acclimatise to the darkness and the damp. She felt as though every breath she took of London air was soaked through with a moisture that blocked her nose and thickened her throat. And then there had been the fog. Beatrice had read about the city’s opaque, settling mists in Dickens, but still her first experience of London fog took her unawares. When it had swept up from the banks of the Thames, rolling through the streets like smoke, she had felt unanchored from her surroundings, cocooned in a strange cotton-white numbness that served only to make her feel more alone. The fog seemed to settle in her chest. She had wheezed for days and when she coughed it sounded as if a small rattling ball had lodged itself in her windpipe.
Beatrice grabs her Primark bag and puts her wallet, the newspaper cutting and her mobile inside. As she leaves, she presses her fingers against the frame of Susan’s photo, and checks her fingertips for dust, automatically. Clean as a whistle, she thinks, proud of the colloquial turn of phrase.
Once outside, she walks up the Jamaica Road to a small stretch of shops: a chemist, an internet café, a Halal grocer and a Chinese takeaway. When Beatrice makes extra tips from work, she likes to treat herself to Peking duck pancakes. Just thinking of the sweet-salt taste of the glutinous plum sauce and the cooling slivers of spring onion is enough to make her mouth water. She doesn’t have