Chapter Nineteen
“When did anyone last vacuum under here?” James asked. He was looking under the coffee table for a shoe I’d hidden from him.
“Mrs. Billings’s days are Monday and Thursday,” I said.
“But when did anyone last clean under the coffee table? There’s loads of dust. And here and here.” He forgot about the shoe and took himself on a dust inspection, running his finger over surfaces that neither Mrs. Billings nor I could reach without standing on something.
“She’s more of a cleaner than a polisher,” I said.
“I’m paying her to do both, aren’t I? When was this last done?” He was peering behind the stereo.
“She’s nearly seventy. You can’t expect her to get behind there.”
“I’m paying her to do a job. If she can’t do it, I can’t pay her for it.” He stood up and looked at me. “Why am I paying her anyway? What do you do all day?”
I couldn’t lose Mrs. Billings! “We need her,” I said.
“Things need to improve around here if we’re keeping her on,” he said. “Tell her that, and tell her it’s her final warning.”
When Mrs. B arrived that morning I told her nothing of the sort.
Instead, I waited until she’d been and gone, then I did her usual route, finishing the bits she’d missed.
After that I did all the dusting James had found to do that morning.
I wasn’t used to the effort; I was exhausted.
I had to message James and ask him to bring a takeaway.
“We have food in the house,” he replied. That sounded more like my mum, back in the days of scrimping and saving, than my husband, who would gladly pay an extra grand just because he could.
James phoned again a couple of hours later.
“What’s all this money you’ve been giving Brenda Billings?
” he asked. He must have been going through the joint account, which I had access to, so that I could do day-to-day errands for him.
I’d been hoping that amongst all the outgoings, a few extra pounds for the Billingses wouldn’t be noticed.
“She’s been doing some overtime,” I said.
“What’s she been doing?”
“She’s been sprucing up some of the top floor rooms,” I said.
“That’s not part of her remit. And what’s she done anyway? Did she clean them, or did she just wave a duster at them?”
“She’s a trusted employee, I don’t go checking up on her.”
“Well, you should do. No more overtime and make sure she does a proper job. Did you tell her what I said earlier?”
I told him I had, of course I did.
***
James wasn’t always as bad as he seems. Or at least, he didn’t always seem as bad as he was.
I never really had any thoughts about him when I was growing up. He was a few years older than me and even without that age gap, school had a very hierarchical structure and we would have been leagues apart.
He wore Levis and designer T-shirts. Or so he said, but he was the reason we in the lower-school years thought Levi was spelled Levy until we were about sixteen.
Before I had even started my GCSEs, he set off for Oxford University, to much hullabaloo, and returned, years later, to much of the same, as Upper Iffley’s first cryptocurrency millionaire.
Or billionaire—rumors varied. In fact, he was one of the earliest cryptocurrency tycoons altogether; James was always one of the first with technology.
He came back at a time when I was rather down on my luck.
About a year before, my mum had been feeling tired, then she started to lose weight.
She had a few aches and pains and was feeling generally unwell.
So she took herself off to the doctor, expecting to come back with vitamin supplements or tablets for anemia, but after some to-ing and fro-ing she came back with stage four pancreatic cancer. She went straight into palliative care.
When Mrs. Billings heard the news she came running round, with casseroles and cleaning services, which she did for free, and she did a pretty good job back then.
My mum and Mrs. B had once been friends.
A few years before, circumstances had conspired to put a distance between them, but she said she would be there whenever my mum needed something for however long that was.
She and Mr. B would cancel their bank holiday weekend away if need be.
But when that weekend came, my mum was feeling better. She got up unassisted and we sat in the lounge, with the late summer sun shining in through the window, and sewed. I made a sketch for a new dress we would make.
When Mrs. Billings called in on her morning visit, we told her things were looking up and it would be a good idea for her and Mr. B to go away. We’d be fine, we said, as we waved them off.
That’s how it is with cancer sometimes, one last good day.
My mum collapsed the following afternoon, and I had to call an ambulance.
At the hospital, I sat with her alone as the doctors and the nurses made her comfortable and I waited and I waited and I waited.
At first waiting for a miracle, then, understanding it wouldn’t come, I waited for the end.
Finally, she passed. At the age of twenty-six I had not one living relative in the world.
They gave me the death certificate because they said I would need it, but I didn’t know what to do with it. When I was growing up my mum usually framed my certificates and put them on the wall. Was I supposed do that?
I found out over the following weeks. Mrs. B took me round to the undertaker, where she talked them into giving me a cost-price funeral. Then she took me to the bank to get my mum’s accounts closed down. She helped me deal with the transfer of property. The house became mine, and so did the bills.
The bills, the bills! They never stopped coming.
When Mum’s estate was settled, I owned the house I lived in and inherited just under a thousand pounds, which she must have saved hard for.
I did the last sensible thing I ever did and used the money to pay off my car loan.
Then I got a part-time job at the village SPAR, stacking shelves, with the promise of more hours and more varied duties to come.
It didn’t pay enough to maintain a house like mine, even without a mortgage. I was forever begging for more shifts.
Mrs. Billings’s help was gradually withdrawn, and I was left to my own devices.
I turned my attention to the housework. I had never realized how much my mum, and then Mrs. Billings, did, but now I learned that dust doesn’t dust itself, washing doesn’t wash itself, and food certainly doesn’t cook itself.
My life became a never-ending cycle of working, cleaning, working, cleaning, working, cleaning, but none of it was ever enough.
And it seemed that all the furniture in the house had just been holding on until my mum died.
Within a week of the funeral one of the legs on my bed collapsed.
Getting it repaired or replaced was an unaffordable luxury, so after a couple of weeks, I reluctantly moved into my mum’s room, the spare room being packed to the roof with stuff.
Then the TV developed a blemish on the screen. It was a red patch, right in the middle, and it made it look as if everyone on everything I watched had rosacea.
I found the number for an electrics repair company and asked if they could fix it, but they laughed.
“How old’s the TV, love?” We’d had it for at least ten years. “May as well get a new one, be more than it’s worth to fix it.” And I heard him muttering the word “frugal” as he hung up, as if that were a bad thing. A new TV was also outside my budget, so I got used to it as it was.
The house used to be a nice place to go home to; it used to be cheerful and warm. Now, as winter drew in, it was cold and dark when I arrived home. I couldn’t afford to run the heating for more than an hour a day; in January my lips went blue. It was always untidy.
Tidiness and I had been at loggerheads ever since I was small.
My possessions lived where they were dropped.
My mum was the opposite and under her command, matters stayed fairly controlled; as soon as she departed, my things ran free.
CDs separated from their cases and roamed around the house; books leaped off the shelves and into precarious piles in every room; childhood toys cavorted across the landing; laundry tumbled out of the basket on its way to the machine and again on its way to the clotheshorse .
Before she left, Mrs. Billings had started boxing up some of my mother’s things.
She said I might find it helped, not to have them everywhere I looked, and she would help with getting rid of them when I was ready.
I didn’t think there was going to be a time when I was ready; instead, I went in the opposite direction and unpacked them all.
I took out the clothes my mum had made and started wearing them.
I took out items in my own wardrobe that we’d made together and started wearing them as well.
The connection to her made me feel less lonely.
I left them lying around, as if I was goading her spirit to say, “Daisy, tidy that up right now.”
I would’ve been embarrassed for anyone to see the house, but I didn’t have it in me to make a change. Yet, change was on its way.
***
At that time I was too preoccupied to notice when word spread that James Dixon was returning to Upper Iffley.