Chapter 4 Zoe Spring 2025
Zoe
The house is the fullest it’s been in years, thinks Zoe, staring up at her bedroom ceiling. The hairline crack seems to have grown wider since she last slept in here, or is it her imagination? Something else to add to the list.
She wonders how her sisters are getting on in their childhood bedrooms. Nobody has been in them for years, since Alice left probably.
She can’t remember if they even covered things with sheets or if everything is covered in layers of dust. She caught the look on Fiona’s face as they went up to the top floor to the old nursery and saw where the roof had caved in the year before.
They have a new roof now, at least, but there was no money left over to repair the plaster and repaint.
Maybe she should have dusted their rooms. Got some bedding out.
But she didn’t want to leave her mother’s side over those last few weeks. Just in case.
The usual nurse came back yesterday evening.
She always kept up a running commentary of what she was doing.
‘I’m going to check your blood pressure, Milly, is that okay?
How are you feeling, Milly, this evening?
Any pain?’ She checked the syringe driver, and scribbled something down on the notes.
Then lifted up the duvet. ‘Just looking at your legs, Milly. What lovely legs you have,’ she jollied.
The tide of mottled purple had risen from Mum’s toes to her ankles and was now moving towards her knees.
Mum hadn’t moved her legs for a long time.
The nurse urged her again to call her sisters.
She nodded and promised she’d do it that evening.
But once the nurse had gone, and the only sound was her mum’s rasping breathing – perfectly normal the nurse had said – she realised it was too late in Singapore.
Fiona would be asleep. She didn’t want to call Sara and Steph without having called Fiona first. Fiona would take charge, she knew.
It would wait until Monday morning, she thought, as she lay down on the camp bed next to her mum.
Now she feels guilty that by the time she called them first thing Monday it was almost too late.
She’d done what the nurse had said. Eventually.
Sat by their mother’s bedside, watching the loose bit of dried skin on her lip flutter against her breath, and finally called them.
Fiona first and then Sara. Short conversations, the sudden intakes of breath, the catches in the voices, enough for her to know that they knew how serious it was.
That they would come straight away. She even got an immediate reply from her text to Steph.
Why hadn’t she done it earlier? Perhaps there was a nasty part of her that wanted to keep her mother’s death to herself after all the years of nursing her.
She sighs. But it was also about not wanting to admit that it was the end.
If only she hadn’t gone to make that toast when she did.
Five minutes she was away at most. Three, probably.
She wasn’t even that hungry. It was eating from boredom, something she swore she’d never do, but sitting with someone while they were dying was a weird mix of boredom and stress.
Until they were gone, and then you’d do anything to have even a minute of those weeks and months back. Zoe swallows and closes her eyes.
She gets up and tiptoes over to the door, opening it inch by inch, and creeping on to the landing. Highdown Hall is settling down for the night, slowly contracting around her, the creaks soothing in their familiarity.
Suddenly the door at the end of the landing opens and Fiona stands there, wearing an old pink dressing gown. ‘Ah, Zoe, I’m glad you’re still up. I forgot to ask, can I have the Wi-Fi password?’
Zoe shakes her head. ‘We don’t have Wi-Fi.’
‘But I need to get online. And there’s no signal in the bedroom.’
‘There’s a bit of signal in the library.
I can sit on the window seat there, prop my laptop on the window ledge, tether off my phone signal.
Sara phoned her children from there earlier.
There’s sometimes a bit of signal in the hall and kitchen too.
’ Fiona’s body is drooping but her eyes are flitting from one thing to another.
She didn’t want to mention the signal in Mum’s bedroom. Fiona would turn it into an office.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Fiona says. ‘How can you live without Wi-Fi?’
Zoe shrugs. She stopped the Wi-Fi contract last year. Another thing they couldn’t afford.
‘I also don’t have any clothes,’ Fiona mutters. ‘I only have what I was wearing and this dressing gown, which was on the back of the door. Did this used to be mine?’
‘I have some you can borrow,’ Zoe says. Fiona follows her back to her room, even though Zoe wishes she wouldn’t, but she knows it would seem churlish to stop her coming in.
‘Gosh, it’s changed in here,’ she says, looking around. ‘It used to be all pink.’
Zoe laughs, the sound strange to her ears. ‘That was twenty-odd years ago,’ she says, handing her some loose trousers and an old t-shirt. ‘This should do for now. I can give you more in the morning.’
‘This is awful for you,’ says Fiona, reaching forward. She touches Zoe’s cheek, and the feeling of her hand makes Zoe jump. ‘I’m sorry we weren’t there to help.’
Zoe feels the tears start to swell up inside her again.
‘I wish you had been,’ she whispers. She knows that Fiona would have done a better job than her, the house wouldn’t be in such a state if Fiona had been managing it, she would have found a way.
Zoe swallows to push the tears down and turns away.
She must stop crying. ‘There’s no hot water in the bathroom on this floor.
There’s some in the shower off Mum’s dressing room.
But you’ll need to go round to the old nursery bathroom upstairs for a proper bath. ’
‘Right.’ Fiona pauses. ‘There’s a huge damp patch on the ceiling in my room. It’s okay, isn’t it? It’s not going to fall on my head in the night?’
Zoe laughs. ‘It’s fine. It’s all dried out now.
That was a leak from the nursery bathroom, caused weirdly by the roof caving in up there.
We had to replace the whole thing last year.
It hadn’t been done in more than a century and was leaking all over the place.
But there was no money left for replastering or repainting.
And it’s not something I could do myself. ’
‘That must have cost a fortune,’ says Fiona, glancing around.
Zoe shrugs. ‘There was no money, obviously.’
Fiona tips her head to the side looking at her.
‘I sold the Chaumet necklace,’ Zoe says by way of an explanation.
Fiona started. ‘The pink one? But that was your twenty-first birthday present from Mum and Dad, wasn’t it?’
Zoe nodded.
‘Surely there were less precious things you could have sold first?’
It feels disloyal to tell her that Mum refused to sell anything, that she said all heirlooms had to be handed down.
But she’d also refused to let out the outbuildings or even the oast house, not wanting strangers on the estate, apart from the cottages that had always been let.
‘I didn’t mind. It wasn’t really my thing. Highdown’s more important.’
‘In the morning, let’s go through what needs to be done. I’ll put together a budget.’ Fiona looks like she wants to say more, but just wishes her goodnight and climbs up the back stairs to the bathroom.
Zoe lies on her bed and listens to Fiona’s footsteps, the cranking of the taps.
She waits for her to come back and go into her room.
When the door clicks shut, Zoe opens her door again and creeps on to the gallery.
She glances at the other doors but Steph’s and Sara’s are shut and she knows the other main bedroom is locked, the furniture ghostly in sheets.
Her mother’s bedroom feels more familiar than her own.
On the bedside table, the half-filled plastic beaker is the only sign that illness inhabited this room.
The nurse removed the medical paraphernalia not long after Mum died.
A pair of reading glasses are neatly folded up on top of the book her mother was halfway through when she stopped being able to read.
Imagine your eyesight going when you’re halfway through a book.
Maybe she should have offered to read it to her. It’s too late now.
She feels better now that the body has gone.
She can remember her mother properly, unencumbered by the body riddled with illness.
She feels ashamed for hiding away when the funeral people came; she should have seen her mother off on her final journey out of the house she lived in for more than fifty years – that her grandparents had gifted her parents as a wedding present.
Zoe kisses the pillow, which is still impregnated with her mother’s Chanel scent, and then retreats from the room, closing the door behind her, and turns the key. She doesn’t want any of her sisters coming in here and messing up the memories. They’re too precious.
Back in her room, she lies down on the bed.
After weeks on the camp bed, she’d forgotten how comfortable a proper bed is.
She stares back at the ceiling, tracing the crack.
It doesn’t feel like she’s going to be able to sleep.
Her thoughts career chaotically around her brain, colliding with each other like bumper cars.
She wonders how her sisters are feeling.
Her eyes start to droop. In that strange dream-state between waking and sleeping she sees her mother, young again, pushing Fiona in the pram, and the oddness of it jolts her awake.
Mum. Is she okay? Has she called out? Is that what has woken her?
Zoe turns over, sees the outline of her chest of drawers and realises she’s in her own room.
Mum’s gone. Her heart constricts and the weight of it descends again.