Chapter 2
Heather Banks
Heather Banks had enough money in her current account to be anywhere in the world. The one place she didn’t want to be was here, in her mother’s house, checking out the contents of her mother’s leaking fridge.
She had come as soon as she got the call.
When she arrived, her mother’s body was still lying in her bed in the cramped front room that they had turned into a bedroom for her a few years earlier.
Heather had made sure her mother had everything she needed in terms of life’s little comforts in the end, but always there remained that unbridgeable gulf between them.
Dotty had never wanted a daughter; she’d made that plain too often from the very start.
It was strange, this silence that enveloped her now.
Two paramedics arrived to take her mother away on a stretcher to some part of the local hospital where visitors never went.
Closing the door after they left with a soft click, Heather had a feeling this house had never been so still before.
Her mother had lived life with a radio constantly blaring in the kitchen and the TV switched to a low hum of endless soaps in the front room.
It wasn’t just the silence that made the house feel out of kilter.
There was something else and Heather had been aware of it from the moment she entered the house, but it took a little while to register.
She was standing at the window in the front room when she realised it.
She was staring at her reflection in the glass: an odd thing to see yourself when you least expected it.
Time was catching up with her, fine lines etched around her eyes, her dark hair just that little more severe against her skin than when it had held its natural colour.
Expensive colourists weren’t always all they were cracked up to be, it turned out.
Then it hit her.
That was it. The windows had been recently cleaned, oh, they weren’t gleaming but they’d been washed around the frames, the glass if not sparkling was grime free.
The place was spick and span, as if her mother had been ready to leave, in that way that people tidy up before they go on holidays, making themselves so late they almost miss their flight.
Heather stepped back from the window, turned to look around the room.
It wasn’t just the windows either. The small chair was free from the mountain of clothes it typically groaned beneath.
The floor was free of the pile of magazines and empty glasses and the obligatory ashtray filled to overflowing.
On the bedside table a small tray held six bottles of pills and assorted medicines that she guessed at a glance had something to do with treating either stomach upset, constipation or diarrhoea.
There was one glass of water sitting next to them, half drunk.
Water? Since when had her mother ever drunk water? At a push, she might wash down some aspirin with a glass of orange juice, but mostly Dotty Wren exhibited not just a disregard for contraindications but a scornful snub of any notion that she should curb her drinking or indeed her bitterness.
Heather moved to the kitchen, then climbed the stairs, ambling into each of the two bedrooms there and lingering for a while over the dull and faded familiarity of it all. As familiar as it all was – nothing very much had changed here in years – she felt as if she’d missed a step.
She knew what it was, of course she knew what it was, but she walked around the house once more, peering into drawers and cupboards as if to find a missing jigsaw piece that would somehow make the picture real.
She even went out into the yard and checked her mother’s bin.
But no, not even there – she couldn’t understand it, there wasn’t an empty bottle anywhere to be seen.
And suddenly, Heather wasn’t so sure what she felt standing here in this place that was meant to be her home, but had never truly felt like it.
It (her mother’s alcoholism, that thing she was never allowed to mention) had driven a wedge between them years ago. It had broken her marriage to a man who’d been a good father and a long-suffering husband, long after he was legally obliged to be one. Heather thought of her father now.
Bobby Banks was an actor, once. He told Heather he’d fallen for her mother and whatever talent he had took second and eventually third place behind their little family.
She’d always been a beauty. But when the hard realities of bills hit with the birth of their daughter, Bobby gave up on dreams of the stage and settled for a factory job, putting aside everything else for his family.
Her darling dad had died three years earlier, in a small nursing home, with views of a river and the comfort of knowing he’d been as good as mother and father to a daughter who adored him.
Dotty Banks was not a bad woman. She was, Heather had known all along, just a disappointed one who needed a crutch and found one she liked in a bottle.
It seemed everything in life came up short for Dotty.
Every glass was half empty. Every win was just a fluke and for every diamond she saw mostly the rough.
None of that mattered any more. For better or worse, Dotty Banks was her mother and, even if Heather was staring fifty years of age between the eyes, today it felt as if she needed her as she never had before.
Automatically, she sniffed the milk carton before she flicked on the electric kettle for tea.
A small note pinned against the fridge door caught her eye.
Her mother had a podiatry appointment later today.
Heather would have to ring and cancel it before the visiting chiropodist arrived at the front door.
At this moment, she couldn’t cope with having to talk to anyone and hear some stranger telling her empty lies that her mother would be missed.
She left a message for the podiatrist, explaining that her mother had died and that she had no need of her services any more.
Then she made a cup of tea which unnervingly tasted just as tea had when she was a teenager living in this house.
Was her mother still buying the same tea bags?
Perhaps the water pipes had so much lead in them that they gave everything a sort of peppery taste.
It didn’t matter. She took the tea to the table and sat there for a while looking out at the back yard.
It was a bleak rectangle of crumbling brick and peeling paint.
Heather couldn’t remember having seen so much as a robin outside her mother’s kitchen window in all the years she’d lived here.
Her mother always said, what bird in their right mind would want to live in Fulham?
It was all so different to the Chelsea flat she’d shared with Philip for most of their marriage.
Heather had loved that ground-floor flat.
It was her home for twenty years. She’d tended the little back garden lovingly, cultivating not just a sea of flowers in the summer but a year-round haven for city birds that visited from the park nearby.
The flat was sold now. For less than five minutes she had considered buying out Philip’s share, but in the end, as much as she had loved living there, she couldn’t imagine just carrying on alone.
Somehow, the idea of it being just her there made how they’d ended up feel even more depressing.
For the last few weeks, she’d been staying in a shoebox flat in Battersea.
It was meant to be temporary, just somewhere to catch her breath; most of her belongings were in storage at this point.
She was drifting, looking for something or somewhere to drop anchor.
It was now obvious to her that apart from a mother who hardly wanted her near for longer than it took to say the rosary, there was nothing to keep her in this city any more.
The only thing stopping her booking a one-way flight out of it was she had no idea where she wanted to go.
It was while she was thinking about the lack of birds in the garden that her phone rang. Her friend Ruth. Oh, God, she’d forgotten that she’d promised to meet for coffee this morning.
‘Where are you?’ Ruth sounded as if she was already sitting in the coffee shop with tea and croissants waiting for her.
‘I totally forgot, I’m so sorry…’ And somehow she managed to explain about the phone call from Carmelita, which felt as if it had been days ago at this point, but really, it was only two hours earlier.
Her mother’s carer had caught her just as she was leaving the gym.
Heather had come straight over, taking the tube and then walking in the rain so Carmelita could let her into the house before she was due to go and visit the next client on her morning roster.
‘I’m so sorry, is there anything I can do?’ Ruth asked.
‘Oh, God, Ruth, you have done more than enough already.’ And it was true.
Ruth was her best friend these days. She’d been the first to swoop in when word seeped through their circle that Heather’s marriage was finally over.
It was Ruth who’d come to court with her for the divorce hearing.
It was Ruth who’d managed to get them both uproariously drunk afterwards in a Soho bar.
They got so drunk that other patrons thought they were celebrating rather than mourning the end of a twenty-year marriage and a business partnership that had made Heather a very wealthy woman.
‘Don’t be silly, this is different and you’re… well, you’ve already been through quite a bit this year so, just ask, if there’s anything.’
‘I think I might…’ Heather started to say, but she wasn’t sure. After all, it was years since she’d stayed in this house, it was firmly her mother’s house. It hadn’t felt like home for so long she could hardly remember it ever feeling that way. ‘I might stay here for the night, just…’