Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
Are you ever really home unless you’ve finally come home again, after a holiday, a convalescence, or why not both?
When Clemence was here last, snow was merely suggestion, a decorative powder, but now it’s a blanket on the world, unrelenting, and so the scene is transformed.
She barely knows this street, hardly recognizes the houses, all of it so much to take in after three weeks in her parents’ spare room, recovering.
It turned out she’d been desperately sick—bacterial pneumonia.
Spending five days in the hospital before her father arrived to take her back home to her parents’ place, and a part of her had wanted to fight it—she had her own home just a few blocks away.
But she didn’t have the strength, and besides, there were so many stairs, and she was struggling to breathe at all.
She couldn’t have managed. That she would ever feel better again seemed impossible, and how was it even supposed to happen with her simply lying there, waiting, but somehow it did, thanks to the wonders of antibiotics: Clemence started to recover.
So that by Christmas, she was well enough to come downstairs and spend the day with her family, her sisters, and their partners, and their kids, but also had a convenient excuse to retreat from the chaos when the whole thing got to be too much.
And then by New Year’s, she was almost herself again, ringing in the hour with her parents, which perhaps was not the most auspicious start, but it was better than the New Year’s Eve the year before she’d spent fighting with Toad about the placement of the mirror in their downstairs bathroom.
At least the home she had to return to now was her own, and she had missed it.
She’d wondered if she would, if after the comforts of her parents’ house, finally come to see its deficiencies.
The drafts, the cheap old windows whose glass frosted up in the cold, and that lumpy bed she’d convinced herself she’d become accustomed to, but now she wasn’t sure.
What if the entire life she’d made had been a delusion, her perception of reality confused since her fever and subsequent hallucinations?
She’d woken up in the hospital three days after the jumble sale, convinced that she’d stabbed Mary-Ann Arbuckle to death with a brooch pin, and everyone had had to tell her that Mary-Ann Arbuckle was completely fine.
But Clemence hasn’t dreamed it—the house is real, albeit transformed by winter.
And there is Tom the handyman shovelling the steps.
She had forgotten about Tom, but she’s grateful that he exists, because she’d been wary of slipping.
She’s still not steady, and everywhere is coated in ice, except where Tom has diligently chipped it away so Clemence can climb the steps safely.
He greets her on the porch with the tip of his hat with the earflaps, and Clemence wonders is he’s fixed the leak in the hall yet.
If Mrs. Yeung has brought him in to do over the place from top to bottom, but no, she sees, once they’ve come inside.
Everything is the same. After all, it’s only been a few weeks, not even a month, but it seems like longer.
So long that she is surprised to find it at all, the walls and door frames as solid as they ever were, albeit stained and haphazard.
The mark from the leak unchanged, and the smell of the place—Mrs. Yeung’s Korean cooking melded with whatever everybody else has been cooking on their hot plates.
“What a beautiful old home,” says Bonnie Lathbury, who likes to see the good in things, and no doubt can even see that once upon a time, her statement had probably been true.
Standing at the bottom of the stairs, she’s examining the newel post, the sole remnant of any original woodwork, never mind the crummy carpet, the holes in the plaster.
She’s carrying bags of groceries, and Roger has more: fresh fruit and vegetables.
They’re convinced that Clemence wasn’t taking care of herself, and Bonnie’s concerned that the problem had been mould.
Both of them uncertain about delivering her back here, reminding her over and over again that she is welcome to stay with them as long as she needs to.
Forever. Bribing her with home-cooked meals and freshly changed linens, but they would tire of this eventually, Clemence knows. She would tire even sooner.
And believe it or not, Clemence actually wants to return here, to this strange house in the middle of the city, a house that seems, at first glance, thoroughly devoid of charm.
She is happy to be climbing these two steep staircases, just as airless as they were in the heat of the summer, and she turns to tell her parents, “It’s not much farther now.
” They’re laden with the groceries, and haven’t permitted her to carry a thing, which was probably wise, because she’s more winded than usual on the way up.
It’s remarkable how much this feels like a homecoming, unlocking that door with her very own key, even though most of the room’s furnishings used to be someone else’s.
Everything exactly where she’d left it, right down to the plate by the sink from the toast she’d had the morning of the jumble sale, still scattered with crumbs.
She doesn’t even need to turn the lights on, because with all the leaves off the trees, her room is brighter than ever, the cushions on her daybed carefully arranged, which is the sole reminder that Jillian had been here, popping in while Clemence was in the hospital to gather clothes and personal items. Everyone had been concerned for Clemence that day, except for Clemence herself, whose mind was far away.
“It’s actually kind of lovely,” Bonnie is saying, as Clemence could have predicted, but there is surprise in her voice that she doesn’t have to lie or embellish. The gingham curtain beneath the sink, behind which Clemence keeps her tea in a tin, and other canned goods.
She tells her parents, “I’ll put the kettle on,” and she is prouder of this, of having them here, than she’d ever been when showing them around the beautiful two-thousand-square-foot townhome that she’d shared with Toad, which had always seemed more like a step on the property ladder than an actual place for people to live.
Outside on the balcony, Clemence thinks she can see paw prints, and wonders about Bailey, if he’s missed her.
Where he goes when he’s not here, and whether there are other people all over the neighbourhood imagining he belongs to them.
She regrets having shut him out over those few weeks in order to make her apartment hospitable on the off chance of Toby who—unlike the cat, old reliable—rarely showed up at all.
Her parents are standing around awkwardly, hovering.
Clemence realizes they’re uncomfortable with sitting on her bed; they don’t want to mess with the arrangement of pillows, plus no doubt they feel it’s an intimate, personal space, so she pulls out the chairs from her small kitchen table, offering these instead.
The table is crowded with her laptop, and Dr. Penelope’s notes—Clemence is not yet behind on her deadline for the index, but she will be unless she quickly gets herself together.
The idea of having to scramble and rush seems strange and foreign from where she’s standing now, and she’s not sure she remembers how to do it.
“And all your books,” Bonnie is saying now, studying the spines that are lined up on the shelf, something else she can use to try to decode the mystery that is her daughter. “Mortimer, Farmer, Lively—how can there be so many authors called Penelope?”
“And over here, too,” says Roger, perusing the pile on the table, holding up Penelope Harkness’s backlist—Say Yes: The Secret to a Happier Marriage; Zap: How to Bring a Spark to Your Romantic Connection; and After You Stray: Putting Your Marriage Back on Track. “Pen by name, pen by game?”
He laughs. Nobody else does. Bonnie is too interested in the titles in his hand. “Clemence, what is this?” she’s asking. “What are you doing with these books?”
“They’re for work,” Clemence says, and she doesn’t know how to read her mother’s anxious questioning, if she’d be happier to know that the books were for personal research and Clemence was actually trying to rebuild her former life.
Bonnie says she doesn’t like to judge, but of course she judges.
Everybody does. She just makes a special effort not to show it.
What would it be liked if they talked to each other, instead of functioning as respective ciphers, but no, because then they would fight all the time.
If she’s being judged, Clemence doesn’t want to know.
“I’m doing the index for her latest book.
She’s friends with Grace. Did you know that? ”
“Grace gave me an autographed copy of Zap for my birthday. Some of the ideas she suggested were very effective. You know the one, Roger?”
“Gross,” says Clemence. The kettle is boiling, not a moment too soon.
She picks up her yellow teapot and waits for Bonnie to admire it, because she wants her mother to know that Clemence too can have beautiful things.
As she prepares the tea, she explains how she bought it from a potter at the artisan market in the summer, and there is a moment of silence as everybody thinks about Mary-Ann Arbuckle, and how Clemence had tried to stab her with a brooch.
“In a fit of delusion,” Clemence would add, if she were explaining the situation.