6. Stoke-on-Trent, April
STOKE-ON-TRENT, APRIL
During the course of my first week, Anna’s dog and I established a routine.
I left my studio at eight o’clock and arrived shortly afterward to take Quill outside so he could relieve himself.
Then I made his breakfast: a strange porridge-like milk and rice mixture that Anna insisted on because it disguised all the oily supplements she had him take.
By nine, we were ready to walk. I would dress the dog in his little clip-on wax jacket and take him to a park about twenty minutes away.
Circling the muddy field three times, we’d get to ten o’clock, when we would start our journey homeward, stopping off at the butcher for a pig’s ear.
Then, when we were back, I’d dry his paws with a muslin cloth, fill a large bowl of water, and put the radio on so that he had voices to keep him company after I left.
By then, it would be almost lunchtime—a horribly long time to wait until my arrival the following day.
As I rubbed my thumb and index fingers against his silky ears to bid him goodbye, I felt an almost unbearable affinity.
I also knew how it felt to count down the hours until my next chance of human contact.
The greasy aloneness of an empty weekend, with no plans, no one to see.
So, throughout that week, knowing Anna was away, I sent her pictures and little updates, trying to keep my tone light and irreverent. Quill was being such a good dog, I assured her. He loved his lunch today. Barked bravely at a Doberman.
I signed off with a G from me, and an emoji of a paw print from him. By the end of the week, I had even dared to add an X . Sometimes, Anna responded with a heart, or an emoji of hands in prayer, or a superstar, thanks . Other times, she flatly ignored me.
It was also because Anna was away that I was able to gain an intimate understanding of her home.
Or, at least, of the rooms I could get into.
I could have explored every inch of the loft, but my access was restricted to the main living space and the kitchen, which I nevertheless crept lightly through, avoiding Quill’s eye as he observed me from his basket.
The kitchen was a beautiful room and clearly Anna’s chief domain, yet the longer I spent there, the more I sensed its profound isolation; really, it was a film set, not a home.
With a twinge of unease, I realized that Anna’s existence up here was pretty solitary: There was just one bowl on the drying rack, and only a single washed-up wineglass, along with the stale tang of tobacco that hung low in the air.
Inside the kitchen dresser, things were more intriguing.
Each drawer contained a chaos of unopened post, cosmetic paraphernalia, half-finished pill packets, unlidded lipsticks, and a wadge of parking tickets from the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, all bunched up in their yellow plastic wrappers like the heads of daffodils.
At the bottom of one drawer, I noticed a round tin, sweetly decorated with roses.
I opened the lid and inhaled the scent of a perfumed balm.
It was amazingly familiar, an old perfume I’d loved years ago but struggled to find again.
The fruity notes had warped with age and blended into each other, but its peppery base remained the same.
As I rubbed it onto my wrists and neck, I imagined for a moment that Anna had appeared and was standing before me.
A frightening thought. I turned then, and closed the drawer, slipping the perfume tin into my coat pocket.
The living space was even better. I loved to linger there, inspecting the books on the shelves or the artworks on the wall.
But far better than the paintings were the Finbow family photographs, which I spent hours poring over, partly nauseated, partly enthralled.
Over in the corner, on a semicircular table near the fireplace, were all the photographs of Mary.
Some of the photos I had seen before in the press, but there were private images from her childhood, too.
My favorite was a silver frame, showing a fair-haired girl of about six jumping up and down on a beautiful sleigh bed.
Somewhere in France it looked like, or maybe Italy, but it was somewhere warm and European.
The sheets were strewn everywhere, and the ornate purple headboard was shaped like a bishop’s hat.
The girl wore a navy corduroy dress with a lace collar and was grinning widely.
You could see all her missing teeth, and her clenched little fists, as she jumped into the air.
I came back to this one over and over, pushing deeper upon the shard of pain it lodged in my chest. This photo had been captured by someone who evidently adored her, and who had reveled in her glorious girlhood.
It felt pitiful to compare myself to her, but Mary and I were not too different in age, and nothing like this existed of me.
My family photos captured me in my Kingsfold uniform.
After I reached my teenage years, they had abruptly stopped.
Around the same time, I had first cut my hair short.
In other frames, Mary was older, glossier.
In these images, she looked beautiful and excessively well connected, someone who modeled clothes elegantly and enjoyed going to parties.
There she was, captured at an event, perhaps a birthday, wearing biker boots and a stringy black dress, double fisting glasses of champagne.
In another, she was surrounded by men, many of them older.
They slung arms around her, knuckles grazing her collar or breasts.
Instantly, I resented their social ease.
How they squared their groins toward the camera, opening up their mouths slightly, so that the shape of them resembled little crescent moons.
But, as I studied this picture closely, I noticed how sad Mary looked behind the wide smile.
There was a vacancy in her eyes, a jelly layer of sadness that I couldn’t bring myself to look at.
A bitterness rose up in my chest as I reflected on how publicly Anna was pursuing her daughter in court and in the press: a woman who perhaps needed to disappear, and who was well within her rights to do so.
I had done it myself, several times before—when I first left home, and then again when I fled London after my breakup.
What if someone had stopped me from closing one chapter of my life and opening another?
When I dropped Quill home each day, carefully checking the drawers and the photo frames so that my riffling left nothing disturbed, I imagined talking to Anna about her court case and helping her see the error in her approach.
She needed to understand that sometimes you have to give people up, and just hope it’s not forever.
That had been the hardest lesson of my breakup: to wait and see if they come back to you. That the true art of loving is in the letting go.
Toward the end of the second week of my employment, I approached Anna’s loft on Glass Street to find two men going through her bins.
My first assumption was that they were homeless.
The fact that they were journalists took longer to register.
One man was young and tubby with a shaved head, the other rake thin and markedly older, but they were dressed in similarly cheap, green coats.
Their hands moved fast as they hunted through Anna’s rubbish bags.
The younger guy held up a camera. The other ripped apart the black bin liner with two hands, like a doctor tearing open a shirt to get at the heart.
I hung back for several moments on the other side of the street, watching as they lifted out wine bottles, paperwork, packets of medication.
Some they photographed, the rest they discarded carelessly over their shoulders.
Suddenly, a large, black-framed Crittall window was tipped open overhead, and boiling water poured down onto the pavement. As it hit the ground, the hot water hissed into steam like a witch’s potion.
“Cunts!” Anna roared at them from above. “Fucking cunts!”
She was back.
A ceramic planter smashed by the journalists’ feet; lumps of soil and dried-out geraniums spread across the ground as they danced backward, raising camera lenses to their faces in self-defense. Next, the Aga kettle was thrown, bouncing as it fell.
One of the men gestured over his shoulder to leave, but the other cocked his head toward the blue front door. It swung open. Anna stepped out in her bare feet and a long white nightie, her hair hastily knotted on the top of her head.
“This is harassment,” she shrieked, not noticing me. Her face was free of makeup, and her eyes looked puffy and red. She picked up an almond milk carton and threw it. “You brutes! I’ll call the police!”
The men retreated up the street, still photographing Anna as she tossed whatever she found: a glass jar, then a wine bottle. When they were almost parallel to where I was standing, I stepped into the road and put my hand in the way of their lenses.
“Leave her alone!” I yelled, pointing to the rubbish on the ground. “You’re making a disgusting mess. Get out of here.” The two men looked at me with confusion. I pointed toward the end of the street. “Go on. Leave her alone. Get out,” I called as they turned back up the street. “Scumbags.”
The sun was dazzlingly low in the sky, and we both shielded our eyes as the men jogged away. When they were gone, Anna glanced across at me.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said breathlessly, relief washing over her face. “Thank you.”
I guided her back toward the door.
“We’ll blame it on the foxes,” I said, gesturing to all the trash.
“Not foxes, vultures. ”
I surveyed the rest of the strewn litter. There, dented in the gutter, was the kettle she had thrown. I bent down and held it up. “Tea?”
Back upstairs, Anna paced the kitchen, incensed.