Closing the flaps on the box (she hadn’t time for a trip down memory lane now), she tucked the licence into her pocket, and leaving this box to one side, returned to the built-in wardrobe. There was a new digital radio still in its box on the shelf – another ‘it took my fancy’ purchase of Mark’s, and a Nike bag with new sports towels in it, but no file, box or folder that could conceivably contain his paperwork. Closing the door to the wardrobe, and buoyed up by the discovery of one essential item, Aisha tore off another bin liner and went through to the bathroom. She didn’t expect to find the car’s insurance in the bathroom, obviously, but she wanted to clear it of his things while she was still in the mood. There was too much of him in the bathroom, too many personal items; Mark had been clean if nothing else. And the smell of his damn aftershave and deodorant still pervaded the house as though he was there and using it. Well, not anymore, she thought.
The mirrored wall cabinet was too high for her to see in properly – it had also been banned from her use too – but it was where most of his toiletries were. Aisha stood on tiptoe, slid open the doors and peered in. It was stacked to overflowing with deodorants, aftershaves, colognes, and a very expensive male French perfume which Mark had bought from Harrods when he’d felt like treating himself. No wonder the house reeked of his aftershave with this lot in the cupboard, she thought. Holding the rubbish sack open with one hand, Aisha ran her other hand behind the neat lines of bottles, aerosol cans and jars, and flipped them forwards. Metal collided with glass as they landed in the bag, making a merry tune, and one she found quite satisfying.
On top of the cabinet, Aisha could see two electric shavers, still in their boxes and hardly used. Why Mark had needed two electric shavers when he mostly wet-shaved, she had never understood, but like everything he bought for himself, it had to be the latest and the best. Jumping up she flipped them down and caught them in mid-air. They were impersonal enough to be given away, or even sold if she knew someone who would buy them. She placed them on the floor beside the bin bag and then turned to the towel rail. It contained his towels, bath and hand, folded precisely in half and half again, deep blue and luxuriously soft. She and the children had never been allowed to use his towels and had had to make do with an old one – one shared between three – which was so old that it would have been relegated to the dog’s basket, if they’d been allowed a dog. Aisha tugged his towels off the rail and stuffed them into the rubbish bag. A waste, but she could never have brought herself to use them, even if they were thoroughly laundered. Last but not least was his electric toothbrush, mounted on the wall to the side of the washbasin. She lifted it from its stand and dropped it into the bag, knotting it securely. She would have to find a screwdriver and remove the wall bracket later.
Straightening, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror over the hand basin. God, she looked a mess, no wonder her parents and the inspector had done a double take when they’d first seen her. Her hair, which she hadn’t brushed since the accident, was now straggled half in and half out of the plait. And her eyes, sunken from lack of sleep, were circled by dark rings and seemed to stare, almost deranged. The skin on her cheeks was taut and dry, and lighter than it should be – she looked ill. And her clothes, which she’d been wearing for days, were now so crumpled that they looked as if she had been sleeping in them, which come to think of, she had. As Aisha stood mesmerized and slightly unnerved by what stared back, she felt again the uncomfortable sensation that she was not alone. The shadow that seemed to form at the corner of her vision, the brief movement behind her in the mirror, and still the smell of his aftershave, so that it seemed Mark was still there and watching her.
She spun round, threw the bin bag out of the bathroom and onto the landing, then hurried downstairs. In a frenzy, she tore around the lounge, seizing everything of Mark’s that came to sight. Once she had removed all his possessions from the house it would empty itself of him, she thought. The gold carriage clock, the crystal glass vase, his umbrella, and a collection of Reader’s Digest short stories. She darted round and dumped them in a pile in the middle of the lounge floor; then racing through to the kitchen, she flung open the drawers and cupboards. She stopped. Everything in the kitchen was his, as was the furniture, linen and electrical appliances. For despite Mark’s initial promises of the two of them choosing some replacements together, they never had, and she couldn’t throw out all the crockery, pans and cooking utensils, never mind the sofa and dinning table – she and the children would have nothing left. Seething with her anger and resentment, she kicked shut the lower cupboard doors, then went back into the lounge. She paused. Tucked down beside the sofa she saw his briefcase, sitting where he must have left it on Friday. Grabbing it with both hands, she pressed the lock: no combination, that was lucky, and it sprung open. Wrenching the two sides of the briefcase apart, she turned it upside down and shook it hard. The contents cascaded down onto the carpet in a waterfall of pens, papers, envelopes, and sweet wrappers.
‘Sweet wrappers!’ She dropped the briefcase and stared in disbelief. Toffees, bon-bons, chocolate éclairs, aniseed twists, handfuls of wrappers from a mixed assortment which Mark must have bought and eaten in secret. Aisha stared, incredulous, then dropped to her knees and began picking the wrappers over, examining them closely as if they were a rare species of insect which, at any moment, might develop legs and scuttle off.
‘How could you?’ she said. ‘How could you? When you forbade the children sweets even on their birthdays and at Christmas? You said you never ate sweets, which was why your teeth were so good. You bastard! You fucking hypocrite! I hope you rot in hell.’
And the voice, with its confident assurance, answered back as she thought it might: You’re wrong again. What I said was I didn’t eat sweets as a child, which is why my teeth were perfect.
‘No you didn’t!’ she cried. ‘I heard you, I know what you said, so did the children. You’re a liar! Liar! Liar!’
Anyone chancing to peep in through the window would have seen a woman on her knees laughing and crying hysterically, and shouting into an empty room. But no one did. And the retired couple next door simply raised their eyes knowingly, and talked of something else, as they had done every other time they’d heard a disturbance from their neighbours’ house.
But wait, what was this? Aisha’s attention focused again on the contents of the briefcase. Here were some official-looking brown envelopes. She began opening them, taking out the contents, and setting them on the floor beside her. A pension report, that was hopeful; one part of the new-style driving licence, the other section was probably in his wallet, wherever that was; a contract for work – apparently he had changed his job two years previously with a starting salary of £85,000! Thanks for telling me! she thought angrily. And here was the bike’s registration document, filled in ready to send off, and also the bike’s insurance. Getting warmer, she thought. She opened the next envelope, which contained a copy of his birth certificate, then the next, which was the car’s blue registration document with correspondence from an insurance company. She flipped over the pages stapled at one corner and read the titles: ‘Renewal Notice’, ‘Schedule’, ‘Certificate of Motor Insurance’. This was it. Her heart beat loudly in her chest as she ran her finger down the boxes of small print – Certificate number, Car Registration number, Effective date of commencement, Person or classes of persons entitled to drive. This was the section she wanted, her mouth went dry as she read: The following are insured to drive this car: The policy-holder. Any person with the permission of the owner, provided that the person holds a licence to drive the vehicle or has held and is not disqualified from holding or obtaining such a licence.
She stopped and reread it. Yes, it applied to her – she was a driver with a full licence, never mind that she hadn’t had his permission, they weren’t to know. Thank goodness. She breathed a sigh of relief. She was insured to drive his car. Hallelujah! She put the insurance certificate to one side and with tears of gratitude
and relief streaming down her face, continued through the remaining papers. There was no sign of his will and the rest of the papers were work documents, together with an address book.
Aisha sat back and stretched out her legs which were stiff from kneeling, and wiped her wet cheeks on the back of her hand. She began turning the pages of his slim, gold-edged, sleek address book, which she thought might hold clues to his life outside the house. There were names she didn’t recognize, there was no reason why she should; she had been excluded from his life when she had given up work and was at home with baby Sarah. Yet it was eerie seeing Mark’s neat distinctive handwriting, in fountain pen, not biro. Some names were obviously work contacts; others, male and female, had been entered under their first name only. There were email addresses, mobile numbers, and website addresses. Aisha returned to the front of the book and went down the first page again, methodically going through: Alan, Abbott Holdings, Astute Accountancy, Ann – whoever she was she had her own website. She turned the page. B. Brian, with an email address, website and mobile. How sophisticated these people were. Bikers Galore, Bikers Ahead, Beemax, Bertram Holdings – that was his pension company, she had seen it on the headed paper. C. Cherry Lodge, Cinema (Odeon and Vue), Chinese Restaurant – Gerrard Street – he had bracketed it (very good), with a landline number and website address. He’s never taken me to that Chinese restaurant, she thought bitterly, or any other restaurant in the last seven years, but Mark had clearly visited it often for the page was well-thumbed and he would never have merited it ‘very good’ if he hadn’t eaten there a number of times, for Mark was a discerning food critic. Aisha continued over the page: Children’s school – Oh, so you remembered you had children! Chiropodist, Chauffeur-driven Cars, Car Hire, Christine. She stopped. Christine. Christine. That name rang a bell.
She looked down again at Christine’s details, her address in Pleasant Road was only a mile or so away, and the 10c probably meant it was a flat. Christine? Then sentences began to form and return from a long time ago and Aisha started to remember. Mark’s voice, not the one that cursed and shouted at her but the cultured, softly spoken and charming voice of Mark that complimented her during their courtship: ‘When my marriage to Angela ended,’ she heard him say, ‘I moved out. I lived in a bedsit … I really had reached rock bottom. Then I met Christine. She was the life and soul of the party … Within a few months we had set up home together. It was only then I found out …’ Of course, Christine was the name of the alcoholic who had initially proved Mark’s saving grace before the drink set in. Same person or a coincidence? There was no surname and she doubted she had ever known it anyway.
Aisha continued to look through the book, there were lots of women’s names; as well as Christine, and Ann of www. annwright.co.uk, there was Jane, Marion Peters, Sue, and Yvette Walters, none of whom seemed to be work contacts. So, is that where you were when you stayed out all night, or disappeared at weekends and took the car? Is that why you needed the insurance to cover any driver? For it had occurred to Aisha that while she was relieved she hadn’t been driving Mark’s car illegally, without insurance, it raised the question as to why he had the additional cover. ‘I wasn’t allowed to drive your car so it wasn’t for my benefit,’ she said. ‘More likely it was so you could have a decent bottle of wine with your meal at one of these expensive restaurants and let someone else drive.’ Aisha remembered that Mark had been very particular about drink and driving during their courtship, and how impressed she’d been when he’d passed her his car keys at the end of one evening and said, ‘Here, love, you drive, I’ve had a couple of drinks.’ She also remembered how she’d sat proudly behind the wheel of his gleaming silver BMW while he’d watched her admiringly from the passenger seat and stroked her hair. A long long time ago – in the days when he told her how much he loved her and would do so forever.
Chapter Twenty-Six
With her eyes fixed and staring straight ahead, Aisha hurried along the pavement. Her coat was buttoned up to her neck and her hair, now completely loose, was flying out behind her in a tangled mane. She kept her gaze on some indistinct point straight in front, and ignored the stares of passers-by. Who cared what she looked like? Certainly not her. And she doubted the undertakers would pay much attention either; they must be used to people arriving bedraggled, overwhelmed by grief and unconcerned with their appearance.
Aisha hadn’t realized that she would actually have to go to the undertaker, and straightaway. She had thought it was something that could be done over the phone, and more or less when she felt like it, which she hadn’t, and certainly didn’t now. It was her mother who had said that she needed to make the funeral arrangements when Aisha had phoned that morning to speak to the children. ‘Haven’t the hospital been in touch with the certificate of death?’ her mother said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you need to get in contact with an undertaker, Aisha. You can’t leave it any longer, it’s been four days now.’
Which the woman at the undertakers had repeated when Aisha had phoned: ‘We have a two o’clock appointment this afternoon, if that’s convenient. We shouldn’t really leave it much longer.’ So Aisha had agreed, two o’clock was as convenient as any other time, if she really had to go. But it felt strange being out in the world after four days in the house. There was a distance, a light-headedness, an air of unreality in all she saw and heard. Though this could have been due to the lack of food, she thought, for apart from the last of her mother’s dhal and mango squash, she’d had nothing but water. With the children away she really couldn’t be bothered with buying food, cooking or eating.
Aisha paused to glance at her watch, but couldn’t read the figures. The glass was shattered and cracks reached out from the centre like tentacles. She knew it was broken, so why it was still on her wrist she’d no idea. It had been like that since the accident, although she thought it had been broken in the garage when he’d brought her down – that was the only time she remembered hitting her arm. She stepped off the pavement to cross the road, then stopped quickly as a car screeched to a halt, its horn blaring. Aisha stared at the driver through his windscreen and then continued across. Before she reached the other side the driver tooted again and waved impatiently for her to hurry up. Drivers could be so aggressive, she thought; it was a wonder there weren’t more accidents!
Continuing to the top of her road she turned left along the High Street, checking the shop numbers against the number she’d written on the scrap of paper she held in her hand. She must have passed the undertakers many times before when she’d gone to the small grocers with her handful of coins further up the High Street, but she couldn’t remember seeing it. She supposed you didn’t really take much notice of funeral parlours – they were like building societies and estate agents, you largely ignored them unless you required their services.
She counted down the shops to 158 and then looked up at the sign above the shop: ‘H. Node, Funeral Director’. Wasn’t a node a swelling, a painful lump that had to be checked for cancer? Strange name for an undertaker, she thought, or perhaps it wasn’t. She’d chosen this undertaker from the plentiful lists in Yellow Pages simply because it was the nearest. Aisha studied the frosted glass door with its gold picture of a horse-drawn cortège. ‘Est. 1820’ it said in black lettering underneath. Well, at least they would know what they were doing, she thought, which is more than I do. But then again, did anyone her age know about funerals? How many people in their late thirties were proficient at burying the dead?
Aisha pushed open the door and a bell clanged from inside. A smartly dressed middle-aged woman in a grey two-piece suit appeared in reception. ‘Mrs Williams?’
Aisha nodded.
‘Come in, dear, I’ve been expecting you.’ The woman smiled, a professional half-smile, which ignored Aisha’s dishevelled appearance and offered sympathy.
‘I hope I’m not late,’ Aisha began. ‘Only my watch isn’t working and I dropped the one at home on the floor. It
was his, you see, and I …’
The woman shook her head kindly. ‘No, you’re not. Come through to my office, we’ll be quite comfortable in there.’
She showed Aisha through a door on the left and into a small red-carpeted room. Four brocade chairs were arranged around a long, low coffee table which had a vase of fresh flowers in the centre. All very tasteful and low-key, Aisha thought, and pretty much what she’d expected, if she’d expected anything at all. An oak filing cabinet was against one wall, and over it hung a gilt-framed portrait of an old man, who was very distinguished-looking with a long beard and fob watch dangling across the waistcoat of his pinstripe suit.
‘Do sit down, dear, I’m Eileen Node, his great, great granddaughter,’ she said nodding at the portrait. ‘He was our founder. We’re a small family business. Can I get you something to drink?’
‘No, thank you. I’d like to get this over as quickly as possible, if you don’t mind.’
‘Yes, of course, dear. I do understand.’ She tutted sympathetically. ‘To be widowed so young and in such circumstances. Do you not have parents, or a relative or friend who could help you?’
‘My parents are looking after my children,’ Aisha said blankly.
Eileen Node tutted again. ‘I understand. Children … poor little mites.’
Aisha watched as Eileen went to the filing cabinet and took out a ring-binder folder and a writing pad. She returned, and sitting in the chair next to her, placed the folder on the table between them, and the pad on her lap.