Home safe from the supermarket, I pour a cup of water from the tap and drain it, twice. I’m hot and flustered – and I’m getting bogged down again. I need to stick to my routine, not get thrown off by changes. That's why Ellen bloody Fraser’s slipped under my guard. I feel the old restlessness rise up in me, the electric buzz of anxiety. I want to soothe it. I know how I could. But I have to be careful, these days.
I just need to keep playing the game of distracting myself: I will go and see Lily.
Outside again, the afternoon sun is still strong enough to turn my pale skin pink. As I cut through the copse of overgrown bushes that separates our homes, heading up the slight incline, I tilt my head up to admire Parklands through the leaves overhead. Even for Park Road, it’s a beauty under its torn plastic sheets and the plywood on the windows – it’s all towering chimneys and carved stonework, that over-the-top detail the Victorians loved.
Lily’s little redbrick cottage, once the mansion’s carriage house, sits in its own small garden on the side of the drive that continues on to the big house, set far back from the road.
She was the house manager for Parklands, she explained once; it was rented out as rooms. I got the impression the residence had got increasingly shabby with the years. She’d stayed on with her late husband, after it was shuttered up for redevelopment: at least her rent can’t be much.
I’ve got my own key, now, so she doesn’t have to get up. That’s what I said, anyway. I worry about her; I had visions of her falling and me assuming she wasn’t answering because she was asleep or at a coffee afternoon.
As I let myself in, the smell of gingerbread slaps me. I sniff the air. There’s a smoky edge to it. ‘Lily? It’s me.’ I find her in her sunny sitting room, in her chair. Her eyes are closed. ‘Lily,’ I say loudly.
She raises her head and fumbles for her reading glasses. It takes her a moment to place me then her face breaks into a smile. ‘Oh hello, darling, you look lovely.’
I can’t help but laugh – she always says I look lovely. ‘Lily, have you been baking again?’
‘What? Goodness, you do mumble.’ I don’t think she likes to admit her hearing’s not as good as it was.
I repeat myself, and add: ‘I’m just going down to make us both a nice cup of tea.’
‘Oh yes, dear, and let’s have something to nibble,’ she calls after me.
‘Sounds lovely.’
Down the steps, in her little kitchen built half underground, I crack open the small, high-up windows as far as they will go and open the oven, fanning the smoke away. The gingerbread men are black, welded to the tray. There’s no saving them, or it. I’ll chuck it later, when the thing’s cooled.
I pull out the tin of biscuits I bought her and arrange a few on a plate. I know she’ll only pick at one, still conscious of her ‘figure’ even these days.
It’s as neat as a pin in here, as ever, but under the sharp whiff of bleach – Lily’s a huge believer in potent chemicals – there’s a darker current. Damp. I make a mental note to have a think about what to do about that. Lily’s vague about arrangements and utterly private about money, in that old-fashioned way.
We met my first winter here, when she drove her ancient Ford into the back of my car at the lights at this end of Park Road, as you head into the village. She blamed the ice on the roads.
‘Oh dear,’ she’d said, as we stood by the phone box: her bumper was hooked over mine. ‘I am sorry. Shall we have a nice cup of tea in the warm, and sort this out?’
I’d walked her back down the road the little distance to the main drive to our houses and followed her in to her hall. She walked stiffly: a hip injury, she told me later. ‘Just a little sore.’ She made us both Earl Grey. ‘I can’t drink that supermarket tea, dear, who can? Or should we have a sherry instead?’
I’m not sure that was what Mark meant when he said I should make an effort to make friends locally, not spend all my time moping around the house when Sophie was at school. I’d found the not working harder than I’d thought – the days went so slowly.
‘Why are you spending so much time with that old woman?’ he had asked once, crossly. ‘Whenever I ring you seem to be at hers. Shouldn’t social services be looking in on her?’
‘I think she’s got someone who goes round. I just like to check on her. She’s fun.’
She’s nothing like my mum, really, who barely bothered to look in a mirror and would have laughed at the idea of spending time on a full face of make-up and polished pink nails, for another day of, well, a coffee afternoon at church, at most. But there’s something in Lily’s full-tilt approach to life, her heroic refusal not to have a nice time, that reminds me of Mum. Or used to, when we first met.
‘Lily,’ I say, once I’m upstairs. ‘Did you forget about the gingerbread? It’s all burnt.’ I put down her tea in front of her – in a proper cup and saucer, of course.
‘Don’t be silly.’ She frowns. ‘Of course I didn’t forget. I just closed my eyes for a minute.’
‘Lily, you’ve got to be careful. The oven had started to smoke. Didn’t your smoke alarm go off?’ I’m sure I checked it just the other week.
‘Oh, that thing,’ she says. ‘It would not stop that awful beeping. So I switched it off.’
I get up to look in the hall. ‘Lily, there are wires hanging down. Did you take the batteries out?’
Her eyes look very blue, in the late sunlight. ‘No …’ Almost childlike.
‘OK.’ I can replace the batteries the next time I’m round, and tape the cover back in place. Despite this, I already feel soothed just being here, away from my life. This? This I can deal with.
I pull the worn pack of cards from the drawer. ‘Anyway, what are you going to beat me at today?’