17 Alma Road
The eighteenth section - part 2...
XVIII (part 2)
“What are we supposed to do now?”
Florence had been standing in Maddie’s bedroom with her back to the window. Owen thought she looked lost. She seemed to scan the room as if it had suddenly been filled with foreign objects, items of no familiarity whatsoever. Following her gaze, Owen sensed a link had been severed, as if the entire contents of those four walls had been orphaned.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Presumably we need to decide what we want to keep and what not. Isn’t that how these things work? Unlike you, I’ve never had to work through the belongings of a loved one.”
“And so soon,” Florence observed unnecessarily.
They had cremated Maddie two days previously and had just come in from the garden where they had scattered her ashes amongst the rose bushes. Although neither of them had said anything definitive, they both felt it was as good a place as any. At least it was within the compass of the house. If Florence had wanted to call it “coming home”, she refrained from doing so. “Better here than somewhere nondescript in London” was all she would admit to.
After a short while she said “We’ll keep the paintings obviously,” then glancing to where various canvasses were propped against the wall, “we can sort through those later.”
Owen imagined the two of them flicking through one canvas after the other, not really knowing what they were looking for.
“I’m sure we can find a home for the books,” he suggested, “those we don’t want to keep, I mean. And as for her clothes…”
“Hardly to my taste,” Florence offered weakly. “Still, I daresay one of the charity shops in town will find them a good home.”
Neither of them had moved. It was as if they had been locked in place by Maddie’s departure, by the manner of it. Although walking through the bedroom door with the intention of sorting something out, resolving the unspoken, they had been paralysed in terms of both thought and motion. Owen knew that his aunt’s question — “what are we supposed to do now?” — concerned more than mere goods and chattels. Perhaps it was closer to a plea than a question. Two years previously there had been four of them — geographically spread it had to be admitted, but four of them nonetheless. Three of them had been able to plan for George’s departure, his illness always propelling him towards its inexorable conclusion, but in Maddie’s case he and Florence had been caught off guard, defences down. She had taken them by surprise. The true subtext to Florence’s question was “how are we to deal with what happened?”
When she verbalised this outright just a few moments later, Owen was prepared.
“Do you think we missed something?” she said, inevitably. “Do you think there was anything we could have done?”
“Don’t think I haven’t asked myself that same question,” he said, “but how could we have known what was going on in London? Whenever we spoke to her she sounded upbeat, there seemed always something on the horizon to look forward to.”
“But was there? Was there really? Or was that just a show she put on for us, knowing…”
“Well, if it was all a show” — Owen felt the need to protect his aunt — “then it was the same one she’d been performing for us for years.”
“Owen!”
The admonishment served to highlight his clumsiness.
“I only meant that there seemed nothing different about her, that’s all. Her rollercoaster lifestyle had been just that for so long, hadn’t it? I suspect we may have spotted alarms when she was younger, but as we all got older — well, perhaps we became, I don’t know, immune somehow. Perhaps there were never alarms. Or perhaps there were always alarms and she protected us from them. I don’t think we ever realised the extent of her periods of depression, the medication she took.”
“So you do think there was something we should have seen?” Florence was unable to keep a tone of desperation from her voice.
“I don’t know, aunt.”
And he hadn’t known. In the previous few years they had all been experiencing difficulties: Florence with George; and even though a long enough period had passed, he was still trying to reconcile himself with the aftermath of Wendy. He tried to recall when he had seen Maddie for any extended period, or the last time he had spoken to her; and in examining every case he could find no clues, nothing upon which he could settle. And if he had, what then? He could only assume that this opacity was one shared with Florence; perhaps it had been worse for her.