long and bony. Joan heard her knuckles crack as she put her weight on them. Her nails looked at odds with the puckered skin around them; they were oval, beautifully shaped with perfect half-moons at the cuticles.
They walked slowly into the store and made for the shelving section. Nina went straight to the pine and selected what she wanted within minutes, a golden Scandinavian wood. The two sets of shelves came to four hundred pounds. Joan thought it must be nice to go for the best without hesitating. Maybe once Rich was in a job they would be able to rip out the chipboard in her living room and have pine. If he was able to get a job; no, she wasn’t going to think negative thoughts, she was going to put her best foot forward.
That evening Joan assembled the flat-pack shelves in the alcoves and cooked turkey with baby sweetcorn and broccoli for Nina’s meal. When she carried it through on a tray Nina was pouring a glass of wine for her, a sparkling white.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘I bought a couple of bottles of the stuff you like. Tastes like lemonade to me, but each to her own. Cheers!’
She looked exhausted after her outing. Mauveish smudges ringed her eyes and Joan noticed her hands trembling on her sticks. She was terribly touched by the wine.
‘You’d no need to buy this for me,’ she said, sipping.
‘It’s nothing, it humours me. Where are we up to with the books? The Ms?’
Joan was lining them up on the shelves in alphabetical order. ‘Alberto Morave next,’ she said. ‘Is he interesting?’
‘Moravia. I think so. The turkey is delicious. What do you have in the evenings? Do you visit family?’
‘No, I’ve nobody close, they’ve passed on. I usually eat on my own, a pizza or a chop, something quick. I quite like those low-calorie, ready-made meals. You can pop them in the microwave and they’re done in a couple of minutes. It’s not much fun, cooking for one.’
‘No. I used to find it a bore before I got married. The university had a staff restaurant which was excellent so I ate in there most days.’
‘Are you divorced then?’
‘Separated. Have you ever been married?’
‘Yes, only for a year, in my twenties. It didn’t work out. I don’t like living alone. I pretend to; you have to, don’t you? It’s like what you said about illness. People get embarrassed if you admit you’re lonely. I didn’t think Mr Right would ever show up but he has and we’re marrying soon.’ She heard Rich’s voice telling her it wouldn’t be long now. They planned to go to the registry office the week after he came out. Joan would have married him and waited for him – she knew other women in a similar position did – but Rich insisted that he wanted to be a free man before they tied the knot. Joan wasn’t going to explain any of that to Nina, though. There were certain things you didn’t confide to clients if you valued your job.
Nina gave a pained smile. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t work out even when you do meet the right person. It’s all a gamble, it can tear you apart.’
‘You’re tired, I reckon,’ Joan said, thinking she sounded low. Her voice was flat and there was a slide in it. ‘You’ve done too much today. A good night’s sleep will put a smile back on your face.’
Nina lowered her head and finished her turkey. She dozed for a while, the tray still on her lap. Joan didn’t move it for fear of waking her. She carried on quietly with the books, wondering how anyone could read this lot, thinking of all the hours of sitting still it would mean. Like her, Rich wasn’t a reader, which was a shame because it would have been a way of passing those long hours he complained about. Joan had to be on the go, doing something; a tapestry, some mending, cleaning windows, stripping the cooker. She was just like Gran that way, always up and active. She had never seen Gran sitting for long: ‘I’m as busy as a hen with one chicken,’ she used to say, zipping from room to room. The day before she died she was turning a mattress. Joan thought of Nina, alone here at night with just her books for company and little else to look forward to. It made a sad picture. She chatted to Rich inside her head, telling him that she was going to get on with decorating the living room when she got home. The whole place was going to be revamped before he arrived; she’d drawn up a timetable. The last time she had been to see him she’d taken colour charts and they’d chosen the emulsion. Rich suggested that she should wait until he was out and he’d help her but she said no, she wanted the place just so from their very first day together.
Joan and her brother Eddie went to live with their widowed grandmother in Bromley when she was three and he was eleven. Their father had died of a heart attack just before Joan’s birth and their mother was felled by cancer when Joan turned three. Gran had a two-bedroomed terraced house. She and Joan slept in the front bedroom, Eddie in the smaller back one. Gran worked long hours in the rag trade but she ran a tight ship at home and they all had their domestic jobs. Gran couldn’t stand even a speck of dust in the house. When the coalman came to shunt his sacks into the bin outside she covered the floors and furniture in the back room with sheets of newspaper. She craved an end-of-terrace house so that he could take his filthy, blackened hessian bags up the side alley but none ever came up for rent. She’d hover around him, warning him not to touch anything, monitoring his mucky boots. Sometimes, to annoy her, he’d pretend to lose his balance and her hands would fly to her face in silent agony.
The house was chilly during the day but on a winter’s evening, with the coal fire well stoked, there was nowhere cosier. When Gran arrived back from work they would make pilchards on toast and she’d tell them how she’d machined twenty skirts that day, or stitched three dozen collars. Sometimes she brought back clothes she’d got cheap because they were seconds. Joan was the first girl in the street to have a pair of loon pants and Eddie cut a dash in hipster trousers when they were just reaching the shops.
Joan was fifteen when Eddie disappeared. By then he had rented a tiny flat in Islington but he often stayed with them on a Friday or Saturday night and his room was kept ready for him. Gran would put a hot water bottle between his sheets on winter weekends to make sure that they were properly aired. His chest, weakened by bouts of childhood asthma, was easily affected by damp.
After they heard the terrible news Gran insisted on maintaining his room just as it was on the last Sunday morning they had seen him. She literally wasted away in front of Joan’s eyes, worn out with grieving for him. Joan would hear her crying in the night, deep sobs against the pillow in her bed by the window, sobs that went on month after month. Joan stopped crying after a couple of weeks. She seemed to have used up all her tears. She felt dry and tight inside and remote, as if nothing much would ever matter again. She didn’t know how to comfort her gran. She was a young fifteen, tongue-tied and awkward. What could she find to say to a woman of sixty-six who had raised two families and outlived a child and grandchild?
Her grandmother died when Joan was eighteen. She was alone in the world then apart from an aunt who’d rowed with Gran and kept her distance and a couple of cousins who’d moved out to Essex, shaking the dust of the inner city from their feet. They had never been one of those close cockney families who were supposed to inhabit London. Joan would wonder if those families ever truly existed – she had never met any of them. At times it occurred to her that she had been handed a raw deal, orphaned and then deprived of the two people closest to her. The sight of her single plate and cup on the kitchen table could make her heart knock.
Gran left her exactly one hundred pounds. Joan put it in a building society and carried on renting the house. She had left school at sixteen with four O-levels. The teachers said that she was good enough to stay on and do secretarial training, maybe head to college eventually. Eddie had been of that opinion too; he’d said that when
