am,’ he tried, though he wasn’t certain of anything at that moment.
‘Hello! I’m Gracie’s daughter.’
‘Gracie,’ he said, feeling even more nervous now she claimed to be somebody’s daughter. He didn’t know any Gracies.
‘Gracie,’ he said again, unsure whether he should yet betray the fact he knew nobody by that name.
‘Yes. Can I come in?’
He didn’t seem to have much say in the matter because she was already pushing on the door to enter his house. Her admission was almost forced, but Doubler was disarmed by her eyes, which were sparkling and bright, and there was a lightness in her look that he recognized and responded to. He stood back as she entered and walked ahead of him as if she knew the house.
‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ she asked as she made her way towards the kitchen. Her ease, her certainty became familiar. Gracie. Gracie must be the name of Mrs Millwood and this must certainly be her daughter. He shut the front door and hurried after her.
‘By all means put the kettle on,’ he said, perplexed, but by the time he had caught up with her, she was already filling the kettle at the sink as if she had performed this task a thousand times.
He sat at the kitchen table and allowed events to happen to him. He allowed this woman to feel her way around his kitchen as she assembled cups and saucers, and warmed the teapot, reaching for the tin of tea leaves as if it were second nature. He watched her and marvelled at the million little ways that identified her as her mother’s daughter.
‘Were you expecting me?’
‘Not at all. I was expecting your mother.’
‘Just as I thought. She was supposed to tell you, but she must have chickened out.’
‘Tell me what?’
‘Mum’s poorly.’
She made this last announcement just as she sat down opposite him. She pushed a teacup towards him.
‘Drink this.’
He tried to lift the hot drink to his lips but found himself quite unable to grasp the cup with enough force to raise it. He looked at Gracie’s daughter.
‘Poorly. What sort of poorly?’
‘Oh, the worst you can imagine, I’m afraid.’ She reached forward and spooned some sugar into his tea, stirring it, and then she sipped at her own. She smiled a small, sorrowful smile, one that, irrationally in Doubler’s eyes, carried a trace of sadness for him as well as a multitude of sadnesses of her own. ‘She’s had it before, of course, but I’m afraid it’s back again with sharper teeth.’
Doubler found himself unable to swallow, as if the disease’s sharp teeth had sunk themselves into his own fleshy neck.
‘When? When did she have it before?’ he asked, once he had found his voice. This was all news to him. The first toothless episode and then the second, fanged one.
‘A good while back. She was younger then, much more able to deal with it and she’s been well for such a long time now, we really thought she’d beaten it.’
Doubler imagined Mrs Millwood beating a sharp-toothed thing with a stick. Or a mop. Or a broom. Surely it wouldn’t stand a chance. And he remembered, now, her absence. She had taken some time off and he had resented it enormously through a cloud of other resentments, and the combined force of his upset and all the other upsets had somehow obscured the reason for her absence. He had been at the lowest point of his life. He had settled into the routine of life without Marie, but nothing had made much sense to him still. He tried to remember how long Mrs Millwood had been absent for.
‘How long?’ he said. Using two hands, he lifted the cup unsteadily to his lips.
A sharp pain flashed across the face of Gracie’s daughter and Doubler realized what she might think he was asking.
‘Until she’s back here, I mean. Back at work, until she’s not poorly again.’ The word ‘poorly’ stuck in his mouth like fluff, getting tangled there and drying his tongue and lips until he thought they might never work again. It had been the daughter’s language, the daughter’s choice of words. But of course it wasn’t a big enough word to describe this thing with savage teeth.
Gracie reached across the table and took his hand in hers. ‘Mum’s really sick this time. We’re taking it one day at a time. She is going to fight it, and the doctors are going to throw everything at it. But the treatment’s going to be awful, so she’ll feel a lot worse before she feels better. If she feels better at all.’
Doubler was horrified by his own selfish thoughts and yet all he could think of was the absence he would be left with. Not the threat of the ultimate absence (this, he hadn’t even begun to process as a possibility) but the absence of the next few days and weeks. Without her visits giving his day some structure and purpose, he wasn’t sure he would cope. He felt his stomach cave in.
‘Will you cope, do you think?’ Gracie’s daughter asked, kindly.
Doubler was taken aback, completely, as if she had seen into his soul. He stumbled to find the words to express how utterly bereft he felt not to be sitting down for lunch with Mrs Millwood today, let alone the terror he felt when he tried to contemplate the bleakness of the horizon ahead of him.
‘There’s the day-to-day cleaning, I suppose. It’ll probably be easy enough to find somebody to help you keep on top of that,’ Gracie’s daughter said, looking around her at the kitchen. ‘I’m amazed she didn’t want to talk this through with you herself. She may be poorly but she has you on her mind, you know.’
Doubler swallowed back his thoughts. To cope with the housework didn’t even touch the surface of the loss he was feeling. And yet, somehow, a conversation seemed to be happening to him, around him, and Gracie’s daughter was covering both sides.
‘I tell you what. How about I find somebody to fill her shoes in the short term? I’d be happy to place some ads and do the first round of interviews if that would help. Shall I?’
Doubler nodded slowly, not entirely sure what he was agreeing to. He didn’t want somebody to fill Mrs Millwood’s shoes. Not in the short term, not in the longer term. He wanted her own outdoor shoes left under the bench by the kitchen door, and he wanted her own stockinged feet to slip into her indoor shoes, which she wore to dart around the house. The point of Mrs Millwood was that she barely wore shoes. She simply floated from room to room just above the surface. She only became substantial, a human form that might need shoes, when she sat down at lunchtime, and then they talked and talked. Nobody would fill those shoes; the footwear wasn’t the point.
‘I won’t hire anybody until you’ve met them, of course. I’ll just do the preliminary interviews and you can make the final decision. How does that sound? I think it will make Mum happy to know that somebody is taking care of things here. She worries a bit, you see, and I don’t want her distracted. I want her mind firmly focused on getting better. She’s strong in that she’s vital and vigorous, but there’s so little of her she’s going to have to use every ounce of her physical strength to deal with the chemo.’
There. She’d said it. Doubler had known that the language of Mrs Millwood’s
