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For forty days, Irena answers in her dead mother’s voice. Then a deadline lands on the family house, and every borrowed phrase begins to split two ways: what Mum once meant, and what the living need now.
Five days after my mother died, Aunt Ruth held up the chipped blue serving bowl and asked me, “Are we giving this away?”
“It isn’t eating anything.”
She shut her eyes. Then she laughed, and Daniel laughed with her, although he had a mouthful of funeral sandwich.
“That,” Ruth said. “Exactly that.”
I’d put the weight on eating, with Mum’s slight annoyance at having to explain how objects worked. I hadn’t expected it to feel good.
“Leave it for now,” I added in my own voice.
I was her After-Speaker. In our family, for forty days from a death, someone with a voice sufficiently like the dead person’s answered direct questions from relatives with words the dead person had actually used. After that, you could give your own answer. I’d agreed before the funeral, when refusing one more thing seemed likely to require more strength than doing it.
Ruth had chosen me after I told Daniel the kettle wasn’t plugged in. Apparently even irritation could qualify you.
“She kept a cracked one inside it,” Daniel said. “In case this one went.”
“That was the good pudding bowl,” Ruth said.
“It leaked.”
“Only custard. It was perfectly all right for something with a bit of substance.”
At the funeral people had called Mum generous and devoted. Nobody had mentioned the cupboard of bowls you had to feed according to their injuries. I was grateful for it now. Ruth turned the chip toward the wall, as her sister always had.
Most of the visitors had gone. The three of us were eating what remained, standing up, though there were enough chairs. I had spent the last three years arriving at this kitchen with a leaving time prepared. Sometimes I announced it before taking off my coat. Sometimes I kept the coat on. During the last year I had mostly stayed away.
Today my coat was upstairs under somebody’s hat.
Ruth had taken it from me when we came back from the funeral. She’d undone the button I was fumbling with and pulled one sleeve straight before hanging it up. I had let her. My hands still smelled faintly of the cold brass rail beside the grave.
Ruth looked at the cups massed beside the sink.
“Can I leave those a bit, Irena?”
“Sit down. It’ll keep.”
“Less brisk,” she said. “She wanted you properly settled before you noticed.”
I tried it again. “Sit down. It’ll keep.”
Ruth lowered herself into a chair with a sigh that seemed to come from her feet.
“I’ll wash them,” I said, speaking for myself. “You’ve done the food.”
She passed me a sandwich before I could reach the tap.
Daniel was opening the cupboard under the sink. He touched the pipe, checked his fingers, then looked into the plastic tub beneath it.
“Still dripping,” he said. “I’ll come back tomorrow with a washer.”
“Tomorrow you could have a day off,” Ruth told him. “There’s plenty of room in that tub.”
He pushed it farther under the pipe.
While I washed up, he told us about the offer. We already owned the house between us; Mum had put it in our names years earlier, though neither of us had ever moved a chair without consulting her. Daniel had asked an agent for a valuation. The agent knew a couple looking in this street, and they’d offered close to the suggested price.
They could give us several weeks to think. Then they would have to renew their rental agreement. Their last day for an answer fell on the thirty-second day after Mum’s death.
“We wouldn’t have to empty it by then,” Daniel said. “Just decide.”
“We’ve barely emptied the sandwiches,” Ruth said, and put two more on his plate.
He ate them. I rinsed a cup and set it beside the others. For the first time that day, I was hungry.
Over the following week Ruth found reasons to ask me things. She wanted Mum’s opinion of a cake with no butter in it, of flowers that had arrived wrapped in more paper than flowers, of Daniel’s attempt to fold the tablecloth. I gave her what I remembered. When I couldn’t find the words, we waited, or someone supplied an occasion that helped. Once I said “perfectly ridiculous” and Ruth corrected it to “plain ridiculous.” Perfectly had apparently been too generous.
I started going to the house after work. Ruth usually had food. We could talk about Mum for an hour without arriving at the question of whether I ought to have visited more.
On the twelfth day, she was looking for a pencil to mark the packets in the freezer when she found the family notebook. The cover had once been red. Mum had kept it in the drawer with the menus.
Ruth opened it on the table. There were deaths, dates, and beside each name the person who had spoken afterward.
“Your mother did it for Grandma,” she said. “You were little. She had her way of clearing her throat before agreeing to anything.”
“Who started it?”
Ruth turned back a page. “Grandma spoke for her brother.”
“I mean who thought of it.”
“I don’t know. It was done before them.”
There was no explanation in the notebook, only more names. Ruth smoothed a corner with her thumb.
“I’ve never liked having to do it,” I said.
“Your mother was nervous too.”
“That’s a different thing.”
She left her hand on the page. “I know. But I’m glad you’re doing it for us.”
If someone had invented the custom, I could have disagreed with that person. Ruth was offering me my mother, my grandmother, everyone already written down. I took the pencil she’d found and helped her label the food.
She had brought soup in the blue bowl. We ate it with bread torn over our laps because the table was covered with freezer packets.
“Do we really need to let the house go?” she asked me.
“It isn’t eating anything.”
Her shoulders dropped. The small release was familiar now, and I liked being able to give it to her.
“Although there are bills,” I added. “And Daniel’s coming over all the time.”
I wanted to sell. I wanted to stop wondering whether every evening spent elsewhere would eventually have to be accounted for. But Ruth had put the larger piece of bread in my hand, and I didn’t say it.
“The bills aren’t terrible between two,” she said. “We could still have Sundays here. There’s no need for anyone to be here every day.”
“It needs looking after.”
“We’ve always managed.”
She began dividing the remaining soup into portions for Daniel. I held the bags open. When she said it was a comfort to have one thing stay as it was, I let her finish without correcting what I knew she had understood.
On the twenty-third day I found Daniel in the back room, with his jacket still on, freeing the sash window. The agent had left me a message asking whether our plans had changed.
“Why haven’t you called him?” I asked.
“Ruth said you’d talked.”
“We talked about the bills.”
He eased a paint scraper along the frame. “She said Mum’s answer was, ‘It isn’t eating anything.’”
“Those were my words. Well. Her words, out of my mouth. Ruth asked me here.”
“I know how it works.”
“I also said there were bills.”
“You always say that. There are bills, there’s traffic, you’ve got an early start.”
I set my bag down too hard.
He stopped scraping. “I’m telling you how I heard it.”
Ruth had given him the first answer, and he had fitted the second to the sister who was always reaching for her coat.
“I didn’t agree to keep it.”
“Ruth thought you did.”
“She could have asked.”
“So could I.”
He put down the scraper. The window stayed shut.
“I didn’t call him,” he said. “I kept thinking we’d talk next time we were all here. Then I’d come in and there’d be something to do.”
“You don’t have to keep doing everything she wanted.”
He looked at me then.
“She didn’t ask me to fix this. She liked it shut.”
“Daniel—”
“And I didn’t hate coming here when she was ill. Sometimes I wanted to go home. Sometimes we watched something and she fell asleep and I stayed till the end. I wasn’t waiting for my life to start again.”
“I didn’t mean all of it.”
“You say it like all of it.”
I looked at the dust on his jacket cuff. I had been in this room twice since the funeral and had noticed neither the stuck window nor that his jacket had never reached a hook.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He rubbed his thumb along the scraper’s handle.
“I do want my evenings,” he said. “I go home from work, then I come here. Yesterday I brought my dinner in a box. There’s nobody to have dinner with.”
I sat on the arm of the sofa. He stayed by the window. For a while neither of us tried to improve what he’d said.
The next morning I called the agent. I told him we hadn’t decided against the offer, and that I would make sure he had an answer by the agreed day. The couple were still interested. He sent the details to both of us again.
Then I told Daniel I would do the house checks until the deadline.
“The back window’s still shut,” he said.
“It’s been shut for years. Tell me what actually needs doing.”
He did. The front-room window had to be opened for a while because of the damp, then latched again. The post needed collecting, the bins putting out. The plants were harder to kill than Ruth thought, but he’d promised to water them. He had fixed the pipe. There were towels in the washing machine that had been there since Sunday.
“I forgot those,” he said.
“They’ll have formed a household of their own.”
He laughed, then told me where the washing powder was.
The work wasn’t difficult. It took time in pieces too small to resent individually. A bin bag tore; the replacement roll was upstairs. The damp towels needed another wash. I had to wait for the cycle, and while I waited I found myself wiping shelves that could have stayed unwiped until we knew what we were doing with the house.
At seven I opened the fridge. Ruth had written my name on a container. There was one for Daniel underneath it, pushed to the back so that I wouldn’t take the wrong one. She had remembered that he disliked cooked carrots. I ate standing at the counter until I noticed what I was doing, then carried the container to the table.
The chair beside me had a flattened cushion, its ties knotted twice around the uprights. I rested my feet on the lower rung. Across town, Daniel would be getting home. I sent him a message to say I’d bring his food tomorrow, and he sent back a photograph of his empty plate. He had already cooked. I put his container in the freezer and wrote the date on the lid.
On my second evening Daniel came to collect a drill. I was folding the towels off the airer. He straightened a corner I had tucked under, caught me looking, and left the next one alone.
“I’m going to eat sitting down tonight,” he said. “At my own table.”
“An ambitious change.”
“I’ve cleared the post off it.”
He stayed long enough to help me shake out the last towel. We pulled from opposite ends and it snapped between us. Mum used to object to that noise and then tell us the towel wasn’t straight.
I told him so. He made a poor attempt at her objection, too high and much too cross, and we had to put the towel down because we were laughing.
When he picked up his drill, I wanted another five minutes. The opening of Sit down. It’ll keep was already arranged in my mouth: the low start, the drop at the end, the reasonable offer of a chair. Nobody had asked me a question.
I remembered standing here with my own keys in my hand while Mum said it. I had been meeting a friend. She’d cut another slice of cake anyway, and by the time I left we were angry, the cake untouched between us. On another evening she’d said it when I offered to clean the oven. We’d watched a bad film instead. I could hear both occasions equally well.
During the film she’d put a cushion behind my back without making me sit forward. She’d worked it down carefully, one side and then the other, and left her hand on my shoulder until I settled. I couldn’t remember the film’s name. I remembered the push of her fingers through the cushion.
“Good night,” I told Daniel.
After he left, I opened the back door and stood on the step while the kitchen aired. I wished I’d asked him to come another day. I could still do that.
Ruth came on the twenty-ninth day with potatoes already peeled in a saucepan. I told her that Daniel and I were meeting here on the thirty-second, to answer the offer, and asked her to come at eleven.
“I thought we’d settled that,” she said.
“We haven’t. I left you with the wrong impression.”
She took the saucepan to the sink and added water.
“Then we’ll talk at eleven,” she said.
She put a lid on it before she left. I cooked the potatoes and took half to Daniel on my way home.
On the thirty-second day Ruth brought nothing. I noticed before she had shut the door and wished I hadn’t. Daniel had bought buns. He moved the paper bag toward her usual place.
There was a fourth plate at Mum’s place. He looked at it, then went to fill the kettle.
The sale papers lay at the other end of the table. I had read them at home, where I could think about rooms and dates without looking at the small mark on the wall behind Mum’s chair. Her hair had touched it for years. Even after I stopped coming often, she’d stayed in the same place.
Ruth sat beside the papers.
“Are you going to sell your mother’s house, Irena?”
I could have found some remembered phrase that sounded less like an objection. Mum had said yes to things. She’d thrown things away. I kept my hands on the table.
“It isn’t eating anything.”
Ruth looked toward Daniel. I waited only long enough to take a breath.
“I want to sell the house.”
She turned back to me.
“I wanted to sell when you asked before. I talked about the bills instead of telling you. I knew you thought I’d agreed with you, and I let you.”
“I heard her as clear as anything.”
“So did I.”
“She kept this place for you two.”
I rubbed a dried speck off the table with my thumbnail. Mum had left no instruction about a sale. We had looked through the papers together after the funeral, and Ruth knew that as well as I did.
“I can’t tell you what she’d say about this,” I said. “I can tell you what I want.”
Ruth pushed the bag of buns away from the documents.
“Daniel’s done so much here.”
He drew his chair closer.
“I want to sell too.”
She watched him. He began, “I’ve been coming—” and stopped. He picked a loose thread from his sleeve.
“I want to sell,” he said again.
“It doesn’t have to be one of you every night. I said that.”
“There’d still be the bills,” he said. “The garden. Getting someone in for the roof. We’d be keeping an empty house.”
“It wouldn’t be empty on Sundays.”
“No,” he said. “It wouldn’t.”
I had expected this to be the point where I could explain things better, perhaps by asking Ruth how much she could pay or which jobs she could take on. She had a small pension and no share in the house. We all knew she couldn’t maintain it. I left the questions alone.
“You’ll both go home,” she said. “And I’ll have to ring first.”
Neither of us answered.
“Here I could come over. Your mother might be in a temper, you might be busy, but somebody would put the kettle on. I saw you without having to arrange to see you.”
“I know,” Daniel said.
“You don’t. You’re the people being seen.”
She reached for the bag and opened it. She put a bun on each of our three plates, then sat with her hands in her lap.
I wanted to promise there would be no difference. I wanted her to say we had been good children, or good enough, and push the papers toward us herself.
“I’ll miss being here with you,” I said.
She looked at the wall behind the empty chair.
“Well,” she said. “So will I.”
We ate before we signed. Ruth left most of hers. Daniel put his finger beside the proposed dates. I told him I’d read them at home. Then I signed and passed him the pen. He signed beneath my name. His hand was quite steady.
I sent the papers to the agent while Daniel made tea. The reply arrived before we’d finished: our acceptance had been received, the buyers had been told, and the sale was proceeding. The transfer would be later. We had some weeks to clear the house.
I read the message aloud. Ruth nodded without looking up. Then she took the unused plate from Mum’s place and carried it to the cupboard.
For the remaining days I kept speaking first in Mum’s words when I was asked. There were easier questions about what to keep and what to put in boxes. Some answers still made us laugh. Sometimes Ruth listened to my second answer with her lips pressed together. She came to pack nevertheless, and brought lunch again. I kept the part for all forty days.
On the fortieth day we ate at the kitchen table between stacks of newspaper. The sale was going ahead; the agent had confirmed the next arrangements that morning. Daniel had spent the previous evening at home. He brought the drill back to take down a shelf the buyers didn’t want, and left it by the door while we ate.
Ruth had filled the blue bowl with potato salad. After lunch I washed it. The chip caught the cloth and drew out a thread.
“I’m taking this,” I said. “I’ve got nothing big enough for salad.”
“Dry the foot,” Ruth told me. “Water sits in the rim underneath.”
She spread newspaper across her knees. I gave her the bowl, and she turned it over to check before wrapping it.
“Those people will get rid of the roses,” she said.
“They might,” Daniel said.
“Your mother got the yellow one to flower when everybody said it was finished.”
She folded the paper over the bowl. I held the next sheet ready.
“Come to my flat next Sunday,” I said. “Both of you. One o’clock. I’ll make lunch.”
Ruth rubbed along a fold with the side of her hand.
“You’ve only got two chairs.”
“I’ve got the desk chair too.”
“I’ll bring the folding one,” Daniel said. “Your desk chair sinks.”
He had last sat in it more than a year ago. I remembered him gripping the edge of my desk as he slowly disappeared behind it. Mum had been waiting at home for something he had gone out to buy, and he’d stayed only long enough to drink half a cup of tea. I’d promised to get the chair fixed.
“It only does that to people who criticize it.”
Ruth put the wrapped bowl in my box. “I’ll bring something for afterward.”
She was still unhappy. When I carried the box to the hall, she stayed at the table, looking out into the garden. The yellow rose had a few flowers left. I’d cut some for her if she wanted them, but for now I put the box down and came back.
There was tea in the pot. I began stacking plates to make room for the cups.
Daniel said, “Sit down. It’ll keep.”
He said it in his ordinary voice, with a piece of bread still in his hand.
“I can stay for tea.”
I left the plates and pulled my chair in. Ruth poured. There was a draft at my ankles from the open back door, but the cup was hot enough to hold in both hands. Daniel passed me the milk. I settled my feet on the chair’s lower rung and waited for the tea to cool.