Impossible to Forget(18)

The corners of her mother’s mouth continued to turn resolutely downwards.

‘Which room is yours?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ replied Maggie. ‘I think we’ll sort that out when everyone is here, but I can put my stuff in the sitting room for now. Keys, please.’

Maggie held her hand out for the car keys and then sidestepped her mother to get back out into the street. A ginger tomcat had jumped up on the car and was preening itself on the warm bonnet. Her mother mistrusted cats, but Maggie let it stay where it was.

‘We’re going to be neighbours,’ she said to it quietly. The cat eyed her languorously but didn’t reply.

She began the task of decanting her life from car to house yet again. She was getting better at packing now, and was more discerning about what was essential for her life in York and what merely desirable. When she got back into the sitting room, her arms filled with bags and boxes, she found her mother talking to Angie. A dull foreboding flooded through Maggie, but Angie seemed to be doing a good job of appearing perfectly normal, if you looked past her wild hair and jumble-sale-chic attire. Even though her own feelings about Angie were still ambivalent at best, she was happy to give a good show of being friends to keep her mother off the scent.

‘Hi Ange,’ she said as breezily as she could manage, and dropped the boxes on to the sofa. ‘Good summer?’

‘Not bad,’ replied Angie.

‘Angela was just telling me that she has been travelling in Europe over the summer. Italy, did you say? And Greece.’

‘Yeah. I had an Interrail ticket. You can go pretty much wherever you want.’

‘We went to Cornwall, didn’t we, Margaret?’

Maggie was sure she saw Angie smirk at this, but the greater evil here was her mother’s displeasure so she said, ‘Yes. But I’d rather have been in Greece. Was it hot?’

‘Roasting,’ replied Angie.

‘Are the others here yet?’ Maggie asked then, casting her eyes around for signs of anyone. ‘I suppose we need a full house so that we can pick rooms. We’ll draw straws, shall we?’

‘You can if you like,’ replied Angie, ‘but I’ve bagsed one upstairs, the one that looks out over the garden.’

Maggie’s jaw tightened. How did Angie always get exactly what she wanted? There were rules about these things. You couldn’t just do as you pleased and ignore the wishes of everyone else. It wasn’t fair. But this wasn’t the time or place to have it out with her. Any hint of dissent amongst the ranks and her mother would sniff it out, and that was to be avoided at all costs. Quickly, Maggie reversed her thinking. If this was how it was to be, then she would pick her second-choice room at least and leave Leon and this Fiona girl to fight it out between them. It was astonishing how quickly one could slip into Angie’s ‘out for yourself’ view of life. In fact, it felt quite liberating to be doing something purely for herself rather than worrying about the sensibilities of others.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll have another quick whizz round and look at the other rooms,’ and before her mother could mention short straws, she was off up the stairs.

There were two further rooms up there, now that the one that she had earmarked as hers was taken – a double room that looked out over the road, and a tiny box room that could barely fit more than the bed. She ignored that one, but stepped into the front room to see if she could feel herself living in it. It was a reasonable size, and quite light with a big window under which sat a teak desk and a wooden ladder-backed chair that looked like it had come from a school. She crossed the floor to look out of the window. The cat was still asleep on her mother’s car, she saw, and there were two little boys playing football with a yellow tennis ball a little further down the street. It was a nice enough room, she thought; not the one she wanted, but nice enough.

Then she remembered that there was another room downstairs, in what must have been the sitting room of the house when it was a family home. She turned on her heel and clattered back down the narrow stairs. Her mother and Angie were still chatting in the sitting room and she ignored them and went straight into the front room. It was huge by comparison to the others, having the bay window that the room upstairs lacked but also an extra area to the side that must have been taken up by the staircase.

Maggie began to reframe her thoughts. Was the extra floorspace worth the inconvenience of being on the ground floor? There was a tiny shower room off the kitchen she remembered from her tour of the house, which might surely end up being mainly hers if all the others were upstairs. Plus, the room had a kind of cut-off feeling that she quite liked. Yes, this one would do very well.

‘I’m going to take this one,’ she shouted through to the others, and then headed back to the sitting room to collect some of her boxes.

Her mother spoke before she had even seen the space. ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea, Margaret. You’ll be terribly vulnerable living on the ground floor. All those strangers wandering about at night with nothing more than a pane of glass to protect you.’

This thought hadn’t occurred to Maggie, and as the possible ramifications revealed themselves to her, she felt her nerves tighten a little, flight-or-fight hormones making her scalp tingle. Her mother was, as ever, right. It would make much more sense to give Leon this room and then the three girls could all live in the relative safety of upstairs.