Elizabeth George - For the Sake of Elena

She’d tried a variety of paid companions after that, four in succession who lasted a total of twelve weeks. She’d worked with a church group. She’d employed a series of visiting social workers. She’d contacted Social Services and arranged for home help. And at the last, she’d fallen back upon Mrs. Gustafson, their neighbour. Against the monitory recommendation of her own daughter, Mrs. Gustafson had stepped in as a temporary measure. But the fuse on Mrs. Gustafson’s ability to deal with Mrs. Havers was a short one. And the fuse on Barbara’s willingness to put up with Mrs. Gustafson’s lapses was even shorter. It was only a matter of days before something blew.

Barbara knew the answer was an institution. But she couldn’t live with the thought of placing her mother in a public hospital rife with inadequacies associated with the National Health. At the same time, she couldn’t afford a private hospital, unless she won the football pools like a female Freddie Clegg.

She felt in her jacket pocket for the business card she’d placed there this morning. Hawthorn Lodge, it said. Uneeda Drive, Greenford. A single call to Florence Magentry and her problems would be solved.

“Mrs. Flo,” Mrs. Magentry had said when she answered the door to Barbara’s knock at half past nine that morning. “That’s what my dears call me. Mrs. Flo.”

She lived in a two-storey semi-detached piece of uninspired postwar housing which she optimistically called Hawthorn Lodge. Grey stucco relieved by a brick facade on the ground floor, the house featured woodwork the colour of oxblood and a fi ve-paned bow window looking out on a front garden fi lled with trolls. The front door opened directly into a stairway. To the right of this a door revealed a sitting room into which Mrs. Flo led Barbara, chatting continually about the “amenables” which the house offered the dears who came to visit.

“I call it a visit,” Mrs. Flo said, patting Barbara’s arm with a hand that was soft and white and surprisingly warm. “Seems less permanent that way, doesn’t it? Let me show you round.”

Barbara knew she was looking for features that she could proclaim ideal. She ticked the items off in her mind. Comfortable furniture in the sitting room-worn but well-made- along with a television, a stereo, two shelves of books, and a collection of large and colourful magazines; fresh paint and wallpaper and gay prints on the walls; tidy kitchen and a dinette whose windows overlooked the back garden; four bedrooms upstairs, one for Mrs. Flo and the other three for the dears. Two loos, one up and one down, both glistening white with fi xtures shining like silver. And Mrs. Flo herself, with her large-framed spectacles and her modern wedge-cut hair and her neat shirtwaister with a pansy brooch pinned at its throat. She looked like a smart matron, and she smelled of lemons.

“You’ve phoned up at just the right time,” Mrs. Flo said. “We lost our dear Mrs. Tilbird last week. Ninety-three she was. Sharp as a pin. Went off in her sleep, bless her. Just as peaceful as ever you’d want someone’s passing to be. She’d been with me a month short of ten years.” Mrs. Flo’s eyes became misty in her plump-cheeked face. “Well, no one lives forever, and that’s a fact, isn’t it? Would you like to meet the dears?”

The residents of Hawthorn Lodge were taking a bit of morning sun in the back garden. There were only two of them, one an eightyfour-year-old blind woman who smiled and nodded at Barbara’s greeting after which she immediately fell asleep and the other a fright-ened-looking woman somewhere in her fi fties, who clutched Mrs. Flo’s hands and cowered back in her chair. Barbara recognised the symptoms.

“Can you cope with two?” she asked frankly.

Mrs. Flo smoothed down the hair of the hand clutcher. “They’re no trouble to me, dear. God gives everyone a burden, doesn’t He? But no one’s burden is more than he can bear.”

Barbara thought of that now with her fi ngers still touching the card in her jacket pocket.

Is that what she was trying to do, to slough off a burden that, from laziness or perverse selfishness, she didn’t want to bear?

She avoided the question by evaluating everything that made the placement of her mother at Hawthorn Lodge right. She enumerated the positives: the proximity to Greenford Station and the fact that she would only have to change trains once-at Tottenham Court Road-if she placed her mother in this situation and herself took the small studio she’d managed to find in Chalk Farm; the greengrocer’s stand right inside Greenford Station where she could buy her mother fresh fruit on the way to a visit; the common just a street away with its central walk lined with hawthorns which led to a play area of swings, see-saw, round-about, and benches where they could sit and watch the neighbourhood children romp; the string of businesses nearby-a chemist, a supermarket, a wine shop, a bakery, and even a Chinese take-away, her mother’s favourite food.

Yet even as she listed every feature that encouraged her to phone Mrs. Flo while she still had a vacancy, Barbara knew she was deliberately avoiding a few of the qualities of Hawthorn Lodge which she hadn’t been able to ignore. She told herself that nothing could be done about the unremitting noise from the A40, or about the fact that Greenford itself was a sandwich of a community squeezed between the railway and a motorway. Then there were the three broken trolls in the front garden. Why on earth should she even think of them, except that there was something so pathetic about the chipped nose on one, the broken hat on another, the armlessness of a third. And there was something chilling about the shiny patches on the sofa where oily, old heads had pressed against its back for too long. And the crumbs in the corner of the blind woman’s mouth…

Minor things, she told herself, little hooks digging into the skin of her guilt. One couldn’t expect perfection anywhere. Besides, all of these minor points of discomfiture were inconsequential when one compared them with the circumstances of their lives in Acton and the condition of the house in which they now lived.

The reality, however, was that this decision went far beyond Acton versus Greenford and far beyond keeping her mother at home or sending her away. The entire decision went right to the core of what Barbara herself wanted, which was simple enough: a life away from Acton, away from her mother, away from the burdens which, unlike Mrs. Flo, she did not believe she was equipped to bear.

Selling the house in Acton would give her the money to support her mother in Mrs. Flo’s house. She would have the funds to set herself up in Chalk Farm as well. No matter that the Chalk Farm studio was little more than twenty-five feet long and twelve feet wide, little more than a converted potting shed with a terra cotta chimney and missing slates on the roof. It had possibilities. And that’s all Barbara asked of life any longer, just the promise of possibility.

Behind her, the door opened as someone slipped an identification card through its locking device. She glanced over her shoulder as Lynley entered, looking quite rested despite their late night with the Maida Vale killer.

“Any luck?” he asked her.

“Next time I offer to do a bloke a favour, punch my lights, will you? This screen makes me blind.”

“Nothing then, I take it?”

“Nothing. But I haven’t exactly been giving it my all.” She sighed, made a note of the last entry she’d read, and exited the programme. She rubbed her neck.

“How was Hawthorn Lodge?” Lynley asked her. He swung a chair over and joined her at the terminal.

She did her best to avoid his eyes. “Nice enough, I suppose. But Greenford’s a bit out on the central line. I don’t know how Mum would make the adjustment. She’s used to Acton. The house. You know what I mean. She likes having her things about her.”