Jenny Oliver - One Summer Night At The Ritz

Emily snorted as if that was the most boring answer she’d ever heard.

Annie came over and sat on the sofa next to her, her hand running appreciatively over the big colourful throw. ‘This is nice,’ she said, pinching the fabric between her fingers, then looked back up at Jane and added, ‘I think you should let her do your hair, Jane. I think maybe it would be more than just for going to The Ritz, I think it’d be something for you. To mark a new beginning.’ Annie did an almost imperceptible glance around the boat as she said the last bit, clearly taking in all the nick-nacks of Jane’s mum’s, all the throws and the mismatched china and the ornaments and vases and dried herbs and pots and pans hanging from the ceiling on a wooden rack.

Jane knew she had to clear it all out. Her mum’s shoes were still in the pile by the door. Annie had been round a couple of times already and said as much. She didn’t want her to bring it up again now, with Emily here who would probably suggest they do it right that minute and go and get a bin bag.

It wasn’t that she wanted all her mum’s stuff still around. It wasn’t that she hadn’t said goodbye to her or anything like that. It was more fear perhaps of exactly what Annie had just said, of a new beginning. For the last ten years she’d looked after her mother as she’d deteriorated from illness, but actually Jane’s life had been on hold for a lot longer than that. Possibly since from the moment she was born. Her mother had always needed someone and that someone had been Jane. Thirty-six years she’d been living for someone else. How the hell do you start again if you never really started in the first place?

She looked between Annie and Emily and realised she wasn’t going to win. Not if she wanted to keep them from moving their focus onto cleaning out the boat. ‘OK but just a trim,’ she said.

‘Absolutely,’ said Emily, pulling over one of the little wooden kitchen chairs and ushering Jane onto it. ‘Just a trim,’ she said as she got her gold scissors out.

Jane closed her eyes and thought back to the evening a couple of days before. When an email had popped up in her account from W_Blackwell@Blackwells.com.

Ms Williams ,

Thank you for sending the diary pages of Enid Morris. I’ve had the information verified by my lawyers. I can meet tomorrow. Name a convenient venue.

There had been no sign off, just his automated signature that appeared at the bottom of all his emails and a marketing photograph of their new hotel complex in the city.

She’d leant back in her chair and cursed herself for even starting this whole bloody palaver. That was where researching a mystery got her – now she was having to meet up with this bloke and she hadn’t the foggiest what she was going to talk to him about. But she’d got caught up with the research, the Googling, the intrigue of Enid’s diaries. She wanted closure for her. Or maybe she just wanted something else to focus on instead of the big expanse of nothingness that stretched ahead of her.

In the morning she’d taken her old laptop down to The Dandelion Cafe that Annie owned and there, once Emily had arrived, had shown them the email.

‘What a pompous arse,’ Emily had said. ‘Got it verified by his lawyers. How ridiculous. As if you’d make something like that up!’

‘What did you send him?’ Annie had asked, nipping back to the counter to pick up the tray of teas and scones that she’d asked her waiter and step-son River to put together for them while she read the email.

‘I sent him photocopied pages of all the relevant bits of Enid’s diaries and the government letter about his grandfather’s war injuries. He wanted to see the actual diaries but I’ve given them to Martha even though she says she doesn’t want to read them. She said again that I shouldn’t be interfering with her family’s past. I wanted to say that really I think I knew Enid better than nearly anyone and that she would have wanted this… I mean in a way she was my family, too. If you make it about blood, then it negates some of the strongest relationships we have, doesn’t it? If I hadn’t had Enid…’ She’d paused, felt her voice irritatingly hitch and had to open her eyes really wide to stop the sudden prick of tears. ‘Anyway,’ she’d said by way of ending her part of the conversation.

Annie had given her a tentative little hug which had made Jane consider when the last time anyone had touched her was, and said, ‘I think Martha’s just being defensive. She’ll come round.’

If anyone had summed up Cherry Pie Island, it was the late Enid Morris. Tiny, ferocious, always dressed in black, never felt the cold, smoked like a trooper and told the filthiest jokes, she’d play classical music at full volume on her boat and invite all and sundry in for a whisky mac and quick hand of poker. But on the flip side she was wise and kind and in some way had influenced all of them. For years it had never occurred to Jane that not everyone went round to the boat next door when their mum was lying on the floor sobbing or had locked herself in her studio for four days solid to work. She didn’t realise that being scooped up from her bed on the sofa at midnight and taken next door because her mum just couldn’t cope wasn’t what happened to everyone.

She’d assumed that to get the moments of sheer, radiant beauty and unutterable happiness from her mum she had to endure the darkness. That that was par for the course. And when life got dark she went to Enid’s.

And then later, when her mother started to slip from what she now understood as depression to dementia, it would be Enid who would gather Jane up in a hug when she had been found with her head in her hands - furious, annoyed, guiltily frustrated - after a particularly difficult episode.

‘I’m wasting my life ,’ she had said on more than one occasion.

And Enid had held her by the shoulders and said, ‘This is life. This is all part of the fabric. At some point you will use it and do something with it. For now, you can only do what you think is right.’ Then she had paused and added, ‘And nothing that is admirable is wasted.’

It was Enid in some sense that had kept her sane while her mother’s sanity slowly dripped away.

And now, through Enid’s diaries she had not only found reference to her own grandmother, Enid’s friend Kate, who her mother had never spoken of, but they had also found out about a love affair in Enid’s past that had left her pregnant with her daughter Martha and alone post World War Two. The man who had left her was a corporal named James Blackwell. His grandson, Jane had found through Google, was William Blackwell, a notoriously hard businessman who owned and ran the Blackwells hotel and restaurant chain.

‘So where did you say you wanted to meet?’ Emily had asked before cramming practically a whole scone with cream and jam into her mouth.

Jane had bitten her lip and looked a bit guilty. ‘I don’t know something came over me.’

‘What d’you mean?’ Annie had frowned, her teacup poised at her lips.

‘Well, I just thought if I’m going to do this, I want to do it properly, so I emailed back and said how about a drink at my hotel and he said, what hotel is that, and I said,’ she’d paused, made a face, then finished, ‘The Ritz.’

Emily had guffawed out her scone in bits on the table.

‘That’s attractive, Emily!’ Annie had sniggered.

Jane had still looked guilty. ‘It was stupid. It was a bit of an impulse because he’d been so snotty. And that was where Enid had gone to meet James Blackwell and so it felt like a kind of homage. Oh I don’t know. But now, not only have I got to meet this guy – god knows what we’re going to talk about – but I’ve had to book a room at the bloody Ritz.’ She’d held her hands up to her temples. ‘It’s more money than I’ve ever paid for anything, ever. But I told myself that I haven’t had a holiday for more than ten years. Proportionally, one really expensive night is nothing, is it? All I have to do is have a drink with this guy and then I can go out and see the sights. I can see London. Go on the Eye or, no not the Eye, I could go to the Summer Exhibition at the RA or have dinner somewhere cool like… I don’t know. I’ll research somewhere cool. That’s what people do, isn’t it? What’s it called? Flaneur-ing. I could be a flaneur.’