Chapter 13

       Bridget, One Year Ago

      Today I’ll go beyond the front gate.

      Duster in hand, Bridget stood at the window of Jenny’s bedroom gazing down the path to the untrodden green beyond. This room had the best view of Blackheath; hers looked out on the garden, to the lilac tree and the shrubbery, a closed, safe prospect. She came in here at least once a day to challenge herself.

      I’ll put on my coat, make sure I have my keys in my handbag, and I will go for a walk in Greenwich Park. Simple. Nothing to fear in that. I remember the park well and it won’t have changed too much, not that little red brick museum on the hilltop with the absurd ball on the roof. I’ll watch the tourists straddling the line marking Greenwich Mean Time, holding sticks up to take selfies. Ridiculous, funny people. They’ll make me laugh. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

      Admiral Jack had built the house here because it sat on the exact same longitude as the observatory. Bridget imagined the line running through her front door, through this room, and out through the lilac tree, hopping over the fence and continuing beyond. It was like Mercury, messenger of the gods, circling the globe so fast you only saw the grass bending in his wake. It linked her to all those foreign countries that lay on the same line on the map: France, Spain, Algeria, Burkina Faso. Who lived in Burkina Faso? It sounded as made up as Timbuktu, which was also a real place apparently, in Mali, another country on the Prime Meridian. Ghana, Togo, the long stretch of the Atlantic and finally Antarctica. Bridget closed her eyes, summoning up the eerie vastness of the southernmost continent. Her husband’s great-uncle had died with Scott somewhere out there. His family were full of people who went on adventures and never came back. The empire was casual about its sons. The Jack dynasty never learnt the lesson that it was safer to stay at home.

      She idly wiped a fingerprint off the pane. Her new tenant must have tried to open it but the lower sash was broken. Only the upper one slid on its ropes. Bridget pulled it down a little to let some fresh air into the room. Jenny used a strong perfume; Bridget could still smell it even though her lodger had left several hours ago. Jenny favoured that fake strawberry scent that was in so many of the cheaper deodorants. Bridget found it unpleasant but she could hardly ask the girl to change something so personal.

      Bridget emptied the bin into the plastic bag she carried. What were dead poppies doing in there? She should remember to mention to Jenny that there was a compost heap behind the gardener’s shed and not to use the waste basket for recyclables. She hadn’t yet made up her mind about her new lodger. Change was not easy, not for Bridget. Kris had filled the house with his booming bass and his immoderate laughter. She’d like the military forthrightness he brought to every situation, the precision with which he’d made his bed and folded his towels. He played his new songs to her, flattered her outrageously, and managed to head off any arguments with some novel distraction techniques learned from his army days. Her favourite was when he had prevented her bickering with Norman about who was suffering from the worst aches and pains by throwing his prosthetic at them both. As a dramatic gesture it had been priceless. She and Norman had been properly shamed into not mentioning health matters on a Tuesday again. In fact, it had been solemnly entered into the list of house rules right at the bottom. Number twenty-four: thou shalt not moan about thy health in company.

      As for Jenny, she was best described as Kris’s opposite. Her silence made others fill the gap.

      We all end up talking too much around her, Bridget mused. She went into the bathroom to clean the mirror over the sink. And that can be dangerous.

      When did I get to be so old? She turned away from the dark-eyed, hollow-cheeked woman who rose from the depths of the mirror-pool.

      I’ll soon deal with you, my pretty. She sprayed blue glass cleaner onto the surface, blurring her reflection. Like Dorothy in Oz making her foe melt. Switching to a J Cloth, she briskly polished the mirror and didn’t meet her own gaze again.

      The jury in Gallant House was still deliberating their verdict on Jenny. The vine liked her but the lilac tree wasn’t sure. The birds in the attic resented her music and the mice in the pantry approved her choice of breakfast cereal. And as for Bridget … It was like the space between dropping a stone into the old well in the kitchen courtyard and hearing it hit the water many feet below. Many had come and gone over the decades since Paul died. It would be interesting to find out if Jenny was one of the ones who stayed the course.

      Taking her bucket of cleaning supplies, Bridget walked downstairs to prepare herself a light lunch as a reward for her housework. She paused in the hallway by the front door.

      Today, I’ll open it and walk right out and keep going, she promised herself. She touched the coat hanging on the peg, her best one, not the old one she used in the garden. It was getting a little dusty on the shoulders. That wouldn’t do. She took it down and shook it. She should send it to the dry cleaners. Feeling in the pocket, she found a bent railway ticket. She checked the date. 8 January 2002. Definitely time it went to the cleaners. She wouldn’t be able to go out, would she, not until