Chapter 111: The Floor
The house at Fenchurch Row was sold with the property company, and the contents had to be cleared by the fourteenth of October.
There was a box of mine in the garage.
Photographs, a provincial championships medal, two shoeboxes of letters from my mother, and a suit bag.
The arrangement was made between solicitors and it took six emails to agree an hour.
Ten o'clock on a Wednesday. Forty minutes.
Margot's solicitor confirmed she would be at an appointment.
Priya drove me and stayed in the car with the engine off and a paperback she did not open.
The gravel is the same gravel.
Twelve metres from the gate to the door, and the drainage on the left has always been wrong.
The front door was open because two men were carrying out a sideboard.
I went in and the hall smelled of dust sheets and lifted varnish.
Margot was in the drawing room.
She was not at an appointment.
I do not know whether her solicitor was misled or was doing as instructed, and it does not matter.
She was sixty-seven by then and she was standing at the window in a coat, watching two men take up the floor.
That floor is 1998 oak.
Three hundred and ten millimetre boards, laid the length of the room. I know the width because I knelt on it eleven times and counted.
Half of it was already out and stacked.
Underneath is grey chipboard, and it looked like the inside of something.
“Water,” she said, without turning round. “Under the bay. It's been coming in for four years and nobody looked.”
“Hello, Margot.”
“Hello, Nadia. Your box is in the garage. The key is on the hook.”
I stood in the doorway. I did not go in.
My feet stayed on the tiles of the hall, which is a detail I noticed at the time and have thought about since.
“They're taking it all up?”
“They have to. You can't patch oak. You match a board and for the rest of your life you see the board.”
She turned round then and looked at me the way she has always looked at me, which is politely, and completely, and from a distance of about a metre and a half regardless of where she is standing.
“You've lost weight in the face,” she said. “It doesn't suit you.”
“I work in a laundry.”
“I know where you work.”
Of course she did.
“I'm not permitted to discuss the proceedings,” I said. “I'm going to get my box.”
“I have no intention of discussing the proceedings.”
“Then I'll say one thing that isn't the proceedings, and then I'll go.”
She waited, with her hands folded, on a floor that was half not there.
“You commissioned a report on me in the July. Five months before the wedding. Nine pages.”
“Yes.”
That is the whole of it. That is what I had waited two years for, and it was one syllable.
She gave it away without a flicker, because it had never once been a secret to her.
“Why?”
“Because my son was marrying a woman with no family, no capital, and a gap of ten years in her history that she wouldn't discuss at dinner.” She said it patiently. “It would have been negligent not to. I would do the same tomorrow.”
“You knew what would happen if I put a hand on anybody.”
“I knew what the consequences of your own conduct would be. That is a different sentence, and I would ask you to use mine.”
“Eleven times, Margot.”
“You were never asked to do anything that would have injured you,” she said. “You were asked to kneel on a floor. In a warm room. For a quarter of an hour, at most, on any occasion. You have knelt on harder surfaces for longer, professionally, and been thanked for it.”
“And I could have stood up at any time.”
“You could have stood up at any time.” She said it as agreement. “You are a grown woman. Nobody in this house ever held you down.”
There is no answer to that. There is no answer to it because it is, in every particular, factually correct.
“Cynthia Okwe,” I said. “Bill Trewin.”
“I don't know those people.”
“No,” I said. “You don't.”
The men came back in for the next stack and we both stood out of their way, which is the only thing the two of us have ever done in unison.
“Your box is in the garage,” she said again. “There's also a coat of yours in the hall cupboard. The green one. Take it or I'll put it in the charity bag on Friday.”
I took the box. I left the coat.
At the gate I looked back once, because I am not made of stone, and she had already turned to the window.
She was watching the men, and she was pointing at something under the bay, and she was giving an instruction.