I am disappointed. I wanted something more, I realise. I wanted her to react, to push, to be angry or upset or to contradict me. I think of my ex-wife. Lucy was – is – a good person, but I find I don’t care about what I did to her. Why not? Why can’t I? I have a blank space where there should be … something. I suppose I’m jealous of those young students who can speak so freely about their identities and pronouns and fluidity. But I’m also furious with them. I resent how blinkered they are to their own enormous good fortune. They don’t know what it’s like to have no labels one can reach for to say, ‘This is me.’ Because I have never understood what I am.
Sometimes, when I’m on my own in the evening and staring at my reflection in the darkened glass of the kitchen window, I can’t see myself. And all of this is wrapped up in the person of Jacob Malik-Edwards and his Yankees baseball cap.
After therapy, I walk back home, convincing myself the fresh air will do me good. But the streets are filled with slow-moving tourists and I find myself having to step off the kerb at several junctures to loop past them. Cambridge has changed a lot since my day. More chain restaurants. A confusing one-way traffic system which relies on sliding bollards emerging out of the road like superannuated Daleks any time an illegal vehicle attempts to pass. The students look simultaneously younger and less carefree than Ben and I ever did. The advent of tuition fees has made them approach their degrees with the seriousness of corporate CEOs.
The centre of Cambridge is now overshadowed by a huge John Lewis, which I always feel rather depressed by. Today, the departmentstore window is, as ever, the perfect display of the homogenisation of middle-class taste. There’s a striped deckchair, a watering can painted to resemble an old orange-hued Penguin paperback, and some prissy fake flowers. To one side, a female (admittedly, I don’t know her pronouns) mannequin has been dressed in cropped jeans, a T-shirt with ‘Bonjour!’ embroidered across the front and the same pair of espadrilles Joanne Buster was wearing.
By the time I slot my key in the cottage’s front door, I have been enveloped by a familiar feeling of greying lassitude. I know, from experience, that the best way to deal with this unfurling fog is to acknowledge its presence but not to get swallowed up by it. Distraction and numbness are the antidote. I pick up the Conservative Party leaflets and seed catalogues that have amassed on the doormat and walk straight through to the kitchen where I pour myself a double vodka with the lightest splash of tonic. It’s a relatively pleasant afternoon – cloudy with sparse wisps of sunshine – so I take myself, my post and my drink outside where I collapse into a striped deckchair bought from (where else?) John Lewis. I light a cigarette. I inhale deeply, allowing the nicotine to hit. A few years ago, I made the transition from Marlboro Golds back to Marlboro Reds. It was around the time that everyone else started vaping, a habit I consider irredeemably inelegant. Sucking on watermelon-flavoured pieces of plastic? Pathetic. I want the raw, dry wallop of strong tobacco and this is what I now get as I smoke myself into a pleasingly light-headed daze. My lids half stutter closed. I knock back the drink. I allow my thoughts to settle.
Better.
I light a second fag and allow my free hand to graze along the lawn, which needs mowing. I tell myself I’ll get around to it, although I won’t. There’s a whiskery nuzzle on my palm, followed by the licking of my wrist. The cat is, once again, claiming to be starving even though I fed him just a few hours ago. I caress the back of his head and stroke the length of his body in exaggerated sweeps right to the end of his tail. He starts to purr, the vibration strumming gently against my palm.
It took me a while to give the cat a name. He turned up as a strayone day and refused to leave. It was months before I realised he was a permanent fixture and years before I understood he was also the most faithful friend I’d ever had. It didn’t seem right to keep referring to him as Cat. So I gave him a name as a little joke to myself. I called him Maurice, short for Fitzmaurice.
‘Alright, Maurice?’ I say. The cat responds by walking off and jumping elegantly onto the windowsill, where there is a single remaining patch of sunlight. Maurice settles himself neatly into its outline and rests his head against crossed paws. I watch him doze.
I glance down at the assorted envelopes and flyers on my lap and begin to sort through them. Most of it is junk. One is addressed to the previous resident, a Mr Asmat Greer, who is the bane of my administrative life. I must spend several hours over the course of each year reposting these ‘final demand’ letters with ‘Not Known At This Address’ scrawled across the front. Sometimes I just throw them straight in the bin. But then – unexpected treasure. A thick envelope. Quality paper. The luxurious heft of bevelled card. I haven’t been asked to any event of note for many years, but nor have I ever forgotten the feel of a high-class invitation. In my twenties and thirties, they crowded my mantelpiece with promise.
I slide my finger under the flap, prising it open. I see immediately that the edges are black and when I remove the invitation from the creaminess of its envelope, it becomes shockingly clear. Not a party, then.
In loving memory of Lady Felicity Fitzmaurice 1971–2024
A funeral service will be held on 27 July 2024, 3 p.m. at The Chapel, Denby Hall
Following the service, please join the Fitzmaurice family at Denby Hall for a reception
In lieu of flowers, we would like to ask that any donations be made to Addiction Recovery in Felicity’s name
Ben’s sister. Dead. All RSVPs are directed to Lady Katherine, Fliss’s mother and only surviving parent. Lord Fitzmaurice – George, as I knew him – died some years ago, doddery and infirm, a pale shadow of the power he once represented to me.
Perhaps it’s the vodka, but I am taken aback to discover a moistness in my eyes. As much as I have come to despise the Fitzmaurice family and everything they stand for, Fliss never quite seemed to be one of them. She was Ben’s older sister by four years, and the two of them had a loving but complicated relationship. A younger brother, Magnus, had died of childhood meningitis aged four. This was just before Ben was sent to Burtonbury School, where I met him. Although the tragedy might, one imagines, have brought the surviving two siblings closer together, the family refused to speak of the dead child in my presence.
Fliss had never found her way. Ben got married to Serena, the requisite semi-aristocratic blonde who obligingly popped out four children in quick succession, one of whom is my godson. Fliss, by contrast, travelled the world doing odd jobs here and there: chalet girl, yoga instructor, jewellery designer – the usual evolution of a feckless rich girl who never actually needed to work for a living. Despite our differences, I’d liked Fliss a lot and she had liked me. There had been a time when, as teenagers, she was romantically interested, but I couldn’t pretend to reciprocate. She reminded me both too much of Ben and not enough.
As the years passed, I valued her refusal to conform to the Fitzmaurice standards. She would turn up at family events in patchwork palazzo pants and crocheted crop tops, sporting a deep tan and an armful of beaded bangles. At our graduation ceremony, Fliss had sparked up a joint in the Senate House gardens and ended the night flashing her breasts to the nightclub barman to get us a free round of tequila. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her, which is another thing that wealth and pedigree affords you: self-esteem insulated from outside opinion; an ability to act on whatever emotion you might be experiencing in any given moment. You can see it only too clearly inthe behaviour of our Prime Minister, Edward Buller, who runs the country like a greedy toddler. He grabs money and influence like toys in a sandpit and smashes anyone who doesn’t let him have what he wants. No wonder he and Ben are such good friends. The rest of us – the hoi polloi, the plebeians, the great unwashed, the unthinking herd – are straitjacketed into convention. Our misbehaviour is unseemly and criminal. An aristocrat’s eccentricity would be my sectionable offence. When we break things, you and I, it’s riotous looting and not an act of necessary political disruption.
I digress.
Even with Fliss, for whom I once nurtured such hope, the cavalier Fitzmaurice genes showed through. Her lineage was too strong for her to resist. When Ben cut me off, she knew it was happening, did nothing to stop it and dropped me without a backward glance.
And now she’s dead, at the age of fifty-three. I let the card rest on my lap for a moment. It’s odd that I haven’t read about it in the papers. But then, the Fitzmaurices were always adept at keeping inconvenient details out of the press.
I pick the invitation back up, the dampness from the ice-cold glass transferring itself as a fingerprint on one corner. Charitable donations to Addiction Recovery. Interesting.
Clearly, we are intended to draw the logical conclusion that Fliss’s death was the result of dependency issues. But why would they choose to signal that so clearly? Especially given Ben’s senior position in government, thanks to Edward Buller vastly over-promoting his old pal. Is there a reason they want to explain Fliss’s death to us in this way? And – most pressingly of all – why, after such a long period of exile, have they invited me?
II.
Serena
SERENA IS CHEWING. Gazing into space and chewing. Once, twice, three times. Chew. Chew. Chew. The doctor has told her she needs to reach at least fifteen chews before she is permitted to swallow.
‘Or at least until the food is completely fluid,’ Dr Hans said in their first appointment, his Germanic accent lending the words a stentorian tone. He reminded Serena of her father: handsome, with excellent teeth and a broad, lived-in face that wouldn’t have worked on a woman but which served to elevate Dr Hans’s authority.
‘In normal life’ – he pronounced life as ‘lahf’ – ‘we rush our food in a race to finish our meals. Why? Why do we not seek out the pleasure in each mouthful, each morsel? We think we are so important, yes? That the world will stop if we take a moment too long to get to that meeting or the child pick-up or the coffee with a girlfriend, yes?’
He frequently ended sentences with a question Serena assumed was rhetorical, but she nodded just in case. Dr Hans was seated behind a mid-century desk, rising vast as a mountain from the elegant lines of walnut. There was a leather-bound notebook in front of him which he never opened, preferring instead to use it as a prop. He wore a gold ring with a bulbous green stone on one pinky finger. All of it gave the impression of masterful confidence.
