Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [37]
They were beautiful. They shone. They had an ease with sensual pleasure—an unquestioning, guiltless talent for it—that women of Wendy’s generation lacked. Women of her age had either spurned this preening as vanity, or else borne the effort of grooming as something dutiful, hard-edged. But these women were different. Physical delight came to them as naturally as breathing.
Wendy stepped back into her room and saw her face in the mirror: dried-out, colourless, pinched.
She sat on the bed for a minute. Then she went down the stairs and out onto the terrace. Some of the women called happy greetings to her as she sidled across the paving stones to Lucy.
‘Of course, Wendy,’ Lucy said. She looked at her watch. ‘Get dressed; I’ll do you after Ali, and then I’ll have to get out and get the bride done.’
Someone handed Wendy a glass of sparkling wine, and she sipped it, and took it up to her room. She felt some flush of freshness tingling over her. She was beginning to enjoy the girlishness of this occasion without, for once, feeling foolish and fraudulent.
She was sitting in the shade on the little stool with her eyes closed, with Lucy’s cool, moist fingers feathering over her face, when another young woman arrived. She had a blonde ponytail and a pierced nostril, and stood uncertainly, holding a bucket and a broom. The cleaner.
‘Oh, I forgot!’ said Ruth. But they waved the girl inside, and she disappeared up the stairs. Soon they heard a vacuum cleaner’s thrum.
An hour later, when everyone but Ruth had gone, Wendy saw herself in her bathroom mirror.
The bathroom smelled fresh and her bedroom was orderly, the bed made with fresh pale green sheets and her things stacked and folded tidily on the chair and the bedside table.
Wendy leaned into the mirror, trying to focus on her earrings as she slipped them through the holes in her lobes, but she could not help sneaking glances at her face. Eventually she straightened, and stared.
She didn’t look like a man.
She didn’t appear to be wearing make-up at all. Her eyes were clear and blue, and the planes of her nose and her cheekbones had strength and dignity. She seemed taller. What had Lucy done? Apart from the gloss at her lips Wendy found the make-up impossible to see. Perhaps it was her eyesight. But her face, in the mirror, seemed to radiate some force of life, some charge of beauty that came from being alive, that she had not ever seen in herself before. It was this all the young women had; this blaze of life. And now Wendy had it too. She stared and stared.
Ruth was calling from the bottom of the stairs, and Wendy trotted about her room, calm and regal, gathering things into the beaded handbag. And then her heart seized.
The little tub, the ashes of Jim, had gone.
The bedside table was clean. But the plastic bag with the magazines and brochures was gone.
The bins were empty. The one in the bedroom, and the bathroom one with its carefully folded wads of toilet paper, all empty and clean. She remembered now the girl leaving, hauling behind her one of the large heavy-duty orange plastic garbage bags Wendy had seen in the streets.
She sat on the bed, her breath coming fast and cold. She put her hands out flat on the cool bed sheets on either side.
Ruth shouted up the stairs now, ‘Wendy, they’re waiting.’
A shivering began to fill her chest. She breathed. She knew the ashes had gone, but still she began to bolt around the room, tearing at things and lifting scarves and bags and hats.
‘Wendy! For heaven’s sake!’
At last she made her way down the stairs and pushed past Ruth, out across the terrace and into the lane.
‘Wait for me!’ Ruth called, as she locked the heavy door.
Wendy climbed into the back seat of the car, sunglasses jammed on her face. She clutched her handbag and the straw hat and a tissue, staring out of the window, trying to swallow the lump of pain in her throat, forcing back her rising tears.
Next to her, Ruth