I sit on the sofa and take a sip of my coffee while the phone rings through. I bite the first half of one of the biscuits and the rhythmic tone at the end of the line continues. I dip the second half into my coffee, shake the drips over the cup and eat the biscuit. Still no answer. I wonder if there is a limit to how long a phone line will ring for and picture a tiny old lady, slightly confused and wearing pink slippers, scurrying through passageways to answer it.
I put most of the second biscuit in my mouth and bite through it. A crumb dislodges and goes the wrong way down my throat. By the time the phone is answered, my eyes are streaming and my voice sounds like something that runs on cogs.
‘Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World.’ The voice does not sound elderly, or like it might wear the slippers I’d imagined the old lady hobbling through the corridors in.
‘Hello.’ I clear my throat. Twice. ‘This is Cate Morris.’
‘Cate Morris?’
This call has been booked, via communication with the solicitor. She knows I’m due to ring at noon, and it’s exactly that now. I grit my teeth. ‘Richard’s wife, Cate.’
‘Richard Lyons-Morris?’
‘We dropped the Lyons.’ I say it quietly, as if I shouldn’t be saying it at all, as if she’s going to tell me off.
I’d known Richard for two years before I found out his surname was Lyons-Morris, not just plain old Morris. ‘I hate it,’ he’d said. ‘Everyone says “lions” like the animal and it’s “Lyons” like the city. I don’t bother with it.’ We compromised by calling our son Leo – Leo Morris instead of Lyons-Morris. She doesn’t need to know this and I don’t tell her.
‘That’s a great shame.’ She sighs down the phone to make it clear that I’ve disappointed her already.
I make an effort to take back some ground. ‘Is this Ms Buchan?’
‘Yes.’ She is utterly unapologetic.
‘Ah, good. Only . . . you didn’t say.’ As soon as I say it, I feel pathetic. My game of one-upmanship is obvious and crude. The biscuit crumbs start to tickle my throat again and I stifle a cough.
‘We had arranged this call, therefore I assumed you would expect me to answer the telephone. I am, at present, the only person here.’ She has taken the high ground and pauses in triumphant silence. ‘Do you need to call back later? Are you quite well?’ Her voice is clipped and curt: she isn’t responding to my bout of coughing out of kindness – it’s just annoying her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say when I can speak. ‘We seem to have got off on the wrong foot. Leo and I are very much looking forward to arriving at the museum tomorrow.’
‘I’m sure,’ she says. ‘And I wish I could say that we’ll put out a spectacular welcome for you . . .’ She pauses and I choose not to second-guess what she’s going to say next: it is clearly a sentence that hinges around ‘but’. ‘But . . .’
I roll my eyes although there is no one in the room to see me. This is like dealing with a difficult pupil – or worse, a difficult pupil’s difficult parent. It always gets my back up. I wish people would say what they mean without resorting to excuses.
‘I am almost the only person left here. Aside from a handful of volunteers in the house and garden, I am the last person working at Hatters. We are on our knees, I’m afraid.’ She clears her throat. ‘As a museum, at any rate.’
‘To be honest, Mrs Buchan . . .’
‘It’s Miss,’ she says and her voice is sharp again.
‘Sorry. To be honest, we’re not really anything to do with the museum. We’re merely making use of Leo’s right to reside in the house. Because of his father. Because of Richard.’
Sometimes I find it hard to say Richard’s name. Sometimes it chokes up my throat with such anger and blind injustice. Other times, it’s bare self-pity and loneliness that brings the same, pointless, tears to my eyes. This time it’s a mix of both: a frustrated longing to tell Richard what he’s putting us through, what he’s caused here in this boxed-up flat.
‘That wasn’t what I meant, unfortunately. My point was rather that it’s the Museum Trust that keeps the entire building going. And that, I’m afraid, is at the point of collapse.’
The fear inside me is a physical pain – a stab of uncertainty. It is the pain caused by the barely stifled threat that has lived inside me every day for four years: the inability of a teacher to raise a family, without support, in the centre of a big city that is being swallowed up day-by-day by investors. Our rent has stayed almost stationary for nine years, ever since we first came here, since a friend of a friend first took pity on Richard and me and let us move in without the usual credit checks or deposits. Now, the value of the flat has escalated to a point where our landlord is doing his own family a disservice by continuing to prop up mine. He has to sell – and we have to move.
‘The trustees have agreed that we can live there for the foreseeable future. I have it in writing.’
‘I’m sure that is so.’ Her speech is punctuated by deliberate pauses: it makes it difficult to work up to any vehement response. ‘The trustees have granted you temporary residency – they have no choice but to do that – but they have neglected to inform you that they are also engaged in a committed campaign to close the whole museum and sell off the contents. Having you and Leo here will . . .’ The pause again. I wonder if she is licking her lips. ‘Having you and Leo here will tip the delicate balance of managing on a shoestring over into complete liquidation.’
‘I’m sure you can’t simply sell museums. It belongs to Richard’s great-grandfather and he’s dead.’ There is an ache at the side of my temple and the first flashing lights of a migraine dance into the edge of my eye. ‘The family have rights.’
‘They do.’ This is the longest pause. ‘And you have the right to live here – with Leo – until such time as the museum closes, but it is not an exaggeration to suggest that that will be within the next six weeks.’
I have applied for twenty-five jobs since my redundancy was announced. Twenty-five teaching posts, all over London and even into the Home Counties, but I’ve been in the business for almost thirty years: my pay-scale is much higher than someone just out of college, newly qualified. I haven’t had a single interview.
I’m not about to start discussing the paralysing terror of my financial situation, of four years of single parenthood and its consequences, with this cold old woman: I am shocked into saying my goodbyes and telling her that we’ll see her tomorrow. And then what?
The cardboard boxes, with their anonymous brown sides, tower around me, and the walls of the flat I have loved close in on me with a similar pressure: a low bitter wind starts to gust around the guttering glimmers of hope in mine and Leo’s future.
*
Richard and I met at university. I was almost nineteen and halfway through my first year. He was twenty-four; a worldly and debonair PhD student, far more interesting than I was.
My boyfriend, Simon, was Richard’s best friend. Simon and I had only been together a few weeks: we’d been to a couple of gigs together, spent a few evenings in the pub down by my halls and I liked him – I really did. Simon was tall, funny, and incredibly kind. I really thought that he and I would work, that we had potential. But then I met Richard.