Once she had finished her juice, Holly walked into the living room and looked around at Cora’s drab, dated furnishing.
It was a decent-sized room and it would be improved no end by getting rid of the heavy lace nets that swamped the window and swapping the gloomy fabrics for bright modern prints.
If Cora would give her a free hand to make improvements, Holly knew she could work wonders in here, but she didn’t intend to broach the subject.
Cora Barrett was a woman most definitely set in her ways, and she had very rigid ideas of how things should be. Holly felt sure that in Cora’s eyes, the room looked perfect.
She glanced up at the Artexed ceiling and the tarnished brass candle chandelier above her head. Living here was like being beamed back to the fifties.
However, the house itself was impressive and Baker Crescent was considered one of the better roads in the area. In the future, with younger owners, Holly had no doubt the accommodation would be transformed. One day, the dusty old museum she stood in now would be just a vague memory.
She sighed and took hold of her thoughts again. Old patterns of depressive thinking weren’t going to help her put the whole awful mess behind her, of that she felt certain.
She peeked through the window, but thankfully there was no sign of Cora returning from the shops yet.
Without even really considering what she should do next, Holly padded upstairs and stood outside the front bedroom, Cora’s room.
The plain, glossed white door was closed, so she gave it a firm push. As it began to open, it caught on the carpet underneath, so she kept pushing.
The room smelled a little fusty, as if it hadn’t actually been used for some time.
It was over-filled with heavy walnut furniture that crowded it out and gave the otherwise sizeable space a claustrophobic feel.
The dusty burgundy velvet curtains were half closed, and Holly snapped on the light to save her squinting unnecessarily into the gloom.
She walked over to the chest of drawers that stood by the window. The top was a sea of framed photographs, many of them featuring a gloriously young and vibrant Cora with various people, but mostly with Harold, whom Holly recognised from their wedding photograph on the mantelpiece downstairs.
She picked one of the photos up and studied it. Cora stood clutching the hand of a young girl with ribbons in her hair on Blackpool seafront. Cora was smiling but the child looked surly.
The photograph was black and white, but Holly could imagine the dull grey colour of the foaming sea behind them and the dirty beige sand on which a group of hapless donkeys stood, waiting forlornly for their next riders.
She replaced the photograph and didn’t bother inspecting the others. She felt fed up enough as it was without studying those long-ago scenes. It was nice to see Cora looking happy in most of them, but when Holly compared that glowing girl with the wrinkled woman she had become, she felt even worse about her own future.
How was it possible that years could flit by so quickly, robbing people of their happiest times?
She felt the keen passing of her own life, the division between the girl she had been before and the woman she had turned into.
Effectively she was betraying Cora’s trust by sneaking in here. That wasn’t the person she wanted to be.
She asked herself the question: would she want someone snooping through her room and rifling through her personal items? Most definitely not, came the uninvited reply.
Yet something in her demanded she take the opportunity to look around. That way, she had less chance of being fooled as she had been before. She might get a measure of who the real Cora was.
In the past, she had fallen far too easily into believing that people were who they said they were. It was a mistake that had cost her dearly; that might have already ruined her future and robbed her of the love of her life.
And she couldn’t quite believe that the old lady really had nobody in her life. No children of her own and therefore no grandchildren; not even any elderly friends to go and play bingo with, or whatever it was that old people liked to do these days.
It was quite sad, yet she couldn’t help thinking that Cora and Harold had obviously kept themselves purposely isolated all these years, and now Harold was long gone and Cora found herself alone.
Maybe she wasn’t quite the frail old lady she liked to pretend to be… People could surprise you.
Holly inched open the drawers one by one. After nearly asphyxiating herself with the smell of mothballs, she came across a large, tattered brown envelope in the last but one drawer from the bottom.
She slid it out and peeked inside. More photographs and a few papers. She was about to replace it when something caught her eye at the top of one of the letters.
Her heart lurched when she read the lines beneath.
It seemed that she’d been right. Cora had a secret of her own.
Chapter Thirteen
Cora
As Cora moved slowly up and down the supermarket aisles wondering what Holly might like for tea, she felt she had turned a corner in what had become a mundane, uneventful existence.
Holly had left the house earlier to go into town and find herself a job, apparently. Although Cora had assured her there was no rush to pay rent or anything of that sort, at least for a few weeks, Holly had been insistent. It was rather a shame, just when they were getting to know each other; and Cora thought of her very much as a visitor, rather than a temporary lodger.
She selected a two-pint carton of semi-skimmed milk and laid it in the rickety trolley with a wonky wheel that she was having trouble pushing in a straight line.
Still, who’d have thought things could turn around so completely in a single afternoon, and so out of the blue like that?
Cora had been standing at the end of a short queue in the post office, waiting to purchase a book of stamps. That had been her sole reason for leaving the house that day, as she only sorted out the bank business twice a week. She’d needed to post a couple of cheques for bills and realised she’d run out of stamps.
She didn’t like all this online banking business, nor the thought of direct debit payments that gave the energy companies cash before she’d even received the full quarter’s service.
What was the world coming to? What had happened to paying the correct amount for a service actually received and used? Harold had always refused to give out his bank details to companies.
‘Blighters can take what they like once I grant them access to my funds,’ he would roar upon receiving a letter informing him he could save money by paying in regular monthly instalments.
My funds. He’d always referred to it as his money, and she’d had to ask for every penny she needed.
She’d never in a million years have been able to take a person like Holly in if Harold had still been around. Even completely bed-bound – as he was for the best part of a year before he died – he’d have caused a big fuss if Cora had brought someone in need back home, even if it was to stay with them just temporarily.
He’d even forbidden Cora from giving loose change to that poor homeless chap and his dog who sat on the corner of the high street in all weathers, for goodness’ sake. Harold had always maintained that ‘homelessness is a lifestyle choice’. What utter nonsense.
Sadly, against her better judgement, Cora had allowed him to get away with his dictatorial manner for all of their married life, and it was only really once he’d gone that her anger had surfaced. She had finally realised the impact his bigoted attitudes had had on her own life. Nobody had ever wanted to befriend them; people preferred to stay away.
It had to be said that when Harold died, there had been a welcome new sense of freedom that Cora had never experienced before.