“Good-bye. Thank you for coming.” “It was the least we could do. Er, if you need anything, to talk or something, just let us know.” “Thank you, I will. Good-bye. Thank you for coming.” Inaudible murmur. “Good-bye. Thank you for coming.” “We were only too pleased to pay our last respects. She was such a lovely woman.” “Yes, absolutely,” Lisa agreed, her smile as firmly fixed on her face as at the beginning of the afternoon before she closed the door on the last departing guests. “Actually, she was an old cow and you were only here to see what you could pick up in the way of free food and drink because you’ve spent what little money you have on maintaining the image required for suckers like her to adopt you,” she spat at the closed door. Wearily, she crossed the hall of her mother’s Mayfair flat into the sitting room and surveyed the remnants of the funeral feast. Only the ‘A’ and the ‘S’ of Annabel Emily Carruthers’ commemorative cake were left. Even the dates, 1928 – 1998 had disappeared. Crumbs, crisps, sandwiches and ash had been trodden into the carpet. Someone had used a cream dish as an ashtray, the dark stub of the cigar sticking obscenely out of the sticky white mess. The reek of spilt wine mingled with that of sweat and smoke. Lisa picked up a wine bottle. Empty. Unsurprised, Lisa reflected that for years her mother had surrounded herself with scavengers who made a swarm of locusts look like gardeners out to prune the hedges. It had been the only way for her to sustain the illusion of having a vibrant social life, most of the friends of her younger days either being dead or mouldering away in institutions paid for by children determined to keep them out of sight. Lisa went through to the kitchen and rummaged through the cleaning cupboard for a bottle of vodka she had hidden there before the funeral. Long experience of her mother’s friends had taught her that it was not only teenagers who raided people’s kitchen for extra alcohol while the hosts were busy elsewhere. The kitchen clock ticked loudly in the silence as she poured vodka into a dirty wine glass. Briefly she wondered if she ought to dilute the spirit but dismissed the idea at the thought that she would then have to find something with which she could do so. Somehow one never diluted vodka with plain water. She sat down at the kitchen table and thought about what to do next. She really ought to go through her mother’s papers. The solicitor had told her that her mother had left everything to her, apart from the lease of the flat which only had a few weeks to run in any case. “You died just in time, Mother,” she raised her glass in a toast to the walls, “unless you had some money stashed away that I don’t know about. But then you always were a canny old bitch, getting out just in time. “Lately I’ve even wondered if my father walked out on you before I was born or if you got out before he spent all your money. Were you even married, Mother, dear?

You reverted to your maiden name quickly enough! Even gave it to me! It would be just like you to get involved with a gigolo at seventeen – pretty face, as you’ve never let me forget, plus money, plus the innocence of youth. Only you weren’t that innocent were you, Mother? Not when it came to money or social position. “Actually, I take that bit about social position back, thinking about your friends of recent years. What was your secret? How did you mange to maintain this flat and those parasites on no apparent income? “ And why did you hate me so much, never talking to me except to complain, hiding me away from everyone of any importance or interest, belittling all the men I brought home? You were really good at that! Even I despised them by the time you had finished listing all their imperfections! And now, here I am, fifty-eight years old sorting out your leavings on my own.” Lisa slumped down in her chair, the picture of alcohol-induced depression. She straightened up as she remembered the one man her mother had not been able to belittle because she never knew him, or even about him. Etienne Vivien, the man who had remained the love of her life throughout the years of desultory affairs. Lisa had met him at one of the carefully selected cocktail parties the principal of her Swiss finishing school considered necessary for her students. Lisa smiled as she remembered her immediate response to the handsome, middle-aged sophisticate, to his voice and the appraising look in his eyes as he acknowledged their introduction. For the first time in her seventeen years of life, she had felt beautiful, no more than that, infinitely desirable. That very night, she had arranged to meet him for tea the next week. In those days of the late nineteen-fifties, the school only allowed the girls out, unchaperoned, for two hours in the afternoon. It was the first rendezvous of many. How she had drunk in his philosophy, barely tasting the tea! Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘La Nausee’ made so much more sense when Etienne had expounded, in his beautifully modulated voice, that all human beings long for death as the only certainty in life. She gave a little smile as she remembered how she had quipped, “And taxes.” To her gratification, he had laughed. However, she was mortified when he explained that he had not laughed at her joke but at her naivety in repeating someone else’s’. She became determined then to learn how to become the sophisticated woman she believed he admired. She had listened avidly as he revealed the maxims by which he lived. Sex was a form of sublime death. Its beauty was destroyed once people tried to link it with life by using it as a means to create more life instead of embracing the self-annihilation it really was. Marriage was simply a declaration of war against that beauty made by deformed, small-minded people who wanted to drag everything down to their own level of ugliness. She was entranced after Etienne told her that she was just like a woman he knew long ago who drove men wild with desire. When he suggested that he had a few days free to prove her effect upon him, she had had no hesitation in writing to her mother to tell her that term was finishing a week later than it really was in order to spend that week with him in Paris. She knew her mother would never check the veracity of that statement, being much more interested in her own social life than her daughter. Buoyed up with the notion of Paris as the city of lovers, she had thoroughly enjoyed the rather seedy hotel to which Etienne had taken her and did not notice the care’ bohemian life-style of her favourite philosophers when they spent hours in bars on the Left Bank, drinking cheap wine and discussing the meaning of existence. She had been so uplifted that she hadn’t even cried when Etienne had put her on the train to Boulogne, saying, “To meet again would spoil the perfect moment, so, adieu, mon amour, adieu.” She had never told anyone about that week but hugged the knowledge of it to herself in the way a rich collector hugs the knowledge of possession of a stolen painting kept hidden from law enforcers. As the years had passed and her mother made her dissatisfied with every other lover she had, that first one had assumed ever greater importance in her eyes. She constantly explored the memory of it, hungry, as now, for a return to that exhilarating sense of sexual power he had given her. Reluctantly, she dragged herself back to the present and noticed that the vodka bottle was half-empty. She put the cap back on, promising, “I’ll finish you when I’ve gone through the old dragon’s papers.” She went through to her mother’s study, formerly her own bedroom but taken over within days of her moving out. All her mother’s important papers relating to property were kept in a box above the desk. Lisa took it down and began to rifle through it. “Lease agreement, oh it still has two weeks to run! How kind of you to give me enough time to contemptuous looks of the proprietor. She revelled in what she saw as sharing the ‘devil sell your furniture! Assuming it is your furniture. Any hire-purchase agreements? No? Gosh, Mother, it looks like you have left me something after all! What’s this? An envelope marked marriage certificate and birth certificate! Oh, so you were married and presumably to my father seeing as I’m your only child! How strange! “I’ve just realized that I’ve never actually seen my birth certificate. I’ve always used the passport you got me to go to Switzerland and then the renewals, of course.” Excitedly, she opened the envelope and looked at her mother’s marriage certificate. It was in French, from the Departement de L’Algerie. “Good God! Mother never told me she was married in Algeria! Let’s see. Extrait du marriage, 12 Mai, 1940. Epoux, Etienne Lionel Vivien, celibataire Epouse, Annabelle Emily Carruthers, celibataire.” She stared at the piece of paper in shock. “No! It can’t be! I don’t believe it! I won’t believe it! He told me he didn’t believe in marriage! Marriage is the denial of the individual and the individual is everything that makes life worth living! It can’t be true! Particularly not with HER! I can’t have taken her leavings!” Bile rose to her throat as the full implications of the dates on the marriage certificate sank in. When she turned to blunder towards the bathroom, her skirt brushed the envelope containing her birth certificate off the desk. Unnoticed, it floated silently to the floor.