The Remaining Voice Read Free Page B

a strange one and no mistake.”
    “Oh but she wasn’t married,” I said.
    “No, no she wasn’t, but I call all my ladies Missus. Makes it easier on them.”
    I nodded and glanced around the room. The water needed topping up in the vase on the window ledge. Most of the flowers (forced tulips in garish colours) had begun to droop and lose their petals.
    “It must have been a shock for you, finding her like that.”
    “No dearie, not at all. Happens all the time. I’ve got used to it. So…what can I tell you?” She inspected the ceiling for a moment. “She’d had a string of carers when I met her. I think she quite wore them all out with her do this and do that. But then they do say cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
    “Do you think she was senile, or perhaps she had an obsession with cleaning?” My father always said ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. I wondered if it was a family trait. If so then it wasn’t one I had inherited; I was messy beyond belief.
    “Oh no, by all accounts she’d always been that way. Liked everything just so she did. Didn’t like children. Didn’t like noise you see. Didn’t like anything much. I think she was depressed.”
    “Depressed?”
    “Oh sure. Most elderly people get depressed. Nothing to do you see. No one to talk to. No one to care for her ‘cepting me, and she did not want to talk to me.” Genevieve leant in close and whispered: “I do not think she approved of a coloured woman taking care of her.”
    I nodded. “Did she ever talk about Paris?”
    “Paris?” Genevieve exclaimed. “No no. Never said a word about it. She would mutter under her breath sometimes in French, but I didn’t know what she was saying. Probably just cursing me for getting her up for dinner. She liked to lie in her bed. Didn’t like to be disturbed. Didn’t like to get up. It was always such an effort to get her to bathe. Oh dear, she was difficult in those last weeks.”
    “I couldn’t find any photographs, or letters, or anything much at her apartment.”
    “No, no you wouldn’t,” said Genevieve. “She didn’t like being reminded of the past. She would as tap her head and say ‘it’s all up here’, and I used to think that woman’s haunted by something she is, and I’d say a prayer for her. Well she’s with the good Lord now. The elderly… they are set in their ways. Is there anything else dearie, only I’ve Mrs Grace to see to. It’s nearly her teatime. I don’t like her to miss it otherwise she gets difficult later on and won’t settle.”
    I thanked Genevieve for her time. I couldn’t say that I’d learned anything much, other than Genevieve was a good woman doing a difficult job. Berthe remained a mystery.

Chapter 2
    Paris was all angles in the lengthening shadows. During my taxi ride I watched them disappear altogether, as the afternoon drew to a close. I have never been a good traveller and I felt weary and in need of an early night. I imagined the smell of newly laundered sheets, soft pillows, and a steaming mug of cocoa. I had an appointment to visit the French lawyer early in the morning and I wanted to get a good night’s sleep before I began my investigation.
    That Berthe had maintained her home in Paris year upon year, without seeing fit to either return to, or reap the benefits from a sale of the property, was nothing short of a miracle, and I was excited and intrigued at the prospect of peeling back the layers of her life. I wondered though, just how much I would find out. If her Hampstead apartment was anything to go by then it was more than likely that her Paris home was just as devoid of her presence – perhaps even more so.
    The streets wandered, the buildings becoming grander with every turn. I have always thought of Paris as something of an illusion and as the taxi pulled up outside my chic hotel on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, a flutter of white doves filled the pavement and prevented me from crossing to the