Free Let's Dance by Frances Fyfield

horror that the marble surround of the fireplace had been painted white. The paper crackled in the hearth at the touch of a match. He wanted to laugh at the sight, wondered if she remembered other times in this room by the light of the dying fire, with everyone else in bed.
    â€˜So what have you done for the last few years?’ he asked, over-heartily.
    â€˜Oh, don’t ask. This and that.’ Spending that inheritance of hers, he thought with a shade of jealousy. He leant forward, curiosity overcoming shyness.
    â€˜And why are you doing this now?’
    â€˜Because someone must. She needs me. I need her. I mustn’t give up. I’ve never done anything else worthwhile, you see. So I mustn’t fail either. I’m sure I can make her better. Anyway, what does that brother of mine want?’
    â€˜He probably wants to make sure that the furniture remains intact, or at least properly recorded and insured. Photographed, perhaps. Your mother won’t be able to stay here for ever,’ Andrew said carefully. What did she mean she needed her mother? How the hell could something as stunning as this still need her mother?
    Isabel looked round and frowned, suddenly determined. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s her home. Movingher would be incredibly cruel and besides, how can it be done? She would never see the necessity. As for the furniture, Robert’s welcome to it in the end, but it has to stay put for now. She finds her way around because of the furniture. Like a series of signposts, you see. The furniture orientates her in time and space, somehow. Do you know, I’ve never really noticed it?’
    Ah, he thought, relieved, we are still poles apart. Not notice furniture? Remain immune to things chosen with loving taste in the days when they were affordable? She was what he had half hoped she would be, a silly woman.
    â€˜Tell me about it,’ she said suddenly, leaning forward towards the light of the fire, depersonalizing the conversation, one ear cocked towards the kitchen. ‘You know about these things. What makes all this old wood so special?’
    â€˜Age,’ he said pompously. ‘Age makes everything special.’
    She looked at him, amused by his intensity. ‘I’ll show you upstairs,’ she said.
    L ater he was in his own small house, mercifully free of envy, taking refuge in the things he liked to touch, making an inventory of his friends. Visualizing mother and daughter sitting by that fire, the beautiful and the damned. You cannot be a good daughter, Isabel. You are not the stuff of which good daughters are made. You cannot be a good daughter because you cannot make your mother better.
    He remembered how his father’s dependence had distorted everything, and he hoped that mother and daughter would be happier.
    T he kitchen was a cocoon; the house in a time warp; and Isabel was not happy. What had she done to earn such disapproval? Food spat out at supper, the façade of manners gone. Isabel had done nothing to deserve this. Yes, she had left George with Mother, which pleased them both, raced back to the dismal supermarket on the outskirts of town, loaded a poor selection of supplies into the smart car with the crumpled fender, raced home, careful over the fields. Telling herself, I must make this work, I must forget about everything else in order to make this work. Why did Andrew Cornell, and everyone else, drop me so abruptly all those years ago? Too busy to wonder if it still hurt, quickly deciding it did not. Andrew, and James Reilly, and John Eliot. One after another. Damn them all.
    Stopping at the gates of the house, Isabel tried to see it the way George might see it, visualizing instead the picture of her mother, rocked in his burly arms. Trying to perceive the elegance of the carefully collected contents of this house in the way Andrew might see them, failing there too. Doubting everyone, herself most of all. Feeling alien, stupid,