Ray got back from work and went for a shower. I warmed through his pasta and washed up the rest of the dishes. ‘Your mother would have a fit,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘It’s three-minute macaroni,’ I said.
‘What? You haven’t made fresh?’
‘Nope.’
‘Neither does she,’ he said. ‘Well, only to impress. She’s a cupboard full of tinned spaghetti hoops, you know.’
‘She hasn’t!’
‘Yeah. She’s not stupid,’ he said. ‘She might not admit it but she’s discovered there’s more to life than home cooking.’
‘Like the bookies.’
‘Definitely the bookies.’
Nana Tello – her real name is Costello but Tom’s baby version had stuck – had a penchant for the horses. Ray spent a lot of time worrying about whether she was getting into debt or betting within her means. She refused point-blank to discuss it with him and denied it a lot of the time, like addicts do.
I liked her gambling. It proved she had weaknesses like the rest of us. Whenever she started on about how a good cook or a good mother or a good homemaker should do things I could conjure up an image of her entering her bets in a smoke-filled office.
As far as she was concerned our silly set-up was a diversion from Ray’s (Raymundo, as she called him) real need to find a pretty young mother for his poor motherless child. She couldn’t accept that our arrangement was platonic and equitable. She veered between casting me as a hussy, a landlady or a housekeeper. Ours wasn’t an easy relationship.
Once the children were settled I claimed the sofa. I flicked the channels hoping against hope that they’d got the listings wrong in the paper: football, darts, a TV movie (all big hair and heroism in the face of fatal illness) and a documentary. I watched this latter for a few minutes. They were uncovering abuse in private old people’s homes. Everything from verbal cruelty and petty bullying to systematic physical and sexual abuse. I kept seeing Agnes and Lily in place of the brave faces on the screen. I recalled the savagery of Dr Goulden’s face in the mirror. He’d been livid at our enquiries. Again I wondered why he’d reacted so strongly.
I zapped the TV. What would Agnes do now? She’d been so certain that something was awry and we’d found nothing. She had to face the inevitability of her friend’s illness and eventual death, though she could go on for years. In the books I’d read there were examples of people who had lost all sense of who they were, who no longer recognised family or friends, who’d lost all personality and needed constant care and reassurance. It would be hard for Lily but it’d probably be harder for Agnes to watch her friend disappear.