The Last Tenant's Wallpaper

The wallpaper came away in strips narrower than Jo’s thumb. She had expected the job to take a Saturday. By Sunday afternoon she had exposed a square of old green paint and discovered how many ways a wall could resist a person.

Her mother had rented the flat for thirty-six years. Now she lived with Jo’s sister, who had a lift and a room facing the garden. The landlord wanted the walls returned to neutral.

Behind the radiator, Jo found a pencilled rectangle. Inside it someone had written: Leave this bit until last. It makes you feel you have finished something.

The handwriting was not her mother’s.

She photographed it and sent it to her sister. The reply came ten minutes later: Ask Mum about Mrs Vale.

Mrs Vale had lived there before them. She had left a wardrobe, two hooks and the wallpaper, which Jo’s mother had liked well enough to keep. They had exchanged letters for a year because the post office could not accept that Mrs Vale had moved.

“What happened to her?” Jo asked on the telephone.

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “We stopped writing.”

Jo continued stripping. Near the door, beneath a fold of paper, she found a list of measurements. Waist. Shoulder. Sleeve. She remembered the narrow table that had stood there when she was little, always covered with laundry.

“She made costumes,” her mother said. “For an amateur company. She left me a coat once. It was purple, completely unsuitable.”

“Did you wear it?”

“To your father’s retirement dinner.”

Jo had no memory of a purple coat. She did remember her mother that evening, standing very straight in the hall while her father struggled with his tie. In the photograph, which she found in a drawer, the coat was folded over one arm.

The landlord agreed that the pencilled rectangle could remain if she painted around it. He sounded puzzled, but it was a small request and the flat was otherwise empty.

On Tuesday, Jo brought her mother to see the finished room. They stood before the rectangle, now an island of faded green in a pale wall.

“I wish I had kept writing,” her mother said.

Jo did not say that there was still time. Neither of them knew whether there was.

Instead she asked about the play the coat had been made for. Her mother sat on the windowsill and began with the leading actress, who had been much too short. Jo put down the keys and listened until the room grew dark.