Looking For Eliza

by Leaf Arbuthnot

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Clever, warm and funny' - ADAM KAY

'Beautifully rendered, thoughtful and original' - Pandora Sykes

'A marvellous read' - Ruth Hogan

Ada is a widowed writer, navigating loneliness in Oxford after the death of her husband. She has no children. No grandchildren. She fears she is becoming peripheral, another invisible woman.

Eliza is a student at the university. She finds it difficult to form meaningful relationships after the estrangement of her mother and breakup with her girlfriend.

After meeting through Ada's new venture, 'Rent-a-Gran', and bonding over Lapsang Souchong tea and Primo Levi, they begin to find what they're looking for in each other. But can they cast off their isolation for good?

An exquisite story of connection and loss, and how a person can change another person's life. Full of heartache yet joyful and life-affirming, this is for fans of Normal People, Expectation and Sarah Winman's Tin Man.

'Leaf's writing is warm and lyrically funny - she has an eye for details both sublime and ridiculous.Looking for Eliza is an intelligent and big-hearted read with the human condition at its core.' - Harriet Walker, The Times

Release date: May 14, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

The moment Ada walked into the small supermarket on Iffley Road, she knew something sinister had happened to it since her last visit. Had the aisles moved three inches to the left ? Had some zealous store manager set up a deli counter at the back, bunching up everything else in the shop ? She grabbed a loaf of rye bread from the baked goods section by the flowers and walked vigilantly down the fruit aisle.

Something was very definitely off. She remembered visiting an earthquake room with Michael years ago in some London museum – there was a mock-up of a greengrocer’s on level two, with a shopping trolley and all these fake cereal boxes everywhere, and every few minutes the whole thing would start shaking terrifically to give visitors a sense of what being in an earthquake was like. Ada had found the room mildly boring. Michael loved it and stood there for a long time, grinning along with the seven-year-olds whenever the quake began. At any moment, she felt, this shop too would start shivering ; its tins threatening to spring from their shelves. This time Michael wasn’t around to smile at the tremors. Ada squared her shoulders, trying to work out what was different. At the end of the aisle, where Braeburns turned to spring onions and leeks, each in their own solitary plastic pocket, she saw, at last, what had happened.

At the back of the shop, where Ada usually lined up with her basket by the chewing gum and snack bars, wondering whether it would be Adul at the till today or Fatima, or very possibly Kim – hopefully not – there were six machines.

They looked like cramped cashpoints. They were self-checkouts, each gleaming with twenty-first-century newness, lasers – for barcode scanning – glowing from their bellies like demonic eyes.

Ada froze. So the human tills had been replaced. Adul was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Fatima. Kim was there though, standing by the last machine in the row. She looked more glum than Ada had ever seen her. In beige moments at home, when the ticking of the clock in the sitting room seemed textured and malign, Ada liked to distract herself by marvelling at the herculean glumness of Supermarket Kim ; a stringy thirty-year-old with turquoise pigtails and a reliably complicated constellation of spots on her face, who once told Ada in a rare two-minute confession that she lived over the shop with her mum, literally just above it, so she could take her breaks in bed with Nirvana on loud.

But now Kim was looking dejected. She was frozen on the spot like Ada, staring into the middle distance, the tip of one pigtail in her mouth. Only her lips were moving, ruminatively massaging the hair poking in, pulling more of it into her mouth as a camel might with a spear of grass.

Ada knew at once what Kim’s brave new role was : to direct customers to the correct scanner. To check the IDs of the Magdalen schoolboys who ricocheted into the shop on Friday nights to pick up crisps and strawberry cider. To punch in her store manager code as and when required. To stoically rescan items that customers mis-scanned. To make sure that no one was logging pay-by-the-weight pistachios (expensive) as pay-by-the-weight peanuts (less expensive, but too salty). Kim was to stand by in silence, the green light of machines blinking enigmatically like Gatsby’s pier, waiting for something to go wrong. If she was lucky the time would go fast.

Ada felt the bulk of a person move directly behind her. She realised she was just standing by the magazines with her rye bread, blocking the way. She stepped aside.

A young woman with pink hair and ripped jeans strode past her, carrying tea and a packet of crumpets. She seemed unfazed by the new checkouts. She went to the nearest one and scanned her items, throwing in a Twix at the last minute. Then she seemed to think better of it and put the Twix back on the shelf. She didn’t notice Ada or Kim, who had shifted her weight and was pulling her other pigtail into her mouth with her lips. The young woman collected her receipt, stowed it carefully in a wallet and breezed towards the exit, leaving Ada agog at her nonchalance, infuriated by it, and envious too.

She realised she was dawdling. She also suspected she might be being melodramatic. This was modernity, that was all ; she was just ageing, having trouble adjusting. This was what it meant to be a little old lady who lived on her own. She was playing her role so impeccably she should be proud of herself. These machines were the future : they were sensible and efficient, they would ease the queues that paralysed the shop’s aisles, forcing customers to rotate around one another like arthritic dancers. If Michael were here, he’d encourage his wife to embrace the self-checkouts, to make a game of it. They’d miscategorise so many lemons as limes that Kim would have to come over to correct them, then they’d plead colour blindness and dodderiness and be forgiven.

Later, lying down on her bed in Swinburne Road with the curtains drawn, watching the mauve of her eyelids pop and blaze with frightful light, Ada realised it had been the combination of those two things that had set her off. On the one hand, the new machines, which meant a hardier kind of isolation, fewer opportunities for conversation and always, off camera, the chirrup and whirr of robotic presence nudging the human out. On the other, the lack of him there, the non-ness of Michael to frame the machines’ arrival in a positive light. Ada hadn’t realised how much she’d been relying on her daily trips to the shop on Iffley Road to supplement her human diet : Fatima’s low laughs at the audacious predictability of Ada’s groceries (milk, rye loaf, tuna, eggs) ; Adul’s incomprehensible football babble (he supported West or East Ham) ; the other, less friendly shop attendants whose names Ada didn’t know but who usually tossed a sentence or two her way, which she treasured and pocketed, and which kept her going until lunch. And irrefutably, no Michael with her to find advantages in the change, or see its funny side or, now she thought of it, as was equally possible, to rage at the implied job losses, at the obliteration of Fatima and Adul and the invasion of the machines even here, in their bourgeois corner of Oxford. Rage was better than her meek devastation, she realised, lying in her bed on Swinburne Road after she had burst into tears in the shop, by the magazines, waking even Kim from her trance.

It ended up being rather the event of both their days. Ada started crying and Kim took her turquoise pigtails out of her mouth. She came over to lift Ada tenderly from the ground where she’d sunk. She helped Ada out of the shop, as calmly as if this kind of breakdown happened regularly, and they stood by the lamp-post outside with the blue bike chained to it. They were silent for a time then had a quick chat, a light hug. Kim said that she would have to return inside and Ada nodded and left, bloodshot and embarrassed, to make the three-minute journey back to Swinburne Road and her yellow front door, which she unlocked with steady fingers, stepping through the dead house to the bedroom upstairs, listening all the while to the silence of the rooms around her and below her, as if even the walls were carpeted.

‘Swinburne Road?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where’s that again?’

‘Iffley.’

‘Near the fish and chip shop?’

‘Kinda. Closer to the supermarket.’

Eliza was shouting. She couldn’t remember the name of the bar she’d ended up in but she liked it ; it was badly lit and raucous, and the deal was, none of the drinks had set prices. The owner eyed you up, assessed from your demeanour, clothing and accent how much you could afford to pay for your whisky or whatever, and gave you a price. Most Oxford students – well-heeled southerners who couldn’t hide their affluence as much as they tried to beneath Oxfam jackets – paid quite a bit, partly because the owner wanted them to stay away, preferring locals. But Eliza had learned long ago that she oozed hard-upness. Maybe it was in the angles of her face or her haircut, a pink bob she’d sliced herself, using her phone camera to check the neckline. Her Cumbrian accent probably helped, too ; no one down here thought northerners had money. In any case, she’d paid £2 for every drink so far, and nothing for the olives, whereas the young woman Eliza was shouting her address at had dropped six quid for a vodka tonic.

Eliza had been at Oxford for five days now and was trying to throw herself into things. It was technically fresher’s week, and you saw them everywhere – these shoals of children moving around the city uncertainly behind student volunteers tasked with taking them to this curry house or that club. Eliza was twenty-five but hadn’t adjusted yet to not being unarguably young, and she was bemused to find herself noticing the roundness of the freshers’ jawlines, the legibility of their unease. When she’d started her undergraduate course at Bath in 2009, had she looked as squashable? As cute?

The graduate equivalent of freshers’ week was less of a thing. But Eliza was still going out as much as she could, beating down the reluctance that rose up her throat every night, ignoring the knowledge that she’d have a better night if she just, you know, stayed in bed. So here she was with Nat, an undergrad she’d met not three hours ago and had already kissed. They’d started talking in the smoking area of Cellar ; Nat was mashed, she was pretty, she seemed to find Eliza funny. After four cigarettes on the trot, each drawn from the packet in Nat’s backpack, they decided to go on to somewhere else. Nat ordered the cab ; Eliza was grateful because she was skint. They kissed on the back seat like they were in 90210 and pressed their bodies into each other by the entrance to the bar. Nat grabbed Eliza’s bum performatively, made her laugh. Now they were tucked in a corner by the window and their fingers kept brushing. Eliza’s rough eczema hands were mannish, she felt, against Nat’s cool soft brown ones, each painted silver at the end like she’d dipped them in melted necklaces.

‘I’m more Summertown way,’ Nat shouted over the music. ‘I live with my parents.’

‘Nice,’ Eliza replied, as loudly. ‘I’ve met a few grads who live there but the rent was mental so I didn’t.’

‘Yeah, the rent is mental.’

‘I got a good deal where I am now.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Mm. There are building works going on. I’m the only tenant in the house – the whole thing is being redone, I think they found asbestos. They’re gutting it. Except for my room. I’m there to make sure squatters don’t move in.’

‘D’you like it?’

‘Yeah it’s alright. It’s not long to get into town.’

She brought Nat’s fingers to her mouth and bit them lightly. Tasted salt.

‘D’you get woken by builders?’ Nat asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Eliza said. ‘I try to be out the door by eight.’ She considered adding that there was no hot water in her house. That she showered in the university gym along with the Varsity polo players coming back from training. That living on what was basically a building site meant getting used to a shit ton of dust, and that she’d taken to covering her narrow bed in a shroud of tarpaulin she’d found tangled by an Audi a few doors down ; it stopped the particles of dirt from getting into her pillow and blankets. That she woke with a raw throat every morning and had to have lemon and water to loosen it. But she didn’t want to put Nat off, and anyway she was satisfied with how little she was paying for the room, how resourceful she’d been to find it : the developer, Nick, a local who’d got rich off the boom in Oxford property, had advertised the room deep in the bowels of a community Facebook page where he was clearly hoping the authorities wouldn’t read it. Eliza had found the ad and called him at once ; five minutes later the room was hers.

‘God,’ Nat bellowed. ‘I’m never up as early as eight.’

Eliza smiled, shrugging. She thought about making a joke about early birds catching worms but realised it probably wouldn’t be funny, so she said nothing. Nat started massaging her neck across the small table. Her arm was at a weird angle because of their seating positions but it felt good. Eliza told her so.

‘You’re doing a PhD, right? In Italian Lit?’ Nat asked.

‘Yep. Just started. They call it a DPhil for some reason. But yeah, basically I’m a creepy grad.’

Nat gave a mock scream of terror, like, ‘Arghghgh !’

They laughed. The divide at Oxford between the undergraduate and graduate bodies was almost its own institution. Undergrads regarded doctorate and master’s students as lank-haired dweebs who subsisted off lentil bakes and organic wine and who knew who the local councillors were. Grads pitied the littleness of the undergrads’ world : their cliques, their debt, the lameness of their sporting societies, the shallowness of their academic programmes, the fact that they so seldom ventured outside the socially imposed perimeters of the city, never piercing through to real Oxford, its history, its politics, its less photogenic backwaters.

But sex was the great unifier. The principal lubricant of grad/undergrad fraternisation. It was socially acceptable, for instance, for an undergrad to pick up a grad on a night out or vice versa ; it was even commended as a sign of openness. Maybe it would have been strange for a thirty-year-old physics researcher to hit on a fresher who had no idea of anything, but Nat wasn’t a fresher and anyway, the codes were different in the queer scene ; age was policed less, mattered less.

‘So what’s the DPhil actually on?’ Nat asked. ‘Wait, tell me when I’m back from the loo.’

She stood up and began to careen to the bathroom, threading her slim body through the people crowding the bar. Eliza lost sight of her. She twisted to watch the road outside. A headlight bloomed white through the night. She swirled her drink. The ice tinkled. She decided she must look like a woman in an Edward Hopper painting ; her back ramrod straight, her face unreadable, her body inscrutable beneath her black shift dress. ‘I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything,’ she thought in an American accent. After this Nat would want to come back to Eliza’s bedroom ; hers wasn’t ideal because she lived with her family. Eliza envisaged opening her bedroom door with Nat behind her kneading her neck or her earlobe. Eliza hadn’t slept with anyone since Ruby ; she wasn’t sure, even eighteen months later, if she was ready, or maybe she’d just been conditioned to question whether she could be ‘ready’ for sex by magazines and TV. Whatever. She and Nat would tip into Eliza’s bedroom. They’d be drunker then, they’d have kissed again on the pavement. Eliza would swoop at the tarpaulin on her bed, apologise for the sawdusty smell of the room and the mugs and the heaters and the cardboard on one of the windows. Nat would say she didn’t mind, add that she liked Eliza’s books or something and they’d kiss more, trying to demonstrate their range and desire, now lighter now harder, maybe this time against the bedroom door.

No, no. Not tonight. Eliza stood up. She placed her glass decisively back on the table. It would leave a shining circle on the wood. She put on her anorak, popped one final olive into her mouth and made her way to the door.

Swinburne Road was like the trip step of Iffley, the southern patch of Oxford arranged around the ancient village that gave the area its name. Most residents didn’t know the road was there. Even those who’d grown up in Oxford and remained there their whole lives struggled to place it. They’d frown when Ada said she lived there, narrowing their eyes as if their pension depended upon them successfully incanting the road’s longitudinal coordinates, then finally they’d give up. Everyone knew the roads on either side – Fairacres and Donny Bridge – but Swinburne eluded all.

Partly it was the road’s shape. Like a sloppy ‘L’, with a kind of crescent at one tip that obscured the entrance. Its unremarkable houses were to blame too : not the tart brick terraces that lined so many of the posh streets of Iffley but an assortment of white and beige semis. You could have been in virtually any middle-class suburb in England. There weren’t many trees. The lamp-posts lining the road had once been notable – after sunset they glowed like hot coals, drenching the road in gold – but then the council replaced the orange bulbs with white ones and even night-time lost its mystique.

But there were worse places to live. There were several pubs within ten minutes’ walk, an excellent fish and chip shop, a café and of course the supermarket, even if Ada was resolved never to shop there again. A few days after she burst into tears at the checkouts, she forced herself to go in to see if she could hack it ; she’d been raised to get back on a horse if ever she fell off one. But it was too depressing. She rushed out of the shop almost the moment she walked in, deciding she would make her way through bits and pieces from the freezer until she found somewhere better to buy her groceries.

When she moved to Oxford with her husband a decade ago they hadn’t put much thought into the address. They were following a job – Michael’s – and by then Ada was writing poetry full-time, which was virtually as ill-paid as not having a job at all. His decision to swap a professorship in Manchester for one in Oxford had not been hard : already in his sixties, he’d been bemused to be offered a post in the prestigious Italian department. He’d not dreamed, like a few of his Manchester colleagues, of making it to Oxbridge – the Premier League of British academia – he was inclined to be content and not to salivate over hypotheticals or dreaming spires. Yet he wasn’t lacking in imagination either, or ambition and a sense of adventure, and the offer piqued him, when it came.

Ada, for her part, was not surprised that Oxford came knocking. Michael was the darling of Manchester’s modern languages department ; he wrote a book every two years, and each was well received by the top peer-reviewed journals. He spoke on Radio 4 about the importance of literature and languages. His classes, on giants from D’Annunzio to Croce, Pirandello to Moravia, were the best-rated in undergraduate surveys ; his lectures the most packed. Ada used to sit in sometimes – that was how they’d met ; she’d watched a panel he was on at Exeter all those years ago and he’d directed his words entirely, or so it had seemed, at her. When she went to his lectures in Manchester, she saw the way the undergrads around her leaned forward to listen, tapping at their laptops to ensure his sentences lodged uncreased in the annals of their word processors. But it had always been a skill of Michael’s, or his peculiar curse, not to notice his own quality. It was a form of tone-deafness : you could have bellowed words of affirmation at his face and he wouldn’t have taken them in. And so the summons from Oxford came, for him if for nobody else, out of the blue.

Ada was happy to move. She liked Manchester but Oxford too would surely be pleasant. She packed up their life and friendships with goodwill. The books and art and crockery came with them ; the furniture, bought for nothing in charity shops, stayed behind. They sold Ivy Cottage and the stable next door and found the house in Swinburne Road through someone in the Oxford Portuguese department who was off to UCLA. Got in before it was put on the market. They were lucky : Ada sold her shares, Michael scraped out the last of his savings and they found a way.

The day after moving in, they walked to the hardware shop on Magdalen Road and bought some paint. Michael chose the colour. Ada dug out two aprons and they spent their first afternoon in Oxford turning their new front door blistering yellow. It was an overcast day in August but warm enough. Michael managed to leave a kidney-shaped palm print by the knocker.

‘Darling,’ Ada rebuked him, her voice gentle. You could see the lines of his skin in the paint ; the patch looked matte, while the rest of the door glistened wetly.

‘When I die, you’ll have something to remember me by,’ Michael replied. Ada rolled her eyes but didn’t paint over the mark. They spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden, picking cherries from the tree that had been kept in life by academics passing through the house before them. There were nettles around the base of the trunk. Ada cut them back, saving the younger leaves for soup. That night, she and Michael read and ate in the sitting room, cardboard boxes all around them like Tetris blocks.

Now Ada lived on Swinburne Road alone. Under the stairs, she remembered sometimes, was the tin of yellow paint ; they’d only used half. After the door was finished, Ada suggested they throw the remainder away : they certainly couldn’t use it on the indoor walls, their eyeballs would peel. But Michael insisted they keep the paint. It would do, he said, to jolly up the bench under the cherry tree.

They never got round to it, of course, and cast the tin into the cupboard. There it was still. Ada wondered sometimes if the gloop inside had hardened into a kind of radioactive spherical brick. She hadn’t touched the paint since Michael had died. She was afraid of its distinctive tang, of its brightness.

In the months afterwards, when Ada felt less like her heart was being pulled from her chest through the small of her back, she came to be rather proud of how ordinarily her husband had died. At the kitchen table. On a flat morning in March 2014. A paper open on the table ; a fiendish sudoku half done, biro in hand.

As his heart stopped beating, Ada was in a deep sleep upstairs. It thinned out as morning wove itself around her new situation. At eight, she woke properly and sat up. Soon she would hear the muffle of Michael’s steps in the kitchen as he poured milk into a jug and prepared a cafetière to bring up to her. There were no such sounds today but that too was routine : sometimes Michael went for a morning walk to the river to watch the rowers pump past on the water. Most of all, he liked seeing the cox at the tip of the boat, bundled up and tiny, her voice – it was often a she – strident in the dawn air.

Ada found her reading glasses and shook out a ­fortnight-old copy of the London Review of Books. She picked up where she’d left off the night before : column three in a piece about the vagaries of the Arab Spring. For a while she tried following the thread of the article but it was no good, she’d need to start from the beginning ; even the names of the movements’ leaders were getting mixed up and she couldn’t remember who was uprising against whom. Finally she cast the paper aside, feeling thick. She found her dressing gown and went downstairs. On mornings when Michael went to the river, she made them boiled eggs. On his return, they would eat them together in the garden, their laps weighed down with blankets they piled by the back door.

But this morning was different. Ada entered the kitchen to find Michael seated, not filling the kettle or scattering coffee beans all over the counter. His forehead was on the wood of the kitchen table as if, Ada thought unaccountably as she observed him, he’d been assassinated from behind by a Soviet spy. He was not moving. His coffee was warm. Heart attack, she discovered later. Killed instantly. Seventy-five. Younger than many but not so young Ada felt she had the right to complain.

Ada sat with his body for an hour, then surprised herself by standing up to call her sister. She spoke plainly, delivering the salient points of the story with no wet breakdowns. Eve came up to Oxford at once on the train. She lived in Brighton with her daughter Gwen, who’d been left by her husband eighteen months befo. . .