The Imposter Anna Wharton (e novels to read .txt) 📖

bed, and the editor’s office door opens. Alec approaches her desk.

‘Er, Chloe . . .’ he says, coughing a little into his hand, ‘Malc would like a word in his office, if you’d like to . . .’

His sentence trails off, but he gestures for her to follow him.

She gathers up her notepad and pen, as if trying to convince the both of them that Malc might need archive material for a big story. Alec glances at the stationery in her hand but says nothing.

Inside the office Alec closes the door. Malc is behind his desk, elbows spread wide behind his head. He doesn’t ask either of them to sit.

‘Chloe,’ he begins, ‘this isn’t the first time you’ve been in this office, is it?’

She shakes her head.

‘Sorry?’

He has pockmarks on his cheeks.

‘No.’

‘No,’ he repeats, ‘and I think the last time you were in here, we talked about the same things: time-keeping, unauthorized absences from the office, general tardiness in your performance . . .’ He checks each felony off on fat fingers. ‘Am I right?’

She nods.

‘Sorry?’

‘Yes.’

He knits those same fingers together and leans forward on his desk. ‘So my question to you is, what are we to do about this?’

There is silence in the room. Chloe looks at Alec, who straightens up as Malc starts to speak again.

‘Alec tells me you were absent during office hours three times last week, then this week—’

‘I . . . I know it looks bad—’ she starts and instantly regrets interrupting him because when he speaks again, his voice is so loud it startles the sound of her own blood from her ears.

‘—and today’s Wednesday, and you’ve only just decided to “pop back in”?’

He leans back abruptly on his office chair, bobbing back and forth a little. There is enough silence then for her to decide to fill it. She’s good at talking herself out of situations, she knows what people want to hear.

‘It’s just my nan,’ she says.

Both men roll their eyes a little.

‘She’s got dementia and I’ve been trying to care for her . . . she gets confused, you see . . . and she went missing . . . and the police, well, they found her in London . . . and I had to go and get her . . . now she’s in a home and—’

Alec interrupts this time. ‘Chloe, we’ve been as patient as we can be. How many times have we heard—’

‘Yes, I know, Alec, and I’m grateful, I really am, but now she’s in a home and I won’t have to—’

‘Until the next time,’ Alec mutters.

Chloe wraps one arm around her middle and bites her fingernail.

‘It’s a written warning this time, Chloe,’ Malc says, and then as if to underline the point, ‘Your last warning.’

She swallows the rest of her sentence, and nods quickly before he changes his mind. Just another warning. She can deal with that.

Alec thanks Malc and they leave the office, shuffling awkwardly in their haste to get back to the safety of the archive.

She speeds through the rest of the Angela Kyle file – she can’t afford to have Alec commenting on her work again today – but she doesn’t put it back in the archive. Instead, when Alec isn’t looking, she slips it into the top drawer of her desk. She’ll wait until he leaves to put it in her bag. Chloe is taking Angela Kyle home.

At Park House that evening, one of the care assistants shows Chloe where Nan is sitting in the recreation room. Chloe doesn’t recognize her at first; she looks smaller here somehow, like she’s shrunken, and takes up less room than she had in her living room with its fake mahogany dado rail. Like the wood moulding stitching together two parts of the wall, Nan held herself and Chloe together too. She was the lynchpin of their family life. Here she appears as anonymous, as tiny, as any other resident. Seeing Nan like that, across the room, unsettles her for a moment.

Chloe takes a few steps towards her, but Nan doesn’t turn around. She watches her silently, this small woman with her delicate frame, her fragile shoulders barely filling her mauve cardigan.

‘Nan?’ she says, more quietly than she might usually. For some reason, this alien environment is making a mockery of them. And as if she feels it too, Nan doesn’t turn around.

Chloe stops then. Which world is she inhabiting in this moment? Is it one where she’s brought Stella back from the dead, or is Granddad off fighting in the war? She never knows what she will face. It used to be day to day, then hour to hour, now it is more likely minute to minute. Faced with such shifting sands, is it any wonder they both let her disease win from time to time? There is another way of dealing with this illness after all: the days when it unwittingly swells their family from two to four could be seen as a gift. A chance for them both to pretend. As if this thief of time that creeps into her brain is letting them both live a fantasy.

As Chloe gets closer she sees that Nan is smiling.

‘Nan?’

She doesn’t respond.

Her hair has been shampooed and set, a brooch she hasn’t seen except in photographs is pinned to her jumper. Her smile is slicked in coral lipstick too. She’s never seen Nan wearing lipstick before.

‘Nan?’

She turns around.

‘Who are you?’ she says.

‘It’s me, Chloe?’

‘I don’t know anyone called Chloe.’

‘I’m Stella’s daughter,’ she says, ‘your granddaughter.’

Nan laughs then, really laughs. Her coral lipstick makes a giant ‘O’ on her face. ‘Stella’s only a baby herself, she doesn’t have any children.’ She turns back to looking out of the window then, still chuckling to herself. ‘I’m just waiting for her to come home from school.’

Chloe leaves her there – in, when, the late fifties? – while she stands beside her in 2004. Instead she sits down in an armchair and waits in case the years catch up with her. They both look out of the window that overlooks the gardens. Just a few feet away, on the other side of the glass, a thrush pulls a worm from the lawn