Facing yet another evening of prepping vegetables at the farmhouse table, in the kitchen of the cottage where she’d spent her childhood, Cassandra knew she had to get out. She craved mud on her boots, yellow-green grass crushed underfoot, and the fresh wind in her lungs, which felt thick with dust. Her father’s books, the Poole pottery that for decades had fed her mother’s ceramics obsession, and the crevices of her grandmother’s old-fashioned cut crystal were filthy with grime. The constant low-level frustration and annoyance that hummed within her was occasionally pierced by a note of existential panic. Surely it was not mandatory to slide into older age in this way, weighed down by hundreds of fading and dirty decorative objects.
She told her mother she intended to walk to Monk's House the next day, a five-hour trek across the South Downs in late January.
'Don't be daft, sweetheart,' her mother said, pushing a bowl of Brussels sprouts towards her. ‘Have you checked the weather? It’s a nice walk, in summer, but now it’ll be dreary. You’ll be there in half an hour if you take the car.’
But she didn't want to get anywhere fast; she only wanted to be away from the cottage and its interminable tasks as long as possible. With her father gone, the huge flint-walled garden had become too much for her mother, whose upcoming move to London required a reckoning with the cupboards, the sheds, the loft. So far, Cassandra had managed to stay away nearly a week.
‘The weather's meant to be good,’ she said. ‘Monk’s House is opening for the day so people can see all the snowdrops in the garden.’
Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash
'Ahhhh,' said her mother. ‘Marginally worth it.' She squinted at the wall calendar. ‘They’re early.’
‘Everything blooms early now,’ Cassandra sighed. ‘ And I need to blow the cobwebs out. She’s on my mind. Olivia.’
‘I can imagine,’ her mother said. ‘Have you been onto the memory thingummy yet? So lovely.’
Cassandra groaned. ‘Not you too, Mum. Seriously?’
‘Jack did send you the link, didn’t he?’
‘And Verity did put you up to mentioning this, didn’t she?’
Her mother brandished a leek at her. ‘I agree with Verity. You should log on. Bite the bullet. No sense in avoiding it — they say it’s not good to avoid it.’
‘Avoid what, exactly?’ Cassandra asked. ‘The memory thungummy?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Cassandra.’ Her mother shook her head, pushing her knife down hard through the thickest part of the vegetable. ‘Grief, I suppose.’
‘I think I can grieve my best friend without needing to log onto something to do it, Mum.’
The older woman sighed. ‘Do you want me to sit with you? Might make it easier. We could get onto it together.’
‘I said no thank you,’ Cassandra said brusquely.
‘You didn’t, actually, but now you have, so all right then.’ Her mother heaved herself out of her chair and went to the Aga to stir a simmering pot of vegetable stock that didn’t need stirring. Cassandra sat and ran her index finger along the tracery of gouges and stains on the old table, wishing she could cry.
’I mean, that’s a kind offer, Mum,’ she said after a time, ‘but I…I don’t know.’
Her mother shrugged, her turned back emanating mild disapproval.
‘I’m amazed your service is even up to it out here,’ Cassandra said, after another pause. ‘Some of those Memor.I.Ams are pretty elaborate.’
‘Seemed to work fine,’ her mother said nonchalantly. ‘Olivia’s isn’t so fancy. Nothing you need those goggles for. And Judith and Bill’s boy put in some equipment for me in Dad’s office. There’s a whatsit on the wall. If you want things to be really speedy, you can plug in. There’s a wire in the top drawer of Dad’s desk, and a gubbinses to attach it.’
Cassandra picked at a sprout, pinching off layer after layer of leaf until there was almost nothing left.
‘You said no goggles,’ she said. ‘So it isn’t one of those ones that makes her…talk? There’s not one of those ghoulish chatbots? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. And Olivia would have hated that.’
Her eyes focused on the nubbin of sprout, she didn’t know her mother was approaching her until she felt the slight warmth of her tiny hand on her shoulder. ‘I understand,’ her mother said. ‘No, darling. I don’t think Jack would have done that. There was nothing like that, nothing that I saw. As I said…I thought it was lovely. Really.’
‘Mm,’ Cassandra said, feeling a fullness in her throat and a pricking feeling behind eyes that remained unaccountably dry.
‘Could I use Dad’s computer?’ she said finally.' ‘I mean, your computer? I didn’t bother bringing my laptop with me and it…feels weird on a phone. I don’t know.’
‘Of course, darling.’
‘Did you get the flowers?’ Paul asked.
‘I don’t know whether you’re talking about Tuesday’s flowers or Thursday’s flowers, but yes. I have enough flowers now.’
‘Well, I wasn’t to know because you didn’t acknowledge them, did you? This is getting ridiculous,’ Paul said. ‘How long is this going to go on? Please, sweetheart. We need to be together. You should be here, especially at a time like this, after Olivia. I said I was sorry, and I meant it, and I couldn’t be sorrier. He takes liberties, that slimy fucker, that’s all, and at a time like that. I’m sorry, Cassie. Please stop avoiding me.’
‘I’m not avoiding you,’ Cassandra protested.
‘Abandoning, then?’ he said, with a flat laugh.
‘I’m helping my mum. I need to be here.’
‘Can’t you turn on the light?’ he pleaded. ‘I can barely see you. I want to see you. Cassie, of course I know Daphne needs help. I’m not being an arsehole. But you’ve been gone for ages. I just miss you, okay? And Flush misses you. Look.’ He turned the camera to their ten-year-old Springer spaniel, lying nonplussed in her bed on the kitchen floor. ‘I hate your not being here. I’d be there in a flash, but I’ve got too many meetings.’
‘Come, then,’ she said. ‘The connection’s better down here now — Mum’s got the new fibreoptic cable installed. She called it something funny. A doohickey? No, it was…’
‘You know I can’t do that. Half the people I see really need PCPs,’ Paul said, shaking his head.
‘PCPs?’
‘Physically co-present meetings. Cassie, love, I do miss you, you’re so charmingly thick about things. You belong in another century. Probate requires a certain sensitivity, you know, I can’t not meet with people properly.’
‘You could have just said in person,’ Cassandra said. ‘That I would have understood.’
‘Literally no one says that anymore,’ Paul laughed. ‘Bless you, you laugh at how Daff talks but you’re just as bad yourself. It obviously doesn’t work for me to come there. I’m the one with the job — you’re flexible. I really, really miss you. The house isn’t the same without you. I can’t sleep in bed without you. Please, Cassie.’
‘Paul, I’m not sure. We…I don’t know. Everything got so -- intense -- after Olivia’s memorial. And my mum…’
‘Oh, Jesus FUCK!!’ Paul groaned. ‘You really can’t let it go, can you?’
He terminated the call abruptly, and she tossed the phone away. In the quiet early-evening winter dark, sitting on the floor of her childhood room with her back against the bed, Cassandra took a few deep breaths to calm down. She listened for her mother, hoping she hadn’t overheard, but heard no sound from the hallway. Sighing and leaning over to retrieve the phone, she recorded a voice note, listened to it, deleted it, and tapped out a message instead.
I’m sorry you’re frustrated, Paul. I promise I’ll be home as soon as I can. Hope you’re okay. xoxo
She waited five minutes, but there was no read receipt and no reply. He was sulking, or maybe he’d gone to the Rose and Crown. She put the phone on its charging plate and, although it wasn’t anywhere near her bedtime, lay down exhausted from the emotion, from shifting boxes, from not eating enough. In the morning, perhaps on her walk, she’d try and fix things between her and Paul.
But sleep would not come. An hour passed, and around nine she heard her mother’s bedroom door shut. Wiggling herself upright against the cushions stacked at the head of the bed, she put her face in her hands for a few moments before drawing a robe around her shoulders and tiptoeing down the hall.
Her father’s iMac was ancient, at least eight years old, and it saddened her to think how little time he’d had to enjoy it before he died. He’d chosen it for the large LED display, top of the range at the time, and spent the last months of his life holed up in his study editing photographs. The same neighbourhood boy who’d installed the whatsit on the wall - a port for a Hypernet cable, as it turned out - had managed to keep the machine going since then by slotting it full of as much memory as it could take.
Despite all the digital security advice she’d received on leaflets from Age Concern and the Women’s Institute, her mother had stashed her login password exactly where Cassandra thought she’d find it: a sticky note on the surface of the desk, under the keyboard. Once in, she logged into her email to find Jack’s message with the link, unread. Acutely aware of Paul’s sensitivities, she’d been reluctant to open anything from Jack until now.
Dearest Cassandra, I can't tell you how much it meant to have you there. Please feel free to say no, but I'd like to hang onto the painting for a while longer before returning it. Olivia's Memor.I.Am is nearly ready - work in progress and never complete, of course, but I wanted to send the link to you first, before opening it to more visitors, to make sure you’re okay with it. Lots of love to you, and to Paul too of course. Jack xoxo
He must have taken her silence for assent to use the image, or simply been too impatient to wait.
She steeled herself and clicked the link.
Olivia Noble. The dead are not dead while their names are still spoken. Olivia, Olivia, Olivia!
Filling the screen in ultra-high-definition colour was the portrait, every brush stroke visible. Had Jack done it on a large-format machine, carted it around Soho to some scanning place? That she would have had an objection to, after all his protestations about wanting to keep the artwork safe.
To get any further and see the tributes, she had to create a mourner’s account anew; she was unable to find her login details from the few Memor.I.Ams she’d visited before. She chewed on a hangnail, thinking. If she didn’t use her real name, no one would realise that the chief mourner had arrived to do her duty. If she did use it, Paul might somehow be alerted to it straightaway. He always seemed to crop up asking questions every time she did anything new on her ancient computer at home. But Paul was bound to find out eventually that she’d gone on the site, whatever she did. Why should he care?
In the end, she compromised by entering her first and middle names, Cassandra Cecilia, and opted to display her initials instead of her full name. Semi-incognito, at least for now, she’d have a look around.
Verity had not been exaggerating - the tributes to both Olivia and the portrait were nearing a thousand. The accolades sparkled with half a dozen synonyms for 'alight'. Luminous. Brilliant. Incandescent. Dazzling. She was aware that the central purpose of her visit shouldn’t be about her, but reading such glowing reviews of her work produced sensations in her body she hadn’t experienced since her long-ago exhibition.
Hogarth's had been chock full of people, but apparently that gathering had been merely the tip of the iceberg. She’d known that Olivia worked all over the world, but the number of mourners who seemed to know her directly was extraordinary, and she, the best friend, hadn’t yet spoken. Cassandra felt ashamed of her late arrival and angry at everything that had held her back before now. Perhaps there was a way to backdate her post, some trick to move it to a more prominent position. But did it matter? Maybe no one would notice.
The intimacy and familiarity of the tributes surprised her, the depth of everyone's devastation, the power of their words. She clicked on one.
Adrienne, Florida, United States: You were amazing. The thought that we won't see you again, hear you laugh, share a bottle of wine with you, is unimaginable.
Frowning, Cassandra scanned the woman's face, her white, bright teeth contrasting with sun-kissed, freckled face. She didn't recognise her features or her name. The same was true for three quarters of the mourners. Maybe Olivia had a lot of best friends. But it was her name underneath the painting.
Darkroom, 2015, from Cassandra Parsons' 'Room of One's Own' exhibition, Tate St Ives, 2016. Private collection.
She was the one at the top, the artist who had caught Olivia’s spirit, the person responsible for bringing her and Jack together. In any best friends’ race, she would surely win the day, a victory to which no one else could hold a candle, stake a claim.
Not confident about producing an appropriate tribute at this time of night in her state of mind, she clicked the main menu. A timeline page showed Olivia’s work, each year's dot exploding into a collage of stunning images united by their quality rather than their theme. War zones, landscapes, street photography, formal portraits. Close-up details of natural and man-made repeating patterns. Olivia rendered the tiniest and most everyday details of life beautiful through her eye, her instinctive framing, an immediate understanding of where she must focus.
Cassandra clicked 2024, triggering a technicolour sunset that splayed across the screen. Those reds and oranges and purples couldn’t be English; the woman with the bright teeth was from Florida. Olivia had gone there that year to photograph devastating hurricane damage on a once-idyllic island.
But the photographs chosen for the Memor.I.Am didn’t show twisted metal and broken buildings, only peace and beauty. A black-and-white detail of a wafer-thin seashell, sunshine entering its aperture and illuminating the whorl at its top from within. A strand of sand suffused with golden evening light, full of ripples and indentations from receding tide, repeating the pattern as far as the camera's eye could see. An open bivalve, its two halves tenuously joined by a fragile strip of elastic protein, empty of its animal but its inner surface gleaming with an opaline sheen.
One menu item was labelled 'Joy', and at Cassandra’s click the speakers of the monitor came alive with the familiar sound of Olivia's laughter, little cascades like a running stream. Cassandra jumped and jabbed at the monitor before remembering her father’s computer had no touch screen. She couldn’t bear this recorded audio clip echoing in a house that had so often heard the real thing. Looking for something easier to take, she clicked a menu item labelled 'Us'. Probably a tribute to Jack-and-Olivia, although she wasn't sure she was in the mood for Jolivia, or Olijack, or whatever other ridiculous portmanteau people called them.
But there was no Jack-and-Olivia montage here, only a large circle with smaller ones strung along it like a circlet of pearls, and a smiling image of Olivia in the middle.
Next time: Cassandra makes a surprising connection on Olivia’s Memor-I-Am.
About the Author
Elaine Kasket ventures into new territory with Still There, her first novel. Known for her nonfiction work, she's now exploring the boundaries between memory, technology, and human connection through fiction. This serialised novel is being released exclusively on Substack, with new installments dropping every Tuesday and Friday. Join the journey from the beginning, and subscribe to make sure you don't miss a single episode.
