‘Did any of the Blythes come to visit Mum in London?’
Rita shrugged. ‘Merry was awful secretive once she got back, ducking off on errands without saying where she was going. She could’ve been meeting anyone.’
Was it something in the way she said it, the shadow of insinuation clinging to her words? Or was it the way she glanced away from me as she spoke? I’m not sure. Whatever the case, I knew immediately that there was more to her comment than met the eye. ‘Like who?’
Rita squinted at the box of lace bags, inclining her head as if there’d never been anything as interesting as the way they sat together in little white and silver rows.
‘Auntie Ri-ta?’ I dragged it out, ‘Who else would she have been meeting?’
‘Oh, all right.’ She folded her arms so that her boobs perked together then looked directly at me. ‘He was a teacher, or he had been before the war; back at Elephant and Castle.’ She made a show of fanning her peachy cleavage. ‘Ooh la la. Very good-looking, he was – he and his brother both: like film stars, those strong, silent types. His family lived a few streets over from us and even your gran used to find a reason to come out on the step when he was passing by. All the young girls had crushes on him, including your mum.
‘Anyway,’ Rita continued with another shrug, ‘one day I saw them together.’
You know that expression ‘her eyes goggled’? Mine did. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Where? How?’
‘I followed her.’ Justification trounced any embarrassment or guilt she might have felt: ‘She was my little sister, she wasn’t behaving normally, it was a dangerous time. I was just making sure she was all right.’
I couldn’t have cared less why she followed Mum; I wanted to know what she’d seen. ‘But where were they? What were they doing?’
‘I only saw from a distance but it was enough. They were sitting together on the grass in the park, side by side, tight as you please. He was talking and she was listening – real intent, you know – then she handed him something and he . . .’ Rita rattled her empty packet of cigarettes. ‘Bloody things. I swear they smoke themselves.’
‘Auntie Ri-ta!’
A brisk sigh. ‘They kissed. She and Mr Cavill, right there in the park for all the world to see.’
Worlds collided, fireworks exploded, little stars shot up the black corners of my mind. ‘Mr Cavill?’
‘Keep up Edie, luvvie: your mum’s teacher, Tommy Cavill.’
Words were beyond me, words that made any sense. I must’ve made some sort of noise because Rita held a hand to her ear and said, ‘What’s that?’ but I couldn’t manage it a second time. My mother, my teenage mother, had sneaked away from home for secret meetings with her teacher, Juniper Blythe’s fiancé, a man she’d had a crush on; meetings that involved the handing over of items and, more to the point, kissing. And all this had happened in the months leading up to his desertion of Juniper.
‘You look peaky, love. Would you like another lemonade?’
I nodded; she fetched; I gulped.
‘You know, if you’re so interested you should read your mum’s letters from the castle yourself.’
‘Which letters?’
‘The ones she wrote back to London.’
‘She’d never let me.’
Rita inspected a dye-stain on her wrist. ‘She wouldn’t need to know.’
My look, I’m sure, said, Huh?
‘They were amongst Mum’s things,’ Rita explained, ‘came to me after she passed away. Kept them all those years, the sentimental old girl, never matter that they hurt her so. Superstitious, she was, didn’t believe in throwing letters away. I’ll dig ’em out, eh?’
‘Oh . . . I don’t know, I’m not sure that I should—’
‘They’re letters,’ said Rita, with a dip of her chin that made me feel daft in a Pollyanna sort of way. ‘They were written to be read, weren’t they?’
I nodded. Tentatively.
‘Might help you to understand what it was your mum was thinking up there in her fancy castle.’
The thought of reading Mum’s letters without her knowledge plucked at my guilt strings, but I silenced them. Rita was right: the letters might have been written by Mum, but they’d been addressed to her family back in London. Rita had every right to pass them on to me, and I had every right to read them.
‘Yes,’ I said, only it sounded more like a squeak. ‘Yes, please.’
The Weight of the Waiting Room
And because that’s the way life seems to work sometimes, it was while I sat unpicking Mum’s secrets with the sister from whom she most wished to keep them, that my dad had his heart attack.
Herbert was waiting with the message when I got home from Rita’s; he took both my hands and told me what had happened. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, ‘I’d have let you know sooner only I didn’t know how.’
‘Oh . . .’ Panic throbbed in my chest. I pivoted towards the door, then back. ‘Is he—?’
‘He’s at the hospital; stable, I believe. Your mother didn’t say much.’
‘I should—’
‘Yes. Come on; I’ll hail you a cab.’
I made small talk with the driver all the way. A short man with very blue eyes and brown hair beginning to rust towards silver, a father of three young children. And while he told stories of their mischief and shook his head with that mask of mock exasperation parents of small children adopt to degloss their pride, I smiled and asked questions, and my voice sounded ordinary, light even. We came closer to the hospital, and it wasn’t until I’d handed him a tenner and told him to keep the change and to enjoy his daughter’s dance recital, that I realized it had started to rain and I was standing on the pavement outside the hospital in Hammersmith without an umbrella, watching a cab disappear into the dusk while my father lay somewhere inside, his heart all broken.
Mum looked smaller than usual, alone at one end of a bank of plastic chairs, drab blue hospital wall glooming over her shoulder. She’s always well turned out, my mum, dressing from a different age: hats and gloves that match, shoes kept swaddled in their shop boxes, a shelf full of different handbags jostling together, awaiting promotion to complete the day’s outfit. She wouldn’t dream of setting foot outside the house without her powder and lipstick in place, even when her husband’s gone ahead in an ambulance. What a loping disappointment I must be, inches too tall, far too frizzy, lips stained with whichever gloss I happen to excavate first from the detritus of loose change, dusty breath mints and random stuff that live in the depths of my faded tote.
‘Mum.’ I went straight to her, kissed a cheek made deathly cool by the air-conditioning and slid into the bucket seat beside her. ‘How is he?’
She shook her head and fear of the worst lodged lumplike in my throat. ‘They haven’t said. All sorts of machines, doctors coming and going.’ She let her lids fall briefly closed. She was still shaking her head, softly, from habit. ‘I don’t know.’
I swallowed hard and decided not knowing was preferable to knowing the worst, but I thought better of sharing this platitude. I wanted to say something original and reassuring, something to alleviate her worry, make it all OK, but Mum and I had no experience down this road of suffering and consolation, so I said nothing.
She opened her eyes and looked at me, reached to hook a fuzzy curl behind my ear, and I wondered whether perhaps it didn’t matter, that she knew already what I was thinking, how earnestly I wanted to make it better. That there was no need to say anything because we were family, mother and daughter, and some things were understood without being spoken—
‘You look dreadful,’ she said.
I stole a sideways glance and caught my shadowy reflection in a glossy NHS poster. ‘It’s raining out.’
‘Such a big bag,’ she said with a wistful smile, ‘and no room for a little umbrella.’
I shook my head lightly and it turned into a shiver and I realized suddenly that I was cold.
You have to do something in hospita
l waiting rooms or else you find yourself waiting, which can lead to thinking, which in my experience can be a bad idea. As I sat silently beside my mum, worrying about my dad, making a note to buy an umbrella, listening to the wall clock sweep away the seconds, a horde of lurking thoughts seeped along the wall to brush my shoulders with their tapered fingers. Before I knew what was happening, they’d taken my hand and led me places I hadn’t been for years.
I was standing against the wall of our bathroom, watching my four-year-old self tightrope-walk along the bath tub. The little naked girl wants to run away with the gypsies. She’s not sure exactly who they are or where to seek them, but knows they’re her best bet for finding a circus to join. That’s her dream and it’s why she’s practising her balancing act. She’s almost across to the other side when she slips. Falls forwards, winds herself, lands with her face beneath the water. Sirens, bright lights, strange faces . . .
I blinked and the image dispersed, only to be replaced by another. A funeral, my gran’s. I’m sitting in the front pew beside my mum and dad, only half listening as the rector describes a different woman from the one I knew. I’m distracted by my shoes. They’re new, and although I know I should be listening better, focusing on the casket, thinking serious thoughts, I can’t stop looking at those patent leather shoes, turning them back and forth to admire the sheen. My dad notices, shoulders me gently, and I wrestle my attention forwards. There are two pictures on top of the coffin: one of the Gran I knew, the other of a stranger, a young woman sitting on a beach somewhere, leaning away from the camera, smile hooked as if she were about to open her mouth and make a quip at the cameraman’s expense. The minister says something then and Auntie Rita starts to wail, mascara spilling black across her cheeks, and I watch my mum expectantly, waiting for a matched response. Her gloved hands are folded in her lap, her attention is fixed on the casket, but nothing happens. Nothing happens and I catch my cousin Samantha’s eyes. She has been watching my mum too and I am suddenly ashamed . . .
I stood decisively, catching the black thoughts by surprise and sending them scuttling to the floor. My pockets were deep and I plunged my hands down to their seams firmly enough to convince myself I had a purpose, then I paced the corridor paying museum attention to the faded posters touting immunization schedules that were two years out of date; anything to stay here and now and far away from then.
I turned another corner into a brightly lit alcove and found a hot drinks machine nudging the wall. The sort with a platform for the cup and a nozzle that shoots out chocolate powder, coffee granules or boiling water, depending on your predilection. There were tea bags in a plastic tray and I draped a couple into Styrofoam cups, one for Mum and one for me. I watched a while as the bags bled rusty ribbons into the water, then took my time over stirring in the powdered milk, letting the grains dissolve fully before carrying them back down the corridor.
Mum took hers wordlessly, used an index finger to catch a drip as it rolled down the side. She held the warm cup between her hands but didn’t drink. I sat beside her and thought about nothing. Tried to think about nothing while my brain ticked ahead of me, wondering how it was I had so few memories of my dad. Real ones, not the sort stolen from photographs and family stories.
‘I was angry with him,’ Mum said finally. ‘I raised my voice. I’d finished the roast and laid it on the table for carving and even though it was getting cool sitting out, I decided that it would serve him right to eat a cold dinner. I thought about going to fetch him myself, but I was sick and tired of calling to no avail. I thought: see how you like a cold roast.’ She rolled her lips together the way people do when the threat of tears makes talking difficult and they’re hoping to cover the fact. ‘He’d been up in the roof again all afternoon, pulling down boxes, cluttering the hallway – God knows how they’ll get back up again, he’ll be in no fit state – ’ She looked, unseeing, into her tea. ‘He’d gone into the bathroom to wash before dinner and that’s where it happened. I found him lying beside the tub, right where you fainted that time, when you were small. He’d been washing his hands, there was soap all over them.’
Silence ensued and I itched to fill it. There’s something reassuring about conversation; its ordered pattern provides an anchor to the real world: nothing terrible or unexpected can happen, surely, when the rational exchange of dialogue is taking place. ‘And so you called the ambulance,’ I prompted, my tone that of a nursery-school teacher.
‘They came quickly; that was lucky. I sat with him and wiped the soap away, and then it seemed that they were there. Two of them, a man and a woman. They had to do CPR, and use one of those electric shock machines.’
‘A defibrillator,’ I said.
‘And they gave him something, some medicine to dissolve any clots.’ She studied her upturned hands. ‘He was still wearing his undershirt, and I remember thinking I should go and bring him a clean one.’ She shook her head and I wasn’t sure whether it was with regret that she hadn’t, or astonishment that such a thing had occurred to her while her husband lay unconscious on the floor, and I decided that it didn’t really matter right now and that I was in no position to judge anyway. Don’t think it had escaped my notice that I’d have been there to help if I hadn’t been probing Auntie Rita at the time, lifting stories from my mum’s past.
A doctor came down the corridor towards us and Mum knotted her fingers. I half stood, but he didn’t slow, striding across the waiting room to disappear through another door.
‘Won’t be long now, Mum.’ The weight of unspoken apology curled my words and I felt utterly helpless.
There’s only one photograph from my mum and dad’s wedding. I mean, presumably there are more, gathering dust somewhere in a forgotten white album, but there’s only one image I know of that’s survived the passage of years.
It’s just the two of them in it, not one of those typical wedding photos where the bride and groom’s families fan out in either direction providing wings to the couple in the centre; unbalanced wings so you suspect the creature would never be able to fly. In this photo their mismatched families have melted away and it’s just the two of them, and the way she’s staring at his face it’s like she’s enraptured. As if he glows, which he sort of does: an effect of the old lights photographers used back then, I suppose.
And he’s so impossibly young, they both are; he still has hair, right across the top of his head, and no idea that it’s not going to stick around. No idea that he will have a son, then lose him; that his future daughter will so bewilder him and that his wife will come to ignore him, that one day his heart will seize up and he’ll be taken to hospital in an ambulance and that same wife will sit in the waiting room with the daughter he can’t understand, waiting for him to wake up.
None of that is present in the photo, not even a hint. That photo is a frozen moment; their whole future lies unknown and ahead, just as it should. But at the same time, the future is in that photo, a version of it at any rate. It’s in their eyes, hers especially. For the photographer has captured more than two young people on their wedding day, he’s captured a threshold being crossed, an ocean wave at the precise moment before it turns to foam and begins its crash towards the ground. And the young woman, my mum, is seeing more than just the young man standing beside her, the fellow she’s in love with, she’s seeing their whole life together, stretching out ahead . . .
Then again, perhaps I’m romanticizing; perhaps she’s just admiring his hair, or looking forward to the reception, or the honeymoon . . . You create your own fiction around photos like that, images that become iconic within a family, and I realized as I sat there in the hospital that there was only one way of knowing for sure how she’d felt, what she’d hoped for when she looked at him that way; whether her life was more complicated, her past more complex, than her sweet expression suggests. And all I had to do was ask; strange that I’d never thought of it before. I suppose it’s the light on my father’s face that’s to blame. The way Mum’s looking at
him draws the attention his way, so it’s easy to dismiss her as a young and innocent girl of unremarkable origins whose life is only just now beginning. It was a myth Mum had done her best to propagate, I realized; for whenever she spoke of their lives before they met it was always my dad’s stories she told.
But as I conjured the image to mind, fresh from my visit to Rita, it was Mum’s face I brought into focus; back in the shadows, a little smaller than his. Was it possible that the young woman with the wide eyes had a secret? That a decade before her wedding to the solid, glowing man beside her, she’d enjoyed a furtive love affair with her school teacher, a man engaged to her older friend? She’d have been fifteen or so at the time, and Meredith Burchill was certainly not the kind of woman to have a teenage love affair, but what about Meredith Baker? When I was growing up one of Mum’s favourite lectures was on the sorts of things good girls did not do: was it possible she’d been speaking from experience?
I was sunk then by the sense that I knew everything and nothing of the person sitting next to me. The woman in whose body I had grown and whose house I’d been raised was in some vital ways a stranger to me; I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl, with the pasted-on smiles and the folding-tab dresses. What was more, I’d spent the past few months recklessly seeking to unlock her deepest secrets when I’d never really bothered to ask her much about the rest. Sitting there in the hospital, though, as Dad lay in an emergency bed somewhere, it suddenly seemed very important that I learn more about them. About her. The mysterious woman who made allusions to Shakespeare, who’d once sent articles to newspapers for publication.
‘Mum?’
‘Hmm?’
‘How did you and Dad meet?’