She let us lead her to her room and over to her bed, under which Sparky lay, looking too sympathetic by far if you asked me. Poppy barely registered him, just slipped under the covers and sank into the mattress, sighing with a deep teary flutter that just about did in my over-plucked filaments yet again.
‘We’ll let you rest, my petal,’ Mum said, softly, as she put a little bottle of rescue remedy on the nightstand. ‘Unless you want us to stay.’
‘I want Effie to stay,’ Poppy answered, wanly. ‘Will you get in with me, Eff?’
I wanted to go with Mum. I wanted to find out how this had happened, why my parents hadn’t seen this coming. I wanted to yell and scream and stamp my feet with violent unadulterated rage at Poppy for being so stupid, so selfish, so bloody cavalier with her precious life, but of course I didn’t. I slipped off my shoes and got into bed next to her. She reached for my hand and I took hers in both of mine, turning on my side to look in her big blue cornflower eyes, avoiding the feel of the crêpe beneath my fingers.
‘Why did you do it, Poppy?’ I asked as softly as I could manage. ‘Why would you want to do something so terrible?’
‘I’m so lonely, Florence,’ she burst out, with an accompaniment of fresh tears. ‘I’m just so lonely. I’ve got no one to love. I’ll never find anyone to love. And I’m here with Beth and Archie all the time and they’ve got each other but I’ve got no one. And I just can’t bear it any more.’
I was so shocked by this I couldn’t come up with a quick response. I’d known she wanted a man, a ‘life partner’, but I had never for a moment imagined she was lonely. Poppy had more friends than anyone else I knew. She collected them without even noticing. The mother of one of Monty’s friends whom she spoke to for half an hour at his sixth birthday party still sent her Russian fudge every Christmas. The postman’s sister-in-law wrote to her regularly from Rye after meeting her one summer a dozen years ago. Yoga enthusiasts the world over corresponded with her by every means known to mankind, including psychic ones. She still had tea twice a year with her kindergarten teacher. She belonged to every club within chanting distance of Tannington. How could this insanely popular bundle of joy and enthusiasm be so lonely she wanted to die?
‘But you have lots of love, Poppy,’ I told her, although I was still so stunned I lacked appropriate conviction. ‘Everyone loves you. You must know that.’
‘I don’t want everyone to love me!’ she cried. ‘I want one special person to love me. Even if it’s just for a while. I don’t need forever.’
‘But, but, what happened to the chap from the face-reading course?’ I asked. ‘Mum said you were seeing him and it was going fabulously.’
‘He has a perfectly lovely wife in Swingleton Green,’ Poppy cried. ‘And two little babies! Which I only found out about after we’d had sex three-and-a-half times. What sort of a person would do that, Effie? To me? To his wife? To those dear, sweet little babies?’
‘Oh, Poppy. He’s only one bloke.’ If the face reader had been within reach I would have rearranged his features, never mind the lovely wife and dear sweet babies.
‘No, he’s not,’ she wept. ‘He’s every bloke I’ve ever known. They’re all married or not ready for commitment or just want to be friends or in the wrong head space or the biorhythms are out of sync. There’s always something, Effie, and I know what it is. It’s me. I’m the problem. And I don’t want to end up all on my own, I really don’t. I’ve tried to prepare myself for the possibility, you know, positive reinforcement and chanting and visualisation — I went to a whole weekend workshop on visualisation, for heaven’s sake. I could visualise better than anyone else there. I excelled at it — but where does it get me? Nowhere! Nobody! And I know this is awful for you because of Harry being gay and everything but at least you’ve had Harry. At least you’ve had it. At least you’ve known it. You’ve had all those wonderful years with him and you have Monty.’ She started to really wail then. ‘Lovely, gorgeous, beautiful Monty.’
What little extra room I had inside me for emotion, and I was understandably quite jam-packed at that minute, instantly filled with guilt.
I had been so busy supping on my self-pity, and not without reason, that I had not stopped to appreciate what I’d had, even though I no longer had it. Poppy had a point. My life had turned to guano, but I’d had plenty of lovely years when I believed it to be perfect. I might have been blind and as it turns out possibly unfulfilled, but at the time I’d thought I had it all. At the time, I’d been unbelievably happy.
And there was lovely, gorgeous, beautiful Monty.
‘Yes, well, lovely, gorgeous, beautiful Monty isn’t actually speaking to me right now,’ I said, thinking this might make Poppy feel better. ‘We’re sort of agreeing to disagree on quite a few things. Crystal, of course, being one of them but I am trying, Poppy, because of what you said I really am trying.’ This was a lie but I resolved then and there to attempt to make it the truth from then on. ‘But he’s given up his plans to do a business degree and wants to be a film maker which we think is …’ Oh God, it sounded so awful now I was saying it out loud. What kind of a mother had I turned into? The sort that foisted her own stubborn opinions onto a child that had hopes and aspirations going in a different-but-who-was-to-say-not-just-as-viable direction? Yuck.
‘He’s such a great boy, you’re so lucky to have him,’ Poppy wept.
All I could do was hug her because she was right. He was a great boy and I was lucky to have him.
‘The truth is I don’t even care so much about a life partner any more,’ she sobbed, ‘but I want a baby, Effie, I really and truly and completely want a baby.’
Poppy had always been fantastic with children and I knew that like most women she hoped to have some one day but I don’t think it had registered that this was her be-all-and-end-all.
‘A little girl,’ she wept. ‘I just want a little baby girl. I can see her, Effie, I really can. I think about her all day long and when I go to sleep I dream about her and she’s so beautiful, she’s just so utterly beautiful. She’s perfect.’ I felt goosebumps emerge head to foot. I could actually picture the little ginger-haired dot nestled in my sister’s arms myself.
‘And then every morning I wake up and she isn’t there, it’s just me, there is no baby and most days I can keep breathing and I smile and I tell myself “You can do it” and I visualise getting up and feeling positive about the universe then I put my feet on the floor and get up and do my Pilates and have Beth’s Bircher muesli for breakfast and go about my business but not every day, Effie. Not every day. Some days it’s just too hard and I can’t do it and I can’t imagine keeping doing it and today was one of those days.’
I knew that sensation. I had recently had some of those days when I was so lonely and scared I’d felt my own life was too hard and that slipping away would be easier than carrying on.
But I could not bear to think that Poppy felt the same way.
Despite the measles situation, I was stronger than my sister. I think I had always known that but I never knew it more than in that moment. Yes, my life was in the toilet, literally, but as hard as these recent times had been, as the world after Young Nick’s phone call in particular had been, it had only fleetingly felt unbearably hard. If only by a hair’s breadth, it had always been within the bounds of what I could manage, even though I didn’t want to manage it, thought it cruel and unfair that I had to do so. Still, I had managed. It had never been as hard for me as it was for Poppy.
She had spent her lifetime being so sweet, so lovable, so kind and caring towards everybody within her radar but now I saw that those very traits that made her so giving to others had left her bugger-all resources to fend for herself.
I lay there with my poor baby sister in my arms, so inconsolable with grief that she had tried to kill herself, and tried not to think about my rotting colon. Never mind out of sync, the biorhythms were totally fucked if you asked me.
Poppy drifted off to sleep eventu
ally and I lay there for the best part of an hour, watching those long golden lashes on her pale cheeks, smelling her buttery breath and feeling something so complicated and painful and odd I couldn’t put it into words.
All I knew was that without Poppy the world was a truly shit place. I needed her in it. Forever. However long that was, etcetera etcetera etcetera.
When she was truly conked out and snoring the fluttery puppy-dog snore she’d long been known for, I extricated myself from the bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen where I knew Mum and Dad would be waiting for me.
‘How is she?’ my mother asked. ‘Oh Effie, I’m so pleased you are here. Your father and I are at our wits’ end. I thought she’d seemed better, didn’t you, Archie? Just lately I thought she seemed better.’
I pulled up a chair and helped myself to a goblet of whatever they were having. It tasted like gin, only worse.
‘I just don’t know where to start,’ I said, surprised that I didn’t feel more angry with them. ‘What’s been going on? What do you mean you thought she seemed better? What’s the matter with her?’
‘I can’t tell her, Archie,’ my mother wailed. ‘You do it.’
Dad hitched at his corduroy trousers. He was looking quite conservative for him. But so old, the poor thing. His brow was furrowed so much his glasses sat higher on his nose than normal, which made him look quite foreign.
His hand shook as he raised his goblet to his lips and took a sip. Then shook again as he put it down.
‘Poppy’s been depressed,’ he said, with such disbelief I felt a huge surge of affection for him, living in his perfect happiness bubble. ‘You know, clinically. We tried St John’s wort and reiki and quite a lot of acupuncture but we had to resort to conventional medicine in the end. Pills and things,’ he said, still bewildered, ‘since the last time.’
‘The last time?’ I was aghast.
‘Ginseng tablets. About a hundred of them,’ my Dad said, his voice breaking. ‘Last year, just after Monty had gone to Australia. We didn’t want to upset you by telling you.’ He looked nervously at Mum as if to check he was getting this right. ‘She’s been so bloody fragile, Effie, and we’ve been trying to look after her, haven’t we, Beth, but it’s not been easy. She’s such a precious soul.’
‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ I was aghast, totally aghast, but also hurt, I think. ‘I’m her big sister.’
Mum blew her nose so loudly I was surprised her ears didn’t fly off.
‘Well, that’s just it,’ she said. ‘You’re her big sister. You’re the one who has done it all first and done it well and she doesn’t feel she can compare to you, Florence. She never has.’
Compare to me? Was I hearing things?
‘But I’m a mess,’ I said. ‘My marriage has collapsed, as has my relationship with my son, as have most of the interior walls in my house. And on top of that, I …’
Shit.
My parents were looking at me, both of them so crinkled and ground down with sorrow that suddenly I knew I could not tell them about the measles. Robust? What on earth had given me that impression? The two of them were as tough as spun sugar. They would snap at the gentlest of tweaks.
I just couldn’t bring myself to drop my bomb when they were so obviously already shellshocked by my little sister lying upstairs with her wrists bound up in cream crêpe bandages.
‘On top of that, what?’ my mother asked.
‘Yes, darling, whatever else is the matter?’ Dad’s goblet shook in his hands.
I just loved them then. I just truly, really, enormously loved them. They did such a good job of looking after Poppy and she needed them so much more than I did. I could get by without them in a way that she couldn’t, especially now. I’d got this far, hadn’t I? So I decided that I would tell them my awful news, but I would wait until the impact of Poppy’s suicide attempt had settled into the creases of the past. When it was not so much a real live tragedy but more of a whispered ‘remember when?’ under the covers at night or a stolen look between the two of them over the breakfast table.
‘The house has rotten foundations,’ I answered, rather limply. ‘I know it seems silly in comparison with what’s happened to Poppy but the thing is that apparently the joists are all turning to dust and need fixing or the whole jolly house could fall down and it’s going to cost a bomb and, well, that’s it, really …’
My parents looked at each other, clearly thrilled, and I swear they both sat up an extra two inches as they beamed. You’d have thought I just told them I’d converted to Hinduism and was going to live on an ashram in Goa.
‘If it’s money you want, darling, that’s no trouble at all,’ my father said, quite delighted.
‘Yes, get out the chequebook, Archie!’ my mother crowed.
This lottery-winning delight was not the reaction I had expected. I had expected them to collapse with relief that I wasn’t turning my house into a common cafe to which ne’er do wells with their white sugar addictions might flock, to their, and no doubt my, ultimate detriment.
‘Which drawer?’ my father shouted from the study.
‘The chequebook drawer, Archie,’ my mother shouted back, rolling her eyes.
I had never before asked my parents for so much as a penny and it felt totally despicable to be doing it now. Or, should I say, it should have felt totally despicable and I had always imagined it would feel totally despicable but then again, I hadn’t really asked them. Seeing what pleasure it gave them, I could not help but be warmed a little by their sheer delight.
Here, I realised, was a problem they could solve, just like that.
I had absolutely no doubt they had tried as hard as they humanly could to help Poppy, to curb her loneliness, to improve her sex life, to get her that little red-headed baby she so deserved, but really, against the will of the crooked universe, they were powerless.
Reinforcing the basement of Rose’s house so I could serve orange pekoe and lemon yo-yos, even though I wasn’t going to, now that was a different matter.
‘What will it take?’ Dad asked, taking the lid off his antique fountain pen with a dramatic flourish. ‘Twenty? I can’t see how you’d fix dry rot for less than twenty.’
‘Well, the builder says ten,’ I started to say.
‘So, you can take that, double it, and add another ten,’ scoffed my mother.
‘Thirty it is then,’ Dad quickly agreed and again he and my mother shared such a triumphant look I damn near called them up on it. I wasn’t such a stubborn old goat that I would never let them help me, was I?
‘Thirty is more than enough,’ I said weakly, then snatched up my goblet and drained the hideous liquid that was settling, pond-like, within. If only they knew. Here I was letting them help me but not in the way in which I actually needed their help.
I took the cheque, kissed them both good night, then trudged upstairs and climbed back into bed with my poor sad darling sister.
POPPY
I could have died all over again but properly this time when Effie walked into the bathroom. What a silly twit she must have thought I was. And she’d be right. All that’s going on in her life and I have to make a fuss about something as nonsensical as not having a boyfriend.
It’s just that it didn’t feel nonsensical. I really needed a boyfriend to get me my baby. And I always tried to throw so much light out into the world, I really did, but I just wasn’t attracting the right sort of light back in again.
Gideon, the face reader, I really thought he was it, my future force. He was so kind and thoughtful and gentle and brilliant at sex. He picked wildflower posies for me and took me on picnics with three different sorts of sprout sandwiches and gave wonderful massages with Fair Trade jojoba oil.
We lay in a meadow one afternoon laughing at the clouds, just holding hands and talking about what we wanted out of life and it was so beautiful. It felt so honest and hopeful. I mean never bloody once did he mention his wife and two daughters.
How could a kind,
thoughtful, gentle person do that? He knew I was looking for a life partner, he knew how much I wanted a baby, and yet he lay there in the long grass with me and pretended to imagine our future together. Is it just me or is that the cruellest thing you could possibly imagine?
I met his wife at a Feldenkrais workshop in Sudbury, that’s how I found out about her. She was this wonderful, tall, blonde, beautiful powerhouse of a woman with a perfectly toned body and the most warrior-like posture. She was telling me about her husband and how he collected Tintin first editions and I knew straight away it was Gideon and sure enough it was.
He came to pick her up with the two little girls in the car and when he saw me he didn’t even look surprised or worried or anything. His eyes just slid over me as if I wasn’t even there and I realised then that it had all been a big fat lie and he was just like Bruno the rugmaker and Jimmy the farrier and Gerald who managed the secondhand bookshop in Bury St Edmonds.
They’d all told me one thing and meant quite another, which I simply can’t understand, no matter how hard I try. Is it just me that these seemingly lovely men tell such terrible lies to or do they lie to everyone?
There are good men in the world, I know that. Daddy is a good man. Harry is a good man. Monty is a good man. That’s three just in my family. So where are all the others?’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I stayed on a few more days at Tannington Hall because Poppy, Mum and Dad each separately asked me to and in the circumstances, I could hardly say no. Besides I was scared to take my eyes off my sister. I didn’t think she would try to do anything silly again, she seemed embarrassed by it, really. But she was still undeniably sad.
When we were together, however, chatting about this, that and the next thing, she seemed to perk up. I could see the mist of loneliness and depression lift a little, and it did my own aching heart good to be of some help.