Mandana twisted her hands away. “No,” she said. “No, never.”
“Or, Mum, I can come over for a couple of weeks each month, make sure you’re sticking to it. I love you, Mum.” She cleared her throat. “I want you to get better. You can, you know, I think you think there’s no point trying, and there is, there really is.”
It was very quiet in the kitchen, no sound at all from outside, other than an owl, hooting faintly, far away. Elle didn’t say more. She just looked at Mandana, her brown eyes meeting her mother’s, terrified about what came next.
“It’s too hard,” Mandana said after a long pause. “You don’t understand, Ellie.”
“I know I don’t,” Elle said.
Mandana looked at the floor. “I don’t want you involved in it,” she said after a while. Her voice was so soft Elle could barely hear her. “I’m so proud of you. I keep thinking I can get back on track if I just sort it out myself, you know. I won’t need it anymore. I don’t like—being this person.”
“But Mum, it’s been twenty-five years.” Elle could hardly bear to look at her mother’s thin frame, her papery hands, her cracked lips. “I—you’re going to kill yourself.”
“Who was it who said, ‘Life would be easier for some people if it wasn’t such a big deal’?” Mandana said, with a small smile. “I feel like one of those people. It’s just hard, and it gets harder.”
“I know it must be—” Elle began.
“No, you don’t.” Mandana tapped her hand lightly. “Darling, you’ve no idea. It’s black as night with me for days sometimes. That’s why I do it, I guess… I don’t want to be a burden to Rhodes, or your father…” She turned away. “Or you. I always felt you saw the worst of it when you were younger, and I promised I wouldn’t let you see it anymore.”
They sat there, the two of them, nothing stirring. “Mum, look at me,” Elle said gently. “I’m not going till you say what you’re going to do.” She held her breath, not sure how Mandana would respond. Elle’s eyes filled with tears; she blinked them back, she didn’t want her mother to see she was crying.
But Mandana saw. She frowned, her tired brown eyes clouding over, then she nodded, and muttered something under her breath. She took Elle’s hand again and said, “OK, I’ll think about it.”
“Mum—”
“OK, on Monday. We’ll go to the doctor,” Mandana said in a quiet voice. She sounded defeated.
“Are you sure?” Perhaps unrealistically, Elle wanted her to
want
to go, not to feel forced into a corner.
“Yes,” said Mandana blankly. “I’m sure.”
“Mum, it’s going to be OK, you know,” Elle said. She tried to feel pleased, but she couldn’t. It was cold in the barn, and she shivered.
“Let’s go to bed,” Mandana said, standing up, moving away. She made a small, broken sound in her throat. “Perhaps it’s going to be OK, like you say.”
Suddenly she kissed her daughter, grasping her shoulder tight with one thin hand. “Bless you, love,” she said, and then she was gone.
WHEN ELLE WOKE
the next morning, for a brief moment she didn’t know where she was. Her “old room,” as her mother called it, wasn’t really her room, not the way her bedroom at Willow Cottage had been. She lay in bed, staring at the stone walls, listening for familiar sounds, and then she saw a pile of old Georgette Heyers, dumped here after she’d moved away, and slowly it came to her. She was in England. She was at Mum’s. She and Mum had talked. It was Libby and Rory’s wedding today. She pulled a cardigan on and went downstairs. Her mother was pottering round the kitchen, but she looked up as Elle appeared.
“Hello,” she called. “Hello hello. I’ve been out to get a paper, it’s a lovely day. Want some coffee?”
“Yes, please,” said Elle, smiling at her. She felt she had to mention their conversation as soon as possible. “Feeling OK today?” she asked, sitting down. “I hope I wasn’t too bossy last night.”
“Oh,” Mandana said. “No, not at all.” She sounded formal. “No, that’s all great. Yes, thanks, it was great.” She said with sudden energy, “I was—I was going to make breakfast. Do you want some pancakes?”
Pancakes had always been Mandana’s Saturday treat, when Rhodes and Elle were allowed to pour as much maple syrup on as they liked, when there were endless rashers of bacon, sugar, and lemon on the table. Elle held the record, still, of eighteen pancakes eaten, though it had come at a price—she’d been so sick their father had banned them from eating them for two months afterwards. Elle could picture Mandana so clearly, dancing round the kitchen to Radio 2’s
Sounds of the Sixties,
in her blue-and-white-striped apron, the wide floral skirts she always wore flying up around her, flipping the pancakes deftly
with her special spatula and singing, while Elle and Rhodes watched, openmouthed in admiration.
“Pancakes…” Elle wasn’t that hungry, but she nodded enthusiastically anyway. “I’d love some!”
“OK,” Mandana said. “Great! Let me just…” She opened the fridge. “I’ve got eggs… Oh, no.” She peered in. “Is that? No, it’s not.” She turned back. “I need to pop out and get some things, so—”
Elle put her hand out. “Oh, no, don’t bother if you haven’t got the stuff, Mum, I only—”
“No!” her mother said. “It’s fine!”
Elle said, “Honest, Mum, please don’t. I’m not that hungry anyway, I was just trying to be polite.” That was the wrong thing to say. “I’ll have cereal… or whatever you want.”
“No worries,” said Mandana, in the accent she used to do to annoy Elle when she was watching
Neighbors
. “No worries, Charlene.”
Elle grinned, looked around, and got up. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“What time do you have to leave?”
“Well, the wedding’s at twelve. My friend Tom’s coming to pick me up here at eleven, if that’s OK.”
“Tom, eh?” Mandana said. “Ooh, who’s
Tom
?” She did a little wiggle.
“Oh, please, Mother,” said Elle crossly. “He’s a friend of mine, from back in the Bookprint days. Dora Zoffany’s son, I’ve told you about him before.” Her mother looked totally blank. “We both needed someone to go with so we said we’d go together. If that’s OK with you.”
The phone rang. “It’s Piccadilly Circus in here!” Mandana said, pleased. “Hello!”
Elle put the kettle on. “Hi, Bryan. It was lovely to see you too, my love. Yes, of course you can come over later. Great.
No, what’s that? Oh, dear, Bryan, I can’t hear you, you’re breaking up…”
She cut the call and put the phone down, disappointed. “He’s gone.”
“So Bryan’s coming over, then?” Though she was never quite sure of Bryan’s place on the scene, Elle knew he existed, if no more than that. She had met him once, at the village fete a few years ago: he was a bearded, waistcoat-wearing motorcyclist who liked pub quizzes, Captain Beefheart, and hating cities.
“Yes, hopefully after lunch, at least I think so,” Mandana said. “What a lovely day I have ahead of me, eh? You here, weather perfect, and it’s the weekend… Lovely.” She sighed, and stretched her arms languorously above her head. “Glad to be alive, that’s what we say.”
Elle smiled. “Me too.”
Elle had a slightly soft apple and some oatcakes for her breakfast, and then a long shower. As she was finishing her makeup in the tiny cream plastic mirror decorated with faded Hello Kitty stickers, she turned towards the window and her eye caught sight of a photo, one of several hanging precariously on the wall. It was in a simple clipframe, of her and Rhodes, the Christmas after she left university, 1996. They had their arms round each other—unusual in itself. Rhodes was floppy-haired and brawny in a suit and tie. Elle was—Elle was a mess, she realized, peering in towards the photo. That crop, the dark berry-colored lipstick, the ghostly white face powder, it was awful! That vile silky cardigan from Kookai too—what had happened to Kookai, and why had she been so obsessed with cardigans? She turned and looked at herself in the mirror.
Last month on the first proper day of spring she’d splashed out on some Kate Spade coral-colored heels and a matching handbag. It was the most money she’d ever spent in one go. As
she’d handed her card over to the dewy-skinned assistant in the Kate Spade shop she’d told herself she deserved it. Unbidden, back at her apartment, came the sobering thought that in fact she had very little to spend her money on. She was only really interested in work. Flights back to the UK were her biggest extravagance, along with clothes, trips to the hairdresser, and eating out. Last time she’d been back, she’d visited Karen and her new husband, Graham, who had just moved into a two-bedroom garden flat in Belsize Park. Karen had told her it had cost £500,000, a sum so huge Elle could hardly compute it. And it seemed a million miles away for Elle, buying an apartment, putting down permanent roots. She liked the simplicity of her life. It gave her control.
“Elle!” her mother called. “There’s—Tom’s here!”
Elle stepped into her indigo-blue linen dress, picked up the beloved Kate Spade shoes and handbag, and went downstairs. Tom was standing in the kitchen, hands in pockets, chatting to her mother. He turned as she entered the room, then did a proper, old-fashioned double-take.
“Er—wow. Wow! Elle, is that you?”
Elle laughed. “Hello! Of course it is!”
“Seriously,” he said. “What happened to you? You look bloody amazing!”
He hugged her. She hugged him back, remembering how lean he was. He looked down at her, his gray eyes smiling.
“You look exactly the same,” she said. “And it’s lovely to see you.”
“Well, you don’t,” Tom said. “You look—all glossy. Like someone in a magazine.” Elle lowered her eyes, like a modest bride. “Doesn’t she, Mrs. Bee!”
He turned to Elle’s mother, and Elle flinched, as Mandana had once shouted at the woman in the post office,
“I’m not a fucking Missus anymore, it’s Mizz. MIZZ, FOR THE LAST TIME!”
But, “Call me Mandana,” was all that Elle’s mother said, with a smile. “Have you got time for a drink?”
Tom looked at his watch. “Well—”
“I don’t think so,” Elle cut in. “We don’t really—”
“I just meant a quick coffee?” Mandana interrupted. “I’ve got some here.”
Tom looked from one to the other, quickly. “Er—half a cup would be great. A wedding is a long day. Especially when you don’t really know the bride or groom.”
“I don’t really understand why you’re invited, if I’m honest,” Elle said. “No offense. I don’t know why I am, either.”
“My parents were friends with Felicity, I suppose it’s something to do with that. Who knows. I also think it’s an ‘everyone in publishing come and witness our joyful publishing union’ thing.” Tom put on a fluting voice and clasped his hands; Elle laughed. He did look the same, she told herself, just a little older. There were lines around his eyes, ones that hadn’t been there before. But he was different, somehow. He was a father. She had to remind herself of that. She wanted to just stare at him, drink in the sight of him: he was there, in her mother’s kitchen, talking to them as if nothing had happened. Tom.
“Last time I saw them,” he was saying, “I told Rory he was a bit of a cock and I asked Libby why she’d published that dreadful Byron book.” Elle rolled her eyes in agreement, and Tom turned to Mandana. “It was this book that came out last year, a fantasy poem about Byron going to Crete instead of dying in Missolonghi. It had no punctuation. Byron has a Mohican and likes punk. He calls himself Georgy. He sings the Sex Pistols while he’s writing
Corsair
.”
Mandana laughed. “Doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. Or coffee.” She handed Tom a cup of coffee, which he accepted gratefully.
“Dare I say I don’t think it was. In fact, it was a load of
pretentious rubbish. In my humble opinion. But it was very controversial. Got loads of publicity.”
“Sounds like Libby,” Mandana said.
“Mum!” Elle said. “That’s not nice.”
“Not nice,” Mandana mimicked, and her eyes flashed. “Oh, she’s a right madam, always has been. So patronizing about my job, I always remember.”
“What do you do?” asked Tom.
“I’m a librarian, which is a dreadful occupation these days. No one cares about us, we’re dinosaurs. It’s full of idiots. Stupid. Having to work with pricks all day—” She opened her mouth wider, as if she was about to shout, or scream like a child, and then abruptly shut it. “Anyway, I don’t like it much. I used to read to the children three times a week, an after-school club, but they’ve stopped that now.”
“No, Mum, really?”
“Yes,” Mandana said. Her face fell. “There weren’t enough children coming. They’d rather stay at home and play video games. And I’m so bored of
Cinderella
. I’ve read it so many times I could scream.”
Tom looked quickly at her, and then at Elle, but he didn’t say anything. Elle put down her mug, looked at her watch. “We should go,” she said. “OK, Tom?”
He took a swig from his mug and pushed himself away from the counter. “Sure. Thanks for the coffee, Mandana. Great to meet you.”
“Well, you too, Tom. Come back anytime!” Mandana said, and she gave him one of her gappy-toothed smiles, her eyes shining, and clasped his hand in her strong grip. Elle watched her, relieved and proud. Her hair wasn’t really thinning, was it? She was imagining that, perhaps all of it. There was life in the old girl yet. Elle picked up her bag and touched her mother’s arm.