Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (25 page)

‘A cottage, a nice little cottage in Norfolk.’ Dad produced a brochure from his briefcase and leafed through the pages. ‘Here, see? Blakeney, the Crow’s Nest.’ He held it out towards Mum, then, in the face of her obvious hostility, showed Anna instead. ‘This one here. Won’t it suit us down to the ground? It’s perfect.’

‘Don’t stand with the fridge door open, Anna,’ said Mum, in a tight, strangulated voice.

Surreptitiously nibbling at a piece of cheese she’d broken off the wedge, Anna bent to look. The brochure page showed a selection of holiday cottages, each with a brief description. The Crow’s Nest was sandwiched between two others in a terrace, with a blue front door that opened in two halves like a stable; there were checked curtains at the windows, and a jug of wild flowers on the windowsill. She thought of the carefree people who might stay in such a place, a family trailing in with sand on their shoes, and pieces of seaweed to hang from the window-hooks. There’d be a dog that surged indoors with them, beating its tail against their legs. A happy, whole family.

‘You needn’t think I’m going anywhere,’ said her mother, draining the potatoes with much clattering of lid against saucepan.

‘But I’ve paid the deposit. We don’t want to lose that.’

‘You can go, you and Anna. I’m not budging from here.’

Anna saw her father’s compressed lips, her mother’s eloquently turned back. She hated it when they were like this.

‘Where is it, where’s Blakeney?’ she asked, to break the deadlock.

‘North Norfolk. Blakeney, right up near Cromer.’ Her father was turning the pages, finding a map. ‘See? It’s not that far to go but it’ll give us a proper break. We could all do with one.’

Mum said nothing, but lined up the three plates and slapped a slice of pork pie on each. ‘Help yourselves to salad and potatoes,’ she said tightly. ‘Oh, I forgot the mayonnaise.’

‘You can go out on boat trips from Blakeney Quay,’ Dad continued, as if nothing was wrong; he took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair before sitting down. ‘Sometimes there are seals on Blakeney Point. And there’s the bird reserve at Cley Marshes. Lovely, that bit of coast. I went on holiday there as a boy.’

Anna piled potatoes and salad on her plate and started eating; her father cut up his slice of pie, but Mum sat opposite him, not even picking up her knife and fork.

‘Will there be television?’ Anna asked.

‘Yes, look.’ Her father pointed to the row of symbols underneath the photograph. ‘But there’ll be better things to do than watch the box. We’ll take binoculars and—’

Anna saw that her mother was weeping silently, tears running down her face, her shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs.

‘Oh, now, love!’ Dad reached across the table to take her wrist, but she jerked away. ‘This was meant to be a nice surprise.’

‘I’m not going.’ Mum jolted the words out between juddering breaths. She got up to snatch a tissue from the box on the windowsill, and stayed standing. ‘What if – what if she comes back, and no one’s here? What if there’s news?’

‘We won’t be far away. It’s not like leaving the country. Three or four hours and we can be back home if need be.’

‘No. No.’

‘We’ve got to do things,’ Dad said gently, and he pushed his plate away. ‘Got to at least try.’

Anna saw how red and puffy her mother’s eyes were; she gave way to a storm of weeping, as if the tears had been stored inside her, waiting for release. ‘I – I – can’t.’ The words croaked out of her. ‘I won’t. I can’t go on holidays without her and have Christmas without her and birthdays without her – I can’t stand it! I won’t.’

‘But, love.’ Dad got up and took her elbow and put his other arm round her, guiding her back to the table. ‘What choice do we have? We can’t do nothing for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to get on with things. Annie needs a holiday, don’t you, love?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna, thinking of the pretty cottage, and wondering whether some of the happy familyness might spread itself to everyone who stayed. She hated it when her mother cried. It meant that her parents weren’t able to put things right, not for her, not for themselves. She’d taken only one mouthful of pork pie and her stomach craved more, but how could she go on eating, with the kitchen suddenly full of raw grief?

Rose, always Rose, she thought savagely. What about me? Don’t I count for anything? Sometimes she hated Rose for doing this to them. Like an evil fairy she had them under her spell, a curse that said,
You’ll never enjoy anything again. If you ever catch yourself laughing, you’ll think of me and feel guilty. Always. For ever and ever. You’ll never be free of me.

They went to Blakeney. It was Anna and Dad siding against Mum, so they won. Anna was used to these sidings and alliances, shifting according to need. In the past there had been more flexibility: Anna and Rose against both parents, or Rose with Mum, or Rose with Dad. Always Rose had been on the winning side, instinctively knowing who to choose as her ally.

This time, it wasn’t much of a contest. Mum had no fight left in her; she only cried. The victory felt hollow; there could be no sense of triumph, with such an inadequate opponent. Her father’s trump card was to arrange for Granny Skipton to come and stay at home while they went to Norfolk; Gran, on her own now, liked to help whenever she could. Dad would phone twice daily from the Blakeney Hotel, and they could set off for home at any moment, if something – the unspecified
something
that always hung over them – should happen.

Holiday, they called it, but it felt more like a test they’d set for themselves. They had to endure the week away to prove that they could do something called a holiday and make at least a pretence of finding enjoyment in it. Anna thought of previous holidays – to Sussex, to Devon or Cornwall, once to North Wales. It seemed now that Rose was the only person who counted, her mood determining whether the others were happy, or purposeful, or bored. It was Rose who devised complicated beach games, the diverting of streams or the creation of artworks from shells and stones. Rose took charge of Anna, who always did what Rose wanted. Rose had never been to Blakeney, but she was a phantom fourth presence, emphasizing the charade.

Mum behaved like someone convalescing from a long illness, taking her first shaky steps in the open. Dad stowed everything in the car and led her out to the passenger seat. She spoke in a small, wavering voice that made her seem very young or very old. In the back seat, plugged into her Walkman, Anna read a magazine and wished she’d stayed at home with Gran. A boring village in Norfolk – it wasn’t a proper holiday. Mel was in Majorca, with her parents and Jamie, and had stirred up Anna’s envy by talking about the sea-front, the heat, and the boys she was sure to meet. When she returned she’d be tanned, glossy and smug. What could Anna bring back, to compete?

But she found, in spite of herself, that she loved Blakeney. She liked the pretty cottage, on the steep street that led up from the harbour; she liked her room, with its creaking wooden floor and blue gingham curtains; liked waking up there, with sunshine streaming in, and the big sky beyond the cluster of roof-tiles and chimneys. People said that the sky was bigger in Norfolk, which she thought must be nonsense: how could it be? But so it appeared, arcing overhead in a great bowl of cloud-flecked blue that swept away towards the promise of beach and waves. The air carried an enticing tang of sea, a faint saltiness she could taste on her lips. A strange, bubbling cry lifted over the marsh: a curlew, her dad said. Sometimes the sky was dappled with cloud that might have been dabbed there with a giant white-tipped paintbrush. Dad called it mackerel sky, and Anna imagined an artist at work, making a scene of countless pale fish that shoaled towards the eastern horizon.

Rose had never been here, and that meant Anna could claim it for her own.

They went for walks, they ate crab salad lunches and fish-and-chip suppers, they went on a boat trip but saw no seals; Anna did some sketching. Her mother wore at first a mulish expression, making it clear that she was here under sufferance. Morning and evening she walked to the Blakeney Hotel to phone home. Anna pretended not to notice. At first time passed slowly, with no one of her own age to be with. The next cottage was occupied by a family with two younger children, a little boy, and a spindly girl of about eleven, who looked at Anna in awe. One evening the parents invited hers to drink wine in the little cobbled garden that fronted the row of cottages. They tried hard, these neighbours, but Anna’s mother was tight-lipped and aloof, saying almost nothing for fear of saying too much.

‘Is Anna an only child?’ Anna heard the mother asking, and at once her own mother said ‘Yes,’ rapping the word out, forestalling further questions. Anna darted a look at her, and almost said, ‘That’s not true.’ But it
was
true, literally, and maybe now it was true in every way.

Anna was discovering her own muleishness. Her mother’s attitude of mute suffering made her impatient. Anna decided that she would do as she liked, go off with Dad or on her own; if Mum chose to stay indoors and drape herself in misery, that was up to her.

Bird-watching saved them, Anna and her father. Out on the shingle beach, or on the Cley Marshes bird reserve, where they paid to go in for the day and sit in the wooden hides full of knowledgeable people kitted out with binoculars and telescopes, she and Dad built up a list of the birds they’d seen. Oystercatchers and lapwings, Sandwich terns and greylag geese, black-tailed godwits and green sandpipers. Anna forgot that she’d rather be in Majorca with Mel, giggling over dark-eyed Spanish boys. This was absorbing; this was a world of its own. She settled into the way of it. You’d find your place, seated on a wooden bench in the hushed darkness of the hide; then you’d let down the flap in front of you – carefully, not letting it clank – and gaze out at the expanse of water and reeds in front of you. At first you might think the pool was unpopulated, except by a group of ducks dozing with heads under wings or feeding desultorily. Rewarded for patience, your eyes would pick out movement in the sedges, or a white shape would move out into view, or there’d be the thrilling flight of a small flock of waders, arrowing and swooping, wing-patterns glancing and flickering as they changed direction, then landed as lightly as windblown leaves, and became identifiable as dunlins. Anna saw them on the seashore too, small busy birds that raced along the water’s edge and darted into the waves.

She pored over her father’s bird book, amazed that the birds and wildfowl that dropped out of the sky or blew in from nowhere should match so precisely the illustrations in the guide. These wild creatures were part of a pattern that was known and recorded. Other people had sat and watched, compared and noted, and now here were the birds, feeding, flocking, roosting. They looked and behaved exactly as the book said they would.

On her way to Waitrose, Cassandra sees Rosanna in the street.

She stops dead; someone behind tuts and swerves, looking sharply at her for an apology she doesn’t make. Her attention is on the young woman ahead, walking slowly along the row of shops, talking into a mobile phone. Only her back view is visible, but it
is
her, Rosanna – the turn of the head as she talks, the hair, the set of her shoulders. Even the way she places her feet.

Now Cassandra is hurrying in pursuit, shoulder bag slapping her side, shoes clopping on the pavement. The young woman talks on, oblivious, until Cassandra’s hand on her arm makes her turn sharply.

And at once it’s all wrong, she is someone different. Too old, or too young – Cassandra’s mind crashes into disappointment and confusion – with the wrong features entirely, and glasses, and too much make-up. Expectation in her glance turns to puzzlement and then annoyance.

‘Oh … sorry. I thought you were my – my – daughter.’ Cassandra feels herself turning hot, or pale; she’s not sure that her words have come out in the right order.

‘OK.’ The girl shrugs her off, sidesteps, and walks on, laughing as she continues her phone conversation. She doesn’t care; why should she?

Cassandra finds it hard to breathe. She steps into the florist’s doorway to recover. Of course she knew Rosanna wasn’t here; what was she thinking? Everything is blurring, swimming. The sense of dread holds her rigid; if she tries to move, she’ll fall down and not know how to get up again.

The shop door behind her has opened, releasing a waft of warm air heavy with the perfume of lilies: sweet, cloying. It fills her senses. She closes her eyes and is in the churchyard, numb with cold and disbelief. White hothouse lilies, so wrong in the chilled air; the ground gashed open to receive him. Everything wrong, everything out of joint. Then, and always.

I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean—

‘Are you all right, my love?’

A face floats in front of her. She wills herself to stand steady, to answer. ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you.’

‘You don’t look all right, sweetheart.’

It’s another young woman of Zanna’s age. Outrage makes Cassandra pull herself erect. Has it come to this, women of her daughter’s age calling her
my love
and
sweetheart
, as if she’s senile? But the woman’s face is so full of genuine concern that she finds herself on the verge of tears.