‘She says your mother never let her open the desk. Never.’ Jamie said.
Annie turned to her friend in astonishment. ‘Since when do you speak Spanish?’
Mercedes was looking anxiously between them.
‘Since Luca … you remember him, about five years ago? My teacher at Berlitz said I had a real flair. And then just as I was getting the hang of it, the miserable little sod buggered off back to Seville.’
She vaguely recalled a smoulderingly handsome anaesthetist who had flitted through Jamie’s life at some point, but it was hard to keep up. ‘You might have mentioned it!’
‘Too much fun seeing you do your dodgy Marcel Marceau act.’
But, even in her own language, Mercedes had no idea what they were talking about. She said Annie’s mother often threw stuff away, she was an obsessively tidy person, but no more so recently. Annie didn’t know whether she was pleased or disappointed. The thought of her mother knowing she didn’t have much time left and deciding to cleanse her life was depressing enough, but perhaps more upsetting was the thought that she’d never found anything she received of a personal nature worth keeping.
‘You’d have thought I’d have noticed that she didn’t have any stuff around,’ she said sadly, as they made their way downstairs to the car with the last bag of Eleanor’s clothes.
‘You would, if you’d been close,’ he said. ‘But you weren’t.’
She was forced to agree. Not only had she not been close to her mother, she wasn’t even sure if she’d liked her much. And did Mother really like me, she wondered.
She’d tried Daniel’s phone again on the way home from her mother’s flat, hoping against hope that this time he would pick up. She tried every two days or so, but she knew in her heart that it was hopeless. She climbed the stairs to find Richard soaking in his nightly bath.
‘Did you see anything amongst Mother’s papers that was at all personal?’ she asked.
Richard reached for his glasses and put them on, rubbing the steam off the lenses and peering up at his wife.
‘Uh … no, I don’t think so. You saw what I took.’
She stood in the doorway, so bewildered that she was talking almost to herself. ‘It’s just so strange. Nothing, not even a letter from my father, or me, or anyone … nothing the children gave her.’
Richard pulled himself up in the water, looking in concern at her. ‘What can I say? Eleanor was Eleanor, Annie. It just wasn’t in her to be sentimental.’
‘Is it sentimental to keep stuff about the people you love? Isn’t it just normal, what people do who want to remember?’
‘Maybe she didn’t,’ he said.
‘I can’t bear it.’ Something suddenly snapped inside her. The mess she’d been wading through in her mind for weeks now parted like the Red Sea and she knew what she had to do. She turned and shot back into the bedroom.
‘Annie?’ she heard her husband call anxiously after her.
‘I … I need to …’
She grabbed her overnight bag from the top of the cupboard and began to fill it with a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, a sweater, underwear and toiletries.
Richard appeared in the door to the bathroom, a towel wrapped round his body like a toga. ‘Annie, what on earth are you doing?’
She turned to him, knowing her blue-grey eyes were
sparking crazily. ‘I think I’ll go to Marjory’s … just for a few days,’ she said.
‘At this time of night?’ His voice was sharp with concern. ‘Have you asked her?’
She shook her head miserably. ‘I just feel a bit desperate, Richard.’
‘It’s me, isn’t it? What I told you the other night.’
‘No … well, yes, that didn’t help, but it’s not just that. It’s everything.’ She battled to control her voice. ‘It’s not about you, Richard. It’s me … I’m so sorry,’ she replied.
‘Don’t go, Annie, please. Not in this state.’
She sat down heavily on the bed, suddenly too tired to even move. ‘I just need a break. Just for a few days.’
‘OK, ring Marjory, set it up if you have to. If she’s OK with it, I’ll take you down in the morning.’ His voice was firm and she found herself becoming calmer as he spoke.
Later, when Richard had turned the light out, she heard him say, ‘I always thought you’d be relieved when Eleanor died. She’s been the bane of your life, Annie. Isn’t it a relief … to be free of all that bullying and criticism?’
‘She was my mother,’ she whispered sadly. ‘How can I be relieved?’
20
Marjory received Annie, as always, with open arms. She didn’t ask questions, although Annie was sure Richard would have said something to the old lady before he went back to London. The house was so restful, so quiet, so free from all the recent pressures. A sanctuary.
For most of the first day, Annie slept like the dead. The bedroom she called her own, unchanged since the days she’d slept there waiting for Tom to be born, was like a child’s room: tiny faded rosebuds on the cotton curtains, a single bed with pink candlewick bedspread, a white chest of drawers, an upright wicker chair. But the very simplicity of the sparse furnishings seemed to soothe her. When she eventually came downstairs that evening, feeling almost drugged, Marjory had prepared a large pot of boeuf bourguignon. An open bottle of red wine and two glasses stood ready on the wooden table.
‘I thought you needed feeding up,’ Marjory said with a smile.
Annie sat down at the table and watched silently while the old lady picked over a large butterhead lettuce, dropping the vibrant green leaves into a battered blue metal colander. When she had enough, she held the colander under the running cold tap until the salad was rinsed clean.
‘This is from the garden,’ Marjory said, indicating the lettuce. ‘But I planted so many that most have run to seed. I think I’m going a bit dotty – I forget there isn’t still a houseful of people.’ She spoke wistfully, and Annie realised she must have loved the time when there were two or three girls filling the old rectory at any one time, plus their friends and relatives to be accommodated. She remembered most meals with at least six or seven people round the large kitchen table.
Marjory waved at the wine. ‘Help yourself.’
As Annie poured two glasses, the old lady set about the salad dressing, spooning Dijon mustard and white wine vinegar into the bottom of the deep wooden salad bowl – the same one Annie remembered from three decades ago – grinding salt and black pepper into the mix, then slowly beating in thick olive oil from a large green tin.
‘We
could
eat outside,’ Marjory said. ‘You’d probably be warm enough, but I’m afraid my tiresome joints don’t appreciate the evening chill any more.’
Annie said nothing much. She knew she didn’t have to. She sipped the wine slowly, waiting, with the first real appetite she had experienced in a long time, for the meal to be ready. Marjory set a wide-rimmed willow-pattern
bowl down in front of Annie, with a generous helping of the hot, rich stew. She gave her a side plate for the tossed lettuce, and pushed the breadboard with a stick of French bread towards her.
‘Eat … eat,’ Marjory urged, waiting until she saw Annie lift the first forkful of meat to her mouth before starting on her own bowl.
They ate in an easy silence. Annie wanted the delicious meal to go on forever. No pressure, no demands, no thought. Marjory’s nurturing acceptance, the warmth of the kitchen, the steady tick-ticking of the station clock on the wall beside the dresser, the kick of the Beaujolais, and the body of Pablo, the silver tabby cat rubbing soft against her bare leg … it felt almost miraculous to her.
It was Annie who broke the silence. ‘Did you never want children of your own?’ She’d always wondered, but never dared ask before.
Marjory laughed. ‘Never, not once,’ she replied. ‘I valued my freedom too much. I wanted to sleep all day and party all night. Paint when the mood took me. Have affairs, smoke too much, get tipsy.’
Annie looked astonished.
‘Oh, I wasn’t always an old woman, dear.’
‘No … no, I know that. I just … you were so good with us all. So … so loving and supportive. I suppose I’d always thought we were the children you never had.’
‘You were grown up, all you girls,’ Marjory pointed out. ‘I didn’t have to change your nappies or feed you in
the night and worry about you. Different thing entirely.’
‘My mother—’
‘Don’t talk tonight, dear,’ Marjory interrupted, seeing Annie yawn. There was cheese and apples to follow the stew, but Annie was unable to eat another thing. ‘Go to bed and rest, you can tell me tomorrow.’
The following day she woke early, but this time without the crushing sense of dread that had dogged her since her mother died. She felt like a child as she jumped out of bed and drew back the thin rosebud curtains. The sun was just beginning to spread through the leaves of the apple trees in the orchard beneath her window, reflecting off the heavy dew to make the grass shine like glass. She dressed quickly and tiptoed outside, pulling on a pair of Marjory’s wellington boots and an old brown wool gardening jacket as she went. The summer air was heavenly: crisp, sharp and invigorating, and Annie took long, deep breaths, filling her lungs with as much as she could until her head was almost dizzy with it.
Nothing had changed for her, she knew that, but this was a magical place which seemed to protect her now, as it always had, from the real world. She thought back to the first time she had come here. Even then it had been a haven, safe from her mother’s disapproval and panic about her unwanted pregnancy; Marjory never judged.
She walked down the drive and across the road to the field opposite, climbing to the highest point to look across the flat salt marshes to the sea. This was where she had
come, almost every day throughout that dreary winter of ’sixty-six, to dream of what might become of her. But none of her dreams had included the baby growing so confidently inside her.
Marjory was up when she got back, grinding coffee beans in the kitchen.
‘I thought we could go outside this morning,’ she said. ‘The sun hits the terrace about now, and it’s even hot enough for
my
old bones.’
They took the cafetière, toast, butter and homemade blackcurrant jam out to the rusty wrought-iron table on the flagstones by the sitting-room window. It was indeed hot, and Annie basked, feeling the warmth seep in, healing her exhausted body.
‘I’m so sorry about your mother. It must be hard. If you want to talk about it …’
But Annie found it difficult to speak. The old lady had donned a droopy blue cotton sun hat and dark glasses, and she couldn’t see much of her face. But she heard from the intonation that Marjory was waiting for her to explain why she was here.
‘I didn’t like her much,’ she blurted out, unable to contain herself any longer. ‘And I often fantasised about her dying and leaving me in peace. But now she’s gone I’m tormented. I feel she’s cheated me, dying so suddenly like that. I didn’t have time to … well, to find out that she loved me. I didn’t have time to forgive her.’ She suddenly felt intensely angry with her mother.
Marjory was silent for a moment. ‘I doubt she’d have said what you wanted her to say, even if she’d lived to be a hundred.’
‘But where does that leave me?’ Annie cried. ‘I’ve tried all my life not to be like her. I’ve tried to make up for giving Daniel away by being the perfect mother to the other three. But it’s all gone horribly wrong. Daniel won’t speak to me, Ed’s tormented, Richard had an affair with some Belgian piece of work, and to top it all, as Mother lay dying, I was seriously contemplating getting my leg over Charles Carnegie … as Jamie puts it.’
Marjory raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, dear.’
‘I didn’t … you know … but we nearly did,’ she muttered, shamefaced. She watched Marjory’s sympathetic but amused expression.
‘Jamie thought it was funny too, but it’s not.’
‘What you’re saying isn’t, it’s your turn of phrase that makes me smile,’ she said. ‘You make it sound like Armageddon.’
‘That’s what it feels like, Aunt Best. I’ve had this hole in my chest for days now, like a bottomless pit of anxiety. I have to keep busy all the time, or I feel I might slide into it, be consumed by it. It’s so frightening.’
‘Poor you. But from what you say, your mother was a bit of a narcissist. They’re tricky in the general scheme of things, but as a parent …? Being a mother is all about unselfishness.’ The old lady paused. ‘She would never have changed, Annie.’
‘But I was worse. Nothing in the world’s more selfish than giving up your baby. I don’t want to end up like my mother, with my children only wanting me to live so they have a chance to forgive me.’
‘Stop being so melodramatic, dear. The thing with Daniel only blew up in the spring – you can’t expect to tidy it away so soon. Why isn’t he speaking to you, by the way?’
Annie hung her head and told Marjory about Emma’s accusation. ‘I’ve ruined it by not believing him. Or at least not showing clearly enough that I
did
believe him. Because I do, I honestly do.’
There was silence at the table but for the far-off sound of a car a way down the lane.
‘It sounds to me as if your main problem with all this is guilt. Plain, old-fashioned guilt,’ Marjory pronounced, looking her steadily in the eye.
Annie nodded sadly.
‘Everyone makes mistakes, Annie. That’s life. You can only do what you’re capable of at the time. It’s easy to see giving Daniel up as a mistake now, but at the time you never wavered. You were adamant you didn’t want him. I’m not saying this to be harsh, just pointing out the truth,’ she added, but Annie winced at her words nonetheless.
‘That makes me a pretty worthless mother.’
‘It makes you what you were: a frightened, bullied teenager in an era of ridiculous social mores.’ Marjory reached over and took Annie’s hand in her own.
‘So what do I do now?’
Marjory patted her encouragingly. ‘Where do you want me to start? There’s Eleanor. She’s dead, not a lot you can do about that. Richard? Not much to do there either … what’s done is done. No point in any tit-for-tat confession nonsense.’ Marjory paused. ‘What else?’
‘Tip of the iceberg!’
‘Poor Ed will have to sort his girlfriend out himself, I’m afraid. It’s Daniel that concerns me.’