“Are you sure that you want to stay?”
“Yeah. I haven’t seen Amanda in a long time, Hannah is a mess, and I don’t want Mark to be by himself. . . .”
“Aren’t Amanda, Hannah, and Lisa here to look after him?” His tone was almost sarcastic, almost amused. “You look exhausted.”
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“I just buried my mum, Stephen . . . how do you expect me to look?” She didn’t want to go home with him, that was the truth of it. She wanted to stay here.
“I didn’t mean that.” He knew it, whether she told him or not. He knew she’d rather be with all of them tonight. He tried not to let it hurt him.
“I know. Sorry.”
“I’m sorry.” God, this politeness.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, by the time you get home from work. Lisa’ll drop me off, I’m sure. Or maybe I’ll take a train . . .”
Stephen raised his hands in a gesture of unnecessary surrender. “Fine, fine . . . seems to me, to be honest, like you haven’t really needed me all day.”
“Is that what you want to feel—like I need you?”
He rubbed his eyes impatiently with one hand. “. . . You know what, Jen? It’s fine that you stay. It’s fine.” He kissed her again, the same dry lips skimming her skin. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She leaned against the door frame and watched him walk to the car, get in, drive away. He had looked back at her, and called out that he loved her, not waiting for an answer. But once again, it felt like they were on opposite sides of a big hole, a chasm they both made attempts to cross, just never at the same time.
When she got back to the others, Mark was making tea.
The national pastime. She got the milk from the fridge and poured some into each mug. He put them on a tray and carried them back to the sofa.
“How mangled are you all feeling?”
Lisa laughed weakly. “Scale of one to ten? A good nine.”
Hannah raised a limp hand from her reclining position. “Eleven over here.”
“Why?” Jennifer asked.
“Because there’s more,” Mark replied. “Not the official stuff—we’ll sort that out at the lawyers. This is your mum. She did manage to write
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a few more letters, like she said. I have them. I was supposed to give them to you all after this was finished. I’d have waited until tomorrow, but Jen’s not going to be here. . . .”
“I am, actually. Stephen just left.”
Lisa raised an eyebrow quizzically at her sister.
“He’s got an early start tomorrow. I just thought . . .”
Mark put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here. Your mum would be pleased—to know that all her girls were here together.”
They didn’t open them right away. It wasn’t Christmas morning, after all. Each of them held her letter in her lap. Amanda tried to remember what her mum’s hands looked like, imagined them holding the envelope.
They chatted until they were too tired. Hannah fell asleep and had to be gently shaken. They peeled off one by one, a subdued chorus of Wal-tonesque good nights issuing forth on the upstairs landing, and went to bed, glad, at least, to have put today behind them.
Lisa
The letter was stuck to the outside of a rectangular box, about one foot square. It was tied with a wide green ribbon. Just the packaging was a reminder—Barbara always wrapped things beautifully. An organza ribbon, or a wax seal, or plain brown paper with sprigs of lavender tied in utilitarian string. It was her signature. Lisa left the package there while she undressed and slipped naked underneath the duvet. She looked at it for a moment, almost afraid of it, and then slipped the letter out of its envelope, her hand faltering as she unfolded it. Mum’s writing, as familiar as her own, neat and rounded on the page.
My lovely Lisa,
We’re the closest, you and me, in many ways. I think we’re a lot alike. You’re my firstborn child, and the person who first showed me 24 e l i z a b e t h
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the miracle of this love a mother has for her child. You made every morning Christmas morning. Thank you for that. There’s lots of things I don’t even think I need to say to you, because I think you know them already. I love you. So much. You’re the strongest, I think. Too strong for your own good, maybe. Ask Andy about that sometime. By the way, I love him—did I ever tell you that? So to you, my darling girl, a request, instead of a bequest. Look after your sisters for me. Look after Mark. And let someone look after you.
Mum
P.S. Re the contents of the box: you’re right—it would have been a waste. Wear it when you dance like no one’s watching.
Inside the box, neatly folded on white tissue paper, was the emerald green Ben de Lisi dress.
Andy answered the phone on the second ring. Lisa’s voice sounded muffled and hoarse.
“That was quick,” Lisa said.
“I thought it might be you.”
“It’s me.”
“Hello, me.”
“What you doing?”
“Watching footie. You?”
“Calling you.”
“How was it?”
“I’m sorry I asked you not to come.”
“That’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, Andy. It was stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t think you really were thinking. I don’t mean that to sound unkind. I just mean that it wasn’t really about thinking, it was more about feeling. You wanted to do it without me, on your own.”
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“Don’t be so bloody reasonable with me.”
“Sorry.”
“And don’t be bloody sorry.”
Silence.
“It’s me who should be sorry.” She paused. “I wish you had been here.”
“Me, too.”
For just a while Lisa sat with the phone and listened to Andy breathing, which was almost as comforting as an embrace. Then she sighed.
“So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here.” He was being so careful of her.
“Good night.”
“Good night, Lisa.”
He’d heard a break in her voice when she said that last word, and that was all he needed. He hadn’t been watching footie. He’d been sitting on the sofa in front of the footie, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Now he stood up, grabbed his car keys from the stand by the front door, and went where his mind and his heart had been all day.
As he drove, a little too fast, he listened to the radio, a little too loud, and wondered, not for the first time in the last two years, what the hell was going on in Lisa’s head.
She wasn’t like any woman he’d known before. The highs were higher and the lows were lower. They’d been friends first, before they were lovers. They’d met at work; they’d both been with other people.
Nothing serious, but it meant romance was off the agenda and that they got to know each other, pretty well, before anything happened. He knew that she was clever and fierce and stubborn and sharp and that she didn’t suffer fools gladly and that she sometimes took three sugars in her coffee when she was hungover, which was not infrequently. She was funny and sarcastic, but never cruel. She was good company—no, she was great company.
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One day a friend of theirs was made redundant, out of the blue. A bunch of them went to the local wine bar to drown their collective sor-rows and bitch about senior management. One by one the others had melted away or staggered off and it was the two of them, setting off to catch the night bus together. She was different drunk. In the office she was immaculate and stylish—to the point of almost seeming unap-proachable. Now she looked ten years younger, and those barriers had obviously come way down. She’d taken off her vertiginous heels and climbed into a fountain, then stumbled, and sat down squarely in the water, like a toddler, laughing and crying, and gasping. He’d gone in to fish her out, and she’d pulled him down beside her and then they’d both been too wet and too giggly for the night bus, and they’d gone to the cashpoint for money and taken a cab home. She only gave the driver one address.
At her flat, she pulled him into the hot shower the same way she’d grabbed for him in the cold fountain, and they’d undressed each other there, kissing with drunken abandon and then with something else.
He wouldn’t have taken it any further. He knew she was completely inebriated, and he’d been to that awkward, short movie with other girls before and determined not to again, but she looked at him through half-closed eyes only partly glazed and told him exactly what she wanted. And then she’d showed him, pushing him back on the soft unmade bed and straddling him, lowering herself onto him gently, but determinedly. When he was buried deep inside her, reveling in how hot and moist and fantastic she felt, Lisa leaned forward and whispered his name, “Andy,” once, into his open mouth, as if to release him from responsibility, before she leaned back, her soft round breasts arching upward beautifully, to ease herself into a fast, powerful orgasm. And Andy couldn’t believe his luck.
He couldn’t believe it the next day, either, when she brought him coffee in bed. Three sugars in hers, obviously.
“How come you’re so perky?” he groaned at her, rousing himself from a place far, far away, where he could happily have stayed all day.
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“Great sex does that for me.”
“It was great sex?!”
She slapped his thigh playfully.
“Don’t fish for compliments. It was great sex. Least it was for me.
Think you got left a little behind.”
He shrugged sheepishly. To be honest, his memory of the night before wasn’t all that detailed.
“But I’ll make that up to you, if you like. Tonight?” She looked at her watch. “Not quite enough time this morning, I don’t think. . . .”
He put his own mug down on the bedside table and took hers from her. Then he pulled her down next to him and pushed the dressing gown she was wearing off her shoulders.
“I suggest we make time. . . .”
They’d both been very late for the sales meeting that morning.
And that was how it had been—the first six months had flown by in a blur of wine and sex and laughter. In the next six months they’d calmed down a bit. She said she knew when things got serious, because they took to lingering in restaurants, eating dessert and drinking coffee instead of rushing home after one course, desperate to tear each other’s clothes off.
She said she lost ten pounds in the first half of their first year, with all the
“exercise,” and put it all on again in the second half, eating pudding.
After a year, he wanted more. They went to the Greek Islands on holiday that summer. He lay on his beach towel and watched her lovely lithe figure saunter down to the sea to paddle, and he realized that he felt as happy as he ever had. Emboldened by retsina, later that night he took her hand, told her that he loved her—a sentence he had seldom volunteered—and asked her to move in with him. He wanted to see her every day and every night. Maybe forever. It had taken her another few months, and several more requests, to agree. She’d given up her flat after Christmas and come to live with him.
So on paper, he had what he wanted. He saw her every day and every night. But he didn’t have her. He knew it and so did she. She was holding 28 e l i z a b e t h
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herself back from him. It frightened him. He believed himself in deeper than she was and that made him vulnerable. He wanted things to keep moving, but she was always putting on the brakes. He couldn’t keep bringing it up with her. On the couple of occasions when he had tried talking about what might come next, she withdrew a little, so that his two steps forward ended up feeling like three steps back.
So long as he didn’t push, things were good. Things were really great. He worried that he was fooling himself. Setting himself up for a fall. What he couldn’t figure out—the sixty-four-million-dollar question that kept him awake at night—was whether she was holding back because of him, or because of her.
And even if he knew the answer, he would keep on doing this. Because, the thing was, he loved her. He couldn’t walk away if he wanted to.
So when she said she wanted to do this whole funeral thing alone, he went along with it, and let her do it alone. And when her voice broke on the mobile, he dropped everything and went to her. And when he parked and climbed out—the car door sounding incredibly loud in the dark silence—and caught the twitch of the curtains in the bedroom with the light still on, waited for her to open the door, and picked her up, clutching her tightly and silently to him, he knew that it had all been the right thing to do. For both of them.
Hannah
Hannah was too sleepy the night of the funeral to read her letter. She was still enough of a child that even burying her mother couldn’t interrupt the rhythm of her needs. She still felt hungry and she still felt tired, even when everyone around her had lost their appetite and wandered around with the wide staring eyes of the exhausted sleepless. The next morning, when she woke up, a warm, unfamiliar presence was beside her in bed, and she sat up, confused. For just a second, she thought it was her mum. When she was younger, and sick, Barbara had sometimes slept
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with her. She remembered nights of coughing and snuffling against her mum’s chest, the aroma of Vicks VapoRub wafting from both of them, feeling arms around her and hearing gentle words. “There, there. Mummy’s got you. Mummy’s got you.” It wasn’t her mum, of course. She hadn’t done that for years, and she would never do it again. It was Amanda, curled with her smooth brown back to her, hair spread wildly across the pillow. She didn’t mind. She quite liked it. It made her feel like she’d had something important to do, even if she hadn’t known she was doing it. Amanda must have been lonely, or sad. Hannah lay back down and tried to fall asleep again, but she couldn’t. The letter was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes again, lying propped against her alarm clock.