An Almost Perfect Holiday

by Lucy Diamond

  She and her brother would talk about it now and then, with the conversational shorthand that came from mutual trauma. ‘Do you ever think about her?’ one of them would say. ‘All the time,’ the other would reply. It was almost better to believe that she had died, they decided. That she had died all those years ago and her body must never have been found. Surely she would have come back, otherwise? Surely she would have made contact with her own children?

  Finally, five and a half years ago, word had come through via their aunt, Sylvia’s sister, that apparently she had died in the US. She had been there for the last twenty-one years, it turned out, although details were thin on the ground. A lawyer had passed on the news; it was a surprise to everyone. A horrible surprise, as it turned out, the worst kind. So she’d been alive all that time, but didn’t want her family to know. Didn’t want to see them or hear them. She had wiped the slate clean, left the country and started over. It had hurt so badly, Olivia could hardly bear the pain. Was it any surprise that when she had met Mack a few weeks later – Mack, who seemed so sturdy and together and solid – she had clung to him like a drowning woman reaching a life-raft? He had made her feel safer. He seemed reliable, the kind of person who wouldn’t abandon another without warning.

  And yet here was Olivia now, being the one to abandon him. Leaving their children with Brenda Hollins next door because she couldn’t cut it any more. It was the moment she had always feared would come; that she’d turn out to be just like Sylvia. Hadn’t she known it all along?

  What a rubbish person she was, she thought, gulping back a sob. Weak and spineless and shit. It would be better for everyone if she kept on driving until she reached the coast and went sailing right on over it.

  Chapter Ten

  Here they were again: the day had arrived, as it always did, every single year. It was Monday and therefore the anniversary of the most terrible episode in Lorna’s life. And this year marked two whole decades since it had happened.

  He’d be thirty-eight now, her Aidan, if he’d survived. Thirty-eight years old, a middle-aged man! He’d have married his teenage sweetheart, no doubt – he was the most loyal boy you could imagine – and they’d have had children too by now, she guessed. A girl and a boy, she liked to daydream, both with his blue eyes and wide smile. And wouldn’t Lorna and Roy enjoy spoiling their grandchildren rotten? Her friends were all nannies and grandmas and grannies these days, but nobody would be calling Lorna one of those names, unfortunately.

  At the time of Aidan’s death, he’d been hoping to go to university to study Mechanical Engineering. He’d always been such a clever lad, such a hard worker. Neither Lorna nor Roy had ever had anyone in their families go to university, so they’d practically burst with pride when he’d been offered a place by both Leeds and Liverpool to study there. As a child, he’d been fascinated by taking things apart to see how they worked – clocks, dynamo engines, Lorna’s hairdryer once, you name it – and always managed to put them back together again, still working. (Well, pretty much. The hairdryer had developed an alarming singeing sort of smell, but Lorna wasn’t one to dampen a boy’s ambition.)

  Six weeks after his death, two envelopes had come through the door for him, and it had been such a bittersweet experience, opening the first one to see that he’d done so well in his A-levels: two Bs in Maths and Chemistry and an A in Physics. She’d opened the second envelope to see that it was a letter from Leeds, his first choice, congratulating him on earning a place on the degree course, with a list of accommodation options. Seeing that parallel future for him on typed pieces of paper had been like a punch in the stomach. This is what you could have won.

  But instead he was gone, nothing more than their memories and a headstone in the local cemetery: Aidan Brearley, Rest in Peace.

  One of the worst episodes in the whole nightmare – and there were plenty to choose from – had been the day Roy had to ring up the university and tell them, his voice catching on the words, that there had been a change of plan and that Aidan Brearley wouldn’t be attending after all. No, he wasn’t deferring a year, he would never actually be making the trip up the M1 to sit in their lecture halls and laboratories, because he’d driven his car off the road and was dead.

  Roy had sobbed for a full forty minutes after that phone call, God love him. They both had. It seemed so final, that door closing in Leeds, a name crossed off the list; Aidan’s place on the course filled by some other student who’d never know the circumstances of their belated acceptance. At the time, Lorna had been unable to imagine any kind of future without her son, when each day brought such emptiness, and yet somehow twenty years had passed. Today was the anniversary of his death all over again, and they had a full fifteen hours of it to get through yet, before the calendar slipped on to another day, another morning. Lorna wondered if she’d survive that long.

  Was there anything worse than losing a child? Could any pain be more sharply felt? The suddenness of his death had felt like an act of violence in itself. Aidan and his girlfriend had been out for the evening together, seeing some band or other in Truro, and he’d been driving them home. It was dark, and the road was wet following an earlier cloudburst and his tyre treads had been on the elderly side, according to the police report, so when he took a bend too fast, the car had left the road, tumbling down the steep embankment until it came up hard against a sturdy oak tree. Aidan had died on impact, a stunned look on his face, as if he’d seen death coming for him and couldn’t believe his bad luck. The girlfriend, meanwhile, had been trapped in the car with his body until the paramedics got her out, and suffered whiplash and concussion, but at least she had survived.

  Oh, Lorna had raged and raged at the injustice of Aidan’s loss, at the cruelty of the world. She had screamed and wept into her sofa cushions like a madwoman, she had smashed things against the kitchen wall, she had dropped to her knees and sobbed in his bedroom, before collapsing to the floor and lying there on the carpet that still smelled faintly of him, for what might have been minutes or hours. And then, after all that raging, she had taken to her bed, wrung out, and had stayed there for a whole week.

  Depressed, the doctor called her, as if it was possible to sum up the maelstrom of her emotions with one single labelling word. As if anyone else had ever felt so tormented, so robbed of the brightest light in their lives! How could anyone possibly understand how she felt?

  Time was a great healer, people kept telling her, and in the twenty years that had passed, admittedly the pain had lessened. She and Roy had clung tightly to one another through the darkest days and nights, seeing the heartbreak out together. They’d had a succession of dogs – Patch and Murphy and Meg – who, to Lorna’s surprise, had helped tremendously in getting her through each day, forcing her back out into the world again, rain or shine, and, most unexpectedly, making her laugh at their daft antics and naughtiness. Not to mention easing a bad day with their innate doggy kindness. How was it that dogs always sensed when you were having a wobble, and knew exactly when to offer a sympathetic nose-push, a head on the knee, a warm bodily lean against the legs in canine solidarity? It didn’t compare to hearing her son’s rich, happy laugh bouncing off the walls, mind. There were some things that even the most loyal of dogs couldn’t make better.

  Work had helped her too, though, keeping her busy. She and Roy had bought up the derelict farmhouse and its old barns fifteen years ago, and it had been a labour of love to gradually transform first the house for themselves, and then the barns into holiday cottages. They were a good team, the two of them, both adept at practical tasks and neither of them afraid of getting their hands dirty. She’d planted up a kitchen garden as well as beds full of flowers, and found that being outside as the seasons slowly turned around her was soothing and helped her sleep better.

  She was doing pretty well, all in all. Holding strong. There was just today to see through and then she could get back to normal again.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Roy, parking the car, and Lorna felt
her mouth dry up as she realized they’d arrived. It was a warm, muggy sort of day with heavy showers forecast, exactly the sort of weather they’d had twenty years ago. Getting out of the car, her fingers tightened around the cellophane-wrapped flowers she’d brought. Sunflowers, his favourite. They’d planted some together in their old garden one summer when he was a little boy, eight or nine, and he’d loved how they’d grown taller than him by the time it was July. She sniffled, feeling the tears gather in her eyes. They were never far away at the best of times, but when it came to the anniversary, anything would set her off. She was like a leaking tap.

  Come on, girl, she said to herself. Chin up.

  As usual, they walked arm-in-arm through the creaking cemetery gates. She popped in there most weeks to say hello to Aidan and pass on the news, but Roy tended only to visit on the anniversary these days. He said he preferred to think of his son as a young man, not a headstone. Fair enough. They all had their ways of dealing with bereavement. Hers was to believe that she could still communicate with him; that somewhere, on some spiritual plane or other, her boy was able to hear every single thing she said to him and know how much he meant to her. I will never forget you, she told him now in her head. Never!

  The Victorian cemetery was deserted, as it so often was, just the faint rustling of the branches of the gnarled old yew trees as the breeze sighed its condolences. You’d see a dog-walker passing through occasionally, but there were seldom other mourners. ‘You were lucky to get a spot here,’ the funeral director had said at the time. ‘This place is pretty much full up nowadays.’

  Lucky, she’d repeated back at him with an angrily raised eyebrow and he’d turned red all the way down to his throat.

  They walked along the winding path in silence. The grass needed cutting, but there was sorrel and vetch blooming, and the air smelled sweet. Rituals were comforting when you had lost someone, she had learned. Today, for instance, like every year, the anniversary would be stitched together with one tradition after another, journeys they repeated because it made them feel closer to their son, places to revisit and mark the passing of time. They always began with this annual visit to the headstone, and the laying of flowers. Lorna liked to tidy up the plot, if necessary, and then they’d say a few words each, usually about how much they missed him. After that, they would—

  ‘Who’s that?’ Roy asked suddenly, as they rounded a corner and came to a halt. Because there, beside Aidan’s grave, was the unexpected sight of a kneeling woman.

  Lorna stared, dumbfounded. The woman was leaning against the stone with one arm around it, as if confiding secrets to a lover.

  Lorna tightened her own arm on Roy’s. It felt as if someone was trespassing on her heart. ‘What on earth . . . ?’ she said, breaking free from his grasp and marching hurriedly on. Emotion whirled up through her like a tornado: anger and hurt and pain. Of all the days, of all the moments, she did not want to encounter some weirdo here, on the twentieth anniversary of Aidan’s death. Who was this woman touching his gravestone as if she had some kind of right to it? Was she on drugs? Was she mentally unwell? Go away, she thought. Get your hands off my son and get out of here!

  ‘Hello?’ she called out, her voice strident and accusing, but with just a hint of a crack in it. A crack that Lorna knew could either turn into a sob or a roar. ‘Can I help you?’

  Then the woman turned, her eyes bloodshot, her cheeks puffy where she’d been crying, and Lorna stopped dead again, staring as her brain tried to assimilate this face with the one she’d known many years before. ‘Olivia?’ she whispered, unable to tear her gaze away. ‘Olivia, is that you?’

  The woman rose. She had put on weight in the last twenty years – haven’t we all? thought Lorna – and her blonde hair, which had once been a pixie cut with a swooping fringe when she was eighteen, was tugged messily back into a ponytail. But Lorna recognized those storm-grey eyes and the woman’s beautiful alabaster skin, even if there was now a fretwork of lines etched on her forehead.

  ‘Lorna,’ she replied, her voice almost a whisper, as if she had seen a ghost. ‘Roy.’ Her mouth trembled as they approached and she took a step back. ‘I . . . I hope you don’t mind me being here.’

  ‘Mind? Oh goodness, no, of course we don’t. It’s lovely to see you.’ Just like that, her mood had changed to one of wonder and Lorna couldn’t help herself, she threw her arms around the woman just as soon as she reached her, the cellophane around the flowers crinkling in surprise. Olivia Asbury, the girl Aidan had mooned over in the sixth form! The girl who had prompted a new, never-before-seen interest in hair gel and ironed shirts and enthusiastic applications of aftershave. The girl who had been sitting next to him in the car when he died.

  Lorna swallowed hard as the memories spiralled around her. ‘You’re in Bristol these days, is that right?’ she managed to say, releasing Olivia after a moment. ‘I saw your dad – gosh, it must be four or five years ago now – and he said you’d been living there a while.’

  ‘Bristol, yes,’ Olivia said faintly. Her eyes had a haunted look about them, her nails were gnawed down to the quick, Lorna noticed, taking in the details. She had been such a little livewire once upon a time. ‘I just . . .’ She bit her lip, her hands flying out as if they were trying to pluck the right words from the air. ‘I just wanted to come today. I hope that’s okay. Twenty years, isn’t it? I still think about him.’

  There was such a lump in Lorna’s throat that she could hardly speak. She wanted to hug Olivia again, even though she knew she probably shouldn’t. But Olivia had remembered. She had cared enough to come here, all the way from Bristol. It was like receiving a gift, when you least expected it. Nodding hard, she gripped Olivia’s hands in hers, unable to express how moved this left her feeling.

  ‘Hello there, love,’ said Roy, noticing that his wife was speechless. ‘It’s good to see you again. You’ve never driven all the way here from Bristol this morning, have you? You must have got up with the lark!’

  Trust Roy, Lorna thought, wanting to laugh and sob at the same time. Typical man! He hadn’t set eyes on this girl – woman, rather – in years and years, and the first thing he wanted to ask about was her journey? ‘Roy,’ she managed to splutter. ‘What are you like? Next you’ll be asking her did she take the motorway or the back roads, when that’s not remotely the point. The most important thing is that she’s here. It’s Olivia and – oh, I’m sorry, I just have to hug you again. Come here, pet.’

  Now Roy was giving her an exasperated look, as if to say, Get off her, you daft old woman, and then Lorna began thinking the same, that Olivia almost certainly didn’t want a second hug from Aidan’s old mum, the first was probably more than enough – except that, in the next moment, Olivia let out a sob and leaned hard against Lorna, winding her arms around the older woman’s back so tightly that Lorna feared for the stems of her sunflowers. ‘Oh, darling,’ she crooned, taken aback by the passion of Olivia’s tears. ‘I know. We’re sad too. We’re so, so sad.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Olivia said, disentangling herself after a moment and blowing her nose. She seemed to make an enormous effort to regain her composure, after which she repeated, ‘Sorry’ and cleared her throat. ‘This isn’t about me. I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Roy told her, but she was insistent.

  ‘No, no, I’ve had my little chat with him. Poured out my problems.’ She gave a shaky laugh, but looked so miserable Lorna felt worried for her. ‘He’s all yours.’ Then her hand was up in a self-conscious sort of wave and she took another step backwards. ‘It’s good to see you both again. Even under these circumstances.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Lorna as Olivia turned to depart. ‘Please. I’d like a minute with him, yes, we both would, but after that . . . Well, all we usually do from here is go and have a fried breakfast in Aidan’s favourite café. If you’re not busy, then . . . you could join us?’ She caught Roy’s eye, worried suddenly that he wouldn’t want an extra person there with them for
their ritual anniversary eggs on toast, but he was nodding in agreement.

  ‘You’d be very welcome,’ he said.

  Olivia’s mouth folded into itself, in a weak approximation of a smile, although the anxiety was still visible around her eyes. ‘I’m not busy,’ she replied. ‘Thank you, that would be nice, if you’re sure. I’ll wait for you on the bench near the entrance, shall I? Obviously take as long as you want.’

  Tears were rolling down Lorna’s face, but they were not the usual tears of devastation. She felt . . . was it odd to say that she felt happy for Aidan in that moment, that his girlfriend had come back? Happy that she still thought about him and cared? What a wonderful person he had been, to have inspired such devotion!

  Blinking, she knelt at the grave and fussed about, putting the sunflowers into the holder there. ‘So many visitors today, my love,’ she said. ‘What a nice surprise! We’re all thinking of you, you’ll always be in our hearts.’ Okay, and now the devastated tears were kicking in. Now she had shifted into the gear of full-blown grief and was losing him all over again. She was remembering how they’d been watching television together, she and Roy, when the knock on the front door came. A normal evening, Roy with his bottle of stout, her with a white-wine spritzer, watching her favourite soap, Ebberston Terrace, and then some programme about the restoration of a stately home, both of them yawning a bit and thinking they’d have to turn in for the night soon. The cat purring on her knee.

  Oh, but she’d give anything to go back to that moment, to freeze-frame it right there, staying in that safe little bubble of time forever! When the world was still good, when everything was steady and ordinary!

  But then there had been a police car pulling up outside, and two officers walking up her front path, caps in hand. ‘Mrs Brearley? There’s been an accident,’ one of them had said, hardly able to look her in the eye. It was Richard Abrahams, her friend Valerie’s son, who was usually the most amiable of young men, always ready with a smile and a hello if she saw him in town. Not that night, though.