Here and Now

by Santa Montefiore

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  For Lily and Sasha

  Chapter 1

  It was snowing. Fat, fluffy flakes, as large as cotton balls, tumbled from the sky, while dawn struggled valiantly to herald the day through the canopy of dense cloud. Marigold stood by the kitchen window with her cup of tea. A stout figure in a baby-pink dressing gown and matching fluffy slippers, she watched with delight as the landscape was slowly revealed to her in all its glorious softness. Little by little the garden emerged out of the night: the yew hedge, the borders and the shrubs, the trees with their gnarled and twisted branches, all hunched and still, sleeping deeply beneath a luxurious quilt. It was hard to imagine life there in the frozen soil. Almost impossible to picture the viburnum and syringa flowering in the spring. Impossible to think of spring at all in this dead of winter.

  At the bottom of the garden, beside her husband Dennis’s shed, the apple tree was materializing through the falling snow. With its thick trunk and knobbly branches it resembled a mythical creature caught in suspended animation by an ancient spell, or simply petrified by the cold, for it really was very cold. Marigold’s eyes caught sight of the feeder hanging forlornly from one of the branches. It was still attracting the odd intrepid bird which fluttered around it in the hope of finding an overlooked seed. Marigold had filled it the day before but now it was empty. Her heart went out to the hungry birds who survived the winter on account of her feeder. As soon as she’d finished her tea, she would put on her boots and go out to refill it.

  She sensed she was being watched and turned to see Dennis standing in the doorway, gazing at her with a tender look. He was dressed for church in a dark blue suit and tie, his grey hair parted at the side and brushed smooth, his beard clipped. He was handsome to Marigold, who still saw him through the eyes of the twenty-year-old girl she had been when they’d met over forty years before. She lifted her chin and smiled back at him playfully. ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.

  ‘You,’ he replied, denim eyes twinkling.

  She shook her head and turned her attention back to the garden. ‘It’s snowing,’ she said.

  He joined her at the window and they both stared out with equal pleasure. ‘Beautiful,’ he sighed. ‘Really beautiful.’ He put his arm around her waist, drawing her close, and planted a kiss on her temple. ‘You remember the first time I held your hand, Goldie? It was snowing then, wasn’t it?’

  Marigold laughed. ‘You remind me of that every time it snows, Dennis.’

  His smile was bashful. ‘I like to remember it. A beautiful woman, a beautiful night, falling snow and her hand in mine. It was warm, your hand. You didn’t take it away. I knew I was in with a chance then. You let me hold it. That was a big deal in those days.’

  ‘What an old romantic you are!’ She tilted her head, knowing he would kiss her again.

  ‘You love your old romantic,’ he whispered into her hair.

  ‘I do,’ she replied. ‘You’re a rare breed. They don’t make them like you anymore.’ She patted his chest. ‘Now go and sit down and I’ll bring over your tea.’

  ‘They don’t make them like you anymore, either,’ said Dennis, moving towards the kitchen table where Mac the black-and-white cat sat awaiting him on his chair. ‘I knew I’d caught someone special when I held your hand.’

  Their daughter Suze shuffled sleepily into the room in floral pyjamas, a long grey cardigan and bed socks. Her blonde hair was unbrushed and falling over her eyes in a thick fringe, her attention on her smartphone. ‘Morning, sweetheart,’ said Marigold cheerfully. ‘Have you seen the snow?’

  Suze did not look up. She had seen the snow. What of it? She sat down in her usual chair beside her father and mumbled a barely audible ‘Good morning’. Dennis caught Marigold’s eye and a silent communication passed between them. Marigold took down two mugs. She’d make Dennis his tea and Suze her coffee, just as she did every morning. She enjoyed the routine. It made her feel needed and Marigold loved feeling needed. Then she remembered they were no longer just three and took down another mug.

  ‘Oh dear, have you seen outside? Snow! The whole country will grind to a standstill,’ said Nan gloomily, wandering into the kitchen. Marigold’s mother searched hard for the negative in everything and was only truly happy when she found it. ‘Do you remember the winter of ’63?’ She sucked air through her lips. ‘We were stuck indoors for a week! Your dad had to dig us out with a spade. It did his back in, that did. He came out of the war without a scratch but did his back in digging us out with a spade.’ She pulled her dressing gown tighter across her body and shivered. ‘I’ll never forget the cold. Oooh, it was Siberian.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Siberia, Nan?’ asked Suze in a disinterested tone, without taking her eyes off her phone.

  Her grandmother ignored her. ‘We didn’t have the luxury of central heating like you do, Suze,’ she said. ‘It was bitter. There was ice on the inside of the windows and we had to run across the garden to use the toilet. We didn’t have an indoor toilet back then. You don’t know how lucky you are, you people.’

  Marigold glanced out of the window. The sight of snow had lifted her spirits. The country might grind to a standstill, she thought happily, but it would look like a winter wonderland.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Nan as a cup of tea was duly placed in front of her. At eighty-six her curly hair had turned white, her body was frail and her face as creased as crêpe paper, but her mind was as sharp and focused as it always had been. The years had taken much, but they had not taken that. Marigold gave Nan the crossword from the newspaper, then went to the sideboard to put two slices of bread in the toaster. Nan had moved in with Marigold and Dennis only the week before after months of gentle persuasion and encouragement. She had been reluctant to leave the home she had lived in throughout her marriage and where she had raised her two children, Patrick and Marigold, even though she was only moving a few minutes up the road. She had insisted that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself and complained that she felt as if she was being shuffled into Heaven’s waiting room when she wasn’t in the least ready to go. However, in spite of her grumbling, she had sold the house for a tidy sum and moved in with her daughter, making herself comfortable in her new room. She had demanded that Dennis replace the pictures on the wall with her own and Dennis had obliged in his good-natured way while Marigold had helped unpack her things and arrange them to her satisfaction. In fact, mother and daughter had rapidly slipped into an easy routine. Nan discovered that she rather enjoyed having someone at her beck and call after all and Marigold relished having another person to look after, because she enjoyed being useful. She ran the village shop and the post office, as she had done for over thirty years. She also sat on various committees, for the village hall and the local church and the odd charity, because she liked to keep busy. At sixty-six Marigold had no intention of slowing down. Having Nan at home gave her a warm feeling of being needed.

  ‘Well, I adore snow,’ she said, cracking eggs into a pan.

  Nan studied the crossword through her spectacles. ‘The whole country will grind to a standstill, mark my words,’ she repeated, shaking her head. ‘I remember the winter of ’63. Livestock died, people froze to death, nothing worked. It was death and destruction everywhere.’

  ‘Well, I remember the winter of 2010 and we all managed,’ said Suze, still gazing into her phone.


  ‘What are you doing on that thing anyway?’ asked Nan, peering at it from across the table. ‘You haven’t taken your eyes off it all morning.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ Suze mumbled, raking the fringe off her face with a manicured hand.

  ‘She’s an “influencer”,’ Marigold interrupted, giving Suze a nod, although Suze didn’t see it. Nor did she see the proud though slightly baffled look on her mother’s face.

  ‘What’s an “influencer”?’ Nan asked.

  ‘It means everyone wants to be me,’ Suze informed her dully and without irony.

  ‘She writes about fashion and food and, well, lifestyle, don’t you, love?’ Marigold added. ‘A bit of everything and she posts it all on her Instagram account. You should see it, the photographs are lovely.’

  ‘Do you make any money doing a bit of everything?’ Nan asked, sounding unconvinced that being an ‘influencer’ was a worthwhile form of employment.

  ‘She’s going to make lots.’ Dennis answered for his daughter because making money was a sore subject. Suze had turned twenty-five in the summer, but had no plans to move out and get a place of her own, or get what they considered a ‘proper’ job. Why would she want to leave home when her mother made it so comfortable, when her parents paid for everything? The little she earned as a freelance journalist went on clothes and make-up, fuelling her social media platforms, but neither parent was prepared to confront her about it. Suze had a temper, aggravated by a deep frustration at the slow progress of her ambitions. While her older sister Daisy had gone to university and now lived a sophisticated life in Milan with her Italian boyfriend, spending weekends in Paris and Rome and working in a world-famous museum, she was stuck in the small village where she had grown up, living at home and dreaming of fame and fortune that never materialized.

  ‘I make money writing for newspapers and magazines, things like that. I’m building a profile, gathering a following. It takes time.’ Suze sighed, lamenting the fact that old people didn’t understand social media.

  ‘You modern people!’ said Dennis with a grin, hoping to appease his daughter. ‘Baffles us oldies.’

  ‘I’ve got nearly thirty thousand followers on Instagram,’ she said, brightening a little.

  ‘Have you, dear?’ said Marigold, not knowing quite what that meant but assuming it was a lot. Suze had set her mother up with an Instagram account so that she could keep in touch with her daughters. And it did keep her in touch, although she didn’t post things herself. She didn’t much like the mobile telephone. She’d rather talk to someone’s face.

  Dennis opened the newspaper and sipped his tea. Marigold was making him his Sunday Special: two fried eggs, crispy bacon, a sausage, a piece of wholemeal toast and a spoonful of baked beans, just the way he liked it. As she put it in front of him he smiled up at her, his eyes sparkling with affection. Dennis and Marigold still looked at each other in that gentle, tender way that people do whose love has grown deeper with the years.

  ‘Suze, do you fancy anything?’ Marigold asked. Suze didn’t answer. The curtain of blonde hair formed an impenetrable barrier. ‘I’ll go and feed my birds then,’ she said.

  ‘They’re not your birds, Mum,’ said Suze from behind her hair. ‘Why do you always call them your birds? They’re just birds.’

  ‘Because she feeds them, just like she feeds you,’ said Dennis, chewing on the sausage, and the rest of the sentence and while she feeds you and looks after you, you can show her some gratitude and kindness was left unspoken. ‘This is very good, Goldie. Delicious!’

  ‘They’ll die anyway in this cold,’ said Nan, thinking about the birds and seeing, in her mind’s eye, dead ones all over the garden.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised how resilient they are, Mum.’

  Nan shook her head. ‘Well, if you go out like that, you’ll catch your death of cold and you won’t make it to spring either.’

  ‘I’ll only be gone for a minute.’ Marigold slipped her bare feet into boots, picked up the bag of birdseed which was on the shelf by the back door and went out into the garden. She ignored her mother shouting at her to put on a coat. She was well over sixty, she didn’t need her mother telling her what to do. She hoped she wouldn’t regret having suggested she move in.

  Marigold sighed with real pleasure as she put the first footprints in the snow. Everything was white and soft and silent. She wondered at the magical hush that came over the world when it snowed. It was a different kind of hush to any other. As if someone had cast a spell and stopped everything, suspending the world in a state of enchantment. She trudged through the stillness and lifted the feeder off the tree. Carefully, she filled it up with seed and then put it back, hooking it over a twig. She noticed the resident robin on the roof of Dennis’s shed. It was watching her with beady black eyes and hopping about, leaving clawprints in the snow. ‘You’re hungry, aren’t you?’ she said, smiling at the plucky little bird who often came close when she was on her knees in the border, planting or weeding. In the spring the garden was full of birds, but it was late November and the wise ones had left for warmer climes. Only this robin remained, with its fluffy red breast, along with various blackbirds and thrushes, and the pesky pigeons and seagulls of course, because the village was a couple of miles inland from the sea. ‘Don’t listen to Nan. You’re not going to die,’ she added. ‘As long as I feed you, you’ll see out the winter and soon it will be spring again.’

  Marigold walked away and the robin flew onto the feeder. It warmed her heart to see it eating. Soon others would join in. It was amazing how quickly word got around – a bit like the village grapevine, she thought with amusement. As she pulled open the back door, her mind turned to church. She’d have to go upstairs and change. She’d clear the breakfast away once she was dressed. Dennis liked to get there a little early to chat to people. She did not like to keep him waiting. He worked hard during the week, toiling in his shed, making exquisite things out of wood as his father had done before him; it was nice for him to have a rest on a Sunday and spend time with his friends. For Marigold and Dennis church wasn’t just about God, it was a social event too, with tea and biscuits afterwards in the church hall. They always looked forward to that.

  In the old days Dennis would go to the pub every evening, play darts, drink a couple of pints of bitter and catch up with friends that way. Now he preferred to stay at home and indulge in his hobby of making figurines, which he created himself with his big but steady hands, and displayed on shelves he’d put up all around the house. There were knights of old, soldiers from the Great War and fantasy characters he fished out of his imagination. His latest project was a church – well, it had started as a church but was fast becoming a cathedral and Marigold thought it might very well develop into an entire village with all the people to go in it. It kept him quiet for hours while he carefully cut the plastic and moulded the putty and painted with the flair of a natural artist. It reminded her of the doll’s house he had made for the girls when they were little. That was a labour of love, complete with furniture, oak floorboards, fireplaces and wallpaper. A beautifully crafted miniature more exquisite than anything one could buy in a toy shop.

  Suze was on her phone talking to her boyfriend Batty when Marigold went upstairs to get ready. The difference in her daughter’s tone was remarkable. It was as if she were two people. One sulky and silent, the other animated and chatty. Atticus Buckley, known as Batty, and Suze had been going out for three years. Marigold wondered whether they’d ever get married. People seemed in no rush to marry these days. When she and Dennis had met, they’d walked down the aisle in less than six months. Batty was a good boy, she thought, despite his silly nickname. His parents were both teachers and he still lived with them, in their large house in town. Marigold wondered why he didn’t move out and rent a place of his own; after all, his garden-design business seemed to be doing well from what Suze told them. Young people, she thought with a shake of the head. Perhaps they were on to something, she mused. After a
ll, why spend hard-earned cash on rent when they could live with their parents for free?

  Just as Marigold was about to go downstairs to clear away breakfast, the telephone by the bed rang. She frowned, wondering with a spike of irritation who would bother them on a Sunday morning. She picked it up.

  ‘Mum?’

  Her irritation evaporated at the distressed sound of her elder daughter’s voice. ‘Daisy, are you all right, dear?’

  ‘I’m coming home.’

  Marigold realized she did not mean just for Christmas. Her heart stopped. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s over.’ Daisy’s voice sounded strained, as if she was trying very hard not to cry. ‘I’m leaving as soon as I can get a flight.’ There was a moment’s silence as Marigold sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to digest what her daughter was telling her. Marigold liked Luca. She liked him a lot. He was eleven years older than Daisy, which had concerned Marigold at the beginning, but then his charm had won her over, and the tender way he had looked at her daughter. He was a photographer, which was romantic. Marigold liked creative people, after all, she’d married one herself, and Luca had the colourful, passionate character of an artist. She had thought that their relationship would last. She had never doubted it. Six years was a long time and she’d taken it for granted that they’d eventually marry and start a family. ‘I just want to be at home, Mum,’ said Daisy. ‘With you and Dad.’

  ‘We can talk about it over a cup of tea,’ said Marigold in a reassuring voice. ‘There’s nothing like a cup of tea to make everything feel better.’

  Sensing her mother’s assumption that the split would be a temporary one, Daisy added firmly, ‘It’s over for good, Mum. I won’t be coming back. Luca and I want different things.’ Her disappointment was palpable. ‘We just want different things,’ she repeated quietly.

  When Marigold hung up she remained on the bed, worrying. Daisy was thirty-two. Time was running out. She had met Luca when she had gone to work in Italy after reading Italian and art history at university, then moved in with him shortly after. Marigold wondered what kind of ‘different things’ Daisy referred to; one of them was likely to be marriage. What else could it be? Had she wasted six years of her life hoping he would be The One? As modern as young women were these days, Marigold still believed that a woman’s nesting instincts were very strong. Would Daisy have time to find someone else before it was too late?