by Ali Mercer
If I’d passed her in the street, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed her.
Unless she had been with Daisy. It had to be said – Daisy stood out. It wasn’t just the all-pink outfit. It was the way they held hands, as if they still did that all the time, without even thinking about it.
I hadn’t held Ellie’s hand for years and years. Let alone Ava’s. I’d forgotten what it felt like to do that. To lead your child by the hand.
It wasn’t Daisy’s fault. She had obviously just gone along with whatever her mother had told her to get her there.
Maybe Paula had been waiting for this moment for years… the chance to wreck something for us. Well, she’d certainly succeeded.
I said, ‘The only person who’s done something wrong is Paula.’
Mark closed his eyes and I thought for a moment that was it, that he’d gone. I’d never seen anything like the way he looked then. So close to death. So agonised, and so hopeless.
Then he rallied and opened his eyes again and said, ‘I lied to you. It wasn’t Paula who stopped me seeing Daisy. It was me. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t cope. I said she could have the house as long as they both left me alone.’
‘Mark, it was years ago. Whatever happened, Paula had no right to do what she just did. It was an awful shock for you. We just have to concentrate on getting you better.’
‘Jenny… She didn’t go off with someone else. I lied about that too. I told you that, and I told my mother that. But it wasn’t true. She liked him. But she never cheated on me.’
I wanted to say something reassuring… but I couldn’t find the words. All that time I’d believed that Paula had treated him terribly, that she’d betrayed him, that she was an awful person…
And Mark had just let me carry on thinking the worst of her.
The girl – Daisy – had looked shocked when Mark collapsed, as if witnessing the breaking of a taboo. As if she didn’t fully understand what was happening, but had at least recognised that it was unusual for a man to writhe around on the floor like that.
I had yelled at Paula to go and take her daughter with her.
And then they had gone.
He said, ‘She wrote to you. After Felix died. A condolence card. I made sure you never got it. She sent one to my mother, too.’
And then he closed his eyes and moaned in pain.
The ambulance began to climb. We’d reached the hill north of Kettlebridge; any minute now we’d descend, and merge onto the fast road to Oxford.
I leaned forwards and said, ‘Did Ingrid get her card?’
He could barely part his lips to speak, but I just about made out the words: ‘Burned it.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ I told him. ‘I need you to survive. Otherwise how can I be angry with you?’
He didn’t manage to reply, but his lips curved in an approximation of a smile.
The ambulance sped down the slip road. Such a long way still to go. But I of all people knew that hospitals were not only places where you went to be fixed. That even the most skilful doctors couldn’t always keep you alive.
And it all came back to me: Felix in my arms. Not being able to feed him. The weight of the milk in my breasts. And afterwards, having no choice but to pour it away.
* * *
Much, much later, Ava and Ellie and I waited together to find out if Mark could be saved.
Back in Kettlebridge, the evening do was going on without us: music and dancing, hubbub, slices of the cake that Toby would have had to cut all by himself. Meanwhile Mark was unconscious on the operating table while surgeons carried out the delicate procedure that would seal off the broken blood vessel in his brain and allow him to recover.
Ava was sitting next to me, still in her wedding dress, flicking listlessly through an old magazine. She had her hair loosely up, with little strands escaping, and a delicate seed-pearl tiara; she’d gone Hollywood glamour for her dress, all swishy silk skirts and close-fitting bodice. Even in that overheated, strip-lighted waiting room, with its atmosphere of anxiety and powerlessness, she was the loveliest bride I’d ever seen.
Not for the first time, I was filled with astonishment that she was actually anything to do with me. She looked as if she might have arrived in the world already adult, without bothering with all the indignities of childhood. But I knew better. I’d taken her round to people’s houses in a carrycot, and given her toys to play with while I set about cutting their hair. When she was a toddler, I’d shared a double bed with her; when she was a little older, I’d made time to read books to her and had been startled by how quickly she’d learned how to read them for herself.
That was Ava all over. She always wanted to be as independent as possible. If there was one thing Sean, as her stand-in father, had taught her, it was that: the importance of not relying on other people. Which made it all the more surprising that she’d found someone she wanted to get married to. Though Toby adored her, and was a choice that made sense.
It had been Ava’s suggestion that Toby should go back to Kettlebridge and call in on the evening do. After all, Mark’s operation would take at least three hours, and there was nothing Toby could do for him by being here.
They’d left Peter, our old neighbour, in charge of things when they departed for the hospital, along with my sister and Brian, the rather good-looking best man. I couldn’t imagine that the atmosphere would have recovered from Paula’s uninvited appearance and its aftermath, but Ava and Toby seemed to want people to enjoy themselves as much as possible under the circumstances. Karen, my old friend who had come down from Manchester, had volunteered to help too, and my sister had, of course, been in her element. Glad to be needed. I had been profoundly grateful to her, not for the first time. She’d been such a rock after Felix died… She’d come straight away to see me, and had ended up staying a week: making phone calls and sending emails, cooking, cleaning, stepping up or fading into the background as needed.
As if by unspoken agreement, we’d never actually talked about how we’d fallen out at Mum’s funeral, or how stubborn we’d both been during the years of our estrangement. Amanda seemed to be happy to pick up where we’d left off, and that suited me, too, especially as, after all this time, I could hardly remember exactly what had been said or who’d been wrong, and anyway, it didn’t seem to matter any more.
Ellie was sitting on my other side, at a slight distance, a gawky, skinny-limbed teen in a red dress that was a little too short for a wedding, and clumpy, deliberately unladylike sandals. She’d taken the newlyweds to the hospital in the second-hand Mini Sean had got for her as a guilty twenty-first birthday present – it had fallen to her to drive, as the only member of the immediate family who was stone cold sober. Since we’d settled in the waiting room she’d opted to cut herself off by listening to music, and had that mute, closed-off expression teenagers get when they really don’t want to talk to anybody about anything.
If somebody had asked me the day before whether she was close to Mark, I’d have said no. I might even have said – flippantly, bitterly – that she’d barely notice whether he lived or died. But I was under no such illusion now. They might not be close – in fact, they were poles apart – but that didn’t mean she didn’t care.
It was no time, really, to criticise him… but he hadn’t helped matters by being so inflexible when she went through her phase of going off the rails. He’d set boundaries for her with a rigidity that was driven more by his need to be in control than by wanting to see her take better care of herself. And she’d known it, and had provoked him and pushed him at every opportunity. Still, things had improved, and over recent months they had moved towards a sort of wary truce.
Thank goodness for Peter, who’d taken Ellie in and was keeping an eye on her. Mark wasn’t crazy about the arrangement, but he hadn’t been in much of a position to object. Ellie’s earlier attempts to live away from home had been short-lived – awful places, worse boyfriends – and her behaviour when she was with us had been so ch
aotic that at one point he’d wanted to throw her out.
It was as if, as a teenager, she’d made a conscious decision to be the exact opposite of the thoughtful, bookish, otherworldly child she had been – as if she wanted to do everything she could to put distance between herself and us, and disappear into a cycle of parties and hangovers and insecure relationships.
Mark had been angry with her, and sometimes I had been too, but it had been hard to stay angry when I knew the way she was carrying on was to do with Felix – was a delayed reaction to the shock of his loss, and to the sadness in the house afterwards. It was a kind of grief, a self-punishing way of proving to herself and us that she was still alive.
After Felix passed away, I never wanted to have another child – Mark might have been willing to consider it, but he knew how I felt and we had decided against it. I’d carried on functioning as a wife and mother – keeping house, providing comfort – but part of my heart had been burnt out, left cauterised and lifeless. It was like that line about courage being similar to a bank account: you write a certain number of cheques and one day it’s all gone. I wasn’t sure how much love I had left, and having another child struck me as a risk I couldn’t afford to take.
Then Ellie had started to take risks with herself, and I had discovered that the old fierce protective instinct was still there, and as powerful as ever. I hadn’t been able to save Felix; I wasn’t about to lose Ellie. I’d had to learn to be careful, though… to nudge her towards wanting to sort herself out, rather than laying down the law or trying to fix things for her.
It wasn’t quite the same for Mark. He cared about Ellie, and he felt responsible for her, and he was fond of her and tried to treat her fairly. But the strength of feeling just wasn’t there. It wasn’t his fault; there was no point expecting or wanting more. He couldn’t help what he didn’t feel, and the only living person who he was really devoted to was me.
At least Ellie and Mark had made peace, more or less. But what if this was it? What if there were no more chances?
What if Mark’s operation didn’t work, or there were complications and that was the end, right there in the operating theatre… just as it had been for Felix?
But I couldn’t think about that. If there was one thing that I’d learned, it was that you might as well hold on to hope for as long as possible. Possibilities were precious. That was what life was – all those different pathways ahead. Death cut them off. And despair was a small, premature death – the sense that the pathways were already closed off, even when they were still there.
That was how I’d felt, after Felix: as if the end for him was an end for me as well. Which it had been. But enough of me had survived for me to be here today, still believing that Mark could come through this.
At least I wasn’t alone. I’d tried to persuade Ellie and Ava to go back to the wedding with Toby, but both of them had insisted on staying with me until the operation was over and we knew how it had gone. And actually, I was grateful.
Ava put her magazine aside. It had a bride on the cover. Not half as pretty as she was, though.
‘I would have thought that was the last thing you’d want to read,’ I said to her.
‘Yeah,’ she said, and pulled a face. ‘Paula must be delighted.’
‘Somehow I doubt that,’ I said.
‘Oh, come on. She’s probably been planning something like that for years.’
‘I think it might have been an impulse thing. I mean, obviously she must have thought about it. And somehow she must have found out about the wedding, and maybe it struck her as a bit of a provocation…’
‘It was the perfect venue,’ Ava said, with that strange mix of pride and defensiveness that some brides seem to go in for – as if they were artists, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to compromise their vision. Not that I’d ever been like that, but then, I’d never tried to organise a big white wedding.
‘I know, but it was pretty much on Paula’s doorstep.’
‘I can’t believe you’re taking her side on this. If you were worried about it, why didn’t you say something earlier?’
‘I didn’t like to,’ I admitted. ‘I guess I thought it would be all right. I mean, I never would have dreamed that she’d just show up like that.’
Ava didn’t look particularly mollified. She smoothed her skirts and examined her immaculately manicured hands. Next to her diamond engagement ring, her gold wedding band gleamed: new, unscratched, and until now, unworn.
Of course she’d wanted everything to be perfect. I’d never known that my cynical, secretive daughter was such a romantic… until she had accepted Toby’s proposal.
‘I can’t help it if she happens to live nearby,’ she said. ‘I mean, how was I to know she and her daughter would have stayed in the house she got off Dad? She could have sold it up and moved somewhere else years ago.’
‘Daisy is your dad’s daughter, too,’ I reminded her. ‘Your half-sister.’
‘Yeah, well, Ellie’s all the sister I need, thank you very much. Quite enough to be going on with.’
Ellie removed her earphones. ‘Leave me out of it.’
‘How can I?’ Ava said. ‘You’re here, aren’t you? Even if you have been trying to make out you’re not listening.’
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see Paula’s point of view,’ Ellie said.
‘Oh, come on. Where’s your loyalty?’ Ava turned back to me. ‘If Paula’s held a grudge against you all these years, that’s her problem.’
‘Well… to be fair to her, it must have come as a shock to find out her husband had a child with someone else. Ex-husband. We probably shouldn’t have left it to Ingrid to break the news. Not to speak ill of the dead, but she wasn’t the most sensitive of people.’
‘So you had a fling with Dad when his marriage was on the rocks. Big deal. It’s not like it was a big, long secret affair. It was a one-off with unexpected consequences.’
‘Well, that’s one way to look at it.’
Ava was studying me with an unusual degree of interest, as if she was trying to get the measure of me. It was as if she was trying to think about all this objectively for the first time – trying on an onlooker’s perspective for size, rather than being part of it.
‘I don’t think you ever would have carried on seeing Dad behind Paula’s back,’ she said. ‘Not for any length of time, anyway.’
‘I don’t know if I’m quite as nice and good as you seem to think,’ I told her. ‘I never really challenged Mark about not seeing Daisy. It was easier to let sleeping dogs lie. But looking at it objectively… he let her down. And so did I. Don’t you think she was entitled to more?’
Ava’s blue eyes suddenly looked very dark.
‘But it was Paula who made it impossible for Mark to see her,’ she said.
I hesitated. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her. But she’d only just called him her dad. Did she really need to know?
And what if he didn’t make it through?
But then, he had wanted to tell me the truth because he thought he might not get another chance. He must have thought it mattered. In the end, he’d chosen to stop lying.
I said, ‘Ava, that wasn’t true. It was your dad who rejected Daisy. He couldn’t cope with her. He didn’t want to know. I don’t think Paula is at all the kind of person we’ve been led to believe she is. Your dad just told me that she actually wrote to me, after Felix died. She sent a condolence card. But I never got it. He thought it might upset me.’ Or so I had to assume. Unless he had wanted me to carry on thinking of Paula as heartless. ‘He made sure I never saw it.’
Ava kept on staring at me but it was as if she wasn’t seeing me at all; it was as if she’d gone somewhere else. Then she said, ‘Now or never.’
‘Something like that. Yes.’
Ava got abruptly to her feet, as if she’d suddenly decided on something.
‘I’m going to go look for a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Can I get you anyt
hing?’
‘You’re not allowed hot drinks in here,’ Ellie said. ‘Haven’t you read the signs?’
‘Well then, I’ll have a coffee somewhere outside. There’s a café somewhere, isn’t there?’
‘It’ll be shut,’ I told her. ‘But I think there’s a vending machine somewhere.’
‘Then I’ll find it. Do you want anything?’
I shook my head, and Ellie said, ‘I’ll pass. Don’t spill coffee on your dress.’
‘Yeah, well, hardly matters now. After all, I’m not going to be wearing it again, am I? Might as well wreck it.’
Ava swished out. Ellie said, ‘Maybe Paula just wanted to show Mark his daughter. Maybe she wanted to show all of us.’
‘I suppose,’ I said.
She wasn’t looking at me, but into space, the way she had sometimes done when she was little, as if she was trying to remember something, or say something that was on the tip of her tongue. Then she said, ‘At the risk of sounding absolutely crazy, I have a message for you.’
‘A message?’
‘Yeah. But you have to promise me not to freak out about it. I’m trying not to freak out myself. I mean, I don’t usually get any words. Or I haven’t before. It always used to just be a feeling. Anyway, I don’t think it’s anything to be scared of.’
‘Ellie, what are you talking about? Have you taken something?’
Ellie raised her eyebrows. ‘Don’t you even want to know who it was?’
Weirdly, though, I already did, even before she said it. It was my mum.
And then she gave me the message – Don’t worry, just do the right thing now – and I knew exactly what I had to do, whether the man I loved survived or not.
* * *
Before I could ask her anything Ava came back into the waiting room empty-handed and sat down next to me again.
Ellie said, ‘Nice cup of coffee?’
Ava frowned. ‘What?’
