‘And I’m telling you,’ Mum snapped, ‘that I’ll feel much better when you stop playing the amateur detective.
‘She’s got a blue blank.’
‘A what? What are you talking about?’
‘Blue for sad and blank for forgetting. Jack made it up. She’s mentioned it a few times. It describes how she feels when she gets upset and doesn’t know why. Do you think that’s what’s going on when she cries at night?’
‘Did you hear what I just said?’ Mum looked old and bitter as the words twisted out of her. ‘What she needs more than anything is reliable care. I thought I could trust you, Katie, and you left her. You lied to me, then rushed off on a date with some random boy and abandoned your responsibilities completely.’
‘I was gone a couple of hours. I didn’t know Chris would take her there, did I?’
‘Just imagine if Dad had been in! How mortifying that would have been.’
‘Has Mary been there before though? Did she ever visit or anything?’
‘Would you just stop with this, Katie! What’s got into you? I can’t be doing with this now.’
She knew something. She definitely did and there were only three ways to find out what. The first was to ask Mary, and given she was so unwell, that was a no-no. The second was to ask Dad. After all, Mary had mentioned his name at the care home.
‘Email him,’ Katie told Chris. They were in his room, away from Mum’s prying eyes. ‘Tell him to meet us.’
Chris was elated. He thought Katie was keeping her promise. It hurt to watch him write: Do you want to meet up? I’d really like it. He added a whole row of kisses and grinned like Christmas was coming when he pressed send.
It only took Dad fifteen minutes to send a reply saying how lovely it was to finally hear from Chris and how it had really made his day. He asked after Katie. He even asked after Mum. Then he asked if Mum knew that Chris had emailed? Because if she didn’t, Chris should probably tell her.
‘No way!’ Chris said.
Dad ended the email by saying that things had been tricky between him and Mum, but if Chris were to tell her that he was keen to meet up, perhaps she’d agree at last. I’d love it, he said. But then he went and ruined it by saying he was on holiday in France until August (which explained the empty house) so let’s do it after that.
‘That’s another fortnight,’ Katie said. ‘Who goes on holiday that long?’
‘People with babies,’ Chris said gloomily.
When had Katie or Chris ever been on a holiday that lasted that long? Never, that’s when. But Dad didn’t mind gallivanting off with his new family for weeks on end. It made Katie want to cry, and that surprised her, because it was usually Chris who had all the feelings about Dad. It also made her want to go running to the café and tell Simona how shitty everything had turned out, but if she did that, Simona was hardly going to dish up sympathy, was she? She’d have a go at Katie for never replying to texts (seven, now), for pushing her, for acting like a coward, for asking for things she didn’t really want (Katie groaned inwardly whenever she thought of the words, teach me) and for generally wanting the strawberries and not the shit.
There was only one place left to look for the secrets of the past and it was the most illicit. If anyone ever betrayed Katie the way she planned to betray Mum, she’d never forgive them. But what choice did she have? She wanted Mary back. She wanted her well. She didn’t want her having vascular incidents every five minutes because she couldn’t remember something she wanted to remember. Katie had given her back her memory of the café and Victory Avenue and it had helped. Mary had been content. Well, going to Dad’s house had ruined that contentment and Mary clearly needed to understand why.
The next day, when Mum went off to collect the GP’s letter and take it the council offices, Katie made Chris a milkshake and set him up with snacks and her laptop so he could watch YouTube videos in the kitchen. She switched the TV on for Mary and then locked the front door and put the key safely in her pocket. She went upstairs to the room she shared with Mum and shut the door.
Katie told herself she could stop at any moment as she opened Mum’s wardrobe. She took a photo of how everything was in case Mum had set a trap – the gaps between clothes on the hangers, the particular angles of the shoes, the boots on their sides, the zipped plastic bags of jumpers, protected from moths in a neat row.
Katie put her winter gloves on. She knew it was ridiculous, as if not touching anything with her bare hands would make a moral difference, but she did it anyway.
She pushed the hangers to one side and picked up Mum’s grey box by its handle. It wasn’t heavy. She put it on the bed, then worried it would leave a mark on the duvet, so put it on the floor.
‘Only in an emergency,’ Mum always said. Well, given that an emergency is an urgent and unexpected occasion that requires immediate attention, this definitely counted. Although Katie imagined Mum wouldn’t agree with her if she ever found out.
The key on the hook was hanging at an angle and the green thread was twisted. Katie took another photo. It was useful growing up with a watchful mother. Katie had clearly learned some of her skills. They’d both make excellent detectives.
Her hands were trembling as she fitted the key into the lock and turned it. She could still stop, but she didn’t. She watched herself keep going. She lifted the lid.
There were four suspension files, all buff brown, each marked with a sticker in Mum’s neat writing – Finance, Insurance, Documents, Arrangements. The writing made it worse, like she was about to look into Mum’s soul. If Katie went ahead with this, it would be, without doubt, the most terrible thing she’d ever done. This was Mum’s special box that she’d set up in the event of her death so that Katie would know what to do, how to handle things and manage her affairs. She was a cautious and careful mother who loved her children and Katie was about to betray her.
But Mary was downstairs with all her memories running out of her head like sand and Katie had to help. She had to keep guilt out of this. She nudged the file marked Finance tentatively open with a finger. She didn’t want to look at Mum’s bank statements, or take any money from the envelope marked ‘cash’, but she did need to check there was nothing relevant to Mary in each file. Knowing Mum, she’d hide the real secrets in the most unlikely place. But apart from her Post Office card and the savings book for the account Dad had set up (and Mum refused to use), there was nothing.
Insurance was the thickest file, but only because Mum clearly never threw any policy records away, keeping old booklets alongside the current ones for both home and car insurance. Katie flicked through them all in case Mum had hidden anything between pages. Nothing. At the back were her life insurance documents. Sum assured: £500,000. Term of cover: life. There followed a list of things Mum wasn’t insured to do, which began with mountaineering and potholing and went through loads of activities she’d never dream of doing anyway and ended with skydiving, base jumping and motorcycle racing. Right at the bottom it stated they also wouldn’t pay out if Mum died during a war or if she took an accidental drug overdose or committed suicide.
Katie wondered if Pat’s life had been insured and, if so, if her insurance company had refused to pay out. She’d never learned to swim, after all. Pretty silly to go in the sea …
The next file was marked Arrangements, which sounded odd – arrangements for what? Inside was a single typed sheet of paper, headed Funeral. The top half was a list of people Mum wanted contacted if she died. There were email addresses and phone numbers for Dad, people at work and organizations, such as the mortgage company and the bank. Christ, imagine phoning total strangers up and telling them Mum was dead. Imagine phoning Dad up! Would he come back from holiday? Would they have to go and live with him? The second half of the page was headed Plot and had the address and phone number of a funeral director, along with the fact – the gruesome and terrifying fact – that Mum had already paid for her funeral and gravestone and the plot was number seventy-eight
in the cemetery in North Bisham – ‘the plot can accommodate three, so depending on the circumstances of my death, there could be room for all of us.’
Katie sat back on her heels and laid her hand in a patch of sunlight that splashed the carpet. She tried not to think of how deep graves were – how dark, how terrible to have all that mud pressing down on you. She tried not to think of the circumstances that would require her to be buried with Mum and Chris – a car crash, a psychopath, a gas explosion. She tried not to think of the girls at school who would come to the funeral and witness that even in death Katie wasn’t allowed to separate from her mother. But the thoughts came crashing in anyway, along with a feeling of utter claustrophobia, like she couldn’t breathe, like the walls were pressing in and the windows had shrunk.
If they all died today, Katie would be buried in North Bisham for all eternity. Her bones entwined with Mum’s, the same soil plugging their mouths, the same earth weighing them down. How dare Mum make arrangements for Katie’s funeral when she wasn’t even dead! What if she wanted to be cremated? What if she wanted to be buried in a wood, somewhere beautiful? Why, even in death, did Mum get to make all the decisions?
Katie raced through the last file, but documents held nothing other than child benefit letters, medical cards, birth certificates and the divorce papers Dad sent months ago that Mum wouldn’t sign (let him take me to court). Dad had cited Mum’s unreasonable behaviour as cause for divorce, stating that she was emotionally absent from the marriage and frequently displayed a patronising and condescending attitude to him. Great! Another thing Katie didn’t need to know.
She felt furious as she spaced the files back along their runners. Her dad was prepared to say anything to get shot of them and her mum was planning everyone’s funeral. She felt sick. You can’t unknow things. You can’t shove information to the back of your mind and not have it hurt you. You can lie to yourself (she jumped me, honest!), you can refuse to think about it (just drop it, Katie, OK?). You can even get dementia and have memories fall away. But the really important ones are like blue blanks in your head – they have an emotional charge that never leaves. They spill and hurt and damage.
The files didn’t look right. Too neat? Too far apart from each other? She should’ve taken a photo of the interior of the box. She ran the files to the top end and squashed them together to see if that looked more familiar and that’s when she saw the book lying along the bottom of the box. It was grey, easy to miss, camouflaged. The story of Bluebeard flickered in her head – the last key, the last room, the secret that awaited his innocent wife behind a closed door.
Sod it. She swung the files to the other end and lifted it up, turned it over. It was marked Diary 1968 in gold letters. On the first page, Property of Patricia Dudley (née, Todd), Strictly Private.
Thirty-one
If Katie opened Pat’s diary, it would be a direct link to the time when Mum was back living with Pat after nearly two years of being in London with Mary. The year Mum turned fourteen. The year Pat drowned. It would be like sitting inside Pat’s head and swilling about in her thoughts. It’d be like eavesdropping on private conversations. Katie shivered, glad for once that she wasn’t in Mary’s room with all the ancestors looking down at her. They’d definitely disapprove, especially the old ladies in the wedding picture. Betrayal! Betrayal of the dead! they’d be yelling if they still had voices.
Well, they could sod off. The only dead person whose opinion mattered in relation to this diary was Pat, and given that she was the one who’d ruined everything between Mary and Mum in the first place, she’d just have to understand that Katie needed to betray her in the hope of restoring peace.
But, in a nod of respect to her great-aunt, Katie would set some rules. First, she’d only look at the diary for ten minutes. Second, she’d never look at it again after today – this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Lastly, she’d never use anything she discovered for her own gain, only to help settle the feud between Mum and Mary.
Rules set, she put her phone on timer and opened the diary.
January 1968 was, Pat noted, a time when the ‘character of England seemed to be changing’. No one seemed to have any morals and everything scared her. This resulted in her having some ‘very dark moods’. The war in Vietnam frightened her, as did the marches against it. She was fearful of decimalization (‘why do they have to change the money?’) and definitely against the abortion act (‘it encourages promiscuity’). ‘If things can’t innocently stay the same,’ she wrote, ‘then I want to be beyond it. That seems a peaceful option to me.’
It struck Katie that Pat had lived all her life (apart from the few years in Bisham with her ‘marriage of convenience husband’) in the same house with her father. She’d slept in the same bed, shopped in the same streets and undertaken the same daily domestic tasks for years. No changes at all. Even the little sister she’d brought up had been swapped for a very similar little girl. But the world outside the windows was changing and there was nothing Pat could do about it.
As Katie read the next pages, she was made aware of a woman who was clearly not enjoying life at all. There were floods, there was a power cut, the butcher only had ‘scrag ends’ and the grocer was selling bad apples. To top it all, a woman at the post office assumed Pat and Lionel were still together. ‘The horror of divorce never leaves,’ she wrote. ‘Years on and I still get nosy parkers stirring up the past.’
There was no reference to Mum at all. Perhaps Pat was too sad and self-absorbed to notice her? The only mention she got in the whole of January was, ‘Caroline watching too much rubbish on television,’ which resulted in Top of the Pops being switched off because the men were wearing makeup and the women were wearing ‘hardly a stitch’.
‘I thought I’d learned to live with “black moods”,’ Pat wrote a few days later, ‘but they are getting more frequent. They get in the way of seeing the good things. They hide the light. On a good day, it’s as if the curtains are fluttering and I can see it’s sunny outside and maybe I’ll go out later. I have a certain optimism. But on a bad day, it’s dark, dark, dark.’
This was followed by a series of scribbles, in black ink, like smudges of sadness. Then two weeks of blank pages. Then, ‘How do I go on? So many days in a row that I don’t get out of bed.’
Katie’s heart slammed. This woman clearly had depression! Was this the illness Mum mentioned? The illness that had put Pat in hospital? Is this what Mary meant when she said, Pat had ‘no joy in anything’?
Even the so-called ‘good days’ were boring. Pat might dare to go outside in the garden or even wander into town with her shopping trolley. But mostly she seemed to fritter away her time with pottering about and small domestic tasks. ‘Sewed a button.’ ‘Darned two pairs of Dad’s socks.’ ‘Wrong delivery from milkman, so left note of complaint.’ The surprise of reading the diary, Katie thought, was just how little Pat actually did.
‘Was I happy in the war?’ she wrote towards the end of February. ‘I don’t remember thinking it at the time, but there seemed such purpose to everything and now there isn’t.’
She made a list of books she’d like to pick up from the library, but never seemed to get them.
Pat went the whole of March without leaving the house, relying on Mum to get the shopping and make meals. Katie skimmed, looking for news of doctors or hospital check-ups or visits, but there were none.
It wasn’t until the beginning of April that anything changed. Pat’s father contacted Mary, requesting she visit. ‘He tells me I’m unwell again,’ Pat wrote, ‘but I tell him it’s just that Caroline looks at me with different eyes and I can hardly bear it.’
Different eyes? No, Pat – you’re ill again. Go to a doctor and get some medicine – stop holding your daughter responsible.
Here, on 15 April was the visit from Mary in full detail – she was half an hour late and ‘flaunted herself to the neighbours before even crossing the step’. Norman (still living next door apparently) h
ad a ‘crush’, despite the fact that Mary was dropped off by ‘her latest fancy man’ who managed to ‘look very married’ before zooming off in his Mercedes. Her outfit (‘a low-cut thing’) was ‘inappropriate’ and the gift she brought Caroline (tickets to a festival in August) was going to ‘cause a row’. Katie felt Pat’s envy of Mary in the pages – this sister who seemed to have everything and got away with so much.
‘Dad’s eyes lit up when she walked in. So much for her being “ruined”. It took him a full fifteen minutes to recall he’s “unable to forgive” her and leave the room. Caroline could barely stop grinning either. It won’t be long before they’re all best pals, mark my words. And where will that leave me?’
Mary’s suggestion that Caroline go back to London after her exams was dismissed outright by Pat. Later, on the same day she wrote, ‘Caroline assures me she has no desire to live in London again, but I don’t see her fitting in here. She has Mary’s ways about her now.’
Mary’s ways? Mum did? Only last week, she’d told Katie that living in London had been a nightmare, that she’d felt like a fish out of water with all the socializing and new people. But moving anywhere different changes you, makes you aware of other choices. Here was Mum, back in her birth town with a depressed mother and a dull routine, with antimacassars and ticking clocks. Mum was too dreary for Mary and too wild for Pat, and perhaps didn’t fit in anywhere any more?
Mary’s visit had clearly tripped some kind of switch, because Pat’s attention turned to Mum. ‘Asked Caroline to post a letter and she was gone forty minutes.’ ‘Secret laughter on the telephone.’ ‘Car stopped outside at tea time and I thought it was Mary. My heart plummeted to the ground.’
On 28 May she wrote, ‘Spent an afternoon raking through knitting patterns, but gave up. What’s the point of bothering when Caroline refuses to wear anything but the angora sweaters Mary brought from London?’
Unbecoming Page 27
