by Ali Mercer
‘Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, Rachel, but… what about custody? Are you happy with the way things are at the moment?’
Rachel slows down sharply for a crossing, and doesn’t speak again till they’re past it and on a narrow country road. It’s been a beautiful drive; the hills and fields spread to the horizon on either side of them, a landscape simplified by winter bareness.
‘I gave Becca up because that’s what was best for her,’ she says.
‘I suppose I, of all people, should understand that,’ Viv says softly. ‘And yet, you know, I do sometimes wonder about Aidan. Whether I could have kept him. Whether it would have been better if I had. Times have changed, and if he was a child now I think I would be given different advice. But that’s my story, not yours. I can see how much you love your daughter, and that you’re doing your best for her.’
Tears spring to Rachel’s eyes. But she can’t start bloody crying while she’s driving.
‘Please, Viv, don’t be nice to me. You’ll set me off.’
‘Oh, dear. I’m sorry. Sympathy can be lethal, I know. But it doesn’t do you any good in the long run to keep things all bottled up. I know that, too. Consider me all ears if you ever want to talk about it.’
‘I don’t think I can. If you knew you wouldn’t see me in the same way.’
‘Try me. I’ve lived in a small town for most of my life. There’s not much that shocks me.’
Rachel hesitates. What is it about sitting next to someone in a moving car that invites confidences? They’re in a safe little bubble, suspended in time between the visit to Aidan and the return to their separate lives. It could almost be possible for her to confess.
‘I suppose you could say it started when my mother died,’ she begins, and then stops.
Viv lets the pause linger until it becomes a silence, though not an uncomfortable one: she’s waiting to see if Rachel wants to say more, but isn’t going to push her. Finally Viv says, ‘It’s not a small thing, to lose a parent. Comes to us all, if we’re lucky enough to live that long: we all end up as orphans sooner or later, making do with our memories. Trying somehow to make sense of it all, because that’s what people do, even when there’s no sense to be found.’
Rachel breathes in, breathes out again. ‘I think that’s the bit I’m struggling with. I still don’t really understand what happened to me, and what I did. But I just don’t trust myself any more.’
‘Have you noticed how people tend to think they’ve got what they deserved? Whether you’re pleased with yourself or blame yourself, it’s easier to believe you had it coming. When Aidan was little, when it became obvious that he had some problems, I thought it must have been something I’d done. And I wasn’t the only one, actually.’
‘But in the end… you stopped feeling like that?’
‘It took a priest to tell me it wasn’t my fault,’ Viv says.
There is another little silence. Then Viv goes on: ‘Anyway, you obviously had an awful time of it last year, what with one thing and another. This year will be better, you’ll see. Good fortune can come as unexpectedly as disaster. Peppermint?’
‘Thank you.’
Viv drops a sweet into Rachel’s upheld hand and Rachel palms it to her mouth. Peppermints! Her mother had always carried them in her handbag, too. In every other way, though, Viv is nothing like her mother.
The landscape they’re driving through is changing, becoming steep and hilly with twists and turns and sharp drops; trees crowd out the view, which occasionally opens up as far as the horizon and reveals the deep valley they’re alongside. She fixes her eyes on the road ahead, and does her best to think of nothing else.
Eighteen
Rachel
Six months before the loss
The cardboard urn with the ashes in it was both heavier and lighter than you’d expect the remains of a life to be. It was a similar weight to a small child: easy to carry, but still substantial.
When they collected it at the crematorium, Mitch had asked, ‘Can I help with that?’ and she had given him the look that means, I can manage.
Because she could manage. And she had. The job, the commute, the household chores, the parenting… the panicky phone calls when something happened and Mitch wanted Rachel to tell him what to do, like when Becca had come out in a weird rash and Mitch didn’t know what it was. (Neither chicken pox nor meningitis but an allergic reaction to laundry detergent, as it turned out.) Or, more usually, when he couldn’t find something, like Becca’s clean PE shirt or school trip permission slip. Nine times out of ten it was nothing to worry about, but it terrified her when he rang her at work just the same.
And she would carry on managing. She had organised her mother’s funeral, and she would go on to sort out clearing and selling her mother’s house, the home she had grown up in. And good riddance. There would be some satisfaction in emptying the place of every last trace of what had gone on there, and turning it over to someone new.
They didn’t speak at all on the way home. Mitch, who was driving, had obviously decided she was in too dark a mood for him to risk an attempt at conversation. He was taking all this so personally. If she was angry he assumed it was with him, and she seemed to be incapable of explaining to him that she wasn’t, not in particular. Not more than usual. She wasn’t even angry, not really. It just came out that way.
She sat in the passenger seat, holding her mother’s mortal remains on her lap, and then carried the urn with care over the bridge to the cottage and up to their bedroom, where she placed it on the floor by her side of the bed.
Mitch followed her up. He pulled a face when he saw where she had put the urn to rest. An ‘ick’ face, the sort of face with which he would respond to anything physical that was slightly disgusting.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘You mean you expect me to sleep in the same room as your mother?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Mitch. No, I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do anything you didn’t want to.’
She picked up the urn again.
‘I’ll put it in a corner of the living room then, if that’s all right with you. Oh, and I’ll be sleeping downstairs tonight,’ she said, and barged past him on her way out.
Next morning she was up at five, even earlier than usual, tidying away her bedding because the last thing she needed, on top of everything else, was for Becca to see it and start asking questions and worrying that her parents were about to split.
She made coffee, dressed in the skirt and blouse she’d put out the night before, managed something to eat. It was going to be a long day. Frank, who had always been the most sympathetic boss you could ask for, had urged her to take some more time off. But the fact was, they needed her there. Also, if she was really honest, she wanted to go back to work. She wanted to be busy, to be rushed off her feet; to be stressed rather than sad. It was the only thing that was going to make her feel like herself again.
Mitch knew that, of course. He knew her better than anyone, always had.
‘Just don’t pretend this isn’t what you want,’ he had said to her years ago, just after the end of her maternity leave, early one morning when she was about to dash out of their flat in London to catch the train to work. She had literally left him holding the baby. The crying baby. Becca had been just ten months old, and oh Lord, she could cry like no other child. It was quite unbelievable the volume and pitch that could come out of a person who was otherwise so small and helpless.
Right now, though, Mitch and Becca were both still soundly sleeping.
Nothing much disturbed Mitch’s sleep. He had that extraordinary male gift of being able to not worry about things. Maybe it wasn’t exclusively masculine, but it seemed that way. He could leave the kitchen in a mess, the ironing undone. He didn’t see the dust – somehow he could filter it out, it didn’t bother him. He called this not sweating the small stuff.
If you want me to do this, Rachel, if you want me to hold the fort and keep the home fires burning, you
have to let me do it my way.
And he had a point. She had to admit it. She had no right to try and tell him what to do.
Sometimes he accused her of being controlling. He knew how much that hurt her, and he knew why. But maybe it was true.
Her reflection in the bathroom mirror was a bit of a shock – pale, tired, gaunt. She slapped on make-up to compensate: foundation, blusher, but no mascara, in case she felt the need to retreat to the loos at some point and cry. Expensive foundation. She still couldn’t quite believe how much she had spent on it. Neither would Mitch if he knew. But she had to try something; she needed to look like her usual self at work.
She hadn’t wept yet. She knew Mitch thought that was weird of her: he had cried buckets at his dad’s funeral, and even more when his mother got married again and completed the process, which had started long ago when he got involved with Rachel, of washing her hands of him.
My mother was never bothered about being a grandmother to Becca, he had said to her. And yours wasn’t really up to it, was she?
Joanie Steele was beyond being anything to anybody now.
Rachel picked up the urn and carried it through the house to the kitchen, where she set it down to unlock the back door and then took it out to the garden. It was light, but only just; the sun was low in the sky and the air was still very cool. The garden looked unfamiliar, as if it was not quite hers but still belonged to the creatures of the night: the slugs and snails, the hedgehog, the local cats on the prowl, the bat and the moths.
When the hospital rang to tell her the news about her mother the cherry tree had been picture perfect, covered in great pink ice-creamy clumps of blossom. Now it was past its best. Within another couple of days the grass would be carpeted with browning petals. The hops were beginning to grow, though, winding up the side of Mitch’s studio, and the rose bushes were covered with buds.
She prised the lid off the urn and set it aside. Then she walked over to the border and began to shake out her mother’s ashes.
A thick, steady stream whooshed out, dusting the peonies, coating the feverfew and the St John’s wort and the still-leafless branches of the jasmine. It was grey and fine and heavy, and its flow was steady and unstoppable, like a sand-timer: no going back now. It made Rachel think of volcanic dust, of molten rock and dark clouds emerging from volcanoes and the petrified bodies at Pompeii, caught and covered before they could flee.
A breeze blew the dust into her hair and eyes; she could taste it on her tongue. The flow of ash was thinner now, dwindling to a slender ribbon making its way from the vessel in her hands to the earth. She thought of the line of blood that had once connected her to the woman whose remains she had just dispersed, how her mother would have felt her move the same way she in turn had felt Becca move inside her.
She allowed the final trickle to fall, obscuring the high shine of the glossy green leaves of the laurel bush.
Mitch said, ‘Rachel… what are you doing?’
He was in his dressing-gown and old slippers and pyjamas; his hair was wild and his face was still puffy from sleep. He was standing on the patio as if hesitating to venture further, like a child who had been woken by his parents arguing and had come out to stand on the stairs, but didn’t quite dare to intervene.
Mitch said, ‘You scattered her ashes here? Don’t you think we should have talked about this? I mean, is this even legal?’
A very clear picture of her mother came back to Rachel: down on her knees, frightened, picking up shards of broken glass.
‘I had to do something for her,’ she said. ‘I did little enough to help her while she was still alive. This garden is one of my favourite places in the world. I couldn’t think of anywhere better for her to be at peace.’
She picked up the lid and dropped it and the urn into the bin. Mitch followed her into the house. She soaped her hands at the kitchen sink. There was a pain in her midriff that was like a stitch. She wanted to cry – she wanted to howl – but it was too shocking for that. Her mum had been alive and now was ash in the garden: there was no way to make sense of it.
Mitch put his hand on her shoulder: she shrugged it off.
‘You did try to help her,’ Mitch said.
‘Not hard enough.’
Mitch sighed. ‘I just don’t know how Becca’s going to feel about this.’
‘How I’m going to feel about what?’ Becca asked. She was standing in the doorway in her pyjamas, rubbing her eyes.
Rachel rinsed her hands and dried them. ‘I just scattered your grandmother’s ashes in the garden,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ Becca said. ‘Can I see?’
‘I don’t think you should,’ Mitch said. He reached for the keys and locked the back door.
Rachel found she couldn’t breathe. Her husband and child were looking at her as if she frightened them.
‘I have to get to work,’ she said, and went off to collect her things and leave the house.
Nineteen
Rachel has taken up running. Not because it’s supposed to keep depression at bay – in her experience, you want the little blue and yellow pills for that – but because she has recovered sufficiently for it to be a possibility. There had been a time when it had taken every bit of energy and willpower she had to stay alive, or at least, to keep on going through the motions: getting up, getting dressed, eating, going to sleep. Embarking on a programme of regular exercise would have been beyond her. But suddenly, as the darkness of winter has begun to lift, the urge to push herself a little has come back.
She heads out as soon as she gets back from work, and when she returns to the bedsit she hears her phone ringing inside.
Her key won’t turn in the lock; she fumbles with it and flings herself across the room to grab it from the table.
There’s only one person it could be, and only one person it could be about.
ICE MITCH. She still has him stored as her ‘In Case of Emergency’ number.
A grouchy, achingly familiar voice says, ‘Are you all right? You sound as if you’re about to have a heart attack.’
‘I’m fine,’ she says, trying to steady her breathing. ‘I’ve been out for a run. Is Becca OK?’
‘Yes and no,’ Mitch says.
She settles down at the little table.
‘What’s up?’ Her breathing is starting to slow now, though her heart is racing as if she were still running.
‘I got a phone call from the school this morning.’
‘And?’
‘Becca’s class teacher is worried about how she’s doing. There’s been a definite slacking off, she says. Homework not done on time, lack of attention in class, that kind of thing. Plus one really blatant example of copying Amelia Chadstone.’
‘Copying? That doesn’t sound like Becca. How did they find out about that?’
‘It was a piece of maths homework, and they’d made exactly the same mistakes.’
‘Maybe Amelia copied off Becca?’
‘Come on, Rachel. Amelia’s top of the class in pretty much everything, apparently. And Becca has always struggled with her maths.’
‘If Amelia’s so clever, how come she made mistakes?’
There is a pause. ‘Rachel,’ Mitch says. ‘We’ve talked about this before. You mustn’t let what happened back in the autumn colour your judgement. I know it’s awkward for you that the girls are friends. But they are.’
‘OK, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m not handling this very well. It’s just come as a bit of a shock. I mean, I thought Becca was doing fine. It’s a very academic school, and she might not be top of the class but she’s always seemed to be coping. And she’s really come into her own in the extracurricular stuff. She was brilliant in Oliver!’
‘Well, yes, but that’s all done with now, and her studies are what really count.’
‘How can you say that? You’re an artist.’
Another pause. ‘Barely. Most of the time I copy Old Masters and paint reproductions of people’s photos of their pets.
And I’ve never made much money from it, as you know. The last thing I want is for Becca to turn out like me. Anyway, they want us to come in for a meeting. Together. They’re going to get in touch with you as well, but I thought I’d give you a heads-up first.’
There is a pause while Rachel absorbs this.
‘I don’t think it’s that serious yet,’ Mitch adds. ‘It’s just that they like to nip problems in the bud if they can. They don’t want her going into some kind of downward spiral. I mean, I can see why they might be concerned. I just don’t want them to treat this like it’s happened because Becca’s just being lazy or something. The poor kid’s had a lot to cope with. If things have gone off the boil a bit academically, sure, we need to get her back on track, but I don’t think they should blame her for it.’
Because it’s my fault. Rachel pauses, takes a deep breath. She says, ‘Have you spoken to Becca about all this?’
‘I’ve tried. I don’t think she wants to talk about it. And she’s still refusing to engage with the school counselling services. I think we just need to go in and talk to the school and hear what they have to say. Put on a bit of a united front. For Becca’s sake. But for this to work, Rachel, I need to know that you can handle it. You can’t go in there and pick a fight with me, or make some kind of scene or start throwing wild accusations around.’
Another pause. Rachel moves her left hand, the one that isn’t holding the phone, to her right wrist and begins to pinch. She feels as if she’s being forced to swallow something. A huge, unpalatable, toxic lump: guilt, grief, regret… and, yes, anger – anger that she can’t afford to show. Or even allow herself to feel.
Somehow, she forces it all down.
‘OK,’ she says.
‘Good,’ Mitch says. ‘I expect they’ll suggest a couple of possible times for the meeting. We can sort that out by email. Oh, and Rachel…?’
