Something to Tell You

by Lucy Diamond

  A letter? For me? Of course she had opened it at once, photos forgotten, tearing through the envelope with a bubble of joy swelling in her chest. One last surprise from her mother, one final letter that she hadn’t been expecting! What a gift, what a blessing, she had thought, delighted. But then of course she had read those opening warning sentences and had reared back immediately, joy replaced by apprehension, her heart giving a hard, worried gallop. She had looked away, troubled, but felt her attention dragged back, like a driver compelled to stare at a traffic pile-up on the other side of the motorway. Don’t want to look. Want to see. Don’t want to know. But how bad is it?

  She had sat there, the letter in her lap, and gazed up in anguish at the bedroom window as if seeking guidance. You were right the first time, Mum: I didn’t want to know. I was happy with you, and then with you and Gareth, and that was enough for me.

  But how could anyone ignore the very last letter from their mother? How could anyone fail to be bewitched by the chance to see that sloping handwriting one last time, hear the words spoken in her mum’s own voice? Her eyes fell helplessly down to the paper again and she read on, knowing that to do so would mean there’d be no turning back:

  Well, he was handsome and I was young – prettier then, too! – and he was kind and funny and . . . Oh, you know. That old chestnut: I fell for him. Yes, I knew he was married. Does that make me a bad person? Probably, Frank, but it was too late by then. And besides, how can it have been a bad decision, when you were the delightful consequences of our affair?!

  He doesn’t know about you, I’m afraid. He already had four children and, when I discovered I was pregnant, I knew he wasn’t about to leave them and his wife for me. It was the end of term and my job at the school had come to an end, so I did a flit before things got even more complicated. I’ve never seen him since.

  Sod it, I thought. I can manage alone. I wanted you, see – I wanted you very much. ‘We’ll be all right,’ I said to myself (and you), hitching a ride back to London with my last pay packet rustling in my pocket. I spent the money on the most beautiful white-painted cot for you and a new winter coat for me, and then turned up on your grandma’s doorstep, asking if she’d help me out. And we did manage, didn’t we? We never had much to spare, but you never went without. You certainly never went without my love, Frankie, I hope you always felt it around you, like your very own strong, shining force-field, because I did my best to surround you with it every single day.

  Anyway, my darling, his name is Harry Mortimer and he lives just outside York. He may have moved on long ago, he may be dead, he may be onto his seventeenth wife by now, who knows, but if you did have an inkling to meet him, then his address is 12 Penny Street in Bishopthorpe, which is about five miles out of the city. Even if he’s gone, those four kids of his will be grown-up – your sort of age! – so you could meet them. Siblings at last! You always wanted a brother or a sister, didn’t you? I’m sorry I couldn’t give you one myself.

  I’m sorry, too, if all this is shocking. I’m sure it is. I can picture you reading it, becoming very still as you try to digest everything, and my heart breaks a bit that I’m not there to put an arm around you, to apologize for the body-blow this must feel like. You know I would rather have told you myself, in person, just the two of us having one of our good old chinwags. I’m sorry if you hate me for telling you like this. It’s just I thought: I can’t die and not say anything. I can’t pop my clogs and leave her with nothing; no clue, not so much as a name. So now you know. You do look like him, by the way. Better-looking, obviously – but that’s thanks to me.

  Favourite girl, loveliest person, please know that this was written in love. And whenever you read this, I’ll be blowing kisses from afar, wishing you all the best things and all the happiness in the world.

  Love Mum x

  One letter, one single sheet of paper, and it had totally pulled the rug out from under Frankie’s feet. She’d felt angry at first – tricked into being told something she had insisted all along that she didn’t want to know. Then she’d felt sad, bereft for the loss of her beloved mother, whose voice and humour and love rang so clear and true through the handwritten words. Finally – eventually – she had felt maddened with curiosity, overwhelmed by the revelations. Those four half-siblings, for one thing. The fact that she looked like her father. Even, stupidly, the fact that she knew his name!

  One letter, and it had been as explosive as a stick of dynamite. How could she write to this Harry Mortimer bloke, she had thought at the time, and her own letter not feel like a similar weapon? Hence the whole doomed northern road-trip, which had only served to convince her that a letter probably would have been a better introduction, after all. She would try again, she had decided now, make a better fist of things this time, apologize if she’d wrecked his party. And if he didn’t respond, then so be it. At least she would have given it a go.

  And yet each time she set out to write the perfect letter, she found it impossible to find the right tone, worrying about the way she was presenting herself. She wanted to give a good first impression – second impression, rather – but it wasn’t easy. Her first attempt was too stiff and defensive. The next try tipped the balance the other way and was apologetic and timid. The third was over-friendly, sharing far too much detail about her life. The fourth sounded desperate – pleading almost. The fifth was a cringeworthy mixture of all its predecessors. In the end, she chucked the pen and paper to one side in defeat. The perfect letter didn’t exist, simple as that.

  It wasn’t only her poor writing skills that were stressing her out. Ever since the unpleasant and unplanned-for visit of Julia the previous Thursday, a subdued sort of atmosphere had settled upon the flat, as if they were all biding their time, waiting for the next dramatic episode to unfold. Frankie felt helpless in the face of the other woman – and in the eyes of the law, too. Previously she’d nursed a private hope that in time she might be able to adopt Fergus as her own child, or at least apply for parental responsibility, but she and Craig had only been together three years; she hadn’t wanted to jump the gun by broaching the subject too soon. Now she wished she’d been a bit more proactive because, as things stood, Julia held a lot more power than she did in the situation.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Craig assured her. ‘All that guff she was spouting about a mother’s rights being sacred . . . it’s not really like that any more. Whatever they told her at the Citizens Advice place – if she even went in there – I bet she didn’t give them the full story. Because nobody in their right mind would think her rights to Fergus outweighed mine.’

  ‘We should probably give her a chance, though,’ Frankie ventured reluctantly in reply. Not because she particularly liked Julia or anything, but because this seemed to her the only decent course of action. Julia had given birth to Fergus after all; he had grown inside her body. Not to mention the fact that Julia’s abandonment of motherhood had been Frankie’s joyful gain. She owed her one, really.

  ‘It won’t be good for Fergus,’ Craig had said flatly. ‘Julia’s chaotic, all over the place. She doesn’t even know him.’

  ‘But she did say she felt better,’ Frankie had reminded him, to which he merely snorted.

  ‘She’s all talk,’ he’d muttered. ‘This will be a whim, you wait. I know her, remember.’

  That wasn’t much consolation. Because Frankie didn’t know her, and didn’t know what she was capable of, either. And so, even though she wanted to be fair to Julia and not completely write her off, Frankie found herself sticking close to Fergus when he went to his friend Preena’s soft-play party at the weekend. Usually she’d nurse a coffee in a nearby café, far from the seething ball-pit of frenzied small children – but not today. ‘The things we mums put up with, eh?’ one of the other women had laughed to her, when the two of them ended up scrambling through a shiny red tunnel to haul out a stuck toddler, and the words had stabbed at Frankie like daggers. If Julia took Fergus, Frankie wouldn’t be a mum any more, she r
ealized bleakly. This whole world would become closed to her overnight, the metal shutters abruptly dropping, sealing her off. The thought was unbearable. Fergus had been like the most wonderful gift, the bonus package that came with Craig. She had fallen in love with them both at the same time, and had adored learning how to be Fergus’s mummy. ‘Do you think you two might have a kid together one day? Another kid, I mean?’ friends had asked now and then, and Frankie always felt torn when it came to answering. Yes, of course she’d love to have a baby with Craig – but then she already adored Fergus so absolutely. Was there even room in her heart for anyone else?

  She had taken it for granted that he would forever be her child and she his mummy, that was the thing. But she wasn’t really his mummy, was she? She had been acting the part all this time. And now she was in danger of having Fergus – and motherhood – snatched away from under her nose.

  ‘Aren’t we the lucky ones?’ she replied to the mum who’d spoken to her, forcing a laugh. Inside, though, she felt like clutching at Fergus and never letting him go. Sometimes you didn’t know how lucky you’d been until you were in danger of losing it all.

  Monday came around and, having dropped Fergus at playgroup first thing, Frankie was able to turn her thoughts to the work she had planned for the next few hours. She’d been in touch with a possible new client, the head of art at a decent-sized greetings-card company, and had been asked to pitch ideas for new designs. She was currently mulling over the concept of a range of cards featuring a family of dragons, and had been making quick doodles in her notebook over the weekend: of scaly tails and rounded ribbed bellies, magnificent wings and fiery nostrils. Everyone loved dragons, right? Especially the fat, funny ones of her imaginings. Now she needed to translate her thoughts into some preliminary sketches, bold and bright, in the hope that the client would be keen.

  The postman must have called while she was out, because there was an envelope on the mat, addressed to Craig. There was something about the thickness of it, the classy starched feel of the paper, that made her glance at it again as she walked through to the kitchen. The postmark bore a north-London code and there was a company name she didn’t recognize franked alongside: Hargreaves and Winter. It sounded like a law firm, she thought worriedly, dropping the letter down by Craig. ‘One for you,’ she said.

  He was already at the table, frowning at his laptop as he tussled with the opening sentences of a book review for the newspaper’s Culture section. ‘Ta,’ he mumbled, considering his screen for a moment and then resuming typing again, eyes narrowed.

  Frankie hesitated. Her big sketchpad and coloured pencils were calling her, but she couldn’t help flicking another glance at that envelope, about which she suddenly had a bad feeling. ‘Maybe you should open that,’ she said. ‘It looks important. I can’t help worrying—’ She broke off, not wanting to tempt fate by saying the words out loud. She was probably over-thinking things, leaping to the wrong conclusion, after all. Wasn’t she?

  Craig glanced across at her in surprise, but did as she suggested, ripping open the seal and unfolding the paper inside. Scanning the contents was enough to prompt a sharp intake of breath. ‘I don’t bloody think so,’ he said, his face darkening. He tossed the letter across to her so that she could read it, and made a growling noise in his throat. ‘Shit. I might have guessed she’d try a stunt like this.’

  Frankie’s intuition had been right. The letter was from a solicitor’s office, brief and to the point: due to a change of circumstances, their client, Ms Julia Athanas, was seeking a child arrangement order regarding living arrangements for her son, Fergus Jacobs, initially as shared care, with a view to eventually having him on a full-time basis. They hoped Mr Jacobs would be amenable to this, otherwise they would advise mediation sessions to resolve the situation.

  The words danced about mockingly on the page and Frankie heard herself give a moan of pain, as if someone had physically hurt her. ‘Living arrangements,’ she read aloud in dismay. Her arms twitched uselessly, for wanting to hug Fergus’s squirming warm body right then and there, to nuzzle her face into his curly hair and breathe in his delightful goodness. Hadn’t she known? Hadn’t she been right to fear this?

  ‘She wants to have him,’ said Craig grimly. ‘Have him, when he doesn’t even know her. Well, over my dead body. That’s not going to happen.’

  Frankie’s heart was thumping, hard and painful in her ribs, at the terrible, unbearable prospect of Fergus not living with them any more. Of not tucking him into bed at night, of not gazing at his beautiful sleeping face, of not hearing his chuckles and songs and train noises . . . oh my God. No. It was too awful to think about. ‘They can’t . . . I mean, nobody could think that was best for Fergus,’ she said, aghast. ‘He lives here, with us. We’re his family!’

  It all came back to family, she thought numbly, as Craig strode around, denouncing his ex. Did the family you belonged to have to be tied together with blood and genetics, in order to have merit? Because this little family of three, which she had come to be a part of, had been built through love – and yet it seemed horribly precarious all of a sudden. Having grown up an only child, with her mum now dead and her stepfather an expat, Craig and Fergus were the only family Frankie had, unless you counted Harry Mortimer and his clan, that was, which she didn’t. It seemed ridiculous that technically, biologically, Harry and those other four children of his could be deemed more of a family to Frankie than the two people she adored most in the world.

  ‘We will fight for him,’ Craig was saying, jaw clenched. ‘We will take this all the way, if we have to. And she will not win. Absolutely no way. Julia will not take him from us.’

  ‘She will not,’ Frankie agreed, wishing she could feel quite so sure.

  Bunny turned off the engine and unclipped her seatbelt, trying to dredge up some energy after the long drive. Back at the weekend, when it looked as if they might have to put Harry up for another week, she’d been glad that Margaret, the SlimmerYou PR woman, had talked her into coming all the way down to Gloucestershire for this talk – a chance to get away on her own for an evening, she’d thought. Harry was a very nice man, of course, and he was, understandably, in a state over the falling-out with Jeanie, but . . . Well, without wanting to sound mean, he was quite irritating to live with. He complained about her dinners: not enough meat, too few potatoes, he was suspicious of couscous and avocado (‘They didn’t have them in my day’) and couldn’t cope with anything spicy. He never thought to pick up after himself or do the washing up. Plus he sometimes treated Bunny like an idiot – advising her on the upkeep of the flowerbeds in the tiny back garden, and insisting on attempting to explain the rules of cricket to her, several times over, when the simple fact of the matter was: she really did not care.

  Bunny was not an idiot. Moreover she was allergic to anyone, particularly men, making assumptions about her and treating her as if she was. Her first husband had been domineering and a bully, and look how that had turned out.

  Still, she had kept her temper, she had bitten her tongue, she had listened patiently to Harry every time he bored on about leg before wicket and the length of an innings, reminding herself that he was probably missing Jeanie very badly and that perhaps he thought he was redeeming himself in some way by being helpful. But now – hallelujah – he had moved on to stay with John and Robyn, so he wasn’t Bunny’s problem any more. In fact, now that he’d packed up his bag and left them, she half-wished she hadn’t agreed to schlep all the way down here to this small Cotswold town, when she’d far rather be cocooned with Dave at home, enjoying the peace and quiet.

  ‘I know you didn’t want to go further south than Birmingham, but the organizer has offered to bring three groups together for the occasion, and they’re willing to pay a bit extra to have you visit,’ Margaret had wheedled. ‘Plus you were born round there, weren’t you? Well, then – they love a local success story. Perfect!’

  ‘Ahh,’ Bunny had replied apprehensively. ‘The thing is, I’d
rather not advertise the fact that I was born round there, to be honest. Just because . . .’ She hesitated, remembering how the local newspapers had printed pictures of her, retelling her story with unnecessary salacious details. ‘Because of . . . privacy issues.’

  ‘But you’ll do it?’ Margaret had pushed. ‘I can say yes to them?’

  Margaret wasn’t an easy person to argue with and so, after some toing and froing, Bunny had eventually caved in and said, ‘Okay, just this once.’ But that was it. She would sneak back into the county for one single night, she had decided, do her thing and then slink away again, as if she’d never been there at all. Having deliberately cut her ties with the area, the last thing she wanted was to find herself getting tangled up in any loose threads now.

  But in the meantime here she was, parked up outside a secondary school where the slimmers’ meeting was due to take place, a mere fifteen miles down the road from where she’d spent the most miserable, frightening years of her life. It was a part of her past that she deliberately tried to shut down whenever her mind flickered in that direction, and now that she was here, so close to the area, she felt besieged by ambushes of memory that kept bursting through. The small terraced house. The smell of her ex-husband’s aftershave. The moment she’d woken up in hospital, bewildered and disorientated . . .