by Lynne Lee
I turned to Dillon now. ‘Tell you what,’ I said, ‘it’s getting late, and getting dark. Time to head back, I think. Shall we do a bit of fartlek?’
Which made him giggle, which immediately reclaimed the space for me. For us. And as we ran-walked and ran-walked our way back towards the car, still giggling, I realised that being back here would require lots of this kind of stuff, of actively smothering the bad memories under a quilt of happy new ones. Dampening down the feeling – already rising, because of Mum, and growing exponentially since my encounter with Aidan Kennedy – that we’d made a mistake of colossal proportions in returning here.
But perhaps it had been inevitable. That I’d end up caring for Mum had always been a given, even before the ink dried on their decree absolute, before Dad had blithely assumed it was a given, and long before Hope’s death made it a certainty. That sense of responsibility had begun dogging me early. Not least because, even before I left for uni, I knew the foundations of what was left of our family were way beyond any sort of remedial underpinning, despite my father’s highly convenient faith in the idea of our mother ‘bouncing back’. Too much said, too much unsaid, too many seams of recrimination and ill feeling having been gouged out of the already unstable bedrock. To create a borehole – suggest, say, that some ‘home truths’ be aired, perhaps – would be to risk an explosion of dark matter that, with my own life ahead of me, and all that delicious distance soon to be between us, I had little motivation to wade through.
But while I doggedly ploughed my dry, academic furrow, seeking to replace chaos with order by escaping to university, Hope, made of different stuff, thrashed around with her emotional machete, finding order in creating more chaos. At least, that’s how it seemed, particularly once I had finally left. She never seemed more at peace than when she’d laid waste to something, be it a plan, a commitment, a previously happy gathering, my Mother’s Day (the last being her particular favourite). Her meltdowns always felt less like impulsive explosions and more like premeditated therapeutic bloodletting. (Which was perhaps why she and Aidan were so well-suited.)
All of which ensured that my father’s favourite child (a construct built on fact; he’d been vociferously opposed to having a second) ended up being my mother’s favourite too, simply by virtue of the fact that I gave her no trouble, and she could rely on me to do the ironing and the weekly food shop. Grace is so good, she would trill to any neighbour who’d sighted me in Tesco. I really don’t know how I’d cope without her. She’s my rock, bless her. I was set up to become her carer from a very early age.
I hated it. It felt like a curse to be so blessed. An unsolicited ‘gift’ (what sane child would want to carry such a burden?), being the favoured child had so many strings attached to it that I felt constantly tied up in knots. There was the expectation that I would scrabble up the pedestal my parents had designed for me, and the constant compulsion to tell Hope that the evidence of her own eyes actually wasn’t – that black was, in fact, white. There’s only so many times you can hear ‘it’s alright for you, you’re the favourite’ before the poison in your chalice becomes apparent. Hope never really hated me – she couldn’t afford the luxury, because I was the only chunk of masonry she had to lean against – but resentment in a family can be a powerful force. Perhaps, if she’d lived, she’d have worked through her demons. Had some counselling, taken up yoga, achieved some kind of acceptance, indulged her inspirational-quote poster quotient to the max and actually come to believe the things they told her.
But she died, so our roles became forever preserved in aspic, the price of my unwanted gift of ‘favourite’ status being a sense of duty I’d had to haul around with me ever since.
And with adulthood and marriage came a further revelation. That while Hope’s blood still ran hot in all parent-related matters, I was done with going over it; the point had already come when it was obvious, at least to me, that Mum would never climb back down from her safe house on the moral high ground. I’m not sure she even wanted to. Being a bitter, abandoned woman who’d been callously cast aside for a younger model was like an old coat in which she’d become way, way too comfortable – so to bring candour into any conversation about our childhood unhappiness, would, I knew, send her into such a funk of self-flagellation that the fallout would be to nobody’s benefit.
So we maintained a mutually beneficial disinclination to exhume the truth – and even more so after Hope died. And, since we saw little of one another (my long hours, the distance, Mum’s increasing disinclination to leave Brighton), that state of affairs worked for both of us. At least till the spectre of dementia took solid form.
One of my early conversations with Matt around the move – around the ‘what to do about Mum’ question, essentially – quickly escalated into row territory, as by that time they were mostly bound to do. Yes, leave London – Matt was fully on board with that notion, not least because, as a doctor, I was geographically hobbled there. To continue to work in a central London hospital would, of necessity, mean raising our family in central London too. But could I not accept his argument that we had other, better, options? Why return to Brighton, scene of so many emotional traumas? To a place where he’d never felt at home, unsurprisingly (what home?), and which held so much potential for further grief?
With his own family uncomplicated, intact, and far distant up in Scotland, he couldn’t get his head around my belief that I had to. I owed Mum nothing – he was frank about telling me that, often. So he had little patience with my endless droning about duty.
He was right, but also wrong, because I wasn’t being selfless. It was, and always would be, about what was best for me. Because it turned out that I could no more free myself of demons than Hope had been able to. To remain far from my mother while her brain and body withered, would, I knew, bring about a sense of guilt so pervasive that it would begin to eat away at me too. I needed to go back in order to keep moving forward. I could no more abandon her – set up carers, throw money at it, keep my physical distance – than she could ever (while she still had the cognition to do so) reassure me in the way that most parents ultimately realise they must: that, absolved from any guilt or blame or shame, or, indeed, duty, I should go live my life where I chose.
And besides, with Aidan long gone, and relations with Norma severed, the Kennedys, so went my reasoning, were history. I had put everything to do with them in a metaphorical memory box, just like the one Hope had so painstakingly made for Dillon, but with a padlock and long-ago thrown-away key. They’d been part of Hope’s life, not ours. They were her Horrible History. They were not part of our or Dillon’s lives now, nor ever would be. And if I couldn’t quite airbrush them out of my head space, I had put sufficient work in to keep them contained; Aidan still as Aidan – I knew his type, they never changed much – but Norma, despite all the rancour, the deceit, and all the hateful things she’d said to me, as a little old lady who, if I bumped into her in the street, I should, and probably still would feel sorry for.
Except I didn’t. Because the box had been opened.
Chapter 8
Hope’s funeral had been a minutely choreographed affair. Just a couple of weeks before her sudden death (and many weeks before anyone had anticipated attending it) she had given me a memory stick she insisted I must listen to, because it contained detailed instructions about her funeral. How she should be dressed, what we should read, what we should listen to, what we should wear, and given to me on the basis that, unlike Mum, I would do as I was told. By this time, she was reading me well.
Difficult to hear (she was lying in the mortuary when I had no choice but to get it out and listen to it), it was harder still to put her plans into action, since, like a circus ringmaster during America’s Great Depression, she had seemed determined to orchestrate a spectacle.
She’d picked the natural burial site not long after her terminal diagnosis, a complex of nascent woodland and wildflower meadows nestling in the lee of the South Downs. And the hu
manist ceremony was always a given, since another thing Hope didn’t ‘do’ by this time was ‘f***ing deities’. She was adamant – she was simply returning to the earth from which she’d come. And would, eventually, become stardust herself. All that would remain would be the plaque above her – English oak, nothing fancy – which was to read ‘Hope Faulkner’, plus her dates, plus ‘Dillon’s Mummy’. One of many reasons, hard though it was to square it with my conscience, why I no longer took Dillon there.
But brain tumours, by their nature, can interfere with personality, and by the time she’d recorded all her must-haves and must-dos, Hope’s wishes for her funeral had clearly mutated into the al fresco summer wedding she’d always dreamed of having, but which both Aidan and her cancer had denied her. Now, in death, it seemed, she could finally be the bride.
The sun had shone, if coldly, on that cloudless winter Wednesday, and the grass, stiff and frosted as we gathered at her graveside, sparkled prettily as it crunched beneath our ridiculous heels, lending the funeral a fairy-tale quality. But of all the arresting montages still available to my mind’s eye, it was the vision of Norma with Dillon, the closeness of that bond, that was among the most powerful of my memories.
As had been agreed, the day after Hope died we collected him from my mother’s and took him back home to London, and did our best to adjust, in a million tiny ways, to the enormity of what we’d committed to take on. Which was a lot. Daniel was just three then, Dillon not quite twenty months, and we both had demanding full-time jobs. But how could we not? If something had happened to us, wouldn’t we have wanted the same security for Daniel?
Though not with Hope. Not while she stayed with Aidan. If the unthinkable happened, Daniel would be spirited far away. To live with Matt’s sister and her husband and their adopted twin daughters in Edinburgh, where they promised us they would love him as their own.
For Hope, when it came to it, things were very different. There was only one place for Dillon to be after her death, and that was with us. End of. Despite him having a father (if, by now, an absentee, and also manifestly unfit one) and a doting paternal grandmother, who was still very much around for him, during those awful final months Hope made a watertight case – an offer we, or at least I, could not refuse.
Which left Matt boxed into a terrible corner. To bring up my sister’s child as his own son was an ask of momentous proportions. Yet once it had become obvious that I had no choice, what choice did he have?
We had talked about it, endlessly, exhaustively. Mainly it was a question of talking ourselves into it, as people faced with such a high-stakes fait accompli have to do. It was obviously going to be challenging, because we both understood that the kind of love you automatically feel for your own child cannot just be magicked from thin air. But we had faith that we could will that kind of love into being; it was only a question of degrees, after all. This wasn’t some stranger’s child. This was our nephew. So I chased all my misgivings away.
And there was also the question of us. What ‘us’ would there be if Matt refused to sign up, given that I knew I had to, heart and soul? Of all the things I could hate Aidan Kennedy for, I despised him most for creating that hairline crack in our marriage, because it could so easily have become a gaping void.
So we practised the art of ruthless optimism. Yes, it would be strange and stressful in the short term, not least because Dillon barely knew us. We lived in London and they lived in Brighton, so we’d shared mutual visits, the odd play date, little more.
Still, we remained doggedly positive. Trusting that, in the longer term, life would just reshape itself slightly, and Dillon would be absorbed into our family bubble. That we would love him as our own.
So we were ready. We had to be. Norma couldn’t be. And was not.
By the time my sister died there was no love lost between them, yet ironically, partly because of Aidan having walked out, Norma had increasingly become central to Dillon’s life, taking care of him while Hope slipped inexorably away, in a way our own mother, stricken by the loss she was facing, seemed constitutionally incapable of doing. Norma loved Dillon – that much was clear. And however Hope might have wished it otherwise, Dillon loved Norma. Aside from Hope, she’d been the one constant in his short, bewildering life, and in a day so chock-full of powerful imagery, the one of Dillon, when we tried to separate him from Norma – howling in anguish, his face smeared with dirt and snot and tears – was the one that haunted me most.
His cries, as he clung to her, cut through me like a knife. She was crying too, distraught, red-eyed, her whole body language pleading. He was wrapped around her koala-style, and as she held him, she swayed and soothed him, one hand gently cupping the back of his head, in a way she must have done a thousand times. ‘Please, whatever’s happened with Aidan, Grace, don’t forget, he’s still my grandson. Please don’t shut me out now. You can see how much he needs me.’
I could. So whatever Hope had thought of her – a mother who was blind to her son’s multitude of deficiencies – it would be madness to cut her off from him, wouldn’t it? It seemed so obvious. She’d stepped in to make up for those deficiencies. And long before Aidan had physically left. How could it ever be in Dillon’s best interests to lose her? ‘Of course I won’t,’ I said, as I finally went to prise him from her, screaming, kicking, bucking. ‘I understand. God, I know that. We’ll sort something out. Something regular, I promise.’
And I meant it. Yes, making that promise meant breaking another: the solemn promise I had given my dying sister. But surely Dillon’s well-being and happiness was what mattered most now? And wouldn’t his happiness be what Hope would want too?
I suppose I was as blinded by emotion as everyone else was that day, because I didn’t register what should probably have rung some pretty loud alarm bells.
It was something and nothing, or so I’d thought – just a farewell, nothing more. ‘Remember, Dilly,’ Norma had whispered as she’d handed him over. ‘Mummy loves you, okay?’
It was a good while before it sunk in. Many months before the truth dawned. She hadn’t been referring to my sister.
The rest of Boxing Day passed without incident. Once the boys were asleep, and Matt was running Mum back home – she refused to sleep anywhere but in her own bed now – I gave Mr Weasley a stray leftover carrot to get his teeth into, and lit the pine-scented jar candle Jenny had given me for Christmas. I then pulled a bottle of red out from the rack in the garage. Now the can had been opened, there seemed little further harm in letting the rest of the worms slither out of it, after all.
At first, my relief at knowing I would now be able to tell Matt the whole story was so intense it must have crowded out my other senses. And having opened the bottle and poured two decent glasses (we both had one more leave day, so could cope with a hangover, I decided), I realised I was in a better, calmer place than I had been in a fortnight. So it wasn’t till his car keys clattered down so loudly on to the kitchen island that it hit me that I’d missed a key trick. Which I shouldn’t have, because I knew my husband well enough, surely, to have realised that there was a major point at issue here, as yet still unresolved, and that was not anything to do with his anger towards Aidan or Norma Kennedy. To have realised, surely, that he would still be upset with me.
‘All okay with Mum?’ I asked, sliding the glass of wine across the island.
He ignored it. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this,’ he said.
‘Oh, please, Matt. Look, I’m sorry. I called it wrong. I thought I was doing the right thing, and I wasn’t. I’m sorry. You know what I’m like. I just didn’t want to worry you if I didn’t need to. Put all that extra stress on you—’
‘You should have told me.’ He reached for his glass. Took a sip. His expression was colder than the still too chilly wine.
‘I know, but . . . Look, it’s just – well, it’s just me, okay? I didn’t say anything to you because it’s always me, isn’t it? Always my family being the ones ca
using all the grief. Whereas yours never do . . .’ I stopped then and shrugged. We’d been here so many, many times. This business of our respective good luck and bad luck when it came to acquiring in-laws.
He didn’t answer straight away. Just swirled his wine in his glass. ‘So go on, then,’ he said eventually. ‘Tell me now.’
So I did. What I knew about the circumstances around the accident. About the point at which I’d recognised Aidan and our subsequent exchanges. About transferring him to Neil’s care, about my encounter with Norma, about the contents of the complaint letter, and, because I knew leaving it out, especially given the mood he was in, would be foolhardy, about the fact that Aidan still had my number, and had telephoned me. And, even knowing that it would send Matt into an even greater froth of anger, I told him about the text he’d sent too.
I regretted telling him about that bit immediately. Matt had variously nodded and hmm’d and rolled his eyes as I’d been speaking, taking sips from his wine, seeming marginally less cross – or at least, or so it seemed to me, redirecting his anger – but when I finished telling him about the phone calls and text, his expression changed again.
‘You mean that man’s been making threatening calls and sending texts to you in the small hours, when you’re at home alone with the boys, and you didn’t at any point think you ought to tell me? Jesus, Grace.’
‘They weren’t threatening. I didn’t even speak to him.’
‘Bollocks. You get a text calling you a bitch and you don’t think that’s threatening?’
‘He was twenty-four hours post-op. In hospital. How on earth could he be a threat to me?’
‘That’s not the point and you know it. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a threat just by existing on the planet. That bloody family.’ He slapped his hand down on the worktop, then reached for the wine and topped his glass up. ‘Do the hospital know? As in, what’s really motivated the complaint against you? You told them that, I hope?’
