by Imogen Clark
CHAPTER TEN
Cara, 2017
After I discover the postcards, things become very confused in my head as I struggle to process what I think I know. Questions chase each other around my mind like squirrels in an oak tree but there are no answers. I retreat to my workroom but I can’t settle to anything. I sew and unpick a sleeve setting three times before I decide that I am on a hiding to nothing. Abandoning the dress on its mannequin, I sit and stare out over the sleeping garden, hoping that the answers will be just outside the window.
Dad and Mrs P are in the kitchen. I can hear cupboards being opened and closed and Dad is singing hymns again. He has never been a churchgoing man, or at least not as far as I know. Just where he learned all these hymns, which seem to be lodged firmly in his memory to the exclusion of almost everything else, is another mystery that may never be solved. This now troubles me in a way that it didn’t before. Until this morning, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the man with whom I have shared a house for more than thirty years. Now I am not so sure.
Obviously, I’ve thought about talking to Dad about the postcards and the idea pushes its way to the front of my mind again. I reject it. Hymns he may remember but a lot of the time he has trouble placing me, his daughter. I can tell from the quizzical looks that he throws me when I speak to him. To start with, I thought he was just chasing my name around the dark recesses of his memory but now I realise that it’s my entire identity that escapes him. So there is no point asking him about the metal box in the attic. I know that he’s becoming increasingly frustrated by his own failings. Just yesterday, the last of the blue Denby china bit the dust as he hurled his dinner plate across the kitchen without warning. I can replace the plates with something cheap and anonymous but I do not want to make things any worse for him in his fragile state.
I keep turning the possibilities over and over in my head but each time I come to the same conclusion. What if Mum didn’t die? What if she’s been alive all this time, sending me postcards, trying to keep in touch? When I think about what this might mean, a knot grows in the core of me, hard as a nut, making it impossible to breathe. My mother is dead – this is a known fact. It has been the truth since I was two and yet what if it isn’t true? Would Dad really lie about something like that? None of it makes any sense. I flounder around in the dark waters of my imagination, desperately searching for something to hold on to.
Three or four times, I find myself standing with the phone in my hand, dialling Michael’s number; but each time, I cut the line before it starts to ring. What would I say to him? My parents may suddenly be a mystery to me but I do know my brother. I need to have more information at my fingertips before I talk to him or he’ll just dismiss the idea out of hand.
Then it strikes me – a moment of clarity in all this confusion. If my mother is dead there will be a record of it. People don’t just die. They leave a trail of bureaucracy behind them. I know my mother’s name, approximately when she died and that she lived in London. There will be a death certificate. All I have to do is search online. Even as I think this, I am crossing the few short steps to the workroom door and closing it firmly behind me. My hand lingers on the brass key in the lock but I decide against. There have been enough locked doors. If they walk in, I’ll just close the search down. No one need know what I am up to.
My hands are shaking so violently that I can barely open the laptop, let alone type in my password. I open Google and type ‘How to find a death certificate’. The first couple of pages are adverts for family-tree hunting sites but I scroll past those and find the official government page. Without giving myself time to reconsider, I click on it and then on ‘Births, Marriages and Deaths’. Almost at once, the page for ordering a death certificate is before me. My hand hovers over the mouse but I am shaking so much that I must click without realising because then a page requesting payment pops up. I am confused. This isn’t right. If my mother isn’t dead then there won’t be a death certificate to pay for. I need to approach this in a different way. I go back to the ancestry sites. It was only thirty years ago when my mother is supposed to have died but surely that counts as ancestry? I select a site at random. It takes me straight in and there, at the top of the screen, is the offer of a free search. All I have to do is enter a name and a date, plus or minus ten years.
‘Cara! Cara!’
Dad’s voice cuts through my thoughts and I jump as if he’s standing right behind me. Guilt washes over me like it did when I was up to no good as a child.
‘Cara!’
I can hear him approaching, his tread heavy and unsteady. I minimise the screen.
‘I’m in here, Dad. In my workroo— In your study.’
The door opens and Dad is standing there. He has his sweater around his neck like a muffler. The empty sleeves dangle uselessly at his sides.
‘I can’t . . .’ he begins and then, defeated by both sentence and sweater, he flops into the armchair, narrowly missing a newly cut out paper pattern. I stand and manage to sweep it out from under him just in time.
‘Oh, Dad. You seem to have got yourself in a bit of a pickle. Here. Let me help you.’ I begin to right the sweater and he wriggles like a recalcitrant toddler. As I thrust his arm into the correct sleeve, a task I must have done for him dozens of times, I recognise that something about helping him feels different. A tiny kernel of doubt is hanging over me. Has Dad lied to me for all these years and about something so important? My sympathy for his confusion feels, for the first time, tainted by some other emotion that I can’t quite place.
‘Where’s Mrs P?’ I ask, trying to shake the feeling, which I don’t recognise and don’t like.
‘Who?’ he asks.
‘You know. Mrs P. The nurse.’ I help him back to his feet and pull the sweater down his back.
‘No nurse,’ he says shaking his head from side to side gently.
‘Come on, Dad,’ I say, leading him by the arm out of the room. ‘Let’s go and make a cup of tea.’
I close the door carefully behind me. My search will have to wait.
I catch myself being short with Dad – well, shorter than usual. Everything he does makes my nerves jangle and I mutter under my breath uncharitably at the slightest provocation. Deciding that fresh air might help, I head out to tackle the leaves. Our garden is surrounded by mature trees, which give us shade and privacy in the summer and blocked drains and leaf-rot in the autumn. Dad used to sweep away the dead leaves as soon as they fell and somehow knowing that the old Dad, my real dad, would not leave them lying there spurs me into action. I work methodically, raking them from one section of the lawn into a tall pile and then moving on to the next. Soon the grass is spotted with brown humps, like giant molehills between the green patches. I go to get a sack from the shed and when I get back, my beautiful piles are strewn all over the lawn again. It is as if I had never begun. There, in the middle of the mess and having a rip-roaring time, are Dad and Mrs P. He leans into her to stop himself from falling over and kicks at the leaves with his foot, swinging it back to get as much momentum as he can. He has the body of a geriatric man but the smile on his face as his foot flies through the pile shines with sheer delight like a child’s.
I see red. There are a million better things that I could be doing this afternoon rather than wasting my time on things that are undone as quickly as I can do them.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I shout as I approach them. ‘Dad. Don’t do that!’
Dad turns towards the sound when I speak but shows no sign of having understood what I said. His leg keeps swinging, even though the pile he is standing over has been reduced to a few leaves. Mrs P, her hands tucked around Dad’s arm to keep him upright, catches my eye and gently shakes her head. She is telling me, without any words, to let this go, that it is just harmless fun, that I should live in the moment. I look at the leaves and Dad standing in the middle with a smile on his perpetually confused face. I know I should be treasuring this moment, taking a
mental snapshot because there will not be many more smiles and surely this should be more important than a few minutes of wasted effort. But all I can see standing amid the mess is the man who has lied to me for my whole life, kept things hidden in the dark when they should have been out in the light.
I drop the sack. I would hurl it at the pair of them but it’s empty and doesn’t have the weight behind it to do more than fall at my feet.
‘You two can clear it all up,’ I say, knowing how ridiculous a suggestion this is but really not caring. Then I turn and stalk back to the house. They don’t call after me. I hear the rustle of leaves as they move on to another pile. I am like a petulant child. I want to join in, be part of the fun, but I am too stubborn to turn back and risk losing face and this makes me angrier still. I know that there was more to my outburst than just some spoiled leaf piles but I leave the thought where it is. I daren’t examine myself too closely. I’m just not ready to go there. I need to move forward one step at a time.
Later, with dinner made, eaten and cleared up after, and with Mrs P getting Dad ready for bed, I go into my workroom. The search page is still there in the bottom of my screen. I click it back up and then, with shaking hands, type ‘Anne Ferensby 1987’ into the boxes.
My finger hovers over the mouse. What if there is no death certificate? That will surely mean that I still have a mother. A living mother. I click. Now I have come this far, how could I not know? I’ve put myself in an impossible position. I watch as the little hourglass fills and empties. Then the screen refreshes itself and a message typed in red shouts out at me.
Sorry, we could not find any results matching your search criteria.
For a moment, my heart sinks until I realise that no results means that there is no death certificate for my mother. My mother is not dead. My mother is not dead. Not dead. Alive.
I do the same search again and again. Each time the result is the same. I try moving the date five years either way, even though this makes no logical sense as I know exactly when she is supposed to have died – February 1987. Nothing. Then I try with the current year but this time my hand hesitates. What if my mother didn’t die in 1987 but is dead now? What if I had lost her, to find her, to lose her all over again?
Now I have to know. I have to know everything. I click and wait but the same response fires back at me. No results.
Tears began to prick at the back of my eyes. I blink them back as I stare at the message. No results. The words blur behind my tears until the screen becomes a mass of coloured pixels. Can my mother really be alive? It makes no sense but what other explanation is there?
I must sit there for half an hour or so, just staring at the screen. At some point, the laptop goes to sleep because when I finally come round from wherever it is I have been, the screen is black. I am vaguely aware that a thought has occurred to me and that this is what has pulled me back to the here and now. I try to focus on what it might have been but I cannot seem to be able to hold it in my head. It’s like trying to catch the seeds from a dandelion head. Every time my hand reaches out, the breeze that my movement makes floats the seeds a little further out of reach. I struggle to think back and recapture the idea. When I finally catch it, it is so simple that I cannot quite believe I ever lost it. If she is alive then maybe I can find something out about her, some other detail that will make all of this less confusing.
A fresh surge of adrenaline powers through to my fingers. I wake the laptop and start a new search. I type ‘Anne Ferensby’ into the box and wait anxiously for the response.
‘Do you mean Anne Hornsby?’ Google asks me, as if I don’t know my own mother’s name.
My eyes skim across what the search has brought up. Anne Browne, who came from a place in Yorkshire that is not even spelled the same way, and then various pages relating to the town. There is nothing that could possibly be my mother. Immediately, I am thwarted. How can there be nothing? Everyone has some kind of digital footprint. It can’t be avoided in this day and age. I refresh the search. I know that it is pointless but I have to do it. Then I try searching against her name and the date of her supposed death. Then her name and the year that she was born. None of them throw up anything.
I bang on the keyboard, like that’s going to do any good, and the keys rattle in protest. How can my mother be not dead and that be the end of it? There must be more out there. If she’s alive then where is she? What is she doing? How is she living? There are millions of other questions that will come to me later but at the moment I’m just focusing on the basics. And then suddenly I can barely keep my eyes open. When I look at the clock it says 2.30 a.m. and everything around me is silent. I close the laptop and make my way to bed. As I clean my teeth, I look at my reflection in the mirror. Do I look like her? Would she recognise me in the street? Would I recognise her?
As I climb into the bed, the exhaustion lifts as the ideas start pulsing around my head again. I just lie there, in the dark, until the edges of the curtains turn pale with the new day.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It turns out that Greg did propose to Beth on their romantic weekend away. I get a handful of texts from her, all hurriedly typed in the ladies’ loo. They’re full of abbreviations and exclamation marks and positively squeal with excitement. I’m not surprised that he asked her. Beth is a great catch. Who wouldn’t want to marry her? But as I’m driving over to Greg’s house for a celebratory dinner with them both the next day, I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for myself. The inevitable pairing off of people seems relentless. I know it’s in the natural order of things but, despite genuine best intentions, Beth will gradually slip away from me as the gravitational pull of her new life becomes too strong to ignore.
I turn into Greg’s road and pull up outside. His sleek, black Porsche is standing in the drive next to Beth’s bashed old Peugeot. The house, a newly built executive home, is clad in manmade concrete blocks designed to imitate the smooth, honey-coloured local stone. The house next door is almost exactly the same, and the house next door to that. The flagged drive reminds me of a child’s drawing and there are no plants to soften the frontage other than two regimented box trees standing sentry over the glossy black front door. Despite its obvious high price tag, the building is bland and featureless. I much prefer Beth’s little cottage with its wildflower garden and the huge wisteria creeping over the tumbledown trellis. I suppose that she will probably sell that now to move into Greg’s mansion and the thought makes me feel sad all over again.
I grab the bottle of champagne that has been rolling about under the passenger seat and check my hair in the vanity mirror. There is something about the way that Greg looks people up and down that makes me feel uncomfortable even though I don’t actually care what he thinks of me. I run a finger over the corners of my mouth to catch any stray lipstick, and take a deep breath.
When I knock at the big, black door, Beth opens it almost immediately.
‘Who is it?’ I hear Greg shout from inside.
‘It’s only Cara,’ says Beth.
‘Charming!’ I say and then throw my arms around her and give her a huge squeeze. ‘Come here you! Congratulations!’ I plant a kiss on her shiny hair, breathing in her familiar perfume. Despite my concerns for myself, I cannot help but be pleased for her. ‘Right. I want to hear all about it,’ I say. ‘Leave nothing out. But first, a drink. I’ve had a hell of a day and I need alcohol to revive me.’
She grabs my elbow and steers me towards the kitchen. It always takes my breath away, Greg’s kitchen. It is a shrine of chrome and granite with every surface reflecting the next. I once commented on the cleanliness of all the appliances – Greg strikes me as the obsessive type – but Beth informed me that he doesn’t actually cook there.
‘It’s all for show,’ she once told me. ‘He can’t boil an egg.’
‘Let me see if I can find some glasses,’ she says, opening cupboards in turn.
After several attempts, she locates a cupboard filled with glasses and
mugs. She is just reaching up for the champagne flutes when Greg appears at the door.
‘Not those, darling,’ he says. His voice makes Beth jump so that she almost drops the glass on to the tiled floor. I see her breathe out in relief that the glass is still in her hand. ‘This is a special occasion,’ he continues. ‘I think it calls for the crystal, don’t you?’
He opens another cupboard. The cut glass sparkles in the harsh light from the overhead spotlights. ‘These, I think,’ he says, taking a tall flute from the shelf and holding it up to examine it. ‘Just give them a little polish.’
For a moment, I think that this is a direction to Beth but he opens a drawer, takes out a chequered tea towel and begins the task himself. Beth stands down and watches him patiently.
‘Shall I pour.’ It’s more a command than a question. He takes the bottle from me, runs a critical eye over the label and then pops the cork expertly. The champagne bubbles and froths and, just too late, I remember its bumpy journey here. ‘That’s a bit frisky,’ he says as he struggles to keep the wine in the glass.
We all hold our breath as the bubbles edge closer and closer to the lip and then begin to retreat back down again just before they escape over the edge.
‘And so,’ he says when all three glasses contain millimetre-perfect quantities of champagne. ‘A toast. To my beautiful bride-to-be.’
I echo his words and raise my glass. Beth bounces on her toes, pointing at her chest and mouthing, ‘Me! That’s me!’
‘Congratulations to both of you,’ I say, and then to Beth, ‘I’m so pleased for you.’
Beth takes my hand and squeezes hard.
‘I can hardly believe it,’ she says. ‘It was such a surprise.’ She winks at me roundly. I flick a glance over to Greg, who is totally oblivious as he basks in the moment. ‘Come and sit down.’ She links arms with me and virtually drags me towards the sitting room. She’s like a puppy, all wide eyes and bounce. I relinquish my self-will and follow her.
