You see, no one expects their lives to pan out as ours were. I was widowed and in a dead-end job and never far from misery. Marnie was widowed and pregnant and in the midst of a great fall from a charmed life.
“I need to move home,” Marnie said the following evening. “I need to sort my life out. I need to see a doctor and start working again and I need to move home.”
She called her cleaner right there at the table. She wanted the place spotless, she said. And she wanted Charles’s stuff boxed up and put into storage—his toothbrush, his clothes, anything that was obviously his.
We visited the flat a couple of days later. We were both shocked to find that the cleaner had left a thick white rug with black detailing stretched across the floor of the hallway. I wondered what lay beneath—a dark bloodstain, or scratches on the varnished flooring, or just the scent of death—but I resisted the urge to lift the edge and peer underneath. Some of Charles’s things were gone—his coat from the back of the door and his shoes, which had been lined up neatly along the wall—but he was still everywhere. He was in the books on the shelves and the prints on the walls and his tall black umbrella was still propped beside hers in the hallway.
“Are you sure?” I said, trying to catch up with Marnie as she flitted between the rooms.
She frowned and then began to climb the stairs.
“That you want to live here,” I said. “Are you sure? We could find you somewhere—”
“No,” she said, standing on the top step and turning to face me. “It should be here. It’s right that it’s here. I want this little one”—and she held her hand to her stomach—“to know at least a little of their father. And this was once our home. It makes sense. It has to be here.”
She looked past me. “This is the spot,” she said. “Probably right here, where my feet are standing now. This is where he took his last breath. That’s something his child should know, don’t you think?”
What do you think? Is it something you’d want to know? I know I’d be devastated if I received a call informing me that my father had died. Not because I would miss the man he is today: a cheat and a deserter. But because I would miss the man that he once was.
For my first decade, he was constant and unwavering and honest and true. He was always there and always encouraging and, despite everything that happened when he stopped being a good father, he was never selfish before that. Instead, he was broken and flawed and determined that he wouldn’t be defined by the very worst parts of who he was. And then something changed. Those difficulties that had bubbled beneath his skin for decades—the impatience and the uncertainty and the volatility—started to seep through his pores.
Will I want to visit the place where he dies? I don’t think so. For me, he died at the front door, suitcase in hand, smiling as he left us behind.
“Maybe a fresh start—” I began.
“I want to be back in by Christmas,” Marnie said.
“That’s only a few weeks—”
“I’m going to host it,” she said. “I’m going to decorate and cook—I’ll need a tree and a turkey—and I’m going to make it count.”
“This is a lot,” I said. “Marnie, it’s a lot for me to take in and it’s a lot for you to take on.”
“I’ve decided,” she said. “And you’re coming. And so is Emma. I’m going to make this happen.”
“We’ll be with—”
“Your mum. Yes, that makes sense. That’s the morning, isn’t it? Well, after that, then.”
“I—”
“This isn’t optional,” she said, her face suddenly stiff and her eyes wide. “I’m inviting you to join me for Christmas. Whether you accept that invitation or not is your decision. But I am going to be living here by then and I am going to do this.”
Marnie and I have very few shared traits. She is open and warm and loving and unafraid. I am closed and cold and angry and fearful. She is light and I am dark. But we are both notoriously stubborn. I know without doubt that on some things she cannot be moved; she cannot be bought or bribed or won.
“Then, yes,” I said. “I’d love to come.”
“And will you help me move back in?”
“Of course.”
“Right, then. Let’s get started. I want to measure up for a new bed.”
* * *
So that was what we did. We wrote down the measurements for a new bed because, although she could sleep in her dead husband’s flat, she couldn’t possibly imagine sleeping in his bed. She ordered a replacement that afternoon. A small double—“it’ll only be for me,” she said—with a blush pink button-backed headboard—“he’d never have gone for pink”—and storage underneath—“for muslins and nappies and all the other things that babies seem to need.”
She moved back in two weeks later, the day the bed arrived, and I tried to be pragmatic but I felt like something was being taken from me all over again. I packed up her suitcases and the kitchenware that had overtaken my cupboards and boxed up her shoes from behind the front door. We piled everything into a taxi early in the morning, bags at our feet and on our laps, and then she proceeded to leave me.
I’m being dramatic, I know. I felt sad that she was going but I could rationalize my grief because I was also pleased to see her so focused and satisfied. I had enjoyed nursing her and caring for her and being her strength, but it’s not a sustainable way to live.
The world is full of vulnerable people. They lean on others, relying always on that additional support, that additional strength. Emma, for example, is incredibly vulnerable. But Marnie is not. She’d started working again a few days earlier—turning on her phone and uploading her videos and sharing updates and engaging with the world she had built around her. She seemed stronger, somehow, with that platform beneath her.
“You can go now,” she said, after we’d carried everything into the lobby and carted it up to the flat, load by load in the elevator. “I think I have it from here.”
“But the unpacking,” I said. “Don’t you want some help with that?”
“No, thanks,” she said. She was standing in the doorway—her doorway—with her hand against the frame and her feet squarely on the wooden floor and I was in the hallway, on the other side of the entrance. “I’m good now,” she continued. “But thanks.”
“But—”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, and then she closed the door.
I felt sort of angry and sort of proud.
And sort of embarrassed, too. I looked left and right, but there was no one else, no one there who had witnessed my eviction. I stared at the spot where I’d sat nearly three months earlier. That felt like another person, another time, another world. And then I went home.
Here’s the thing. Marnie had a family—as we all have families—but it had never felt much like a family to me. As a child, I believed that a family was unshakable, unbreakable, something fixed and immovable. I had a sister, and she would always be my sister, and parents, who would always be my parents. It wasn’t until much later—when my father left and my mother disowned me—that I realized I’d been wrong. It wasn’t fixed at all. But it had been throughout my formative years. I didn’t realize that I’d need to build my own unit until much, much later. I didn’t realize that I’d need to become someone who others wanted to love.
But it was a lesson that Marnie learned at a far younger age. Her family had come in waves—sometimes in, sometimes out—and was entirely unpredictable. She wanted this family—her new family—to be different. She had the power to craft this thread of the web, to build this unit as she wanted, and this was what she wanted.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I have always loved autumn. I like that sense of something ending but not quite over. I like open fires and curtains drawn and thick woolen jumpers and boots that encase your feet and cushion your toes. I like winds that nip and cloud
s that soften the sky and that feeling of stepping out of the cold and into the warmth. The summer is too much, too full of expectation, with so much pressure to be joyful and buoyant and bright. And the winter is too dark, even for me.
But December has always been a strange month in this city, an anomaly that doesn’t quite follow the pattern of the calendar. For that month only, the fabric of the place feels different. There is something unusual in the appearance, the atmosphere, the people who filter through as the darkest days approach.
Some of the changes happen slowly, over the course of several weeks. Strings of lights are hung between buildings, sparkling against the black of a night that draws in earlier each evening. Shop windows are overhauled, decorated in festive tones with ornaments and pine trees and sleighs and snow. There are fewer people on the streets. As the last weeks of the month draw nearer, the workers—who spend the entire year on the trains and pacing the streets and flowing in and out of rotating office doors, people like me—tack annual leave onto the bank holidays and stay curled on their sofas instead. The tourists—wearing red hats with white bobbles and carrying shopping bags and cameras and children strapped to their chests—are present in their droves, filtering in and out of toy shops and ice skating on makeshift rinks in otherwise underexploited venues and standing on the wrong side of the escalator. But, even then, there are not enough of them to balance the absences, to counteract a city half emptied, its occupants stationed instead in their homes.
Other changes are almost instantaneous—suddenly we are smiling at our fellow commuters, and then we are making polite conversation with our colleagues in the kitchen, about their plans for the break, who will be cooking, and gosh, that’s an awful lot of children for two whole days and aren’t you all outnumbered. And then, almost without noticing, we are suddenly wishing a merry Christmas to everyone we pass—the man at reception who always seems so curmudgeonly but is now wearing a festive light-up pin on his suit jacket, the director in the elevator grinning in a rather unnerving way, the barista at the café where you buy your morning coffee, the garbagemen, the cleaner, the woman who washes up mugs in the kitchen sink. The structure of the city shifts and suddenly we are all better people than we were before: kinder, happier, optimistic—the very best versions of ourselves.
We do not register the colleague who has no partner anymore, whose children will be elsewhere, whose parents are long dead. We still ignore the homeless woman sitting at the side of the road, her worn sleeping bag beneath her, a blanket draped over her shoulders and the cold seeping into the whites of her eyes. We cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge the sadness that still exists in this festive joy.
At that time in my life, I could be both. I could bring the sadness and the joy. I had a best friend who was hosting lunch and a beautiful sister, but an absent father and a dead husband and a mother plagued by dementia.
I suppose this year I will bring little joy; only sadness. I can’t shake it, you know. It has been getting worse. It is still getting worse.
I suppose, now that I think about it, that was my last joyful year. I called Emma just after midnight on Christmas Eve. We had agreed to visit my mother first thing in the morning the following day. We hadn’t admitted it aloud, but I knew that we both wanted to go in as early as possible, so that it was done and so that we didn’t need to think about it for the rest of the afternoon. I knew that Emma didn’t want to visit, that she was dreading it, and I was expecting her to grasp at excuses, to find a way to exempt herself from the trip. I called her and listened to the phone ringing and I wondered if she might ignore it, if she might ignore me to avoid my mother.
“What’s the plan, then?” I asked when Emma finally answered. “Shall we meet at the station? Walk over from there?”
“Is she better, do you know? Have they said?” replied Emma.
“They say she’s still flu-ey, but I reckon an hour or so’ll be fine.”
“Oh, but if she’s—”
“Emma,” I replied. “Come on.”
“I don’t know, Jane,” she said, her voice exaggerated in an overstated performance of concern. “If she’s not well . . . and then we turn up, bringing in all these bugs . . . Should we hold off? Go next week, maybe, instead?”
“Em, she’s our mother. And it’s Christmas.”
“I think I’m going to give it a miss, if it’s okay with you,” Emma said. “Shall I meet you at Marnie’s? Around twoish, threeish? Will you text me the address?”
“Em—”
“Thanks, Jane. Love you. Merry Christmas.”
And then she hung up.
I looked at the phone. I was angry but this conversation had happened in many different guises over very many years and so I wasn’t surprised.
Emma was—rightly, I felt—angry with my mother, who had provided very little support in the very worst years of her life. But I was angry, too. And I was just as entitled to that anger, if not more so. I had not only been briefly disowned, entirely abandoned, but also ignored for the majority of my childhood. Emma had always been the favorite. But she never thought about that; she never even tried to see it from my perspective. Emma was always anxious, always on edge, always distracted by her own issues and fixated on her own feelings and that made her selfish. She could refuse to visit because she knew that I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t do it and I never did. Because that would have been cruel.
But what if I had opened that conversation by saying that I couldn’t find the courage to go, couldn’t silence my anger for an hour, and that this time it was all on her? What if I had done as she always did? What if I had stopped being her strength and asked her instead to be mine?
I still don’t know the answers to these questions. Can someone who has spent her whole life leaning on others ever support someone else? I’m not convinced that they can. I think that when you willingly take on that role in someone else’s life, you have to accept that they will always put themselves first and that the structure of that relationship cannot be reversed. They will let you fall before they sacrifice themselves to support you.
* * *
I arrived early, because the taxi driver—who was charging triple for a bank holiday journey—had exceeded the speed limit at every opportunity. I had hated it: the momentum, the vibrations, that feeling of being completely contained, so completely surrendered to somebody else.
I walked into my mother’s room and she was sitting up in bed wearing an orange T-shirt and a bright blue cardigan that was slipping from her left shoulder. It had a frilly collar and pinned to one of the scallops was a festive badge, a tree decorated with multicolored baubles, flashing small pinks and yellows.
“Morning,” I said, and I grinned as I stepped through her doorway and underneath the mistletoe pinned to its frame. “How are things?”
“Good,” she said. “I’m good.”
I pulled the armchair from the corner toward her bed and sat down beside her. When she first moved into this facility, I hired a man with a van—I found his card pinned up in the post office window—to transport some of her things from the house. The armchair was the most substantial addition. And although there were a few raised eyebrows from the nurses, I insisted that it was absolutely essential. I also included four of the cushions that had decorated her king-size bed at home, some framed prints, a tasseled lampshade, a pile of books, and her jewelry box. I eventually introduced some other small improvements: a nonslip coaster stamped with a childhood photograph for her water beaker, for example. A speckled gray vase for flowers—I had bought a festive bunch from the florist at the train station the day before—and a tablet so that she could watch films and scroll through old home videos and sometimes, when she was feeling able, send me an email. I was receiving them less and less by then.
I look back now at the version of me that spent so much time caring for and—maybe this isn’t the right word but—mothering her. And
I’m surprised by my own dedication. I fought as a child to be recognized: I did incredibly well academically, winning prizes and accolades from my teachers; I was helpful, almost obsequiously, around the house—laying the table and emptying the dishwasher and changing the bedding; I tried to be lively and entertaining, a positive influence within our home. Those things—the ornaments and the weekly visits—were simply more recent examples of the many ways in which I’d danced for her attention.
I lifted her cardigan back over her shoulder and she glared at me, her pupils wide. I could tell that she’d been given something—perhaps for her cold, perhaps simply to keep her calm—and thankfully the drugs seemed to be obscuring Emma’s absence. It slipped past entirely unnoticed. And yet, despite the medication, she was astute in many ways that day, grilling me for details of my journey and demanding to know my plans for the afternoon.
“You’ll be with Marnie and Charles?” she asked.
“Just Marnie,” I replied.
“Not Charles?” she asked, and her brows furrowed at the center of her forehead.
“No,” I said, and I dropped my head to one side and her face shifted from confusion to concern because that movement has only ever preceded bad news. “I’ve told you this before. Do you remember?” I sighed. “Charles is dead.”
“He died?” She was horrified, her voice high and her face ugly with disbelief, as she was every time she received this information. “When?”
“A few months ago.”
“How?”
“He fell down the stairs. You know this already. You just don’t want to remember it.”
Seven Lies Page 19
