The Secrets We Left Behind

by Susan Elliot Wright

  ‘Here we go, folks!’ Marcus shouted, jogging over to where the rest of us were standing. We all made lots of ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ noises as the fireworks started to fizz and spit, then there were whistles and bangs; a Roman Candle shot a red flame that changed to green and orange and purple, and a few feet away a Silver Fountain was spilling millions of twinkling stars down onto the grass. Everyone smiled and clapped, and for a moment I pretended this was my fiftieth and we were celebrating my birthday and I didn’t have to tell lies any more.

  ‘Cheers!’ Duncan appeared beside me and clinked his glass against mine. ‘This is great, isn’t it? We should make more of New Year in future. Let’s hope this year is a good one for all of us.’

  Despite my thick coat and woollen scarf, I was over-taken by a sudden shiver so violent I spilt my drink. ‘Steady on.’ Duncan moved behind me, opened his big winter jacket and pulled me close, wrapping it around me. ‘How’s that?’ he said into my hair. ‘Better?’

  I nodded and snuggled into his warmth.

  The fireworks were a huge success. Just after eleven, Estelle declared she was a little tiddly and blew everyone kisses from the door before heading up to bed. I loved Estelle, really loved her. I’d had a few other boyfriends before I met Duncan, but even if they were okay about Hannah, their mothers weren’t. Estelle, on the other hand, had adored her immediately and insisted she call her Grandma from the off. I’d felt almost as much pride in reporting Hannah’s progress and achievements to Estelle as I would have to my own mum, had she been alive. When I was little, my parents addressed their mothers-in-law as ‘Mum’ because it was considered good manners in those days; I’d have been happy to do the same with Estelle.

  The remaining guests were chatting and laughing in the kitchen, so I nipped into the sitting room, plumped the cushions and put more logs into the wood burner. A bluesy jazz CD was playing to an empty room, but we’d be putting the radio on soon so we could hear the chimes. I glanced at my watch, and just as I registered that there was a little over ten minutes to go, the phone rang. My stomach crawled; a call at this time of night could only mean trouble. But then I realised that all the people I loved were here, safely under this roof. I looked around for the handset, but the ringing stopped. Then I heard Duncan come out into the hall, away from the hubbub of charter in the kitchen. ‘Hello?’ he said, his voice still carrying the trails of laughter from his last conversation. ‘Hello?’ He sounded upbeat, cheerful, as if he was still chatting to friends. ‘Hell-o once more. No? Okay then, silent caller. It’s not midnight yet, so if you’ve called to wish us a happy New Year, please call again. By-ee.’ He hung up and went chuckling back to the others. Definitely a wrong number, then. It wasn’t that unusual, I supposed, someone calling their family on New Year’s Eve, hearing an unfamiliar voice and ringing off rather than wasting time with an explanation. He’d left the handset on the stairs. I picked it up and dialled 1471. I could hear my own heartbeat as I held my breath. You were called, today, at 11.49. The caller withheld their number.

  *

  That night I dreamt that Hannah was dead. She was in tiny pieces and I calmly collected them all up, put them in a shoebox and took them to the hospital, where I was convinced they would simply fix her, put her back together again. When the nurses looked inside the box and shook their heads, the enormity of it began to dawn on me: my Hannah was dead; it was final. Even though I knew in the dream that I hadn’t killed her, I also knew that I was responsible and that I could never, ever go back and change what had happened. I woke with a jolt and my eyes snapped open. My breath felt trapped in my lungs and I could feel my heart thumping away as if it was trying to escape from my chest. It was only after I’d been downstairs for a glass of water that the horror began to dissipate and I started to feel calmer.

  ‘Hey,’ Duncan murmured as I slid back into bed beside him. ‘What’s the matter?’ But his eyes were still closed.

  ‘Bad dream,’ I whispered, moving closer, comforted by his warmth, the safe, man-smell of him. Soon, he was breathing evenly again and I was alone, trying to work out why I felt so edgy. It was that still, timeless moment before the dawn, when reality and dreams merged together like sea and sky on a misty morning. I tried to empty my mind, but as soon as I started to drift towards sleep, my thoughts became images and for some reason I found myself back there, in the Hastings house. For a fraction of a second, instead of lying on a comfortable bed in a centrally heated, carpeted room, I was back on the bartered mattress that Eve and I found on a skip, looking up at the dream-catcher hanging from the ceiling in front of the window. No thick, light-blocking curtains then, just an Indian cotton wrap, the red one with the gold embroidery, turning the sunlight crimson as it flooded the room, warming the floorboards and filling the air with the smell of old wood.

  I looked around in the dark. I could make out the familiar shapes of my dressing gown hanging on the back of the door, the wardrobe with Hannah’s old teddy bear still sitting on top, and the chest of drawers with Duncan’s squash racquet resting up against the side. I am lying in bed with my husband, I told myself, in a proper house with a mortgage and respectable neighbours. Hannah and her little family are safely asleep in the next room; all is well. I turned over to go to sleep but my mind wouldn’t slow down. It was as though there were several films running in my head at the same time, all in colour, all with the sound turned up. I curled onto my side, threw the covers off and then felt chilly and pulled them back up again. I could feel myself beginning to drift but, although I kept slipping in and out of dreams, I was still aware of the sleet smattering against the window and of Duncan breathing steadily next to me. I sighed and changed position yet again, and that’s when I saw it. At first, it was a giant crow standing over me, tall and black and sinister. Then it moved slightly and it became Scott; he was wearing a black top hat and a dark cloak folded around his body like wings. ‘Go away,’ I said, only the sound didn’t come out, and I realised that my eyes were still closed. I knew that, if I could only open them, he’d be gone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I went back to the Project a few days into January, mornings only this year because I wanted to make sure I could be on hand for Hannah if she needed me. My first day back was pretty depressing. Christmas had plunged many of my families into hideous debt, and they were so bogged down by financial worry that the day-to-day business of parenting became even more difficult and exhausting. We could help them keep their creditors at bay and navigate their way through a hostile benefits system, but we couldn’t do much to help them significantly in the long-term. What most of them needed more than anything was someone to offer practical help; another pair of hands, someone to absorb some of the responsibility. Sometimes, I wanted to ask where their mothers were.

  Some of my colleagues said they found their clients resented them, or at least, resented their middle-class, financially comfortable lives. But I could honestly tell my families that I knew what it was like; I’d been there; I understood how it felt not to know where next week’s rent was coming from and to be dealing with it on your own. But I could also tell them that it didn’t have to be that way for ever, that things could change, life could improve. They looked at my clothes and my car and they assumed money had never been an issue for me, so I told them about when Hannah was a baby and we’d lived in a grotty flat above a shoe shop where I worked on the days Scott didn’t, and how he’d buggered off leaving us with no money the day before the rent was due. I was seventeen. We paid ten quid a week for that flat – two rooms and a shared bathroom. I spent the next three weeks hiding from the landlord until I managed to find a job where they’d let me take Hannah with me. It was easier in those days, though, before this obsession with health and safety. I pushed her in her pram up and down the high street, going in and out of all the shops until I ended up at a coffee bar called the Continental. The owners, an Italian couple called Mr and Mrs Sartori, fell in love with Hannah and said they’d set up a playpen for her in the ba
ck room where I could keep an eye on her and where she could play safely when we were busy. You wouldn’t get that now. Mrs Sartori was brilliant. She adored Hannah, and she treated me like one of her own daughters. It was she who taught me to cook, really. I still make her minestrone soup and the crispy little bread rolls flavoured with rosemary and olive oil to go with it. But the best thing about Mrs Sartori was the way she helped me with Hannah, and how she always knew the right thing to do. She showed me how to sponge her down to reduce her temperature when she had a fever, and how to keep her upright to reduce the pain when she had an ear infection. And if I was tired after a bad night with Hannah, she’d take her out in the pram so I could get some sleep, because, she said, The tired mamma not a happy mamma, and bambini not-a happy if the mamma not-a happy.

  This morning, I’d found Lauren, a young mum who had her second child just before Hannah had Toby, in floods of tears because the baby had a sore bottom and she blamed herself. She was so tired when she got up in the night to change him that she hadn’t noticed his nappy rash and so hadn’t put any cream on him, and now, the way she saw it was that her child was suffering and it was all her fault. Lauren was only just getting used to being on her own with her two kids, the dad having left her when the baby was three days old. The poor girl was on her knees with tiredness, not to mention financial worry. Where was her mum, that’s what I wanted to know. We weren’t supposed to probe too deeply into our families’ backgrounds, but it seemed Lauren’s mum was retired and only lived about half an hour away, so why couldn’t she spend some time helping her daughter? I was still thinking about this as I drove home, and there was a tight ball of anger in my stomach, possibly because Lauren reminded me a little of Hannah. I was suddenly overcome with an urgent desire to see my daughter. I flicked on the indicator, pulled over and took out my phone. ‘Are you in?’ I said when Hannah answered. ‘I’m on my way home and I wondered if you needed any shopping or anything.’ She sounded a bit fed up. She didn’t know what she needed from the shops, she said. She couldn’t even think straight at the moment because they’d been up half the night with Toby – he had colic. She was shattered.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, pretty sure she’d say no – I knew how hard it was for new mums to let their babies out of their sight in the first few weeks. ‘I’m having lunch with Grandma today; can I persuade you to let me take Toby with me? Dad says the car seat will go in my car easily enough. Grandma would be over the moon, and it’d give you a couple of hours to get some sleep.’ To my surprise, she said yes almost eagerly. She’d feed him now, and she’d thaw some expressed milk in case he needed a top-up.

  *

  Estelle’s face lit up when she saw I’d brought Toby. I kissed her cheek and, as always, the smell of Nivea triggered a wave of longing for my own mother. As usual, Estelle was fully made up and dressed as though we’d be eating in a restaurant. I always felt flattered that she’d made so much effort, and I tried to dress nicely whenever I visited her in order to return the compliment. Today she was wearing a floral skirt with a contrasting green jacket and a carefully chosen pink silk scarf. She radiated a calm beauty.

  Hannah had said Toby would be bound to want feeding again before too long, but he was quiet for the moment, so I put the kettle on for coffee while Estelle prepared the lunch. ‘Nothing fancy,’ she said, ‘just a bit of bread and cheese.’ We sat at the kitchen table where she cut up a fresh baguette and put it into a basket, then arranged the selection of fine cheeses she’d bought from Waitrose onto a board and even added bunches of black grapes so that it looked like something you’d order in a good restaurant. Toby was dozing peacefully in his car seat, which I’d put at the other end of the table so we could keep an eye on him. ‘Goodness,’ Estelle said, leaning towards him. ‘Look at the length of his eyelashes! He’ll make the girls jealous, that’s for sure.’

  I smiled, and as we gazed at him, his lashes fluttered in his sleep. I used to spend a lot of time watching Hannah sleep. ‘I wonder what babies dream about?’ I said as his raspberry-pink mouth twitched into a windy smile and then relaxed again; there was a tiny white blister on his upper lip.

  ‘Milk, probably,’ Estelle said, with an air of resignation. ‘I seem to remember that the business of caring for young babies has a great deal to do with putting food in at one end and cleaning up what comes out of the other! Goodness, I don’t know how we get through it, any one of us.’ She gave an exaggerated shudder, then tilted her head to one side as she looked at me. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it? Watching your child struggling with her own baby; it brings it all back.’

  ‘Yes, it does a bit,’ I sighed. ‘I know it’s a cliché, but they grow up so fast, don’t they?’ I went to the cupboard and took out the yellow cups and saucers that Estelle liked to use for coffee. ‘I have to stop myself from telling Hannah what to do. In my head, she’s still about eight.’

  Estelle nodded. ‘Especially daughters.’ She cut pats of butter from a half-pound pack and put them into a ramekin. ‘Julie was only twenty when she had her first, as you know.’ She knew I got on well with my sister-in-law, and I think she imagined that we’d shared confidences. ‘But she fell into it like an old hand. She was a good little mother, like you were.’

  ‘Hey, what do you mean, were?’ I teased.

  ‘Sons are a different kettle of fish, you see.’ She shook her head and chuckled. ‘Truth be told, I think John and Duncan would have still had me tying their shoelaces at that age if they could have got away with it.’

  I smiled. ‘Hannah was the opposite. She was trying to dress herself at the age of two and she’d get very cross with me if I tried to help.’ I set the cafetière down on the table and pulled out a chair. I enjoyed these moments of womanly camaraderie with my mother-in-law. ‘You know, I don’t think I realised I’d still be worrying about her even now; I think I sort of assumed—’

  ‘Oh, you don’t get off that lightly.’ She chuckled again. ‘I still worry about all three of them, and here’s Duncan, a grandad himself now.’

  ‘And John and Alice have a grandchild due in the summer, don’t they?’ I reminded her.

  Estelle gave another of her famous shudders. ‘Two sons who are grandfathers – as if I didn’t feel old enough already!’ But then a faraway expression settled on her face and she absent-mindedly twiddled her rings, which all hung loose on her fingers but were kept in place by the swollen knuckles. On her wedding finger were her engagement ring and a gold band so thin now that it looked as though it could snap; on her middle finger were three eternity rings – Duncan’s dad had bought her one on the birth of each child. I poured the coffee and pushed it towards her, together with the sugar bowl. She added a spoonful of sugar and stirred it round several times before tapping the teaspoon twice on the side of the cup and placing it neatly in the saucer. She looked thoughtful.

  Toby shifted in his seat and screwed his face up but didn’t open his eyes. We both looked at him and waited, but then his face relaxed and he made a few sucking motions before drifting back to sleep.

  ‘You know, dear, I sometimes think motherhood is the best and worst thing that can happen to a woman.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Life is so very short, even when you reach a great age, such as I have.’ Her hand was shaky as she raised her cup to her carefully painted lips and took a sip of coffee. I waited for her to continue, but she seemed to drift for a moment, as though some unexpected memory had slid into her mind.

  ‘Estelle, what did you mean?’

  Her eyes focused on me again. ‘I’m sorry, darling?’

  ‘About motherhood being the worst thing that can happen to a woman.’

  ‘Oh, yes, well. I just meant that it’s all so temporary, you see; the joy of it. One minute, you’re a brand-new mother with your brand-new baby that you grew inside you – you’re the centre of one another’s worlds, and you know you will do anything for your child. It’s the most complete and perfect type of love. And then the next min
ute . . .’

  She had that faraway look again. I’d seen photographs of Estelle as a young mother, and then as an older mum after she had Duncan. She’d always been a good-looking woman, not pretty, exactly, but handsome. And in all the pictures, whether she was posing in a studio, perfectly groomed and wearing a hat and gloves while holding a freshly washed and combed child on her lap, or whether she was on a beach in an old skirt and with her hair tied back while the kids built sandcastles, she positively glowed with love and pride as she looked at her children. A complete and perfect love. The thought triggered a memory of the exact moment I’d realised how important Hannah was to me. I’d been giving her a bottle and she had her hand curled around my little finger; I looked into those cornflower-blue eyes and I suddenly knew that, if I had to, I would kill with my bare hands to protect her.

  ‘Your children have your love and devotion for ever, you see, until you die. But you only have theirs for a limited time. Now, I don’t mean that they stop caring about you, but I’ve learned this, and so must you.’ She looked over her glasses at me almost sternly. ‘Once your children have their own children, the balance alters. And it’s only right and proper that it should.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I knew she was right, but I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it yet, not really. ‘But Hannah still asks for my advice.’