Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  Donna had vast numbers of books – worn paperbacks in haphazard piles and big coffee-table books about myriad subjects like Ngorongoro and Toulouse-Lautrec. Cold Comfort Farm was on the arm of the sofa. Tess picked it up and recognized it was Iris’s copy. She held it to her chest for a moment, and then put it back.

  Her mother’s shiftless relationship with spirituality was well represented too – Buddhas, Ganesh figurines and dream catchers sat alongside kitschy religious talismans on most surfaces, and the fridge was a wall of aphorisms on magnets.

  Tess realized, as she climbed the stairs, that she’d never actually been up here. Or, if she had, she didn’t remember. Her mother’s room was at the front of the house, with big sash windows through which the weak sunshine nevertheless flooded. She headed for the second bedroom, beyond the family bathroom with its tropical-fish shower curtain and chipped claw-footed bath. It was bigger than she’d expected, with a clean, neat double bed, a pine chest of drawers, and a Lloyd Loom-style woven chair someone had half-heartedly spray-painted pink at some point. She put her suitcase down on the bed and went back to her mother’s room.

  This was much messier. It would have made Sean twitchy. And that thought made Tess smile. She remembered messy. As a child her room in her mother’s house (and that was always how she had thought of it, never as ‘our house’) had always been different from everywhere else, with its neatly made bed and tidily stored things. She and Iris were alike in that way. But in the same way that Donna had made her tidier, Sean had made her a little bit messier. She’d told him he was like the creepy husband in that Julia Roberts movie – the one where she faked her own death to escape him – who needed everything exactly in its place or he went off the deep end. She used to skew cushions and leave newspapers folded back on themselves on purpose sometimes. She’d left it immaculate earlier today. Not a thing out of place. Not a trace of herself.

  It looked like Donna had left in a hurry a few minutes ago, not like she’d been gone for weeks. The duvet was pulled up haphazardly, and the pillows were just thrown any old way. At her dressing table, necklaces hung from the mirror, odd earrings glittered, and tubes and bottles were left with their lids beside them. Tess picked one up and sniffed at its dried-out contents, which still held the faint scent of her mother – part spa, part hippy. On the mantelpiece above the tiny fireplace were three pictures of her. Tess as the archetypal chubby smiling baby; Tess as a more pensive schoolgirl, with slightly buck teeth and a scraped back ponytail; and Tess three or four years ago, laughing, with Iris. This one was much in the style of the pictures downstairs in the study. Black and white, unselfconscious. Understood. They were all of her. Tess was surprised and touched. She sat down on the edge of Donna’s bed and pulled one of the pillows on to her lap, hugging it to her. In spite of everything, she felt the comfort of family, of the familiar, here. So many of the things surrounding her now had surrounded her when she was a child. As alien as Donna sometimes was, as distant from her as Tess sometimes felt, and always had, in some ways she was home too.

  There were no pictures of Donna with Iris. None. For perhaps the first time, Tess thought she understood just a little of what Donna felt about her and Iris. Jealous, yes. Rejected, maybe. Inferior? Well, Tess had done and said little to suggest otherwise. For the first time in ages, she wanted to know what Donna thought and felt – really thought and felt – about what was happening. This was like a little puzzle of her mother. The book, the photographs, sat oddly with the half-conversations and the self-imposed exile. Donna felt complicated, suddenly, to Tess, who had compartmentalized her differently.

  Tess spent the rest of the afternoon in a cathartic cleaning frenzy. She closed the door on her mother’s bedroom and concentrated on the kitchen, which did not bear close inspection. For three or four hours, she listened to the radio, losing herself in a play and Gardener’s Question Time, and scrubbed every surface once she’d cleared her way through to it. It was mindless, satisfying work. When she finally finished, she made herself coffee in a clean mug and sat at the clean table, flicking through a terribly worthy vegetarian cookbook she’d found on the shelf earlier, wrapped in a coating of greasy dust, and thinking she might pop out afterwards and buy steak for dinner.

  Outside, it was getting dark now. She wandered back to the front room and closed the curtains against the evening, feeling almost cosy. In the street, the sound of a car stopping, a door opening and closing, attracted her attention briefly, reminding her that it was quiet here, much quieter than where she was used to living. She heard a key in the lock.

  ‘Hello? Tess? Is that you?’ It was Donna’s voice.

  Tess went to the doorway, heart pounding.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I know you said not to, but I couldn’t stay away …’

  She didn’t know until she heard her voice just how much she wanted to see her. She rounded the corner and walked straight into her mother’s suntanned, many-braceleted open arms.

  Tess

  February

  Week 13 and a few days. Hey, passion fruit. I saw you yesterday. Actually saw you. It was the most extraordinary moment of my life, and, yes, slightly Sigourney Weaver in Alien. They put some jelly and then a probe on my stomach, and looked around for a bit, and then turned the screen towards me, and there you were! People claim you can’t really tell what you’re looking at, but I could. I could, I swear. I saw your arms and your legs and your head. And, most important of all, I saw your tiny heart, pulsating away.

  Now this one is exciting … it says you can feel me – when I put my hands on my belly, it says you can feel it. I can’t feel you, of course, not yet, but you can feel me. That’s enormous news, baby mine. I feel like I want to read to you now – poems, not newspapers. We’ll start with my favourites: Philip Larkin and Roger McGough and Mary Oliver – and play you music – Bach and Elgar for culture and Oasis and Nina Simone for fun – and just talk to you, and keep my hands on my stomach all the time so you know I’m here. I have spent twenty years waking up to the Today Show on Radio 4 – shouting at the politicians refusing to answer questions while I get dressed – but I can’t listen to it any more, and I’m trying not to use my stern and fishwifey voice around you. The world is a dark and dismal place, baby mine, and I don’t want you hearing about it if you’re up and listening. I don’t want you ever to hear anything bad at all. And there hardly seems to be any good news. I’m just hypersensitive. I cried at an advert last night. For frozen food. Everything makes me cry. Refugee crises, muggings, depression in the housing market. It makes me scared and sad. I’m shutting it all out. I want an absurdly, impossibly wonderful world for you – rainbows and unicorns and perpetual sunshine. Cue Louis Armstrong’s gravelly tones. I want to protect you from anything bad.

  You’re coming along in there, lovely. Cooking nicely. Your funny head has the start of ears in the ultrasound picture, but you’ve still got your eye patches on. There’s a nose getting more obvious too. I hope you don’t have mine. I never liked mine – it has a bump and the nostrils are too big. My granddad had a great nose. It might be even cuter on a girl. What’s not cute on this girl right now is what is allegedly my bump. For something the size of a passion fruit, you are certainly demanding some room in there. I wouldn’t mind, except that the reorganization of my vital organs that you’ve caused isn’t giving me the kind of bump famous and lucky people get – all neat and limited to their tummy region. I’ve got boobs like zeppelins, a muffin top, thunder thighs and nothing you could in all honesty call a bump. It’s more of a slurry heap, making me wider and not at all cuter. It all just popped out with no warning. I woke up one morning and looked like Jabba the Hutt in the bathroom mirror. No warning.

  I am spending an unhealthy amount of time staring at my stomach, looking in dread for stretch marks … so far so good. It wouldn’t be your fault, of course, but I’d rather not.

  Holly – that’s my best friend, and your godmother – she came with me. I was going to be big
and brave and go alone but she got wind of it and went mad. She took the afternoon off to come. She cried too. She squeezed my hand so tightly while they were looking for you and then she cried when we saw you.

  I think I need to tell your father. He needs to know, right? There’s no guidebook on how to do this. I need to figure out how to make it work with him so it’s best for you.

  Your granny is back. God, it’s weird to think of her as Granny. Iris is the granny. She’ll be your great-grandmother. Blimey. Donna – she’ll be Granny. She came back from Goa, to be with us. And it was wonderful that she did. We’re so different in so many ways, me and her. It’s still a bit strange, living with her, like halls at uni in the first term – a bit best behaviour and feeling our way. Careful of each other. But I’m so moved by her being here. I didn’t know I needed her. I’ve spent years conspicuously not needing her, and now I do, and somehow she just knew. And I can’t help linking that – me and her – to me and you … it’s like I understand something now that I didn’t – that I couldn’t – before. So you’ve given me a gift, before you’re even born.

  Tess

  Tess put off going to Iris’s house until she couldn’t avoid it any longer. Holly insisted on going with her. It was the first weekend of half-term, so there was no marking or planning to do, she said. Dulcie was on a school trip to the Berlin Wall. ‘Nothing compared to the cold war she’s fighting at school,’ Holly had grumbled, but Dulcie had insisted on going.

  ‘I’m coming. It’s going to make you sad. So you’re not going on your own. Besides, it’ll take my mind off worrying whether she’s miserable or not. All that no one to sit with on the coach bull. Anyway, you’re not lifting boxes and climbing around on loft ladders without me. No argument.’

  ‘God. Poor Dulcie. I probably won’t do any of that this time. And I don’t think there even is a loft. It’s more so I can see what’s what. Make an inventory.’

  It was clear to her that the house would need to be sold. And emptied before that. There didn’t seem any point in delaying the inevitable. It was like pretending Iris would be coming home. And she wouldn’t.

  So some stuff needed to be sold. God knows what it was worth – Tess was no expert. Some given away. And, the worst of all, Iris’s personal possessions sifted through.

  And there was only her to take responsibility for it. She’d told Donna she was going. There’d been a long pause. Donna hadn’t looked at her, and so Tess couldn’t read her expression. She’d blurted out into the silence that Holly was going too, and then Donna had turned her face towards her, and she still couldn’t really read the expression, but she’d smiled her acceptance, and said something about catching up with her VAT returns, and needing to book up some appointments, and the moment had passed.

  She was glad, of course, to have Holly with her.

  The drive down was slow and wet. Holly’s Toyota was about the same age as her daughter, with about a trillion miles on the clock and a tape deck, on which Holly played ancient tapes she kept in a black vinyl case under the back seat. She had pretty much the whole Now That’s What I Call Music back catalogue (although she’d stopped buying them when they were only produced on CD. The noughties were both a mystery and an anathema to her, to Dulcie’s despair) and a weakness for nineties hits, which she still liked to raucously sing along to, holding an imaginary hairbrush up to her mouth when she wasn’t changing gear or indicating. It was impossible not to succumb. By the time they were halfway down the A303, Tess was singing a duet with her to All Saints’ ‘Never Ever’.

  ‘God. I could do with a pair of baggy combats right about now …’ Tess pulled her sweater up and undid the button of her jeans. Things were getting tight. These were her fat jeans.

  ‘I hear you. Me too. Mine are actual buns, though, as opposed to buns in the oven.’ Holly giggled. ‘Not as acceptable at all.’

  This was their first reference of the day to the baby. Tess loved Holly for not going on about it, for giving her the space and time she needed.

  Holly’s phone pinged with a WhatsApp message. ‘Check that, will you? It’ll be Dulcie.’

  Tess rummaged around in Holly’s capacious handbag for the phone and squinted to read the message.

  All okay. Dreading today. Sachsenhausen. Feeling sad already.

  ‘Oh God. Ask her who she’s sharing with.’

  Tess duly typed in the question, then held the phone in her hand to await a response.

  ‘Is that a concentration camp?’

  Holly nodded.

  ‘God.’

  Ping. ‘What’s she said?’

  ‘Give me a minute …’ Holly was wound tighter than usual.

  ‘Ella. It’s fine.’

  ‘Who’s Ella?’

  ‘I have no idea. Not one of “the gang”.’ Holly made angry air quotes with her free hand.

  ‘Well, that’s just as well, maybe?’

  ‘Maybe. You can’t get much from an instant message, can you?’

  ‘Don’t worry. She’ll be fine. It’s just a couple of days.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘She’s made of stern stuff, my god-daughter.’

  ‘I used to think so. I’m not so sure now. You get enough knocks, it gets harder to get up …’

  ‘You think it’s serious?’

  Holly shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can’t those things just blow over? I mean, you remember girls. Depressingly similar to women, now you come to think of it. We were them. Remember Malice?’

  Holly grimaced. ‘God. Yes. You had me, though.’

  ‘That’s true. Thank God for you.’

  ‘Tell her I love her.’

  Tess typed. ‘I’ll tell her we love her.’ She pinged the message back. ‘With emoticons.’

  The house was cold; the thermostat was turned down low. Tess wondered if Iris had been keeping it like that. It was a horrible thought. Post was thick on the mat – they’d had to push hard to open the door. More had been picked up previously, and was piled on the hall table, unread.

  Holly put the kettle on while Tess looked through the post for anything that needed answering, although it was mostly fliers and pizza menus. The doorbell rang. It was Carol, Iris’s neighbour. Tess didn’t know her well – she had only moved in several years ago – but Carol had been the one to call the ambulance when Iris had become so ill. She’d come now to check on Tess, when she’d heard the car, she said. She came in, and accepted Holly’s offer of a cup of tea. The sitting room was neat and tidy – the cushions on the sofa all straight, the remote control next to an old copy of the Radio Times.

  ‘I turned the heating down – I wasn’t sure how long she’d be gone, you see, and I know the bills are monstrous at the best of times. Didn’t seem to be any point heating an empty house. I didn’t want you to think she sat in the cold – I made sure she didn’t.’

  ‘You’ve been so kind, Carol.’ Tess wanted to cry. Hormones.

  The woman shook her head, dismissing the thanks. ‘She’s a lovely woman. I was glad to look out for her.’

  Holly came through with some tea on Iris’s old tin tray.

  Carol said she was very sorry to hear that Iris wouldn’t be back, but Tess could hear the relief in her voice, and she understood it.

  She knew that in the weeks – maybe months – before the chest infection, Iris had been getting worse – two or three times she’d locked herself out, and once Carol had found her in the front garden in her nightdress, looking for something, and talking about the lavender that hadn’t grown there for years.

  Carol had a husband and two teenage sons of her own. She must have viewed Iris’s increasingly unpredictable behaviour with some fear. She barely knew Donna, and she understood that Tess was at least a couple of hours away, with a job and a life of her own. When she called, after each incident, there was apology in her voice. She always said, ‘I’m not complaining, I just thought you ought to know …’

  She hugged Tess
when she left – a quick and shy embrace. ‘Please give her my love. I know … I know she may not know me, but, like I said, she was a lovely lady.’

  Tess hated being here without Iris. All the life the house once had seemed drained from it. She had more memories in this home than anywhere else – all vivid, happy, colourful. It had been her safe space and her happy place. Where she had felt most loved, and understood. That was all gone, with Iris. Without her warmth, it looked sad. She thought she might cry.

  Holly put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Get a grip,’ she said gently. ‘Let’s get on with what we came for, hey? You list, I’ll write.’

  Gigi

  Check-ups had become routine in the last three years, and Gigi had spent her life in a hospital, but there was just something about that word. Oncology. It was the worst word on the long list on the board in reception that told patients where to go. Because of the fear, she supposed. Fear of the unknown, or fear of what was bloody well perfectly known.

  Whenever there was a telethon or an advert on the television or an article in a magazine that said that one in two or one in three people would be affected by cancer, Gigi said a silent prayer. Let her be the one for all of them, for Richard, and Christopher and Olly and Meg. And Ava. Let her brush with it be the only time for all of them.

  Because she’d had it, but she’d survived it. She’d been the very luckiest of lucky ones. A breast-cancer survivor. She hadn’t even found a lump herself. She’d just shown up for a routine mammogram, because she’d been called once she’d turned fifty. She’d shown up like she’d been showing up for years for her cervical smears. Because that’s what you did. She’d gone alone to the screening clinic. Barely even thought about it. She’d made an appointment for after a shift, so she wouldn’t have to drive to the hospital and pay parking on a day off. She was meeting Meg afterwards, to shop for a dress for Meg’s GCSE prom. Another dress. There were two already at home, still tagged and hanging on the wardrobe, under consideration. She was going to make the same joke at the till in yet another shop – that there’d been less fuss about her own wedding than there was about her daughter’s prom. Try to dissuade her from the sluttiest options without incurring her teenage wrath. Take her for a Nando’s on the way home – keeping those vital lines of communication open – and let Richard fend for himself. The mammogram was supposed to take half an hour out of that ordinary day. That was all. She hadn’t really thought about it, bar remembering to shave her armpits in the shower, and choosing the whitest bra in the drawer. Not until she was topless in a tiny room, with her left boob shoved into something that looked like a meat slicer and the radiographer had stopped making small talk.