by Lynn Watson
In the course of their conversation, Fran had talked about Ned, her new lover, and Marcus, her neighbour and potential friend, but she hadn’t mentioned Andy by name, referring to him only as Judi’s partner. As soon as the news had sunk in, she had wanted to be there but when she suggested visiting on Saturday as already planned, Andy put her off, saying the house would be full of their local friends. She knew she would feel awkward, an outsider. No, she had to focus on choosing a poem to read, as Judi had requested.
‘That’s really kind of you, Vicky. I feel overwhelmed at the moment. Can you give me a bit of time to think about it?’
Vicky took hold of her hand and stroked it.
That night, Fran lay in bed listening to the silence – no passing cars, no rumble of trains in the distance, no cat fights, no pigeons, no builders and no tipsy late-night revellers. It was the dark and empty silence of loss, the silence of someone never coming back.
Eventually, she slept and dreamt she was in a hotel room, trying to pack her case in time to catch the bus to the airport. She knew she was going to miss it and felt rising panic as she started unpacking again when she couldn’t find her passport or her purse. Then she was walking across a field towards the sea, switching the suitcase from one hand to the other and hoping to hail a taxi so she could get to Judi and Andy’s place before they left home. She lost the path and a cyclist was wheeling unsteadily towards her through prickly thistles and long grass. It was someone she knew well, except they didn’t speak or acknowledge her as they brushed past, seemingly unaware of her presence. She dropped her suitcase and turned to call out, but the figure was already a microscopic dot in the far distance and she was forced to look away, dazzled by the sun.
Chapter 5
Fran booked them into a guest house beyond the headland and close to the Beach Plaice, a restaurant and art gallery where the mourners were invited to gather after the service for a late lunch of fish and chips. The funeral itself was to be held in the village hall, with a small number of family and friends going to the crematorium for the committal. They drove down in Vicky’s car, arriving too late to do anything other than settle into their attic bedroom, which looked out to the dark shapes and moving lights of ships on the horizon. The night was clear and they left the dormer window open to the sky, so that when she gave up on sleep and gazed over the bay, Fran was reminded of the times when she and Judi camped out in a little green tent, leaving the door tied back so they could watch the stars. Vicky was a quiet sleeping companion and lay on her side near the edge of the bed, her arm falling towards the floor and her face lovely in repose.
In the morning, they took a circuitous route to the village hall, walking along the beach, up the cliff steps and back along the coastal path until it met the grassy track leading into the village, past Judi and Andy’s cottage and the pony paddock. Vicky was silent, leaving Fran to talk or dwell in her thoughts. They stopped for her to stroke the nuzzling pony and offer a handful of the lusher grass growing on the track side of the fence. Reaching the hall, they weaved through the milling crowd and took their seats in the second row from the front, as Fran was among the inner circle going on to the crematorium. Vicky studied the two photos of Judi on the order of service: on the back, as a child with a mischievous grin; and on the front, a picture taken in one of the good phases during her illness, when she still somehow managed to look stunning.
Fran felt tense but was looking forward to her poetry reading. When the time came and she was introduced by the humanist celebrant as Judi’s oldest friend, she walked confidently to the lectern and scanned the strained, serious or politely sombre faces in front of her. She had planned a short speech, and in the event she made it even shorter.
‘Judi was mesmerising, a dazzling free spirit. She inspired me and led me astray. I’ve chosen a poem that reminds me of her mystery and the wild little pony she loved as a child.’
She took it slowly, her voice unwavering and her eyes lifting at the end of each verse to glance at the family mourners in the front row. Andy’s eyes were unnaturally bright and glittering.
As she skirted the stone pillar to return to her seat, there was a quick darting movement across her path and she glimpsed the back end of a mouse vanishing down a hole in the skirting board. She sat down, exchanged a sad smile with Vicky and watched the mouse hole while the celebrant prepared the guests for a short interlude of music and silent reflection. Sure enough, the little mouse reappeared, sniffing the air before scampering along the edge of the wall and stopping to pick up a crumb or some other object of interest. Wary and quivering, it held her attention as Guacamole had done on the night she had eaten the Junoco truffles. It was there to alert her, to remind her or to console her; in any event, it felt like more than coincidence.
She concentrated on recalling something she had read in her recent online research, about laboratory mice becoming more timid and risk-averse when given the kind of brain-enhancing drugs that improve alertness, focus and mental performance in humans. She couldn’t remember the precise theory behind this, but it had something to do with the smart mice becoming more conscious of danger and consequently more cautious.
Her train of thought was broken as the funeral guests began to shift and gather their things. The mouse swivelled round and scuttled to safety in a flash. Goodbye, Fran mouthed silently, aware that Vicky was putting a comforting arm around her shoulders to guide her out, and that her cheeks were burning hot and streaming with tears.
An hour later, with everyone socialising in the restaurant, Andy came up and hugged her in his sudden, edgy way. She took his hands and squeezed them hard before stepping back and introducing him to Vicky. Then she saw Judi’s brother waving in recognition, and he came across to join them. Annoying little Jeremy had grown into a ruddy-faced and solid middle-aged man, every inch the English gentleman farmer, as his father had been. Andy moved away to talk to his other guests and Jeremy began to reminisce about how he would try to sneak up on Fran and Judi to get in on their picnics and invented games.
‘I was banned on the grounds of age and sex, needless to say. It was a select club – girls over ten only, no exceptions!’
‘I’m sorry, Jeremy. We probably were very mean to you, but rules are rules.’
Soon after this, Fran and Vicky slipped out to the car and had a lively conversation on the journey back to London, ranging from the state of global politics to embarrassing incidents in their personal lives. Fran had rather more silly anecdotes than Vicky, having spent a lot of time on internet dating over the past few years. And as if on cue, a text message came in from Ned asking if she was free for dinner on Friday. She had managed a brief call with him to find out how he had been affected by their Junoco experiment, but she hadn’t mentioned anything to him about going to Judi’s funeral.
As they approached London and were slowed down by traffic, she turned the conversation back to the day’s events.
‘I’m glad I said that about Judi leading me astray. People turn into saints, don’t they, the moment they die, and it’s so dull and uninspiring just to hear about all their good works and generosity. In fact, the other speakers went a bit off-track today, as far as my truth about Judi is concerned. I wanted to say what a gift she had for shoplifting, but it was probably good that I didn’t, in the circumstances.’
‘I think you got it about right, and I guess the oldest friend can take a few liberties, if anyone can. I wanted to ask, what did Judi call you? I heard Andy calling you Frankie.’
‘Yes, that was Judi’s name for me, ever since we were kids. My mother called me Francesca, but I was Frankie to my dad too; it was his pet name for me.’
‘It suits you, it really does.’
Fran realised Vicky wanted to call her Frankie, but she wasn’t ready for that. It felt good, all the same. It had made a difference, having Vicky there.
***
She had to travel back down to Sussex on the following Friday, in response to an agitated phone call from h
er mother.
‘George is being difficult again, Francesca. I won’t go into details on the phone. Cerise and I can’t get through to him and we thought maybe you can persuade him to see sense. He has listened to you in the past, although he’s a lot worse now.’
It was true that Fran had persuaded Uncle George to let them throw out some of his stuff and restore a semblance of normality to his part of the house. This had happened several times, and each time the unbelievable clutter and junk became even more unbelievable. In his tiny flat on the top floor, hoarded items had overflowed onto the narrow landing, so the path to his bedroom was nearly impassable. On her last visit, he had insisted that nobody touch an armchair draped in a heap of crumpled shirts and socks because there was a hedgehog nesting underneath it, despite it being pointed out that the bedroom was two floors up and it would be a strange and inexplicable feat for a hedgehog to get to it.
George and Cerise were brother and sister, now aged eighty-two and eighty. Fran’s father Lawrence had married Cerise some twenty-five years previously, when Fran was in her late twenties and married herself. Her mother, Eleanor, had left her father and abandoned the family home, although the lure or provocation behind this move was never made clear. Fran was introduced to Cerise a few months after her parents split up, and within a year Cerise had moved in with Lawrence. The twist in this so far unremarkable story was that, after Lawrence died suddenly in his seventies, Eleanor moved back in to live with Cerise and they were joined a couple of years later by George. The other notable fact was that Fran got on far better with Cerise than with her mother, finding her amusing, warm and generous to the world. Eleanor, by contrast, had always maintained a distance between herself and her only daughter, and she was getting progressively more querulous and intolerant as she got older.
Walking from the station towards the large red-brick house, which was conveniently located close to the town centre, Fran saw teenagers from her old school in practically the same uniform, hanging round the bus stops and sitting on the low walls. She was eight when they moved here, her father having been offered a consultant surgeon post in the county hospital. In the few years until the end of primary school, Judi had regularly come round to play at her house, but Fran couldn’t remember these visits nearly as vividly as the times she spent with Judi on the farm. She did recall them sneaking downstairs at night to raid the pantry, and also that her mother was distinctly frosty towards Judi’s mother whenever she arrived to pick her up.
It was Cerise who opened the front door to welcome her. She was dressed, as ever, in flowing silky garments, including loose white trousers and a scarf covered in boldly drawn birds and butterflies. Fran’s immediate thought was that Cerise would just adore Frocks and Chocs and she should invite her up to London soon. Also, that Cerise was a bit like Daniela, or how she imagined Daniela might be in another twenty years.
The parrot, Pansy, made her customary weird screeching noise as Fran entered the house. It was hardly a welcome but she felt sympathetic, knowing that the bird had once talked a lot but had said almost nothing in the years since Lawrence died. She approached the cage, which extended from floor to ceiling and took up an entire corner of the front hall. Pansy cocked her head to one side, fixing her with a beady eye, rather like the ungrateful sooty pigeon from the chimney episode, but less hostile and with an added streak of curiosity. She was a magnificent bird, a blue-and-gold macaw that had been acquired by Cerise’s mother in the 1970s and was now well over forty years old. Cerise was ambivalent towards her as she thought she should be living in the wild, but Lawrence had struck up a relationship with Pansy over time and had enjoyed and encouraged her clever mimicry.
Her mother was upstairs in her sitting room and Cerise suggested she went up quickly, as Eleanor kept asking when she was going to arrive. Once she got there, the conversation was as guarded as usual, with Eleanor showing initial interest in her move to London but soon looking at her watch when Fran started describing her new job, which she had decided to refer to vaguely as being ‘in the fashion business’. Her mother was thinner now and her liver-spotted hands were those of an old woman, but her eyes were bright and she retained an aloof kind of elegance. She soon moved the conversation on to George’s latest exploits. His flat upstairs was more chaotically bursting than ever and he was bringing home anything that might be useful to his current project of building a computer that was so advanced it was going to revolutionise future space travel.
‘It’s something like that, anyway. I probably haven’t described it right but it’s all very silly and it will just lead to more and more junk and dirty plates. The problem now, what I want to tell you, is there’s a man called Tom Harrison who has attached himself to George over the past few weeks. He’s a homeless type and he’s not been in the area long, but somehow he has sniffed George out at the café or somewhere and George has told us that he is asking for money, and we suspect George is giving it to him. I don’t know how much.’
At this point, Cerise called them down for tea, which was a home-made fish pie followed by raspberries from the garden with double cream. Cerise had arranged a vase of sweet peas on the kitchen table and opened the window to let in the late-afternoon sun. George made his way in slow stages down the two flights of stairs and was pleased to see Fran. He began to tell her about his space computer but was quickly interrupted by Eleanor.
‘Francesca doesn’t want to hear all that, George. How many crackpot projects have you started and never finished? She wants to know why you have let your flat get so messy again, after all her hard work clearing it out last time.’
‘Be nice to George, please, Eleanor. Let’s not have an argument now, when it’s so sunny and Francesca’s come down to see us.’ Cerise was playing her self-appointed role of peacemaker, which sometimes had a positive effect. Not today, however.
‘Well then, I’ve told Francesca that George is giving money to that man Tom and she thinks it’s all wrong, don’t you, dear?’
Before Fran could reply, George abruptly stood up, toppling his chair sideways, and stomped red-faced out of the kitchen and back upstairs, breathing heavily as he went. The three women looked at each other, Eleanor rolled her eyes and Cerise put George’s barely touched fish pie back in the oven to keep warm.
In the circumstances, Fran decided she couldn’t ask her mother about what had happened to Marina, as she had fantasised about doing ever since she had seen her little sister in her lakeside dream and sketched her imagined likeness at different ages. She had even brought the initial Junoco-inspired toddler drawing with her, in the hope of perhaps showing it to Eleanor, but the time, as ever, was not right.
On the way home on the train, she realised she also hadn’t told her mother, or even wanted to tell her, that Judi had passed away. For her part, Eleanor had presumably forgotten that Judi was seriously ill – or perhaps she just thought it too insignificant to mention.
***
By early August, preparations for launching the online chocolate business were progressing rapidly and Fran had devoted time to thinking about the marketing and promotion, so she could impress Daniela and Vicky with her ideas and insights. Her further experiences with the Junoco truffles had contained similar elements to the first: the desire to draw sketches, the heightening of her senses without any feeling of disorientation or loss of control, the powerful waking dream and the connection with Guacamole as he sat on his drum.
On the day of her next meeting with Daniela and Vicky, the flow of commuters towards the tube station was relatively light, as it was the school holidays. Fran was now adept at avoiding the exposed tree roots and she clicked along nicely in the red shoes with uncharacteristically high heels that she had bought on impulse the day before.
As she approached the triangle of the green, she noticed a dark mound on the grass. Her instinct was to swerve off and cross the road, so that she wouldn’t pass close to it. Something made her keep to her path, however; whether it was the fixed obliviousne
ss of the passers-by or her resolution to toughen up and handle these things, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps she realised, without being fully aware of it, that the bundle on the grass was the injured and desperate girl who had accosted her outside the café and begged money for the bus. She had seen her once or twice in the intervening weeks but had been far enough away to avoid the risk of another direct encounter.
When she drew level with the curled figure, she slowed and looked over to it. The young woman’s arms were clutched around her knees, and she lay sideways like a high diver about to hit the water. Her bleached hair fell across her forehead and her face, what little could be seen of it, was unnaturally pale, with brighter patches that were probably fading bruises. Her eyes were closed and she was quite still.
‘Just leave her. She’s sleeping it off and she’ll come round, unfortunately.’
The smartly dressed man marched past Fran without slowing down. His voice was confident and dismissive, oozing superiority. Fran consulted her watch. She had twelve minutes before her meeting and it would take three or four minutes to get to the office without arriving flustered. She thought of Max and Chaddy. What if the girl’s mother were to see this on video; what if it were shared around on the internet? Every last incident was recorded by someone these days, every indignity, every tragedy. What if the mum watched the stream of people hurrying by, so they didn’t arrive too late to pick up a coffee and croissant before heading into work? Would she even care a jot, if she did watch it? Max and Chaddy would expect their mum to act, or at least to call for help. It wasn’t that difficult.
