by Julie Cohen
Leaning against the wall by the font, lost in memories of her mother, she hardly realised the service was over until the people in the front pew stood up and she saw her father. She watched, frozen, as he came out from the pew and began to walk up the central aisle towards her.
His hair was thinner and whiter. He wore glasses and a black suit and carried his overcoat over one arm. It was her father, after all these years, and the recognition nearly made her stumble backwards while at the same time she wanted to run forward into his familiar embrace.
She saw the exact moment he spotted her, because his expression changed from stoic calm to naked pain.
His footsteps quickened until he was almost running. God, he was thin – he’d always been slender but he was more than that, he was skinny, his features sharp and his suit too large. ‘Dad,’ she began, but at that same time he reached her and seized her elbow. He pulled her out of the church, around the side of the porch where they were alone.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.
His eyes were hollowed, his cheekbones prominent. Something was missing in him, something she couldn’t pinpoint but this was her father.
She had never seen this anger on his face before. She’d seen shock, dismay, sadness: never anger.
‘I wanted to say good—’
‘You don’t get to say goodbye,’ he said. ‘You left your mother a very long time ago. Why did you come?’
‘You wrote me a letter.’
‘I wrote you a letter to be . . . to be polite. I thought it was my duty.’ He nearly spat out the word. Her father, this gentle man, a doctor, friend of everyone. The guiding hands of her childhood. She shrank back.
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘People are coming. You shouldn’t be here; you shouldn’t be seen. I don’t know what you think you’re doing but I don’t care. Get out. Go away.’
‘But Da—’
‘Don’t call me that! You gave up the right to call me that when you—’ He glanced over his shoulder again. ‘Go away, Emily. You don’t belong here any more. Go away. Now. I don’t want anyone to see you.’
She turned away from him. She couldn’t see clearly from the tears in her eyes, but she heard the shuffle and murmur of people coming, and she ran away, into the churchyard.
She had played here as a child, after services while her parents talked with the old vicar. Her feet led her by themselves between the graves, along a listing flint wall and through an archway in it to a newer part of the cemetery, the part where the graves didn’t lean and they were studded here and there with flowers, plastic and real. She leaned back against the wall, trying to gulp in air, holding her stomach in pain.
She thought of her father behind the camera and the photographs proudly displayed in their home, the photographs that documented her childhood, the person she had always thought she was. Birthdays, church fêtes, seaside holidays with her sister, her school photographs in pristine uniform, her graduation day outside the Senate House in her cap and gown. She was the good girl, the clever girl, the girl following in her father’s footsteps into medicine, the girl who was going to deliver babies and save the world, Head Girl at school, first-class degree at Cambridge, the girl everyone in the village knew. Your family must be so proud, they had all said to this girl, Emily Greaves, the doctor’s daughter.
I don’t want anyone to see you.
She stuffed her fist into her mouth to stop from crying aloud.
The graves surrounded her, a community of the dead. Generations all buried in the same churchyard, side by side under their names and their dates. Her mother . . . her mother was not from this village originally, but Emily knew where Charlotte Greaves would be buried, next to where Emily’s grandfather and grandmother Greaves were buried. A collection of grey stones under a far-reaching arm of the yew. She’d used to play there as a child, too. The Greaves Graves, she’d used to call them, laughing. She had traced their inscriptions with her finger, all the way from John Greaves, 1784 to his however-many-greats-grandson, Emily’s grandfather, Martin Greaves.
‘Will I be buried here one day?’ she had asked her father, aged eight or nine, and he had smiled and said, ‘Perhaps. But wouldn’t you rather get married and be buried with your husband?’
‘I’m not going to get married, ever. I’m going to be a doctor, just like you.’
Emily sank down on to the damp, cold grass. The wet soaked through her tights in seconds but she didn’t feel it. She listened hard for the sounds of her mother being interred in her grave, on the other side of the church, under the yew tree.
She heard footsteps instead: quick, hurrying footsteps, crunching on gravel. Approaching her. Emily stood, wiped her nose and eyes with the back of her hand, and was attempting to straighten her dress when the person appeared in the archway. She was tall and slender in a black coat buttoned up to her neck, a red scarf, curly hair pulled back into a clip and escaping in tendrils in the drizzle. The woman paused, dug in a black handbag and took out a packet of Marlboro Lights and a lighter. She lit her cigarette and sucked in the manner of a woman who needed nicotine in order to breathe.
‘Polly?’ said Emily.
The woman turned and spotted Emily, mid-drag. She started to cough.
‘Polly.’ Emily stepped toward her.
‘Bloody hell.’ Polly dropped her cigarette on the path. ‘Emily? What are you doing here?’
‘Same thing as you. Saying goodbye to Mum.’
‘Has Dad seen you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he say it was all right for you to be here? Did he invite you?’
‘No. I just came.’
Polly frowned. She was a pretty woman, stylish and poised, but to Emily’s eyes she had aged possibly more than their father had: she had lines on her forehead and around her mouth. Her hair was dyed a shade darker than her natural one, which made her face appear sallow, despite the make-up she wore.
‘You don’t have any right to be here, after what you did,’ Polly said.
‘I haven’t done anything that makes her any less my mother.’
‘You killed her.’
Emily stepped forward, feeling, for the first time, a stirring of anger at her own family. It was easier to be angry with a younger sister, a sibling who had always looked up to Emily and hero-worshipped her. It was easier to feel that this drama was all manufactured and ridiculous.
‘What? How can I have killed her? I haven’t seen her in nearly twenty years, since we were on holiday in Florida together.’
‘Do you even know how she died?’
‘It didn’t say in the letter.’
‘It was cancer,’ said Polly. ‘Long and slow cancer. The kind that you get better from for a little while, but you never really get better. She got weak after you stayed in America, and we thought it was because you’d hurt her. Because you’d broken her heart. But finally she became so weak that Daddy persuaded her to go in for tests, and that’s when they found it. She’s been struggling with that every day for the past fifteen years, and where have you been?’
‘I write every year,’ said Emily. ‘I’ve told Mum and Dad where I’ve been. Any of you could have reached me at any time. Any time you wanted to.’
‘We didn’t want to. We never spoke of you after that holiday. We were in Florida, and then suddenly we’d cancelled the rest of the holiday and we were going home, and it was as if you never existed at all. I tried mentioning your name to Mummy more than once, and she acted as if she couldn’t hear me.’
‘But that couldn’t kill her, Polly. And I’m as sorry she’s gone as you are.’
‘It killed her. You killed her.’
‘Cancer killed her.’
‘She died of a broken heart.’
‘People don’t die of broken hearts. I’m a doctor. That doesn’t happen.’
‘It
happened to Mum!’ Polly shouted it. ‘After you left she was never the same. She kept it inside her for years without talking about it and it ate away at her. It caused something wrong with her. It caused something wrong with all of us.’
‘She never talked about it? Not ever?’
‘She wasn’t herself after that. Not that you’d know.’
‘You mean . . . you don’t know what I did? They didn’t tell you?’
Polly had been away, out with her new friends; not there for that horrible, final confrontation. The last time Emily had seen her father until now; the last time she had seen her mother at all.
‘All I know is that you made me lie for you. I lied to Mum and Dad and Christopher, because I trusted you. I thought you knew what you were doing, that you’d always do the right thing.’
Polly snapped out another cigarette from the packet and lit it with shaking hands. Emily could see the ghost of the little girl that Polly had been, the smiling little girl who used to dance around the house.
‘I loved you,’ Polly said. ‘I looked up to you. All my life, I wanted to be like my big sister Emily. And then suddenly you’re gone. And everyone I love is heartbroken. And we never hear from you again.’
‘I didn’t want to leave you behind. I didn’t have a choice. I tried calling you after you were back in England, but the person who answered said you’d moved out of the flat. I thought Mum and Dad would tell you where I was.’
‘It hurt them too much to even think about you. You never even said goodbye. Just suddenly: gone.’ Polly blinked hard and dragged on her cigarette. ‘And Mum was different, and Daddy was different. And Christopher . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Polly. This wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. I never wanted to lose you, too.’
Her sister shook her head. ‘I hope it was worth it for you. I hope you’re happy.’
‘I am happy,’ Emily said. ‘I have a little boy. Well, not so little now – fourteen. He . . . asked me the other day if he had any cousins.’
Polly laughed bitterly. ‘Fat chance. What have my models for good relationships been? Yours and Christopher’s? Mum’s and Dad’s? All that deception and silence? Nobody ever talking about anything? You think it was easy for me to trust someone after you left?’
‘So you’re not married?’
‘Oh, I’ve been married,’ said Polly through a cloud of smoke. ‘Men are dicks.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The words seemed so empty for how she felt.
‘No, you aren’t.’ She dropped this cigarette on the path, too, next to her last one, and ground it out beneath the pointed toe of her shoe. ‘If you were sorry, you would never have come back. You would never have made my father look at your face and remind him of how you broke Mum’s heart. He wouldn’t be standing there right now beside her grave, looking like death himself, so bad that I couldn’t stand it for another minute without a fag and had to miss my own mother’s burial.’ She kicked the filter, sending gravel flying. ‘And I’m going to him now. I’ve had enough of you.’
‘Please,’ said Emily. ‘Please tell him I love him. I . . . didn’t get the chance before.’
‘Too bad,’ said Polly. ‘Now you know how I felt when you left.’
‘Polly, I’m sorry that I left. I’m sorry that you never knew why. I can tell you everything. I can tell you the whole story.’
‘Too late.’ She stuffed her cigarettes and her lighter into her bag and walked through the archway, leaving Emily behind.
She tried to ring Robbie from the phone box outside the post office but Pierre, who answered, said that he’d gone down to Camden. No one picked up at home, either. Adam would still be in school. She looked at her watch and tried to stem a fresh tide of tears.
This had once been home to her: this street with its row of shops, newsagent, baker, grocer; the Royal Oak on the corner, the path leading down to the river, the school, the bus stop, the house she’d grown up in. Now the shops were different, the pub had been repainted, the red phone box replaced by a metal half box on a post. The geography was the same, but everything else had changed and though she’d thought she’d feel like the same person when she came back, she knew she was a stranger. She had once belonged here in Blickley, and now she didn’t. Her sister resented her, her father was ashamed of her, her mother was dead.
She put the phone back on the hook and wondered what to do next. She hadn’t thought any further than getting to the funeral, though now that seemed silly: perhaps she’d had an idea that her father would let her stay at the house. She considered trying to get a room at the Royal Oak for the night, but it would be full of locals. If Polly didn’t know what had happened to drive a wedge between her and her parents, the locals wouldn’t know either, but they might have theories. She quailed at the thought of their questions and curiosity.
Uncertain of her reception, she’d only booked a single ticket to the UK, and even though it was only mid-afternoon, the thought of driving another five hours back to Heathrow was unappealing. She hadn’t slept properly for nearly forty-eight hours. She needed time to rest, to lick her wounds. To try to work out whether she was truly the monster her family thought she was, or whether she was the person she’d felt like for the past eighteen years.
Emily got back into her rental car and drove south, to a place of happier memories.
Chapter Ten
‘Your sister said what to you?’
‘It’s OK, Robbie,’ she said, sounding bone-weary down the telephone. It was about nine o’clock there, and he doubted she had rested or slept. ‘She can’t help it. Polly has always been emotional. She’s passionate by nature. She blames me for abandoning her, and I can’t blame her for that.’
‘But she never even tried to—’
‘She took my parents’ side. She had to; they never told her what happened.’
‘You could tell her. If she knew, she might understand.’
‘I offered to,’ said Emily. ‘But she didn’t want to know. And I don’t want her to know, either. I . . . don’t want to give her any more reason to hate me.’
‘You’re not ashamed, are you?’
‘I’m . . . sorry for causing them so much pain.’
He couldn’t touch her, couldn’t take her hand. ‘I love you,’ he told her.
‘I know. I love you too.’ He heard her sigh. He wondered where she was sitting: in a hotel room, but what did it look like? Was she on the bed, or in a chair?
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘tell me something cheerful. How is Adam?’
‘Adam’s out eating pizza with the soccer team. He sends his love.’
‘How’s your day been?’
He’d considered telling her about William. About that fetid bar, about the anger in William’s face, the way booze and adulthood had not quite rubbed out all the traces of the little boy he had used to be. But Emily wanted to be cheered up. She’d been rejected by all that was left of her family and said goodbye to her mother forever.
‘I went down to Camden,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you about it later. But right now, tell me where you are. What are you looking at?’
‘I’m looking out the window.’
‘Do you have a sea view from your room?’
‘Yes, but it’s dark. I can see some lights on the water.’
He picked up the phone and carried it across the room to the window. The water was slate-grey, the rocks black. ‘I’m looking out the window at the sea, too. Can you see me?’
‘Robbie, I’m on the east coast. I’m facing the wrong way for Maine, even if I could see three thousand miles.’
‘Look anyway. Can you see me?’
She paused. He knew she was looking, even though it was impossible. Even though he was being silly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I can see you.’
‘I can see you, too,’ he said. ‘Come ho
me soon.’
After Adam went to bed, the house was very quiet. The absence of Emily was a tangible thing, as if the house had a hole in it that Robbie would fall through when he entered one of the rooms that had been familiar, but now seemed strange.
A second night without her, and tomorrow would be a third. Emily hadn’t been able to get a flight home till Monday. He didn’t go to bed, though he was tired and it was nearly eleven. He wanted to call her, but it was too late where she was. He ached to be with her. He wanted to be with her now. He wanted her home, safe, where she belonged, in this place they’d made theirs even though maybe they weren’t supposed to.
When Robbie stepped out with Bella for a last time about eleven thirty, he smelled snow on the air. After thirteen years here he might still be considered from ‘away’, but he could read the weather as well as anyone who’d been fishing the Maine coast all their life.
‘Going to be a storm soon, Bella,’ he said to the dog, who waved her tail, did her business and trotted back to be let in the house. For a dog born in Maine and supposedly bred for hunting, she hated the cold as much as a delicate Southern belle. In the summer, though, they could barely get her inside. He thought about the conversation he’d had with Emily last week about breeding her and maybe keeping one of the puppies. ‘At least let’s choose a father dog who isn’t such a wimp,’ he’d said, and she’d hit him with a rolled-up copy of the Portland Press Herald.
Smiling, he pushed open the kitchen door and was just unlacing his boots when the phone rang. He loped to the phone, one boot on, and snatched it up. ‘Emily?’
‘Yeah, no, this ain’t Emily,’ said the male voice on the other end, who sounded distinctly annoyed. ‘Listen, you know Bill?’
‘Bill?’
‘Only we found this number in his pocket and we didn’t know who else to call. He’s pissed off everyone around here and I’m not prepared to have him sleep on one of my tables overnight.’
‘William, you mean? William Brandon?’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Listen, will you come and get him or should I call the cops?’
