The Family Gift

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘They don’t,’ I say.

  Another lie. They might only let single-celled amoebas in but I don’t know. Dan knows me inside out. Please don’t know I’m lying, I pray. I love him so much and I couldn’t bear his reproach, but I can’t talk about a meeting I haven’t been to yet.

  ‘The sleeping pills . . .’ he tries again.

  I decide to come at him with a big lie: ‘I went to see AJ this morning and I’m coming off them. Slowly, obviously—’

  Dan doesn’t let me finish. He’s beside me, on his knees, holding me close and he’s muttering: ‘I was so worried, Freya. Any pills are dangerous. It’s so easy to get addicted, and you take such good care of everyone else, I wish you’d let me help you.’

  For the second time that evening, I lean against him only this time, I feel like crying.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say and I feel utterly appalling. Another lie. Worse than before. What’s wrong with me?

  Dan hugs me lovingly in the morning in bed before we get up.

  His early morning beard growth nuzzles my neck and despite everything, I arch towards him, responding.

  ‘We’ve got a few minutes,’ he says softly, and his body covers mine, allowing me to feel exactly how ready he was for me, as he maps kisses along my neck and down my breastbone.

  ‘Mummy!’ roars a small voice. ‘Ambulance!’

  Teddy.

  Dan rolls off so quickly he nearly falls off the bed, and we both giggle hysterically, so that when Teddy comes in, uncharacteristically up early on just the wrong day, she stares at us.

  ‘Wendi the Dolphin has run away,’ says Teddy in a cross voice. ‘It is not funny!’

  ‘Wendi was there last night,’ I say, getting up, because I know Dan can’t at that exact moment. ‘We only say ambulance when we’re hurt. Wendi is just missing.’

  Teddy stops and puts a dramatic hand just above her stomach, which is where she has always figured her heart is. ‘It hurts here!’ she yells.

  Dan tries to smother a laugh.

  ‘Daddy!’ she growls at him.

  ‘A hurt in your heart. That’s different,’ I say, figuring that at least the other two would be woken up by the Wendi incident. Teddy sure can scream.

  Wendi turns out to be under Teddy’s bed and will require medicine to get better, Teddy announces.

  Out of the mouths of babes.

  I’d slept my full six hours last night thanks to a Zimovane but I tell Dan, when he asks, that I’d been restless because I was cutting back.

  ‘I’m so proud of you, Freya,’ he says before he goes and I feel about as low as I could get. ‘But there’ll be other side effects, I looked them up.’

  I blink. Lying takes practise. ‘I’m doing it slowly,’ I say, hating myself.

  That morning, Lorraine is over as we test and cook recipes for a corporate food gig the following day where I’m doing two different demos at a conference.

  Lorraine is speedily making a tarte tatin for tomorrow and at the same time, packing away all the ingredients for the one we’ll begin to make at the conference. She’s better at tarte tatins than I am: she has the patience for the fiddly placing of caramelised apple slices.

  I have asked her why she sticks at what she does and doesn’t try to get her own TV/cookbook thing going.

  ‘I can’t stand up in front of the camera,’ she says. ‘You either can or you can’t.’

  ‘But you could,’ I always say back.

  ‘That’s why I like you, Abalone,’ she shoots back. ‘You genuinely think that what you do is nothing and that anyone can do it. You’ll never get a swelled head.’

  ‘Not with you around,’ I laugh.

  Finally, we’ve finished, the catering fridge is full and bags are packed with all our goodies. We’ll travel together, as we always do. Lorraine’s insured on my car so that we can share driving on long trips. I have an hour before I have to pick up Teddy and on a whim, I decide that a few moments with other people is a good idea.

  So you don’t have silence and have to think about all the lies?

  Yes, Mildred. Precisely.

  I wish she wasn’t always right.

  ‘I want company,’ I say out loud. To be among people. Apart from the fabulous walls that Kellinch House provided, I’d figured moving to Bellavista would be good for all of us because it was a beautiful village within a city.

  Community – I love that. Why not take advantage of it?

  Grabbing my purse and a carrier bag for any groceries I might find en route, I set off. First stop is Giorgio and Patrick’s. I’m no sooner inside the door before I’m hailed by Giorgio himself.

  ‘Freya, my darling,’ he says, in an exaggeratedly Italian accent. ‘We have not seen you for so long. I must give you a kiss, carissima.’

  He emerges from behind the counter and kisses me Italian style, three times on the cheeks.

  ‘Afternoon, Giorgio,’ I say, feeling the tight knot in my chest melt. ‘Thank you, I needed that.’

  ‘We could do it again,’ says Giorgio and he does it again. Lovely!

  ‘Giorgio, sweetie, I think she came in for coffee,’ comes the sardonic voice of his partner, Patrick, who’s the tall, businesslike member of the pair.

  ‘No, Patrick,’ I say. ‘I needed that,’ I add, feeling myself tear up. I wish I wasn’t so hopelessly receptive to kindness these days.

  ‘I was only teasing,’ says Patrick instantly, clearly seeing my tears.

  Weirdly I am not embarrassed and Mildred keeps her mouth shut.

  Being sad is not a hanging offence, I realise. Excellent!

  I do not have to be Freya The Viking at all times, after all.

  ‘Sit down over here.’ Patrick bustles forward and finds me a seat, where I am adjacent to the kitchen.

  ‘This is our quietest little nook,’ he says. ‘Now what will it be?’

  I think about it for a minute because my mind has gone blank.

  ‘Junior moment,’ said Giorgio, abandoning the Italian accent briefly. ‘Like a senior moment but you are youthful and beautiful. I hate that phrase, senior moment. Youth is in the mind. You just sit there, sweetie, and we’ll bring something out.’

  Giorgio races off and I sit there and look around. They’ve put me in absolutely the best place in the little café, because from here, I can see everything. I’m far enough away from the window not to be in full view of passers-by and yet I can see everything. People walking outside, mothers pushing buggies with small children, a couple of teenagers who are probably bunking off school early. A tall and thin old lady making her way slowly but with great determination towards the café . . .

  Miss Primrose, I think, delighted. A moment later she comes in, and even though Whisper is the most adorable white fluffy dog, I’m thrilled to see she’s on her own, because that means she can sit with me and not linger at the door ordering her coffee, which is what she normally does, I now know.

  ‘Miss Primrose.’ I stand up and wave to her.

  ‘Freya, my dear girl,’ she answers, in that lovely, slightly posh voice. I never realised it before, but Miss Primrose sounds decidedly upper class. There is something of the old-fashioned grande dame about her. And yet my idea of a grande dame is that they are always isolated and looking down upon the rest of us. There is nothing of that with Miss Primrose. She comes to sit beside me and Giorgio goes ‘tush’ and helps her out of the way while he organises a little throne of cushions behind her.

  ‘Really,’ he says, ‘you know better, with your lower back problems.’

  She pats his hand gently.

  ‘Dearest, how kind you always are.’

  In moments, we have food and drinks in front of us. Neither of us has ordered but it appears that Patrick and Giorgio not only run a café, but they operate a psychic ordering system as well. I have a mocha and I can
smell the blended chocolate and coffee and feel myself salivate, which is weird because I don’t like mocha normally. Yet this smells delicious and just what I want. I also have a heated berry scone with raspberries bursting out of it, a little mound of butter in a tiny delicate dish, and some juicy jam.

  ‘Sometimes I give them my jam,’ Miss Primrose remarks, ‘but I don’t have enough fruit or the energy to make it these days, I find. I need to sit a little bit more than I used to when I was younger. And one must listen to the body, I always think, don’t you?’

  She looks at me with those pale grey eyes and I realise that there is nothing of the faintly dizzy old lady about Miss Primrose. She has the clear, penetrating gaze of a headmistress.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, because I’m not sure what else to say.

  Miss Primrose has a couple of very plain biscuits and a beautiful china pot of what smells like Earl Grey tea.

  ‘I do love the cakes that dear Patrick makes but, unfortunately, when one gets to my age, what one wants and what one can actually consume vary greatly. Whisper is the same. She is older than I am in dog years, I think. I rescued her, so I’m not entirely sure. But she has an old soul.’ Again she looks at me with a penetrating gaze.

  ‘How lovely to have saved her,’ I say.

  ‘You look a little tired, child,’ she adds. And one papery-skinned and delicate finger, slightly cool, touches my cheek. The hopelessly receptive to kindness thing goes into overdrive and to my absolute horror, I find the tears are rolling down my face.

  I’ve lied to Dan. He might hate me if he finds out. Scarlett is so sad. And I can’t help. And Lexi – right at the back of my mind, in the place I am trying to avoid, are thoughts of Lexi and whether I’ll lose her to her birth mother or not.

  ‘Turn your chair a little so you’re more hidden, my dear,’ says Miss Primrose as if nothing is happening. ‘Don’t want the whole village coming over to have a gawp. Rubber- neckers, I think they’re called.’

  She deftly rearranges the position of her chair so that she’s almost blocking me from view, because she, too, is tall, although her height has clearly somewhat diminished because of her age. She reaches into a beautiful little black leather handbag that looks as if it came straight from 1950 and hands me a sweetly smelling, freshly pressed handkerchief.

  ‘Use this,’ she commands, ‘much better at drying tears than those tissues.’

  ‘Better for the planet, too. Lexi would be impressed,’ I say, sniffling. ‘She’s very into saving the planet.’

  ‘Clever girl,’ says Miss Primrose. ‘It often astonishes me how the human race has lasted so long when we rape and pillage this beautiful land, but we can only do our best. Do you take sugar?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  She pushes my mocha towards me. ‘Take a little bit, it will help. There is a little sweetness in the chocolate that’s very healing. Patrick always knows what’s best.’

  ‘I thought it was Giorgio who figured out what people wanted?’ I say somewhat confusedly.

  ‘Oh no,’ she shakes her head. ‘Giorgio is an exquisite creature who enhances all our lives, but Patrick underpins it all. Don’t mind that slightly gruff exterior, he has a heart of gold.’

  I take a sip of my drink and find that Miss Primrose has sliced and started buttering my scone. She adds jam and cuts it neatly into tiny little squares as if feeding a child.

  ‘Have some,’ she says.

  And I do. Not even Dan talks to me this way. Nobody talks to me this way, but it’s nice.

  ‘You’re terribly sad, my dear. Do you want to tell me about it. I shan’t be offended if you don’t. However, I am a vault of secrets, so anything you tell me is safe.’

  For a second, anxiety flares inside me and I look up at her, but her gaze is steady. She must have been movie-star beautiful in her youth because her face is a perfect oval and the wise eyes surrounded by map-lines of wrinkles are still large.

  ‘No, everything is fine really, it’s just, you know, some days are difficult.’

  ‘Lots of days are difficult,’ said Miss Primrose. ‘So many days in fact, but we get through them. I sensed you had a sadness in you that first day we met.’

  ‘You see things?’ I said suddenly, perking up. What if she was psychic: she could tell me everything and explain that I was going to feel fine soon the way horoscopes did in magazines. Wear green and Tuesday is going to be your lucky day. By the end of the month everything is going to be fabulous. You won’t have nightmares, Scarlett will get pregnant, Dad will recover, Elisa will go back to Spain, you’ll think of amazing recipes and write the book in record time . . .

  I love horoscopes, I often read quite a few magazines until I get one I like.

  ‘No, I don’t see things in that way,’ she says and pours some of her aromatic Earl Grey. ‘I just notice things. I’m terribly old, you know. If you’re terribly old and you pay attention, you do see things. Sort of like Sherlock Holmes if he got to be very, very old and perhaps spent less time in 221b Baker Street experimenting with unusual medications.’

  We both laugh.

  ‘You’re not what I thought,’ I blurt out and then I feel embarrassed.

  ‘Nobody is ever what anyone thinks they are,’ says Miss Primrose. ‘Now do you want to talk about it, because I’m a very good listener and I don’t discuss.’

  ‘Well,’ I take a nibble of my scone. ‘There’s so much going on with my family right now and I can’t fix it all.’

  Miss Primrose eyes me. ‘No,’ she says, ‘tell me what’s making you sad, not what’s making everyone else sad.’

  ‘It’s just something bad happened to me,’ I say once I’ve consumed my mocha. ‘You know when you are going along and everything is fine and then pow, this litany of problems spring up out of nowhere and change everything.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Miss Primrose gravely, ‘I know exactly what that’s like. I’m eighty-five, have lived through some of the hardest times of the twentieth century, I understand that absolutely. So tell me, are you keeping this particular pain of what happened to you all to yourself or do other people know?’

  ‘My family know.’ I backtrack. ‘I mean, it’s not all about me. My sister is going through so much, for a start. You won’t talk to anyone about this, will you?’ I say, suddenly anxious.

  ‘Not a word,’ she insists.

  ‘My sister and her husband have been trying for a baby for so long and it keeps failing and I don’t know why, because they deserve it so much.’

  Miss Primrose’s hand finds mine. Her fingers are very long and strangely, I imagine them playing the piano, coaxing delicate music out of the keys.

  ‘Did you ever play the piano?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I wasn’t taught to play it as a child though, not the way I was brought up: no money. In later years I had the chance and I did.’ She stretches long fingers untouched by arthritis. ‘I took up the piano when I was sixty and I have to say, I did adore it. But now my stretch is rather gone, you need the stretch in your fingers you know.’

  ‘I understand,’ I say.

  ‘Your sister,’ she prompts.

  ‘They deserve a child so much. She’s brilliant with my children. You met Teddy and she’s such a little pet but she can be an absolute monkey. Scarlett comes over all the time and helps me with the children at the weekend if I have to go down to the country and do a demonstration and if Dan has got work. We have a lovely childminder, Angela, during the week. But our work is sort of strange, doesn’t come at ordinary hours of the day.’

  ‘What I have found from my time on this green earth,’ Miss Primrose says, putting down her teacup, ‘is that we don’t always get what we deserve but we have to learn to live with what we get.’

  ‘I know,’ I agree, taken aback at this approach. ‘I know, but I keep seeing people who shouldn’t have children but they
have them and Scarlett and Jack don’t.’

  ‘They may never have them,’ she adds calmly.

  I stare at her crossly.

  ‘I’m just telling you what you know in your heart,’ she goes on.

  And the anger dissipates. She’s right.

  People don’t always get what they want. There’s no law that says they must. If they did, there would not be people starving all around the world, parents who couldn’t look after their children, diseases that killed parents and children. Those things wouldn’t happen because everyone would have what they want.

  We have to learn to live with it. The truth of this is so overwhelming that I cannot quite deal with it right now, so I shove it into a corner of my mind.

  Taking a deep breath and another sip of the mocha, I continue.

  ‘Last year my father had a huge stroke: he’s there but he’s not there, if that makes sense. My mother takes care of him. She takes care of his father and her mother as well, and that’s hard work but taking care of my darling Dad is slowly killing her. She has to do it, she says, because she loves him so much and . . .’

  ‘Then you must let her do it.’

  This is not how I want this conversation to go.

  ‘But she’s wasting away,’ I insist, ‘watching him not being there and mourning what they had, what they never will have now. I worry so much about her.’

  ‘Still, it is her choice to make,’ Miss Primrose continued.

  We have to learn to live with it, I think again, unearthing Miss Primrose’s words.

  That can’t be right. What about ‘the universe will send you all great things’ or whatever the hell it is?

  I snuffle some more into her handkerchief.

  ‘As if that wasn’t enough, I was mugged in a parking garage and it was horrible. I was pushed to the floor and I broke a bone. But that wasn’t the worst thing; it’s The Fear. That fear coming back. And my daughter has a birth mother, and she’s sniffing around my daughter now, causing trouble.’ I finish with my voice suspiciously high.

  ‘How can I live with any of that?’