Joey smiled and tried to keep the tears that had suddenly welled up from spilling over. It was such a relief not to face disapproval. A couple of tears trickled down her cheeks.
“Oh, good God,” said Angus. “See, this is why I’m not married! This is what I do best – make women fall all to pieces.”
Joey dabbed at her eyes with a succession of thin paper napkins. “I just don’t know what to do. I’m leaving soon, and, I mean, I will be going back and forth, for a while, at least until we open Stanway House, but it’s not as though I live here.”
“Could you? Would you ever want to?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never lived anywhere but New York. And I can’t see them coming there.” Joey had been aware of these obstacles from the very beginning and had always known that she would have to deal with them at some point. But now, her return to New York was looming. The moment she had been dreading was upon her.
“So, let it play out,” Angus said. “Don’t do anything at all. See where the damn thing means to go. And above all, give it time. Don’t play the short game here, Joey. Because that’s a game you’re not going to win.”
Joey sat in silence for several moments. The waitress came over with a bag containing rolls and coffee for Ian. Angus insisted on paying the bill. As he laid a note on the table, Joey covered his hand with hers. Angus looked up.
Her words spilled out before she had time to second-guess herself. “You’re his oldest friend, Angus. Do you think I could make him happy?”
“I’m not a fortune teller, Joey. But you certainly seemed to make him happy the other night.”
Joey was relieved to discover a different charge nurse on duty – a tiny wiry-haired woman with a sweet, solicitous smile.
“We brought some breakfast for Ian McCormack. He’s in there with his daughter, Lily,” said Joey.
“Lily, yes … now let me see.” The nurse scrutinised the clipboard in front of her. “She’s been transferred upstairs.”
“She has?”
The nurse nodded. “You can go on up, if you like.”
“Is she still in intensive care?” Joey asked.
“She is. But there’s a waiting room up there – Third West.”
Joey and Angus went up in the lift in silence and marched grimly to the intensive care nurses’ station. Moments later, Ian appeared in the waiting room. Joey and Angus studied his expression, hoping for clues as to Lily’s condition. But they couldn’t really tell much. He looked rumpled and careworn, much as he had the previous night.
“Come sit down,” Joey said. “We brought you something to eat.”
Angus put his arm around Ian’s shoulders and steered him to a chair. Joey prised the lid off the cup of coffee and handed it to him.
‘Thanks,” he said, taking a sip. “Thanks very much.”
“How is she?” Joey asked.
“She’s downstairs having an MRI. She had a quiet night, which is good, but she’s heavily sedated. They’re checking her for bleeding on the brain.”
“Jaysus in heaven,” Angus exhaled.
Ian nodded solemnly, then glanced at his watch. “They took her down at six o’clock. They said it would take –”
A doctor in full scrubs was now striding toward them. Joey and Angus noticed him before Ian did, and Angus instinctively stood up. Ian looked up, and they all braced themselves for the worst.
“I have some good news,” said the doctor. “No sign of bleeding.”
“Thank God,” Ian cried, as his breathing quickened. “So she’s – she’s –”
“She’s got a hell of a headache. And she’s got a five-inch gash that’s going to take a bit of healing. But everything inside looks fine. We’ll keep her here for a day or two, to keep an eye on things – you never say ‘never’ with head injuries – but I am very optimistic. If all goes well, and I think it will, you should have Lily home by the end of the week.”
“Oh my God,” whispered Ian. “Thank you. I can’t thank you enough.” It seemed to take every ounce of strength he possessed to keep himself from breaking down.
Lily came home on Thursday. Her head was wrapped like a turban in gauze, and her walk was anything but spritely, but she was alive and she was on the mend. Joey made an executive decision to put all the contractors on hold for two weeks. There was no way she was going to allow building work to begin while Lily was trying to rest and recuperate. She would be back in school in a couple of weeks, her doctors had predicted, but in the meantime, she needed peace and quiet.
The truth was that Joey was finding it hard to focus on the house renovation at all. New York – Dave, Alex, Preston Kay, all her colleagues at the Apex Group – felt suddenly very remote, like the characters from a book she had read and was fast forgetting. She drifted through her days, concentrating as best she could on what she had to complete before she left, aware all the time of the real story filling her heart – hoping each morning that Ian would appear at her door, invite her to come over and visit Lily, ask her to join him for a cup of coffee, a glass of wine.
He never came. On a couple of occasions, Joey saw Lilia coming and going, and another woman she took to be Ian’s sister. She delivered pastries and fruit, and magazines she thought would amuse Lily, and she slipped notes under the door offering to stay with Lily if Ian needed a break, or to read to her if she needed diversion other than television. But the message was loud and clear. Ian wasn’t ready to have her back in his life, or Lily’s.
Joey had avoided the pond since the accident, and she hadn’t seen any of the women. Every time she thought of the pond now, terrifying images surfaced in her mind. The whole idea of going there again made her uneasy. She dreaded having to face Lilia. But the pond had been such a wonderful, magical place, right up until that near-tragic last visit and she didn’t want to remember it as the place of Lily’s accident, she wanted to remember all the pleasure and the happiness she had experienced there – the exhilaration of swimming, the fun of being knocked on her ass by Gala’s White Hot Russian Cocoa, the tender camaraderie of Meg’s birthday party, the knitting and the tea drinking and the arguments and laughter.
She had to go back. And she had to do it without Lily.
Joey arrived just as two burly deliverymen were carrying a huge crate along the path that led to the pond. She followed them into the clearing, where Aggie, Gala, Meg, Viv and Lilia were waiting. Lilia looked puzzled. The others looked about to burst, like children waiting to yell “Surprise!” at a birthday party.
The men set the crate down.
“Where do you want it?” one of the men asked.
“Just here,” said Gala, indicating a patch of flat land that faced the water.
“You can’t just put this on the ground,” the other man said bossily. “It has to be properly mounted.”
“We know that,” said Meg. “That’s Phase II.”
“You don’t want us to take it out of the box?” the first man asked.
“No!” the ladies shouted in unison.
“But thanks,” Viv mollified.
The men placed the box where specified. Aggie signed a piece of paper and the men trooped off through the woods.
“What on earth is going on?” asked Lilia. She had carefully avoided making eye contact with Joey, but at least she hadn’t been on the offensive.
“Meg’s going to make a speech,” Viv announced.
“So, what else is new?” quipped Gala.
The sun was dropping in the sky, bathing the water in soft, coral tones.
“Lilia,” Meg began, “we have a little something for you. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a very long time.”
Lilia looked around, confused, nervous. Joey caught her eye and smiled tentatively. Lilia held Joey’s gaze for a moment, nodded gently then peered intently at the box.
Meg consulted a piece of paper, on which she had written some notes for her speech. She cleared her throat and began, dramatically, and in earnest.
“Once
upon a time, we called ourselves ‘the lost girls’.”
She paused and turned to Joey. “It was when I was writing my book on J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys. How they might have been the inspiration for the ‘lost boys’ of Peter Pan. Well, we all had a little too much wine one night, and Gala – I think it was Gala –”
“It was me,” Viv called, interrupting.
“It was,” Gala confirmed.
Meg continued. “And Viv said, ‘Why are you mucking around with all that, Meg? You should write a book about us! You could call it ‘The Lost Girls’!”
Joey glanced around at the women, who were all nodding and smiling at the memory.
“You might find this hard to believe, Joey, but each one of us has been lost. Some for months. Some – for years.”
The women had grown quiet and sombre.
“Gala was lost first. In Auschwitz,” said Meg. She paused, and gathered herself. “Aggie was utterly lost without Richard. Viv got lost a couple of times in the – cancer forest – and I’ve been lost so many times that it’s a wonder I’m here at all. I wouldn’t be, I daresay, without all of you.” Meg’s voice cracked, and when Joey looked around at the faces of the ladies, there were tears on everyone’s cheeks. “I know that in my bones. I’m surer of that one fact than I am about anything else.”
Meg paused to recover her composure. Aggie stepped forward and rubbed her friend’s back. Meg took a deep breath and attempted to continue.
“And you, our dear, dear Lilia, have also been lost, for what feels to us, as I’m sure it does to you, like a very long time. But you have never, ever – ever! – been alone. You’re not alone now, and as long as we all shall live, we shall be by your side. Longing for the Lilia that we know and love to return to us. For we ‘lost girls’ have our own never-never-land, and it is here.”
Everyone looked up and around, gazing at the slashes of light above the pond. Meg’s eyes found her paper again and she continued:
“‘If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one,’ wrote our beloved Mr. Barrie, ‘you may see at times a shapeless pool squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.’ I’m sure he was writing about our pond. Because we are the lucky ones. We have each other.”
Meg nodded to Gala and Viv. They stepped forward and lifted the lid off the box, then unfastened the cords that held the container together. They lifted away the wooden sides to reveal a magnificent hand carved wooden bench.
“Oh, my dear sweet friends… this is… it’s beautiful!” exclaimed Lilia.
“It’s in honour of Cait,” Aggie explained quietly.
A sob escaped from Lilia’s lips as she slowly walked toward it and ran her hand over the back.
“It’s inscribed,” Meg said.
Joey walked over slowly and peered at the long bronze plaque. She read:
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
J.M. Barrie
In memory of
Catherine Margaret McCormack ~ 1972–2002
Lilia was speechless.
“It’s meant to give you strength, Lil,” Meg said. “It’s meant to be a place where you can sit and be with all your happy memories.”
“They’re all happy,” Lilia said softly. “Even the ones that hurt.”
“Well, we’ll leave those somewhere else, dearie,” Gala said kindly. “In the churchyard, say.” She popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, which bubbled over. Gala held the bottle aloft. “I hereby christen thee the official ‘remember the roses’ bench of the J.M. Barrie Ladies’ Swimming Society.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Aggie.
“Bravo!” called Viv.
“Of course,” Joey smiled to herself, remembering the dedication in Meg’s book. “We couldn’t very well go around calling ourselves the ‘lost girls’ now, could we?” said Gala.
‘They would have locked us all up!”
“Time for pictures,” Viv said, brandishing a camera. “We’re losing the light already. Just let me set up my tripod.”
“I can take it,” Joey offered. “I’ve got a pretty steady hand. Why don’t some of you sit on the bench and the others stand behind it.”
Joey framed the shot as the women settled themselves on and behind the bench. “You’ll have to email me a copy,” Joey said. “I’m going to frame it and put it right on my desk.”
She lowered the camera as the women settled in. “I don’t want to leave you all,” she said, trying to smile. “I don’t know if you realise what you – how much I – I needed someone to – take my hand, to let me belong. Even for a little while.” Tears were gathering now in her eyes. She had better get the picture, before she really fell apart. She might never see them again. They were old, one never knew. She might come back in a month or two to find that one of these precious, irreplaceable women had been swept away by a sudden stroke or a heart attack. How could that be possible? How could they be so alive and beautiful, and yet so insanely vulnerable to what life threw in the path of people their age.
Looking through the viewfinder, she saw Lilia getting up.
“What are you doing, Lil? Come on!” Viv said.
“I’m setting up the tripod,” Lilia said firmly.
“But why? Joey said she –”
“Just help me, Viv, would you?” Lilia said quietly. “Joey needs to be in the picture.”
Joey felt her heart give a little flutter, and then Viv was taking the camera away and mounting it quickly on the tripod. She felt Lilia’s thin, frail hand in hers, leading her to the bench, where she settled Joey in beside her. They were still holding hands when the flash of light immortalised them all for ever, together.
Chapter 25
Lily was sitting up in bed, pale and thin, her head encircled in colourful silk.
“I like the scarf,” Joey said quietly. She kissed Lily on the cheek and sat down in the chair beside the bed.
“It’s Granny’s. It’s Hermès.”
“Wow.”
“She says it’ll be mine one day. I think it’s hideous, actually. I’m only wearing it because it’s so soft. Everything else is too scratchy. But I’m really not the horse-and-bridle type.”
“No. All the same, you’re rocking it pretty well.”
“Thanks.”
“Speaking of which, I have a present for you.”
“You’ve been leaving me presents for a week! Thanks, by the way. The strawberries were heaven.”
“This one’s even better.”
Lily looked at her suspiciously, as though she’d had quite enough surprises in recent days. Joey reached into the large shopping bag on the floor and pulled out her Fendi boots. She set them on top of the quilt covering Lily’s legs.
“No!” Lily said, a real smile spreading across her face for the first time. She sat up a little straighter.
“They look way better on you that they do on me.”
“You are joking?” Lily was grinning as she pulled herself up to a full sitting position. She picked up one of the boots and ran her hand across the buttery suede. Joey shook her head. “I don’t want you to forget me, kiddo.”
“Not much chance of that,” Lily returned, entranced by the feel of the boots in her hands.
Lily raised her gaze to meet Joey’s. “You really mean it? You’re really giving them to me?”
“I am. And I want you to think of me every time you put them on. Promise? Cross you heart and hope to – sorry! Scratch that last part.” Joey ran her hand jokingly across her forehead, as though wiping away sweat.
Lily laughed and leaned forward and Joey embraced her.
“Cross my heart,” Lily whispered. She sat back and took Joey’s hand. “I wish you didn’t have to go.”
“I think I’ve caused enough trouble for now, don’t you?”
“What do you mean? You haven’t caused any trouble! You’ve been – the best thing that happen
ed in – in this house for a very long time!”
Joey shook her head, determined not to get emotional. “I’m not sure everyone would agree with that.”
“You have!” Lily said dramatically. “The two of them, God!”
“Who?”
“Dad and Granny. They’re driving me absolutely mad!”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got to cut them some slack. They’ve been worried sick about you. What happened to you was – not nothing.”
“I know, but geez, it’s me that it happened to and I’m dealing with it. If they don’t let me go back to school next week, I swear I’m going to – can’t you take me back to New York in your suitcase? Please? I’ll be good! I promise!”
“My couch is your couch, I told you. You say the word and I’ll be waiting at the airport.”
“You mean it?” Lily now looked fifteen again. A blush of colour had risen to her cheeks.
“I’m counting the days.” Joey glanced at her watch. “But my ride’s going to be here soon. I ought to go.”
“Okay.” Lily made a glum face. Joey couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that tears were glistening in the corners of her eyes.
“I am not saying goodbye,” Joey said firmly as she stood up, “because I’ll be back before you know it.”
Lily seemed to take the cue. She wasn’t going to allow herself to get weepy either.
“My hair will be really short next time you see me. And I’m going to dye it black.”
“Oh yeah? What’ll your dad have to say about that?”
“He said yes!” Lily crowed, beaming.
Ian was sitting in the kitchen, pretending to read the newspaper. He looked up when he heard Joey’s footsteps and smiled when she appeared in the doorway.
“Cup of coffee?”
“I wish I had time.”
“When’s your flight?”
“My car’s coming in five minutes. I have to be there two hours ahead of time.”
Ian nodded. He opened his mouth as though he were going to say something, but then thought better of it. There was so much that Joey wanted to say: how sorry she still felt for whatever part she had played in the crisis that had rocked his family, how much she wished them all nothing but health and happiness, how desperately she longed to be his again, in his bed, breathing in the scent of his hair. She wanted to kiss the side of his neck. She wanted to feel his weight upon her again and to hear his laugh, which had seemed to bubble up from a secret cavern of good humour and joy – only to be sealed up once again by the desperate events of the past two weeks.
The J M Barrie Ladies' Swimming Society Page 22
