by Hilary Boyd
‘It’s sad,’ Jamie said, shaking the clothes free of their pockets so they could be taken in bin bags to the charity shop. ‘All this reminds us of her, of course, but it’s also strangely impersonal. This could belong to anyone really.’
The more the wardrobe and cupboards emptied, the more Annie began to agree. There’s absolutely nothing that’s even remotely personal to her here. No letters, cards, diaries (not even engagement diaries), photographs or albums – only yearbooks of the ‘finished’ girls from the school. No sign of the pictures her grandchildren had drawn her when they were little, or the crooked clay models and constructions made of egg boxes and loo rolls they had given her with such pride. She found a V&A Museum address book beside her mother’s chair in the drawing room, and on the rosewood table by the window were a few photographs in silver frames: her wedding to Ralph, Annie and Richard’s wedding, a group shot of the children in late childhood, faces from the summer ball, one of Eleanor with the Queen at a charity night.
‘Maybe she thought she was dying and chucked it all away,’ Jamie suggested.
But Annie was bemused. Everyone keeps things of sentimental value. Everyone except her mother, it seemed.
‘But she wasn’t ill. Shall I ask Mercedes? My mother would never have lugged the bin bags down to the basement on her own.’
‘Just seems so odd … to strip your life down to a few silk polo-necks. She must have been terrified of just this. You going through her things.’
Annie sat down on the bed. She felt so tired. And confused. Richard’s confession had shocked her to the core, it made little difference that she was hardly in a position to judge him.
Jamie was looking at her intently. ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight.’
‘Have I?’ she said absentmindedly. ‘Maybe Mother just never cared about anything enough to keep it, Jamie. She just threw things away all the time.’
‘Poor Annie … did you hope you might discover some proof that she, I don’t know, loved you or something?’
She stared straight ahead. ‘Like what though?’
‘Not sure, but you hear of it, don’t you? Letters, stashes of mementos kept carefully in a drawer that reveal that the dead person really cared.’
She smiled. ‘You’ve been watching too many sci-fi soaps.’
‘I’m sure she loved you, Annie, in her own sweet – or in Eleanor’s case not-so-sweet – way. Surely you don’t need proof.’
But she did. Not necessarily that her mother had loved her, but who her mother was. She realised she had absolutely no idea. All she knew was Eleanor’s lifelong imperative to appear in the right place at the right time, with the right people, dressed in the right frock, saying the right thing with the right accent and the ‘proper’ social values. What did Mother really feel about me? Or about Daddy … about life in general? Her cronies at the funeral had been effusive about what a ‘character’ she’d been, how no event was complete without her. Could Eleanor Westbury’s life really be reduced to her obsession with class and social status?
‘It’s all too late,’ she said bleakly. ‘We can speculate all we like, but we’ll never know for sure now.’
Jamie looked at her sympathetically. ‘You know you’re very loved, don’t you? And you know how to love other people,’ her friend stated firmly. ‘So somewhere along the line, you must have been shown how. That’s usually down to the parents, isn’t it?’
She hadn’t thought about this before.
‘I suppose you’re right … I do know how to love, although not always very successfully.’
Mercedes was in her mother’s study, packing into carrier bags the books Annie had said she didn’t want. The housekeeper, with her resolute Catholic faith in the decisions of the Almighty, had remained surprisingly cheerful during the dismantling of what had come to be her home over the last twenty years. With the money Eleanor had left her she was now able to get a small flat in the village in Murcia, southern Spain, where her daughter and grandchildren lived, and perhaps that helped. Annie took a deep breath. Let’s hope she understands what I’m asking.
‘Mercedes, did my mother throw things away a lot recently?’ She mimed putting something in the wastepaper basket.
‘You need bag?’ Mercedes asked, reaching over for a roll of black plastic bags that sat on the desk.
‘No … no, I … my mother, she have clear-out? Papers and things?’ Annie unconsciously raised her voice in pigeon English, in the mistaken notion that volume equalled clarity. She opened the top drawer of the desk and mimed picking something up, tearing it in pieces, then chucking it in the bin. She heard Jamie sniggering behind her.
The Spanish woman looked concerned. ‘You lost something, Señora? Ella nunca me deja abrir el escritorio, nunca.’
‘She says your mother never let her open the desk. Never.’ Jamie said.
Annie turned to her friend in astonishment. ‘Since when do you speak Spanish?’
Mercedes was looking anxiously between them.
‘Since Luca … you remember him, about five years ago? My teacher at Berlitz said I had a real flair. And then just as I was getting the hang of it, the miserable little sod buggered off back to Seville.’
She vaguely recalled a smoulderingly handsome anaesthetist who had flitted through Jamie’s life at some point, but it was hard to keep up. ‘You might have mentioned it!’
‘Too much fun seeing you do your dodgy Marcel Marceau act.’
But, even in her own language, Mercedes had no idea what they were talking about. She said Annie’s mother often threw stuff away, she was an obsessively tidy person, but no more so recently. Annie didn’t know whether she was pleased or disappointed. The thought of her mother knowing she didn’t have much time left and deciding to cleanse her life was depressing enough, but perhaps more upsetting was the thought that she’d never found anything she received of a personal nature worth keeping.
‘You’d have thought I’d have noticed that she didn’t have any stuff around,’ she said sadly, as they made their way downstairs to the car with the last bag of Eleanor’s clothes.
‘You would, if you’d been close,’ he said. ‘But you weren’t.’
She was forced to agree. Not only had she not been close to her mother, she wasn’t even sure if she’d liked her much. And did Mother really like me, she wondered.
She’d tried Daniel’s phone again on the way home from her mother’s flat, hoping against hope that this time he would pick up. She tried every two days or so, but she knew in her heart that it was hopeless. She climbed the stairs to find Richard soaking in his nightly bath.
‘Did you see anything amongst Mother’s papers that was at all personal?’ she asked.
Richard reached for his glasses and put them on, rubbing the steam off the lenses and peering up at his wife.
‘Uh … no, I don’t think so. You saw what I took.’
She stood in the doorway, so bewildered that she was talking almost to herself. ‘It’s just so strange. Nothing, not even a letter from my father, or me, or anyone … nothing the children gave her.’
Richard pulled himself up in the water, looking in concern at her. ‘What can I say? Eleanor was Eleanor, Annie. It just wasn’t in her to be sentimental.’
‘Is it sentimental to keep stuff about the people you love? Isn’t it just normal, what people do who want to remember?’
‘Maybe she didn’t,’ he said.
‘I can’t bear it.’ Something suddenly snapped inside her. The mess she’d been wading through in her mind for weeks now parted like the Red Sea and she knew what she had to do. She turned and shot back into the bedroom.
‘Annie?’ she heard her husband call anxiously after her.
‘I … I need to …’
She grabbed her overnight bag from the top of the cupboard and began to fill it with a pair of jeans, some T-shirts, a sweater, underwear and toiletries.
Richard appeared in the door to the bathroom, a towel wrapped round his body lik
e a toga. ‘Annie, what on earth are you doing?’
She turned to him, knowing her blue-grey eyes were sparking crazily. ‘I think I’ll go to Marjory’s … just for a few days,’ she said.
‘At this time of night?’ His voice was sharp with concern. ‘Have you asked her?’
She shook her head miserably. ‘I just feel a bit desperate, Richard.’
‘It’s me, isn’t it? What I told you the other night.’
‘No … well, yes, that didn’t help, but it’s not just that. It’s everything.’ She battled to control her voice. ‘It’s not about you, Richard. It’s me … I’m so sorry,’ she replied.
‘Don’t go, Annie, please. Not in this state.’
She sat down heavily on the bed, suddenly too tired to even move. ‘I just need a break. Just for a few days.’
‘OK, ring Marjory, set it up if you have to. If she’s OK with it, I’ll take you down in the morning.’ His voice was firm and she found herself becoming calmer as he spoke.
Later, when Richard had turned the light out, she heard him say, ‘I always thought you’d be relieved when Eleanor died. She’s been the bane of your life, Annie. Isn’t it a relief … to be free of all that bullying and criticism?’
‘She was my mother,’ she whispered sadly. ‘How can I be relieved?’
20
Marjory received Annie, as always, with open arms. She didn’t ask questions, although Annie was sure Richard would have said something to the old lady before he went back to London. The house was so restful, so quiet, so free from all the recent pressures. A sanctuary.
For most of the first day, Annie slept like the dead. The bedroom she called her own, unchanged since the days she’d slept there waiting for Tom to be born, was like a child’s room: tiny faded rosebuds on the cotton curtains, a single bed with pink candlewick bedspread, a white chest of drawers, an upright wicker chair. But the very simplicity of the sparse furnishings seemed to soothe her. When she eventually came downstairs that evening, feeling almost drugged, Marjory had prepared a large pot of boeuf bourguignon. An open bottle of red wine and two glasses stood ready on the wooden table.
‘I thought you needed feeding up,’ Marjory said with a smile.
Annie sat down at the table and watched silently while the old lady picked over a large butterhead lettuce, dropping the vibrant green leaves into a battered blue metal colander. When she had enough, she held the colander under the running cold tap until the salad was rinsed clean.
‘This is from the garden,’ Marjory said, indicating the lettuce. ‘But I planted so many that most have run to seed. I think I’m going a bit dotty – I forget there isn’t still a houseful of people.’ She spoke wistfully, and Annie realised she must have loved the time when there were two or three girls filling the old rectory at any one time, plus their friends and relatives to be accommodated. She remembered most meals with at least six or seven people round the large kitchen table.
Marjory waved at the wine. ‘Help yourself.’
As Annie poured two glasses, the old lady set about the salad dressing, spooning Dijon mustard and white wine vinegar into the bottom of the deep wooden salad bowl – the same one Annie remembered from three decades ago – grinding salt and black pepper into the mix, then slowly beating in thick olive oil from a large green tin.
‘We could eat outside,’ Marjory said. ‘You’d probably be warm enough, but I’m afraid my tiresome joints don’t appreciate the evening chill any more.’
Annie said nothing much. She knew she didn’t have to. She sipped the wine slowly, waiting, with the first real appetite she had experienced in a long time, for the meal to be ready. Marjory set a wide-rimmed willow-pattern bowl down in front of Annie, with a generous helping of the hot, rich stew. She gave her a side plate for the tossed lettuce, and pushed the breadboard with a stick of French bread towards her.
‘Eat … eat,’ Marjory urged, waiting until she saw Annie lift the first forkful of meat to her mouth before starting on her own bowl.
They ate in an easy silence. Annie wanted the delicious meal to go on forever. No pressure, no demands, no thought. Marjory’s nurturing acceptance, the warmth of the kitchen, the steady tick-ticking of the station clock on the wall beside the dresser, the kick of the Beaujolais, and the body of Pablo, the silver tabby cat rubbing soft against her bare leg … it felt almost miraculous to her.
It was Annie who broke the silence. ‘Did you never want children of your own?’ She’d always wondered, but never dared ask before.
Marjory laughed. ‘Never, not once,’ she replied. ‘I valued my freedom too much. I wanted to sleep all day and party all night. Paint when the mood took me. Have affairs, smoke too much, get tipsy.’
Annie looked astonished.
‘Oh, I wasn’t always an old woman, dear.’
‘No … no, I know that. I just … you were so good with us all. So … so loving and supportive. I suppose I’d always thought we were the children you never had.’
‘You were grown up, all you girls,’ Marjory pointed out. ‘I didn’t have to change your nappies or feed you in the night and worry about you. Different thing entirely.’
‘My mother—’
‘Don’t talk tonight, dear,’ Marjory interrupted, seeing Annie yawn. There was cheese and apples to follow the stew, but Annie was unable to eat another thing. ‘Go to bed and rest, you can tell me tomorrow.’
The following day she woke early, but this time without the crushing sense of dread that had dogged her since her mother died. She felt like a child as she jumped out of bed and drew back the thin rosebud curtains. The sun was just beginning to spread through the leaves of the apple trees in the orchard beneath her window, reflecting off the heavy dew to make the grass shine like glass. She dressed quickly and tiptoed outside, pulling on a pair of Marjory’s wellington boots and an old brown wool gardening jacket as she went. The summer air was heavenly: crisp, sharp and invigorating, and Annie took long, deep breaths, filling her lungs with as much as she could until her head was almost dizzy with it.
Nothing had changed for her, she knew that, but this was a magical place which seemed to protect her now, as it always had, from the real world. She thought back to the first time she had come here. Even then it had been a haven, safe from her mother’s disapproval and panic about her unwanted pregnancy; Marjory never judged.
She walked down the drive and across the road to the field opposite, climbing to the highest point to look across the flat salt marshes to the sea. This was where she had come, almost every day throughout that dreary winter of ’sixty-six, to dream of what might become of her. But none of her dreams had included the baby growing so confidently inside her.
Marjory was up when she got back, grinding coffee beans in the kitchen.
‘I thought we could go outside this morning,’ she said. ‘The sun hits the terrace about now, and it’s even hot enough for my old bones.’
They took the cafetière, toast, butter and homemade blackcurrant jam out to the rusty wrought-iron table on the flagstones by the sitting-room window. It was indeed hot, and Annie basked, feeling the warmth seep in, healing her exhausted body.
‘I’m so sorry about your mother. It must be hard. If you want to talk about it …’
But Annie found it difficult to speak. The old lady had donned a droopy blue cotton sun hat and dark glasses, and she couldn’t see much of her face. But she heard from the intonation that Marjory was waiting for her to explain why she was here.
‘I didn’t like her much,’ she blurted out, unable to contain herself any longer. ‘And I often fantasised about her dying and leaving me in peace. But now she’s gone I’m tormented. I feel she’s cheated me, dying so suddenly like that. I didn’t have time to … well, to find out that she loved me. I didn’t have time to forgive her.’ She suddenly felt intensely angry with her mother.
Marjory was silent for a moment. ‘I doubt she’d have said what you wanted her to say, even if she’d lived to be a
hundred.’
‘But where does that leave me?’ Annie cried. ‘I’ve tried all my life not to be like her. I’ve tried to make up for giving Daniel away by being the perfect mother to the other three. But it’s all gone horribly wrong. Daniel won’t speak to me, Ed’s tormented, Richard had an affair with some Belgian piece of work, and to top it all, as Mother lay dying, I was seriously contemplating getting my leg over Charles Carnegie … as Jamie puts it.’
Marjory raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, dear.’
‘I didn’t … you know … but we nearly did,’ she muttered, shamefaced. She watched Marjory’s sympathetic but amused expression.
‘Jamie thought it was funny too, but it’s not.’
‘What you’re saying isn’t, it’s your turn of phrase that makes me smile,’ she said. ‘You make it sound like Armageddon.’
‘That’s what it feels like, Aunt Best. I’ve had this hole in my chest for days now, like a bottomless pit of anxiety. I have to keep busy all the time, or I feel I might slide into it, be consumed by it. It’s so frightening.’
‘Poor you. But from what you say, your mother was a bit of a narcissist. They’re tricky in the general scheme of things, but as a parent …? Being a mother is all about unselfishness.’ The old lady paused. ‘She would never have changed, Annie.’
‘But I was worse. Nothing in the world’s more selfish than giving up your baby. I don’t want to end up like my mother, with my children only wanting me to live so they have a chance to forgive me.’
‘Stop being so melodramatic, dear. The thing with Daniel only blew up in the spring – you can’t expect to tidy it away so soon. Why isn’t he speaking to you, by the way?’
Annie hung her head and told Marjory about Emma’s accusation. ‘I’ve ruined it by not believing him. Or at least not showing clearly enough that I did believe him. Because I do, I honestly do.’
There was silence at the table but for the far-off sound of a car a way down the lane.
