Christmas at Claridge's

by Karen Swan

  ‘What? No!’ Clem blanched.

  ‘Tom,’ Stella said in a warning tone, watching Clem closely.

  ‘Why not? Everybody else knows now. The secret’s out. At the very least she should know the damage she’s caused; the number of lives she’s fucked up because of her precious reputation.’ His lips pulled into a tight sneer and Clem knew he was thinking of Chiara and his own loss. He looked across at his sister. ‘You have to confront her with the consequences of her actions.’

  ‘Or what?’ Stella asked, leaning in towards him as she picked up on the implied threat.

  ‘Or I will. I mean it. She’s not getting away with this.’

  ‘Tom, this is all too much, can’t you see?’ Stella said in a quiet voice. ‘It’s too soon. Clem needs time to come to terms with what’s happened. It’s hardly appropriate to start charging around, throwing accusations about.’

  ‘But it’s her fault,’ Tom roared, causing several people to turn and stare.

  ‘I’m not saying it isn’t. I just don’t think now’s the ti—’

  ‘Tom’s right.’ Stella and Tom turned as one as Clem stood up, her cheeks unnaturally pink and her eyes too bright. ‘She needs to know.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Stella asked in alarm, her arms instantly wrapping around her belly as her blood pressure rocketed and the baby kicked.

  ‘Tell her the truth.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Tom and Stella said as one, rising from their seats.

  Clem silenced them both with a look and they shrank back. This was between mother and daughter.

  Or rather, two mothers.

  Clem waited until the bell’s echoes were absorbed into the thick walls and silence rang out again, before crouching down and peering in through the letterbox. Inside, everything in the smart hallway was still. The small hillock of letters and junk mail that had built up just inside the door had finally over-balanced, so that a few were scattered across the floor, one or two pizza delivery flyers even making it as far as the finely tapered legs of the console table. On top of the console, Clem saw the dendrobium orchids her mother tended with such fastidious care, drooping and yellowed, and the blue Hermès ashtray that usually held her parents’ car keys was empty. Lulu’s lead was also missing from its hook.

  Clem straightened up, turning back to look along the residential street, as though she expected her parents to come walking down it towards her. But it was quiet. She found her own set of keys in her bag and let herself in.

  Even just three steps in, she could detect the air was musty and she knew the doors and windows hadn’t been opened for a couple of weeks at least. Hesitantly, she closed the door behind her and looked around. The hall looked different again at standing height, although the strange sense of desertion was still the same. On the stairs to her left was her mother’s paisley Etro shawl, a present from her father the Christmas before last; it was draped over the banister, as though waiting to be taken upstairs by the next person passing. Clem’s fingers touched it softly as she passed, the movement triggering the release of a trace of her mother’s scent; Clem was surprised by the depth of emotion – misplaced nostalgia? – that crashed over her from that one tiny gesture.

  She inhaled sharply, holding on to her rage, and continued down the hall, not bothering to check herself anxiously in the mirror as she usually did. There was no one here who cared today. The breakfast room was bright, even though it was an overcast day, and there were still a few flaky crumbs from a croissant on the pale green tablecloth at the round table. Clem frowned to see them there. Her mother was fiercely proud of her well-kept home and crumbs were unheard of. There may as well have been a stack of porn on the table as crumbs. One of the chairs was still pushed away from the table, left at a distracting angle, as though someone had got up in a hurry, and a copy of The Times had been left behind, folded in half in her father’s usual way. It was dated 14 September. Today was 6 October.

  She felt a shiver of concern creep up on her at the confirmation that her parents weren’t just out; they were gone.

  Clem noticed that the giant ferns in the conservatory were chestnut brown and papery a filled copper watering can standing beside them – so near yet so far. She picked it up and sprinkled water over the parched leaves, watching as the potted earth soaked up the water as quickly as she could pour it.

  When the can was empty and a half-inch of water slowly puddled in the shallow overflow dish, she walked through to the kitchen and stared with her mother’s keen scrutiny at the bare worktops. Not a coffee ring or dice of shallot could be seen anywhere. She walked over to the sink and found nothing inside it, no solitary teacup stained with a tidemark, no saucer that may once have held a croissant. Where were they this time? Another cruise?

  Clem walked upstairs, anticipating the squeaks on the treads even before her feet touched them. She had grown up in this house and the only secret it held from her was the whereabouts of her parents.

  On the walls were the pretty watercolours her father had judiciously bought at various mid-level auctions in the Cotswolds and at brocantes on their annual holidays to Burgundy each summer, and as she stepped onto the wide landing, her eyes fell to the large square mahogany table cluttered with sepia-toned photos of her and Tom as children. The resemblance between the two of them had been more apparent when they were young, and both still boasted the same plump skin and bright eyes, but that wasn’t what she saw as she took in their baby selves now, and she had to place a hand on the wall to steady herself until she felt she could move again.

  She stopped by the door of her old bedroom. It was years since she had looked in – years, actually since she’d last come upstairs. She had made a conscious and deliberate decision long ago never to use the private quarters of the house, to reject the intimacy it implied and to make a point instead of only moving through the house like a first-time guest, setting her mother on edge, pushing her back. Clem was surprised to see the same blue-striped wallpaper pasted to the walls, although the Nirvana posters had long since come down, leaving faded patches behind, like memento mori hinting at the girl who’d once lived there, the girl she’d once been – the family they’d once been.

  On the bedside table, where her multi-stacking CD player had taken pride of place, was now an antique hand-painted water carafe and a vase of flowers that looked like they’d been burned, tiny specks of ash peppering the wooden surface like teardrops. On the floor was a small oval rug in muted hues, a far cry from the garish-coloured rag-roll rug she’d bought in the market for £5 when she was fifteen. The room’s overall effect was odd, as though her mother had been conflicted in both wanting to hold on to her teenage daughter but sanitize her taste, too, for occasional guests.

  She opened the wardrobe and the bare hangers rattled lightly on the wooden bar, some cuffed with lavender sachets. Only a tapestry opera coat was still in there, with a spare duvet folded neatly on the wardrobe floor and a white glossy shoebox pushed into the corner, the lid half-off. She went to close the door when she remembered . . . she hadn’t kept shoes in that box.

  She crouched down and pushed the lid off fully with her finger, as if she was pushing away a leaf to peer at a ladybird. On the top was a lilac card, covered with a densely glittered number six, and ‘Darling Daughter’ written in an elaborate script. She didn’t need to look inside to remember her father’s precise writing – written in sharp black ink with his italic pen – and the joke he’d written about what the fish said when he swam into the wall: ‘Dam!’ Beneath were some letters from a girl called Hilary, from Birmingham, who she’d corresponded with briefly when she was eleven after they’d done pony club together. She flicked further down the pile: more cards, mostly birthday cards, but some Valentine ones too, all illustrated with twee pictures of bunnies, teddy bears and fat red hearts. She saw a postcard of a Greek island with blue-orbed roofs and thick white walls and remembered the island-hopping holiday she’d taken with her friend Jax the summer before . . .
everything. She remembered the freedom she’d felt as she took those first steps to adult independence: sunbathing topless on the rocks, walking over parched fields with a warm bottle of water in the midday sun, perfecting backward dives in salty pools and drinking chilled beer in waterfront bars every night as the local boys clamoured to talk to them. It had been her first – and only – perfect summer, where she’d been free of everything: school, her controlling mother, exams . . . herself. She’d met Rafa seven months later.

  She got up and forced herself to walk out of the room without a backward glance. She walked down the landing, looking into Tom’s room from the doorway. It had been given much the same treatment as hers – the ugly, teenage idioms removed (posters of butt-naked Pirelli girls and acrylic Chelsea supporter scarves draped across the curtain pole in Tom’s case) – in favour of more tasteful pastel landscapes, although his rugby and cross-country trophies were still on the shelves, polished and dusted, and his boyhood bear, Snowball, was still sitting on his pillow. Beside her, on the small return wall to her right, was his pinboard. It looked untouched – invitations to twenty-firsts and school balls that dated all the way back to 2001 yellowed and curling at the edges. There were some photos of him, too, with assorted mates, sporting dreadful hair in almost all of them. She recognized Tommy, with whom he used to catch the bus to school, and Marty, his erstwhile bandmate (their musical ambitions thwarted by Marty’s ability to sing like a cat and Tom never having progressed past grade II cello). Lots of Clover, of course. And she caught sight of herself in a photo almost entirely hidden behind the others. She was looking at something to her right, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing hoop earrings and a ridiculously big grin. Tom, no doubt, was pulling a face – he had a peculiarly elastic face that gave him special abilities in that area, which was the only reason he’d ever won all of their staring competitions. She pulled it out carefully, but after years of sitting wedged between everything else, the photos had begun to bond to each other and a whole pile was dislodged and fell to the ground.

  ‘Shit!’ she muttered as she crouched down and tried to find the one that had caught her eye. She knew it was vain to be so eager to see an old photo of herself, but she had no recollection of the photo, or even of where it had been taken. She rifled through the mess until she found it. It had stuck to a brochure detailing Harlequins’ 2002 home and away fixtures and she had to carefully, and very slowly, peel it back so as not to pull away the top layer of film. It bubbled a little in the middle, but eventually gave – along with her knees as she saw the full picture.

  Her mother had taken the photo, she remembered that immediately. It had been taken on a day trip she’d organized to some Tudor castle in the country – wanting to steep her son’s pen pal in some English history – dragging them around rose gardens and long halls haunted with suits of armour. In the picture, they were at the entrance to a maze, Tom goofing around and pointing at the sign that read: ‘Beware. Do not enter the maze without a map. Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times.’

  But it wasn’t her brother that she was smiling at. Rafa was standing on Tom’s far side, looking at her with soft eyes and a tentative smile. It was the final image of her, before. She had surprised him with her first kiss moments later, utterly fearless and with all the precocity that is the preserve of pretty young girls coming into their prime.

  It had been her sliding-doors moment, when she’d had a choice and the choice she’d made had led her to this point: sitting wretched and mute in her parents’ empty home, her young son 800 miles away. She hadn’t known, in that moment, that her provocative act was going to lead to love; the big one. She’d just fancied him, her big brother’s pen pal – the older man, the foreign guy – and had been testing her new-found womanly wiles. She had only been seventeen; she hadn’t been chasing love. When that photo was taken, she and Jax had been planning to backpack through India after their A levels that summer; she was waiting to hear whether she’d been offered a place at St Martin’s and could finally set out on the path to a career in the fashion industry that she’d dreamt of since she was seven. When that photo had been taken, she’d had so much ambition, drive, purpose and self-confidence, but within the month she was pregnant and it was all gone. All of it.

  And ten and a half years later, it still was.

  She let the photo drop back onto the pile and got up. There was no point in this, playing with ghosts – seeing Luca’s face in her family’s; finding Rafa’s on a wall – it wouldn’t bring them back. The only thing within her power now was to tell her mother the whole truth, to offload and close the circle at long last.

  She strode into her parents’ room, rigid with anger and tension, flinging the door open, as though she expected to find the two of them eating toast and reading the papers in bed. But the bed, naturally, was neatly made, with hospital corners and plumped-up pillows, her father’s leather slippers positioned symmetrically by his armoire.

  She instinctively reached for the doorframe as she tried to make sense of what her eyes were showing her: a wheelchair and an unattached drip; a collection of small, white child-proof bottles grouped on her mother’s bedside table. But it was the grey, bobbed wig on the dressing table that really took the breath from her, already combed through and just waiting to be put back on.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The nurse smiled back at them as she held the door open. Tom reached forward and put a hand to it, nodding in thanks. He hadn’t spoken much since Clem had rung him from their parents’ house, and they’d ridden the long cab drive over pretty much in silence.

  Brother and sister kept their eyes to the floor as they followed the pink-trouser-suited nurse leading them swiftly through the corridors, absently tracking the red, yellow, green and blue lines painted along it and leading variously to X-Ray, Pathology, Oncology and Haematology Clem realized they were following green for Oncology.

  ‘What can . . . what can you tell us about our mother’s condition?’ she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.

  The nurse turned back again to glance at them, but didn’t stop walking. She smiled kindly. ‘Your mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in both lungs and has just finished a combined course of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.’ She paused. ‘I should warn you, it is an aggressive treatment approach. You may be shocked by her appearance.’

  Clem felt her muscles tighten, not knowing what that meant she should expect – frankly, she’d have been shocked by her mother’s appearance if she’d had a cuff button missing from her blouse or chipped nail varnish.

  Tom’s hand found hers and they walked together, in step, in unison.

  The nurse stopped by a set of double doors. ‘Your mother’s in here, in isolation at the minute. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to put these on before you can see her. Her immune system has been very compromised by the treatment and we can’t risk any infection getting to her.’ She held out two all-white suits, with integral gloves, boots and face masks.

  Clem’s face crumpled at the sight of them – It was that bad? End-of-the-world, apocalyptic bad? – and she put a hand to her mouth to try to stop a cry escaping her. Tom hugged her hard.

  ‘It’ll be OK, sis. She’ll rally when she sees us. I know she will.’

  Clem nodded and they climbed into the suits with shaking limbs. Would their mother even recognize the two of them in these get-ups? Would she recognize the two of them without them?

  The nurse, suited up herself now, too, led them through the ward towards a room at the end. A bold yellow sticker was on the door: ‘Strictly No Entry to Unauthorised Personnel. Infection-control suits must be worn beyond this point.’

  ‘Please prepare yourselves,’ the nurse said, her hand on the door. ‘As I said, your mother’s been very poorly.’

  Slowly she pushed the door open. Another white-suited figure was sitting beside the bed, head bowed, gloves clasped around one small, inert, pale bony hand, which l
ed up to an atrophied arm with wires connected to it. Clem felt the floor drop a foot beneath her. Their mother – always particular about her figure – was so emaciated, her form barely broke the flat skim of the sheets that covered her; her skin had a putrid yellowish tinge, as if she’d been cast from wax, and she looked desiccated, stripped of all moisture, as though there was no longer blood in her veins or water in her tissues, just cold, grey ash.

  The cry that came into the room, announcing their arrival, wasn’t hers but Tom’s, and their father jumped up at the sight of them both.

  ‘Tom! Clem! What are you . . . how did you . . .?’ Words failed him as he rushed over, enveloping them both in clumsy, over-sized hugs. He pulled back to look at them both – tanned, fit and healthy from their summer in the sun – and Clem saw exactly how much of a toll their mother’s illness had taken on him, too. He had lost a considerable amount of weight, so that his skin hung slack around his jaw, great bags of exhaustion and despair puddling beneath his eyes. His complexion was scarcely better than his beloved wife’s, and his eyes were red-rimmed from the silent tears that fell as she slept. Thank God you’re here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Tom demanded, his voice croaky, and Clem knew he was remembering the vicious blame he’d directed at their mother only a few hours earlier.

  ‘She swore me to secrecy, Tom. She was adamant that she didn’t want to burden you with a mother living with cancer. She thought you’d fret at every cold, every sneeze . . .’