by CE Rose
Listening to Madeleine’s humming and the clack of her heels on the tiled kitchen floor, I fed my hungry son. I absently wondered what she was doing or throwing out, but I didn’t care. Like falling off the waggon I knew she was bad for me, but it was such a relief for someone to help, to take over responsibility, just for a little while.
* * *
With her usual efficiency, Madeleine strapped Joe in the back seat of her Range Rover and slung the pram in the boot. Chattering all the way, she headed for the motorway, driving smoothly and fast for several miles before taking the exit. Sitting next to Joe, I gazed through the window at the pretty tree-lined country road and sparkling canal beyond. I knew we were headed for a village called Lymm. We’d been there before; it had always been Madeleine’s first choice for ‘a small expedition’ as she called it. In recent times I’d given an involuntary shudder whenever the Cheshire village was mentioned, but today I barely noticed the road signs. Like Laura, I thought of nothing; no pressure, no stress, no decisions. No bloody panic, Mum, Norfolk or cold fish. I just took in the passing cottages and greenery, the sunshine and feeling of space.
Madeleine eventually parked up and turned. ‘Here we are, darlings.’ She beamed. ‘My two favourite people in all the world! Let’s spend some of Henry’s dosh.’
We spent an hour in her regular haunt, a minimalist citrus-smelling boutique that sold ridiculously expensive clothes. The assistants fawned over Joe as we drank cappuccino and nibbled Biscotti di Prato. Madeleine bought herself several ‘mix and match’ items for autumn, finally persuading me to try on a pair of tight jeans, which surprisingly fitted. Then we ate a late lunch in the French Bistro, Madeleine ordering a glass of champagne for me, but sparkling water for herself. There wasn’t a gap in her light-hearted patter until she slipped Joe from his pram and proudly presented ‘her gorgeous grandson’ to the chef and the kitchen staff.
It was a lovely afternoon – heartwarming, in fact. Charming, funny and generous, I had forgotten what easy company my mother-in-law was.
* * *
We eventually arrived home and greeted the dog. Still feeling calm, relaxed and hopeful, somehow, I carried my sleeping son into the lounge.
‘Thank you, Madeleine.’ I nodded to Joe’s contented expression. ‘That was just what we both needed.’
I couldn’t help yawning. I was replete with delicious food and the alcohol had made me sleepy.
‘Why don’t you lie on the sofa and close your eyes, darling? I’ll slip Joe in his cot and programme one more wash. Then I’ll love you and leave you.’
‘Thank you. If you don’t—’
‘When have I ever minded? It’s a pleasure.’
Sleep must have been almost instant and deep, as I only became aware of the conversation when I heard Madeleine’s eloquent tones drift in from the hallway. Wondering who she was speaking to, I pulled myself upright and absently listened.
‘Yes, she’s in a bad way I’m afraid,’ I heard. ‘Looks truly dreadful. Miles is worried, of course, but there’s only so much he can do when he’s so dreadfully busy. We can only hope that she’s looking after little Joseph properly. But I’m here now to keep an eye on everything, and if I have the slightest concern, then of course I know the right people to bring in. Do you know the Priory? They offer inpatient mental health services in a safe and supportive environment. A beautiful setting, and just down the road. A couple of weeks in there is sometimes all it takes and I’ll gladly have Joseph. In fact it would be a delight, he’s such a lovely little man and some one-to-one bonding would be a treat…’
My heart thrashing, I stood, my ears pricked. What the hell? What the bloody hell…?
‘Glad to hear the pussies are well,’ she was now saying. ‘I don’t think she’ll be collecting them in the near future, perhaps not for months. She’s really not up to anything, I’m afraid. Could this George fellow take them on full time? To be honest, Joan, I think we might just have to sell the property. Get a price for the contents, of course. These clearance people are very efficient. Yes, of course, dear, I’ll pass on the message.’
My whole body icy, I looked at my watch. It wasn’t just the alarming conversation and the appalling suggestion she separate me from my child that bothered me, it was my mother-in-law’s enunciation. No one else might have noticed, but I knew. We’d only been home for twenty minutes. In the days before she went ‘dry’, Madeleine could drink for hours before that telltale slur appeared. I had absolutely no doubt she’d driven me – and more importantly, her grandson – along a bustling motorway and back, topped up with God knows how much vodka.
I didn’t slap her cheek today. Instead I kissed her goodbye, thanked her for her help and for an enjoyable afternoon. I don’t know how my face appeared; I couldn’t have hidden my sheer anger or determination if I’d tried. But the gratitude was genuine and I hoped that was what she’d see. She’d forced my hand, unwittingly goaded me into action; she’d injected me with a surge of strength and energy I hadn’t known I possessed.
No more prevarication or excuses; Joe and I would drive down to Horning. We’d live at The Lodge for the duration of Miles’s trial. It would give me time to sort out Mum’s affairs, then return with the cats. If Miles wanted to see his son over the next couple of weeks, it would be easier for him to travel from London to Norfolk at the weekends.
I nodded. If he wanted to save his marriage. That part was up to him.
Part Two
Chapter Seventeen
Monday
The journey from Sheffield to Norfolk had always been tortuous. I had no idea what route Dad took, but it was four hours on a good day, much longer on a bad. Laura and I had sat in the back of his Jaguar, each of us with a comic and a bag of sweets which were to last the whole trip. Mixed with the odour of leather seats, the smell of confectionary soon made me nauseous. I never actually vomited, but part of me wished I had; it would have stopped my churning stomach and proved to my sister that I wasn’t making it up.
Today Joe was in her place, snug in his car seat, and I smiled wryly at the memory. ‘Don’t start moaning, Ali. Nobody believes you,’ Laura would say, turning away to the window.
How I hated being in her bad books. I’d hand over my Refreshers or Love Hearts and try to talk her round by asking things that, looking back, weren’t wise – about the mascara she wasn’t allowed to wear, the secretly bought bra she didn’t yet need, the spotty boy who’d slipped her a note at Sunday school. And when those queries were ignored, I posed the usual all-embracing question: ‘Did I do something wrong, Laura?’
Why she complained long and loud about our stays in Horning, I never knew. She had such glorious fun once we were there. Unlike me, she made friends easily wherever she went and the small boating village was no different. As ever, her entourage comprised mostly boys. With their soft broken accents, bobbing Adam’s apples and acne, they’d seemed so mature and knowing to me then. Would Kelvin and Ivan still live on the estate behind the narrow high street? Maybe they now had kids of their own who stole their granny’s homemade elderberry wine and shared it with the tourists. I was only offered it once, but the sweet and sharp tang had never left me.
Despite the persistent drizzle, I felt lighthearted and positive as I drove. For the first time since Joe’s birth it was comfortable to drive on both buttocks, and it was rewarding to have made a firm decision, to take some control of my life after the haze of the past few months. I had no idea what to expect when I arrived, but that was fine. Tom and Joan knew I was on my way and so did Miles.
It had felt stilted and strange dropping him off at the railway station yesterday, but his face had flooded with colour when I asked if we’d be seeing him at the weekend. ‘Of course I want to see you both,’ he’d said, as though life had been hunky-dory at home for the past couple of weeks. ‘I’ve already checked, and the trains go from King’s Cross to Norwich.’ Then after a beat, ‘Why on earth would you think otherwise?’
Was he deluded
or was I? And why was there a shiftiness behind his eyes? But it made no odds; I was on a mission, not only to sort my mother’s belongings, but to unravel the secret about Dad. Because surely that was what Mum had wanted to discuss with me? The reason for the calls I’d ignored.
Unless Miles had come too, I’d travelled to Mum’s by rail over the past few years, so I enlisted the assistance of the SatNav to keep me on track. Would it give a fond nod to the medieval town my dad used stop at halfway? I wasn’t sure where it was, but he’d park outside a church with turrets and we’d use the public toilets nearby.
My questions and goodies were always gone by then, but I’d beg Laura to wait outside the cubicle for me. When I emerged and looked to the sinks, there’d be a moment’s panic at her absence, but she’d be outside the block, her slim arms folded, her foot propped against the wall.
Twenty-five plus years ago. How time had flown: some things were so clear in my mind, yet others hazy. As I headed east, I squeezed out the memories. I was ten, Laura fourteen that last summer. Apart from Dad being there for the whole time, was there anything different about it?
I sighed and shook my head. Nope, I couldn’t remember anything odd, even in retrospect. It was a wonderful holiday. The sun shone with little rain. Laura won the beauty pageant at the fete on the village green. She snogged Kelvin and Ivan. She gained yet more followers, bribed me with coins not to be seen anywhere near her crowd. In truth, she was hardly there.
But that didn’t matter one jot. I was in heaven with my grinning, fun Dad, busily doing the things I loved, but for weeks instead of days: inhaling the sugary smell of summer; plucking chubby green apples, firm cherries and plums from the trees in our garden; picking bucket after bucket of melting strawberries at a farm. The wind blowing my hair and the sun singeing my arms, we trundled along the dappled river in our motor boat and hunted for brown, sausage-headed river reeds. We moored at Black Horse Broad, swam in its dark water and ate thick-crusted sandwiches at a riverside pub. My orange lifejacket swamping my skinny chest, I’d climbed into the canoe and learned how to sweep through the water.
‘Oh Ali,’ Mum would say when we finally came home. ‘Look at you. You tan like a berry!’
The memories rushed as I drove. That summer we borrowed Tom Hague’s cruiser and motored further down the River Bure than ever before, past the cottages and windmills, the broads and tall grasses, eventually reaching an intersection with the River Ant and staying on the boat overnight in the market town of Stalham. Dad won a bid on an antique writing box for Mum at the auction. We climbed up the thin steps of the dank church spire. When I reached the top and strode onto the balcony, I discovered a thrilling and terrifying fear of heights.
Perhaps I was cramming five years of memories into one, but it felt as though it had all happened during that perfect two months. If my fair-haired, handsome Dad was ailing or ill, I didn’t notice. He was funny and generous and kind.
And Mum? What of Mum? I could only remember the day we came home to the aroma of strawberries, rushing into the kitchen to peep at the glossy red jam bubbling in tureens on the stove.
‘You’ve arrived just in time, love. Pop down to Evans’s to buy me more jars. I’ve used every one.’
But even the local hardware shop had run out, so Dad and I drove to Wroxham for more. Longing for edible candy pebbles or a dummy or hearts, I hovered at the confectioner’s window, but Dad laughed. ‘Bad for your teeth, love.’ Instead he bought me a quarter of coconut mushrooms, and though I didn’t really like them that much, I gobbled them up so Laura wouldn’t know.
Digging deep in my memory, I tried to picture Mum. With Laura out and about all hours with her village friends and me monopolising Dad, did she feel abandoned that summer? But she had her artwork, of course, that exquisite eye for remembered detail that neither Laura nor I had inherited.
An image of her face floated back. Perhaps she had been tense or preoccupied as Laura had said. But she liked to be alone when she painted. The delicate flowers, the reeds, the river birds; the swan-like sailing boats at the regattas. And me and Laura, pencil drawings of us as babies and happy fat toddlers. We’d argue which one was who, but Mum always shrugged and said she couldn’t remember, that we were both beautiful girls. Only as an adult did I twig that she was being kind. Laura was the fair, pretty baby with those curls and a smile; I was solemn with a shock of dark hair. Tiny tots had all looked similar to me then, but now I had mine, I knew each newborn was distinctive and different.
A recollection suddenly struck me at the traffic lights, a picture-perfect image of Mum and Dad at the stove when we’d returned with the jars. His arms around her waist and her reluctant laughter. ‘You and those strawberries, Doug. What are we going to do with all this damned jam?’
‘Eat it until Christmas,’ he’d replied.
But of course, by then he was dead.
Chapter Eighteen
Taking in the yellow scene, I trundled through a large expanse of bright rapeseed and waited for the long canopy of trees. I’d know then I was nearing the home stretch and a tiny bakery where Dad used to pull up for fresh bread. After chatting with the old couple who owned it, he’d return with miniature loaves, piping hot from the oven. Neither I nor Laura liked the raspy feel of the crust, so Mum would wrap them in a tissue and we’d devour the warm dough knowing we’d soon be in Horning. But today I didn’t stop. Miles hadn’t either when he was at the wheel. He’d preferred to get there as soon as he could, driving too fast, which was always a worry.
‘Always in a hurry, my boy,’ as Madeleine had put it when we announced our engagement. ‘You were the only thing he had to wait for, darling girl.’
Miles had fitted that awful cliché of ‘everything a woman could want’, or so my friends said. It was probably more a case of everything a mother would want for her daughter: he was reasonably tall, blond and handsome; personable, clever and athletic. He came from a wealthy family, had a good job, owned his own home and drove a sports car. But he wasn’t my romantic hero. Devoid of passionate angst or poetic tendencies, he didn’t have a creative or artistic bone in his body. He didn’t particularly enjoy listening to music, either. He was more your straightforward, dependable type of guy.
Now catching sight of my pallid face in the wing mirror, I sighed. At least that’s what I’d thought. His complete devotion to me, too. Perhaps it was the chase he’d found so appealing. Back in the day, he’d asked me out so many times it became a chambers joke. ‘You’ll give in sooner or later,’ friends and colleagues said. ‘No I won’t,’ I’d replied. And I’d meant it, I really had.
Why had I changed my mind? Was it really because his old flame reappeared on the scene and made me feel jealous? Or was it his mother? That weird attraction we’d had for each other. And what had her devotion been all about? A desire to control me? Or was it to mend me? And my need to be… repaired? Discomfort spreading, I threw the thought out. I didn’t need to go there; I didn’t need to dwell on the bloody woman or why I’d found myself slapping her; for now I’d escaped.
As though he’d spotted the wooden signpost for Horning, Joe woke and moaned sleepily.
‘Hello gorgeous,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘We’re nearly at—’
Only then did I realise I must have driven right past the spot where Mum had crashed, the ambulance-and-collar, the youths-drinking-beer scene a witness had seen fit to report and pass on. Guilt and culpability flared again. The guilt for still not having felt the loss; culpability for not having known when she’d passed. They were feelings I couldn’t explain, like that frequent sensation she hadn’t left at all. Should I turn back, find the junction and make some sort of homage? But I wasn’t completely sure where it was. My ‘liaison officer’ Tom Hague had dealt with the police collision investigation and forensics, the outcome and communications, as well as any press or social media releases. True to his word, he hadn’t bothered me with any of it. He was a good man; a loyal friend to both my parents. I looked f
orward to thanking him in the next day or so.
Entering the medieval village was strange. I’d been here at Christmas, but it felt as though I was seeing everything through new eyes. As an orphan, I supposed. I had Joe now and I was immensely grateful, but had his birth unbalanced the cosmic scales? One person in and one out?
Passing the Swan Inn and the Sailing Club, I was soon in the centre of the village. The smart new-builds made the white-painted old properties look shabby. The thought made me feel disloyal; how I’d loved the few endearing outlets there’d been as a child – the tiny post office where I’d spent hours choosing comics or peering at the saucy postcards; the gift shop where I’d longed to touch the ornaments and windmills, and especially its perfume section where I’d inhaled the distinctive sweet aroma of lilac or lavender, which took me back even now.
The village green looked much the same, a large square of manicured grass gazing out to the river. Laura had hung out with a mix of locals and holidaymakers at a greasy cafe on the corner. The Baker family had neither been natives nor tourists and I’d always felt it. But that wasn’t anything new to me; I’d fallen between two stools most of my childhood and in a strange way I’d liked the discomfort. Or perhaps I had just been contrary: yearning to be noticed, yet deliberately staying on the periphery; struggling with shyness but enjoying the knowledge I was clever. That contradiction had continued into adulthood too, in the way that I’d had no time for Miles when he’d pursued me, yet had wanted him badly when his attention was diverted.
The river looked dull from a distance, the grey sky reflected on its smooth surface. But as ever, the mishmash of moored boats gave the scene colour. Did the fish and chip boat still berth at a weekend, I wondered. A memory winged back and I smiled. There it was: Laura’s exhilarated expression when she burst into the kitchen one balmy evening. ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to come! There’s a fight on the green; everyone’s joined in. The chippy’s on fire. Come on!’ Her excitement was so contagious, even Mum dropped what she was doing and we went as a foursome to investigate, Laura so enthused she held my hand.
