by Eve Chase
8
Sylvie
My days develop a frenetic rhythm. Trying to keep the gnawing dread at bay, I bounce from moment to moment in a blur of busyness. Between hospital visits – and calling Mum’s phone to listen to her voicemail over and over – I become obsessed with turning Val’s perfect pink apartment into a home. I want Annie to hang out here, not stay out of a sense of duty.
When Caroline arrives from America, I need her to approve of the place too, rather than assume it’s a reflection of her mad little sister’s metropolitan mid-life crisis. I throw old Welsh blankets over the pristine white sofa and cook Mum’s recipes from my childhood: red velvet cake, mushroom quiche with soggy pastry, and a briny fish pie.
The world of work feels like it exists on a different plane. One in which I can no longer function. So I bat off all new commitments, including a five-day catalogue shoot in Greece, reasoning that just because I’m self-employed it doesn’t mean I can’t have compassionate leave. As my agent, Pippa, waspishly points out, I can, I just don’t get paid. ‘Take as long as you need,’ she says, then, more steely, ‘but not too long.’ We both know it’s a risk dropping off the radar when so many other make-up artists – younger, hungrier, with churning Insta feeds and instructive vlogs – are competing for work. I don’t tell Pippa my hand is not steady enough to do a cat’s-eye flick right now, that I barely sleep, and every time someone asks, ‘How are you?’ I have no idea what to say.
There’s no language for this strange, shifting place I’m inhabiting, unable to grieve, yet reeling from loss, the days raw with every chatty phone call I don’t make, emails I don’t send, the Christmas plans Mum and I always start discussing, madly, in August. I arrive at the date in the diary when we were going to see a new exhibition at the V & A. And I imagine the afternoon happening, in a parallel what-if universe, us walking past the Greek statues, Mum saying, like she always does, ‘I could live in here.’
As I’m surviving on coffee and adrenalin, the weight drops off. (Satisfying, even in a crisis.) My heart feels like it’s running 10Ks in my chest. In the mirror, I observe a violent twitch in my left eyelid. Like so many things, we think other people can’t see them: they can. And yet. The man in the black canal boat, the one who plays guitar and wears a battered fedora, giving him a sexy, rakish air, has started smiling at me whenever I walk past on the towpath, furrow-faced after a hospital visit. Or I’ll be on the balcony, ruminating, heron-watching, and catch him peering up at me. He might be a nut, or in need of glasses, but his smile always looks like a question. Once, I smiled back.
Steve phones. ‘You’re not all right, are you?’ Passive-aggressive. Annie must have said something. ‘You sound manic, Sylvie. It’s bonkers you being at Val’s flat at a time like this. Come home, babe. Let me look after you.’
The offer is so tempting – in a cowardly, screw-it-I’m-done sort of way – that I have to sit down.
I could slot back into my marriage, my house, our joint account, like a spoon in the cutlery drawer, and end Annie’s resentful shuttle between bedrooms. But something in me resists. I think of Annie’s words: ‘So you’ve been living a lie all this time?’ How I’ve plugged painful, awkward bits of my life for so long. So I grip on, like a woman dangling from a window ledge by her fingertips.
‘You’ve always been your own worst enemy, you know that?’ Steve says, hanging up, reminding me why I left.
Caroline saves me, blowing across the Atlantic, emerging from Customs in a fluttering marquee of lime-green linen, sweating and grinning, like a bomber pilot who’s survived another rough tour. (My sister hates flying and becomes religious when airborne.) We hug and I inhale the comfort of her American house with its stoop and comfy snugs, her big, riotous, loving family and three slobbering dogs – as well as the thousands of miles she’s travelled, all the months we’ve been apart.
Caroline’s married to a haulage-company director, Spike, the loveliest man, built like a grain store. They have five children under nineteen including Alf, a seven-year-old with Asperger’s, who very much needs Caroline around. (We Skype a lot.) We are as different as sisters could be. She’s big, blonde, steady and solid, like a Labrador. I’ve always been the scrawny dark one, nervy, light on my feet, like a witch’s cat. Oh, yes, and Caroline has managed to stay happily married, like our parents.
‘Still dressed for a funeral I see, sis.’ She grins. Me wearing black is one of our jokes. She holds me by the shoulders. ‘And traitorously skinny! I’ve put on six pounds since Mum fell, mainlining cookies, and you’ve shrunk a dress size. How is this even possible? Are you just eating steaks and foraged berries or something fashion-crazy? Is your breath gonna smell like a caveman’s?’
I laugh. The relief of her is physical and enormous.
‘Or …’ she narrows her eyes ‘… you’re not, are you?’
‘Not what?’
‘Having animal non-marital sex?’
‘Oh, my God, no! Caro, I am so far from having sex that I may as well join an order.’ For some stupid reason, I think of the man in the fedora on the boat.
She lifts an eyebrow. ‘Why are you going red, then?’
‘Hot flush.’
‘You know I don’t believe that! You still look thirty. It’s incredibly annoying.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ But I can feel my grin stretching wide. How confusing it is to feel so ridiculously happy to see someone when the reunion is occurring for the very worst of reasons.
We’re soon chatting at a hundred miles an hour until the gap between us closes and her transatlantic accent slips into British and it’s as if we saw each other yesterday. Then we’re kids again. I’m lying in the lower bunk bed, reaching up to touch her fingers dangling down from above. We’re walking back from school along the overgrown Devon lanes, bulging school satchels digging into our shoulders, grabbing wild flowers – ox-eye daisies, Queen Anne’s lace – from the bank to give Mum at teatime. Mum’s turning from the sink, wiping suddy hands on her A-line denim skirt. It all rushes at me, sucking away my breath, nipping back time, like a belt.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asks, shooting me a sideways look. ‘Have I got too fat to wear green or something? Do I look like a hedge?’
‘No. You look gorgeous.’ I lift her bag into the car’s boot. A carry-on. Not staying long, then, I think, a bubble of sadness in my chest. ‘I’ve missed you, that’s all.’
She slips an arm around my shoulders. ‘Same.’
*
The sight of our magnificent mother lying sessile on her hospital bed, suspended in the fathomless murk of a coma, her bodily functions outsourced, makes Caroline burst into tears.
I did warn her. But nothing really prepares you. I take her hand in mine. Her palm is hot and damp. She hates hospitals. They’re up there with flying on her anything-to-avoid list. She had so much surgery as a kid it’s not surprising. ‘I can’t believe this. I thought she was invincible. She’s never ill! She never even gets colds. Oh, Sylvie, I feel so bloody guilty for living so far away.’
‘If you’d lived next door, it wouldn’t have stopped it.’ I hand her a tissue. ‘Caro, there’s a chance if … when she wakes …’ I stall. The subject has its own weft, too many layers. ‘Her memory might be affected. You should know that.’
I watch this information percolate through my sister’s features. Like me, she’d never have imagined that so much family history might vanish with Mum, like a Polaroid image left in stark sunlight, fading to a skeleton-grey silhouette then gone.
A moment passes. She links her little finger in mine and shakes it. I smile at her, relieved. Growing up, we used to do this all the time. It was our secret way of saying, we’re sisters, that’s all that matters; we won’t talk about the past, where the monsters live. ‘I just want her better,’ she says.
‘Me too.’
We stare at Mum quietly for a while. The machines beep and buzz. ‘You know there’s a small chance she can hear us?’
‘Oh, wow.
Really?’ Caroline leans closer to the bed. ‘I’ve got your wedding photo here, Mum.’ She digs into her handbag and pulls out a small framed photo of our parents outside Hackney register office. (Beaming at one another, eyes shining, they look like they can’t believe their luck.) She places it on the table to remind the nursing staff that Mum’s an individual, a woman with a story, not just a grey-haired patient in a backless gown, daft enough to fall off a cliff. ‘There. Stunning.’
The curtains rattle back. Kerry. My favourite nurse on account of her non-medical professional snort of a laugh, which reminds me of Mum’s. I make the introduction, then pull out the newspaper article about the rescue I’ve kept for Caroline and show it to them both.
‘Ooh. Not every day I get to change the IV on a celebrity,’ Kerry says.
‘I wish you could see this, Mum.’ Caroline shakes out the newspaper. ‘You’ve only gone viral.’
Mum’s accident had coincided with charged public debate about funding for coastguard emergency services. Since the first instinct of most onlookers was to take photographs – what click-bait she made, lying so perilously, enthrallingly, close to the abyss! – the story found its way into social media, the local Devon papers, then spilled, in a surreal way, into the mainstream press.
‘Not far off a Kardashian,’ I say.
We wait for Mum to smile or say, ‘The Whatishians?’ feigning ignorance to amuse us. But she doesn’t. Mother. Her sense of fun. Her secrets. Silenced.
*
‘Aren’t you two a bit old for a sleepover?’ Four days later, Annie emerges from her bedroom, wearing the pyjamas I bought her from Paris and a guarded look of daughterly dismay. I suddenly remember crawling into Caroline’s sofa bed in the early hours, unable to bear the idea of her flying back to America. We’d been up half the night, talking about Mum’s prognosis, Steve’s affair, Caroline’s acne rosacea, and Annie’s conditional offer to read maths at Cambridge, which we agreed was insanely exciting, and proof that one day she’d run the world. We sobbed and laughed. We drank way too much. The incriminating wine glasses are still on the coffee-table, along with empty Doritos bags, a violent sight at eight a.m.
‘Your mother’s led me astray, Annie. She always does. And now it feels like a coyote’s died in my mouth. Come on, we’ll budge up.’ Caroline pats the side of the bed. Her accent is more American this morning, as if part of her is already over the Atlantic, back with Spike and the kids. Although I know she’s desperately torn about leaving Mum, I can sense how much she longs to be with her own family again. I almost forgive her for leaving.
Annie flops down on the bed, picks up the remote and flicks on the telly. The news starts to roll. Our eyes glide sleepily to the screen. The weather: warm and cloudy.
‘There’s something I haven’t told either of you,’ Annie blurts. The temperature in the room instantly drops. ‘It was my fault. Granny fell because of me.’
‘What?’ Wine throbs behind my eyes.
‘Annie, don’t be daft,’ says Caroline, with a small laugh.
‘You don’t understand. If I hadn’t tried to take a photo …’ Annie begins. Her voice breaks.
‘Oh, sweetheart, you think that makes it your fault?’ I say. ‘The cliff edge crumbled and she slipped. It’s bad luck. Hideously bad luck.’
‘Selfies are even more dangerous! People are always falling off cliffs while taking selfies. They step back and then … Argh!’ Caroline stops abruptly, seeing the horrified expression on Annie’s face, me shaking my head. ‘Sorry. God. Sorry. There I go again. Me and my big mouth.’
‘See what I’ve had to put up with all these years?’ I joke, trying to change the mood.
Annie almost smiles.
Caroline wiggles up on the pillow. ‘Come on, tell us all about your new chap then, Annie.’
Annie’s expression darkens. She shakes her head.
Caroline glances at me. A question zips like a current between us.
A new sort of anxiety starts to marble inside me. I’ve been focused so much on Mum this past week, I barely know anything about Ed. No, not Ed. Elliot. ‘Right,’ I say, my voice coming out too high, fake cheery. ‘Pancakes? Those big fat Nigella ones with leaky blueberries. What do you think?’
‘Tired of pancakes, tired of life,’ nods Caroline.
‘I feel a bit sick. Can’t face anything.’ Annie twists out of the bed and plants a foot on the rug.
‘Wait.’ Caroline flings open her arms. ‘Before I skedaddle. Last group hug. To stop the 747 falling from the sky. You know I’m totally neurotic.’
Annie stays: Caroline’s the teen whisperer. We both fold into her arms and we stay like that awhile, buttressed against the outside world. It’s the first time I’ve been properly still – or held – since Mum fell. Something in me loosens. Tears start rolling down my cheeks.
‘Now, ladies,’ Caroline says, switching to her firm mom-of-five voice, ‘before we get too maudlin about things, I think we need to remind ourselves that our patient’s tough as old boots, right?’
I nod and rub away my tears, igniting hung-over sparks on my inner lids, the shape of a skeletal tree, a red vein forest. Suddenly Mum feels closer. She never gives up. Neither shall I.
‘Annie?’ Caroline asks.
‘Right,’ says Annie, weakly.
‘There.’ Caroline hugs her close again, kissing the top of her head. ‘That’s more like it, Annie. Don’t blame yourself. And never forget this is Granny Rita we’re talking about, okay?’ Caroline shoots me a glance. Understanding flows between us, a secret sisterly transmission, and when she speaks again, her voice is soft, barely audible, like a private thought exhaled. ‘I reckon our Rita’s survived much worse.’
9
Rita
A darkling mood is spreading through Foxcote, tender as a bruise. As each hour’s squawked in by the cuckoo clock on the landing, Jeannie seems to drift further away. Four days they’ve been at the house now, and no signs of improvement.
Rita may be what Nan would call ‘born cheerful’ but she still feels the contagion of Jeannie’s sadness, the sag of energy under Foxcote’s eaves. Even the forest seems to mirror it, the air cloying, still and warm, boiling with insects. Above the trees the clouds hang, low, white and heavy, like damp laundry on a line.
Rita really hadn’t expected another ‘episode’ to strike so soon. Or for Jeannie’s decline to be so steep-sided, like one of those old mine openings in the woods, their mouths gummy with moss, hidden under leaves. And now her loyalties are torn. Quite how dishonest is it right to be? She’s promised to inform Walter – that’s the arrangement and, as her husband, he’d argue he has a right to know. She’s not so sure. ‘Don’t mention anything to Walter, will you?’ Jeannie mumbled yesterday morning, and the cup of tea Rita was holding had jerked in her hand and sloshed on her wrist.
The possibility Walter might use information – her information – against Jeannie makes Rita want to slide out of her own skin in shame. What if Walter, and those terrifying private doctors of his, decided this new slump in Jeannie’s spirits warranted a return to The Lawns?
Last night she lay awake, tossing and turning, wondering what to do, thoughts scuttling, like the mice under the rotten floorboards. She woke up none the wiser.
Brevity seems the only answer. ‘Friday. J still has migraine. Lost appetite,’ Rita writes, sitting at the desk in her stuffy bedroom, the top of her thighs grazing the rough underside. Chewing the pen, she gazes at her terrarium – the ferns love the ravishing low light – then back at the pad. No, even this small amount of detail is damning – Walter will spot the signs, stupid – so she scrubs it all out, slaps the notebook shut and shoves it into the desk drawer. She hates that notebook. And she dreads Walter phoning again.
He called yesterday afternoon, sounding rattled – Jeannie, Rita had said, was out having a stroll – and told her the Namibian mine had collapsed during a busy shift. It was a godawful disaster. He needed to go out there immediately, and wou
ldn’t be able to visit at the weekend, as he’d hoped. Rita tried to imagine the suffering taking place at that moment, those poor people, buried alive. She thought about the children who’d lose parents, how their lives would be unrecognizable from what they’d been seconds earlier. It put the problems at Foxcote into perspective. And yet she still couldn’t help but be enormously relieved Walter was going abroad. She assured him everything was fine at Foxcote. Jeannie was perfectly cheerful. No need to worry.
Her first lie. It had slipped out surprisingly easily. Even though her fingers left sweaty prints on the black Bakelite phone. But he will ring again: a man like Walter will always find a way to check up on his wife even from the other side of the world. And she’ll have to tell another.
She also needs to hide Jeannie’s state of mind from Marge, who Jeannie is convinced is in ‘Walter’s camp’.
Keeping Marge away is difficult. The more vigorously Rita refuses the housekeeper’s offers of help, the more determined she is to give it. She arrives without warning for spurious reasons, her rusting car coughing up the drive, trailing a boar’s tail of exhaust. Rather than knock, she lets herself in using her own keys, then stomps around, obstinate, unstoppable, flapping dusters, slopping mops and snapping out sheets, armed with gristly sausages, homemade pork pies studded with globs of yellow fat, and enamel pitchers of creamy milk – ‘to build Mrs Harrington up again’ – and questions, endless questions. ‘Did you get a good look at the baby, Rita? Was there a funeral?’ Rita explained the baby was taken away in an ambulance. No, she didn’t see her. No funeral: Jeannie was too sick, not coping, and Walter thought it better if they all pretended nothing had happened. Marge listened avidly, hugging a bottle of Ajax to her bosom. ‘All that maternal love.’ She sighed, as if deriving a small shiver of pleasure from the drama. ‘Nowhere for it to go.’
