‘And you’d be right, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.’
He twisted to face her, his eyes bright, and she felt a shot of something like malice in her veins; it felt appropriate to shatter the regard in which he held her gran, the woman who had lied to her, made a mockery of her life. The woman who had held her hand while she cried for her mum and who had helped her draw pictures of her mother in heaven, which she would store under her pillow, when all the time she knew that Victoria’s mother was in bloody Oslo! It was the worst betrayal, and Victoria was angry.
‘Is life getting you down?’
‘Just a bit.’ She laughed at the understatement.
‘Well, if there’s anything I can do, or if you just want a good listening ear, I—’
‘Actually, Gerald.’ She cut him short. ‘There is something I would like to tell you. Not a secret exactly, not any more, but a strange thing, that’s for sure.’
‘Oh?’ He looked at her as if what came next might require his full attention.
She took a deep breath, aware that she might be stripping away some of Prim’s veneer for him too, having to inform him that she had lied for all these years . . . but that was just too bad.
‘You know about my mum, that she, erm . . .’ It felt weird saying that she had died, the most definitive of human actions, when she was about to immediately disprove it.
‘Yes, dear, I do. A sad, sad business for you all. I know what happened and that you were very small, I believe.’
‘Well’ – Victoria made a clicking noise at the side of her mouth – ‘here’s the thing. My mum turned up at Prim’s funeral. She even came back here to Rosebank, but stayed in the garden, and then I met her briefly to talk before she had to leave again.’
Gerald held her eyeline, his mouth moving silently in confusion as he knitted his brows. ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, your mum “turned up” at the funeral? Do you mean in spirit form?’ he asked quietly. ‘I personally am not a believer, but if it brings you comfort, dear, to think you met with your mother, then I think that is a fine thing.’
Victoria actually threw her head back and let out a snort, shaking her head. ‘No, Gerald. It’s even stranger than that. My actual mum, who it turns out did not die, pitched up after all this time to inform me that she is very much alive.’
‘But I don’t understand!’ He looked a little ashen.
‘That makes two of us.’
‘She’s not dead?’
‘Not even a little bit.’
‘And she came here?’ He was clearly trying to fathom what was going on.
‘She came here and stood by the lake.’
‘Are you sure she is your mother?’ He asked the most obvious question.
Victoria nodded. ‘Absolutely positive.’ She found his expression of complete and utter disbelief comforting. It proved to her that she was right to be outraged, upset and defiant because it was the worst bloody thing imaginable!
‘But, I don’t . . . why did . . . how does . . .?’ he floundered.
‘Trust me, all the questions that are whizzing around your head right now have been whizzing around mine since I found out.’
‘Why would Prim say she had died if she hadn’t, and why would your mother agree to it?’
She shrugged. ‘Who knows, Gerald? That’s the big question.’
‘Well, I never did.’ Gerald shook his head and gave a long sigh. ‘As if you don’t have enough to deal with right now, Miss Victoria.’
‘Tell me about it.’ Victoria stared at the fireplace and thought about Christmas when she was six.
‘I wish I had my mummy here with me . . .’
‘I know, darling, but she’s like that angel on top of the tree, watching over you . . .’
‘I must say, I don’t know what to think,’ Gerald sighed. ‘I don’t know where to start with this. It’s . . . it’s wonderful terrible.’
‘I guess it is.’ Wonderful terrible. ‘My head is swirling constantly.’ She rubbed her temples.
‘I bet. Where does your mother live? Locally?’
‘No. Oslo.’
‘Oslo!’ He gasped loudly, as if this revelation was worse than the first. ‘Goodness me!’
‘Prim used to say that lies rankle, because the person lying to you thinks you are stupid enough to fall for it. I always thought I was smart, turns out I wasn’t.’
He whipped his head towards her. ‘You are smart, Victoria, and you will find a way to figure it out. Life has thrown you a curve ball and it’s knocked you off your feet, but you’ll get back up again. You will.’
She hated that she cried, wanting to rage, wanting to get mad, but tears hauled her back to square one, leaving her lost and bereft and with the weight of loneliness crushing the breath out of her. Gerald patted her arm.
‘Don’t cry, dear. Don’t cry. Prim would not want you to cry.’
‘You don’t know that! You don’t know what Prim would or would not want because you didn’t know her – how could you? I lived with her every day of my life and even I didn’t know her!’
‘I know she loved you. I know she loved you very much.’
‘How?’ she fired. ‘Because she told you that? Because, let’s face it, she told me lots of things that weren’t true – like the fact that my mum had died but she hadn’t!’
‘No, she was living in Oslo,’ he mused, and for some reason this made Victoria laugh while her tears continued to fall.
‘Yes, she was living in Oslo.’
‘I’m going to leave you to it.’ He stood. ‘I think you need to be alone with your thoughts, but you know where I am if you need me. On the end of the phone. Day or night.’
‘Day or night,’ she acknowledged through her tears.
‘I’m not sure we need a fire, Daks. It’s not that cold.’ Victoria watched from the corner of the sofa as her friend took great care in twisting rips of newspaper into spills and placing them under small shards of firewood that Bernard-the-traitor-spy-handyman had some time ago prepared and piled into the log baskets on either side of the fire in the drawing room.
‘It’s not about cold.’ Daksha drew her from her thoughts. ‘It’s about cosy. Plus, I can’t tell you how much I love a real fire. In our house, if we want a fire my dad presses a button on a remote control and a flame whooshes along a glass panel and hey presto! But this’ – she now ran her fingers over the gnarled bunch of dried twigs in her hands – ‘this is old school.’
‘I guess.’ Victoria curled her feet under her legs and pulled her favourite soft, pink blanket from the arm of the chair, placing it over her legs. It seemed she lived in her denim cut-offs right now, as if aware that the warm days would be ending soon. Daksha was right; it was a night for cosy. Mrs Joshi had dropped off a chicken dish that was simmering in the bottom oven. The subtle smell from coconut and spices wafted from the kitchen, enough to make her mouth water – quite a feat, considering her recent lack of appetite. Her ribs, she noted, were a little more pronounced than she was used to, her jaw sharper. Being slim meant there was no spare weight for when illness or the lack of desire to eat struck. She had never been a girl who strived for skinny.
‘You’ve been quiet today. I’m worried about you,’ her friend levelled.
This she knew, both that her friend was worried – the give-away being the frequent petting of her hair and the making of cups of tea, which she delivered with a small smile of concern – and that she had been quiet, unable to settle.
She had spent more minutes than she cared to admit poring over the photograph of her as a baby lying in her mother’s emaciated arms with her gran standing to one side, complicit. She toyed with the idea of devouring the remaining letters and then calling Sarah to rage at her, her mind fraught with conflict. Part of her wanted to delete the woman’s numbers and punish her in the way she felt she had been punished – banished with silence for so many years. And the other part wanted to jump on a plane and rush into her mother’s arms, where she w
ould lay her head on her chest and never, ever leave . . .
But it wasn’t Sarah who bore the brunt of her anger – it was Prim. Her thoughts were vignettes of all the platitudes offered by her gran in her moments of distress, many when she was a small child and her sadness was more honestly expressed:
‘But I don’t want to make a Mother’s Day card for you, Gran – I want to give one to my mum!’
‘Oh, I know, darling! I know! But it would be wonderful for me. Don’t forget I don’t get a Mother’s Day card now either . . . your mummy was my little girl . . .’
You liar! How could you? You liar!
Daksha arranged a final bundle of twigs and looked more than a little chuffed with her handiwork.
‘Eat your heart out, Bear Grylls! So, come on, it’s not like you to be so quiet, Vic. Talk to me!’
‘I just feel like being quiet.’ She spoke softly, a little irritated by her friend’s line of questioning, no matter how well intentioned. ‘I think everything that’s happened is percolating. I can’t stop thinking about all that I’ve read in the letters: replaying them in my mind.’
‘Of course.’ Daksha struck a match from the large box of Cook’s Matches and knelt low, carefully touching the little flame to several points on the paper spills. She then sat back and watched closely with a fixed look of determination. ‘How are you feeling about it all?’
Victoria stared into the grate as small flames flickered and the fire began to cradle the kindling.
‘It changes. I think about the fact that Prim lied to me for all this time and I go nuts, even swear at her in my head.’ She winced with the shame of this admission, knowing she would not have conceived of such a thing when Prim was here. Her tears were, as ever, not that far from the surface. ‘I can’t stop crying! I’m sad because she died, and I love and miss her so much. And that feeling of missing her is mostly greater than my anger, but not always. Like, right now, I also wish she were here so I could yell at her!’
Victoria bit her fingernail, a new and pleasing habit.
Daksha blew into the fireplace and the flames flickered and flared, starting to take hold before she carefully placed a cut log on to the fire, watching as they licked up the sides of the dried bark.
‘Do you understand what happened that made Prim lie to you?’
Victoria took her time in responding, liking the crackle of the fire. ‘Not really. But in some ways, it’s like they are two different people. There’s my Prim, who baked me cookies when I got in from school and who made my costume for the summer play, and the other Prim, who took me from my mum and lied to me; lied to me about the very worst thing I could imagine. I think I need to let everything settle and try not to think about it all so much. I need to calm down and try to make sense of it when I’m not freaking out.’
‘I like the sound of her.’ Daksha turned in the hearth to look her friend squarely in the face.
‘Who?’ Victoria knew who she meant but wanted to give the impression that Sarah was not the first and last thing she thought about each day and night and every minute in between.
‘Sarah!’ Daksha tutted.
Victoria nodded. ‘You do?’
‘Yes, the way she’s handled things since making contact, like sending everything through to you immediately and the way she was at the hotel – I mean, what’s not to like, right? She’s very elegant, attractive, a lawyer, lives in Norway, which is always voted one of the happiest places to live.’
‘Yes, Daks, she’s a regular Wonder Woman. You’ve not met her properly; she could be a total cow when she’s got her guard down. She abandoned me, don’t forget!’ There it was again, the anger that bubbled in her throat.
‘She doesn’t seem like a total cow,’ Daksha offered quietly.
‘That’s right, because only a total cow would choose drugs over her baby, would still mourn a bloke she knew for the equivalent of five minutes, would choose to have no contact with her elderly parents, have the bloody nerve to pitch up on the day of her mother’s funeral and tell her long-lost daughter, who believed her dead, that her name is in fact Victory! A fucking stupid name if ever I’ve heard one!’
‘I just . . . I just thought she seemed nice.’
‘It’s bullshit, all of it! What if the vicar’s right? What if she is after the house?’
She didn’t believe this, not for a single second, but was running out of verbal ammunition to fling in the direction of Sarah Hansen’s reputation.
‘Did she mention the house?’ Daksha asked almost sheepishly.
‘Well, no, not yet! But she wouldn’t, would she, if she was clever; she’d bide her time!’
Daksha lay two chunky logs on the flames, which had now truly taken hold, and took up her place in the opposite corner of the sofa. The two sat awkwardly.
‘I’m worried about you.’
‘So you’ve said, Daks! God! Give it up! What do you want me to do? Jump up and down? Make out to be happy? Sing? What are you, my mother? Wouldn’t that be absolutely brilliant? No mum for eighteen years and then suddenly I’ve got Mrs Joshi cooking my food and cleaning the kitchen, Sarah, and now you! Mother figures crawling out of the woodwork! Oh, lucky me!’ It frightened her a little how close to the surface her anger lurked, revealed by the most minor verbal scratch of irritation.
Daksha stared at her.
There was a beat or two of uncomfortable, unbearable silence, which rang loudly, cocooning them. And suddenly, in that beautiful room with floral paintings on the walls, vintage cushions nestling into the crooks of the arms of the sofas and chairs and a glorious orange fire roaring in the grate, it felt like the least cosy place she could imagine.
‘Do you want me to stay here tonight? Or would you rather I went home?’ Daksha asked calmly.
‘I don’t care! I don’t care right now!’ Victoria rammed her fingers into her fringe, hating the words that left her mouth, hating the bitter tang of regret on which they coasted from her tongue and hating more than anything the fact that everyone had lied to her! But she didn’t know how to stop, how to calm down, and she certainly didn’t know how to apologise. Her emotions were a whirling tornado, stoppered inside a bottle, and try as she might, she couldn’t smash it. Everything felt like too much, even having to be nice to her friend. Her very, very best friend in the whole wide world. She despised the moment, knowing she would hate it for as long as it lived in her memory.
Daksha calmly stood and smoothed her jeans. ‘In that case, I think I’ll go and pack my stuff and get my mum to collect me.’
‘Whatever you want.’ Victoria pulled the blanket up to her chin and slid down on the sofa.
‘What I want is to go home,’ Daksha spoke directly, if quietly, as she left the room.
Victoria felt the sharp pang of regret at the thought of her friend leaving her alone, but misplaced pride and confusion prevented her from speaking up and trying to make things good. It was self-punishing and felt appropriate for her state of mind, in which she kept reminding herself that she was the victim in all of this. She heard Daksha clatter down the stairs and stayed put.
When the car beeped on the drive, Victoria sat up. She felt torn between running to the hallway, throwing her arms around her friend and crying out her apology, and wanting nothing more than to be by herself, alone with her thoughts and the photograph and letters that offered such a horrible insight. It was still surreal to her that Prim had let her down in this way and that even Grandpa had known, Bernard too, but not her. Daksha stood in the doorway to the drawing room with her overnight bag in her hands and resting against her shins.
‘I took the chicken out of the oven.’
‘You haven’t eaten.’ Victoria felt bad that Mrs Joshi had cooked for them both.
‘I’m not hungry.’ Daksha wrinkled her nose, as if even the thought of food was more than she could stand. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’
‘Yep.’
Victoria watched her go and heard the clunk of the front door,
followed by the sound of the car crunching its way across the gravel to the lane, and then it was quiet. It was the first time she had been on her own, properly on her own, since Prim’s death. She felt odd, tired, sad and already lonely.
Is this what it will be like now?
Slipping down further on the sofa with her knees curled to her chest and her head sinking into a silk cushion as the fire crackled in the grate, she fell into a deep and restful sleep, claimed by exhaustion . . .
The beep of her phone woke her with a start.
There was a split second when she didn’t know where she was. Her neck ached, as she had slept with it at an odd angle, and she felt the chill of the early hours in her bones. It was unusual for her to wake and find herself downstairs and not in her bed. And again, a recurring theme in recent weeks, her first thought was where’s Prim? Before the sharp bite of reality clamped her throat, making breathing momentarily tricky. And not only this, but the Prim she had relied on, Prim her friend, her mentor, her mother figure – well, she didn’t even exist. This thought was enough to plunge her into an icy pool of loneliness where it was all she could do to stay afloat.
The room was now in darkness, the fire long ago dwindled. And of course no Daksha. Jumping up, she switched on the table lamp at the back of the sofa and was glad of the soft light that helped calm her racing pulse. Pulling the patchwork eiderdown from the back of one of the chairs, she wrapped it around herself. Finally, sitting in her quilted wigwam, her breathing settled and her chill subsided.
Victoria reached for her phone and was surprised to see the beep had come from a Facebook alert and not, as she had assumed, a text from Daksha. It was a message request from Flynn McNamara. Her gut leapt with expectation. She accepted it immediately and read the words with more than a pinch of curiosity.
What you doing?
The message was as uninformative as it was random and surprising. It made her laugh, a welcome distraction that lifted her momentarily from the emotional tempest in which she was mired. She considered her response before replying with:
Well it’s 2.45 in the morning! I should be sleeping . . .
The Day She Came Back Page 11
