The Day She Came Back

by Amanda Prowse

  ‘He loved her?’ This was news.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Not in a romantic way, but he’s worked for her for decades, as you know, Rosebank is a safe haven for him.’

  Victoria felt glad that she had made things right with him.

  ‘I don’t think Bernard has had the nicest life. His wife is quite scary. She has a mean mouth, I seem to remember.’

  This too: news. Victoria felt the rise of guilt in her chest.

  ‘And without him I would have lost touch with you completely and this would not be happening, so I’m grateful to him and I always will be.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you. I know Bernard would’ve let you know, so why didn’t you come to Grandpa’s funeral?’

  They stepped in unison on to the escalator that would take them to the platform. Sarah, on the stair below, turned to look at her.

  ‘I wanted to!’ Her response deliberate and wide-eyed. ‘More than I can tell you – the chance to say goodbye to my lovely dad . . . But that was the rule!’ She wiped her face.

  ‘The rule?’ Victoria gave a short laugh. ‘Who made the rules?’

  Sarah bit her lip and looked decidedly uncomfortable. ‘I knew getting in touch with you would only be possible when Mum died, and even then I knew it would be going against everything we had agreed.’

  ‘But what did you agree and why? How was the whole thing concocted?’ She knew she was pushing, but her need to know the details had not lessened.

  ‘I want you to read some more of the letters when we get back and then I promise we can talk about it fully.’ Sarah looked around, like she was afraid of being overheard. ‘I think Prim knew I would get in touch. I sensed that from her.’ Sarah held her wedding ring, like it was a thing of comfort. ‘Strange how, even after all these years, it never really occurred to me that she might have someone else.’ She changed the topic. ‘I can’t picture her in my mind with another man, someone who replaced my dad.’

  The two walked from the escalator and Victoria followed Sarah until they came to a bench and sat down. She placed her carpetbag on the floor by their feet.

  ‘Gerald didn’t replace Grandpa.’ Her tone was kinder now. ‘I don’t think anyone could have done that. But Prim was sociable and outgoing until the end, and I think it was nice she had someone to sit on the veranda with or to discuss her plants. Gerald used to do a lot of jobs in the garden and the lake. And there were a lot of jobs to be done.’ She smiled, remembering the way they would call to each other through open windows or the French doors and meet in the garden room or on the veranda for tea and shortbread . . . or gin. She thought fondly of his neat house, and liked knowing that if and when she needed him he was on call – to offer toast from his dainty toast rack, a warm bath with the provision of soft towels or to tote a gun to dispel an unruly crowd. It felt good to know he was in her corner.

  Sarah put her hands in her jacket pockets and hunched her shoulders. ‘I know I have no right to feel odd about Gerald, none at all, but it’s a bit like the world I left at twenty is frozen in my mind. I don’t imagine it to have moved forward at all. It’s good Mum had help in the garden. The house takes a lot of upkeep; I remember that even back in the day. But you will have your inheritance and your money from Granny Cutter too to help with that.’

  Victoria felt uncomfortable that it was being mentioned so casually, feeling suddenly protective of not only what was hers, but also her gran’s choices.

  ‘Mind you, the question is whether you want to spend that money maintaining a big house when there’s a whole wide world waiting to be discovered.’

  ‘Actually, Daks and I are going away in March. At least, that was the plan. We’ve been thinking about it for a while. I don’t always feel like going, not with my head all over the place, but I know it will be good when it comes to it. We’re going to the Far East and South America and will stay away until our money runs out.’

  A sleek, shiny train pulled in and Victoria watched the commuters pile on and the doors close. It left, leaving them on an almost deserted platform.

  Sarah nodded at her. ‘That sounds wonderful. And you’re not going to university? Bernard did tell me that,’ she added with a little humour.

  ‘No, I didn’t think it was for me.’

  ‘Didn’t – so you might think it is for you after all? Have you had a change of heart?’ Sarah twisted on the seat to face her.

  ‘No, not exactly. I guess I’m just questioning my reasons for deciding not to go . . . and besides, everything is up in the air.’ Victoria looked skyward, as if that was where the answers might lie: questioning her choices that had been based on a set of facts that were now no longer relevant.

  ‘What were those reasons?’

  She quashed the memory of Flynn asking a similar question.

  ‘I . . . I didn’t feel good about leaving Prim alone. I mean, she was fine and not ill or anything, there was nothing she couldn’t do if she went at the right pace, but I worried about her and I didn’t want to miss out on being with her or have her struggle or be lonely or a million other things.’

  ‘Shit.’ Sarah kicked at the floor.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That responsibility – it was mine but you, you took it on.’

  ‘I had no choice, I was all she had – or so I thought. Anyway, I didn’t mind – I loved her.’ This the truth, despite her battling emotions. ‘Plus . . .’ Victoria queued up the words on her tongue. ‘I was a bit scared of . . .’

  ‘Bit scared of what?’ Sarah pushed.

  ‘I was a bit scared of the thing that happened to you happening to me.’

  Sarah gave a nervous laugh. ‘What do you mean? How . . . what thing . . .?’

  ‘Prim always said you were studious and happy until you started at university, where you went off the rails, started taking heroin and then you died. It sounded like a straightforward progression and it scared me. I didn’t want that to be how I ended up and I thought I might be like you.’ There, she had said it. Sarah looked aghast as some of the colour drained from her face.

  ‘But . . . but that’s not how it was. Not at all.’ Sarah shook her head. ‘I was already “going off the rails”, as you put it, trying to carve a path, escape if you like, and I had that kind of personality – I wanted more and more and more. Which is okay if what you crave is spinach, binge-reading or walking outdoors, but for me it was hard drugs; not good.’

  ‘No. Not good,’ she agreed.

  ‘You don’t need to worry, Victoria. Mine were a unique set of circumstances. I would hate my past mistakes to affect how you live your life.’

  ‘Are you kidding me right now? I am paying a huge price for how you lived your life; I always have!’ The words erupted from her without too much thought of how they might land.

  Sarah looked crestfallen. Her mouth fell open.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said it like that.’ Victoria positioned her bag on the floor, feeling horribly uncomfortable. She didn’t want to have this conversation in public. ‘I didn’t mean it how it came out. Can we change the subject?’

  ‘Sure.’ Sarah rallied a little and there was a beat of readjustment while the topic was indeed changed. ‘I envy you and Daksha; I always planned on travelling with Granny Cutter’s money after university.’

  ‘Granny Cutter’s money?’ What money?

  ‘Yes! She set up a trust fund for me, and then Mum and Dad set up one for you, so that when we got to a certain age we would have an income, a very good income. Her father, your great-great-grandpa, was a wealthy industrialist who moved to Surrey to open a paper mill. He gave Granny Cutter the money for Rosebank and she bought it outright, quite a thing for a woman back in the day.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. I don’t seem to know much, do I?’ Just another secret, another aspect of my life to be kept secret . . . ‘The lawyer, Mr Dobson, was sorting all the paperwork and he gave me the run-down. I think I missed a lot of the detail – I was still very numb when I saw him.’

  ‘
I think maybe Mum might have been anxious about talking about family and history and things in case she let slip anything about me. You would only have to look at the paperwork to see that I have received my trust allowance every month since I was twenty-four.’

  Victoria felt weakened by the fact that every apparent revelation only served to throw up more questions and, with it, more deceit. She wasn’t sure how she felt about a trust fund, having always found the idea of earning her own money and making her way the most exciting, along with a healthy dollop of guilt at having survived financially a little too easily. Flynn’s words came to her now, uttered from his beautiful, lying, cheating, lopsided mouth:

  ‘Easy, I guess, when you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from . . .’

  ‘You know, Sarah, I thought that maybe part of the reason you gave me up to Prim and disappeared was because you didn’t have any money and that you thought you might struggle to care for me financially in the long term, and believe it or not, whilst it didn’t excuse the lies, I understood that a little. But the fact that you had an income, a good income, just waiting for you . . .’ She shook her head. ‘You could easily have afforded me.’ She felt the wobble to her bottom lip; it was hard trying to contain all that threatened to burst from her, not least of which the idea that it made her sound like a commodity to be bought and sold, a thing. A thing which Sarah had let slip through her fingers. And it hurt.

  ‘Oh no, Vic . . . Victoria. Our initial separation had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the fact that neither Prim nor I expected me to live. I wanted heroin more than I wanted anything, even you.’ Her face crumpled in tears at this truth. Her words were like rocks, which pounded Victoria, hitting her full in the chest, making breathing tough. ‘And that’s a hard thing for me to say, to admit, but it’s the truth. The only way money came into it was that I knew I could afford to buy the stuff to put into my veins and end my life.’

  ‘So what stopped you?’ She looked at her squarely.

  ‘Jens.’

  ‘Jens?’

  ‘Yes, ultimately. He was the reason I came to Oslo.’ Sarah smiled. ‘He is everything.’

  ‘Jens,’ Victoria repeated. Who is everything. But me, your daughter, for eighteen years I have been nothing . . . ‘Do you . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Do you have any other children?’ Victoria held her breath, wondering how it might feel to know that there were other people on the planet who Sarah got to mother and who were mothered by Sarah.

  ‘To my mummy, Sarah, on Mother’s Day . . .’

  ‘Can my gran run the Mummy race?’

  ‘No, my mum’s not picking me up. I don’t have a mum . . .’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘No. Just you. Just you.’ She reached for a tissue to blot at her tears. Victoria exhaled, unable to hide her relief.

  ‘Jens has worked with me, helped me, and he got me clean one day at a time, and we have been together for sixteen years and we are still keeping me clean and keeping life on track, one day at a time.’

  So you loved the stranger who came into your life more than you loved me . . . you could do it for him, but not for me . . . Victoria hated the feeling in her gut that her self-worth, her value, was draining away.

  ‘So when you stopped taking drugs sixteen years ago, I would have been, what? Two, nearly three – why didn’t you come and find me then?’ She hated the pleading tone to her question.

  Sarah looked over her head, along the track towards the dark tunnel, and her brows knitted, as if to recall that time was not easy. ‘I did write to Prim, but she was doubtful of my sobriety, said she would only risk giving you her mother back if there was a cast-iron guarantee that I wasn’t going to disappear, relapse or kill myself, as she would not put you through that. But I told her there were no cast-iron guarantees, and she said it wasn’t worth it as you were happy. And she was right.’

  ‘God, you were as bad as her!’ This news was monstrous. Sarah had asked for contact and Prim had denied them . . . a simple decision that had shaped her whole life.

  ‘She wasn’t bad.’ Sarah let her eyes mist as they spoke of Prim, who they clearly both missed. ‘She wasn’t bad, not at all.’

  And in that moment it felt like a connection, both of them, Victoria knew, picturing the woman who had mothered them and who she knew, deep down, had loved her so very much. Sarah took her time.

  ‘She was just doing what she thought she had to. Figuring it out, like we all do, every day, working with what we have in front of us and hoping it all turns out all right in the end. It’s so easy when you can look back and point out where bad decisions were made or where you went wrong, but at the time, in the thick of it, you just have to make a choice and go with it. That’s what I did and that’s what Prim did.’

  ‘I see that, but I didn’t get the chance to make a decision and go with it. I was told you had died, completely irreversible, no chance for me to take a second look or change my mind – dead, Sarah! That’s for ever. And my grief has cut me to the bone. All that I missed, all that I longed for, it shaped the person I became. And the crazy thing is, I would have been an entirely different person if only you had both trusted me with the truth!’

  ‘Do you think you would have been a better person?’ Sarah asked.

  Victoria shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but probably a happier one, certainly right now. Because it’s having to deal with the dishonesty, the lies, that is the very worst part of all this.’ Her voice was small.

  ‘I think . . . I think it’s important that you look at all the letters. I think it might explain, way better than I am able, what it was like for me, for her and for you.’

  She took a deep breath; they were, after all, still on the platform, which was filling once again. ‘How did you get the letters you had sent to Prim?’

  ‘She sent them back to me when I moved to Oslo. I think she felt safer having them out of the house. And I had kept hers and’ – she opened her palms as another train came and went and once again the crowd on the platform thinned – ‘I guess I hoped one day to show them to you. I had never shown them to another soul, kept them locked away until a few weeks ago, when I gave them to Jens to read.’

  ‘Oh, you did? What did he think?’ She felt her jaw tense at the thought of another highly personal aspect of her life being shared with strangers before she was made aware; even this most precious correspondence was coming to her second-hand.

  Sarah drew breath. ‘He thought they were unbearably sad but honest, and I think it made him proud of how far I have come.’

  Well, good for you and Jens! Victoria nodded.

  Sarah tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘I haven’t looked at them. I can’t. I vaguely know what’s in them, but I guess I feel nervous because I can’t truly remember what I wrote, the detail. Not only was it a long time ago, but also I don’t think I was always in my right mind. In fact, I know I wasn’t. Even the thought of them is painful.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll do that. I’ll read the rest of them.’

  Sarah turned to face her. ‘I can tell by your tone that something is not right, and it’s important that we discuss anything that’s bothering you—’

  ‘Jesus, Sarah, there is so much that’s bothering me!’ She cut her short.

  ‘I know. I know.’ Sarah closed her eyes.

  ‘Actually, you don’t know. You don’t know at all—’

  ‘No, and you don’t know either!’ It was the first time Sarah had raised her voice, interrupting, her gaze now steady. ‘I get that things are messed up. And I know things haven’t always been great for you, but you don’t know my life, Victoria – you don’t know what it’s been like for me.’

  Victoria hadn’t meant to laugh, but the snort of derision left her nose nonetheless. ‘Yes, poor you, Sarah! Jesus! Imagine if the boot was on the other foot and you had been told your child had died? Imagine that! Only for her to pop out of a cake – surprise!’ She waved both hands. ‘Yes, imagine if she just popped up, bu
t only after you had grieved for her for the best part of eighteen years – and now think about the fact that you weren’t misinformed of her death by accident, but by design; someone lied to you, Sarah! They lied to you, they chose to make you feel that way.’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Well, lucky you!’ Victoria folded her arms, desperately trying to stop her anger turning to more tears.

  ‘But I do know what it was like to lose you. Because I lost you! And I know what it was like to wake each day and wonder what you were doing and who you were with and whether you were thinking about me, wondering if you were happy . . . I knew you were loved. I knew you were loved near and far, by Prim and by me, even if you weren’t aware of it, and I knew you were safe and warm and comfortable and all the other things that every parent wishes for their child.’

  Noble, but you didn’t love me enough to choose me over drugs. That honour goes to Jens . . . ‘So, what, I should be thanking you?’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’ She pinched the top of her nose, frustrated. ‘I am trying to tell you that you are not the only one who has suffered.’

  Victoria bit her lip and made a ‘hmph’ noise.

  ‘You know, I thought – I have always thought – that the best life you could have would be one with me by your side.’ Sarah paused. ‘But I hear you talk about your hurt and how messed up you feel your life is and I don’t know if I still think it. I know I made mistakes – Prim and I both did – and I thought I could make amends. But I guess you’re right: I can’t know what it was like for you, just like you can’t know what it’s been like for me.’ She let this trail and wiped again at her eyes.

  ‘I guess.’ Victoria looked back towards the terminal, feeling the weight of emotion that was almost too heavy to bear. ‘I am honestly thinking that, right now, it might be better if I just jump on a plane back to England.’ She pictured the sofa in the drawing room with her on one end and Daksha on the other. This was already feeling like too much and they were yet to leave the airport terminal. If she could have clicked her heels . . .