“Say something. I need you to say something.” She does not know what she wants him to say, only that his silence is suffocating.
“Sorry. It’s just a lot to take in. How are you feeling? I mean, are you OK?”
Audrey nods but she cannot find the words to articulate how she is feeling. She fears that if she tries, all that will emerge will be a persistent, fearful howl.
“Look, I don’t want you to worry about anything. I’ll go to the town hall in the morning, inquire about marriage licenses. I think you can get them pretty quickly these days. And then we’ll tell our parents. You haven’t told yours yet, have you? OK, well, I’ll come with you. We’ll tell them together. It’ll be much easier for them to accept if they know we’re getting married.”
Audrey listens to him talking and envies him his clarity, his certainty, his unambiguous sense of purpose. It is a decisiveness, she knows, that should reassure her. She has a sense that in a parallel world there is a version of herself whose lungs are inflating with relief and gratitude. But the Audrey sitting here, opposite Edward right now, feels his words slip into her chest and clatter against her ribs, demanding to be let out.
“But what about my university place?” Her voice sounds small and she wonders whether she has managed to say the words out loud. But then he turns over her hand, squeezes her fingers, and she cannot discern whether the clamminess between their flesh belongs to him or to her.
“Audrey, we’re having a baby. And I want to be with you—with both of you. Maybe you can go to university later, when the baby’s gone to school?”
Audrey stares down at their hands, notices how neat his clipped fingernails are in contrast to hers, bitten to the quick.
Edward is six years older than Audrey—six years wiser, she has always believed—and there is a kindness about him she finds reassuring. He is steady and reliable: a junior aviation strategist for the British Overseas Airways Corporation who has enjoyed a quiet, unblemished journey through private school and university. He is not maverick or spontaneous in the way that Audrey’s friends’ boyfriends usually are. But then, those boys always break girls’ hearts. And one thing Audrey is sure of is that Edward would never break anyone’s heart.
Audrey loves Edward, she is in no doubt about that. She has just never imagined spending the rest of her life with him. She has never, in truth, imagined spending the rest of her life with anyone. While most of her friends daydream about weddings and motherhood, Audrey saves her dreams for a dark mahogany desk in a university English department, library books stretching from the floor to the ceiling and lecture halls filled with students taking notes from her meticulously prepared lessons. For years she has secretly harbored the fantasy that if she works hard enough, and believes in herself, a future in academia may await her. It is a dream, she knows, that stretches her imagination to its limits, yet one which, in moments of fortitude, she dares to believe might come true.
Now, suddenly, that dream seems to be little more than a childish fantasy.
“I love you, Audrey, you know I do. And I will always, always look after you and the baby, I promise. Will you marry me, please?”
He is waiting, she knows, for her to lift her head and meet his gaze. But it feels like a gargantuan task, to heave this great weight from her shoulders. She hears the seconds tick by, feels him stroke the back of her hand, senses the anticipation thicken between them.
She is aware of the points shifting, hears the grinding of gears as she reaches the base of the V where two lines diverge, watches herself hurtle along this new route. She glances sideways out of the window to where the other branch is receding, the distance growing ever greater until there is nothing more than a memory of where her alternative future had once been.
And then she is nodding. Her head is moving independently of her ambivalence. She feels his fingers encase her hand, can sense his happiness radiating from his touch. His words echo in her ears—I will always, always look after you and the baby—and she tries to hold on to them, to take comfort from the reassurance and stability he is offering.
Chapter 14
Lily
Lily sat at her desk, staring out of the glass wall onto the Thames beyond. Steel clouds hung low in the sky, the river leaden and unmoving. A tourist boat drifted across the water, camera flashes blinking into the gray air, its passengers keen to take home a more enviable image of the city.
She forced her eyes back down to the computer screen, the cursor blinking on an empty document. Her fingers moved across the keys, typing out a sentence she read back and then deleted.
The phone on her desk rang, startling her. She glanced down to see her assistant’s name flashing on the LCD screen. “Sophie, I said I didn’t want to be disturbed. What is it?”
She heard her assistant clear her throat, could feel the girl’s anxiety filtering through the handset. “Um, I just had a call from reception. They said your mum’s down there wanting to see you. I couldn’t see anything in the diary.”
Heat rose into Lily’s cheeks and she picked up the glass of water from her desk, gulped down its contents. “Could you go and collect her?”
Replacing the phone in its cradle, Lily stood up and glanced out into the busy open-plan office, her thoughts leapfrogging each another as to why her mum should be paying her an impromptu visit.
The door opened and Sophie showed her mum in.
“Can I get you both a cup of tea or coffee?”
Her mum glanced in Lily’s direction, hands clasped together as if in prayer, before turning back to Sophie. “Thank you, that’s very kind, but I’m fine.”
“Yes, me too, Sophie. Can you check my four o’clock meeting’s still happening?”
As the door closed there was a moment’s silence. Lily gestured to the sofa, her arm extended stiffly, her body reacting against a clash of worlds she usually kept separate. “Sit down, Mum, please. Is everything OK?”
Her mum sat on the edge of the sofa, handbag clutched on her lap, coat still done up. Lily noticed the buttons were in the wrong holes, the collar jutting out at an awkward angle.
“Yes, I was just passing and I thought it’s been ages—years—since I’ve seen you at work. I’m sorry, I should have telephoned. I didn’t think.” She opened her handbag and fiddled with something inside, then zipped it closed again.
“Don’t be silly, it’s lovely to see you. I’ve probably only got about fifteen minutes, though. The diary’s crammed with meetings until seven. How are you?” Lily’s mobile pinged with a trio of successive bleeps. “Sorry—I’d just better check those. There’s a board meeting tomorrow and I’ve been waiting for some info. Just bear with me a second.” She retrieved her phone from the desk, swiped open the screen, and scanned three emails. Opening her electronic calendar to check on an appointment, she noticed a small note at the top of today’s date. “God, I’m so sorry, Mum. You had your doctor’s appointment today. How was it? Nothing bad’s happened, has it?”
Her mum looked up at her, blinking as though some dust was trapped under her eyelid. She coughed, lightly at first, and then vigorously, her hand flat on her chest. “I couldn’t get a glass of water, could I? I seem to have a tickle in my throat.”
Lily popped outside her office door, filled a glass with water from the dispenser, and headed back in. Her mum was exactly where she’d left her: sitting on the edge of the sofa as if uncertain how long she wanted to stay. “There you go. Are you sure you’re OK? That cough sounds like it’s getting worse.”
Her mum nodded without looking up. “I just had something caught in my throat, that’s all.”
“So what did the doctor say?” Lily sat down opposite her mum, smoothed her dress over her thighs.
“Everything’s fine. Just a routine appointment, nothing to report.”
The phone on Lily’s desk rang and she peered through the glass wall to where Sophie was waving an apologetic hand at her before the ringing stopped.
“Are you sure? How were
your blood counts?”
“Honestly, darling, it was all the same as before. No change. But how are you? You’ve been working so hard since Daniel left and I’m worried about you. Has he said when he’s coming home for the weekend? You must be missing each other terribly.”
Her mum smiled and Lily tried to hold her gaze, tried not to let her expression betray her. “Not yet—he’s pretty frantic out there. He’ll come back as soon as he can. I know it’s not ideal but it’s only for six months and you can’t expect to have careers like ours without making a few sacrifices.” The half-truths tumbled out of Lily’s mouth.
“I’m not criticizing you, darling. You know how proud I am of both of you. I honestly don’t know how you keep all the plates spinning. It makes me tired just watching you.”
Her mum stretched out an arm and took Lily’s hand. Before Lily knew it was going to happen, there was a lump in her throat, tears in her eyes. She felt the truth rise into her mouth and sit readily on her tongue, felt the preemptive relief of disclosure: the strain her marriage had been under, Daniel’s suggestion that some space might do them good, her fears that she would not be able to fix whatever was wrong in their relationship when they were living thousands of miles apart. She could feel it all, ready to be divulged, ready to find a sympathetic listener and wise counsel in her mum.
The shrill beeping of her mum’s phone broke the silence.
“Oh, I’m sorry—I don’t know why the volume’s so loud. You need to show me how to turn it down. Let me switch it off. Oh . . . hang on a second.”
Lily blinked against her tears, her hand hanging limply by her side where her mum had let it go to read the message.
“Darling, I’m really sorry but I’m going to have to dash. You need to get on now anyway, don’t you?”
Something in her mum’s voice made Lily’s shoulders stiffen. “Why? What is it? What’s wrong?”
She watched the questions skim across her mum’s eyes, watched the two sides of a dilemma being weighed up in her mind.
“Nothing. Nothing bad, it’s just . . . Well, Jess forgot to tell me that a plumber’s coming to look at the shower and neither she nor Mia will be at home, so she’s asked if I could let him in.” Apprehension twitched between her mum’s eyebrows.
Lily got up, went to her desk, and bent down toward her computer, swiping the mouse to bring her screen back to life. “That’s fine, Mum. You go. I need to get this presentation done anyway.” Her tone was brusquer than she’d intended. She kept her head down, eyes on the screen, as she heard the rustle of her mum standing up to leave.
“I’m sorry, it’s just bad timing. But are you sure everything’s OK? Was there something you wanted to tell me?”
Lily shook her head, still staring at the screen. “No. Nothing.” She forced herself to stand upright and smile, trying to dissolve the tension. “It’s fine, Mum, you go. I’ll see you on Sunday for lunch.”
There was a brief hesitation before her mum stepped around the desk, folded her arms around Lily like a pair of giant wings, and hugged her gently.
Stay, Lily wanted to say. Please don’t go.
But instead she loosened herself from her mum’s embrace and took a step back. “You’d better get going. You don’t want to be late.”
Her mum looked at her, and Lily felt a succession of unspoken questions congeal between them. She walked over to the door, found Sophie at her desk, and asked her to accompany her mum back downstairs.
“Don’t work too late, will you, darling? And I’ll see you at the weekend.”
They kissed goodbye, and as her mum headed toward the elevator with Sophie, Lily watched them go, noticing how much narrower her mum’s shoulders were than they had been just six months ago.
Back inside her office, Lily sank into the chair at her desk and spun it around to face the window. Fat raindrops hit the glass, sliding down to collect in small pools on the black metal ledge. She breathed slowly and methodically, silently repeating the line her therapist had been schooling her in for years: You can’t change others’ behavior. You can only control your own reaction to it.
Lily closed her eyes, thinking about all the times over the years that Jess’s behavior had tested her reactions. All the times her mum had canceled arrangements because of some eleventh-hour emergency of Jess’s. All the extra help her mum had given Jess because she was a single parent who’d messed up her life. And not once had her mum acknowledged the irony that Jess—who had torn their family apart—was awarded the lion’s share of maternal time and attention.
She thought about her mum, just a few minutes earlier, sitting on the sofa holding her hand, and suddenly found herself imagining the gaping absence her death would leave behind. It was as though something were pressing down hard on her windpipe: an assault, a compression, panic inhaled with each breath.
She was forty-three years old, she told herself. She must have known this day would come eventually, that there would likely be years—decades—when she would be alive and her mum would not. She knew that most children, at some point, became orphans.
Opening her eyes, she looked out of the rain-streaked window to the street ten floors below: miniature figures hurried along the pavement beneath a canopy of umbrellas; car headlights illuminated the glistening tarmac; farther down the river the London Eye continued its almost imperceptible rotation.
Lily knew there was only one person in the world who might understand how she felt about the prospect of losing her mum, just one person who might comprehend how great a loss it would be. But that particular conversation was impossible. These days, she couldn’t even imagine how it might feel.
Lily swung her chair around and pulled it close to her desk, tucking her legs neatly underneath. Focusing on the empty presentation in front of her she began to type, but as her fingers tapped at the keyboard she couldn’t help noticing that her hands were shaking.
Eleven hours later Lily woke with a jolt and sat bolt upright in bed, her heart pounding, beads of sweat gathered at her temples. She looked around the darkened room and glanced at the clock beside her bed—3:04 a.m.—a voice in her head reminding her that it was just a dream.
Switching on the bedside light, she reached across for a glass of water and wrapped her clammy palms around it, sipping gently, her mouth desert-dry. She was desperate to lie down and sleep but every time she blinked, they were there: those tiny blue hummingbirds.
The dream was always the same. She is standing in a darkened room, silent save for the gentle rhythm of flapping wings. In front of her there are thousands of tiny blue hummingbirds: small, fragile, beautiful. She studies them, unsure whether she is unable to move or simply unwilling to disturb them. They flutter in the tentative light of early morning, their tiny bodies a miracle of nature, the speed of their wings too fast for the eye to follow. There is something meditative in watching them, their miniature movements hypnotic. But suddenly they are swarming toward her, beating their wings against her cheeks, her hair, her neck. She raises her hands to protect her face, but the birds are so small they inch around the gaps, their long beaks pecking at her flesh. She closes her eyes, tries to bat them away, but there are too many, all flapping and pecking, and she feels the first sting of a beak piercing her skin, followed by another, and then another: the bridge of her nose, her forehead, her scalp. And then they are pecking at her eyes and she is flailing her arms, trying to escape their assault, but there are too many and there is nothing she can do to stop them. She feels the blood trickle down her cheeks, tastes its metallic flavor on her tongue, hears their wings beating in her ears. And then she wakes up.
Lily gulped at the water, willing the images to release her now she was awake. She’d been having this dream for years yet still she woke every time panicked, sweating, scrabbling for air.
She lay down again and stared up at the shadow of the chandelier on the ceiling. It had been Daniel’s anniversary present to her last year: bespoke hand-blown Italian glass, a thousand separat
e clear pendants hanging from a central stem like an exotic crystal tree, the kind of chandelier you might find in the lobby of a boutique hotel or a Michelin-starred restaurant. Lily had seen the receipt lying on the desk in Daniel’s study, had balked at the cost, but Daniel had needed to give her something extravagant to assuage his guilt at being abroad on their anniversary for the third year in a row.
Lily stared up at the chandelier, imagining that perhaps the two men who’d come to install it hadn’t done the job properly, that it might come crashing down on her head one night as she lay sleeping.
Reaching over and switching off her bedside lamp, she curled her limbs into a fetal ball, held herself tight, and implored herself to go to sleep.
Chapter 15
Jess
Just over two miles west of where Lily lay awake, Jess raised her head from the pillow and looked at the clock.
3:22 a.m.
From the room next door she could hear the rustle of a duvet. There had been so many nights since her mum moved in that Jess had been aware of her restlessness in the early hours of the morning. So many nights she had sensed them both lying awake in adjacent rooms, barely fifteen feet apart, separated only by a line of bricks, two thin layers of plaster, and three decades of unspoken conversations. On many occasions she had listened to her mum tossing and turning, knowing she should get out of bed, put her head around the door, and offer to make her some cocoa. But she hadn’t, not once. And Jess didn’t know whether what stopped her was the fear of discovering the reason for her mum’s insomnia or the anxiety that she might disclose her own.
Jess heard her mum attempt to stifle a cough. She lay completely still, hardly daring to breathe, remembering all those childhood nights curled up alone in bed. All those nights she had listened to her mum sobbing in the bedroom across the landing. All those nights she had heard hissed conversations from the floors below. She remembered sitting at the top of the stairs, hearing Lily’s voice from behind closed doors, knowing she should not have been eavesdropping but being unable to tear herself away as she listened to her sister’s pleading: Please, Dad. Please stop it. You have to. Please.
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