by Cathy Kelly
‘So this is it?’ Anneliese demanded, waving her arms to encompass the whole group. ‘Us standing around watching her die? That’s great. Well done Mr Marine Specialist.’
As she turned to see the whale’s dark shape move silently through the water again, Anneliese felt more empathy with the great creature than with any of the human beings around her. They knew nothing. Pain, loss, fear – they knew nothing about it. But the whale, circling in fear, she understood.
The man began to speak again but she didn’t want to hear.
Tears bit at the corners of her eyes as Anneliese stormed back up the beach.
She knew she’d lost it, but she was past caring. Bottling up her feelings had got her nowhere in life. She didn’t care enough about the world to hide who and what she was. Let the bloody world deal with it.
As she got in the door of the cottage, she caught the final ring of the telephone, before it clicked into answering machine mode. The message was still Edward’s voice, telling everyone that he and Anneliese were busy and couldn’t come to the phone, but to leave a message. Strangely, it was Edward’s own voice that came on the phone then, leaving her a message.
‘Anneliese, love – sorry, don’t know how to tell you this, but just had a phone call from Brendan and…I’m really sorry, darling, Lily’s in hospital, they think she had a stroke. She was sitting outside the church in town and they found her there this morning after Mass. Anyway, she’s in the hospital, they took her in by ambulance. Brendan’s on his way there now. I can’t go just yet, I have…’
He paused. ‘…something else to do, but I’ll drop in this afternoon, if that would be all right, if…’ he paused again. ‘If you wouldn’t mind me being there, I mean. Nell won’t be there, obviously, but I’d like to be there for Brendan and for you. OK, goodbye, Anneliese. Sorry to be bringing you such horrible news.’
The phone call ended. Anneliese stared at it for a moment, before rushing over and hitting one of the speed-dial buttons to ring Brendan’s number. Brendan Silver was Lily’s son-in-law, and Anneliese’s cousin, well, cousin-in-law, if such a thing existed. He was actually Edward’s cousin. A good, kind man, but not the sort of person you’d need in a crisis, and poor darling Lily was in a crisis. Anneliese felt her heart ache for her darling aunt. Lily mightn’t have been a blood relation to Anneliese, but she was one of the dearest people in her life. Strange how Lily – who had virtually raised her granddaughter, Izzie, when Izzie’s mother had died – seemed to understand how difficult life had been for Anneliese and Beth. Anneliese couldn’t imagine Lily ever suffering from panic attacks or depression. She was so calm, so serene, and yet she did understand. She’d been through the darkest thing a person could deal with: the death of her daughter, Alice. Lily understood darkness.
When Beth and Izzie were teenagers, Lily often stepped in and invited Beth to come and stay when Izzie was spending a few days with her. Anneliese hated the sleepover concept, but with Lily it was different: when Beth was in her house with her cousin, Anneliese could relax. The two girls were like chalk and cheese, mind you, and Izzie was three years older too, but they loved each other and got on well despite the squabbling. It was also a welcome distraction for Beth. Lily never said why she was doing it, nothing so bald as saying: ‘You’re clearly depressed, I’ll take your child off your hands.’
It had never been like that. But she had understood that Anneliese sometimes needed the space to recover, so she could get her life back on track again. Lily had been such a part of Anneliese’s life ever since she had first come to Tamarin, thirty-seven years ago, and now Lily needed her.
Brendan’s mobile phone was turned off, but she left a message anyway. ‘It’s Anneliese here, I’ve just heard about Lily, I’m on my way to the hospital. I’ll run by her house first and pick up some things for her.’
Anneliese grabbed a few things for herself first. Coins for the phone in the hospital, the plug for her mobile phone charger, a few of her tranquillity teabags, a big jumper and socks in case she had to stay overnight, her knitting and the spare keys Lily had given her years before for emergencies. Then she locked up, put her overnight bag in the car and drove off. In the distance she could still see the people standing on the high dunes, looking down into Tamarin Bay, and she thought of the whale circling aimlessly in the water, not knowing where she was or how to get out. Even with all the people watching her and all the ocean life teeming in the Atlantic out beyond Tamarin Bay, Anneliese knew the whale felt lost and alone in the world.
It had only been a week since Anneliese had last visited Lily’s house. So much had happened in that week. Edward had left her and now Lily herself lay in hospital. Anneliese felt the guilt again, guilt that she hadn’t gone out and talked to Lily about her and Edward splitting up. She just hadn’t been able to face it, to face the pain and pity in Lily’s beautiful old face.
‘Oh love, I’m so sorry for you. Is there anything I can do?’
Anneliese had known all the things Lily would say, and she was afraid that they wouldn’t be any comfort to her, so she’d told Lily nothing. Now, her stupidity and fear meant that she mightn’t ever be able to say any of it. Lily was nearly ninety. At her age, a person who’d had a stroke might never recover. And all the pain Anneliese had inside her might remain bottled up there for ever.
As she drove, she let the tears flow, unchecked, down her cheeks. It wasn’t like the tears she felt with the panic attacks or the depression; those tears she tried to stifle, as if she could physically push them back into her body and stop the pain from escaping. But these tears for Lily were cleansing, they were a tribute.
Anneliese and Edward had always loved the road out to Rathnaree, which headed west of Tamarin along the top of the hill from where you could see the swathe of both Tamarin and Milsean Bays. Then the road dipped into woods and fields and parkland, bordered by huge hedges that stretched long tendrils out on to the road, making the road itself very narrow and forcing cars into the hedges in order to pass each other.
Lily’s house was the family home she had grown up in, a former forge that had once been a part of the huge Rathnaree estate. The Old Forge was no longer owned by the Lochraven family. They’d sold a lot of the land off years ago and now the house and the four acres of land it sat on belonged to Lily. That mattered a lot to her, she’d told Anneliese once.
‘I don’t think I’d be happy here if it was still part the Lochraven estate,’ she’d said. ‘I know it’s crazy. I’m old enough for it not to bother me, but there’s peace in the fact that it’s mine now, nobody else’s. There’s nothing like owning your own little bit of God’s green earth.
‘My mother, Lord rest her, would turn in her grave to hear me saying that. But I like the fact that it’s my own land and my own house. It gives me immense joy, actually, to own it.’
‘Why did the Lochraven family never give the house to your family?’ Anneliese asked. It didn’t quite make sense to her, that these incredibly wealthy people would never gift the homes to the loyal workers who had served them for years.
Lily had laughed loudly at that.
‘Oh, Anneliese, the number of times I wondered about that. I finally came to the conclusion that those sort of people don’t gift anything, that’s how they stay rich. They hold on to it and we’re just the peasants who do their bidding, working our fingers to the bone and getting nothing but a pittance in return. Well, I used to think that. Long ago. But I know a bit better now.’
There was something final about those last words, as if she didn’t want to be drawn on the subject of how she’d learned those lessons, but Anneliese had to know more. Thirty-seven years ago, Anneliese would ask anyone anything. She ploughed on.
‘Both your parents worked for them, didn’t they?’ she said.
‘My mother was the housekeeper from 1930 to 1951,’ said Lily. ‘Until she died, actually.’
‘She must have seen some amazing things, working in that big house,’ Anneliese added.
‘I had no problem with gratitude. It was just that gratitude was a one-way street. My mother and my father worked hard up at Rathnaree and they just accepted that they’d never receive any gratitude for it. They got exactly what they were due, nothing more. The Lochravens liked to say their servants were part of the family, but they weren’t treated like that. They were just words, and words mean nothing. Oh, don’t mind me, Anneliese,’ she said. ‘I used to think if you were rich and from the gentry, you had it all. I know better now. Life hurts them the same way as it hurts us all.’
Anneliese thought of that now, as she turned off the road, up a narrow, hedge-lined lane to Lily’s cottage. It was such an enigmatic thing to say, but there had been a sense that Lily had a lot more to say if she were asked.
Anneliese wished she’d asked now. A person didn’t get to Lily’s age without learning a lot of life’s wisdom and, right now, Anneliese could have done with some wisdom. After losing her only child, Anneliese had never known how Lily didn’t crul up into a ball of bitterness and die.
It had been a long time since Lily’s home had been a forge but the name stuck: the Old Forge. Her father had been a blacksmith, the last in a long line of blacksmiths, who had come to work for the Lochravens. In his time, it had been a working forge, complete with picturesque horseshoe-shaped door and the tang of hot metal in the air. Eventually though, the forge itself had shifted to Rathnaree with its huge stables. Over the years, the original forge had been absorbed into the family home, until it was hard to tell where the forge ended and the house began.
There was a herb-filled front garden, because Lily loved herbs, and a fine big vegetable garden at the back that she no longer had the energy to dig or sow. When Lily’s husband, Robby, had been alive, the couple had kept cows and hens and Lily had become proficient at selling free-range eggs, making her own butter, doing anything to get by in the lean years when Robby hadn’t been able to find much work as a carpenter.
He was long dead, at least twenty years, Anneliese thought, remembering Lily on that bleak day in St Canice’s, when winter rain had lashed against the church’s stained-glass windows and Lily’s face looked as if it had been carved from the same wood as her husband’s coffin as she stood and stared at it.
All I’ve done is lost a husband, and he’s not lost for ever, he’s just run off with someone else.
She tried this idea out in her mind, seeing how it felt. Edward wasn’t gone for ever: he had just chosen to leave her. Was that worse or better than if he died? Because if he died, and he still loved her, she’d have that comfort to help her along as she dealt with the pain of being on her own. Yes, she grinned, feeling some crazy sense of relief, in the midst of all this madness, death certainly trumped separation.
On the outside, the forge looked much the same as it had in those pictures Anneliese had seen of Edward and Alice standing outside it as children, laughing as they stood beside the big rain barrel where Lily kept the water that the family used for everything from washing their hair to bathing. Inside it was different, full of character and warmth in the way only someone like Lily could fill a house, with lots of books and pictures of the family, and flowers, mixed with herbs from her garden, scenting the air. There was a beautiful bathroom too.
‘I always swore that, if I had to live in this house, I’d have an inside toilet,’ Lily used to tell Anneliese. ‘When we were kids, we were used to it, nobody had indoor toilets. Except up at Rathnaree; they had the most amazing bathroom installed for Lady Irene, all marble and mirrors replacing the old wooden panelling and a huge cracked tub. None of us had ever seen anything like it. I think everyone on the estate went in to have a look. It was just sheer luxury. I swore, one day I’d have a bathroom like that!’
And she had, thought Anneliese, with a smile. Well, it wasn’t quite like the fabled Rathnaree marble version, but it was pretty luxurious: pure white tiles and a swirling chocolate brown Deco pattern running along the edges. She was glad that Lily had had her lovely bathroom, it was nice at the end of your life to have had the things you dreamt of having. You could look at them before you died and say, ‘I wanted that when I was twenty, and now I have it!’
‘Stop,’ Anneliese said out loud. She was talking as if Lily was already dead, and she wasn’t. But Lily was very old, and maybe this was the way for her to go. Quickly was always better for the person who died, but it was horrible for those left behind. It would break Izzie’s heart if her darling gran died before she had a chance to say goodbye.
Anneliese wondered if she should have offered to phone Izzie to tell her the news. She had an idea from her last conversation with Lily that Izzie was away on a shoot: Mexico, New Mexico…she wasn’t sure about the place or time – time had escaped her these past few days. She barely knew which day of the week it was.
If Brendan hadn’t phoned Izzie to tell her what had happened, she would when she got to the hospital. But now she had to rush, not stand here looking at old photographs and thinking back on Lily’s life. That was no good for anybody. She hurried upstairs into Lily’s bedroom and packed some nighties, underclothes, bed jackets and soft slippers. Hurry, a voice inside was telling her.
Lily looked so frail in the hospital bed when Anneliese walked into the intensive care unit. Even though she’d thought about the possibility of Lily not waking up, the realisation hit her forcibly when she saw that frail body lying doll-like under the covers, winking and beeping machines all around her. The ICU was as quiet as a church with nurses hurrying back and forth, quietly and efficiently, while patients lay still in the ward’s four beds. There was no sign of Brendan at his mother-in-law’s bedside and Anneliese was glad for that. She didn’t want to have to comfort Brendan. Instead, she could sit quietly on the chair beside the bed and look at Lily. The older woman’s eyes were closed and yet she looked more than asleep; the animation that normally shone from her face was absent today. She’d always seemed somewhat ageless in normal life, yet now she looked like a very old lady, with fragile bones and skin delicate as tissue paper. A drip needle was stuck into the back of one of her fragile hands and Anneliese winced at both the pain of the needle and the ache of the bruise that had already settled around the sharp metal.
‘Oh, Lily,’ she said, taking Lily’s other papery hand in her own and stroking it. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. I’m so sorry you’re here and that I haven’t been talking to you. Things have been so dreadful with me and Edward, and I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry, that’s not fair. And now, you’re here and I don’t know what you’d want me to do. We never talked about this. I don’t know if you want heroic measures to bring you back, or if you’re happy to go, my love. I wish I knew. You deserve the dignity of choice.’
It was odd, because Lily could talk about anything. Not for her the ostrich-in-the-sand mentality or thinking that if you didn’t face an issue, it would disappear. Lily faced everything head-on. But death, and what to do in the run-up to death, was one of the last taboos.
Anneliese held the old woman’s fragile hand and prayed for guidance. She wasn’t equipped for this, not now. Because of Edward, she felt as fragile as Lily herself.
‘Oh, Lily, what do you want me to do?’
SEVEN
Cosmetics contracts were the holy grail of the industry. There might be huge kudos at landing a photoshoot for Vogue but the honour was supposed to make up for the lack of cash involved in such a high-profile shoot. Editorial was great
for a model’s portfolio, but mascara ads meant a whole lot more cash.
Once a model had signed on the dotted line with one of the cosmetic giants, she never had to worry about badly paid photo-shoots again. Cosmetics contracts guaranteed a lot of money up front and some security in an industry not known for it. A contract made a model more valuable in that a million billboards made her famous, made her a name. Once a model became a name and not just another slender beauty, she had a chance at the big time: more advertisements, television, endorsements. When that happened, everyone – including the model’s agency – got to laugh all the way to the bank.
The day after she’d stared at Joe and his wife outside the museum and had felt her life crashing painfully around her, Izzie had to put her pain aside for a big meeting with a cosmetic company client about a mega-million-dollar campaign aimed at teenagers. The Jacobman Corporation wanted a new model to front their new cosmetic line and Perfect-NY were, through a fabulous piece of luck, in the running to find the girl.
It was a huge slice of business for Perfect-NY and exactly the sort of job that Izzie didn’t want to be doing the day after her heart had been broken.
As she marched into Jacobman’s giant office block on Madison, she looked the part – on the outside. She was fashion perfect in black Marc Jacobs with her hair sleeked back, wearing a solid four ounces of Bobbi Brown nude make-up in order to look as if she was wearing no make-up at all.
On the inside, however, she was tired, dead-eyed, and felt as if she had barely enough energy to lift her coffee cup to her lips.
The meeting was in the Jacobman Corporation’s third boardroom – the first and second ones were big enough to host a Yankees game – and there were only four people present: Izzie, representing Perfect-NY, two people from the SupaGirl! range and a Jacobman bigwig, Stefan Lundberg.
Cosmetic companies spread their net wide when looking for the right girl for their products. But Perfect-NY had been invited to showcase any of their girls who filled the brief because the current Mrs Rick Jacobman Jnr had once been a model at Perfect-NY and had, astonishingly, never forgotten the agency which had launched her career, a rather short one which had then launched her into the arms of Rick, heir to the Jacobman millions. Around the model agencies, Svetlana Jacobman was seen as a model who’d won the ultimate cosmetics contract. Even with a cast-iron pre-nup hanging over her should it all go horribly wrong, Svetlana had joined the ranks of the truly rich.