Tiny Acts of Love

by Lucy Lawrie

  Following the signs for the crèche, we arrived at a small room at the back of the building. A large woman in a green apron held out a hand to welcome Sophie in, prompting her to start screaming. She clung to my body, digging her fingernails into my arms, scrabbling at my waist with her feet, hot tears rolling down her face.

  Eventually she calmed down, after several minutes of shushing and cuddling by me, and deep, shuddering gasps from her. I was just detaching her and preparing to leave when another mum came into the room.

  ‘Oh hello, Mabel. Here’s Rory. He was sick five times in the night but he seems okay now. Just give me a shout if there’s any problem. I’ve put a couple of spare changes of clothes in his bag just in case . . . you know . . . diarrhoea.’

  I stared, open-mouthed in astonishment. So to reap the promised benefits of the Group, I was expected to leave my daughter in a disease-ridden crèche. How, exactly, was it going to help me, in my struggles with motherhood, anxiety and exhaustion, if I had to spend the next week nursing poor Sophie through a vomiting bug before then, in all likelihood, succumbing to it myself?

  I hauled Sophie back onto my hip, and went next door to explain that I wouldn’t be able to attend the session. It wasn’t due to start for another ten minutes and the room was empty apart from one short figure standing by the window.

  It took me a second to place him – it was Bobby Spencer, the undertaker’s assistant and possible stalker.

  He took a step towards me, a look of mild amusement on his face. And somehow, in that moment, I knew he wasn’t the culprit. He didn’t look threatening at all, or even very interested in me. And I could see, now, that he was far too distinctive-looking to be an effective stalker, with his diminutive proportions and marmalade hair.

  But why was he here? I could see that he might be an ideal candidate for therapy – the childhood bullying issues, and the death of his father for starters – but surely he had the wrong room . . . he didn’t have kids, did he?

  ‘Cassie Carlisle? Welcome. It is you. I saw your name on the list but wasn’t sure if it was you.’

  I remembered in a rush of horror that he had trained as a counsellor and that his ambition had been to set up a combined funeral parlour-come-counselling practice.

  ‘Bobby. Are you . . .’

  ‘Have a seat, Cassie,’ he said in a low, compassionate voice, gesturing towards the circle of brown plastic chairs. ‘I’m co-facilitating today. Liz Collins, the key facilitator, is one of my supervisors. I’m doing a training module on group therapy.’

  ‘Bobby. I’m sorry; I was going to have to cancel anyway because there’s a problem with the crèche. But I’m going to have to ask to be reassigned to another group.’ I spoke matter-of-factly, snapping into lawyer mode. ‘To be frank, I’m not comfortable discussing my personal issues with you. There’s a clear conflict of interests.’

  With this dubious assertion, I mentally pulled myself back onto comfortable ground. And, God, it felt good to be a lawyer again, rather than a struggling ‘first-time mum’.

  ‘You mean because I threatened to report you to the Law Society? Yes – sorry about that. I was just trying to put a little pressure to bear on the situation. Nothing personal, you understand.’

  Pressure to bear? Sophie, still wriggling in my arms, grabbed my hair and shrieked into my ear.

  ‘I can assure you,’ I said as I disentangled Sophie’s fingers, ‘that your complaints about me had nothing to do with Elliot’s decision to offer you a settlement. The complaints were without foundation, and I’m confident the Law Society would have thought so too.’

  ‘Really? So it didn’t make you extra keen to wrap up the settlement quickly?’

  ‘No. Goodbye.’ I turned, and made for the door.

  ‘Bye-eee!’ said Sophie, with a hundred-watt smile.

  ‘It was a load of nonsense,’ Bobby called out after me. ‘In case you hadn’t figured it out.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The ghost thing. I made it all up – didn’t you realise?’

  ‘That’s not my concern.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what I was doing, going into the preparation room in the middle of the night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was trying to get caught,’ he said. ‘I knew that if I was caught on CCTV doing anything like that, I’d be out the door like a shot. Old McCabe’s got a real thing about anything supernatural – he sacked the receptionist, last year, for claiming to have seen a ghost waiting in the lobby. Apparently when she approached it, it said it had an appointment with McCabe, and then disappeared right in front of her eyes.’

  Bobby seemed delighted by this, and paused for my reaction. I raised an eyebrow. He went on.

  ‘So I knew how he would react to my little story. But I was planning to play the driven-mad-by-grief-over-the-death-of-my-father card and take him to a tribunal, or at least threaten to do that, and I knew he’d have to pay up. I needed the extra money to pay for the final part of my psychotherapy training.’

  And he’d got his way – Elliot had paid him £2,000 as part of the compromise agreement.

  ‘What about the bit about running away from home with the Ritz crackers and the bananas?’

  Bobby fell into a paroxysm of silent laughter, unable to speak for several moments. ‘It was brilliant, wasn’t it? The little poignant touches. I thought it up very carefully.’

  I spoke in my most severe voice. ‘This is extremely serious, Bobby. Do you realise that you may have perpetrated a fraud?’ I was hoping he wouldn’t ask for my case law authority. But at that moment, the mother from the crèche, having successfully offloaded her vomiting child, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Welcome!’ said Bobby. ‘Take a seat, Sandra. Why don’t you sit next to Cassie? She’s new to the Group.’

  ‘I’m going to go now,’ I said.

  ‘Do see about joining another group, though, won’t you?’ urged Bobby. ‘I would hate to think you weren’t getting the help you needed.’

  The cold air was wonderful against my hot face, as I manoeuvred the buggy out of the front door and prepared to tackle the steps down to the pavement.

  And then – joy broke over me like a shaft of sunshine. Jonathan was standing there waiting for me. He came up the steps and helped me down with the buggy.

  ‘I had a feeling you might not go through with it,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d better wait for you.’

  ‘But you’ll never guess why I didn’t go through with it! You’ll never guess who was there.’ I told him the story, and was rewarded with a small smile, a roll of the eyes reminiscent of the old Jonathan.

  Maybe he didn’t understand how I was feeling. Maybe he couldn’t get inside my head; couldn’t feel, as if they were his own, the heft and tangle of my anxieties. But he was there, just outside. He was waiting for me.

  30

  I went to see Elliot McCabe a few days later.

  ‘Cassie!’ he exclaimed when he walked into the reception area and saw me waiting. ‘Well, this is a surprise.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling in. I was just passing by and thought I would drop off these employment policies. There’s quite a good new one on pandemic flu. A few others, too. They’re just templates, but they can be adapted for any business.’

  ‘Oh I see,’ he said. ‘Thank you. How useful. I’ll take a careful look through these. Would you like a coffee while you’re here?’

  ‘That would be great, thanks.’

  He nodded to the receptionist, and led me along the corridor and into the back garden.

  ‘It’s just about warm enough to sit outside, wouldn’t you say? Nice to enjoy the sun while we can.’ He dragged the garden bench slightly out from the wall and gestured to me to sit down.

  ‘Just about.’ I was glad I was still wearing my winter coat.

  The receptionist came out and fussed around, pulling up a little ironwork table and setting out cups and plates.

  ‘Elliot, I ran into Bobb
y Spencer the other day,’ I began. ‘He admitted that he’d lied about the whole ghost scenario. I just thought you’d want to know. I feel rather awkward . . . you know, that you offered him a settlement, when that was clearly what he was angling for. I feel that I should have been able to secure a better outcome for you.’

  ‘Oh, no, don’t worry,’ said Elliot, frowning and shaking his head. ‘The settlement was worth it, to get shot of him. It was my own fault for taking him on in the first place. That boy was never right for the funeral business. He could put on an act, undoubtedly. He could practically drip with sympathy, when he felt like it. But that isn’t what our clients need or want.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. What they need, to be quite honest, is someone who can take the drama out of it. Who can quietly get on with all the arrangements and merge into the background. The thing is to try and make it seem as though everything has organised itself. Bobby was far too much of a drama queen for that, always wanted to be the centre of attention.’

  The tea arrived, with a plate of chocolate biscuits. I cradled my cup in my hands, watching the steam race off into the cool air.

  ‘What about Milly Watkinson’s mother? That funeral certainly didn’t organise itself.’

  Elliot gave me a long look.

  ‘I saw the carriage,’ I explained. ‘The white horses. They passed along my street. To be honest, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.’

  He gave a brief nod. ‘So these employment policies . . . Do I need to take any immediate action, or can I just file them away?’

  ‘Oh, just file them away . . .’ I began, and then remembered that wasn’t what I was supposed to say. ‘Well, I suppose you should really read them and decide if they are appropriate for you as a business. You never know – they might come in handy.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure about this one here,’ said Elliot, leafing through them. ‘We don’t really have any breastfeeding mothers. All our employees are men, except for Julia the receptionist, and she’s quite old.’

  ‘Well, just bin that one then.’

  ‘And this one on carbon off-setting . . . well, I’m not sure about all that.’

  ‘Yes. Well, just bin that one too, then. Or recycle it. Whatever.’

  ‘Was there something else that you wanted to talk to me about?’ Elliot asked.

  ‘No, no,’ I said brightly. ‘I’d better be getting on.’

  But Elliot didn’t move. He sighed, and looked up towards the sky, squinting in the weak sunlight. When he spoke, he sounded soft, a little awkward. The blustery corporate act was gone completely now.

  ‘Her name isn’t Watkinson, Lord love her. Watkinson is the family dog. Her name is Milly McCabe. She’s my granddaughter.’

  ‘What?’ I exclaimed, unable to keep the horror out of my voice.

  ‘Her mother, Ann, was my daughter-in-law.’ He said nothing for a few moments, shifting slightly on the bench. The sun slipped behind a bank of cloud and the air seemed to grow even colder.

  ‘Euan’s wife. My son’s wife. My boy’s wife.’ His voice plunged an octave or so onto those last two devastating words.

  ‘How . . .’ I began. I wanted to ask how they had coped, how they had got through it. But of course, none of them had. They were still in the middle of it.

  ‘He’s doing his best. He knows she wanted him to be strong, but he’s still reeling from it all. It wasn’t easy, towards the end. They had the pain more or less under control, but she couldn’t see properly. The wretched thing had got into her brain, you see.’

  He shook his head, and scuffed at a stone on the path with his shoe. I wondered how it must have felt for her . . . to witness her own senses beginning to shut down. Knowing she’d seen her daughter’s face for the last time.

  ‘She used to tell him that all those things would pass . . . hanging around hospitals, waiting for test results, the limbo of not being able to plan anything, the rawness of it all. She said they would forget those things, just as they would have done if she’d been able to recover and go home. And that, some way down the line, they would just be left with her. As she was. She told them not to be scared of the grief – that it was just another form of love, at the end of the day.’

  He made this last statement with almost no expression in his voice – no bitterness, but no warmth either, no conviction. There was only, perhaps, a sense that there might be a question behind it, thrown out into the space between us.

  But if there was a question, it was one that I couldn’t answer. There was no getting away from the fact that she was leaving behind a small child. She would never be able to put her to bed again, or make her favourite meal. She would never be able to go to her school plays or carol services, or stay up with her in the night if she wasn’t feeling well.

  ‘You don’t look convinced,’ smiled Elliot, a tiny quiver in his voice.

  ‘She sounds incredibly brave,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, she was,’ said Elliot. ‘There’s no doubt she was brave. She made everyone else brave too, or so it seemed at the time.’

  But what about Milly now, I thought – a seven-year-old for goodness’ sake. What about the rage, the confusion, the abandonment? The sheer hollow longing for someone who had gone and would never come back. How could that ever be made right? All the bravery or beautiful words in the world could not make that right.

  Elliot opened his jacket and took a photograph from the inside pocket. ‘Here’s a picture of the three of them. It was taken at New Year.’

  It showed Milly and her parents piled up on top of each other on the sofa, each wearing pyjamas and a pair of reindeer ears.

  ‘Ann blacked out in the kitchen a couple of days later, would you believe it. That was when she went into the hospice.’

  ‘What a lovely photo,’ I said woodenly.

  ‘I’ll need to give it to Euan. He’s collecting a few final bits together for Milly’s memory box.’

  The thought hovered there in front of us for a moment, and then vanished into the blank white sky.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Caught up in a wave of sadness, I put my hand over his and held it there for a minute. And then, because there was nothing else to say or do, I gathered my things together, said my goodbyes, and left.

  *

  There was a note waiting on my desk when I got back to the office; Radcliffe wanted to see me. Somehow I didn’t feel nervous as I climbed the stairs to the top floor. I had cried all the way back from Braid Hills and was exhausted beyond the point of nerves.

  ‘Ah, Cassie, thanks for dropping by,’ said Radcliffe. I noticed that his tone was different today – almost, perhaps, conciliatory.

  ‘I’ve just had an email from Elliot McCabe,’ he went on. ‘I’d asked him for feedback about you as part of the competency review.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. Oh indeed. Do you want to read his response?’ He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk towards me.

  Murray,

  You asked my opinion of Cassie as a lawyer representing your firm. I find this hard, because she has never seemed like a lawyer to me. She seems to me to be something else entirely . . . a human being, perhaps. She is, however, the only person I would ever consider instructing, in relation to employment matters.

  Kind regards,

  Elliot McCabe

  I said nothing. Perhaps the dig about human beings and lawyers would annoy Radcliffe. I wasn’t sure. And I wasn’t sure I cared, either.

  ‘So,’ said Radcliffe. ‘In light of this rather . . . odd . . . but positive report, and the extremely favourable feedback I’ve had from Jean Forrester, I think we can let the competency review drop for the time being.’

  I pulled my face into a smile.

  ‘And I would like you to set up a social event: you, me, Elliot and his wife Lorna. You know she’s—’

  ‘On the Board of Turley Sturrock. I know.’

  ‘Invite a couple of others, too – Malkie Hamilton, maybe. Organise whatever yo
u like. A dinner, a concert, tickets to the rugby. Something fun.’

  I gave a deep sigh. ‘Sorry Murray, but I can’t do that just now.’

  ‘Can’t do it? Why?’

  ‘They’ve recently lost a daughter-in-law. To cancer. The funeral was only a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think they’ll feel like attending a social event with us. His wife certainly won’t want to be ambushed for business.’

  Murray raised his eyebrows at the word ‘ambushed’.

  ‘A daughter-in-law, you say? Well, give it another week or two, then,’ he said. ‘But don’t wait too long. We need to strike while the iron’s hot. Move in for the kill.’

  My insides heaved with contempt. Thoughts of trying to find a new job, and having to put Sophie in full-time nursery, flitted across the back of my mind; all the reasons I’d turned myself inside out trying to please Radcliffe since coming back from maternity leave. But here it was now: the line I wasn’t prepared to cross.

  ‘No,’ I said in a quiet voice. ‘I won’t do it.’

  Radcliffe stared at me for the longest time. I couldn’t read his expression. It could have been frustration, annoyance – there might even have been a hint of amusement.

  ‘Okey-dokey,’ he said finally. ‘It’s your call. I suppose Lorna knows where to find us, if she’s looking for representation. Maybe we’ll arrange an event for later in the year.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, nodding. ‘I think that’s best.’ I got up and left the room.

  31

  I was on my way to the supermarket the following Sunday afternoon when the text arrived. Jonathan and Dita were looking after Sophie at home – it was a heavy, grey day and it looked as though a downpour might begin at any moment. The phone chirped in my pocket while I was waiting in a long queue at traffic lights on Queensferry Road.