Sing me to Sleep

by Helen Moorhouse

  Vicky gave a ‘tsk’. “Bloody African music,” she snapped and grabbed Guillaume’s arm, no longer interested in what Jenny had to say. She swept from the room, dragging a reluctant Guillaume behind her.

  Jenny followed meekly, relieved, yet her mind raced.

  She stood in the hallway behind them as Vicky perched herself on the steps leading down to the kitchen, unintentionally preventing Jenny’s entry. Jenny’s head still swam – the sound of Vicky’s long nails tapping faintly on her wineglass, her raucous voice calling for quiet and calm, shouting that she had an announcement to make, was distant to her.

  It was only when Vicky announced her pregnancy to the room of people who barely knew her and Guillaume leaned against the wall just behind her, his body angled so that he could look at Jenny who still stood, alone in the hallway, and mouthed the words ‘I mean it’, did Jenny finally understand what he meant. And understood also that yes, frighteningly, he did mean it. Every part of it. Every single word.

  Chapter 25

  December 23rd, 1997

  Jenny

  Jenny stared at the clothes strewn on the bed. Other Jenny’s clothes. Tops and skirts and wedge heels. Don’t bring much, Guillaume had said. His words echoed in her head – they had done since the night of the party. The night of Vicky’s bombshell. And his. The night that she finally understood that he was serious when he said that he wanted to escape.

  Jenny had fretted since. All the signs – all good sense – pointed to the fact that she should stay. She should stay and make her own baby with a man who adored her, to build the future that they had planned. Not to run off across the world with a man who wouldn’t stand by a woman who was pregnant with his child – even if she were Vicky.

  Jenny thought that she might go out of her mind as Christmas drew nearer. Why on earth couldn’t she decide? Why was it even a choice? Stay with Ed and everything that she knew and loved or go with Guillaume?

  But wasn’t what she knew and loved all that she had ever known and loved? Rainy London, Tubes and buses and the corner shop and Pilton Gardens? Wasn’t there a huge world out there that she should see? That she owed it to herself to see? Didn’t she deserve some spice, some excitement? Didn’t everyone think that she had settled too young? That she had never lived a life outside her comfort zone? And in a way, didn’t she owe it to Ed to let him do the same?

  Jenny’s head ached with the argument that she had fought inside herself ever since Guillaume had planted the idea within her. Was she smothered here? Was he right? Shouldn’t she take a leap? Take a breath? Gasp in all of the air that the world had to offer? All the passion that a man like Guillaume could bring her? Had brought her since that summer evening when they first connected? A man like Guillaume who could desert his unborn child . . .

  Jenny’s eyes strayed to Bee. Her own child. Sitting cross-legged on the end of Jenny’s bed, clumsily wrapping a scarf around her little neck. It took Jenny a moment to realise what she was doing. She reached out and gently untangled the scarf from the toddler’s neck and pulled it gently from her hands. The chiffon fabric slipped through Bee’s groping fingers and her face crumpled as Jenny stuffed the scarf into the top drawer of the bureau beside her.

  A large tear rolled out of one of Bee’s eyes, followed by another. Jenny’s heart sank. She longed so badly, ached, to bend and cuddle her. But she couldn’t let herself. Couldn’t allow herself to smell the baby scent of her, to feel the softness of her cheek wet with tears. It would be too much to bear. Not when the task ahead had to be completed. Not when it made Jenny feel so . . . impure, she realised. Her perfection as a mother sullied forever by what she had done to her daughter. She reached out instead and stroked the copper curls as soothingly as she could.

  “There now, silly,” she crooned. “You can’t play with dangerous things, you know that.”

  Bee responded by pulling herself away from her mother’s touch as quickly and as forcibly as she could and, sliding off the end of the bed, pelted out the door in the direction of her own bedroom. Jenny watched her go: the shape of her little legs encased in the bright pink tights under the little denim pinafore, the way that her body propelled her across the landing, surefooted, the arms held out at either side to give her balance. By the time she was halfway across, Jenny knew that the confiscated scarf was forgotten and that Bee was absorbed in the movement of her own body, the air rushing through her fingers. Jenny smiled as Bee flopped to her knees and then stood up again as quickly, bounding into the bedroom in three jumps and disappearing behind the door where her soft toys lived.

  She could take her, she thought, and immediately banished the idea from her mind. It was too upsetting. Taking her or leaving her, whichever. Jenny felt the flood of tears at the back of her eyes for the tenth time that day and squeezed the lids shut to hold them back. A sob escaped her throat. She had to leave her here. It was best for her, and that was the most important thing. Stupidly, a part of Jenny ached and throbbed at the thought of being separated from her daughter. The dust would settle eventually. The future would happen, life would go on.

  Jenny glanced at her watch and tutted in frustration, picking her bag up off the bed. Where the hell was Betty? She had promised to be here at two, yet now it was half past. And Jenny knew that she didn’t have much time. The check-in time at the airport was five, Guillaume had told her in the Christmas card he had sent from Manchester the previous week. It had pleaded with her to meet him at his flat – showered her with messages of love and devotion, promises of fresh starts. Jenny had fancied that she had caught a whiff of Guillaume’s scent as she took it out of the envelope and then it was gone. She had ripped the card up and thrown it in the open fire, of course. Not because she didn’t long to reread the words in Guillaume’s scrawled handwriting, but because she couldn’t bear for Ed to find it. Not only to keep the secret safe, but to not break his heart completely.

  Lovely, loving and loved Ed. Husband and best friend. The best person she had ever known. Jenny banished the thought from her head. No. She had to do this. There was no point in thinking about him like that now. No point and no headspace.

  The doorbell ‘binged’ suddenly. It spurred Jenny into action and she fled out the door of her room. She paused for a second as she heard Bee croon a tuneless dirge to her dolls and her heart contracted fiercely. Not now, she forced herself. Best that she just go, as quickly as she could. It would be easier that way.

  And best not to engage Betty in conversation apart from a brief hello. Best to grab her coat and run as fast as she could, to shout that she’d see everyone later and that there were mince pies in the oven. They had baked them together, Jenny and Bee. They were the last scent she breathed from her home as she slammed the front door of 17 Pilton Gardens behind her, inhaling the freezing cold air as another heavy frost had already begun to settle.

  She had planned to take the Tube. It was a five-minute drive to the station. And she was confident enough of driving the route once traffic was light, even though she was taking a risk in driving on her own having not yet passed her test.

  Jenny unlocked the car door and clambered inside without a backward glance, slinging her bag on the passenger seat. Betty’s lateness had delayed her by . . . Jenny glanced again at her watch . . . three quarters of an hour. That left no time to spare. She needed every second if she were to get there, to catch him on time.

  And if it hadn’t been for the slow crawl of cars that formed a tailback all the way to the turnoff for the precinct, Jenny might have stuck to the original plan and parked on one of the side streets near Fulham Broadway station, got on a train, changed at Kensington, and made it to Notting Hill in twenty minutes or so.

  But that’s not what happened.

  Because in order to make sure she made it on time, in order to make sure she kept to the first stupid decision she had made, Jenny Mycroft made a second, even more stupid one, and kept on driving.

  And that was the end of the end.

  Chap
ter 26

  2020

  Jenny

  The belongings, the personal effects that were sent back to my broken-hearted husband all those years ago were as follows:

  One watch, gold.

  One wedding ring, plain gold band.

  One engagement ring, gold and diamond solitaire.

  One leather handbag containing purse, diary, tissues, child’s handmade Christmas card and other sundries.

  Umbrella.

  And nothing else.

  There was nothing else that was fit to go to him. Nothing that remained unharmed after the fire began, ignited by a spark from the engine in the pool of petrol that spilled out onto the road. Not the manuals in the glove compartment, not the thankfully empty car seat in the back.

  It was my own stupid fault, of course. Inexperienced driver tackling Christmas traffic in slippery conditions. A drunk driver coming from a Christmas lunch . . .

  They said afterwards that there was nothing I could have done to stop it happening.

  But there was.

  I could have caught the Tube, stuck with the original plan.

  I could have not gone.

  I could have stayed at home and baked even more mince pies with my beautiful, wonderful daughter. Or sung carols, or watched The Snowman, or just gazed at the sparkling lights of the tree and smelled her smell and stroked her hair.

  I could have just telephoned Guillaume – I didn’t have to see him. There was no need. It was just some warped sense of propriety that made me think I should tell him in person.

  I could have stayed away from him in the first place, of course.

  I could have snuck off to bed on the night of that dinner in summer, like I had planned to do and then I’d never have seen him in that light, in that new way.

  I could have done all of those things that Ed wanted me to do. I could have gone to Cambridge, could have taken a different path.

  I could have stood up to the fear instead of thinking that escape was the best route.

  There was plenty I could have done to stop it actually.

  But I didn’t, did I?

  And so, on December 23rd, 1997, two days before my baby’s third Christmas, with my whole life ahead of me with a wonderful man, I died.

  I left them.

  Which was exactly what I had finally made up my mind never ever to do.

  Part Two

  Rowan

  Chapter 27

  june 1999

  Ed

  John Adams died in June 1999, in solitude and silence, much like he had lived out his remaining years after the death of his beloved daughter, Jenny.

  Apart from the kindnesses shown to him by his son-in-law, her broken-hearted widower, and the absolute adoration that he felt – but didn’t seem capable of showing – for his granddaughter, Beatrice Rose, there was nothing of interest on earth to John Adams. He had outlived the first love of his life – his wife, his Rose – by exactly eighteen years when he finally decided that enough was enough. The death of his only child had finished him. He lasted a mere eighteen months after the car crash that claimed his first and only daughter.

  And then his heart simply gave up.

  But in the death of John Adams, which was barely marked by anyone, there was redemption. Because finding his father-in-law’s body slumped across his bed was what turned Ed Mycroft’s life around. The moment was a revelation.

  Ed had looked around the room with a fresh perspective. At the sparse, functional furnishings, the outdated wallpaper, the clothing neatly folded and slung over the back of a chair, the single ornament – a photograph of the woman who would have been his mother-in-law had he not been only eleven when she died, her arm slung casually about the shoulders of a girl no older than that. The girl who became his wife. The smiles of mother and daughter were identical, their hair sweeping across their faces in a seaside wind.

  In John Adams’ fridge were a single pint of semi-skimmed and a sliver of bacon, curled dry at the edges. A layer of dust covered the surfaces in the living room, which hadn’t changed since the days of Band Aid and the miners’ strikes. His wardrobe consisted of three pairs of trousers, five shirts and two knitted sweaters. And the suit that he had worn to his daughter’s wedding, and in which they buried him.

  His funeral service was simple and short. No one spoke – hardly anyone came, in fact. Ed placed a Chelsea scarf in his coffin before they closed it at the funeral home, whispering that he hoped it would keep him warm.

  And then they buried John Adams beside his wife and his daughter.

  That was a family gone. That was that.

  But it was enough for Ed Mycroft who turned the key in the lock of his home at Pilton Gardens on the day of that funeral and saw his home – really saw it – for the first time since the day in December 1997 when, incapable of making his own way from work, he had been brought home by a kindly WPC to where his sisters and his mother scurried about his house, ashen-faced and oddly silent.

  Since the day a year before when he, too, had given up.

  Seeing his home – their home – as a slightly messier reflection of the one where he had found the sad and lonely corpse of his wife’s father triggered something in Ed Mycroft. He stopped at the entrance to the living room, stared at the décor – Jenny’s décor – in dire need of freshening-up, and thought for a moment that he might be bowled over by the flood of emotions that rushed like a tidal wave from wherever he had kept them at bay. It wasn’t the obvious mementoes like their wedding photograph. It was the cushion on the couch that Jenny used to clutch to her when she watched TV, the thick church candle in the holder on the hearth – it suddenly struck Ed that the last time the wick had been trimmed and the flame lit was the night before she died; it was the Patricia Cornwell on the bookshelf that she had never finished. It was as if his brain was equipped with some sort of radar that picked out these items solely. Eventually Ed Mycroft’s breath was taken away and finally he broke completely.

  Not the everyday, functioning brokenness that he had sustained for almost a year now, the brokenness that had confined him to the house, that had lost him a stone in weight – and his job. Not the dull veil that had hung over him, blocked out the real world, kept function to a minimum other than that which sustained himself and his child. None of these things, in fact.

  Instead, it was as if that veil was ripped off his eyes and he suddenly saw everything in the sharpest relief. And felt pain so intense that his knees buckled and in the privacy of his own living room, with the living reminders of his dead wife all around him, he howled in grief and agony and desperation and misery. He cried like he couldn’t stop, gripping the doorframe beside him to keep himself from collapse. Memories stabbed him like knives driven into his heart. He mourned their time together, her passing, and he raged at the future that had been taken away from him and from Bee. He had never felt such despair in his life. He hadn’t thought that it was possible.

  And when the tears had finally stopped and his back teeth ached from where he had clenched them together, when he had actually made himself physically ill, vomiting out more of the blackness and pain that he suddenly realised was all he had inside him, Ed Mycroft made a decision. That he was going to have to do something about all of this, or else risk being found slumped dead across his own bed at the precise moment that his heart had finally given up. That he was going to have to function. That he was somehow going to have to keep swimming through this soup that he was in, through no fault of his own. And more importantly than that, he was going to have to carry his daughter on his back, like a proper father; like a decent human being.

  And with no idea how to do any of this, he reached for the phone book and picked out the first grief counsellor that he could find within a three-mile radius.

  And thus began the time he spent with Dr Phyllida Rice. Who repaired him as best she could to carry on. Who helped him repair the breaks to the best of his ability.

  She encouraged him to talk to others. And
he found Betty’s husband, Mike, a willing ear in return for a hand on the allotment that he worked. In Guillaume’s place – Ed had given up trying to locate his friend – Mike was a steadying hand and a good companion. And somehow it worked. The fresh air, the companionship, the constant talking and thinking. It didn’t fix him – Ed knew that he was completely and entirely unfixable. But it helped him to cope.

  And by New Year’s Eve, the big one, the one where everyone was going to party like it was 1999, Ed Mycroft felt well enough to face the world and went out to celebrate with his brother-in-law, leaving his precious daughter in the care of her aunt.

  As he shaved and washed, applied some hair gel and the Hugo Boss aftershave that his mother had bought him for Christmas, he brushed away a tickling sensation at the end of his nose which he thought was a fly, or a cobweb but which was, of course, the tender touch of the person who watched over him at all times – that of his dead first wife.

  And then, out on the town, in a haze of fireworks and bottled beer and Auld Lang Syne and relief that the world didn’t end on the stroke of midnight, he met his second.

  He just didn’t know it at the time.

  Chapter 28

  New year’s eve, 1999

  Rowan

  Rowan Sutherland liked horses; she liked hot baths smelling of rose oil; she liked her laundry to be dried outdoors; she liked autumn, and the feel of velvet against her skin, and the smell of wet dog; she liked the countryside.

  There were few things in reality that Rowan Sutherland actively disliked. She just wasn’t a ‘disliking’ sort of person.