“Very well, Libby – thanks for allowing me to come here today and for answering my questions. The only thing you need to be aware of is that my report is only a recommendation – some judges don’t even bother to read them and just make up their own minds on the evidence presented to them, so please keep that in mind, okay? We won’t know until the day of the hearing itself what the outcome is going to be.”
“Well, any judge worth his or her salt can see that John-Paul isn’t any good for Jack. I don’t want him out of the boy’s life because it’s important that he knows who his dad is, but on a day-to-day basis Jack needs stability and I can give him that. It’s breaking my heart every time I think about what’s coming down the tracks for him, so can you imagine how poor Tina is feeling? At least if she knows that he’s going to be properly looked after, after she’s gone, it’d be something. That’s all I want, to be able to do right by my sister.”
Rachel nods. “I understand this must be so hard for you, Libby – that’s why I want you to know that I’m going to do my very best to make sure that we get the very best outcome for Jack.”
Chapter 35
Conor puts down the phone to his wholesaler. He is stocking up on the latest word-of-mouth sensation, a new Scandi psychological thriller translated as The Lighthouse Keeper, which is set to be huge. They were talking about it on the radio that morning and already he has sold four of the five copies that he has in stock. He could really use a blockbuster right now. They’re an easy sell. They bring people who don’t usually buy books back into bookshops.
The bell tinkles as the door opens. Conor looks up and sees Jack.
“Hey, Jack!”
He has got taller in the last few weeks and the gap of bare skin between where his tracksuit bottoms stop and his runners begin has got wider. He seems to have forgotten his socks. “What’s happening?”
“It’s Tuesday,” Jack announces wearily as if he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“And?”
“Well, Rachel always comes on a Tuesday now, so that’s why I told Ma I was going outside to play – in case she comes again today.”
“Who is this Rachel you’re forever moaning about?”
“You know – the prissy one!” he says somewhat impatiently.
“Yeah, I know, but why does she come to your house? Is she a friend of your ma’s or something?”
“Nooooo – Ma hates her – even more than me! I don’t know who she is.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Ma is always in bad form after she calls in to us. Ma is in bad form a lot lately. When I went home yesterday she was crying again. Sometimes I see her crying and I ask ‘What’s wrong, Ma?’ And she says ‘Oh, it’s nothing, love’, but I say ‘Well, you only cry if there’s something wrong’. So yesterday I asked her and she said ‘I’ve just got a pain in me tummy’ and then I said that it must be really sore because one time I had a really bad pain in my tummy – it was really, really bad – but I didn’t cry, so hers must have been even sorer. She says what is she going to do without me but I told her that she’s being really silly because I’m not going away anywhere, I see her every day. I only go to school and here but I didn’t say that bit because she doesn’t know that I come here. Then she smiled and told me to get her a tissue so she could dry her eyes and I asked her if the pain in her tummy was gone then and she said that it was.”
As Conor lets the boy talk, he tries to piece together the jigsaw of Jack White’s life for the last few weeks but it doesn’t make sense to him. Conor knows that the boy loves his mother and would do anything for her and from what he can tell she loves him too, except for the fact that she seems to sleep a lot. And then there is this Rachel person – who is she and what does she want with Jack’s mother?
“Well, hopefully she’s all right now.”
“I just wish everything was back to the way it usedta be. Before Ma was sad and sleepy all the time. When Ma picked me up from school and then we went to the homework club together, then home for our tea and Rachel never came.”
“I’m sure it will be all be back to normal soon, Jack.”
He looks up at him, wide-eyed and serious. “I went to the church on my way here and I tried to light a candle but then Mrs Keely the sacristan came out and saw me and told me to get out and stop causing trouble – but I wasn’t messing, cross my heart and hope to die. She said that young fellas today are pure brazen and that I should be ashamed of myself causing trouble in the house of the Lord but I just wanted to light a candle to pray for Ma to be happy again. That’s what Ma always does when she says something is worrying her – she lights a candle in the church. So now my prayer won’t come true.”
“Never mind all that – it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?” He puts his arm around his shoulders and rubs his arm. “Why don’t you read some more of Tom’s Midnight Garden while I make you a sandwich if you want?”
He runs over to his usual spot on the floor and takes the book off the shelf. Conor comes out a minute later with the white bread sandwich.
Jack takes a bite and says, “Ma is always giving out to me because I run away out the door without eating anything after school but I like your sandwiches better – Ma always makes me eat brown bread – she says it’s better for me.”
Conor feels guilty then for undoing whatever dietary goodness his mother was trying to instil in him.
“Leni always made me eat brown too,” he sighs. “But I have to agree with you, white tastes way nicer.”
Ella silences the engine. She gets out of the jeep, steps out into the quiet cul-de-sac and walks towards Mrs Frawley’s house. Then she has second thoughts about coming here – she should really just turn around and go back home again – but something pulls her towards the front door. She wants to sit on the stiff-backed chairs in Mrs Frawley’s good front room with its perfectly straight cushions and china on display in the glass cabinet. She wants to sit in that room with Mrs Frawley. They have always called her Mrs Frawley even though, as far as Ella knows, she has never been married.
She presses the bell and waits. She doesn’t know what she is going to say to her. It feels as though she is waiting for ages for her to answer. She checks her watch and it is almost five. Mrs Frawley has probably gone out for her daily walk. Just as she is turning around to head back towards her jeep, she hears a voice calling her from the door.
“Ella, love, is that you? What are you doing here?”
She turns around to see Mrs Frawley standing on the step in her usual uniform of a high-necked pullover and skirt.
“I didn’t know where else to go.”
“I see. Well, you had better come inside so.”
Ella follows her wordlessly into the house.
“Shall I make us a pot of tea?”
Ella nods. She goes into Mrs Frawley’s sitting room and sits down on the wingback chair. The room is chilly. Unlike Ella, Mrs Frawley never seems to feel the cold. Even in the depths of winter she would always have the windows in the tower open to have the sea air blasting in. Ella finds herself looking around the orderly room. It is meticulously tidy as everything associated with Mrs Frawley always is. She notices that she has changed the carpet since she was here last.
A few minutes later Mrs Frawley comes back in with a tray and a china teapot painted with yellow primroses and matching teacups. “Where are the girls?” she asks.
“Andrea has them.”
“I see. I’m sorry I’ve nothing sweet to offer you but I wasn’t expecting visitors today.”
She places the tray down on the coffee table and sits on the centre of the sofa. She starts to pour the tea in a steady arc into a cup, which she then hands to Ella.
She pours for herself and they sit sipping the tea.
“So how are they doing?” she says eventually.
“They’re good.” Ella pauses. “They miss you though.”
Mrs Frawley half smiles. “I was going to come to visit, when things settle down again in a few weeks.
”
“Please come back.” The words are out before she can help it.
“Now, Ella, I told you before – it’s for the best. You will thank me for this one day, I promise you.”
“But I can’t cope, I just can’t do it.”
“Do what, love?”
“I can’t do the whole mother thing.”
The older woman laughs. “It’s too late now, my dear – you have three little people relying on you.”
“I’m no good at it . . . ”
“Ella, you know very well that that is one phrase I will not allow you to use!”
“Sorry,” she says, suitably chastened.
“You’re doing fine, dear.”
“But I’m not – you don’t see me every day. Maisie cries all the time, Celeste hates me – Dot I can just about handle. Just about. I’m a disaster. I can’t do it. Please, Mrs Frawley, please come back to us – if not for me, for the children’s sake?”
“You know I can’t do that, dear.”
“But why not?”
“It would never have worked out with the two of us there and, besides, my time had come anyway. I think at this stage of my life I’d quite like to embark on a new adventure.”
“Like what?” Ella is aghast. This is Mrs Frawley – she doesn’t do adventures.
“I don’t know, that’s the fun of it all. When I first came to your house to look after yourself and Andrea, you were two very lost little girls, God bless you, but I was only supposed to be doing the job for a few weeks as a favour to a friend of your dad’s. But when I met your father and got to know him, when the few weeks were up I just couldn’t walk out on him and leave him in the lurch. So I stayed on with your family. Initially it was only supposed to be for a few months but as you know I ended up staying there, until first Andrea and then you went off to university. Then when you had Celeste and you were working on The Evening Review and you asked me to come and work for you, I really wasn’t sure. I mean it was a different thing raising you and your sister but to start again with your offspring, well, I think I would have liked a new challenge at that stage of my life. But, with all due respect to you, you were in a bad way and I knew you were under a lot of pressure and I couldn’t say no to you. It reminded me of the way you used to always get around me to have a treat after dinner even though you had acted up during the day and I swore you weren’t getting any treats for your bold behaviour.”
Ella smiles.
“Celeste reminds me a lot of you at that age, you know.”
“Really?”
“She does. She’s a bright girl but she’s headstrong and she certainly won’t make being her parent easy – but her spirit and tenacity will get her far, just like her mother.”
“She really misses you.”
“And I miss her too but it’s about time I retired. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time but then when you lost your job, the time felt right.”
Ella has never been able to put an age on her. She guesses she was in her twenties when she came to work for her father back when Ella was four and Andrea was six, so she calculates that she must be somewhere in the region of between sixty and seventy years of age now. She looks good though – she maintains her trim figure by walking. When she worked for Ella she pushed the buggy up the steep hills of the headland every day, come hail, rain or shine.
“Ella, you have had a difficult few weeks but I didn’t make my decision lightly. It was my time to go – you do understand that, don’t you, dear?”
Ella nods but she doesn’t.
“I know this is hard on you right now but it will get better, trust me. I’ve known you since you were four years old and I like to think that I’ve got to know you quite well over the years.” She is smiling kindly. “I think you will look back on this and thank me. Just you wait and see. As I always say, everything happens for a reason.”
“But there is no reason. My life is over!”
“Don’t you think you are being a bit dramatic?”
“But it feels that way.”
“Ella, my love, excuse me if I sound unkind now . . . yes, you did a stupid thing but you need to put everything into perspective – it’s not the end of the world. So what? You lost your job but you have so many good things in your life. Your children are beautiful and healthy, thank goodness, and you have a lovely husband. Financially you have no worries either. I’m not criticising you but did you ever stop in all those years of striving to get to the top and just take the time to take stock and appreciate that? A lot of people would gladly trade places with you in the morning.”
“No, but –”
“Well, then, when life throws an upheaval in your path you have to try to turn it around into an opportunity. At the moment you have the chance to spend some time with the girls, and there will be other jobs down the line, I’m sure of it.”
“I think that there is something wrong with me.”
“How do you mean?”
“That I’m not maternal or something. That it is genetic . . . I don’t know . . . I feel like I’m going to mess everything up and that I’m going to turn out like my own mother . . . I’m so scared that history is going to repeat itself and that I’m going to let down my kids as well.”
“No, you most certainly are not, because you won’t let that happen! You are not your mother!” Mrs Frawley says sternly. “I don’t like speaking ill of a person that I have never met but she made her choice and, frankly, as the person who had the pleasure of trying to step into her shoes and trying to raise you and Andrea into two young ladies, while your father earned a living, I think I am entitled to speak my mind. In my opinion she made a pretty poor choice in leaving her family for a man who by all accounts didn’t treat her very well in the end and certainly not half as well as your father did. I’m not sure if it’s my place to say that and I’m certainly not trying to take credit for how you’ve turned out, because you have a marvellous father, but I do allow myself a small bit of pride whenever I see you and Andrea and I can’t help thinking of how much your mother missed out on.”
Ella is stunned. This is the first time she has ever heard Mrs Frawley discuss her mother. She usually refuses to be drawn on the subject. As a teenager Ella went through a period of wanting to know more about why she had left them, where she was now and if she had ever been in contact since. She knew that the topic was off limits with her father. Her gentle, good-natured father had been so heart-broken and destroyed by her mother’s desertion, he had never really got over it. So she used to annoy Mrs Frawley instead. She would think up elaborate ways of trying to extract more information from her and try to trick her into telling her things about the past by pretending her dad had told her something and hoping that Mrs Frawley would take the bait – but the woman to her credit never divulged.
Ella has two memories of her mother. The first is standing in a supermarket queue with her when she was wearing her royal-blue woollen coat. Even then she was aware that her mother had stood out from all the other women in the shop with their grey and black coats. She was like a painted character forced to live in a monochrome world. Another lady had come up to them and said “She looks just like you” and she remembers her mother had smiled down at her and squeezed her hand tightly. The other memory is sitting in their garden on a sweltering summer’s day. It had to have been the heat wave of ’76. She remembers picking blades of grass and handing them to her mother who would tear them down the middle until they were split in two pieces before handing them back to her again. But she isn’t sure if she can even rely on those memories. Can she trust them? Perhaps they were snatched images from photos she had seen and they had somehow bled together into a fuzzy muddle her mind.
Sometimes she scans the faces of women in the streets and wonders if they are her mother. She looks at middle-aged women with similar-shaped grey-green eyes like hers. Sometimes she stares at them so much that they give her a funny look in return and she is forced to look away quickly. It always
seems strange to Ella that Andrea has no interest in learning where their mother is – she had closed that chapter of her life on the day she left them – but Ella has always felt it is a gaping hole in her life.
“Do you know where she is now?” Ella can’t help herself from asking.
“I don’t, Ella dear, but you should just leave it in the past now. There is no point in raking over old ground. Speaking of your dad, how is he?” She is obviously keen to change the subject.
“He’s good. He has recently met a lady in the golf club and, although he never says as much, I think they might be more than just friends.”
“Well, it would be nice indeed if he found a companion at his age. Your father is a good man, generous to a fault and so very kind.”
“Yeah, I’m happy for him.”
“Look, you will get through this and come out the other side of it because you are strong.”
“Do you really think so?”
Into the Night Sky Page 18