by Carrie Adams
It was when I’d sneaked downstairs in the middle of the night at James’s flat and made myself watch their wedding video that I’d first noticed I was standing in a puddle. There are weddings and then there are weddings. In some you know that the couple have the secret ingredient that gives them the chance of making it, and others feel empty from the start. I would have liked to be at Jimmy and Bea’s wedding. I could tell it had been a good one. I would have got very pissed and danced with gusto to “Come On, Eileen” and ended up snogging one of the ushers. The only strange thing about the video was how few people I recognized in it. Apart from family, I hadn’t met any of their friends.
“Whatever happens, Tessa, you’ve already proved that you’d be a good stepmother and they’d be lucky to have you, all of them, Bea almost more so than the children.”
A mother talking. I thanked her silently for her unrelenting support but was fairly sure that if anyone was going to fight my corner in my absence, it wasn’t going to be Bea. Bea wanted Jimmy back, not only for herself but for her children, and wasn’t it plain to me how forceful a mother’s love was? Hadn’t I benefited from it all my life? I think Bea had come grudgingly to like me, but that didn’t mean she was going to throw the game.
I sighed and got off the sofa. “How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Pretty good, considering.”
I understood that.
“But, then, I’m not quite sure he’s left us yet,” said my mother.
I understood that, too.
I WAS MAKING COFFEE THE following morning in a bid to wake up after another sleepless night when I heard a car horn honk outside. My heart leaped into my throat. But it wasn’t James. It was my old friend Ben and his wife, Sasha. I put down the tools and went outside.
Ben wrapped his arms around me. “Thought you might like some decent pastries,” he said. Sasha held up a bag from Paul, the French patisserie.
“City snob,” I said.
He mock-shuddered at the rural air polluting his lungs. Sasha came up and took my arm. “How are you?”
“Much, much better for seeing you two.”
“And your mum?”
“Come and see her. She’s being amazing. As ever.”
“How’s her eyesight?” asked Ben.
“Hard to tell, but perhaps improving slowly. The eyeballs roam slightly—don’t be put off. She’s still in bed but she’d love to see you. Dad’s there too.”
“Huh?”
“Mum said she wasn’t ready for a night alone.”
Sasha and Ben glanced at each other. “He obviously didn’t snore,” said Sasha, who clearly loved nothing better than a night without her husband farting and snoring next to her. I had shared many a bed, though not in that way, with Ben, and I was aware that he could elevate duvets. Heavy-togged ones at that.
“Well, not now, certainly.” Graveyard humor, I know, but we laughed. “Don’t worry about Dad. You get used to it pretty quickly.”
“How long’s she keeping him here?”
“The undertakers are coming any minute. It’s okay, my strongest sense of him isn’t up there anyway. It’s in the sitting room, just in front of the fire.”
“He was always prodding that thing,” said Ben, who knew my parents better than his own. “Do you think she’ll mind if I go up?”
“I don’t think she’d mind if you went and talked to her in the bath.” I squeezed his arm. “I’ll bring up some coffee.”
“Let me help you,” said Sasha.
Ben went upstairs, knocked gently on the door, and opened it.
“Hi, Lizzie,” I heard him say.
“Ben!” my mother exclaimed. “You absolute angel! Thank you for coming.”
I smiled at Sasha. Mum didn’t have to see Ben: she would have known his voice anywhere. Our “family” were coming to her side, and I knew then that we would be all right. There was safety in numbers, whether it was blood or water or something in between.
BEN AND SASHA STAYED THE night. It was a godsend for me to have them there, because it kept my mother and me from slipping into long, gloomy discussions about the future. Instead we buried ourselves in memories of the past, which Sasha, bless her, pretended to be interested in. The time when Dad had decided to build a chicken house…The time when Dad and I had gone backpacking…The time when Dad had taken me to school in his scout’s outfit…etc., etc. I even forgot to listen for the phone. Briefly, anyway.
Leaving Mum to have an afternoon nap, we went out for a walk along the bridle path. I took the high road; I didn’t want to see the light dancing on the water. I left it alone along with the memory of what had happened between James and me. I must love him, I thought, if I had it in me to risk losing him. Of course I told Ben and Sasha everything that had happened. For the large part they remained silent while I spoke about the breakdown of James’s first marriage, Bea’s collapse after the abortion, and the false pretenses under which they had divorced.
“No one tells you how hard it’s going to be,” said Sasha.
“My dad did, before he died. He wanted me to know exactly how hard it is.”
“But if everyone knew, no one would ever get married,” said Ben. “Maybe he scared you too much.”
“I was always scared,” I said. I had been given a generous insight into life on the other side of the fence by my friends, and I knew that to reach a rose you had to bypass thorns.
“It’s a bit like democracy,” said Ben. “It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s better than the alternatives. And until someone comes up with something else—”
“I could happily live in a women’s commune,” said Sasha.
“I’ve always rather fancied the idea of you in a habit,” said Ben.
“I didn’t mean abstinence. Men would have visiting rights,” said Sasha, “but when their work was done, they’d be sent away again and we could all get a good night’s sleep.”
Ben didn’t seem remotely put out by the idea of being sent away. In fact, he started whistling “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” Sasha pushed him. He grabbed her hand and kissed it. It was nice to see. Made me feel happy and sad at the same time. I had come so close, but it had somehow slipped away from me. Well, I thought stoically, it would make it that much easier to take care of my mother if I didn’t have to justify it to another half, who would, despite his best intentions, come to resent the burden.
And if three’s a crowd, what does that make six? Seven, including the ex. I thought about Amber, Lulu, and Maddy, and realized I missed them. It was an awful lot of baggage, but now that I risked losing it, I felt empty without it. I wondered how Bea was bearing up and was sorry I couldn’t call to see how she was. I missed James with an ache I couldn’t describe. There was a hole—more than a hole, because it spread beyond the boundaries of me and seemed to swallow everything else. I missed Dad, too, but it wasn’t the same. Mum was wrong about that, because, no matter what, I knew my father was mine. Alive or otherwise, he loved me. I couldn’t say the same for James. I knew what he had thought he’d felt, but the landscape had changed. I’d changed it.
AT SOME TIME IN THE middle of the night—I didn’t look at my watch, because I didn’t want to know how little sleep I was getting again—I went down to the kitchen and made myself a drink. As I sipped the scalding chamomile tea, I heard footsteps on the stairs. The door opened, and Ben stood on the threshold. He looked ruffled, sleepy, and about nine years old. “Thought you might be awake,” he said.
“I feel numb in the daytime, then my brain goes into overdrive the moment I lie down. I’d resort to whisky, but we poured it all down the bloody sink when Bea was here, and I haven’t had a chance to restock. I found some Night Nurse, but it’s seven years out of date.”
Ben poured milk into a glass and sat down opposite me. He drank it, leaving a white mustache on his upper lip. Now he looked six.
“You and Sasha seem well,” I said.
“We are,” he said. “At the moment.
”
“The path of true love and all that,” I said.
“The path of any love.” I thought he was going to elaborate, and eventually he did. “Sasha wants to adopt a child. Two, actually. They’re brother and sister.”
“Wow,” I said. Sasha and Ben had always seemed committed to life as a child-free couple.
“She’d been looking into it for a while, then found a little girl who made an impact. She comes with a baby brother, so it looks like a job lot.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” I said.
“I’m terrified, for all the reasons I didn’t want to have my own. What do I know about parenting?”
“What does anyone know?”
“At least you had a good model.”
I couldn’t deny it.
“That might be why you told James about Bea. You have an image of the perfect family unit locked in your head and think that anything less is a compromise.”
“That’s exactly what my father said. I’m seeking perfection, but perfection doesn’t exist.”
“No, it doesn’t. And, for the record, you would have been a great stepmother.”
“Thanks.” We sat in silence for a while. “Fancy a midnight feast?” I asked.
“Always.”
I got up and rummaged in the fridge. I found ham and cheese, a jar of cornichons, and white pickled onions. I took a packet of crackers out of the pantry, briefly recalling Bea on the stone floor with the sherry bottle in her hand, and placed them in front of Ben. I heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Sasha?” I said.
“She usually sleeps like the dead,” said Ben. “Sorry.”
I held up my hand. The kitchen door opened and I was surprised to see my mother. “Mum, you okay?”
“Hungry,” she said.
“Well, you’re just in time for a midnight feast.” I pulled out a chair and quickly found myself cutting up bite-sized pieces of cheese and ham to make little cracker sandwiches so she could feed herself.
“What are you two plotting down here?” she asked.
“I was telling Tess we’re thinking of adopting two children.”
“Excellent idea,” said Mum.
“What about Sasha’s work?” I asked, maintaining caution.
“She’ll stretch herself like any other working mother, and I’ll be forced to stop thinking about myself, which, frankly, is beginning to tire even me.”
“Not possible,” said a voice from the doorway. Sasha stood there in one of Ben’s T-shirts and a pair of his socks. She looked bloody sexy. Ben pulled her onto his knee and fed her a cracker.
“Exciting times,” I said to Sasha.
“You’re a terrible keeper of secrets,” she said, elbowing him.
“Come on, Sasha, this is Liz and Tess we’re talking about. They’re family. And, anyway, it concerns them.”
“It does?” asked Tessa.
“Well, who else would be godmother? And since my mother’s barking, I’d expect Liz to step up to the plate and be granny.”
“My pleasure,” said Liz.
“And mine,” I agreed.
“Is there such a thing as a godgranny?” asked my mother.
“There should be,” said Ben. “You’d be perfect.”
The four of us sat in the kitchen, eating and chatting, until light crept through the window and summoned us back to bed. I slept well into Sunday and woke feeling better. The first thing I did was check my phone, but James hadn’t called. He had a lot to sort out with Bea, but I would have appreciated a heads-up.
I got out of bed and opened the curtains. I was lying to myself, of course. Did I want to know where I stood on the Bea/Tessa swing-o-meter? Absolutely not, since I now suspected it had always pointed in her favor.
Strangely, I felt no bitterness, because I knew in my heart of hearts that James had had no idea either. He had done what he’d said he’d done. He’d forced himself to get over her, he’d tried his best, but how do you get over the love of your life? How do you ever completely get over anyone you’ve ever loved? I wasn’t sure you did. I think that if you’d loved them at all, then you’d always love them a bit. I got dressed and went downstairs. After all, wouldn’t I always love Ben a fraction more than I ought? As the day ticked past, I felt a growing emptiness in the house. It wasn’t that Dad had gone altogether, but I was aware of his presence fading. He was leaving us gently. I stared at the daffodils through the kitchen window as the kettle boiled for more tea and thanked him for the strength he’d somehow left behind.
THE MORNING OF DAD’S CREMATION was gloriously warm. We should have been dressing for a perfect English summer wedding. I stopped the car outside the single-story red-brick crematorium that crouched in a landscaped garden planted with a variety of primulas. My mother got out of the passenger seat, pushed the Gucci sunglasses Sasha had lent her up the bridge of her nose, and took my arm. Then we walked toward the building.
People had already arrived. Fran and Caspar had come, which was way beyond the call of duty. There were faces from the village I recognized. Then the coffee-morning women stood up one by one and told my mother who they were, in case she didn’t recognize their voices. There were the guys from the pub, old friends who’d driven miles to be with us, and a couple of Dad’s former colleagues.
Seeing them all made me proud of him. I knew I’d got lucky. Friends had lost fathers in their sixties to strokes and heart attacks. Dad had outlived many of his own friends by more than a decade, so it was not with a heavy heart that I took my seat. Mostly, I felt blessed.
And then I saw Peter, Honor, and the three girls. My heart stopped for a second, then punched a hole through my ribs.
“What is it?” asked my mother, sensing me tense. I didn’t have time to answer, because Maddy broke free of Honor, ran down the middle aisle, and threw her arms around me. That was when the lump arrived in my throat.
“You’ve been crying,” she said.
“Only a little,” I replied.
“Hello, Maddy,” said my mother.
“Can I sit on your knee?” she asked.
“I don’t think—”
“That would be lovely,” said Mum, and sat down to accommodate the sprightly eight-year-old. She clambered on, lifted Mum’s glasses, lowered them with a nod, and kissed her cheek. Damn that lump.
Honor came to retrieve her granddaughter, but I held up my hand to tell her all was well, Maddy could stay, so she went back to her seat. I was grateful. I didn’t want to talk to her and discover here, now, what I already knew. That James wasn’t coming. That was that. Amber blew me a kiss, then went to sit with Caspar and Fran. I stared at Dad’s coffin. Stay with me, Dad, I pleaded, for just a moment longer.
The vicar said nice things; I read an excerpt from Moby-Dick, and felt strangely removed from the proceedings. What else would they have done? Bea couldn’t have brought the girls alone. It would have meant too much. If James had come, I would have read too much into it, and then he would have had to let me down from a greater height. They couldn’t possibly have come together, but they had clearly wanted to be represented. My mother and father had made an impact that they had wanted to acknowledge. That was why they had sent Honor, Peter, and the children. It was what I would have done in the circumstances.
DAD LEFT THIS WORLD THROUGH an electronic trapdoor. For such a long life, it was a short exit. I knew it was perfunctory, but Mum and I had decided that a happy memorial service when her eyesight was better was what Dad would have preferred. The Pearl Fishers was piped through the surround-sound system, presumably so you couldn’t hear the flames boost to the exact temperature needed to reduce my father to a jam jar of ash. I watched him go—or the coffin, anyway—and knew that the man he’d been was not inside it.
After that, we were ushered out pretty quickly, and I noticed people emerge from the subtle side doors to gather up our flowers and replace them with the next lot. Morbid fascination made me hang back a fraction longer than I should have,
and as the silent flower-bearers finished laying out a carnation creation that spelled GRANDMA, hey presto, another coffin emerged from the hold. It wasn’t exactly the same as Dad’s but it wasn’t very different. The door through which I had entered opened as the door through which I was leaving closed. What had Linda said? “The effing conveyor belt of life.” There it was, in a single-story nutshell. Rather than feeling disappointed by the lack of pageantry, I felt comforted by the commonplace efficiency of the production line. Henry Ford would have been proud. More than that, Dad liked efficiency.
I WALKED INTO THE “ROSE GARDEN,” whose name conjured up White House grandeur but failed to deliver, and was surrounded by Dad’s friends. I couldn’t get near Mum, and was worried about her getting tired, but so many people wanted to talk to her it would have felt churlish dragging her away. Occasionally, I caught a flash of the girls as they ran around the garden. And then I saw him. James was here. My heart punched another hole in my rib cage. I’d done such a good job of convincing myself it was over that I would have been less surprised to see Dad. He’d chosen me, and I was overjoyed. I wanted to run to him, jump into his arms, wrap my legs around his middle, and hold on forever, but there were a lot of people about who might have thought such behavior inappropriate at a funeral. Besides, he was on the opposite side, looking out over the countryside, and hadn’t seen me.
I felt two small hands slip into mine. Lulu and Maddy were at either side of me. “You’re still here. I am so happy to see you,” I said, which made them smile.
“Good,” said Maddy. “Because we want you to be happy.”
“Maddy! You just made her cry,” said Lulu.
Maddy looked devastated.
“No, sweet pea,” I said hastily, “it’s only because I’m so pleased you all came.”
“See?” said Maddy.
“When did your dad get here?” I asked.
“He’s not here. He’s at home with Mummy,” said Lulu.
I held back my frown. Lulu often got things wrong—all the time, in fact. She said things she didn’t understand or hadn’t grasped. I glanced to where James was standing, waiting for me to jump into his arms. But he was gone. I scanned the thinning crowd—there was only so much looking at wreaths people could take before the brew beckoned—but couldn’t find him anywhere. Then, walking away with an elderly woman, I saw a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair.