by Mia Dolan
Annie nodded. ‘I’ll take you to their den.’
Marcie heard everything about her grandmother’s ordeal of living with Babs. She held her hand as Rosa Brooks recounted how it had felt and was surprised to feel how birdlike her hands had become and how transparent her skin.
Her father stood by looking pensive as he heard all this. Suddenly he was also looking old.
‘I should have been here,’ he said softly.
Rosa shook her head. ‘No. You should have been with your wife and children.’
He nodded then stopped abruptly as though a most terrible realisation had exploded in his mind. ‘I’ve got to go. Be back in a mo.’
‘I’ve made stew,’ said Garth, after Tony had left.
Whatever it was smelled good.
After they’d eaten, Marcie, with Garth’s help, got her grandmother to bed.
‘I am so glad to be home,’ whispered her grandmother as she snuggled down in her bed below a heavy satin eiderdown.
Marcie stroked her grandmother’s head. ‘Have a good sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
Her grandmother’s smile was weak and wistful. For a moment she was certain that the jet-black eyes were seeing her as clearly as they’d used to. The moment passed.
‘I will be very much better in the morning,’ said her grandmother. ‘Tomorrow I will be young again.’
Marcie heard Garth opening the front door to someone, then heavy footsteps walking along the passageway.
‘Marcie! Marcie!’
Marcie gasped at the sound of Michael’s voice.
‘Now you will be young again too,’ said her grandmother.
It was a strange comment to make but Marcie didn’t ask her grandmother what she meant by it. She ran into her husband’s waiting arms.
For her part Rosa Brooks was feeling incredibly happy. Her face was glowing and she didn’t mind at all when Marcie dashed off, flying into Michael’s arms, her face streaked with tears.
Rosa was happy because Cyril was here. Nobody else could see him of course, only her and he was here for her.
‘You’re wearing your white suit,’ she said to him.
Beaming at her, again the young man she’d fallen in love with, he swept the familiar panama off his head and offered her his hand.
She took it, of course, whilst noticing that all her age spots, all her wrinkles were no more.
Her husband had come to take her home and home, she decided, was wherever he was, even in the hereafter.
Chapter Forty-three
THE DAY HAD started grey and although rain had been forecast on the Home Service, it hadn’t happened. In fact a weak sun was trying to force its way through the blanket of grey.
As though she’d ordered it, thought Marcie.
According to the doctors it was as though Rosa had switched herself off of her own accord.
‘She would have lived,’ reported the doctor.
‘Without her sight and with one leg,’ Marcie pointed out. She’d shaken her head. ‘No. She’d decided the time was right.’
The words she’d spoken had taken her unawares. It was almost as though someone – most likely her grandmother – had whispered them in her ear. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m joining Cyril on the other side.’
Before Michael had come marching down the garden path, her grandmother had told her how she’d met Marcie’s grandfather, how they’d drifted, how they’d got back together again.
‘This morning I am young again,’ she’d said to Marcie.
Marcie hadn’t understood what she’d meant, but she did now. Her grandparents had been reunited after the Great War of 1914–18 and they were reunited now.
Marcie hoped they looked exactly as they had done then; in fact she was sure they did.
Christmas lights were glowing from windows and cheeks were pink in the icy air.
‘Sad her dying just before Christmas,’ someone said to her.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’ Her grandmother having a funeral before Christmas was not a sad affair.
She exchanged a secretive smile with her husband. ‘A death just before a birth.’
Everyone presumed she meant Christmas, but Michael knew and Marcie hoped, she just hoped, that the spirit of her grandmother would become the spirit of her daughter – the one growing in her womb.
People offered their condolences to both her and her father. She accepted them gracefully both for him and for herself. The hard man, who made a point of telling people that he rubbed shoulders with some of gangland’s most noted felons, was crying like a baby, his shoulders shaking and tears streaming down his face.
Marcie looked at him clear eyed. I should be crying, she thought to herself, but I’m not.
It was a strange feeling; she would miss her grandmother very much indeed and yet she was not sad. In fact she was glad for her. For some odd reason the words of Sydney Carton, the lawyer in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities kept running through her head; about him going to ‘a far, far greater rest . . . than I have ever known’. She recalled her grandmother reading to her from Dickens when she was a child. Over time she’d forgotten that. How strange that she remembered now.
‘Are you all right?’ Michael’s voice was gentle.
‘I’m fine, Michael.’
He offered her his arm. She hugged it, glad of the warmth she felt through the fabric of his overcoat.
It was so good to have him back, so good to know that he’d never been unfaithful to her.
‘I knew you’d be here. Home is where you run to when times are hard.’
Once he was safely home, she’d mentioned David Morgan to him, told him how he’d propositioned her, how she didn’t turn up and that she’d been surprised at never seeing him again at the prison.
‘Apparently he had an accident. He was on sick leave for a long time.’
If Michael knew any more than that, he didn’t let on and she wouldn’t press the point. They had a future to look forward to and that was all that mattered.
The church was barely a quarter full, but seeing as it held a great many people it didn’t seem so bad.
Marcie felt her eyes being drawn upwards to the roseate window. At the very moment she looked at it a beam of light shone through each of its petal like portions, gleaming onto the coffin like a set of heavenly stairs.
Dust motes caught by sunlight danced like miniature stars falling onto the Christmas tree, dark green and multi-coloured to one side.
Marcie smiled. It was the same vision she’d seen in her dream after the one on the bridge, the man in the white suit and the glow on a young girl’s cheeks. Her grandparents were together and young again.
Following the service the family divided themselves between two black limousines, following the hearse taking Rosa Brooks to her final resting place beside her late husband.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without her,’ wailed Marcie’s father whilst tightly grasping her hand.
In return Marcie patted his hand and murmured soothing words, the sort of words she might use to her children. Strangely enough she felt as though she were the parent and her father the child. Even Babs, dry-eyed beneath a candyfloss hairstyle, looked irritated by the way he was carrying on.
Not to be outdone, Babs gripped her husband’s free hand, but only after giving Archie a clip around the ear.
Archie had asked his dad out loud when the cottage in Endeavour Terrace would be sold and how much would they get for it. And could he have a bike.
Strangely enough, Marcie was not offended by the question; neither was she offended that Babs was after the money. It was a certainty that Mrs Barbara Brooks would be reconciled to her husband at least until she’d spent some of what she considered her fair share of the money.
The sun was warm on Marcie’s back as her grandmother’s coffin was lowered into the grave. As the first clod of earth fell on the coffin, she became aware that she hadn’t heard a word the priest had sa
id. And she still wasn’t snivelling like her stepmother was pretending to do.
Archie, Arnold and her father were snivelling for real, blowing their noses into man-size handkerchiefs.
She sensed Michael eyeing her with a questioning look and realised he wanted some kind of explanation.
Marcie smiled. ‘She doesn’t want me to mourn. She wants me to get on with what has to be done. I have to care about everyone now just as she used to.’
He nodded as though he understood. The truth was of course that he couldn’t understand. The bond that tied Marcie to her grandmother was very special. Marcie knew that now. She knew she’d inherited her gift and that, as far as she was concerned, was far more precious than money.
Epilogue
Marcie’s third child, Rosa, was born very appropriately on a rosy morning.
From the moment her daughter blinked open her knowing blue eyes, Marcie had the feeling that her child had been here before.
Their lives had changed so much in a very short time. Following his arrest for murder, Michael lost his obsession to outdo his half-brother and prove something to his father. As a result of realising he had nothing to prove, he sold the nightclub, though kept his commercial properties.
The house in suburbia was swapped for one on the Isle of Sheppey. Big, square and white, it was surrounded by green fields and close to the sea and a long shingle beach. London was a train journey away. Michael also bought some shops in Sheerness, one of which Marcie turned into her own boutique with a sewing room above. Her dream had come true – if only in a small way, but who knows where it might go. The children could come to work with her when necessary and she had a ready trade. The girls of Sheerness were ready for what she had to offer and her fame was surely but slowly spreading.
They now had the best of both worlds. Whatever came they would cope with together. They would be a proper family.
Both Marcie and her mother realised that there were lots of bridges to build between them. It was never going to be easy to eradicate years of being apart and they were still learning about each other.
Sam Kendal – as Marcie’s mother insisted on being called – was the kind of woman who could compartmentalise her life as Marcie never could. She could not forgo her London life whereas Marcie and Michael had found it easy to do. To both of them their family would always be everything.
Marcie’s father’s life had also changed after Babs had run off with a dog-food salesman. Desdemona had moved in to Rosa’s old cottage with Tony and the kids. It was a little crowded but the atmosphere was good, the kids were being looked after. Tony Brooks would never be the ideal husband but with Desdemona he was better than he had been.
The boys also were sorted out. Archie had the promise of an apprenticeship in a local garage when he finished school. At present he was helping out there weekends and enjoying it. Arnold had taken a shine to the new woman in his father’s life and enjoyed his father being there. Both boys were on a warning not to go back to the street gang they’d once led and neither were likely to, especially once they’d realised one of their number had robbed their own grandmother, Rosa Brooks.
Marcie was in no doubt that things in her family would not always run smoothly.
‘They’re far from perfect,’ she said to Michael at twilight, as they sat and watched the sun go down. ‘But I can’t help loving them.’
He regarded her sidelong, a peculiar and particularly beautiful smile on his face. ‘You love them despite their faults. That’s how people should be loved.’
She realised he was right.
They linked hands, their love unspoken and their gaze fixed on their eldest two children.
Joanna was digging in a flowerbed with her little brother sat on a blanket watching her.
Rosa was asleep in her pram and being pushed around the garden by Garth, who lived in what had been an old stable. Michael had converted it for his use. Garth had festooned the walls with his paintings. To him it was sheer bliss.
Marcie and Michael caught snatches of Garth talking to the baby as he pushed the pram. He talked to her all the time as he walked, even though she was sound asleep. Anyone close by would be surprised at the familiar manner in which he spoke to her, almost as though he had known her before, a lifetime ago.
Some might think him mad, but Marcie didn’t. Garth was looking after Rosa just as Rosa Brooks had once looked after him. He was telling her he hadn’t forgotten her kindness.
Acknowledgements
I can’t quite believe this is my third novel and, I shouldn’t say this myself, but it’s my favourite so far.
Of course, a lot of people have been involved in this book, and it takes a team to make a successful series and I would like to thank the following:
Hannah Telfer and Anna Derkacz from sales.
Alex Young and Di Riley from Marketing, Sarah Bennie, Ed Griffiths and Hannah Robinson from publicity.
My Editor, Gillian Green, who never seems put out with working with someone strange like myself.
A special thanks to my family who continue to always put family first, and support me without ever questioning me.
I could never have finished these books without Jeannie Johnson, so big thanks and hugs to you.
And, finally, my biggest thanks to the special man in my life: Craig Darroch. It’s so nice to be loved and never judged, and to be picked up no matter how many times I fall down.
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Published in 2010 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © 2010 by Mia Dolan
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