But I wouldn’t run away from her. She had the tickets in her handbag.
And. In her defence. She had given me my first McDonald’s.
And. She was taking me to see Miss Saigon, and it wasn’t even my birthday.
In the packed foyer of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, I made a beeline for the merchandise stall. Mummy hurried to keep up with me. Possibly relieved I was no longer crying, she linked my arm, something she never did, and said quietly, ‘Ooh, look at all this, Holly. Isn’t it lovely?’
I nodded, and replied quietly, ‘I’d like the cast recording.’
This was so unlike me. I would usually have had to beg and cajole and plead, not just announce, ‘I would like . . .’
But it worked. Mummy nodded.
‘And the souvenir programme.’
Again she nodded.
‘And the T-shirt.’
Again success. I didn’t ask for anything else as I didn’t want to push it.
The woman working on the stall eyed me awkwardly. She looked to Mummy. ‘You do know this show is really recommended for sixteen-year-olds and over?’
Mummy paled.
I jumped in. ‘I am sixteen!’ I insisted. ‘I’m a primordial dwarf!’
I’m not sure the woman knew what that meant.
Mummy was a stickler for rules. I would never have been allowed to go and see a ‘fifteen’ film, but she knew she was in no position to argue today. This was meant to be the best day of my life. In many ways it still was. But she wasn’t to know that. She thought she had ruined my life, not improved it. And so she kept smiling at the usherettes, who eyed me with equal suspicion, and muttering, ‘I know she doesn’t look sixteen, but she is!’
Eventually we took our seats. The show was amazing and incredible and beautiful, and Lea Salonga was everything I wanted her to be and more. I didn’t like the woman in the row in front of us who turned round and told me to stop singing along to the songs. And Mum told me (again) to stop showing off when I replied insolently, ‘I’m adopted!’
But unfortunately we only stayed for the first half. Mummy made us leave in the interval because there were too many women in it in bikinis.
‘Bikinis,’ she repeated on the train home, ‘and high heels.’
I looked out of the window. So what?
‘They were prostitutes, Holly.’
I tutted. But then put on my innocent face. ‘What’s a “prostitute”, Mummy?’
She flustered. I knew full well what a prostitute was: Collette O’Hara who sat on my table for mixed-ability English had told me. ‘It’s someone who’s paid to sleep with someone else.’
‘Oh. Sounds a bit boring,’ I’d replied.
And again I looked out of the window.
‘Mary Magdalene was a prostitute,’ she added in hushed tones. As if this was the worst thing in the world.
I didn’t care. She had ruined my day, my life by making me miss the second act of the show. I was feeling mutinous.
‘What, Jesus’s girlfriend?’
‘She was not his girlfriend! Jesus didn’t have a girlfriend!’
‘Was he gay like Uncle Peter?’
‘Holly, stop this.’ And then she added, ‘Uncle Peter’s not gay. He and Colin are just judo partners.’
She looked out of the window, alarmed. I thought she might add, quietly, ‘I think.’
We continued the journey home in silence. At Tring Station, she phoned Aunty Beryl from a payphone to ask her to come and pick us up, as we were earlier than planned and Dad was playing golf all day. Aunty Beryl arrived in her Golf Polo. Cousin Tracey was sat in the back.
As I climbed in next to her, I saw Aunty Beryl mouthing to Mummy, ‘Have you told her?’
And Mummy nodding.
I glared at Tracey. Who smiled back malevolently. She knew. She did. She knew.
And then Mummy, putting her seat belt on in the passenger seat, turned round and smiled at Tracey.
‘Hello, Tracey! My little ginger minge! How are you?’
Aunty Beryl didn’t speak to Mummy for two weeks.
ONE
2013
From the Hemel Gazette:
ELSPETH JEAN SMITH (JEAN) Passed away peacefully and with dignity on 26 April 2013, aged 73 years. Dearly loved mum of Holly, and treasured wife of the late Ted. She will be sorely missed by all who knew her. A service will be held at St Dunstan’s Church, Tring, on Monday 6 May at 11.30 a.m., followed by cremation at Chilterns Crematorium. Refreshments afterwards at the family home. Donations if desired to the Alzheimer’s Society.
I stared out of the window, at the path, a mirror in rain, and pictured him standing there, as he was last night. He’d come in his car, straight after his concert. He was still wearing his tux and dicky bow, though it was untied, and the neck of his shirt was undone. In his hand were twenty midnight-red roses.
‘Marry me, Holly.’
As the youth of today said, WTF?!
‘Jude, the timing.’
His face crumpled, an unmade bed.
‘What, my rhythm?’ And he said it again, slightly more staccato: ‘Marry . . . me . . . Ho . . . lly?’
I rolled my eyes. Typical classical violinist.
‘No, Jude. It’s my mum’s funeral tomorrow. I wasn’t expecting you till the morning.’
Which explained why I was stood on the drive in my nightie. Well, I say nightie – it was an oversized Care Bears T-shirt I’d found at Camden Market. Jude didn’t like me wearing it in bed because he said it made him feel like a sex offender.
‘But I thought this might cheer you up.’
He was a pathetic unmade bed now, yellow beneath the street light that used to keep Mum awake as her curtains were so thin.
‘Jude, this isn’t working.’
Now he was a pathetic unmade yellow waterbed that was going to spring a leak. I was sure he was about to start crying.
‘I can wait,’ he said, a white dove of a sentence, offering peace, pleading, Please don’t humiliate me, Holly. Not when I’ve driven all this way to see you.
But I was resolute.
‘I don’t want to wait, Jude. It’s over.’
His eyes had widened then, and that’s when I saw he wasn’t going to cry, but get very, very angry. Indignant that I’d dared turn him down. Hacked off that he’d driven all this way to be . . . rejected?
I was snapped out of the memory by Aunty Beryl.
‘What’s out there that’s so interesting?’ she enquired, peering through the net curtains.
‘Nothing. Just thinking.’
She straightened out the nets and with a strain said, ‘I’m very disappointed Jude couldn’t come today.’
‘He could. I just didn’t want him to. We split up.’
She looked genuinely shocked. I didn’t see why. Jude and I had only been together for four years. Compared to her and Uncle Norman, that was nothing. Jean and Ted had been together since Moses had a skateboard. Compared to that, me and Jude were the blink of an eye. I smiled to show I didn’t care and headed off to the kitchen to get myself a drink.
The women from church were saying Mum had died of a broken heart. Shirley who arranged the flowers reckoned she’d heard someone on the radio claiming this was an actual thing now. Something about the heart becoming so enlarged when grieving a spouse that it inflated until it exploded. Betty who polished the brass, as well as working on reception at the surgery and therefore knowing a thing or two about All Things Medical, went one better and said what Mum had actually been suffering from was ‘takotsubo cardiomyopathy’.
No one liked the sound of that. It smacked of the indisputably foreign. Amid murmurs of disapproval, Dilys from the choir claimed to have ordered it at the Chinese once; it had given her diarrhoea.
Oh, don’t get me wrong – she didn’t actually say the word. This being the women from church congregating by the breakfast bar, she just grimaced, pointed to her stomach and shuddered. And to be fair, give her her due, we were at my moth
er’s wake. People were eating. There were vol-au-vents present.
Never one to be outdone, Betty counterattacked that takotsubo cardiomyopathy wasn’t a takeaway meal but a medical condition whereby a traumatic incident triggers the brain to distribute chemicals around the body that weaken the heart. She bandied the words about like nobody’s business, thrilled to know something no one else did. And all with a mouthful of scampi.
I had always found Betty and her coterie deeply irritating, so tried to squeeze my way out of the kitchen and offer a tray of rather tired-looking cheese sandwiches to the other flock of people in the living room. I could still hear her chirruping away, though, as much as I tried to block her out.
‘. . . Yes, she had takotsubo cardiomyopathy. I mean, the doctors didn’t actually say that, Pauline, but how many times have we said it? I know more about the human body than the rest of those so-called professionals put together.’
And then more murmurs, this time of approval. That was very much how they operated, those women, liking to think that they had superior knowledge to everyone else on the planet. That’s what came of going to church, I supposed. In the modern world, with decreasing congregation numbers and their beliefs more and more out of sync with current thinking, they didn’t reflect and adapt; they clung to their beliefs. It gave them an unerring sense of their own rightness, and it drained by osmosis into all their other thinking too. They were always right. The rest of the world was wrong, and fools into the bargain.
I felt a tug at my arm. Geraldine from over the road.
‘Are you OK, Holly?’
‘I’m fine, thanks, Geraldine,’ I lied, trying to mask my irritation with the breakfast-bar gossip. ‘Cheese sandwich?’
‘Ooh, lovely.’ She took one. ‘No Jude?’
‘No, we split up.’ I smiled. ‘All good, though.’
Mum hadn’t died of a broken heart. The death certificate proclaimed septicaemia, which was brought on by a chest infection she was too weak to fight. So any inferences that she’d gone because she couldn’t live without Dad, who’d died a year previously, were medically inaccurate, no matter what the women wanted to believe.
‘Is it true those flowers are from Sylvie di Marco?’ Geraldine purred, tilting her head towards an ostentatious display of pink lilies I’d plonked in front of the fireplace.
I nodded. Geraldine’s eyes instantaneously filled with tears.
‘Isn’t she kind? A global superstar and she even took the time to send flowers.’
‘She’s not really a global superstar, Geraldine,’ I pointed out, irked that my boss, Miss di Marco, hadn’t actually sent them but told me to spend a hundred pounds of her money on flowers for the house. It’s actually pretty difficult to spend that much money on one bouquet. ‘I mean, she’s hardly Beyoncé.’
Geraldine didn’t care. She shook her head. ‘I saw her in The Sound of Music in Coventry years ago. No one can pull off a dirndl like Sylvie.’
As if on cue, I felt my phone pulsing in my pocket. Why? Why did I keep it on me today of all days? Wasn’t it clear my dragon of a boss would be demanding some kind of attention . . . even when I was meant to be burying my mother? I ignored it, and Geraldine, though that wasn’t hard, as she’d turned her back on me and was rhapsodizing about the bouquet.
I caught the words ‘Sylvie di Marco, thank you very much’ and ‘never seen anything quite like it’.
I looked back to the kitchen, divided from the living room by a corrugated-plastic window, an original feature from when the house was built in the 1960s, and saw the shadows of the women from church, bent over their plates of vol-au-vents, heads ducked. With the light coming through behind them from the kitchen window, their silhouettes took on the shape of some scary shadow-puppet play. They should have been accompanied by sinister music. Something on the xylophone – I had always found that an unnerving sound – or that piece of music they used to play every time Alfred Hitchcock came on television with one of his chillers, or . . . No! I’ve got it! Something on the organ. Something dark and foreboding on the church organ.
Mum had continued to be the local organist over the years, till her dementia had got the better of her. And that had only really been in the last year. It was like when Dad had been here, he’d kept it at bay, made sure she was coping, no doubt doing everything for her when the rest of the world wasn’t looking, but once he’d gone, she fell to pieces. It first became obvious at church when she played the opening hymn at one of the services. The vicar usually chose a shortish hymn that would cover his and the choir’s procession from the back of the church to the choir stalls, one or two verses more and that was your lot. I believe the hymn in question was ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’. When they got to the end and everyone put down their hymnbooks to consult their orders of service, Mum continued to play. And play. And play. And play. She just wouldn’t stop, not realizing they’d finished. In the end the vicar had to walk over, shout at her and jab the on/off switch on the organ. Apparently Mum cried. After that the women at the church finally agreed with what I’d been saying for months: that Mum shouldn’t really be doing so much.
On the mantelpiece, above the look-at-me! flowers, was a framed photograph. Mum’s pride and joy. It showed her and the choir in their red robes standing on the steps of St Albans Cathedral when they had taken part in an episode of Songs of Praise. It was taken about ten years previously. I had no idea whether they still even made Songs of Praise. Mum looked so happy, so proud. Like this was the pinnacle of her life. It was the sort of smile usually adopted by gold-medal-winning Olympians. It was an infectious smile. I found myself mirroring it. Then I heard someone in the kitchen say, ‘She seems to be taking it quite well, doesn’t she? Can’t be easy losing both parents in the space of a year.’
Were they looking at me, smiling at a photo of my mum? Is that what was deemed to be ‘taking it well’?
‘I know,’ someone replied, ‘but then she wasn’t their own flesh and blood.’
That was like a shard of glass to my wrist.
I recognized the voice as Betty’s, the know-all. I was tempted to return to the kitchen, pick up the unappealing Black Forest gateau she had brought as an offering for dessert – ‘Your mum loved my BFGs!’ she’d announced when she’d arrived – and shove her face in it. Actually, I should’ve dunked her in it for referring to it as a ‘BFG’, never mind getting so personal. It would have been such a rewarding thing to do. It would have marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. Mum was dead. Long live me! I wondered if by doing it, I would have received a round of applause. Mum worshipped the ground Betty walked on, but I had long harboured the suspicion that everyone else was slightly scared of her. I would have been standing up to the bully in the playground, and she would never have wielded her power again. But then I remembered this day was not about me, it was about Mum, and the last thing she would have wanted was a dessert-based contretemps, so I refrained.
Aunty Beryl was advancing towards me, dodging her way between doddery neighbours and people whose faces I recognized but whose names escaped me. Her hair was sandier now; the red had faded and a lot of grey had taken its place, like she’d been left out in the midday sun too many times on a hot Greek island. And since her daughter had opened her own tanning salon in St Albans, her skin did too.
‘Holly, Holly, meant to say – did you get Tracey’s card?’
‘Er . . . yes, I think so. Yes, I did.’ How could I forget it? It had been all about her.
Dear Hollie
She never spelled my name right. Mind you, I always spelled hers ‘Tracie’ to wind her up, so maybe she was just reciprocating.
I was so sorry to hear about Aunty Bracelet’s passing.
I really did detest the way she called Mum ‘Bracelet’.
Bless her, she was a love, wasn’t she? But at least none of us has to keep traipsing over to see her now. I know it was a schlep for you coming from London, which is probably why you didn’t do it as m
uch as me and Mum.
I’m not sure you’ve ever forgiven me for clearing the loft out for her that time, though I’m sure you’ll agree now that it’s one less job for you to do, so maybe one day you’ll thank me for it.
At which point I’d only skim-read the rest of the card. Something about not being able to come to the funeral because of wanting to be the next Hilary Devey. And something about childcare. Though more likely, the reason she couldn’t come was because she was writing to random relatives, likening them to stuff she’d seen in the window at Ratner’s. Aunty Beryl was wittering on about the demands of running your own tanning salon when Geraldine flew in as my fairy godmother and interrupted with her excitement about the flowers under the mantelpiece. As Beryl turned to view them, I slunk away and headed upstairs. As I climbed said stairs, practically gluing my back to the wall as there was so little space since the stairlift had been installed, I felt my phone pulse again. On the landing, I took it out. Two texts from Sylvie.
The first:
I can’t find my reading glasses.
And the second:
Found.
I returned the phone to my pocket and hurled myself at the spare-bedroom door to open it.
The single bed I now lay on had once been mine. Since I’d left home, it had become a veritable Generation Game’s conveyor belt full of bric-a-brac. You see, when Mum had been admitted to hospital and I’d found myself coming to the house more often to clean or rifle through drawers looking for life insurance policies, et cetera, I discovered the following hidden under the duvet on the bed in the spare room:
• A Penhaligon’s bath and body kit, fragrance: Elizabethan Rose
• A manicure kit in a burgundy leather pochette
• Square compact mirror, possibly from a Christmas cracker
• A DVD of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, still in plastic wrapper
The Girl Who Just Appeared Page 2