• A mirrored Marks & Spencer photo frame, no photo
• A travel mini oil-painting kit, still in plastic wrapper
• Badedas bath oil, possibly opened as there was a sticky mess running down the neck of the bottle, which had stuck to the bed sheet
• A large box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, none eaten, but seal broken
• A copy of Rosemary Conley’s Amazing Inch Loss Plan, price scissored off the back cover
• A CD entitled 20 Top Ten Hits of the 80s, a sticker on it ‘Free With the Daily Express’
• Five cheap silvery bracelets (I hoped they were from Tracey)
• Thirty-five plastic bags. Neatly folded. Placed in another plastic bag.
The fitted wardrobe with the sticky door was crammed full of similar stuff, so too one of the drawers in the big chest that seemed strategically positioned so that whenever you walked into the room, you broke a shin on it. That is, if you could get into the room in the first place: Mum had chosen behind the door as the perfect place to store a human-sized teddy bear with a red polka-dot bow tie. I would have described all this stuff as tat, or crap, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I had purchased some of the items for her (the Penhaligon’s smellies and the photo frame), and it had quickly become clear to me what all this – oh, OK, I’ll say it – crap was. They were all presents given to her that she was saving to stick on a stall at one of her beloved bring-and-buy sales at the church. I found it soul-destroying to think that rather than being cherished, the things I had given her over the years had been treated as money-spinners for the new church roof. But then I caught myself thinking, Well, how much effort had I really put into selecting that photo frame? I’d not even put a picture in it. So why shouldn’t she do what the hell she wanted with it anyway? Not that she would now. So who had won?
And why, even now she was dead, was I viewing this as some sort of competition?
My phone pulsed. Again. I looked.
When are you back?
I should have ignored it, but there was something Pavlovianly canine about my response to anything from the Boss, so I quickly jabbed back:
Day after tomorrow.
I knew this would illicit no reply, but, horror of horrors, I felt it pulse again.
When does my new banquette arrive?
I sighed. Tapped:
Thursday.
Just as I was discarding the phone, yet again another pulse.
‘What?’ I hollered, and checked the screen.
But it was from Gracie, my flatmate.
Hope it’s not too vile up there. Sending love and call if you need to chat. G x
And just in case Sylvia texted again, I switched off my phone. If I wasn’t allowed some peace and quiet today, then I didn’t know when I was.
My mum and I had always had a very combative relationship. If I said something was black, she’d claim it was white. And – as Betty had so kindly pointed out – she wasn’t even my real mum. I know that sounds awful, but since the trip to McDonald’s, Mum had been the first person to honk the Adoption Klaxon if I’d done something that she claimed was abhorrent (got drunk on Diamond White, sported a love bite, criticized Gloria Hunniford). Then she would reel out the stock phrases: ‘Biggest mistake of my life, adopting you’; ‘What was I thinking of, choosing you?’; ‘You’re your mother’s daughter, and she was trouble.’ Even though, actually, she never knew my birth mother. Conversely, however, if I was behaving myself and conforming to her expectations of how a daughter should behave (playing the piano at a school concert, wearing my hair in pigtails at the age of eighteen, looking confused when people swore on the telly), then it was as if she had given birth to me herself. The slightest hint of a compliment paid about me to her by a neighbour or a friend would elicit a snapped response of ‘Yes, she gets that from me, Betty/Geraldine/Dilys.’
She had the power to wind me up more than anyone else on the planet, because of her ability to blow hot and cold so much. And because of her competitive desire to put me down all the time. At any given opportunity. When Tracey had sent the initial letter about her being like a big, sparkly bracelet, Mum had come marching into my bedroom, brandishing the letter aloft.
‘See? See?!’ she’d squealed. She squealed well. ‘Tracey says nice things about me. Tracey loves me!’ Then she’d shot me one of her Exocet glances. ‘Which is more than can be said for you, you ungrateful little . . . mole!’
Then she’d thrown the letter on the bed and stomped back out to the landing again. And once more I’d been left with the sinking feeling that nothing I could do for her would ever be enough. Maybe that’s why I’d downed tools and come to keep an eye on her before the end, just to prove, finally, that I was a good daughter.
The invincibility I’d felt on our day out in London, the potential freedom I savoured on finding out I was adopted had quickly been extinguished, like a hot coal in the snow. Life had soon returned to normal. Actually, it became worse. I’d always felt like I didn’t belong to this life, and now I had valid reason. I increasingly fantasized about the mother who’d given me away. Unsurprisingly she was the nicest woman on the planet, in my head, just a bit misunderstood. I tried a handful of times to question my parents about her, and each time was greeted with a wall, not quite of silence, but of ‘We’re not sure’s and ‘No idea, sorry’s. I didn’t believe a word of it. The day I’d turned twelve, I’d secretly squirrelled through all the boxes in the loft until I’d struck gold and found my birth certificate hidden away between some old copies of the Church Times. I slid it into the pages of a Blue Peter annual and said nothing. I didn’t act on the information, but I committed it to memory, feeling like a spy, then returned it to the Church Times one day when Jean was out at a meeting for a new design for cassocks and Ted was busy in the garden. Each night when I went to bed and said my prayers, I would recite the name and address from the certificate in my head, making sure I would never forget. It wasn’t till I left home to go to university that I ever dared write it down. I biro-ed it in tiny handwriting in the corner of my Filofax. I would never forget who had given birth to me. And just as well I had trained myself to remember it, as I had returned home one day when Mum was quite poorly to find Tracey returning from a trip to the tip, and an empty loft.
‘It was only a load of old boxes and bundles of newspaper, Holly. God!’
If only she’d known.
How could Betty be so cruel? Especially if she called herself a Christian? Was my suffering diminished because I was adopted? Blimey. I remembered her being hysterical with grief when the Queen Mum died. And this was my mother! Clearly she felt more closely linked to the royal family than I was allowed to be to my own. And my own they were. Or the only ones I knew. Not that there were any of them left anymore. I’d come into this world alone; now I was on my own again.
I hadn’t shut the bedroom door. Remarkably, the sinister-looking teddy hadn’t done his usual trick of toppling forward and wiping out a small village of knick-knacks on a nearby shelf. The chit-chat of the do downstairs floated up as general noise. I couldn’t distinguish words, just sounds. Like a symphony of disappointment. Not disappointment that Mum had died, per se. More like . . . well . . . everyone that Mum knew just seemed continually disappointed. Nothing was ever good enough. Life, friends, family, television. The church might have offered some respite, but inevitably they’d always find something to be let down by. I lay there on the bed, feeling as if I was floating on their disappointment, and, I hate to say it, I felt disappointed too.
But what did I have to be disappointed about? Was I disappointed that today hadn’t been a more glamorous, elaborate affair? It was the funeral of a woman in her seventies who lived on a suburban housing estate in Tring. It was never going to be the Royal Variety Performance. Was I disappointed due to a sense of anticlimax? Since she’d died last week I’d put every effort, Sylvie aside, into planning and executing this day. And now it was over and . . . what? But no, it wasn’t that. It
was more the sense that I still didn’t feel bereft, distraught, desolate, as a grieving daughter was meant to. I thought I might have. I hoped I would do. But I was familiar with an overriding feeling that was possibly something I’d learned as a baby. You’re on your own, Holly, and somehow you have to get through this. If I’d been posher, it might have been a case of Stiff upper lip! It wasn’t, though; it was more a case of sink or swim. And if you get too upset, you might sink.
Why had Betty’s words stung so much? I wondered. Possibly because there was a huge grain of truth in them. Jean and Ted had not been my birth parents. We’d spent a lifetime trying to convince each other we were a proper family, but the effort had been mostly futile. Unlike the majority of adopted children, I didn’t feel I was of them. Don’t get me wrong – I loved them both very much, and cared for them a great deal. I was certainly grieving in my own quiet way now they had both gone. But I had viewed both Jean/Mum and Ted/Dad as two elderly people I dropped in on from time to time to check they’d not fallen and broken a hip. I had cried a lot since Mum had died, but I was unsure whether I was crying because of missing her or for the missed opportunities, that sense that we’d never achieved the normality I assumed other families felt.
I’d certainly not cried when I went to see her at the chapel of rest. She’d looked funny in her coffin. Not funny like Joan Rivers, though admittedly she does look very funny, but funny like it wasn’t her.
‘It doesn’t look like her,’ I’d said to the funeral director, Amelia.
Her eyes had narrowed (Amelia’s, not Mum’s) and she’d insisted, ‘No, it’s definitely her. Everyone else in the chapel of rest at the moment’s a man.’
I could tell it was her, of course. It’s just that her nose looked bigger. I’d never noticed her having a particularly big nose before. And now here she was, looking like Concorde had crashed on a beach.
‘Her body looks like it’s on back to front,’ I’d added, perturbed.
‘It’s definitely not.’ Amelia had started to sound irritated.
I’d never noticed how big her tummy was before. She looked pregnant.
‘She looks peaceful, doesn’t she?’ sighed Amelia, trying to make our conversation veer towards the positive.
‘Yes. I took her to the Isle of Wight last month. She really enjoyed it.’
And we’d both stared at Mum, unsure what else to say.
I’d not been with her when she died. This had upset me slightly at the time, but then of course I was an only child, her closest relative, so I had done my fair share of sitting at her bedside at the hospital while she drifted in and out of consciousness. I’d returned to her house that night to sleep. A nurse phoned me at twenty past midnight to tell me what had happened. She was very sweet, although she sounded about fifteen. She had gone to check on Mum, had sensed something was afoot and decided to stay with her. She held her hand as she took her last breath. I didn’t feel jealous that this stranger had shared something so intimate as my mother’s final seconds. I was just pleased that she’d not been alone as she’d left.
I had said my goodbyes a few days before, when Mum was still lucid and responding. I had thanked her for being a wonderful mum, I had told her I loved her very much, and I’d thanked her for adopting me. I was holding her hand as I’d said it and I felt the faintest of squeezes in reply. I was glad I’d said it, even though it was only half meant. I hoped it would make it easier for her to let go. I hoped it was something lovely for her to hear, possibly as the final thing she ever heard. And in a way I was glad she’d adopted me. And even though our relationship had been, for the most part, fractious, I did love her – to quote Prince Charles – whatever ‘love’ means. The bottom line was, I didn’t know anything else.
Of course, I had loved Jude, in my own sweet way. He was funny and kind and handsome – even if he had recently had a Mohican. Well, he called it a Mohican; I called it a midlife crisis – and talented. I loved watching him play the violin in his orchestra. They played in vast halls on the South Bank and maybe, I thought, that’s where I preferred him. At arm’s length. Away from me. On the stage. For me to observe but not connect with.
He would be upset. His music would be therapeutic, but he would be upset.
Was I upset? Strangely, about Jude, I couldn’t tell.
To cheer myself up, I felt in the pocket of my trousers (there’d been a few raised eyebrows when I’d turned up at the church in a trouser suit today. Outrageous behaviour, clearly something I’d picked up in London!) and pulled from it a crumpled piece of lined paper. I smoothed it down, the action soothing me, like a crack addict preparing her apparatus. I knew this paper would be my balm, and after consulting it, I’d be able to head downstairs, smile painted on my face, invigorated. I looked at the words scrawled on it in my own biro-ed tiny hand.
Francesca Boyle, 32B Gambier Terrace, Liverpool 1
It was thrilling to think that one day soon those words were, hopefully, going to change my life.
TWO
My boss’s penthouse flat overlooked Tower Bridge. In that flat there was a coffee table. On that coffee table lay a pristine copy of her autobiography, Let Me Sing Cake. She knew full well that if you opened the book and consulted the titles page inside you would see a subtitle:
Sylvie di Marco – Icon. Diva. Enigma.
But unbeknown to her, the woman who had my job before me had crossed out the last word and added another in biro so it read:
Sylvie di Marco – Icon. Diva. Enigma. TWAT.
The fact that it had lain undiscovered in the five years that I had worked for her tickled me muchly.
After leaving school, I studied music at Durham University. I had become rather good at both the cello and the piano; in fact I subsidized my meagre student loan by playing the piano in a wine bar three nights a week. On graduating, I started playing the cello in the orchestra for a string of West End shows. But after a few years of doing that, I grew bored. Much as I loved my musical theatre (my adoration for Miss Salonga had never really died), I changed career and started to work in the offices of one of the theatre producers who had previously employed me as a cellist. I soon learned I enjoyed office work much more than sitting at the back of an orchestra pit. It also meant I had more time for a social life, as I wasn’t spending most evenings playing the bass line accompaniment to ‘Defying Gravity’ or suchlike. After a few years of that the producer – I’ll call him Titch, for that was his name – put on a production of a jukebox musical that was clearly trying to cash in on the success of Mamma Mia! It used the back catalogue of the Smiths and was called Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, which actually is what the audience was, mostly. Even the most hardened of Smiths aficionados were confused by the story of a boy called William and his journey through space to find the meaning of life and save his planet. All done to a soundtrack of guitar-heavy indie music.
The female lead in this ill-fated production – it ran for two months and got excruciating reviews – was Sylvie di Marco. She came off the worst in the notices, as the critics were confused as to why someone as hitherto successful as her would choose to be in something so shoddily put together. She played William’s sister, Sheila, in the show. Originally Sheila had been William’s mother, but she claimed she was far too young to be convincing and so asked for the part to be rewritten as his sister. The producers obliged and a star was torn. The one achievement the musical held was it made it into the Guinness World Records for being the show that featured the highest number of bows in a performance, as during the song ‘Sheila, Take a Bow’, Sylvie had to bow more than a hundred times. After the reviews came out, Sylvie claimed the bowing had put her back out, her understudy went on, and she never returned. It was during this period of recuperation that I was sometimes sent to her apartment on behalf of Titch with a basket of fruit, ostensibly to spy on her, but feigning support and concern. And it was during one of those visits that her PA had announced she’d had enough and was leaving and Sylvie, who appeared
to have taken a shine to me, offered me the job on the spot. Fool that I was, and my interest piqued by the alleged increase in wages, and the photograph in her bathroom of her with Lea Salonga, I took it.
It was on the Smiths show that I first met Jude as well; he was playing in the orchestra. The experience stung him and he vowed never to ‘play West End’ again. He ran back to the safe confines of chamber music and symphonies, working for one of the better-known London orchestras. He actually wooed me by playing some Rimsky-Korsakov underneath my flat window one night. It was a touching moment. Till the woman in the flat above me threw a bucket of water down on him, screaming, ‘Shut the fuck up – I’m trying to sleep.’ The force of the water ripped the fiddle from his hands, causing it to smash on the pavement. It cost Jude hundreds of pounds to put right. I had to say yes to dating him then: something positive had to come out of the incident.
Two days after Mum’s funeral I slipped my key in Sylvie’s door at eight thirty on the dot and let myself into her apartment. I heard the soft pitter-patter of paws on marble and then saw her minuscule chihuahua, Michael, trotting towards me in a lime-green woollen cardigan, whimpering. I knew why he was whimpering – he needed a wee – so I unhooked his lead from the antlers of a deer’s head on the wall and took him out straight away. As soon as we got out of the art deco building, he scampered to a nearby bush and cocked his leg. He seemed to stay there for ten minutes, emitting his own River Thames beneath him. Poor thing had been desperate. His business done, I scooped him up in my arms and carried him back inside. In the lift I tickled his bald tummy and he made pathetic baby licks to my hand as I did so. Don’t get me wrong, I was a dog lover; I just never really ‘got’ chihuahuas. And the name Michael never did sit easy with me. Sylvie had named him after her good pal Michael Ball, claiming they both ‘didn’t look much but had mahoosive cajones. Ha!’
The Girl Who Just Appeared Page 3