Lucy looked at it. It had yesterday’s date and was the payment for her upgrade to business class, one thousand one hundred dollars. She opened her mouth to call Julia back and then closed it. What would she say? She could not afford to pay her back, anyway. So she accepted the love and walked through customs.
• • •
AUNT EVA BURST out of the doorway when Lucy pulled up in the hire car as if she had been planning it, lurking in the hallway until she heard the rumble of an unfamiliar engine.
“You haven’t brought enough clothes” was the first thing she said, looking at Lucy’s carry-on bag. “I’ve rung round the funeral people and they can’t do anything for at least a week. I put a couple of slots on hold, but I didn’t put a deposit down until you were here.”
Lucy stood in front of her, wondering if they were meant to hug, but Aunt Eva didn’t move. It was a relief.
“There’s so much to do,” Eva continued, as if they were talking about going on holiday or redecorating a bathroom. “Do you need a shower?”
“No. I’ll dump my bag upstairs; you put the kettle on and I’ll hit the phones.”
“Good girl.” Eva sighed. “I can give you the morning, but I have to get back to the library this afternoon.” Eva had worked since she was seventeen and refused to countenance retirement, believing it a sin not to be meaningfully employed during daylight hours.
“I knew I could rely on you,” she continued, and Lucy disappeared up the stairs two steps at a time so she didn’t give in to the temptation to say, Yes, you see, I am available in a family emergency. Today at least there was no possibility of Eva asking her what exactly she did all day.
She walked straight into her old room and threw the bag on the bed. Her beloved duvet cover was on it, the one she had chosen at age seventeen, a bright floral pattern to match the wallpaper that she had once considered the height of sophistication, but over the years the light streaming in through the window had faded and dulled it so now it looked permanently dusty. On the top bookshelves were rows of Pullein-Thompson horse novels with pictures of ponies emblazoned on the front, then enormous paperbacks like Gone with the Wind and The Forsyte Saga, their spines cracked, the titles illegible, leading down to textbooks, literary theory, and the contents of various reading lists never returned to different libraries, from the local village to Newnham College, Cambridge.
It was the history of her education in four shelves six feet by four. On the wall still hung a poster-sized crayon drawing of her done by an art student as they sat on the grassy bank beside the River Cam. The young woman had come over and asked her if she could draw her, just for practice, and Lucy, who was nineteen, said yes, feeling it was the sort of thing that should happen to a person when they are young and newly up at university.
Afterward the woman had given her the drawing and Lucy had treasured it because it was the first time anyone had told her she was pretty and she actually believed it. The sunlight had faded this, too; the paper was brownish cream and curled, although Lucy could still make out the green in her eyes, and the blondish tint in her hair she had in those days, thanks to the copious use of lemon juice and Sun-In bleaching spray.
“LUCY!” called Eva, her voice accompanied by a series of loud thumps. Was it possible, thought Lucy, that Eva was hitting the ceiling with a broom handle in order to chivvy her along? Although Aunt Eva and Uncle Malcolm had been married for nearly forty years, they had never had children, and she tended to treat her niece and nephew in ways she had seen in television programs in the seventies. This little exchange was just like something out of a sitcom, but Lucy respected her aunt for it. You always knew where you were with Eva, which is not something she could ever say about Mother or Father.
“Coming . . .” Lucy called down the stairs as she sent Richard a quick text.
Then she picked up a plastic pen in the shape of an elephant’s trunk, which she had been given during her summer job in the safari park in 1990, grabbed an old diary she had resolved to write in the same year (she had found within one month that the entries comprised of what she had eaten for lunch and there were no great insights she wished to record for posterity), and set about organizing her mother’s funeral. This took three hours (to her relief, the funeral director told her he could retrieve and dress the corpse) and included a trip to the local sandwich shop to discuss catering options: egg-and-cress sandwiches, sausage rolls, iced buns, and tea and coffee, though as Lucy had no idea how many people would show up, she said she would confirm numbers nearer the end of the week. The only moment of discord between Lucy and Eva came when Eva tried to insist there be a bar, wine and spirits, and Lucy refused.
At this moment, Lucy’s telephone rang and a long international number came across the display.
“It’s George,” she said, and Eva stopped mid-sentence.
“I just think people will expect a gin and ton—”
“Eva thinks we need to give people a drink. An alcoholic drink, George. At the afters.”
“I’m doing fine, Lucy. How are you? Tell Eva that if people want a drink they can fucking well come back to the house and start looking for the bottles mother hid round the place and then forgot about. Last time we were over, Cordelia found three vodkas in the kids’ toy box.”
Lucy put her hand over the phone receiver and mouthed, “George really doesn’t think that’s a good idea.” Eva nodded sulkily, which Lucy ignored.
“What day is it booked for?” barked George, and when Lucy told him a week from tomorrow, he announced he would arrive the day before.
Lucy bristled. “Oh, so you’re happy for me to make all the arrangements?”
“No. You can e-mail everything to me and I’ll”—he stopped himself from using the word “approve”—“check them.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. At least this aspect of the day was predictable.
“Service is at Saint Luke’s, new priest, he sounds very nice, met Mum a couple of times at least. There’s no room for a full burial in the graveyard there, so how d’you feel about cremation and we’ll put a small plaque on the outside of the church wall?”
There was a pause, a crackling on the phone line. Lucy realized that George was talking to Cordelia before he agreed, which he did.
“We can use the church hall afterward, and I’ve booked the Tasty Bite to do finger food.”
“No flowers,” George said; Lucy heard Cordelia saying something now, “It’s awful to have to deal with loads of wilting flowers, so tell everyone to make a donation to . . .”
“Alcoholics Anonymous?” suggested Lucy, and Eva winced.
“No, that’ll upset Eva,” said George correctly. “That center where Mum played bridge sometimes. They were very kind to her there.”
Lucy fell silent. She knew nothing about this center or the kindness of the strangers there.
“For the coffin, get a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. They were her favorites. And I’m working on the service. I’ll send you through some suggestions for hymns and readings. You can add anything you like. Do the bidding prayers or something.”
Lucy felt ashamed. She had not even thought about the funeral service and had no clue about what should be in it. She had been so self-righteous about her efforts. And she couldn’t bear to admit to George she had forgotten what a bidding prayer was.
“Let’s try and find a decent organist. I know Mum would love to have ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,’ but we can’t do it if the organist isn’t good.”
“What’s that?”
“You know. Bach.” There was another pause, so he started to sing. “Dum, dah, dum, dah, dum, de dah, de dum, dum de, dum dah.” Now exasperated. “It’s at the beginning of the Beach Boys song ‘Lady Lynda.’”
“Oh, yes.” Lucy began to sing along. “I love that song. Did you know Al Jardine cowrote that?”
“I did, Lucy. I remember an e
ntire summer when all you listened to was the Beach Boys. When you weren’t reading the Brontës, that is. Mind you, now I know that Dennis Wilson was the unrecognized genius of the band.”
“Bollocks!”
“Lucy!” said Eva.
“You don’t know everything! You should listen to Pacific Ocean Blue!” shouted George, his voice cracking. Lucy imagined Cordelia reaching her right hand forward to stroke his cheek.
“I’ve got to go. Talk later.” And he hung up, the choke still in his voice.
Lucy looked at Eva and their eyes welled up.
“George is upset,” she said.
Eva looked at her.
“Of course George is upset. It’s terrible for him. Your mother and George . . . they really loved each other.”
She wiped her eyes. “Where the hell is your father?”
Lucy said she would ring Paula and find out. Eva snorted.
“Paula won’t let him out of her sight since the stroke.”
“What?” said Lucy. “When did he have a stroke?”
Eva calmly told her there had been a small stroke four months ago, but no one had wanted to worry anyone. Lucy looked at her.
“We all thought you’d been through enough.” Unusually for Eva, she faltered under Lucy’s accusing glare. “We worried you weren’t coping. With what happened to Richard and his job. Losing your home, the life you had . . . and everything.”
Lucy thought about what she had said to Julia on the plane about her family; she had not been truthful enough about the astonishing dysfunction of it all. The last time she had spoken to her mother they had argued. Her mother had not wanted her grandsons to live in the apartment in New York because of global warming.
“Don’t you understand?” she had kept saying (it was after lunch, her time). “Manhattan will be underwater in fifteen years.”
• • •
IN HER ROOM, Lucy sits on her dusty bed and looks out the window at the rows of comfortable, identical houses lining the road. Some have toddler furniture in the driveway, others small cars with Learner plates, others midlife-crisis motorbikes, then for-sale signs for the move to the retirement home. Whole lives are lived in these front gardens, but Lucy wants no part of it all. She remembers the eighteen years plotting her escape. What had she yearned for when she stared out of that window? Why hadn’t she achieved it?
She glances at the books on the shelf, the brown cardboard box full of her old records; she picks up George Benson, “The Greatest Love of All.” Thinks how the day her father took his racing-green Jaguar to a happier life near Glyndebourne she tried to cheer up her mother by playing it to her and reading out the words.
She wonders how she became the sort of woman they think she is. She knows they all have an idea of her role in the drama of this family, so should she play it, or will she throw in some new lines? What has she ever done to any of them, apart from be herself? Is that why her mother didn’t love her?
Then it dawns on her that she feels exactly the same as she did all those years ago. And this is the worst feeling of all, for surely as your fortieth birthday approaches, looming inexorably over the horizon and darkening your sky, you are meant to have some answers.
There is a perfunctory rap on the door, and Aunt Eva, coat buttoned up, walks in to find Lucy curled up in the duvet, sobbing.
“It must be the jet lag,” Aunt Eva says.
• • •
THE MOMENT Father arrived he made straight for his old chair, an orangey-brown Parker Knoll positioned in front of the television in the living room. He looked a lot older than Lucy remembered and was definitely a little shaky on his pins, but when he sank into the chair with a little moan of contentment, Lucy’s pang of pity quickly turned to resentment. She had often thought that bloody chair was the only thing he really regretted leaving all those years ago. She decided that she was not going to mention the stroke, either.
She had got it together enough to walk to the corner shop to buy some bourbon biscuits, his favorite, and he was disproportionately grateful for her thoughtfulness. There was no evidence of any food in the house at all, apart from a box of crackers and two tins of tomato soup past their sell-by date. Lucy knew that whatever meals her mother had consumed in the past few years had been provided by Aunt Eva. Paula confirmed this as they stared into the empty fridge together, saying, “At the end she looked like a Belsen victim,” which annoyed Lucy intensely; The Belsen victims had no choice, she wanted to scream, but she knew that Paula always said inappropriate things like this (her lawn was like “the Somme”; sunburn was like “a trip to Bhopal”), so Lucy nodded with a suitably noncommittal expression, as she couldn’t think of any other, brought her father a cup of tea with a little milk and two sugars, and sat beside him on a low stool to make a few minutes of small talk about his grandsons.
“Of course, they won’t get to play much sport, will they?” he said. “They don’t have playing fields there, in New York City, do they?”
She and George had been sent to the local Catholic junior school, where three hundred kids ran round a tarmac area that doubled as the car park. It wasn’t exactly Eton. Lucy looked away; today was going to be an exercise in self-control. She was glad when Paula emerged from the kitchen in her mother’s apron and yellow rubber gloves.
“We’re talking about New York, love,” said her father.
“Ooh, yes. Such an exciting place.”
“Have you been there, Paula?” asked Lucy, surprised. Paula nodded.
“Yes, I went on a girls’ weekend for my forty-fifth—remember, Lawrence?”
“She had to buy two new suitcases to bring all the stuff home, I remember that,” he muttered grumpily, but she trotted over and kissed the top of his head.
“We went to the outlet malls. It was incredible. I bought a Max Mara coat and suit I still wear.”
“She’s still the same size, Lucy. Never gained a pound. Gorgeous as ever.”
And he patted Paula on her bottom. She giggled flirtatiously, and Lucy remembered that Paula, in her skintight Levi’s and red leather blouson jacket, had been an object of much desire among her brothers’ classmates.
“How’s Louis doing?”
“Much better. He’s got over his ups and downs.” (Louis had been a full-fledged heroin addict for ten years, but the month in an open prison after he was caught dealing seemed to have sorted him out.) “And he’s just had a lovely little boy with that new girlfriend of his. They’ve become Quakers.”
“Oh.” Lucy was genuinely interested in this. She often toyed with the idea of becoming a Quaker. “Have you been to a meeting, Paula?”
“Yes, I went last month to look after the baby. Very interesting. I sort of agree with all the pacifist stuff after Iraq and all that. But I couldn’t do it myself. You can’t have jewelry.”
Her father burst out laughing at this. It took a moment before Lucy realized his laughter was indulgent, a sort of “ooh, you are awful” laugh. Paula and her father were soul mates, it was true. No wonder her mother had turned to the bottle.
“D’you want more tea?” Paula said, and her father grunted “yes.” He pointed at the row of videotapes of George playing soccer on a shelf by the telly and asked Lucy to put one on. She walked over. He had recorded them religiously every Saturday of George’s thirteenth year.
“Any game in particular?” she asked.
“No.”
She selected the under-fourteen’s Buckinghamshire five-a-side and stuck it in the antiquated VCR. She handed her father the remote, and he reclined his chair a little, raising the footstool so he could watch in the greatest comfort. He switched up the volume so he could hear the running commentary he had done himself in the style of John Motson while he was filming.
When Lucy went into the kitchen, Paula was sobbing.
“It’s so sad. It’s so sad,”
she kept saying, over and over again. “We should have been friends. Once you get older you realize you should just forget everything and be friends, but your mother wouldn’t have any of it. Even after twenty-three years she still referred to me as ‘that cow Paula Arnold.’ She always made out that I stole him away. But, Lucy, you know he walked out that door himself.”
He bloody ran, thought Lucy.
“Your dad begged her for a few of those wretched tapes. He just wanted to see them. But she refused, said she’d burn them if he asked her again.”
Lucy hugged her. She smelled of face powder and Anaïs Anaïs.
“She wasted her life. That’s why I say to Lawrence it’s good that you had a bit of a career. And it’s why I’ve always helped out at the golf club. You have to have something for yourself, Lucy. Otherwise what happens if they leave you?”
Lucy wanted to say that her father, with his stroke, and his lame left leg and his bottom firmly planted in the Parker Knoll, was not going anywhere. But she knew that to Paula, who loved him, he was still Lawrence Cunningham, age thirty-five, heartbreakingly handsome in his cream polo-neck, the object of much desire among the Mothers at the School, as he climbed out of the racing-green Jaguar and opened the doors to take schoolbags and children out.
Paula pulled herself together. “Now, I’ve brought something for you; I hope you don’t mind.” She shuffled over to her bag and pulled out a sheet of stickers.
“You and George have to decide what you’re going to do about the house, but before he gets here, have a little mosey round, and anything you want, stick one of these on it.”
Lucy burst out laughing. The stickers had smiley faces on them.
Paula looked offended. “I know you might think I’m being”—she paused, searching for what would almost certainly be the wrong word—“indelicate—”
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