Elizabeth Noble
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LETTERS TO IRIS
Contents
Prologue
Tess
Gigi
Tess
Gigi
Tess
Gigi
Tess
Gigi
Tess
Gigi
Tess
Tess
Tess
Gigi
Tess
Tess
Gigi
Gigi
Gigi
Tess
Tess
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Tess
Gigi
Tess
Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
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Tess
Tess
Tess
Tess
Tess
Gigi
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
By the same author
The Reading Group
The Friendship Test
(formerly published as The Tenko Club)
Alphabet Weekends
Things I Want My Daughters to Know
The Girl Next Door
The Way We Were
Between a Mother and her Child
For David, for everything
Prologue
Then
Mornings like this morning were Iris’s favourite kind. Tom always preferred springtime, when the sun was high, and everything was burgeoning and bursting. Of the two of them, he was the lay-a-bed, groaning with reluctance at the early starts the farm required, and had done since they were small children. But he hated it just a bit less in the spring and summer, as it was light, and there was no chill in the air when you threw back the blanket. Autumn days were Iris’s. It made no difference to her that the tip of her nose was often cold when she woke up, and it was still dark outside. She liked the mists and the nip in the air, the colours of the leaves and the crunch of them under her boots once they’d fallen.
Tom said she was contrary and melancholy in her choice. But he still sat on the fence in the yard with her, in the few minutes before work started, both clasping a cup of hot tea with their whole hands, warming their fingers, not talking much as they came round.
Most of their friends in the village came from much larger families, often with six or seven other siblings. But it had always been just her and Tom. Irish twins, people called them, Tom just ten months older than her. There had been two more, born when Iris was barely old enough to remember her mother’s round belly and tired face, but both those boys had been born already dead. After the births, her mother had been pale and tearful and quiet for what felt like forever, and Iris remembered her and Tom climbing up into the bed she shared with their father and, each on one side of her, trying to cuddle her into a smile or a tender touch, tears streaming down her face. Iris didn’t know why there had been no more babies after that last loss. It was just the four of them, and it was just her and Tom.
Everything was about to change. She knew it. It was all anyone talked about these days. Everyone huddled around the radio and pored over the newspapers and talked about war. Her parents and the other older people – they all remembered the last time, and seemed full of dread, gaunt-looking and anxious. They saw it differently from some of her and Tom’s friends, gung-ho to stop Mr Hitler. Ignorant bravado, their father called it, willing Mr Chamberlain on last autumn when he’d promised peace for our time. No one seemed to doubt, though, that there would soon be war. Mothers were red-eyed in the grocer’s, especially now they were talking about conscription in the spring. And everything would change once it started. She didn’t want it to, but, at the same time, there was an inexplicable excitement, a horribly guilty feeling you daren’t say out loud because you couldn’t even explain it to yourself. Sometimes, before the war had started to loom large, Iris thought she loved that nothing ever changed – that the landscape of her childhood was the vista of her almost-adulthood – and, sometimes, that thought had been unbearable. As she looked out this September morning, on the land she knew so well, her brother hunching his shoulders against the early chill, she only wondered how their lives would be …
Now
She’s called Iris.
She’s Gran to me. Mum to my mother. Mrs Garroway to the doctors and the administrators, and to these burly, kind men in green uniforms lifting her out of the back of the ambulance now, in a way that was far gentler than their size suggested. A patient. A bed blocker.
But she’s Iris. Iris Mary Rose Garroway. She was born in the spring of 1921, on 3 April. She doesn’t know for sure, because she never asked, but she was almost certainly born at home, because people were, then. At home on a farm.
She’s ninety-five years old.
She weighs just a pound or two over eight stone. Far, far less than she should. She was bigger once – curvy even, with broader hips than she ever liked, although she was always just a bit proud of her waist, trim even after my mother was born, she said, and photographs showed it. She doesn’t eat enough now. She has no appetite to speak of, and in hospital the nurses haven’t had the time, or the inclination perhaps, to sit with her and feed her. Even when I’ve gone in, with morsels of things I know she loves, she hasn’t been very interested, nibbling to be polite, because she still remembers politeness, even if she doesn’t know to whom she is showing it. She was taller too. Five foot six. It’s amazing how old people shrink. She’s barely five foot now, but seems much, much shorter, because osteoporosis has bent her spine into a cruel curl that directs her face towards the floor and hunches her shoulders. Her cardigan hangs off her, and her feet look too narrow for the sheepskin slippers they wear. Her eyes were very blue, before the yellowy film of age covered them over. She must have been born with them that blue: her mother chose the name because of them. She was supposed to be called Rose, but her mother changed her mind. It wasn’t just the colour of them that was pretty. They’d shone and twinkled when she laughed, crinkling at the edges, always upwards, so she looked perpetually optimistic and cheerful. She’s been old all of my life: she was sixty when I was born, and even in my earliest memories the hair that had once been thick and chestnut-brown – you could see it in photographs – was salt-and-pepper-grey. But I do remember the sparkling eyes.
She wasn’t always this desiccated old lady, hunched, fragile, frightened, you know. Of course not. None of them ever were. None of the people in this new place where she’s come to live – the last place, most likely, where she will ever live. She was all of the things we are, and have been. She was a girl, a young woman, a bride, a mother, a friend. She ran, and swam, and rode a bicycle. She laughed, and she loved. She lived.
But she can’t remember that now, not most of the time, anyway. There are moments of lucidity, but they are fleeting, and they happen less and less often. They torture us less and less often. When she’s lucid, you wonder if she knows where she is, and what she’s become, and it’s an unbearable thought. It’s easier when she’s absent. She remembers her mother, a crochet shawl around her shoulders, rocking a stillborn baby she can’t yet accept has no need of rocking. She remembers tastes and smells from her childhood on the farm –
she’d still know how to milk a cow, although she hasn’t done it for decades, or make a daisy chain on a lazy summer afternoon. She knows all the words to her favourite hymn – ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’ – but she doesn’t know who the Prime Minister is, or how she got to this place, or at whose behest she is here.
And now she can’t even remember me. It’s been weeks since she used my name, except to repeat it when I’ve said it, quizzically, rolling the syllables as if she’s hearing them for the first time. Sometimes I think she’s forgotten me entirely, although I still hope – hope for the little, occasional miracles of her knowing me without being distressed about who and where and how she is now.
And I don’t think she will ever know this baby – her great-grandchild – I have growing inside me. I want to whisper it to her. I haven’t told anyone, and I haven’t wanted to, not yet, but, standing here now, I want to lean in and whisper it to her. But I don’t. Because I don’t think I can bear it if she doesn’t react. I have so needed her, all my life, and now, when I think I may need her more than ever before, I don’t want to face the truth that I can’t have her.
Tess
November
London was suddenly Christmassy. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness gave way almost overnight to the season of spending on credit and hot chocolate with whipped cream. Bonfire Night was over, and the city apparently couldn’t wait to wrap itself in fairy lights, knowing how much prettier it looked when it twinkled. It lent the damp, chilly weather – nights drawing in fast – and the grey buildings the magical veneer of cheer and the promise of festivities to come. The windows of the West End were dressed for the season in jewel-bright colours and sparkle. Tourists were meandering through Carnaby Street, taking it all in through a selfie lens. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry.
Except for Tess, who was in a crashing hurry. She’d been in back-to-back meetings staring at a flipchart since lunchtime – which had been, for her, a rather hurried warm lettuce and dried-out falafel affair at her desk – and now, released at last, she was weaving her way impatiently through the lackadaisical crowds. It had felt like a day without end – more problems than solutions, and hardly a moment to sit at her desk and actually think. It wasn’t that she hated her job – part of a Human Resources team in a City firm – she was good at it, and most of the time she enjoyed what she did. Right now, though, the company was restructuring after a large merger, and it seemed like major, and often painful, decisions were being taken on a daily basis. It was hard to keep up with the schedule being imposed from above. And at the moment it was simply interfering just a bit too much with her actual life. Taking up space in her brain she very badly needed for thinking about other things. Those being, in no particular order: the precise whereabouts of her difficult mother, her very poorly grandmother, her boyfriend and, oh yes, who’d leave it until last on the list? Her new, very, very new pregnancy. Confirmed as of just a few hours ago, between the falafel at lunch and a Kit Kat at tea break. The pregnancy test she’d bought had been burning a hole in her desk drawer, until she’d peed on it in the bathroom, telling herself it would almost certainly be a negative and she could get back to worrying about all the other stuff she was worrying about. A plan that had not gone terribly well when it came out positive, and she’d had to punch both her knees in the stall to stop her legs from shaking. And go back to the meeting. And talk about cost per square foot, and bodies per floor. At that point taking the test at home had seemed like a much better idea, hindsight as beneficial as ever. Bloody hell. She realized as she walked that she was muttering her list. And swearing gently.
It almost made her laugh out loud, that listing of preoccupations. She’d read somewhere that creative people did it more than other types, because processing out loud made things clearer or something. Not true. Not true at all. None of it was clear. She was too old to let a difficult relationship with her mother distract her from her everyday adult life: that was the stuff of teenage years, when shared domesticity made it impossible to ignore. She hadn’t lived with Donna for – God – fifteen years or something. She was too old to be so invested in, and vulnerable about, the health of her beloved, but undeniably elderly, grandmother. It wasn’t like it hadn’t been coming. She was ninety-five, for Christ’s sake. Tess was afraid she was too sad. Was it right that it hurt her this much? Right that she should be so very terrified of the only ending that was possible now? Even in this new age of living longer, that was a hell of an innings, as the crass saying went. The boyfriend thing was odd too. She should feel wonderful about him, not anxious. He was a great guy (didn’t everyone say so? Okay, nearly everyone …), they were happy enough, it was all how it was meant to be … The pregnancy – okay – so that was a curveball of elephantine proportions. But she was thirty-five. She was sexually active. Not exactly an immaculate conception. But still, bloody hell.
Tess realized that she was breathless, and sweating, despite the damp chill in the air. Neither was a good look. Or a classy way to arrive. And she wasn’t quite as late as she thought she might be. Bugger it. There was an empty park bench with her name on it (actually, it had someone else’s name on it, but they weren’t using it, so for now it was hers), and she sat down gratefully. Just for a minute. She closed her eyes, and willed the swirling thoughts in her brain to settle and still. She concentrated on breathing in and out. She’d read about it in some article on Mindfulness in the hairdresser’s a couple of months ago. Be present, Tess. And other aphorisms for ‘calm the hell down’. It worked, though. She felt her heart rate slow, and the breathing steadied. She felt marginally, and no doubt temporarily, less crushed by the weight of everything.
One thing at a time. Get tonight over with. The rest would have to wait a while longer. Tonight was enough to be going on with. She could juggle only so many balls at one time. She could be only one persona at a time. She had to push everything else to one side for now, or she’d cry, and crying wasn’t an option. Her mascara was definitely not waterproof. Tonight, she was playing corporate wife. Not an actual wife, in fact. But ‘partner’ was too professional and girlfriend was too Upper Sixth. Corporate wife was the persona required this evening. It was one of Sean’s fairly interminable work dos. Drinks (but never more than two since that embarrassing incident a while back) and dinner (always chicken, for some reason. Always.), speeches (invariably self-congratulatory) and an Uber home at eleven, if you were lucky.
The two of them had met at exactly such an event. An old university friend of hers had begged her to be his plus one, and since she’d had nothing better to do and a drop-dead gorgeous new dress she’d been waiting for an occasion to debut, she’d said yes. She’d been the age (early thirties) and stage (three or four boyfriends of more than six months duration in the last six or seven years. Approximately three fifths of peers married or engaged. Not quite panicking, and espousing the theory that a man was strictly an add-on optional extra to an independent, fulfilling life, but yet aware that Mr Right was unlikely to appear in her front room uninvited on a Monday night during Silent Witness) to say yes to all sorts of things. Casting her net. Putting her secretly girlish dreams out in the universe, Deepak Chopra style. She hadn’t known about the chicken, or the speeches, then, or she’d have said no, and then she might never have met him.
He was the tallest man in the room, which was always a good start. At six foot five he was the tallest man in most rooms, unless his father and brothers were there too. They were a family of lanky giants. Impossible to lose in a crowd. It turned out her mate Stuart had known him, and when he’d come over to say hello, she’d had to crane her neck back to look him in the face, and that’s when she’d noticed the eyes, which were lovely. They’d been sat on different tables for the dinner, and they had kept catching each other’s eye during the speeches, which was fun, and even exciting. When she’d excused herself to go to the loo, she was pretty sure he’d followed her: he was lurking in the hallway when she came out, feigning surprise that she was there
too. Numbers were exchanged. He’d called the next day. Drinks. Dinner. A concert at the O2 … It had been textbook, really.
And before she knew it, they’d been a ‘couple’. They were almost exactly the same age, but it always felt weirdly to Tess like he was several years older. He seemed so much more sorted than she was. He was ambitious, and successful, and … just grown up. She’d been thirty-two then, but in some ways she’d still felt like a twenty-year-old, playing at being an adult and waiting to get caught out. It was quite a trick, she realized, seeming like you understood everything even if you didn’t. Sean was self-assured, and confident (mostly, if not always, without that confidence tipping over into arrogance), and it was very attractive.
Their lives had meshed so easily, and so fast. It was a bit like being on an emotional Travolator. Sometimes she forgot they’d been together for only two and a half years. A dot-to-dot relationship, with everything done when and how it should be. Three dates before the first time they had sex (good, if not spectacular, sex, but improving with time, familiarity and some drunkenly brave instructions). Six months before their first holiday (beach, Turkey), and the meeting of the parents (could have gone better, on both sides, but they were grown-ups, not kids, so it didn’t bother either of them unduly). A year before they moved in together (his place – bigger, better and nearer the Tube were his three arguments, only two of which were irrefutable). Symbiosis had happened almost before she’d realized it. Which sounded irresponsible. And possibly was. Sean’s healthy salary paid exactly sixty-five per cent of their mortgage, as well as their utilities. Tess’s home had been a rental, and she’d given it up without too many pangs. Sean had already bought his place: it made sense. It wasn’t necessarily her type of thing – it was a modern two-bed apartment with no character, but the building had a gym and a lap pool. Sean used both most evenings. She’d had a paddle in the first week and gone nowhere near it since. And gyms were her Room 101. She’d ‘girlified’ the space by stealth, as her best friend Holly called it, and it was certainly comfortable enough, although she sometimes missed her rather scruffier rented ground-floor flat in Battersea, with its high ceilings and Victorian tiled fireplace. His corporate insurance paid for their medicals – his idea, not Tess’s. It felt terribly middle aged to have a medical when there was nothing apparently wrong with you. His Avios points sometimes flew them on their holidays. And they drove his car. Tess also had her grandmother Iris’s Renault Clio, which was knackered, in truth. Tess had railed against it at first, this imbalance in their wages and thus in their shared life, at least over a bottle of wine with Holly. They were the gender pay gap, in coupled form. They both had good degrees from good universities. She was better at Sudoku than him. And multitasking. And crosswords. Sean had laughed and told her he didn’t care, and eventually she’d accepted it. And if it was a betrayal of her feminist principles to appreciate having a bit more disposable income at the end of each month as a result of this arrangement (new Jigsaw outfit just because … oh, go on, then), she kept the betrayal to herself.
Letters to Iris Page 1