by C F Dunn
A deep crease formed between her eyes as she took me in, reminding me of our mother, and I bridged the gap between us in a few steps, kissing her on one cheek.
“Beth – how are you? Mum said you’ve been over; I’m sorry I didn’t see you.”
“Dad said you couldn’t see anybody, not even me; he said you were too… ill.”
She transferred Archie onto her other hip and put her arm tentatively around my back, wordlessly holding me close. I breathed in her warm, familiar scent of motherhood and soap. She stood back, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes.
“I’d never have forgiven you if you’d got yourself killed,” she whispered. The baby kicked his legs against us, then thrust his curled fist into my thick plait and tugged it like a bell-pull. I gently disengaged his hand and kissed his dimpled fingers.
“Hello, Archie.”
He regarded me soberly with huge blue eyes, broke into a half-smile, frowned, then his face crumpled and a thin, siren-like wail filled the coffee shop. I cringed apologetically as the patrons stared as one.
“Sorry, I’m not good with babies,” I said helplessly, backing away.
“How would you know until you’ve had one? Babies cry, Em; it’s what they do.”
Beth shot me a glance as she swept Archie up and around to face her. He stopped crying immediately, tears drying on his red cheeks, and he chuckled as his mother rubbed noses with him, the overhead lights giving him a halo through his wispy, red-gold baby hair. The customers retreated into their newspapers and cups.
Archie’s head swivelled as the door shouldered open and a woman in a bright red jacket edged through it, dumping bags bulging with vegetables from the market on the floor, and looking expectantly at Rob.
“Go into the back and I’ll bring you both coffee in a minute,” he said to us, indicating the rear of the shop with his elbow, and moving towards the woman in red, pad and pen poised.
I followed Beth through to the family’s private area at the back of the shop where a large, saggy, carroty-coloured sofa faced a TV with a cacophony of brightly coloured plastic toys scattered in front of it. The twins were already ensconced, lounging at various angles off the sofa with their eyes fixed on the screen. A limb occasionally waved abstractly as they gave their total concentration to the garish moving images. Expertly clearing a path through the toys with her foot, Beth eased herself down on the sofa with Archie still firmly attached, grasping his mother’s jumper with determined fists and revealing her creamy skin. She pushed a twin off the other end so that I could sit down, and tucked her leg under her, shuffling until comfortable.
I removed a well-chewed teddy bear before I sat on it; it grinned lopsidedly up at me, one of its ears coming unstitched at the corner. I recognized it as one of Beth’s from a lifetime ago, and clasped it to me as I sat down gingerly, feeling the springs of the old sofa protesting. The noise from the film was overwhelming in the small room.
“Here.”
Beth unceremoniously deposited Archie on my lap as she retrieved the TV remote control from under a pile of colouring books and turned the volume down. The baby considered me cautiously, then reached out a little hand and scrabbled his fingers against the rough surface of the cast on my arm, his mouth the shape of an “o”. I smiled at him hopefully, but his head pivoted away from me as he heard his mother sit down beside us, and a beam crossed his face.
“Babies are a complete mystery to me; how do you communicate with them if they can’t talk?” I said, probably sounding more spinsterly than I intended. Beth rearranged her jumper, the knit baggy after years of being washed and dried contrary to the care label.
“You’re not born knowing what to do, Em, and you can’t get it all from books; you’ve just got to get on with it and learn on the job. It helps if you get pregnant first, of course.”
“There’s not much chance of that,” I said, answering her unspoken question. She leaned forward and picked a crumpled square of muslin off the floor, draping it over my shoulder.
“You might need this; he’s just had a feed and he’s a bit possety at the moment.”
She made no attempt to take Archie off me and I couldn’t lift him to give him back, so I resigned myself to ensuring that my writhing nephew didn’t throw himself backwards unexpectedly – or throw up all over me. In the light from the window behind us, his hair shone. I touched the fine wisps.
“He has the same colour hair as Grandpa, Beth.” My heart lurched unexpectedly and she looked at me curiously. Archie stuffed his hand in his mouth and gummed it, dribbling.
“Well, you knew him better than I did, Em – I don’t remember him that well, but I recall Nanna saying something like that.”
There was an awkward silence between us, filled with a gabble of raucous cartoon voices. Flora rolled onto her back, oblivious.
“You look well, Beth; is Archie sleeping through the night now?”
It sounded like the sort of thing my mother would ask.
“He’s been doing that for months, except for the odd night, but thanks for asking anyway. I’d look better if I had your frame and I could shift a few stone, though.”
She wrinkled her nose at Archie who rumbled a laugh back. “You look like crap, by the way.”
“Gee, thanks Sis,” I moaned.
“At least you have an excuse; I don’t.” Archie bounced on my lap, and I put a protective arm out to prevent him from launching at his mother. “You’re skinny, like Mum and Grandpa – you lucky wench. This is what three kids and two mortgages does for you.” She thwacked her thighs, bound tight by her jeans like over-stuffed sausages. Beth had always been comfortably stocky, like our father, and there had been an undercurrent of resentment for the genes she had inherited.
“Yeah? Well, who ended up with the ginger hair and freckles, then?” I reminded her, trying to make light of it and regarding her perfectly even, milk-white skin and glossy, dark-brown hair that did what it was told.
She pursed her lips. “You did; what I wouldn’t have done to have your hair!”
“Since when?”
“Since forever. You had all the attention, Em; boys only ever talked to me because they wanted to get to know you. Remember Jack?”
I frowned, flipping back to my childhood and a lanky, unprepossessing youth in his early twenties. “Yes – sort of; he was your first boyfriend, wasn’t he?”
“He was – until I brought him home that Easter.”
I looked blankly at her.
“You haven’t a clue, have you?”
I shook my head.
“All he could talk about was you, Em – you and your long, perfect hair. Pre-Raphaelite red, he called it.”
I vaguely recollected he had been an art student who hadn’t stayed around for long, which explained why he hadn’t made a lasting impression on me.
“But I was only about… twelve-ish, wasn’t I?”
“Pre-cisely.”
I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again, stumped. Alex rolled into Flora on purpose, making her squeal, before using her legs in their candy-striped tights as a runway for his model aeroplane. It soared over her head and she walloped him with her Barbie, its flimsy skirts flying as they broke into a tussle. I watched them, anxious to be sidetracked, waiting for the simmering tension that had sprung up between us to cool.
“I didn’t know, Beth – I’m sorry. But you’ve forgotten what it was like at school. I had years and years of the pointing and the whispering and ‘ginger nut’ or ‘ginger pixie’ and ‘parkin’, and forever trying not to stand out as being different.”
“At least you weren’t inconspicuous,” she twisted the word. “At least you were noticed. Not packed off to boarding school like me because I wasn’t the clever one – the scholar.”
Beth’s normally gentle expression had been replaced by a mask of sourness in no more than a moment. I stared at her, open-mouthed.
“What?”
“Well, you were a scholar, we
ren’t you?” she scowled defiantly. Archie grizzled, rubbing his eyes.
“Yes, but so what? You went to boarding school because Dad was always being posted and you had to keep changing schools. They wanted some stability for you.”
“Yes? You think? And how come you got to stay at home with Mum?”
“But… but that was years later, and I never saw Dad because of it. It had nothing to do with being a scholar, or anything.”
“Emma, you were always Dad’s little star. He didn’t bother about what I wanted to do. I could’ve made a living on my back and he wouldn’t have cared. But you – you had to be the best – nothing was too good for you. He wouldn’t have had you working in a shop. And now you’ve got them running around after you again, just like the old days. All I’ve heard about for the last month is ‘Emma this, Emma that.’”
Her mouth screwed. Stunned by her attack, I went on the offensive, my face flaring in anger and hurt. “That’s not true, Beth. You were always closer to him; he understood you, and at least you had a father when you were growing up. I only saw him when he came home on leave, and even then he was always tired and grumpy. All he wanted to know was what my end-of-term reports were like and what my predicted grades were. I don’t ever remember him asking if I was happy.” I fumed, years of bottled-up resentment spilling from me. “By the time he retired and he came home for good, all I had from him was pressure and flak. Do you have any idea of what it was like at home after you left? I dreaded coming downstairs in the morning because of the questions, the criticism, the constant barrage of… of rubbish.”
More hurt lurked behind my words than I would have thought possible, and it ambushed me as it poured out, my voice rising. Archie jumped, startled, and gazed at me, his round head wobbling uncertainly. Beth snatched him from me, and he wrapped his pudgy arms around her neck. She glared at me over his head. The twins stopped fighting and untangled their arms and legs, sitting up and staring open-mouthed at us, Barbie suspended in mid-attack.
“Oh yeah, you poor thing, and look at you now,” she spat, sarcastically.
“Mummy…” Alex pulled at her arm anxiously.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded, half off the sofa, nails biting into the palms of my hands. Flora’s mouth hung open, her eyes wide.
“Who’s a Cambridge professor…?”
“Doctor,” I muttered, seething.
“Doctor,” she ground the word with her teeth. “And who has the career; who gets to travel – who lives in America, for God’s sake?”
“Don’t blaspheme,” I snapped automatically.
She ignored me. “And who has a life outside all of… this…” and she flung her arm out, taking in her entire world with one sweep of her hand.
I looked at the shocked faces of her children, at the plethora of normality in the furnishings, the toys – the wonderful, sublime, utter ordinariness of it all – and I knew what I was missing.
“And who’s holding her baby?” I pointed out, my voice suddenly quiet. “And has a husband, and a home and… and amazing children? What do I have? What can I honestly say I’ve given to this world, other than a lot of grief, from what you’ve said? Where has all this come from, Beth? What happened to you?”
Beth calmed down. “You happened. It’s not your fault, Em, but I never felt I could compete with you.”
I looked at her swiftly as she echoed my own thoughts.
“So – you’re jealous of me because of… what? You want some of this?” I held my damaged arms out to her. “You want to have been stalked and mauled by a psychopath, or pursued by a self-pitying drunk? Or perhaps you’d like to swap places and have a relationship that probably isn’t happening and, even if it is, shouldn’t. I mean, with which one would you like to spice up your life a bit, because I sure as hell would like a little bit of what you’ve got.”
I shoved a strand of hair out of my eyes, scowling at my big sister, as she returned the look.
“Don’t be such a flippin’ drama queen, Em.”
I would have retaliated but the door flung open, the handle hitting the wall with a thud as Rob came in, his face furious.
“I can hear you in the shop, for pity’s sake. What do you think you’re doing?” He took in his wife’s flushed face and my blazing eyes. “I don’t know what your problem is, the pair of you, but get over it,” he hissed. “Kids…” He held out a hand to the twins and they went to him without a word. He scooped Archie into his free arm and turned his back on us, following the two older children out of the room.
“Golly,” Beth said.
“Heck,” I echoed.
We looked at each other, and I saw for the first time in years the similarities between us, not the differences.
“Do you think he’ll forgive me for that?” I ventured.
“I’m the one who has to live with him,” Beth said and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I burst out laughing, pent-up tension and relief flowing as one unstoppable tide, and she honked back a laugh, another then another rising from her until she too became engulfed, and we fell against each other sobbing intense, wrenching laughter that was an amalgam of joy and grief.
“He has a point, though,” I said, catching my breath.
“He’s useful for something, then,” Beth heaved out. “Does that mean we have to have therapy or something?”
“Oh, definitely something. I know a simply fantastic doctor.”
The irony of it set me off again. This time Beth didn’t join in, but sat back and looked at me with the same curious expression she had employed earlier. I sobered, swallowing the convulsions until I was in control once more.
“What?”
“Would that be the same doctor Mum mentioned – the one in the States?”
Instantly on my guard, I said, “Might be; depends what she said about him.”
“She said there’s something between you – or there was. Did something happen? Did he hurt you? Dad said…”
My short, guttural laugh had her blenching from me. I unfolded myself from the sofa as I stood up. Beth put a hand on my arm, looking up at me.
“Emma, Rob’s right, we’ve got to sort ourselves out. We were good friends once, weren’t we – before I left home? If there’s something I can do – anything – please let me help. If this man did something…”
I put my hand on hers and patted it in just the same way our mother would.
“Thanks, and you’re right – Rob’s right – we’ve things to sort out, but he’s not one of them. He’s all mine to deal with.” One way, or another, I thought. “We’ll get together, won’t we, over the next few weeks?” I offered.
She stood up and put her arms right around me, and there was real warmth in her gesture, which I returned with more feeling than I thought possible, given the years of unspoken acrimony between us. It was at this juncture that Rob returned, and he surveyed us with his hands on his hips.
“I didn’t know what I would find, but a cessation of hostilities wasn’t expected. But it’s good; I’m not complaining. Would you now like to reassure your progeny, Beth – and your niece and nephews, Emma – that all is well? All is well, I take it?”
“Very well,” we chimed.
He managed a smile. “Emma, stay for lunch, will you? Don’t abandon me to suffer Beth’s résumé of what just went on between the two of you for the next couple of hours.”
“I would love to, but I have things to do.”
Beth put her arm around my waist. “Won’t they wait?”
I shook my head regretfully. “No – not any longer. Let me say goodbye to the children; I don’t want them remembering me for the wrong reasons.”
It didn’t take long for the twins to lose their caution, and I extricated myself before I was hugged to death. Archie was another matter; he swung his head around and buried it in his father’s chest, fingers firmly in his mouth. Rob put a reassuring hand on his back.
“He’s tired and he’s at that age w
here all strangers are anathema; don’t worry about it, Em.”
I kissed the back of the baby’s head through the tousled soft fluff. He had a warm, clean baby smell – utterly enticing, totally memorable – and it stayed with me long after I left the shop and made my way towards the museum and my search for some answers.
CHAPTER
3
The Museum
The air felt degrees less cold as I walked down Broad Street, a cardboard cup of milky coffee in one hand, an almond croissant in the other. I caught sight of my reflection in the windows of the shops on the sunless side of the street where the shadows made a mirror of the glass. Hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed, I looked half-alive, except for the dark purpose burning in the black depths of my eyes.
The crowds of early morning shoppers had eased. Now was the best time to search the museum records, before parents and children descended on it with an idle hour to spare before tea, and bath, and bed.
I stuffed the last of the pastry into my mouth, and drained the cup, caffeine tearing through my bloodstream, sending my heart thumping erratically as it tried to keep up with the excessive amounts of unaccustomed stimulant. Within moments, the world became sharper, brighter and, as the door to the museum opened, expelling an occupant, for the briefest second, Staahl’s dead, grey eyes looked at me from another man’s body. But it wasn’t Staahl, it couldn’t be, and the man walked by – a stranger passing a stranger in the street – and no more. I blamed my jittery state squarely on the coffee and pushed through the door.
The hushed and darkened galleries of the tiny museum were devoid of life bar a subdued rustle from around the corner. A woman – not much older than I – struggled with a catch on a display case, clenching a sheaf of papers beneath her arm. She yelped as she nicked her finger, the papers slipping haphazardly towards the floor, and I rescued them as they fell. She succeeded in securing the lock on the glass case before turning to retrieve them from me.