Alex, with his crazy dream of happily-ever-after, hasn’t helped either. I only need to look at my sad and lonely father to see that there aren’t any happy endings. I’m glad I’m single: it’s easier this way.
Rafe Thorne was just a stranger, I’d told myself firmly as I’d stomped back to Riverside Halt. He was just somebody I’d accidentally bumped into a lifetime ago – a fleeting dream, nothing more. I felt like an idiot now, that was for sure, but what had I really expected? Thank God I hadn’t told him that his dead brother wanted me to pass on a message. The thought of his reaction to that little gem made me feel hot with horror, and as the small train had carried me back towards High Wycombe, where I could catch a bus to Taply, I’d comforted myself with the knowledge that I would never, ever have to lay eyes on him again. I’d vowed that when I got back to my flat in London I would try my very hardest to forget this whole sorry episode.
Unfortunately, though, my brain – always brilliant at remembering every minute detail – had insisted on replaying the encounter over and over again, and with every mile I’d travelled I’d felt worse rather than better. Whatever had I been thinking, barging into the house of a total stranger? He’d probably thought I was a deranged fan. And I’d as good as broken in, too. I hoped he wasn’t inclined to complain to the police…
Feeling as though a swarm of scarab beetles were chomping on my innards, I’d tortured myself for the entire bus journey from High Wycombe to Taply. Then, still lost in thought, I’d wandered around the shops for an hour. The town had been looking beautiful in the winter sunshine, the Thames flowing slowly beneath the stately arches of Taply Bridge and carrying flotillas of swans down river. The Christmas tree was up in the town centre and festive white lights were strung through the streets; as the afternoon had begun to fade they’d flickered on, turning the place into a magical warren of medieval houses and lamplit windows. I’d bought a takeout coffee and sat with it on the riverbank, my hands wrapped around the paper cup, staring at the ever-changing water until my drink had grown cold. I’d half hoped and half dreaded that Alex might appear. At least he’d have understood.
And he could have told me whether Rafe was all right…
No matter how hard I’d tried, I hadn’t been able to put Rafe out of my thoughts. His haunted eyes and the bleak twist of his mouth were etched on my mind’s eye. He’d been every bit as tortured by guilt and regrets as Alex had told me he was.
Even now, as I sit with my worried father, Rafe hovers on the edge of my thoughts; it takes a big effort to push him away.
“You’re just like her, you know.”
My father’s words pull me back to the small kitchen. The cosy lamplight and the warmth from the Rayburn are a world away from the cold neglect of Mellisande.
“Sorry?”
“You. You’re just like your mother.” My father’s voice is sad but he’s smiling a wistful half-smile. “You get more like her all the time.”
“Because of the Egypt thing, right?” I know I got this from my mother, along with my single-mindedness. That used to drive Dad crazy; Mum would vanish into her study for hours and he’d practically have to drag her away from her work to eat. I’ve been known to do exactly the same, except there’s nobody to drag me out of my office – other than maybe an exasperated security guard. My eyesight and skinny body are down to Dad’s genes, although thank God I didn’t inherit the beard.
I sip my tea. “I guess when I talk about my work, especially the Aamon stuff, it must remind you of her?”
“You certainly got the archaeology bug from her – but, no, that wasn’t really what I meant.” My father leans back in his seat and considers me thoughtfully.
“Claudia might have gone but she lives on in you, Cleo Rose, and not just in your work. It was more the expression on your face just a moment ago, that dreamy faraway look: that reminded me of her.”
This is a bit of a surprise. My thoughts were miles away – about six miles away as the crow flies – but I can’t say I ever thought of my mother as being a dreamer. No, I remember her being focused on her work or gathering lecture notes together. She was always busy.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” My father shakes his head and reaches out to take my hand. “She wasn’t always a mum and a professor, you know. And we met in the seventies. It was a different age. People behaved differently.”
I laugh. “I know! I’ve seen the pictures! Kipper ties, flares and tank tops. There were no fashion police, that was for sure – and don’t think that Tolly and I never noticed your special herbal cigarettes.”
“Ah, yes. Well, the less said about those the better, I think. But it’s true that Mum was a bit of a daydreamer; she always had the most vivid imagination. Your granny used to say she was fey.”
My maternal grandmother, Granny Rose, always seemed as ancient as anything she and my mother were studying, and when she died it was after a long and happy life. She’d been a great storyteller and I’d loved hearing about her adventures on digs. It was Granny Rose who first discovered Aamon’s tomb and who had begun the family tradition of loving all things Egyptian.
“When Claudia was younger she was always daydreaming,” my father continues, his own eyes now adopting a faraway expression. “I used to tease her about it. She’d have these conversations with thin air – talking to herself, she called it – and she’d often know things about people that would surprise them. Granny Rose used to say she had the sight.”
“What?”
“I know, I know! It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Dad laughs. “Utter nonsense, of course, although it was quite uncanny the way Granny Rose found that boy pharaoh’s tomb. I’ll never forget that story; she used to say it was almost as though somebody led her to it, but to be honest that was probably your grandmother’s instinct. Apparently she could practically sniff the artefacts out. And she’d have insights into things that had never occurred to anyone else. It was definitely some kind of gift – and your mother certainly inherited it.”
I stare at him. This is true, but it’s not how I remember my mother, not in the slightest.
“This doesn’t sound at all like Mum. Are you sure?”
“Long before she was your mum, Claudia was my wife,” Dad reminds me. “I used to tell Mum she could always get a job predicting the lottery! She said second sight ran in the family but it didn’t do to make too much of it, especially since she had her heart set on being a don. She mentioned it less and less as she grew older, but I often wondered whether you or Tolly might take after her. Still, it seems you’ve just inherited my sensible, if slightly dull, genes.”
I wish. As my father wanders down memory lane, recounting some long and involved story about something Ptolemy once did, I’m far too busy trying to reconcile the mother I knew with the person my father’s just described. The Claudia Carpenter I remember was an academic who wrote for serious journals and who lectured at Oxford. She was professional and focused and intellectual. In other words, my mother was everything I admire and everything I’ve always wanted to become. To discover that she may have had experiences similar to mine is both comforting and alarming at the same time. If only she was still alive so that I could talk to her. I know Mum would have been able to help me.
Silence falls between us – but for once it’s companionable one rather than an awkward one. We sip our tea and listen to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall and the distant sounds of traffic.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner that Mum was so sick,” my father says suddenly. His shoulders sag and he looks exhausted, worn out from ten years of not broaching the subject. I almost choke on my tea because this is the most taboo topic in the Carpenter family. Never mind Harry Potter’s He Who Must Not Be Named: this was the Carpenters’ That Which Must Never Be Discussed. I couldn’t have been more taken aback if my father had painted himself blue and started tap-dancing across the table.
“We thought we were doing the right thing for you and for Tolly by no
t burdening you with it, but I can see now that we couldn’t have got it more wrong. Parents don’t have all the answers.” My father looks wistful. “I wish to God we did, but the truth is we’re just as clueless as anyone else. There’s no magic knowledge that appears the moment you become a parent. You just have to do the best you can. And sometimes you get it wrong. Very wrong.”
It’s the first time we’ve ever talked about this. I mean properly talked about what happened, rather than skirting around the elephant in the room.
“If I’d have known how sick she was, I would have come back much earlier,” I say. My throat feels tight and my eyes prickle. “I wouldn’t have stayed in Cairo. I’d have spent time with her.”
“And don’t you think Mum knew that?” My father shakes his head. “Oh, Cleo, she was so proud of everything you achieved. To drag you away just to sit at her bedside was the last thing she wanted.”
“But what about what I wanted?”
“It doesn’t work like that. We didn’t get to choose what we wanted because this wasn’t anyone’s decision to make except Mum’s. Not mine, not Tolly’s and not yours either, Cleo Rose. Claudia wanted everything to be as normal as possible and I had to respect that. Do you really think it was what I wanted?” His eyes are bright now. “It would have really helped me to have had you both here too. There were times when all I wanted to do was pick up the phone and share it. Being alone with it all was almost as bad as watching her slip away from me, day by day, hour by hour.”
I look at my father and suddenly I see him. I really see him. I see beyond the familiar things – the wire-framed glasses, faded grey sweater and hands ink-stained from marking mountains of GCSE coursework – to the tired and lonely man underneath. There’s grey in his once dark hair and lines fan out from his eyes, giving a sad droop to his expression. It tugs at my heart. Nursing somebody in the final stages of cancer must be hell on earth, and to do it all alone an even deeper Hades. I’m skewered by shame that I’ve never once thought about how it must have been for him. I’ve been like Rafe Thorne, haven’t I? I’ve been so immersed in my own grief that I haven’t been able to think of anyone else. I was far too busy blaming my father for keeping me away. Not once did it occur to me that this might not have been his decision.
“I’m so sorry, Dad. I had no idea. I thought–”
“I know what you thought, sweetheart, and it’s what I decided I wanted you to believe. It was bad enough for you losing Mum without being angry with her too. What would that have achieved?”
I open my mouth to reply – but then I think of Rafe Thorne, so resentful towards Alex for dying in the first place, and eaten up with guilt and grief. I decide to keep quiet, because I know Dad has a point. Would it have helped to know that Mum had chosen to shut me out during those final months? Probably not. It would just have been another hurt.
“I didn’t want you to blame Mum, not when you were already so upset, so it seemed far better that I took the blame instead.” He gives me a rueful smile. “I guess I just didn’t think you’d still be quite so angry with me almost a decade on.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
His ink-stained hand closes around mine and even though I’m almost thirty it still feels as big and as safe as it did when I was a child. Once upon a time I used to clamber onto my father’s lap and he would make everything better by giving me a hug and telling me that everything would be OK. I’m not about to try this now, but I have a very similar feeling.
“No, I’m sorry.” He squeezes my fingers. “It wasn’t the right decision and I shouldn’t have let Claudia have her way. But you know what your mother was like. She could be pretty determined!”
I laugh because I don’t think “determined” really covers it. “Bloody-minded” and “stubborn” are probably more accurate. Then I realise that this is the first time my father and I have talked about Mum since she died. It still hurts, but not nearly as much as I’ve always been afraid it would; in fact, it feels good to open up about it at last. As the afternoon seeps into evening and the sun casts shadows into the kitchen, we share memories, and rather than feeling sad my heart feels lighter with every word.
“I’m so glad you came over today,” my father says finally.
I nod. “Me too. I just wish we’d talked about this before.”
“No regrets, sweetheart. That’s the past – and if there’s one thing that being a historian’s taught me, it’s that no matter what we may think, there’s no way we can change that. We just have to come to terms with it, learn the lessons and then move on as best we can. And if we can’t…” His voice tails off.
“And if we can’t?” I echo.
My father gives me a sad smile. “Then I guess we’re more stuck in the past than anything you might find in a pharaoh’s tomb, and just as dead inside.”
For some reason an image of Rafe Thorne, passed out on the floor in his cold empty house, flashes across my mind and I shiver. I wish I could have helped him.
“I’m so thankful that we’ve been able to talk today.” My father takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger before replacing them and giving me a rueful smile. “Mum would have hated to think that the way she chose to die drove a wedge between us all. We used to be such a close family. You’ll think me a silly old fool for saying this, but I’ve always felt that she just wouldn’t be at rest until she knew we were on our way back to that.” He pauses and looks at me with tired eyes, once bright blue but now as faded as stonewashed denim. “Is that ridiculous?”
No, I think, not ridiculous at all. Since I walloped my head there are many things that make far more sense than they did before.
But I won’t tell Alex Thorne this. No way. It’ll make him far too smug.
“And I really feel that today we’ve started to find our way back, don’t you?” Dad adds hopefully. “I know things can never be the same – but you, me and Tolly, we’re still a family. Mum wouldn’t have wanted us to become strangers because of a choice she made. She’d have hated that.”
Dad’s right. There was once a time when the Carpenter family was a tight unit. We travelled together and played together, and Mum and I had even tentatively started working together on the Aamonic period. As I sit at the table, the tired sunshine squeezing its last hopeful rays through the ragged net curtains, memories flicker through my mind like faded snapshots in an old album: Dad and Tolly in the garden; Mum and I wielding spades and grinning like loons on our first dig; the flat we rented in Cairo with its cracked tiles where lizards basked before we chased them; a lonely railway station at Christmas…
I exhale slowly. Some memories are best left buried and others are bittersweet. Are we finding our way back? I look at my father’s hopeful face and suddenly it’s as though I’ve just shrugged off my biggest rucksack, packed to the brim with my heaviest textbooks. A rucksack I hadn’t even known I was carrying.
“Yes, I think so too,” I agree.
Dad smiles and silence falls, along with the evening.
“I’ll make us both a nice cup of tea, shall I?” he says finally, and then winks at me. “Thank goodness for tea, eh? Where would the British be without it when emotions run high?”
While he bustles with chipped mugs and hunts out the same tartan biscuit tin I remember from childhood, the oddest feeling comes over me. It’s a bit like pins and needles, but in my head. Dad’s still speaking – something about how Tolly might be taking his latest girlfriend to the Caribbean for Christmas – but I can’t take it in.
As my oblivious father chats away, Mum is standing right next to him as clear in every detail as though she were really in the room. The peachy light of the sun’s last rays bathe her and she looks exactly as I remember her, tall and slim and with her thick red hair loose in ringlets to her shoulders. As I watch her she’s looking at Dad with such love that my eyes fill with tears, and when she turns and smiles at me they spill over and the whole room becomes a kaleidoscope
of shimmering light. By the time I’ve dashed them away she’s gone.
Was that another trick played on me by my damaged cerebral cortex, I wonder as I sip the tea, or was she really there? I know what the former, logical Dr Cleo Carpenter would say, but the new me – the one who talks to dead rock stars and breaks into houses – thinks very differently. I feel as though my mother has put her arms around me and given me a hug, the hug she couldn’t give me on her last Christmas Eve. I close my eyes and allow myself just to be for a moment or two, to enjoy that sense of love and acceptance. I have the strongest conviction that now she knows I’ve made my peace with Dad I won’t be seeing her again, but rather than being sad about this I’m calm. It feels right.
I feel right.
And maybe it’s a coincidence – maybe it is my injured brain playing tricks – but when I go to bed that evening in my old bedroom, the sense of peace stays with me. I lie in my single bed and burrow under my duvet, feeling warm and as safe. If I did see Mum then she’s happy and at peace. And even if I didn’t, I’ve still taken the first steps towards making things right with my father. Whether the vision was my imagination or not, I can’t remember when I last felt so calm. Nothing else matters right now. Not the museum, the research, the job or even Simon Welsh.
Alex had been right all along: making peace with your loved ones does help to make sense of it all. Now all I need to do is figure out a way that I can do the same for Rafe. That won’t be easy. If he sees me again he’ll probably call the police.
Hmm. That’s a problem for another day. Right now I can hardly keep my eyes open.
I click off my bedside light.
“I love you, Mum,” I whisper, and although she doesn’t say it back I feel it. Moments later I tumble into the deepest sleep I’ve had for a very, very long time.
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