The Last Dance

by Carolyn McCrae

  Her mind was too much on Carl. She needed to know about him. She was not really listening to anything else.

  “He’s fine, as I said, doing well. He has published quite a bit and he’s getting quite a reputation – he’ll probably break into film soon – he is such a good communicator and he loves his subject. “I wondered if I was painting too bright a picture.

  “Is he married?”

  “No. He hasn’t married – nor,” I continued swiftly, “do I believe him to be living with anyone. I think he is ‘unattached’.”

  Susannah said nothing, after a few minutes of gazing across the darkness towards the lights of Sandhey I left her to her thoughts.

  “Kathleen really is dead. It’s here in the paper.” Susannah saw the notice in the newspaper at breakfast the next morning.

  “Donaldson, Kathleen, (nee McNamara, previously Witherby) from West Kirby, Wirral, Cheshire,” she paused for effect, then continued but Alicia was not listening, she had half turned towards the window: “later moved to Grasmere, Cumberland, passed away peacefully at home on 14th December 1971 aged 56.

  A tired, small voice “I didn’t realise she was so much older. I hate her so much, I’ve always hated her. I am so glad she is dead. She should have died years ago and then there wouldn’t have been all this trouble.”

  Susannah had missed the defeat in Alicia’s voice “Don’t be a bitch mother beloved sister of Maureen, who’s she? We never knew her did we?

  “I knew her. I was her friend. She was my friend, at least I thought she was. How could she have been my friend when she was that woman’s sister?”

  Susannah didn’t hear and continued reading.

  “widow of Henry and wife of the late Arnold, mother to Carl” No flowers but enquiries via…..”

  Susannah stopped reading out loud. I remembered the wording of the funeral notice. I had written it with Carl over the phone. I remembered it gave an address – a local solicitor in Grasmere. We had deliberately not used Roberts and Jones.

  I saw the look on Susannah’s face – one of dawning recognition, hope, determination.

  “I know where he is.” She whispered.

  Alicia saw the look in her daughter’s face and just said, as if to herself, “Don’t go to that boy.”

  I don’t think Susannah even heard her as she was already out of the room.

  She certainly didn’t hear her mother’s quiet last words to her “Please. Don’t go. I need you here. I love you.”

  I didn’t go to the Lakes that day. I had to stay at home.

  Alicia was dead.

  As Susannah drove off I turned round to Alicia. She was sitting up in her bed looking out of the window. “This made such a lovely nursery.”

  And she just died.

  I sat with her for a few minutes, thinking of so many things and yet focussing on nothing. Our last real words together had been angry. I had only really told her how much I cared for her the previous night, and in anger, but she must have known. She had not told me how she felt about me, and she hadn’t told Susannah – oh so many things she had not told her daughter.

  I sat holding her hand looking at her dear face.

  She was so much loved and yet it had never been enough, she had had so much talent and had used none of it, she had suffered so much pain.

  And now she was gone.

  I had to call Sandhey, Charles and Max needed to know, but first I called Grasmere, but I held out little hope that the young solicitor was going to be able to keep Carl and Susannah apart until I could get there. I would have to talk to Carl.

  Carl, Maureen and I were supposed to be meeting for lunch at a local hotel. He had travelled up the previous day and I was driving up this Monday morning. We were then going to sort out all the myriad of things that can be sorted out after a death, papers needed signing, certificates to be obtained, there was so much running around – I had always had the idea that it was no bad thing, keeping, as it did, the bereaved’s minds from their loss. Now it was just going to be a nightmare of logistics.

  And it had started to snow.

  I called the hotel and spoke briefly to Carl. I told him what had happened to Alicia and that Susannah was on her way to the Lakes, the weather was dreadful but there was no way I could stop her. She did not know that her mother had died.

  I was surprised at how easily the words could be spoken.

  “Carl, you will have to sort out your mother’s affairs, Gordon at the solicitors will be able to do everything I could do for you. I’m sorry. I can’t come up.”

  He seemed to take that in his stride.

  “What radio station does she listen to in the car?”

  “What on earth sort of question is that?”

  “What radio station? I’ll call them and get them to broadcast one of those emergency messages – you know the sort of thing, dangerously ill, daughter must return home, believed to be driving north through Lancashire. She might hear it and get back to you. You know that if she comes here I will have to see her and I really don’t want to do that, not yet. It’s not the right time to do that.”

  He was talking sense but I had to admit I hadn’t a clue what radio station she might be listening to.

  “I’ll try the BBC anyway – they’ll help.”

  In the end it was the weather that stopped her. I got a call from a phone box just south of Preston.

  “Ted what should I do? It’s snowing and the roads are dreadful. I think I’m stuck. She was crying with frustration and anger, but was able to give details of where she was.

  “I’ll get someone to come and get you. There’s a chap from the office who lives not far away – he’ll find you and get you into the safe and warm.” I wasn’t going to tell her then, when she was cold and alone.

  So it was amongst concerned and sympathetic strangers that she heard the BBC announcement. She called me immediately and I told her it was too late – her mother was dead.

  “I didn’t tell you when you were on the road as I didn’t want you to be worried and frightened – I wanted you to be with friends.”

  “I know Uncle Ted, thank you.” I think the fact that she had called me Uncle again told more about how vulnerable she was feeling than anything else she could have said.

  When she got back home and the doctor had been and Alicia taken away we sat at the table where only that morning we had all been reading the paper at breakfast.

  I sat her down with a glass of brandy and began to talk about Carl.

  I told her that I knew where he was, that if she really wanted I could put them in touch with each other, I told her how concerned he had been that morning when we had spoken, how he had tried to get news to her over the radio.

  “But if he really wanted to see me he could, couldn’t he?”

  What answer could I give?

  “Of course he could have been in touch with you at any time but he didn’t when he thought you were happy without him.

  “But he knew that wasn’t true. And he was here when Joe – when Joe died.”

  “Perhaps he wants to wait until you are well again.”

  She argued that she was well, but the tears running effortlessly down her face showed that she was not.

  “Susannah, my dear, you have been through so very much in the last few months. You have had so very much to deal with and been hurt and troubled so very deeply. Carl has had the good sense to stay away from you – he feels, and I believe quite rightly, that to come back into your life at this time would harm you far more than it would help.”

  “So I’ve got to pull myself together.”

  “No one’s saying that, my dear. We are saying that you need some time to come to terms with everything. For a start,” I tried to turn the conversation to more practical things, “you cannot stay here. You must go and stay at Sandhey. Max believes that would be the best thing. Monika can look after you until you are better able to set up your own house again, with your children.”

  Chapter Th
irty-Six

  Perhaps that is what life is like, years of routine punctuated by events that disrupt everything for short periods of time, changing people’s directions, but not lasting long. And after the events of 1971 the next few years seemed to be a quiet time in the lives of the Donaldsons.

  Susannah went back to live at Sandhey immediately after her mother’s funeral, and she began to be more peaceful. Perhaps it was hearing Carl on the radio, seeing him and listening to the enthusiasm behind those programmes that led to her decision to go back to University. She was going to earn that good degree she had failed to get five years earlier. She had changed subjects – to History – and was going to study like she should have done before. Circumstances were not going to get in her way this time. For some reason she had determined on Sussex and, as soon as her application was accepted in April 1972 she spent all her time in Brighton.

  Meanwhile her children grew older without her. She had not seen them since the birthday party in 1970, she didn’t so much avoid them as make sure she was never in a situation where she would see them. They lived with a succession of mother’s helps in the houses next to the Parrys. They had frequent visits from Monika and Charles. The Parrys didn’t interfere – having made their point about the children being ‘Parry Children’ they seemed to be content as long as someone else paid.

  Meanwhile, after Alicia’s funeral, I got my life back together at the flat in Millcourt and concentrated on the business.

  I had tried to avoid Carl’s programmes when Alicia and Susannah were with me but now I made the effort to follow his career, watching his successful television series based on the battles of the Peninsula, listening to his participation in various quizzes on the Radio. He was doing well, juggling his development as popular communicator on television with his growing reputation in the academic world. He was also publishing fiction, historical novels which captured even more of the public to his enthusiasm for those times. They were going to film these, a well known actor was to star. Everything was going well for him.

  I knew so much of what he was doing but direct contact was limited to Christmas and Birthday cards.

  When, in July 1976, Susannah graduated Max wanted to mark the occasion. A party was held in the garden at Sandhey.

  I stood in the brilliant sunshine of that long hot summer on the lawn of Sandhey that had seen so many family gatherings. Watching Susannah standing with champagne glass in hand, just as Alicia had stood on the afternoon of her daughter’s wedding, I was struck by how much she was like her mother and how little there was left of the young girl who had made that disastrous marriage twelve years earlier.

  The thought occurred to me that it could have been exactly the same glass.

  She caught me looking at her and walked over.

  “Am I like her?”

  “Very”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Very”

  She laughed. The years of study had changed her, she had lost the defeated, vulnerable, child-like quality that had hung around her throughout her marriage. She was no longer a victim.

  “Ted, I haven’t asked this for years – you know as well as I do why not – but how are the children?”

  I laughed out loud, I knew she was going to ask me that so I had been to see them just the day before. Monika and Charles weren’t the only people who had kept up the contact with them.

  “What are you laughing at?” she was bewildered

  “I just knew you would want to see them now.”

  “I didn’t say that! I just asked how they were.”

  “But you do want to see them don’t you?”

  “I am just wondering how they are.”

  “Yes, of course you were ‘just wondering’.”

  “Stop messing with me! I’m serious.” She was laughing, a relaxed, confident laugh such as I had never heard from her.

  I stopped joking.

  “Yes, Susannah – it’s about time you were serious about those children. They have not had a mother for 6 years. They have been brought up by nannies and they don’t know what or who they are.”

  “You make it sound like it was my fault.”

  “Fault doesn’t come into it. We’re not talking ‘fault’ we’re talking about what is best for those children of yours. Josie is nearly a teenager now – she’s old enough to know she’s been abandoned.”

  “She hasn’t been abandoned! She’s had the best possible care!”

  “And if Charles and Monika hadn’t visited them every week, if they hadn’t given them birthday and Christmas presents every year – if they hadn’t taken them away for holidays what do you think they would have been?”

  “They haven’t done all that?”

  “Of course they have. Didn’t you have any idea?”

  “No.”

  “You are so like your mother, so like the worst bits of your mother!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever knew. No don’t interrupt. She was beautiful, but she was also the most selfish and self-centred woman. Nothing existed if it wasn’t in her life, if she hadn’t a starring role in it. Just like you. You have had your eyes completely shut to everything and everyone since you started this course. You have been ‘focussed’ – that’s the modern term for it isn’t it? – focussed. Focussed to such an extent that the rest of the world can just take a running jump. Well we haven’t all been idle while you have been somewhere else in your mind. We’ve been looking after your children, your brother, you. We’ve been making sure everything went well for you because sooner or later we knew you would grow up. Well, we’re still waiting!”

  I had said far too much – but yet still nothing like enough. I watched the shock on her face, hating myself for spoiling her big day, the day she had worked so hard for.

  So yet again I left, hoping things would sort themselves out – a failing of mine that seemed always to cause more problems than it solved but which I couldn’t correct.

  I got a phone call from Max the next day.

  Susannah had asked for a serious talk with him, and she then found out all the extended family had done for the children, all she owed him and Charles and Monika. She talked to them long and hard around that wretched kitchen table at Sandhey that had seen so much of the family history. She had learned of the childhood illnesses, the traumas, the broken bones, the Christmas presents, the way Josie acted as a little mother to the boys, how they always asked how their mummy was, “is she better?” “When is she coming to take them home?”

  She then sat in the garden with Max and Monika, finding out all the little details of the family that she thought she had no feelings for looking through album after album of photographs that Monika had kept, for when she might need them. She went inside and asked to talk to Charles on his own, he told her how they knew she would pull through someday – that they all understood how awful it had all been, how Monika had always told them that one day ‘Mummy’ would be better.

  “You’ve kept them together.”

  “Yes, we have. We’ve kept them together for you.”

  “Ouch! Have I really been that selfish?

  “Yes. Don’t expect me not to tell the truth now you’re strong enough to take it.”

  “That’s a compliment isn’t it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Will you go and talk to Monika?” Charles knew there was much Monika wanted to tell this new Susannah.

  “Let me tell you something you don’t know.” Monika was sitting with Susannah on the sea wall at the bottom of the garden, mugs of iced tea in hand. Two hours later they were sitting on that wall with their arms around each other, both crying.

  It must be a difficult thing, at such an age, to realise that there are people whose feelings and thoughts matter as much as your own. In those two hours Susannah learned that she had more to look forward to than many, that she had more to be thankful for than most and that she had a wonderful future a
head – if only she would face it.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry Susannah, just understand. Just understand through all your book-learning – that there are people who love with no return, who love where there is no reason, who love through thick and thin, who care for other people simply because they are other people with feelings and who are hurt.”

  After the phone call from Max I called Carl. I had been calling him regularly every month to keep him up to date with Susannah’s progress and the children. We spoke frequently enough for him not to think too much of it, but this time he knew exactly what the call was about.

  “She did it didn’t she?”

  “Yes, Carl, she did. She did what she should have done years ago. She got her First. They’ve offered her a job doing research.”

  “I’m so pleased for her. She deserves something to go right for her.”

  “She still wants you, Carl. She hasn’t ever forgotten. She won’t ever forget.”

  “Did anyone ever tell her?”

  “No. No one ever did.”

  “I won’t marry her, Ted. You know that. I can’t have children. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I think she has enough children Carl, I don’t think that’s a problem.”

  “Is she back with them?”

  “Practically.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Are you ever going to do anything with your life, Carl? Other than work I mean. Are you ever going to do anything if you can’t have Susannah?”

  “Nope. Her or nobody – always has been, always will be. But sometimes I almost give up hope that she will need me as much as I need her. She’s got to need me – not because of desperation or pain or that she had no one else – but simply because she’s on top of her life and thinks I would make it even better. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I believe I do.”

  Susannah came to see me at Millcourt that evening. She told me what had happened, she asked how much I had known – I had shrugged – and I listened as she asked question after question.

  We sat into the night, talking, sitting on the same window seat that she had played on as a child with brother Charles and Carl.