by Julie Corbin
‘What do you want?’ I sound calm but my knees are wobbling and I’m sliding down the wall. I drag myself upright again.
‘Your daughter sounds just like you did. Does she look like you?’
‘What do you want, Orla?’
‘To catch up,’ she says lightly. ‘What else?’
‘I’d rather not,’ I tell her. ‘Please stop calling me.’
‘Grace, don’t be like that.’ There’s bewilderment in her voice. ‘Why can’t we spend some time together? Weren’t we friends once?’
‘Once,’ I agree. ‘Twenty-four years ago.’
‘But we were friends. We connected. Good friends are hard to find, aren’t they?’
‘I have enough friends. I’m happy as I am.’
‘I want us to meet up,’ she says, more definite this time and I sense steel behind the apparent friendliness.
‘Well, I don’t,’ I say firmly. ‘And I don’t want you ringing me again.’
‘I don’t understand.’ She breathes in and then out, loudly, the out breath ending on a sigh. I wait and, finally, she says, ‘We have history together? Don’t we?’
‘Ancient history. Long’ – I’m about to say dead and buried but think better of it – ‘ago,’ I finish.
‘Just once. Meet me just the once. For old times’ sake.’
‘What old times would they be exactly?’
‘Are you saying that we didn’t have any fun together? Does our whole relationship have to be coloured by what happened at the end?’
I think about Rose. How much she trusted me. I feel the familiar sadness ripen inside me like a bruised, inedible fruit. ‘Yes, I think it does.’
‘Grace, I’ve changed.’ Her voice drops to a whisper. ‘I have. Truly, I have. I can’t explain it all to you over the phone. It sounds dumb and I don’t think you’ll even believe me.’ She laughs and the sound grates in my ear.
I move the phone away from my head and hold it at a shaky arm’s length so that her excited voice is muffled.
‘I know how this must seem, me getting in touch after all this time but please, just listen. I’m back visiting my mum. She’s living in Edinburgh now. In Merchiston. My dad, you know, he passed away a few years back.’
I bring the phone up to my ear again. ‘I’m sorry.’ I mean it. ‘I liked him. He was always very kind to me. And your mum.’ I think for a moment. ‘I liked her too.’
‘I know. It was sad. Dad was very sick and was in a lot of pain but towards the end he was peaceful and, well . . . I guess we all have to let go eventually.’
‘You sound American.’
‘Do I?’
‘Your intonation. Some of the words.’
‘Canadian. I lived there a while.’
‘How is your mum?’
‘She’s good. She remarried. Is happy with her new husband. Murray Cooper. He’s what you would call a good bloke.’
I strain to catch an edge of bitterness in her voice but there’s none that I can hear. Perhaps she has changed? I shake off the thought and think about what Euan said: Find out what she wants. ‘Why do you want to meet me?’
‘It’s a long story. And better told face to face.’
‘Why would your story have anything to do with me?’ I try to keep my voice light but my jaw is trembling and my mouth is dry, each word seeming to stick to the insides of my cheeks.
‘Relax, Grace. It’s not what you think,’ she says darkly, her tone edged with mirth. ‘How about I drive up tomorrow?’
‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘I’ll come to you. And not tomorrow. Thursday is better.’
‘In Edinburgh?’
‘Yes. I need to shop for supplies: brushes, acrylics, that sort of thing.’
‘You’re still painting?’
‘Where shall we meet?’
‘There’s a small restaurant, on the left-hand side, halfway up Cockburn Street. One o’clock?’
‘Fine.’
‘I look forward to that.’ I can hear her smile. ‘See you then.’
As the line goes dead, so do my legs and I crumple down on to the floor. I sit in a heap for five minutes or more, trying to work out how scared I should be. On the one hand she sounded friendly and interested, on the other, pushy and determined. Perhaps she does just want to be friends but it seems unlikely. Orla always had her own agenda, and as Euan reminded me, she wasn’t one to give up before she got what she wanted. Thinking back, it doesn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that even if she is only half as reckless and manipulative as she used to be then I should be afraid. I have to tread carefully. I can’t let her back into my life. She is a living, breathing reminder of what happened all those years ago and I don’t want her near Paul and the girls – not least because of what she knows about me.
June 1978–1982
Orla’s mother is French. She wears neat black suits with fitted skirts that fall just below her knee and short, boxy jackets with square pockets and large buttons. She wears patterned silk scarves that she wraps three times around her neck and tucks into her collar. She wears stockings not tights and slides her feet into shoes with three-inch heels. Her lipstick is red and she keeps it in the fridge. Her perfume is both earthy and exotic and it draws me to her. She sings mournful songs as she does the washing-up. She smokes cigarettes, openly, defiantly, dropping her head back to make smoke rings curl up to the ceiling. She calls me ‘mon petit chou’ and strokes my hair as if I am a cat, long luxurious strokes that make me smile up into her face. She kisses me on both cheeks whenever I come to visit. She has flashes of anger, stamps her foot, says ‘merde’. Then, in the next second, she will laugh like the world is once more a happy place. When Orla’s father comes home from work she kisses him on the mouth and strokes her hand down the front of his trousers just as she strokes my hair.
‘She’s a right selfish madam,’ my mother says.
‘A fish out of water,’ Euan’s mother says.
‘God knows what Roger sees in her,’ my father says. ‘She’s as flirty as a flea in a bottle.’
I think she’s wonderful. When I’m ten I ask her if she always wanted to live in Scotland. She throws back her head and laughs like this is the funniest thing she’s ever heard. Then she looks at me mysteriously. ‘Be careful whom you fall in love with, Grace,’ she says. ‘There are so many ways to live a life.’
I am allowed to call her by her first name. ‘On-je-line,’ I say, sounding out each syllable.
She claps. ‘Such a perfect accent,’ she says.
To Angeline, I am clever, I am pretty and I am the best friend her daughter could ever have.
Orla is allowed to drink wine. It’s mixed with water – half and half – but she has it in a proper wine glass, sits with her parents around the table and is listened to as if she were an adult.
Both Orla and I are only children but whereas I am often kept at home or weighed down with ‘too dangerous’, ‘be careful’, ‘mind you don’t fall’, ‘you’ll catch your death out there’, Orla is allowed to swim in the sea in winter, dance in puddles, camp outside under the night sky.
When I’m ten I see Angeline in the back garden, topless. ‘In this country,’ she says, ‘when the sun comes out you should always take advantage of it.’
I stare at her. Her skin is the colour of caramel and gleams with oil that smells strongly of coconut. She leans forward to kiss me on the cheeks and her nipples brush my arm.
And she is a Catholic. She wears a black lace mantilla over her head. She reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and when her dark eyes flash my way I feel blessed. Sometimes my mum allows me to go to church with her and I watch her pray like her life depends upon it. She prays in French, murmuring the words in a fast, breathy monotone, her fingers rubbing each pearl in her rosary beads as she moves along the chain and all the way back to the beginning. She lights a candle in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary and crosses herself. Then she turns to me and takes my hand. ‘Ice cream?’ sh
e says and I nod, smiling up into her eyes.
At home we eat plain food. ‘Get that down you,’ my mother says, passing me a steaming plate of stovies. ‘It’ll bring the colour to your cheeks.’
Angeline wrinkles up her nose at the mention of corned beef and cabbage or mince and tatties. She says haggis is hardly fit for dogs. She travels to Edinburgh once a week to buy courgettes, aubergines and peppers, olive oil and anchovies. Sometimes they eat in front of the television. Dried fruits, apricots and figs dipped into Camembert melted in its box.
Orla spends a lot of time ignoring her mother. ‘I’m more of a daddy’s girl,’ she says. By the time we’re both teenagers, they have out-and-out screaming matches. Orla swears and shouts in rapid, hectic French. She throws cups and glasses until her mother grabs her wrists and shakes her. It’s at times like this that Orla turns up at my house, unannounced, just barges in like she lives here. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing: having tea, soaking in the bath, asleep even, she just comes straight in and has hysterics. My mother calms her down, mops her tears, listens to her complaints and feeds her home-baked biscuits and cakes. Then my dad drives her home. If it was me, I’d be told to stop the nonsense, but Orla gets away with it. ‘She’s highly strung,’ my mother pronounces. ‘It’ll be the French blood in her.’
When I’m fourteen, I’m on a trip to Edinburgh with my grandmother. Gran is in the toilet in Jenners department store and I am waiting for her. I walk a few yards into the lingerie department and run my fingers through a rack of silk nightdresses with elaborate lace around the bodice and sleeves.
I see Angeline. My heart lifts and as I open my mouth to shout hello, a man walks towards her. It’s Monica’s father. I wonder why he’s there. I watch him as he wraps his arms around her from behind and she leans back into him so that he can kiss her neck. She whispers up into his ear and his arms tighten around her waist.
She sees me and one of her eyebrows arches just a little. She places a finger vertically over her lips and leaves it there until I raise my own to mimic her. Then she smiles and blows me a kiss.
I don’t know what to think.
3
There is no one in the graveyard but me. Windswept trees afford some shelter from the briny air that evaporates up from the sea but still many of the headstones have fallen over and others are faded or covered in moss, succumbing to weather and neglect. But not this one. This one is upright, gold lettering legible on a background of pink marble.
Rose Adams
1975–1984
Safe in God’s hands
The grave in front is well tended. I have brought some delicate yellow roses, twelve of them, wrapped in a cream silk ribbon. I put them in the vase and pull a few small weeds from the ground. Then I kneel down, clasp my hands together and close my eyes. Guilt, regret, sorrow and remorse: over the last twenty-four years I have known them all but now, with Orla’s phone call yesterday, I am mostly afraid. Afraid of being found out. I try to come up with a prayer but God and I have never been close and I don’t feel I have any right to call on Him now. Instead, I speak directly to Rose. Please, Rose. Please. I have done my best. Please. It’s not much but it’s all I can think of to say to her.
Orla’s voice is still in my ears and I find myself going over and over what she said. And the more I think about it, the more I realise that she was leading me in the direction she wanted, keeping me talking until I agreed to meet her. I am disappointed with myself for falling in with her plans but at the same time I am not sure what else I could have done. She wasn’t about to give up. If I hadn’t answered her yesterday then she would have called back today and tomorrow and the day after that until I spoke to her. All I can do is listen to what she has to say and hope that she will leave again without causing any damage. One thing is for sure: I don’t want her to meet Paul and the girls. I have a life, a good life, and there is no place for Orla in it.
On the way back to my car, I pause in front of Euan’s mother’s gravestone.
Maureen Elizabeth Macintosh
1927–1999
beloved wife, mother and friend
It strikes me, as it always does, that the dash in between both dates says nothing about the life that was led. Mo was the original earth mother, universally loved and as much involved in my upbringing as my own parents were.
She gave birth to six children of her own: four boys and two girls. My own parents, on the other hand, tried for a baby for almost twenty years and when their marriage approached the end of its second decade with still no sign of the longed-for baby, they quietly gave up. Each month had become a time of mourning, a curse, and they couldn’t live that way, my mother said, so they let go of their dreams and immersed themselves in work – my mother in the university library, my father as a carpenter with the local firm of builders.
Mo and her husband Angus lived next door and their children, a healthy, happy brood, spilled over the fence and into my parents’ lives. A balm of sorts, perhaps. My mother would bake cakes with the girls while my father taught the boys how to work with wood, how to measure and use the electric saw, how to join and sand, how to make bird boxes, wooden spoons, letter racks and shelves.
So it was in the giving up that somehow I came into being and I was born on my parents’ twenty-first wedding anniversary. But what with all the waiting and the hoping and the praying and then the letting go, my mother found that the reality of a child was often more than she could take. So when I refused my dinner again or ran away from the potty only to wet myself, Mo scooped me up and took me next door where I was absorbed into the crowd. I was propped up in the pram alongside Euan, her youngest and just three months older than me, or in the playpen in the kitchen where she talked to us while she chopped vegetables or prepared a chicken.
When I started nursery school my mother went back to work. Every day I escaped the intensity of parental interest that shadows the only child and walked home with Mo and Euan to spend the afternoon with them and any other stragglers who needed a place to go. Often I stayed for tea, Euan and I bolstered with cushions until we were tall enough to hold our chins above the level of the table.
I wish I’d brought two sets of flowers: one for Mo’s grave too. Instead, I have to be happy with brushing spots of earth and stray leaves off the stone. She’s been dead almost nine years but I can still remember her voice. Some things we’re not meant to know, Grace. Some things we’re meant just to accept.
I wonder at the things I accepted and the things that I didn’t and I hope that wherever she is, she understands the choices I made.
I’m two minutes from my parents’ house and I drop in on them on my way back from the church. My dad is up a ladder. He’s closer to ninety than eighty but he won’t slow down: I’ll be in my box soon enough and up till then I’ll carry on as normal.
I keep the ladder steady and shout up to him. ‘Hello, up there!’
He looks down between the rungs. ‘Oh, it’s you, hen. Shouldn’t you be working?’
‘I’ve been out taking photographs.’
‘Nice work if you can get it. What brings you here then?’ He climbs down, putting one careful foot after the other. ‘Of course, it’s the birthday cakes. For the party.’ He cuddles me tight. ‘Your mother has been fretting over the icing for days. Should she make it pink for Daisy and Ella or just for Ella?’
‘Ella.’
‘That’s what I said.’
I follow him over to the bench where he throws himself down, landing heavily on his backside, his feet flying up in the air.
‘Look at that view.’ His breathing is hoarse and he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and coughs into it. ‘No amount of money can buy a view like that.’
My dad has the bench positioned on the crest of the hill with an uninterrupted view of the sloping land and the water beyond it. The air is crisp and clear and, out at sea, an oil tanker tips over the horizon. The wind whips the waves into frothy white peaks that wash the rocky shoreline clean wh
ile up above gulls caw, flock and hover on the wind then dive into the water for fish.
I breathe in deeply and smile. ‘I love it here,’ I say, then notice that a small red stain is spreading across his handkerchief. ‘Is there blood on that hankie, Dad?’
‘What’s that?’ He pushes the evidence deep into his trouser pocket. ‘You’re as bad as your mother. Looking for problems where there aren’t any.’
‘Dad?’
‘What?’ His face contrives innocence but behind it his eyes flicker with anxiety.
I want to hug him to me but I don’t. I am on the edge of my own tears, ready to blurt out my own problems. ‘Shall I get us a cup of tea?’ I say.
‘She won’t want you interrupting her.’ He gives a derisory hiccup. ‘I tried to steal myself a cup a minute ago but was given short shrift.’
I lay a hand on his shoulder then go into the house. My folks have dozens of photos in the hallway: Euan and I sit end to end in a Silver Cross pram dribbling ice cream on ourselves; me and my dad holding up a shelf I’d just made; my parents’ wedding photo, an impossibly young couple standing in front of the church, shyly holding hands.
And at the end of the row there’s a photo of Orla and me. We are just thirteen and are standing together in front of a high wooden fence. Our inside arms are wrapped around each other’s back, our riding boots and jodhpurs splashed with mud. We are grinning like mad. I remember the day well. We were both competing in the village pony trials and managed to come home with four rosettes and two cups between us.
I bend down and scrutinise the photo. There is no mistaking that we are the best of friends, tired legs and arms are slumped against each other and my forehead is resting on her shoulder. I caught up later on, but at that point she was almost six inches taller than me. And looking at her face, the black curly hair, dark eyes and open smile, I feel something unexpected. I feel happy. Tomorrow, for the first time in twenty-four years, we will lay eyes on each other. With a few chosen remarks to the right people she could blow my world apart and yet there is a small corner of me that is looking forward to meeting her.