by Amy Bratley
I read that letter more times than Harry Potter books have been sold. I knew it off by heart even though Isabel told me I should shred it. The ‘ps.’ made me spit feathers. I quoted it, verbatim, to anyone who asked where Ethan was or why we were no longer together. I called him, got his voicemail and read the note back to him, demanding to know if it was an elaborate joke. I never heard back. I called again, but still no answer. I sent him a furious email, but I got no answer. And Rome? I knew he had a cousin out there, but he’d never said he wanted to go there. It had made me wonder if I knew Ethan at all. When I had no reply from him, I stopped trying to contact him completely, finding it preferable to pretend he was dead.
‘And it made you feel like shit, remember?’ Isabel said. ‘You fell to pieces, remember? Virtually had a nervous breakdown. Christ, Eve, I don’t want to see you like that ever again and I don’t want you to go stirring anything up with him because . . .’
She let her words trail off into nothing. She fixed me with a stare, genuine concern on her face. I nodded in acknowledgement. When he’d left, it was like my world ended. Like we’d been driving along in a really fast car with the music turned up high and I’d been whooping at the top of my lungs, when, without warning, he’d opened the passenger door and shoved me out onto a deserted road. I just stared at his letter endlessly, in case I’d missed a sentence, or a clue. But no. That was it. Four lines of piss. And then came the self-doubt. Wave upon wave of poisonous self-doubt drowning out all rational thought. I started to believe it must have been my fault. I scoured my brain for the times when I’d given Ethan a hard time and decided that my petty jealousy had driven him away, that I was to blame. If someone as vibrant as Ethan thought it wasn’t working out and had left in such a hurry, then it was probably because I wasn’t good enough for him.
‘You’ve got to keep your head straight,’ she said. ‘Especially because . . . has Joe said anything about his plans?’
She watched my face, and when I looked confused, she shook her head as if dismissing the thought.
‘About what?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said.
‘No, come on,’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s just that I think you need to be careful,’ she said. ‘From what Joe’s been saying, I think, you know, he’s going to do something really special and for you to be playing around with . . .’
‘He’s going to do what?’ I said, watching her face carefully. ‘And I’m not playing around, for God’s sake. I’ve seen Ethan once, in a room full of other people, completely by chance. Anyway, what’s Joe going to do?’
When she didn’t answer, I frowned.
‘Isabel!’ I said. Then it dawned on me. Of course. He’d been asking about moving in together, dropping bundles of property details on the kitchen table, talking about having our own football team of children, buying bigger and more elaborate bouquets of flowers. He was going to propose, for real this time, wasn’t he?
‘Is he going to propose?’ I said, biting at my thumbnail, looking at Isabel. ‘I mean, seriously propose?’
She didn’t look at me, just shook her head pityingly.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ she said unconvincingly. ‘But he’s got plans. He came to see me about something and I’m just warning you, it’ll break his heart if he finds out you’ve been disloyal when he’s trying—’
‘I’m not being disloyal!’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just care about you.’
Isabel wouldn’t budge when I pressed her for more details and eventually I gave up, assuming that Joe was actually going to propose. It made sense. He’d been working up to it for months with the jokes and banter. I waited to feel excited, but instead, I panicked. Did I want to get married? I picked up the carrier bag of paintbrushes, took one out and flexed the bristles against my palm.
‘I should get on and start with the kitchen,’ I said, pointing to the grubby old kitchen, which had seen more deep-fat frying than should be legal.
‘Don’t see Ethan again,’ Isabel said softly. ‘Don’t go next weekend. It’s a big mistake.’
I sighed.
‘Sorry, I’ll shut up,’ she said.
‘Yes, shut up, I get the message,’ I said to Isabel, stomping into the cafe’s kitchen, when my phone rang. I whipped it out of my pocket, hoping it was my dad. He often rang in the morning, just to see how I was getting along, and I needed to hear his reassuring voice to ground me.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I said, smiling down the phone. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Hello, love, yes, I’m good. Are you still coming over later?’ he said. ‘How’s your morning going? Are you at the cafe?’
The sound of his voice released something in me. I leaned against the counter and looked out of the small kitchen window, out to the courtyard, currently a dumping site for broken furniture. I sighed.
‘Fine,’ I said, my voice cracking. ‘But, well, actually, I’m not fine.’
‘I can hear something’s wrong,’ he said. ‘I can hear it in your voice. What is it, love? Come on, out with it. Tell your old dad.’
My spirits lifted a little. If there was one person in the world whom I couldn’t keep my feelings from, it was my dad. It was like he could read my mind, or see into my heart.
‘Actually, Dad,’ I said, ‘you’re right, something’s happened.’
I pushed open the window with my free hand. Isabel stuck her head around the door, held up an example of the menu we’d had printed up and delivered. She gave me a big smile and dropped one on the counter, then opened the back door to the courtyard.
‘Oh God, what?’ my dad said. ‘Is everyone still alive?’
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘But Ethan’s back.’
There was a silence.
‘Ethan?’ he said.
Dad murmured while I told him everything about Ethan turning up to the Saturday Supper Club out of the blue.
‘Isabel says I shouldn’t see him again,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to the next Supper Club. It’s wrong, isn’t it? I haven’t even told Joe yet. I don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling, but everything I used to feel, it’s all come flooding back. I feel sick to the stomach.’
Dad made a humming sound. I heard the sound of the fridge opening and closing in the background.
‘Well,’ he said, pouring what I knew would be his usual morning fruit smoothie into a glass. ‘Personally, I don’t think you should see him again, even if it means giving up on the Supper Club. He broke your heart, love, really mashed it up good and proper.’
‘I know,’ I said, resting my hand on the back of my neck. ‘But I need to know why he went. I want to know whether I still do really have feelings for him. I literally can’t stop thinking about him. I know it’s reckless, but what was it Mum used to say? Jump off—’
‘Jump off cliffs and find your wings on the way down,’ he interrupted. ‘But your mother was crazy. Mad as a hatter. Saying that, I would have done anything for her, including jumping off a cliff, as you know. God love her. But listen, why don’t you come over and we can talk about it? Or you can talk and I’ll listen. I’m good at listening. Then we can make sense of this together. How about it?’
My eyes filled with tears.
‘OK,’ I said, in a tiny, high voice. ‘Thank you, Dad.’
‘No need to thank me,’ he said gently. ‘I love you very much. Your mum did too. Both you girls are everything to me.’
I heard him smile down the phone.
‘I love you too,’ I said, smiling back.
Chapter Six
The night before my mother died, when I was sitting on a squeaky vinyl chair, keeping a vigil beside her hospital bed, in a perfectly eloquent outburst she told me how to make crème anglaise. I listened to her words like she was giving me the Secret of Life. And, in a way, she was.
‘This is the time to say goodbye,’ my father had whispered to Daisy and me earlier that evening, eyes red, his e
ntire body trembling, in the hospital corridor next to a vending machine. ‘Because when your mum falls asleep this time, she’s not going to wake up.’
Daisy, who had just turned fourteen, was furious with everyone: me, Dad, the doctors, Mum. She punched the vending machine, stalked away from the ward we were in, yelling that she hated us all and that she didn’t want to be in this stupid ‘arsehole’ hospital a minute longer. Dad, exhausted from nights without sleep, stumbled after her, telling me to go and sit with Mum, which I did, holding her hand and my breath as I watched her, more quiet and still than I’d ever seen her, waiting for something, anything, to happen, when she opened her eyes and ran through the ingredients (heavy cream, whole milk, vanilla essence, sugar and large egg yolks) and cooking method of crème anglaise.
‘It’s heavenly,’ she muttered, closing her eyes. ‘Don’t forget.’
‘I’ll never forget,’ I said, my nose pressed to her ear, her hair wet with my tears, to make sure she heard. ‘Thank you.’
She didn’t say anything else and, despite what my dad had said, I didn’t say goodbye because I thought ‘thank you’ was better, and I didn’t want her to think I was planning to go anywhere. I wanted to be with her until she’d had enough. I stayed by her bed, holding her hand gently, willing myself not to cry. I didn’t want to make her feel guilty for dying. I didn’t want her to feel she had to comfort me, when it was she who needed comfort the most. I knew she feared whatever was to come, whatever death was. I had heard her say to my dad, ‘I am scared, Frankie. I am so scared to be without you all . . .’
I didn’t want her to be scared. I didn’t want her to feel alone. Two hours later, after I had fallen asleep with my head on the side of her bed, Dad told me that she had gone, that her organs had finally stopped working. I crawled under the bed and sat there and I screamed and screamed, until a nurse closed our door shut and Dad pulled me out by my legs and held me so tightly, there was no air left to scream.
‘It’s the three of us now,’ my dad said afterwards, on the car ride home, when each of us sat in our coats, raw, pale-faced and hollow-eyed.
‘It’s the three of us against the world,’ he said.
When neither Daisy nor I replied, Dad pushed a Beatles album into the CD player and turned up the volume. ‘This was your mum’s favourite,’ he choked.
Was. I looked out of the window and watched dawn breaking over London, a streaky pink sky contrasting against the grey buildings, the joggers and dustbin trucks and buses and coffee shops opening up, as if nothing had happened at all, as if it was just another ordinary day, while listening to my dad sing ‘Here Comes the Sun’ at the top of his lungs inside that small Renault with an empty crisp packet underfoot and mum’s CND stickers on the boot, her Chanel No. 19 perfume lingering on the passenger seatbelt. He sang out his heart; sang for her, my mum, his wife, all of our most precious love. Was.
When we were home again, we steered clear of the kitchen table, formerly the heart of our family life. Without Mum, there was no vase of freshly cut flowers there on the table, no delicious cooking smells wafting out the oven, no jar of home-baked biscuits or enormous Victoria sponge cake, oozing with fresh cream and strawberry jam, waiting at the table centre, no smiling face encouraging us to sit together, to eat and talk and hug and laugh. We avoided meal times, snacking on crackers and cheese instead, or nibbling on meals that various aunts left out in big glass dishes with a list of cooking instructions scribbled on a pad. Dad couldn’t cook at all and didn’t even attempt it. I tried to speak to him to coax him out of his misery, but for a few weeks he lost his voice completely and didn’t even reply. I tried to talk to Daisy about how we could cheer him up – cheer us all up – but she slammed her bedroom door in my face, leaving me alone with my grief. So, at a loss to know what to do, with advice from those various aunts, I decided to learn how to cook. I made it my mission to learn the recipes my mum had filled our life with. I pulled out Mum’s recipe books and studied the words and ingredients and made simple meals for Daisy and my dad. I called them to the kitchen table and pushed plates of food, sometimes inedible, sometimes good, under their noses. Dad would put his hand over mine and thank me, his eyes glistening. Daisy would invariably push the plate away and say she wasn’t hungry.
‘Our hearts might be empty, but at least we have full stomachs now,’ Dad would say. ‘Thank you, Eve.’
At those moments, I felt unimaginably proud. I knew that my mother would be pleased with me, from wherever she was watching. I knew that this was her key to life: cooking and sharing good food with her family. I would make it my mission to do as she did. I would fill her shoes the best I could, fill the house with the same warmth she had. At those moments, I could see a future beyond grief, a future where we could all, once again, be sat around the kitchen table, together. And after a while Dad began to make an effort to live again, keeping his grief hidden deep, and my mum’s memory alive, by constantly talking about her; so, even though she wasn’t there for us to see and touch, it was almost like she was in the next room, just waiting.
And that’s how we learned to exist. I cooked and Dad ate. We talked about Mum. We talked about what she would do and what she would say. I tried to tempt Daisy out of her room with cakes cooked to Mum’s recipes. But Daisy withdrew completely. She refused to eat the food I prepared. On the rare occasion she did eat, she relished telling me it was nowhere as good as Mum’s. When once I put on Mum’s favourite apron, Daisy ripped it off me and cut it into pieces with the kitchen scissors.
‘You can’t be her, you stupid little girl!’ she screamed in my face. ‘I hate you!’
I was holding a recipe book at the time and I hit her as hard as I could until she stopped screaming at me.
‘What do you think your mother would say?’ Dad had shouted at us, his whole body shaking. ‘How would she feel if she could see you both? Think of that, think of her. Respect her memory!’
But, for a while, whatever I did seemed to anger Daisy. I felt I’d lost her too. It wasn’t until she left home, four years later, aged eighteen, that our relationship really improved again. Daisy, three years older than me, enjoyed flaunting her newfound independence and I was a receptive audience. Though she was quite scathing about certain aspects of my life, stuck at home cooking for Dad, I tried hard to make her like me. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes I felt like giving up, but I persevered. For Mum, for our family, that was.
‘What do you think Mum would think I should do?’ I asked Dad now.
We were standing in my dad’s large bathroom. I’d gone straight over to his house in Clapham after Isabel and I had finished at the cafe. As always, when I opened the front door of the three-storey townhouse where I had grown up, I was greeted with the smell of freshly ground coffee – Dad drank pints of the stuff – mixed with paint – Dad was always redecorating some part of the house. The sound of Radio 2 blasted out hits of yesteryear. As I shouted out hello and threw my cardigan onto the coat rack by the front door, I brushed my fingers over Mum’s red wool coat that Dad still refused to take off the coat hooks, even after all these years. If I nestled my nose into the fabric, I swear I could still smell her perfume.
‘Your mother would have said what she always said when faced with matters of the heart,’ Dad said as I stood, arms crossed, leaning against the bathroom door while he, dressed in shorts and T-shirt, set about shaving off every last strand of his head of white hair for charity. ‘Jump in and think later. But I don’t recommend it at all, especially not in this case.’
Dad was perched on the edge of the claw-foot bathtub, staring into the mirror on the open door of the medicine cabinet above the sink, his hair falling in puffy clumps like dandelion seeds onto the monochrome tiled floor. A tall, well-built man with tanned skin from all the time he spent out in the garden, Dad’s hair had been jet black before Mum died, but without her he said the colour drained straight out of him and into the earth. His eyes, dark blue pools, had never lost thei
r luminescence. They always seemed full of sadness to me, but often when I asked him if he was sad, he’d laugh and tell me how happy he felt.
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘But this isn’t a question of getting back with Ethan. God, no. It’s whether I should pull out of the Supper Club and how I should tell Joe that Ethan has turned up. I know I should pull out, but there’s a part of me that does want to see Ethan again next week. That’s awful, isn’t it? I’m a horrible person.’
Dad shook his head. ‘Only natural,’ he said, pushing shut the medicine-cabinet door and turning on the tap to wash stray strands of hair down the sink. ‘You were in love with the guy, but you have to be careful with Joe’s feelings here. Your loyalty is to him. I think you should tell Joe the truth and not see Ethan again. I don’t want you getting hurt again. I’m an old man. I can’t stand any more heartbreak. Besides, surely you have enough on your plate with the cafe. Talking of which, my pal Andy has a load of old school chairs, those wooden ones with a slot at the back for books, going for cheap. Interested?’
‘Um, yes,’ I said, abstractedly. ‘Thank you.’
Dad paused for a moment and put his head to one side. He held out his arms and smiled.
‘Come here, love,’ he said. ‘You look like you need a hug. I’m worried about you.’
I smiled, walked towards him and gave him a hug, leaning into his chest. He smelt of the garden, of soil and flowers and sunshine.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said, pulling away and trying to cheer myself up. I hated worrying him. He’d had enough stress in his life without my petty troubles. ‘So, who are you trying to impress with your new no-hair image?’
I picked up a clump of white curls from the floor by his feet. It was so white it was almost blue. I looked up at Dad and knew he was thinking the same thing. We were tuned into each other, Dad and I, often saying the same word at exactly the same time. We both laughed, then he rubbed his hand over his smooth scalp and grinned.
‘I’m hoping that if I do enough charity events, God will be pleased,’ he said drily. ‘I’m hoping He’ll let me in through those pearly white gates if I prove my worth.’