She’s right, children do provide a certain sort of excitement, there’s a natural drama to having them. But then there is so much fear too, and this can sometimes seem to outweigh the excitement of the pleasant variety. I don’t think I’ve ever controlled it properly. The awful worry about safety has often overwhelmed me, right from when my children were born, and as for fretting about their happiness – that has been never-ending. It was one of the more bewildering things that people said afterwards about Miranda’s death, that she had had a short but happy life, as though that would comfort me. It was no comfort. Her life, I reckoned, had in fact been too short to know real happiness. I looked at my own life and saw that my true happiness lay in meeting and marrying Don and in giving birth to my three children. Miranda never experienced any of that. Her happiness, at eighteen, was a restricted happiness.
And there was Lynne, feeling unhappy, craving what she called excitement, confusing it with happiness.
*
I went, on my own, for a longer walk than the beach offered. I went along the road to a track leading up the hill to a little church I’d noticed. It was evening, before dinner, and cooler, but I wore a straw hat to shade me from the still strong sun. I wanted to watch the sunset in half an hour’s time, and planned to be on top of the hill by then. I walked slowly not because the path was steep but to avoid churning up the dust. I was so self-absorbed that it wasn’t until I was almost at the church that I saw the procession. It came from the other direction. I stopped just in time not to be noticed and lingered behind a bush. It was a funeral procession. A white coffin was being carried by six men in black suits and behind them were thirty or forty people, the men in black, the women mostly in white. They were singing, but I couldn’t make out the words, and as they sang they walked in a curious swaying motion, their heads moving from side to side in time with the song. I could see a preacher standing at the church door and beside him a boy carrying a cross. I turned and hurried back down the hill.
We had dreadful arguments about a funeral. There was no body, we had nothing to bury or cremate. How could we have a funeral, in any understood sense? But Don wanted something. Not a church service, but some sort of memorial service at which we would all talk about Miranda. I accused him of wanting to use such an occasion for publicity purposes, so that he could set forth his theories about negligence being the cause of her death and try to precipitate the inquiry he wanted. He said I was perfectly right and that there was nothing wrong with wanting to do this. But I couldn’t bear the prospect of hearing him rant about murder and killers and justice not being done, and all when we were mourning Miranda. Molly, as ever, was the peacemaker. She said it was too soon. We should wait. And we did. We waited so long that there never was a memorial service, and I was relieved.
A proper funeral, such as the one I had just glimpsed, might have been different. Afterwards, I felt the lack of a coffin and of some formal service. I suppose I wanted the comfort of the ritual, the dressing in black, the open tears, the laying to rest, however it was done. I would have liked a gravestone or some such symbol. I would like to have stood in front of it and seen Miranda’s name and her dates and the words ‘beloved daughter of Louise and Gordon’. But there was nothing. Her body was never, as expected, washed ashore, giving rise to unspeakable suspicions of what had happened to it. We gave her school some money to give a prize every year in her memory. That is her memorial. It isn’t enough.
*
Strange, thinking this morning about going home as I packed. ‘Home’ is not really home as I had known it for twenty years. My flat hasn’t had time to become home. After every holiday we had, I always liked reaching home, however enjoyable it had been.
Going home today will be a test. I’m not sure I will pass it. I might feel dismayed as I go up the stairs and open the door onto … what? Four small neat rooms with no history. Miranda had never been within their walls. There is nothing at all to remind me of her, not even photographs. This is my home, and no one else’s.
*
Our seats were not together on the plane. Lynne made a great fuss but it did no good. I wasn’t worried. It was a night flight and I wanted to sleep, so it seemed immaterial to me where we sat. Lynne was behind me in any case, should I wish to talk to her (and as we’d been talking for a week there was nothing left to talk about). I had an aisle seat beside a young couple. The man was next to me, the woman next to the window. I decided they were returning from their honeymoon – they held hands, and both wore very bright gold wedding rings. We smiled at each other, and settled ourselves, and I closed my eyes, preparing to try to sleep, and put an eyeshade on. Then I heard him say. ‘Miranda, do you want your book? Because it’s in the bag I’ve put in the overhead locker. Shall I get it?’ She said no, she was too sleepy to read.
My heart thudded, hearing her name, the way it so stupidly does, as though my Miranda was the only one. I turned my head very slightly and peeped from under my eyeshade. She was about the age my Miranda would have been. She had blonde hair, like my Miranda, and was tanned and healthy-looking, and slim and pretty – all like my Miranda. But her face was very different, much narrower, the nose longer, the forehead higher. I calmed down.
When we landed at Gatwick this morning, I saw her stand up and realised this Miranda was much too small to have been my Miranda. She didn’t look like a Miranda at all. I felt she wasn’t really entitled to the name. The silliness of this thought meant I was smiling as we came into the arrivals area. ‘You look happy, Mum,’ Finn said.
*
I should have known that Finn would not be meeting me at Gatwick just to please me, to give me a lovely surprise, which it did. That sounds bitter, but it is not. I would never want anyone to drag all that way when it’s perfectly easy to get the train to Victoria and a taxi from there. Meetings at airports are only for special occasions, in our family, for those returning after long absences. When Molly comes back, I will certainly meet her whatever time she lands.
But Finn was there, and there was a moment of pure pleasure at the sight of him. He even looked presentable, wearing a very clean white T-shirt and smart-looking black chinos (which should have been another clue). It wasn’t until he said he had a minicab waiting that I realised something was wrong. ‘Minicab?’ I queried, and then ‘Finn, tell me. Whatever it is, just tell me.’ So he told me, standing there in the middle of the arrivals hall, scores of travellers rushing past and a loudspeaker booming some incomprehensible information. Lynne had taken hold of my arm and was squeezing it, thinking, I suppose, to reassure me that support was there for whatever I was going to have to bear. ‘Everything’s fine, honest,’ Finn said, at first, and then, ‘It’s Dad. He’s OK, but he had a slight accident. He’s in hospital, the Middlesex.’
Lynne was going in the opposite direction, so didn’t come in the minicab with us. We said goodbye, hurriedly. I didn’t even thank her properly for arranging our holiday, which I must do. Once we were settled in the back of the car, I asked Finn to tell me exactly what had happened, but he didn’t seem to know. He said he’d had a phone call at work from Judith, asking him if he could go to the Middlesex hospital where his dad had been admitted after an accident. She was in bed with a bad back and couldn’t go herself. So he’d gone there, and found Don in bed, in a room of his own. He wasn’t attached to any tubes or anything and he looked just as if he was asleep. There was a plaster, a transparent plaster, not very big, on his forehead covering what looked like a couple of stitches. No blood. Finn spoke to him, but he didn’t open his eyes. After a few minutes, he spoke again. Still no response. There was a chart hanging on the end of the bed but Finn couldn’t understand it. Eventually, he went to find a nurse to tell him what was wrong with his father. It took ages – they were all very busy, rushing about in the ward next to Don’s room. He stood at the desk and waited, and finally a nurse asked him whom he was visiting and he told her and she said the staff nurse would come and explain, and he should go back to his fat
her’s bed and wait, which he did. Don still appeared asleep or unconscious. When the staff nurse did come, she asked first where his mother was and said she should be contacted. Finn hadn’t liked to say his parents were separated, so he just said I was on holiday, back the next day. He asked what had happened, and was told his father had collapsed in Tottenham Court Road, hitting his head on a traffic bollard. It was thought that he was concussed, but he had not come round from his faint, if it had been a faint. He was going to be given a brain scan, to check for any other reason for his collapse.
‘I hate hospitals,’ Finn said, at the end of this account. ‘I just wanted to get out.’ I said, of course, he did, we all do. We’ve been a healthy family, with little experience of hospitals, thank God. And it was one thing we were spared, or so I tried to tell myself, when Miranda was killed. We didn’t have to sit beside a bed in a hospital ward, seeing her with tubes stuck into her, watching her die. We didn’t have to go through the horror of identifying her in a hospital morgue. A pathetic attempt to catch sight of an entirely elusive silver lining, but I tried.
I said that Finn should carry on in the cab, taking my case, and that I would go to see Don on my own. He was very easily persuaded. I said I’d go to Judith’s after I’d found out what was happening, and meet him there. Judith would be alarmed and want to know anyway. So I was dropped off, feeling shaky and tired, and not at all as though I’d just come back from a wonderful week in the sun, and I made my way into the Middlesex, a hospital I’d never had reason to visit before. It was bewildering, with more corridors and staircases than seemed possible, but after getting lost several times I found the ward. There was a toilet next to it and I went into it first and washed my face and brushed my hair. My face looked odd in the mirror, calm but strained, as though it were a mask. I saw a nerve twitching to the right of my right eye, and put up a hand to stop it. I’d seen this face before. It used to stare back at me, afterwards. I hated it.
Then I was ready. I was ready to see Don, whatever state he was in. All the way from Gatwick, listening to Finn, I’d been saying over and over in my head ‘it isn’t Molly, it isn’t Molly’ – the relief! I could tolerate something dreadful happening to Don, but not to Molly or Finn – that was the shameful truth. I’d felt no surge of terror when Finn told me Don was in hospital. Slowly, on the long drive to the hospital, I had begun to feel anxious and troubled about Don and what might have happened, but there was a certain luxury about my concern. I could afford it. This was awful to admit, but I didn’t have to admit it to anyone but myself. It showed me that my love for Don had been altered, maybe damaged, more than I had thought. He’d done most of the damage himself.
The nurse, who took me in to see him, said he was about to be moved into the general ward but I could have half an hour with him in the side-room. She told me that a brain scan had shown no abnormalities, no sign of a haemorrhage. He hadn’t had a stroke, or a seizure. It seemed that it had been a simple faint, probably due to lack of food. He was malnourished and dehydrated and his blood pressure was very low and, of course, he had been concussed. They were going to keep him in another night and then I could take him home. I nodded.
Don had his eyes closed. He was lying very still in the bed, the covers up to his neck, his arms underneath them. He was very pale, and gaunt, his cheekbones standing out alarmingly. I said his name, and his eyelids flickered, but he didn’t open them. I sat down at the bedside and waited. I didn’t kiss him. If his hand had been above the covers, I might have held it, but it wasn’t. I just waited. I was there. I had come straight to him. It was enough, surely.
6
IT FELT GOOD, after all, coming back here. Not exactly like coming ‘home’, but definitely a relief and a pleasure – it was reassuring to find the flat quite familiar and not as soulless as I’d feared. Maybe it felt welcoming because I’d come to it straight from the hospital, before I went to Judith’s. I felt I had to check myself in first, and change my clothes, and then I could face my sister-in-law, who I knew would have lots of questions. It was the second time that she’d had to take our family’s bad news and pass it on (and all because hers was the only phone number listed on Don’s mobile that answered when the hospital called).
Finn was there, of course, watching football on Judith’s television, a plate of sandwiches at his side and a can of lager in his hand. No reason why he shouldn’t have been. He did put the sound down to ask in what I recognised as a deliberately casual tone of voice, how Don was, and I replied in the same style, saying he was fine, no real damage done, it had just been a faint, probably due to lack of food. ‘He doesn’t look after himself,’ Finn said, biting into a sandwich. I agreed. ‘What’ll they do?’ he asked. ‘What’ll they do with him?’ I said there wasn’t much they could do. They’d feed him, and tell him to eat sensibly, and send him home. ‘Home?’ queried Finn. ‘Home,’ I repeated. ‘Where’s that, these days?’ Finn asked. ‘Wherever he’s living,’ I said, too abruptly, so that for a moment he took his eyes off the screen and we stared at each other, each knowing how worried the other really felt.
I didn’t stay long. I was exhausted, and it was school today. Judith had heroically got out of bed to prepare a simple supper for me, but I couldn’t eat it. She, too, started on what was going to happen to Don. ‘He needs looking after,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen him, he’s just a skeleton, it’s dreadful.’ I nodded, not trusting myself to reply to this with the unkind words that he is a grown man and it is his own fault, because that was what I was thinking. ‘You know he’s lost his job? He’s been fired.’ Judith said. That did shock me, and yet it shouldn’t have done. I’d known Don’s agency must at some point get tired of his absences on ‘investigations’. They’d been tolerant, they’d put up with a lot. I’d always assumed that Don’s flashes of inspiration, even if rare now, had been worth his neglect of his work for long stretches of time, but maybe these days inspiration wasn’t flashing at all, and the advertising world had decided it could do without him. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’ Judith said, seeing my face. He hadn’t. We hadn’t spoken for a while and when we had it had been about Finn. ‘Oh, he came here,’ Judith said, ‘wanting to talk to Finn, but he was out, I didn’t know where. He wouldn’t stay. But he left his mobile number and his address. Look, that’s where he is living.’ She dug a scrap of paper out of the kitchen table drawer and handed it to me. It was an address in Green Lanes, Tottenham. Not the kind of road I’d have imagined Don, who likes peace and quiet, choosing. Cheap, though. What kind of flat could he have rented in a place like that? Maybe it really was only a bedsitter. It was distressing to imagine it.
‘He can’t go back there,’ Judith was saying. ‘He’s sick, he needs looking after.’ I reminded her she’d already said that. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you don’t seem to care – no, no, sorry Lou, I didn’t mean that, what I meant was you don’t seem worried at the thought, that’s all.’ I told her that what worried me was what she seemed to be hinting at: that I should look after Don in my flat. ‘Am I right,’ I said, ‘is that what you’ve got in mind? Do you see it as my duty?’ She shook her head vehemently and denied it, but of course I was right, it was exactly what she had been thinking. ‘Judith,’ I said, trying hard to speak quietly and calmly, ‘I’m as upset as you at the state Don has got himself into, but it isn’t going to force me into becoming responsible for him again. I’ve tried. You know I’ve tried, but I can’t cope with him while he goes on being obsessed. He was making me ill too. I can’t try again, just when I’m beginning to recover and have my own life back. I can’t.’ Judith reached across the table and patted my hand. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know. You’ve been wonderful, you’ve …’ I stopped her. ‘I’m going home now, Judith,’ I said. ‘I need to sleep, and it’s school tomorrow. But I’ll call you, after I’ve seen Don again. I can’t think straight now.’ We kissed – Judith’s cheek so warm and soft and scented with vanilla soap – and I went and said goodnight to Fin
n, and kissed him, lightly, on the side of his head (and smelled smoke … is he smoking now?).
*
That was yesterday. Today was busy, too busy until four o’clock even to think about Don. First day back after a holiday is always chaos. Every child seemed to have forgotten the routines we follow and to need constant individual attention. The vocal ones – Paige, Sophie, Haroun – clamoured for it, wanting me to listen to where they had been and what they had done. The quieter ones plucked at my jacket and whispered and then cried when I didn’t hear them, and they felt ignored. Jeremy and I struggled to restore order and make them feel secure and attempt some semblance of teaching, but it was only towards the end of the day that anything like normality was achieved. At story time, there was silence. When I’d finished reading, I told them all that tomorrow I want them to remember what we do in class. What do we do first? That’s right. And then? That’s right. And what do we do now, after story time? Yes! Then let’s do it. And they did. They got their coats and sat on the mat until their names were called as their parents arrived.
The classroom was messy. I told Jeremy to put it to rights, because I had to dash off. I didn’t tell him why, or where to, just said I’d do my share another day when he wanted to go promptly himself. It’s the good thing about having Jeremy – he’s very biddable and not normally very curious about me, a convenient combination. I was at the Middlesex by four-thirty, which was good going. I could have been even earlier if I hadn’t stopped to buy something for Don. Not grapes. It’s the only fruit he doesn’t care for. I bought peaches, his favourite, and some bananas because he clearly needs carbohydrates. I needn’t have bothered. When I got to his room, he’d gone. I thought at first he’d simply been moved into the general ward, which I’d been told would happen, but then he wasn’t there either. ‘He discharged himself,’ the sister I finally found told me. ‘About an hour ago.’
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