by Debbie Rix
Hamish gratefully sipped the wine. He swilled it around his mouth, making noises of appreciation before finally swallowing it.
‘It’s good – a Pinot Noir?’
‘Spot on… it is rather good, isn’t it? I was worried I’d left it too long and I’d have nothing to serve but two cases of degraded wine. But it will be perfect. Needs decanting though because the labels have all been a bit damaged by the damp…’
‘Angela mentioned needing to chill some white wine and beers?’
Hamish looked hopefully around the damp basement.
‘Oh, I’ve got those in here,’ Alex patted the fridge protectively. ‘Easier just to open them as I need them and serve from here really.’
‘Oh… OK. If you think so?’ Hamish was reluctant to get caught up in a disagreement between his parents-in-law. He had a certain sympathy with Alex, who was an affable, gentle soul. A writer, he had enjoyed some considerable success in his younger days as an investigative journalist, but as he headed towards his seventies he preferred to spend his time in his study, listening to music, well away from the hustle and bustle of the main household. He was tall – well over six feet – and had begun to stoop slightly as he aged. ‘Too many years hunched over a typewriter,’ was his excuse. His once dark hair was now thinning and grey. He was still handsome, with a high forehead, a straight ‘Roman’ nose and strong jaw. A devoted father and husband, he was highly intelligent, but also introverted and undemonstrative. Sophie had mentioned several times to Hamish that she and her brother, Simon, had found him difficult to ‘read’ as they were growing up.
‘He’s basically in his own little world. Always has been. Happiest with his computer and his abstract ideas…’
Guests were due to arrive about one o’clock. At twelve-thirty, Sophie’s younger brother Simon arrived, with his wife, Victoria.
‘Oh good,’ said Angela, as she opened the door. ‘So glad you’re a bit early… Go and help Hamish chivvy your father, will you?’
The seating now arranged to Angela’s satisfaction, Sophie suggested her mother should go upstairs to change.
‘Mum… off you go. Vic and I will just finish tweaking the flowers and make sure everything’s perfect. You go up now… Or you won’t be ready in time.’
Angela emerged just before the first guests arrived, wearing an attractive pale grey-green linen dress, which emphasised the colour of her eyes and the slightly olive tone to her skin. Her freshly highlighted hair was swept back in a short bob away from her striking face. Her only make-up was mascara and a slick of lip gloss.
‘You look lovely, Mum,’ said Sophie honestly, kissing her mother.
The guests assembled in the marquee, looking around hopefully for a glass of wine.
‘Alex,’ hissed Angela, ‘we need the wine in here… so we can help ourselves.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they all get a drink,’ said Alex calmly.
With Hamish’s encouragement, he had set up a rickety table as a bar outside the garden entrance to the basement. But guests had to traipse down the old garden steps, slippery with damp moss, to collect their glass of wine, and a queue was beginning to form, snaking back into the marquee.
Sophie caught her brother’s eye and together they grabbed four bottles of white wine and a box of hired glasses and set up a separate drinks station next to the serving table.
Soon everyone had been served with a drink and were mingling happily in the garden. Sophie, Simon and Victoria brought large stainless-steel trays of lamb tagine and couscous out from the kitchen and laid them on hot plates arranged down the long serving table at the side of the marquee.
‘Lovely grub,’ said Sophie’s Uncle Tom, approvingly, as she ladled lamb onto his plate. ‘Another of my sister’s triumphs?’
‘Yes… this is one of Mum’s stalwart recipes. It’s delicious…’
When the main course had been cleared away, Alex stood up and tapped his wine glass. The room fell expectedly silent.
‘Well, that’s the first time you lot have ever been this quiet.’ There was a polite rumble of laughter. ‘I wanted to say a few words about the lady at the centre of this gathering today.’ He gazed lovingly at his wife. ‘Not only has she made the food, arranged the flowers, organised the marquee and the chairs and tables, she has also organised me and her children to do her bidding – once again – which is no mean feat, I can tell you. We’re an unruly bunch, but Angela has the ability to persuade and cajole us until we are all her willing slaves.’
The guests laughed and murmured agreement.
‘She is, without doubt, the most remarkable, beautiful and intelligent woman I have ever met,’ said Alex, glancing at Angela, who blushed. ‘I met her first at university. She was studying medicine; I was an inadequate English lecturer. I thought I had no hope. She was constantly surrounded by a gaggle of eager medical students, hoping upon hope that she would grace them with a date. But, for some inexplicable reason, she sat down next to me in the bar one night and asked me if I liked Miles Davis… I did, of course. I’m still not sure if she really does… But, either way, she had me from that day forward wrapped round her little finger. Darling – thank you for sitting next to me all those years ago, thank you for pretending to like Miles Davis. Thank you for marrying me – thirty-five years ago. You are the most wonderful woman I know – to Angela…’ He raised his glass.
‘To Angela!’ the assembled party responded.
Angela smiled, dabbing her eyes with her napkin.
She stood to face the guests. ‘I do like Miles Davis – as it happens,’ she said, smiling at her husband. ‘And I’m so glad that I sat down next to you all those years ago. So I’d like to return the toast… To my darling husband – thank you for the last thirty-five years…’
The guests stood and raised their glasses once again.
Angela gently motioned them to sit. ‘I’d just like to say a few words more if I may. We have lived a gilded life, here in Hampstead. All these years in the same house – which we could never afford to buy now, by the way…’ She looked once again at her husband, who nodded ruefully. The assembled company laughed. ‘So, apart from being married to such a clever and thoughtful husband…’ the guests cheered, ‘we’ve also been blessed with two glorious children…’ Angela raised her glass to Sophie and Simon, accompanied by yet more cheers. ‘I’ve also been privileged to have had my darling mother Rachael with me for so many years – as many of you know, she sadly passed away last year and I do miss her… She’d have been sorry to miss this party too. If you think I’m bossy you clearly never met my mother…’
The guests nodded, murmuring, ‘Hear, hear.’
'And apart from my wonderful family, I have been lucky enough to have a worthwhile and satisfying career – to be a GP in this beautiful part of London has been the icing on the cake. As you know, I had the practice here in my house until a few years ago. And even now, I just have to walk five minutes up the road, past the beautiful heath, to our new group practice. I feel so blessed. And finally to be able to call all of you dear people “friends”…’ Angela raised her glass to her guests and then, overcome by emotion, mopped her eyes once again and sat down.
The guests erupted into raucous applause and Alex put his arm around his wife’s shoulder and kissed her cheek.
Sophie leant back in her gilt chair and perused the marquee. Here were the people her parents had gathered around them over a lifetime: family, old medical acquaintances, grateful patients who had long ago become close friends, people her mother had met at the school gates thirty years earlier when taking Sophie and Simon first to nursery and then to school. Sophie knew all of them; they had been part of her life growing up – here in this happy, ramshackle house with its damp basement and shabby sitting room.
As the afternoon wore on, she managed to speak to most of them. Everyone wanted to know how she was doing, how was the job, when were she and Hamish intending to start a family? These were obvious questions fro
m loving friends who were only showing an interest in a young woman they had known all her life. But she began to find them increasingly intolerable, forcing her to retreat to the kitchen, ostensibly to busy herself with the washing-up.
Uncle Tom appeared at the kitchen door.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked kindly.
‘Oh… OK,’ she lied, stacking the dishwasher with the first load of dirty plates.
‘You look lovely today. I’m sure your mum must be very proud of you.’
‘That’s kind. But this is her day, isn’t it?’
‘Your dad gave a good speech,’ Tom mused, sticking his dirty pudding plate on the drainer by the sink.
‘Yes… he pulled it out of the bag. He always does. He drives Mum mad appearing to be completely uninterested and then goes and delivers a speech like that. Here… pass that plate over.’
Tom handed her the pudding plate, which she squeezed into the back of the rack, then filled the soap dispenser and shut the door of the dishwasher with a satisfying click. It instantly rumbled into action.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s that. The first load.’
‘You’re a good girl,’ said Tom. ‘You must be fed up with people asking you about starting a family though…’ He trailed off, concerned he had said too much.
‘Did Mum send you up here?’ Sophie asked suspiciously.
‘Angela? No. No… I just noticed everyone asking you questions, and thought you looked a bit tearful.’
‘Yes… well, it’s not for want of trying, you know. I do want a baby.’ She felt the tears welling up, her throat constricting as she tried to stop them from coming.
‘Oh kitten… come here,’ said Tom. He held her to his chest in a bear hug. ‘It’ll happen,’ he said into her hair. ‘Just give it time.’
‘I’ve given it time,’ she mumbled into his chest.
‘Well, give it a bit more then.’
He released her and opened the fridge door, where he found an opened bottle of champagne.
‘Here,’ he said, pouring them two glasses. ‘Let’s have a little of this. To you, my little princess.’
‘Oh, Uncle Tom, you’re so sweet.’
She sipped the glass of champagne and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘I had a dream the other night,’ she said at last. ‘About Grandma.’
‘Did you… dear Mum I do miss her.’
‘I do too… she was so special, wasn’t she?’
‘What was it about… the dream?’
‘I can only dimly remember. Just that we were sitting on a boat – a sailboat, I think. Somewhere hot, somewhere with turquoise water and dolphins leaping up beside us.’
‘Nice…’ said Tom, sipping his champagne.
‘Did I ever go sailing with Grandma?’
‘I’m not sure…’ said Tom. ‘Perhaps you did. I have a vague memory of you and your parents sailing somewhere. Alex took you all to the Med – the Greek Islands, I think. He hired a boat. Angela was furious, as he had no real idea how to sail. He’d done a bit of dinghy sailing at school but had never been on a proper yacht. Not sure you could do that now… but in those days apparently you could hire a small yacht and just set off. Maybe you were remembering that?’
‘Do you know I have no memory of that at all?’ Sophie replied.
‘Well – you were only about three and Simon was just a baby. That’s why Angela was so cross about it. Neither you nor Simon could swim. She was convinced you’d all be drowned.’
‘Oh… well, perhaps that was what I was remembering. I must ask Mum about it sometime…’
‘Ask me what?’ interrupted Angela, suddenly entering the kitchen carrying a toppling pile of pudding plates.
‘Here,’ said Tom, putting down his champagne glass, ‘let me…’
He took the plates from his sister and put them down on the kitchen table.
‘Ask me what?’ Angela persisted.
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said Sophie, ‘you’re busy.’
Angela stood at the sink, rinsing the pudding plates. ‘No go on… I’m listening.’
‘I just wondered if I’d ever been sailing – with you and Grandma? When I was a child. Uncle Tom thought perhaps we had…’
‘Yes we have,’ said Angela. ‘We went to a funny little island near Athens… what was it called? Agistri… That's right – when you were very small. We stayed in a weird hotel run by a very odd man, ex-hippy. He lent your father his own boat – it was a positive deathtrap.’
‘And was Grandma with us?’
‘Mother? Yes, she was. The hotel overlooked a private cove, I seem to remember. No facilities or anything – not like hotels today. But it was rather charming in a basic kind of way. We’d sit in the restaurant overlooking the bay, watching little boats sailing past each day. Alex – who’d last sailed at university, or school – was determined to hire a boat. Somehow he persuaded the owner to lend him one and we all piled on board. It was terrifying. I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do, and Alex, for once in his life, was uncharacteristically bossy. He shouted at us all day. It was quite dreadful, and I really thought we’d never see land again.’
‘And Grandma?’
‘Oh, she was remarkably calm. You children sat with her most of the day and she told you stories – you know what she was like.’
The sound of splintering glass interrupted the story.
Angela and Sophie rushed into the hall to find Alex standing over a pile of broken glass, a flimsy tray hanging uselessly in his hand.
‘Oh dear,’ said Angela. ‘Never mind. They were only cheap and nasty hired glasses. Sophie, get a dustpan, will you?’
Later that evening, back home in Herne Hill, Sophie lay on the sofa, her head in Hamish’s lap.
‘I thought your dad did rather well today,’ said Hamish. ‘Your mother’s great – but she’s quite a handful, trying to organise him all the time. Did I tell you? I found him in the basement hiding from her.’
‘I know… she’s just used to running things. It’s the GP in her, I suppose. But he’s spent their whole marriage quietly refusing to be controlled. God knows how they’ve stayed together all these years.’
‘Maybe that’s their secret…’ suggested Hamish. ‘Neither will yield to the other…’
‘Are we like that?’ asked Sophie.
‘No… I’m completely under your spell,’ said Hamish, stroking her hair.
‘No you’re not… you do exactly as you like, you know you do.’
‘Ha… I don’t think so,’ said Hamish smiling. ‘I have one word for you… “Cheltenham”.’
‘Oh, Hamish, not that again…’
She felt him flinch, and instantly regretted her impatient tone. Perhaps it was the champagne and the wine, or simply spending the day with her family, but instead of shutting Hamish down, she softened. ‘You really want that job, don’t you?’
‘Well, it’s a great post and a nice hospital in a beautiful part of the world. I mean… darling… do you really want to stay in London, bring up our kids here with our postage-stamp sized garden?’
‘It’s a beautiful garden…’ she said, sitting up. ‘And we don’t have any kids… yet.’
‘I know… Look, I’ve been thinking. Perhaps we need a compromise.’
‘Go on.’
‘I apply for the hospital in Gloucestershire, and if I get the job… we start IVF up there. It might be easier to get on the list there – fewer people, less demand than in London.’
‘Do you really mean that – about the IVF?’ She sat up – excited, elated almost.
‘I do… I know what it means to you. Tom said something to me today… before we left. I hadn’t realised how upset you are about it all. He said you were in tears this afternoon – apparently people were asking you about when we were going to start a family…’
‘He was very sweet to me. Said it would happen eventually. But he doesn’t know does he? He was just trying to be positive.’
‘Well… it got me thinking. I have been feeling a bit negative about the whole IVF thing, if I’m honest. I spend so much time in the hospital system that somehow it was the last thing I wanted – to medicalise us, our relationship. I kept telling myself, we’ve only been “trying” properly for a year or so. But I know you’ve been off the pill for a lot longer than that, and although we didn’t take it all that seriously at the beginning – timing when we made love and so on… well, obviously something’s not right. And the new thinking, medically speaking, is that we should do something about it while you’re still under thirty-five. So let’s do it.’
‘That’s wonderful, Hamish.’ Sophie leant over and kissed him. ‘Thank you… I know how hard this has been for you – and I’m so grateful. But just one thing… what about my PhD… if we move to Gloucestershire? I guess I’ll just have to put that on hold?’
‘Not necessarily. I wondered if, perhaps, you could transfer to a university nearby. Cardiff, Bristol… even Oxford? They’re not that far away. Perhaps we could find a house halfway between the hospital and whichever university you get into. I’m sure we could make it work, somehow.’
‘You really think we could?’ She lay back down, her head in his lap. He kissed the top of her head. ‘I do…’
‘OK then, let me talk to my supervisor tomorrow,’ said Sophie, brightly. ‘And thank you, darling. We will make it work, won’t we?’
Chapter Four
Traiskirchen refugee camp, south of Vienna, Austria
December 1956
Rachael woke early. As she exhaled, her breath ballooned out of her mouth in a dense fog of condensation. Her hands were icily cold, in spite of the fingerless woollen mittens she had found the previous day in the communal clothes store. She blew onto them, and then tucked her hands underneath the thin blanket, secreting them between her thighs – the warmest part of her body. The sky outside was still dark, but there was a faint glimmer of golden light on the wintry horizon.