She should have said more, whatever the risk. She had started the car engine. Now she switched it off and got out again, shaking. If I don’t say it now, I never will. And what is there to lose? She doesn’t care about me.
‘Are you all right – did you forget something?’ Caroline asked as Margaret opened the door and stepped into the hall.
‘Just to say. To say – I’ve never said it before and not even to Esther, though I think she knows and Louise has an idea, she’s much better than you would think, at listening.’
‘So am I,’ Caroline said. ‘Come in, come through to the den, I’ll put the fire back on, tell me what it is.’
Seduced, she almost went.
‘No, there’s no need, it won’t take long. It’s just – did you never care, never once even think how it was for me? I don’t want to complain, I don’t, but it’s held me back, all this time, and now I think I might just be happy. But I don’t want it to happen again. Why does everyone leave me? Is it just chance, an accident, or is there something about me?’
‘Leave you?’
‘My mother, my father, Daniel, then you. And then Mike. They all left.’
There were tears pouring down her face and she could not stop shaking.
‘Not Janet and Harry, they were so kind, but that was it, they were kind, I wasn’t their daughter, I was nobody’s. Was I? Tell me the truth, tell me the truth for once.’
‘Wait – wait – ’ Caroline put out her hands and clasped Margaret’s between them, warm and firm.
‘I don’t know why I’m saying this, what’s the point? You’re not going to make it any different now. Don’t tell me – I don’t want to know now. Whose daughter I really am.’ She stopped with a gasp, appalled. What on earth had got into her? She should just have gone home.
‘No, listen – ’ Caroline held her hands tighter, not letting go. ‘I never left you. Daniel didn’t leave you. I can’t say a thing about your bloody mother, she let you down, of course she did, and Dad, but he let us down as well, you know that.’
‘But – ’
‘No. Daniel left me. Me. And I left because of him. Believe that. Truly.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t need to.’ The hands still gripped hers, painfully, painfully. ‘I never left you. And I’m sorry.’
Margaret, weakening, pulled her hands away and stepped back.
‘I’ve made a fool of myself. I’m fifty-five, I’m a middle-aged woman, and I feel as stupid as a teenager.’
‘That’s how it is,’ Caroline said. ‘For all of us.’ She put her arms round Margaret and hugged her close. Her scent, the soft brush of her hair against Margaret’s cheek as she bent to her, so much taller, bent to cradle her. Margaret moved away, but gently, patting Caroline’s arm.
‘All this with Janet – it’s upset me.’
‘Will you be able to drive home?’
‘Yes of course.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
At Braeside, Esther and Louise sat up talking for a while, but it was colder there, even in the kitchen. It was getting late and they were tired.
The minutes ticked by on the noisy old wall clock, but they did not go to bed.
‘I don’t think she’s going to be able to go home,’ Esther said. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of. We’re up against it now, we have to decide.’
‘Let’s make appointments to go and see some places then,’ Louise suggested. ‘We’ll speak to the doctor, see how long they’re going to keep her in, what plans they’ve got for rehab, convalescence. They’ll have specialist units where she can go while they assess her, we won’t have to do this all on our own.’
‘I wish I had your confidence in the NHS and Social Services,’ Esther said.
Louise smiled. ‘Yeah, maybe I’m being a bit optimistic. We’ll see.’
‘What did you think about Caroline?’
‘We did ask her to come.’
‘Yes, but – how did you think she looked?’
‘The same, but dead tired. How old is she? She must be nearly seventy.’
‘Yes.’
‘White hair suits her.’
‘It’s still impossible to get past the barrier, the front she puts up.’
‘Poor old Tilly, you could see she didn’t want to offer her a bed – or even a lift!’
‘You can hardly blame her,’ Esther said. ‘After all, they’re sisters but Caroline doesn’t treat her like one.’
‘For Caroline,’ Louise said, ‘the world stopped when Daniel died. Even when he went away, you could see her change, pull herself away from us all. Even Mum.’
‘It was the accident,’ Esther said, thinking back. ‘It changed them both, brother and sister.’
Sitting there in the ticking quiet, there occurred to both of them the same idea: that there was more than they knew, that there were things Caroline could tell them, but had chosen not to. After so many years, it was hard to go back in memory to that time, to what they had known, never mind all they had not.
They sat on in silence, wondering.
In her old room, Caroline slipped between cold sheets and switched off the bedside lamp. She lay in shadows made grey by the street light outside, listening to silence with its faint backing music of traffic on Queen’s Road in the distance.
I’m old, she thought, you cannot pretend seventy is not old. At first she thought what she felt was a thrill of fear, and perhaps it was, but it was blurred by relief. She was actually relieved. Nearly over, she thought, unless I live till I’m ninety like Janet. Even then, I don’t have to think about this any more, I don’t have to bother. There must come a time, and I think it should be now.
If she kept it all to herself, though, as she had done for so many years, what difference did her decision make? Only in my head, she thought, unconvinced, knowing that a commitment becomes real only if you share it in some way. There was no one now to share it with, no one but the Elties, and they were the people she should probably not tell. Besides, all lies become a kind of truth if they last long enough, and everyone else believes them. She thought of Margaret, screwing up her courage to say all that. No question now, of undoing Diana’s lie. Daniel was right about that.
There were other things she could say. If not now, never.
Sleep crept in, bringing images of strange creatures, unrecognisable places, the precursors of her dreams, and she turned over, giving way to them, unable to think any longer.
The Photograph
2013
i
For months, Esther had been obsessed with ageing – not just her own but the ageing process generally, if process was what it was. She was irritated by its recent commercialisation – 60 is the new 40!
She thought about ageing a lot because of Janet.
Every Friday, the supermarket shop completed, she drove to the care home in Culter where Janet now lived, a large Victorian house, converted and made convenient with all the ugly apparatus of social care. It was not her home. That was the Harrowden Place house, soon to be on the market. None of them could keep it on; it had to go. Because she had Braeside, Esther had become philosophical about this.
She signed in, exchanged a few words with the girl who greeted her, and went upstairs to Janet’s room, along the narrow landing and into the rear wing of the house, a modern extension with a dozen new bedrooms. On the way she paused to let a woman in a blue overall go by with a wheelchair, the occupant huddled in a glower of ill temper, ignoring Esther’s attempt at a friendly smile. A very old man, toothless, hairless, as so accurately predicted by the much younger Shakespeare, staggered past, clutching – and pursuing – a three-wheeled trolley, the next model up from a Zimmer frame, Esther supposed. His cardigan had food stains down the front and was buttoned wrongly, but at least he smiled back, seeming quite cheerful.
It was all horrible and she ached with guilt.
Janet’s room was like a single bedroom in a good but not luxurious hotel: c
lean, pleasant enough but no more. Janet sat in a velour-covered upright chair, an unread book in her lap. Esther knew it was unread; it had been the same book for weeks. Not like the old days when she often had a book propped up behind the taps on the sink or on her lap as she mended clothes or plaited a child’s hair or fastened awkward buttons on a frock. She had taken them to the library once a fortnight, coming out with four new books for herself each time.
When Janet looked up she smiled, and Esther thought thank goodness, she knows me, it’s all right. Esther often tried to bring some small gift with her, this time a tube of rose-scented hand cream. Janet’s hands, once rough with housework and gardening, were soft and freckled, a large brown stain spreading over the back of one, the veins knotted cord beneath thin skin.
‘How are you?’ Esther bent to kiss her mother’s cheek, the skin here delicate as silk crumpled and then smoothed out.
‘Ach, I’m fine. Just the same.’
Today seemed to be a good day, but you could never be sure. Sometimes, dismayingly, Janet asked about Jack – I never see him these days – and Esther had to decide whether to remind her mother about his death, and risk upsetting her. Most of the time, Janet wasn’t upset or even put out by this. ‘You’ll miss him,’ she might say, or ‘I still miss your father’, and they could move on to reminiscence. Janet’s memory flickered. Sometimes she seemed to remember everything and be as sharp as ever, but you could not rely on it. Esther told herself that even if she could have coped with the physical effort of looking after her mother since the stroke, she could not cope with this. It would get worse. Already, no conversation was reliable.
She had never managed to get all the photographs into albums, but she brought in a few each time to show Janet, some very old, others of her own children, taken recently. When she thought of the imminent great-grandchild, she realised unhappily that Janet would not celebrate the birth, or enjoy seeing the baby.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘Andrew sent me this nice snap of him and Laura in Morocco on holiday last year.’
Janet held up the snap and peered at the two young people in shorts and vest tops, arms round each other, in front of a hard blue sky and white buildings. Then she looked at Esther.
‘How’s your boy?’ she asked.
Esther’s heart skipped. Here we go again. ‘That’s Andrew and his wife. You remember he’s married now? I told you they’re going to have a baby at the beginning of August?’
She saw the shift in Janet’s expression, from surprise to resignation. Something else she did not know. She had moved in a few weeks to this new state of not knowing things, from simply not remembering. With a pang of pity, Esther added,
‘You meant Ross, didn’t you, when you asked about my boy?’
‘Ross?’
She sifted through the photographs – surely there was one of Ross? ‘Here. In the garden at Braeside. It’s quite an old one, he can only be about fourteen.’ She gave it to Janet, who held it, wavering, in her hand.
‘I have the two boys,’ Esther prompted, ‘and Kirsty. Kitty.’
Janet put the photograph down. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m not daft.’
‘Sorry, of course you’re not – ’
‘He’s very like,’ Janet interrupted, handing the photograph back to Esther.
‘Very like?’
‘I think so.’
Who did she mean? ‘Andrew takes after Jack’s side, of course, but Ross – ’
‘Like Daniel,’ Janet said. ‘A real look of Daniel about him.’
Esther thought of the photograph still propped up on the kitchen dresser, the boy with his face half turned away, and Caroline, coming out of the shadows.
‘I found an old photo of Daniel,’ she said on impulse. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Oh I don’t know.’ Janet looked away, losing interest, restless. ‘I wonder they’re not here with our tea and biscuit. What time is it?’
‘They always come and see you, when they’re home,’ Esther said, desperate, guilty all over again. ‘The children – it’s just they’re not often here these days.’
Her mother looked surprised at this non sequitur, as well she might. I’m as bad as she is, Esther thought, jumping about from one thing to another.
‘I like to see them.’ Janet leaned forward, patting Esther’s arm. ‘Don’t you worry, I’m fine here. I’m all right.’
‘I wish – ’
‘Can you leave me this one – ?’ It was not the old likeness of Ross she had picked up, nor Andrew and Laura, happy in a hot country. It was Jack and Esther, taken years ago by one of the children, in the garden at home. They posed for the child (Andrew? Kirsty?), their smiles a little rigid by the time the shutter closed.
‘Of course I can. You can have any of them.’
‘It’s fish tonight. Cod. I’m not that keen.’
‘Maybe they’d give you something else, if you asked?’ You could do nothing but go along with these disconcerting changes of subject. They did at least provide a new topic of conversation. In a little while, the smell of cooking would drift along the corridor and Esther would get up to go, full of relief and anxiety, to drive away thinking about her mother, and whether after all, she could manage to look after her.
On the way home, to break this pointless cycle of self-reproach, she thought about what Janet had said about Ross. Very like Daniel. Was he? Photographs are deceptive; Janet was thinking of Daniel for some reason, that’s all. She makes mistakes all the time, mis-remembers and forgets. Every week there’s another fragment of memory gone, her mind a completed jigsaw someone is piece by piece dismantling. Sometimes you can put the pieces back for her, but they soon disappear again, or others do.
Esther did not think Ross looked like Daniel; she did not want him to be like Daniel. How could anyone tell anyway – Daniel had died when he was younger than Ross was now, when she was a teenager. Her father was dead and Janet’s memory not to be relied on. There was no one now who could tell her what Daniel was like, no one recalled him with the perfect clarity of love or friendship and no one, in any case, had talked about him for a very long time. It was all so long ago and clouded by the years between, the lives of those other people – friends and teachers – who had known him, filling up with the complex layers of work, family and desires, success and failure, their own losses looming far greater than the distant tragedy of a dead boy. Only Daniel remained the same, young, that half-smile as he turned away, keeping his secrets.
There was Caroline, of course.
Louise was using her laptop when Esther came through the hall from the kitchen where she had left the bags of shopping. She was at the top of the stairs, where it was easier to access the wireless signal. She looked down at Esther over half-moon glasses.
‘How is she?’
‘All right.’ Esther hung her jacket over the newel post. ‘Are you wearing my socks?’
Louise looked down at the red hiking socks. ‘My feet were cold.’
‘It’s May – nearly summer. You’ve gone soft, in the South.’
‘My clothes are all wrong for here. I always underestimate how cold it will be.’
‘You should have come with me.’
‘I’ll go tomorrow. Then she’ll get two visits.’
‘Mm.’
Esther went into the kitchen to unpack the shopping. A moment later she heard the thud of stockinged feet on the stairs and Louise came in.
‘I tried to work in here,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t get online.’
‘Signal’s best upstairs or at the front of the house.’
‘So much for broadband and rural Scotland being connected to the rest of the world.’
‘Who says?’
‘Will I make coffee?’
‘I’ll have tea. Didn’t get any with Mum. They must have missed her out when they went round. She mentioned it, then seemed to forget again, but I told the girl on reception when I left.’
Louise was unpacking bags
but since she never remembered where anything was kept, dumped it all on the table. Esther, sighing, decided not to complain.
‘You make tea – coffee – whatever,’ she said. ‘I’ll put the stuff away.’
Eventually they sat down on either side of the table (Louise nearest the stove) and opened a packet of chocolate biscuits.
‘You’ve still got that photo of Daniel on the dresser,’ Louise said. Scanning the familiar bits and pieces added to over the years by children bearing gifts, a precious pottery bowl or wooden carving made at school, she had snagged on the image of Daniel. She kept coming back to it, uneasily.
Esther twisted round in her chair and reaching up, caught the photograph between her fingertips. She laid it on the table between them so that Louise saw it the right way up.
‘Do you think he looks like anyone – I mean anyone now? Not Caroline.’
Louise studied it. ‘No.’
‘Sure? Not either of my boys?’
‘Your boys?’ Louise looked again. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘Mum said Ross reminded her of Daniel. Had a look of him, is how she put it.’
‘When did she last see Ross?’
Esther explained.
‘That’s a good idea – taking old photos in. Have you shown her this one?’
‘It’s been up there since I found it. I thought I might, next time.’
From the top of the stairs the shrill singing of Louise’s mobile interrupted them. She got up. ‘Sorry.’
The noise stopped before Louise reached it, lying on the landing next to the laptop, but there was silence as she called back, then Esther heard her voice muttering – Hmm – sure – I don’t know – ok then . . .’ – monosyllables which could only make sense when joined to the inaudible other half of the conversation.
When she came down, Esther was on the landline, speaking to Margaret. She said, ‘Here’s Lou now, I’ll ask her.’
‘What?’
The Treacle Well Page 32