Grief makes you selfish.
It wraps round you like a cocoon, holding you fast at first, and only gradually can you begin to reach outside it. It was the little things that were slowly bringing her out of it, words and actions poking through and forcing her to take notice, although she was quick at first to retreat into the shell she had created. The children had helped, too young to understand what was happening but it was one of the cats who had taken it upon itself to console, coming uninvited into her bedroom where she would find it asleep in the morning, leaping onto her lap during the day where she would find herself stroking its soft grey fur.
It was odd she should find it such a comfort because she was not a cat person, but Sheba the cat obviously thought otherwise.
Wise creature.
As she drove west out of London, she could physically feel something lifting from her and it came as a surprise to find she was humming along to a tune on the radio.
Well, well.
It had been a dull start to the day, but the clouds were beginning to disperse and the sun was doing its best to make an impression. As it did so, she felt her spirits lifting and some of the grief escaping as if through a pin hole. Strangely content, she drove on, stopping at one point for petrol when it would have been possible to abort the journey and return to Selina’s but instead she continued steadily on her way. She stopped later at a roadside café for a meal, surprised at how hungry she was and choosing the ‘All Day Breakfast’ option which involved stuffing herself with bacon, eggs, sausages and the like. In the Ladies, she dug out lipstick and scent and fluffed up her hair, smiling inanely at herself in the mirror because there was nobody else around and deciding that, all in all, she wasn’t looking too bad.
She had passed the ‘Welcome to Devon’ sign and was indicating her intention to turn off the main road before she had time to think about it, driving more slowly through several villages, very nearly pulling over at a farm that advertised cream teas but, on top of the big breakfast that seemed just a few calories too many. On either side of the road the moor stretched out, uneven ground with the Tors pushing up in the distance. It had been so long since she was here and, opening the window, she felt the fresh sweet air rush in, bringing with it a memory of brisk walks over the gorse-strewn ground, the springy turf dotted with sheep and ponies. Sometimes, back in the good days, long before James was on the scene, her mother would abandon her work for the day and they would head off up the lane from their house, over the cattle grid and onto the moor. For ten years it was often just the two of them, her dad at school, her mum giving herself time off from her creative schemes and Francesca never minded that she was an only child, enjoyed it in fact.
Those were the days when her dad was always around and although she never attended the private school at which he taught – her mother thought it a bad idea – she and her mother often went along to the various events there. She remembered that her mother never looked like any of the other mothers in her flowing skirts and crazy patchwork jacket, but her magnificent red hair meant she was noticed.
‘This is Francesca,’ her mother would say when somebody enquired. ‘She’s like her father,’ she would add, seeming to Francesca to be apologizing because her daughter had not inherited her fabulous foxy mane.
‘Mr Blackwell is a delightful man,’ the person would go on to say. ‘Quite absorbed in his work of course. Wrapped up in the past shall we say?’
It was a put-down.
Francesca was too young to understand that but she did not fail to notice how irritated her mother became at these events. On the way home on one occasion her mother referred to the school mothers as snotty madams and her father had laughed and said that snotty or not they carried an awful lot of weight and it was wise to stay on the right side of them. They were full of their own importance, he said, and when they worked together on a pet project they were a formidable team. The headmaster was terrified of them because he knew that, if he put a foot wrong, they would have him booted out in no time.
‘You cross those ladies at your peril,’ he had said.
It wasn’t until thirty odd years later that Francesca understood exactly what that meant.
Why did he leave his job and his family so abruptly?
Why did he never ever make contact again?
It was James’s arrival that sparked it off and even prior to his birth she had begun to notice a change in her father. In later life, trying to make some sense of it, it occurred that perhaps James was not her father’s child, that maybe her mother, her vivacious red-haired mother, had had an affair and that her father had been unable to cope with that. They seemed an odd couple; her father an earnest softly spoken man, her mother a shining effervescent beacon who lit up a room the moment she entered it.
So her parents were incompatible and the marriage had probably run its course but that was no excuse for abandoning Francesca.
You only had to look at Francesca to know that she was her father’s daughter. She had his colouring, his eyes, his shy smile, a habit of tilting her head at a certain angle when she was thinking. You had to look carefully to see anything of her mother.
Aged ten and a bit, she gained a brother and lost a father.
When her brother James was very small, she and her mother used to take one of his hands each and swing him up high whereupon he would giggle with delight and say ‘again’. One, two three … swing him high!
The ten year age gap was too big for Francesca to feel entirely comfortable with childish games but part of her enjoyed it too and that was enough to squash the rebellious streak. By the time she was fourteen, James was a hefty four-year-old and far too big for such things. He was a bright happy child, not seeming to miss a male influence in his life, chatty and naughty, a joy and a mischief in equal measures.
On those days, during the long summer holidays, her mother would assemble a picnic of sorts although, as often as not, when they arrived there would be little pots of trifle but no spoons and she would have failed to put the lid back properly on the jar of pickled onions – she adored them – and the sandwiches and butterfly cakes would be soggy and vinegary. ‘Who cares? It all gets mixed up inside. Eat it, Francesca, and stop fussing.’
Her mother called her Francesca, her father too although sometimes he would abbreviate it to Frankie which James picked up on but she herself liked the full title because she thought Francesca sounded slightly foreign and interesting. Her mother had a thing about names. She was Amanda and woe betide anybody who tried to call her Mandy.
It was her mother’s laugh she remembered, a hoarse throaty laugh that was seldom heard afterwards. Her mother was an eccentric – did not care what people thought of her – arty, her hair a mass of rich red curls that Francesca thanked heaven she had not inherited; her fingernails were always sticky with the clay of her beloved pots.
James was a typical boy, forever in trouble. Once he got his little legs stuck half-way across the cattle grid, too impatient to use the gate at the side, so that her mother had to struggle over to rescue him, pink cheeked and cursing, scooping him up and having a fit of giggles as they climbed out.
‘I’ll swing for you, young man,’ she had said. ‘Just look at your shoes.’
Francesca watched from the safety of the lane, her feet primly on solid ground, her shoes un-scuffed, feeling that touch of jealousy stabbing at her because, whatever she might say, however she might deny it, James with his red hair was her mother’s favourite child and his arrival had deprived her of that special dubious pleasure of being the only one.
Prior to his arrival, preparations began in earnest. The nursery was decorated in bright sunshine yellow, baby clothes started to appear and her mother let Francesca hold her hand over her tummy to feel the baby as it moved about.
The first time she felt it, she jerked her hand back, shocked at the force of the movement.
‘He kicked me.’
‘He’s just saying hello to his big sister,’ her mother
said with a smile.
She supposed she blamed James later for making her mother so ill. He came early and she saw him in the incubator at the hospital and he was every bit as small as the dolls she still secretly played with but his head was bigger. She was allowed to hold him when he came home, but he was still very small and floppy and her mother hovered anxiously until she handed him back. He stiffened in Francesca’s arms, looked anxious himself as if he knew she didn’t have a clue what she was doing.
Francesca knew that his needs had to come first, but she could not help the resentment nibbling at her, the irritation that she had to do so much of the work herself round the house because her mother took some time to recover from her ordeal.
‘Never again,’ she heard her say to a neighbour when Francesca was not supposed to be listening. ‘He’s the last one. It was horrendous. I thought I was going to die. I lost half of my blood.’
Francesca crept away before she could be accused of listening in, wondering just how much blood that was. She asked her dad how many pints of blood you had in your body and he said he thought it was eight, but he could be wrong and why did she want to know?
With her mother not recovered fully for some time, her dad did his bit round the house in his clumsy fashion although he took his job at school seriously and, if he came home early, he always brought work home with him. Gradually Francesca learned not to be quite so worried about handling James, managing it eventually with a degree of competence although you wouldn’t have thought so because James still seemed suspicious of her.
Things had changed so much with his arrival that for a while she forgot about the strained atmosphere that still existed. The realization came as she noted the difference in the relationship between her parents and Izzy’s. There was a lot of cheery shouting and laughter at Izzy’s house, secret smiles shared between her mum and dad, something that was singularly absent in hers.
She tried to ignore it and to their credit they each tried not to let it disturb her, but instinctively she knew something was wrong and then, one day, without a word he was gone. His boots were gone from the porch, his coat was gone from the peg in the hall and upstairs all his stuff had disappeared from the bathroom.
In the sitting-room, half of the books on the shelves were gone too.
‘Where has daddy gone?’
‘It’s complicated. I’ll explain when you’re older,’ her mother said and never did. None of Francesca’s questions were ever answered, her mother seeming to have put it out of her head, obsessed as she was with the baby.
When James was a little bit bigger and starting to recognize them and smile, a more interesting stage, she brought her best friend Izzy round to see him. Her mother did not care for Izzy, thought her too familiar and too forward although she would not explain to Francesca what she meant by that. She did not care for Izzy’s mother either, but there the feeling was mutual. With her plummy voice and total disregard for the locals as she called them her mother was given a wide berth by most of them. They had tried to entice her into the community but her pointblank refusal to join in anything meant that they no longer bothered to try.
This all went over Izzy’s head. Izzy, maternal to the core, went completely daft about the baby, imploring her mother to let her hold him and then picking him up and nestling him immediately to her chest as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
‘Hello, baby,’ she murmured, stroking his cheek.
James went quiet at that, hooked his hand round her little finger and did not wriggle as he did when Francesca picked him up.
‘He feels safe with you,’ her mother said to Izzy with some surprise, glancing at Francesca but blessedly not stating the obvious and saying that, even though she was his sister, he felt nervous in her arms.
And, in view of what was to happen later, he was quite right to be so.
Chapter Six
FRANCESCA SIGHED, PULLING off the road at a lay-by.
Maybe James had known then, even as a baby, that, when push came to shove, she would let him down. Izzy had come into her own on that day and what happened had bound them together, Izzy insisting that it really was not Francesca’s fault and she must not blame herself.
If only her mother had thought the same.
Izzy, the very soul of discretion, had kept her mouth shut and even though for a while Francesca was not entirely sure if she could trust her, she soon realized that Izzy was keeping the episode firmly to herself to the extent of not even telling her own mother the truth.
‘Well done, Francesca,’ Izzy’s plump cheerful mother had said, pulling her close and hugging her. ‘You did your best. You couldn’t have done more for him.’
But it was far worse when the local paper got wind of it and the reporter came along, notebook as well as camera in hand because they didn’t run to having a photographer too.
‘Put your arms round each other,’ she instructed Francesca and Izzy and awkwardly they tried to pose for her. ‘Don’t look so serious,’ she told them. ‘You can manage a little smile between you, can’t you?’
She had to be joking?
Wishing she hadn’t dragged all that up again in her head, Francesca reached for her phone, saw that at last she had a good signal and rang Selina.
It was answered at the second ring.
‘Where the hell are you? We’ve been worried sick, darling. You haven’t been picking up. Did you get my message?’
‘The reception is a bit off. Sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m in Devon.’
‘Devon? As in Devon and Cornwall?’
‘Of course. Is there any other?’
‘What on earth are you doing there?’
She talked as if Francesca had landed on the moon.
‘I come from Devon. Remember?’
‘But we’ve an appointment to view a flat tomorrow morning. I was coming with you.’
‘I’ll cancel. There will be other flats.’
‘Honestly, Francesca.’ Exasperation flooded her voice. ‘What’s got into you?’
‘I just needed to take a walk down memory lane. I did it on impulse.’
‘On impulse? You drove over two hundred miles on impulse? That is a crazy idea.’
‘Why?’ She felt her hackles rising. ‘Will you please stop telling me what to do? It feels good to be back.’
‘For God’s sake, Francesca, didn’t you stop to think that we would be worried about you? I thought you might have had an accident. If you hadn’t called by this evening I was seriously considering calling the police and reporting you missing.’
Francesca laughed at the indignation in her voice. ‘For heaven’s sake, there’s no need for such drama. I’m a grown woman, remember?’
‘You are not acting like one. I am telling you I can do without this today.’ Her sigh was deeply felt. ‘It’s been one of those awful days we dread. There’s been an incident at nursery.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘I was called in. I was just about to go into a meeting at work so it was hellish inconvenient but when you get summoned to attend by Miss Martin you drop everything. It turns out that Crispin was in a fight and had punched George who had banged his head so he had to be checked out at hospital just in case because they are scared shitless about liability issues.’
‘Is he OK?’
‘Absolutely fine. A little bump that’s all, but she made me feel as if I was in the dock. Dreadful woman. However, I have to say that, on the evidence presented it doesn’t look as if we have a leg to stand on. I could plead deliberate provocation because George has a distinctly sneaky look about him but you know what a little devil Crispin can be when he’s roused. Just like his daddy. Anyway, there’s been hell to pay. His mummy was called in too and she was not in a forgiving mood. I thought for a minute she was going to sue. In the end I smoothed things over by promising a huge donation to the summer raffle which she is in the process of organizing. It was bribery, darling, pure and simple.’
&
nbsp; ‘Oh for goodness sake, Selina.’
‘Exactly. Miss Martin kept the two of us waiting outside her office for ten minutes before she called us in. By that time I was ready to wring her neck. It was much ado about nothing. I’ve had to calm all sorts of ruffled feathers including Miss Martin who takes it all very seriously and then, when I finally got home feeling like a wet rag I find that you’re not there and nobody knows where you are. Bethany is at her wits’ end and convinced you’ve flipped and are lying dead in a ditch somewhere.’
‘Will you calm down? I have not disappeared. I’m in Devon and I’m perfectly all right.’
‘Are you quite sure about that? After all, you are in a vulnerable state just now. I can’t believe the number of times I’ve had to repeat a question two or three times before you answer. You don’t seem to be able to concentrate and I’m not sure you should be driving.’
‘You know me better than that.’ Francesca bit her lip, feeling guilty now to have worried her so. ‘I do concentrate when I’m driving,’ she went on firmly although she was aware that was not quite true. ‘Nor am I suicidal. I’m going to get through this, but on my own terms if you will let me.’
‘I know that, but I can’t help worrying about you. You haven’t let go yet. It’s all bottled up and it’s not good for you. You should have a good cry and you’ll feel heaps better.’
‘Stop it, Selina. It’s the way I am. We bottle things up in our family.’
‘David would have wanted me to keep an eye on you and I do feel sort of responsible,’ Selina went on. ‘After all, if I hadn’t introduced you in the first place, you would have been spared all this.’
‘Don’t. You are being ridiculous. I wouldn’t have missed knowing him for anything. They were very precious months we had together. I had hoped for longer but it wasn’t to be.’
Just Another Day Page 4