With a deep breath, she dives out towards its centre.
The cold water claims her. The shock is electric. It envelops her traitorous body. As she pushes for the surface, she feels her wild, beating heart, her breath rising hot and urgent in her throat, her undeniable, incredible aliveness. She floats on the surface of the river and experiences a certain peace. She feels herself connected to the flow of life all around. Here I am, she thinks. Here I am.
SIX MONTHS LATER
35
Margot sits on the window seat, gazing out at the black silhouettes of the trees bristling on the surrounding hillside, birds’ nests caught like knotted tangles in their leafless branches. Lucy lies nearby in her old bed, her eyes closed. Tom sits slumped in a chair at her side. None of them have moved for a while, though every so often Tom reaches out to stroke Lucy’s hand, to twist the loose gold band on her ring finger.
The hospice nurse, a middle-aged woman called Pam, comes in to check on Lucy. She adjusts the drip standing sentry at the bedside before turning to Margot and Tom. ‘Long night,’ she says. ‘How are you holding up?’
Margot nods. She doesn’t have the words.
Lucy opens her eyes. ‘The window,’ she gestures.
Margot looks out at the winter landscape, everything brown and grey in the early morning light, a world devoid of colour. ‘I don’t know, Luce. It’s cold out.’
‘Worried I’ll catch my death?’ Lucy asks, her voice a dry rasp. Tom buries his head in his hands. Lucy reaches out and caresses his arm with a finger. ‘I need to feel the air on my face.’
Margot looks at Lucy, at her frail limbs, her thin face, grey and collapsed in on itself, at the dark shadows under her eyes. Who is she to deny her sister this?
She turns and wrestles with the catch on the window, opens it with a thump, feels a rush of cool air slide into the room. She lays another blanket over her sister’s narrow frame before pulling her own cardigan more tightly around her body. It is cold, but it feels good to let a little of the outside in. A reminder of the world beyond this strange, stilted bedside existence where each breath feels painful and hard won.
Through the open window the first bird lifts its voice in morning song. Lucy closes her eyes. ‘That’s better,’ she says. ‘I can breathe now.’
It was Lucy who had wanted to return to Windfalls. ‘Take me home,’ she’d told Tom. ‘Please.’ It was, she’d said, the only place she wanted to be.
Margot had taken the phone call from Ted and caught the first train south from Edinburgh. As the carriage had juddered and swayed its way to London, she’d remembered travelling the same tracks the previous September, that day a different sort of trepidation flowing through her veins.
The journey was more familiar now. She had been back and forth since the wedding, accompanying Lucy to her medical appointments, sitting with her through those interminable hours of treatment when she’d been hooked up to the IV and given the chemo drugs designed to slow the advance of the tumours. Sometimes they’d chatted. Sometimes they’d watched reruns of favourite shows or played podcasts on an iPad, splitting the headphones so they could listen together. Sometimes Lucy slept and Margot had sat reading next to her. Sometimes she had left her and wandered out to the small patio area where she would chat to others who were accompanying friends and family in treatment, or sit quietly and simply stare at the sky and breathe, thinking about how extraordinary her sister was and the sheer impossibility of her not being in the world.
After those gruelling visits to the clinic, Margot sometimes slept on Lucy and Tom’s sofa, or dropped by to see Eve and the girls, but mostly she returned to Windfalls. In the face of Lucy’s illness, she and Kit had reached an uneasy truce. ‘Tell her,’ Lucy urged her, more than once. ‘Tell her what happened.’ And Margot would nod and reassure her sister that she would – in time. But not now, when Lucy was feeling better. And Lucy had shaken her head – her hair shaved and her scalp wrapped in one of her Indian silk headscarves – and told Margot how annoyingly stubborn she was.
They had talked about Mr Hudson. On one of those long, protracted afternoons at the clinic, Margot had told her sister how she had found the courage to look for him online. He hadn’t been hard to find. His name had appeared almost immediately in the search engine results, linked to a string of news articles about a teacher in Manchester who had been prosecuted for indecent assault and was currently serving time in prison. Several of the articles had been accompanied by photos of the offender being ushered from a police car into the courthouse. The sight of him had made her breath falter. Time had not been kind. He’d looked harassed and bloated, a softer, older version of the man she remembered. She had stared at the photos for a long time, feeling her anger rise at what he had put her through – what he had taken from her. Worse still, she was not the only one. If she had found the courage to speak up, would she have saved someone else from the same ordeal?
‘You were terrified, ashamed. What you went through … it’s understandable that you felt you couldn’t tell anyone,’ Lucy had said, gripping her hand. ‘But it’s not too late. You can still tell the police.’
‘Why would they believe me, after all this time?’
Lucy had looked her in the eye. ‘There’s evidence, Margot. You buried it, but it’s there. Your baby.’
Margot had dropped her head and wrapped her arms around herself, her fingers unconsciously caressing the small dark heart in the crook of her elbow. She’d nodded. ‘I’ve tried so hard not to think about him, but ever since I told you and Eve, I keep thinking … I can’t leave him there. It’s wrong.’
Lucy nods. ‘I know. Perhaps there is a way. Perhaps … a proper burial?’ she had suggested tentatively. ‘It might help?’
Margot had nodded, unable to look at Lucy, letting the tears fall into her lap.
Lucy had squeezed her hand. ‘When you’re ready.’
Margot had been at Windfalls the afternoon that Lucy had told them all she wanted to stop – that the treatment was no longer having any effect. Lucy and Tom had spoken with the doctors and she had taken the decision that it would be better to focus on the time she had left, with the support of the palliative care team, rather than enduring more punishing cycles of chemo.
Margot hadn’t wanted to accept Lucy’s decision, but she had known she had no right to challenge her, not when she had seen first hand the toll of the treatment. The last few months had been a terrible endurance and Lucy had borne the drugs with a stoic courage. But watching her suffering had been painful for them all. Lucy had been so strong that Margot had convinced herself of a miracle. She doesn’t know if she can bear what is to come.
It’s Margot who tells them. She leaves Tom in the bedroom and goes downstairs to where Eve, Kit and Ted sit silently in the kitchen, empty mugs and a cooling teapot in front of them. She stands in the doorway and, at the sight of her, they understand. Ted releases a soft sigh.
She nods. ‘Pam says you should come now.’
Kit turns her face. ‘I can’t.’
‘Come on, Mum,’ says Margot. ‘For Lucy.’
Eve touches Kit’s arm. ‘We have to.’
It is Ted who helps Kit from the chair and supports her up the stairs to Lucy’s room. Pam adjusts the drip at the bedside then steps back to allow the family around the bed. Eve puts her arm around Tom. Margot stands alone by the window seat. The ache in her chest threatens to cleave her in two.
‘I’ve increased the medication,’ says Pam. ‘She was in a lot of pain.’
Kit goes to Lucy and strokes her cheek. She brushes her daughter’s forehead and bends to kiss her. Lucy’s breath is a slow, irregular rasp.
Margot watches Eve kiss her sister. She sees Tom reach for Lucy’s hand and press it to his lips. ‘I love you, Luce,’ he says. ‘I’ll always love you.’
Kit lets out a strangled sob and Ted reaches for her, supporting her at the end of the bed. Margot thinks her heart will burst. She turns and faces the window, counting the
slowing of Lucy’s rattled breathing. A pale sun is rising over the hills, emerging between the clouds and momentarily shining silver on the twist of river in the valley below, visible between the leafless trees. She remembers the morning after the wedding. She remembers walking out into the garden, following her sister’s footprints in the dew-soaked grass until she had come upon her floating on the surface of the misty river, arms outstretched, eyes closed and a beatific smile spread across her face. She remembers how she had watched her from the cover of the trees, marvelling at the strange peace of the scene, and at her sister’s spirit, thinking back on all the other times she had watched Lucy swim and play in the river as a younger girl, wild and carefree.
Margot thinks of her sister in her place of joy and it’s only as her attention returns to the room, that she realises the bird has stopped singing. Outside the window, a thin veil of rain begins to fall.
It is Pam’s suggestion. The nurse mentions her idea to Margot, explaining that she has found it sometimes helps some family members to say goodbye. As soon as the thought is in her head, Margot knows it is something she would like to do. While Ted phones the undertaker, Margot goes outside to find Sibella. ‘Would you help with something? Mum can’t face it and Eve needs to gather herself before she goes home to tell the girls.’
‘Of course,’ Sibella agrees. ‘Whatever you need.’
The rain has stopped as quickly as it began. The winter sun filters across the wet trees, turning the bare landscape into a dazzling mass of light. The drops cascading off the branches form a shifting silver waterfall that takes her breath away. She can’t look away, the beauty somehow intensified by her pain.
The emotion swells and mingles with the ache of loss – her feelings amplified – until tears burn in her eyes and the shimmering landscape blurs. She turns her face to the sky and whispers words of gratitude and love.
Bowing at the river’s edge, Margot fills a small flask and carries it reverently back to Lucy’s room, where she finds Sibella waiting for her with clean cloths and towels, as well as a basin of warm water. Sibella watches silently as Margot adds the river water to the basin. She isn’t quite sure why it has felt so important to carry the river home to Lucy, but something about the gesture feels right. As if the water she loved might somehow help bear her onwards, to her final resting place. ‘A last swim,’ she says, turning to Sibella, attempting to explain, her throat aching with love and sorrow.
Sibella nods and passes Margot a cloth.
As they wash Lucy’s body, Margot is struck by the fact that it is Lucy, and yet it is not. The more she tends to her sister’s body, the more clearly she understands that Lucy is no longer with them. Whatever made Lucy so inimitably Lucy is no longer there. It is eerie and strange, yet Margot finds it comforting to touch her, to care for her sister in this final act of love. She can’t help glancing once or twice at the open window. Where are you, she wonders? Where have you gone? Her stillness, her coldness, is baffling.
They carefully remove the wedding ring from her finger. Margot steps back and feels a hot rush of anger at the sight of Lucy’s sunken face. She should have had more time, time for pregnancy and stretch marks, wrinkles and liver spots and wispy white hairs on her old lady chin. It’s so desperately unfair. She tries to remember the beauty of her sister. She tries to lock away for posterity the memory of Lucy at her most radiant. Not this ravaged version, her body devastated by illness. One day, Margot will be an old lady, yet Lucy never a day older. It’s hard not to feel robbed. She sighs. ‘She looks at peace, doesn’t she?’
Sibella nods. ‘She does.’
Margot uncurls Lucy’s hand and tucks a smooth river stone into Lucy’s fingers before pressing them back into a tight fist. Satisfied that they have done their best, they leave the room.
She finds Tom and Eve outside on the patio. They sit shivering in the cool morning light, their breath ghosting in the air, driven as if by some unspoken agreement to escape the compressed atmosphere of the house. Open the window. She remembers Lucy’s final request and looks to the blank sky, blinking back the tears. Already it feels wrong: three of them sitting at a table where there should be four. She reaches out and squeezes Tom’s shoulder as she passes. He is rigid beneath her touch and Margot senses what an effort it is for him to hold himself together. She takes the seat beside him.
‘I thought you’d left,’ says Margot, turning to Eve.
‘Just summoning the courage.’ She bites her lip. ‘I can’t bear to tell the girls.’
‘Will Andrew be there?’
‘Yes.’ Eve lifts her head to meet Margot’s gaze. ‘He moved back in last weekend.’
Margot eyes her. ‘That’s good. Are things … OK?’
‘He’s been brilliant these past few weeks. Solid. We’ve talked. We both want to make it work, and not just for the girls’ sake. I think we’ve both come to realise … what’s important. Lucy’s illness has shone a light on what really matters. The rest …’ she shrugs.
Tom clears his throat. ‘That would’ve made Lucy very happy.’
Eve nods. ‘I told her yesterday.’ Margot watches Eve and Tom share a look of understanding. Yesterday. The word seems to catch in the air, reminding them all how ‘yesterday’ will always be a memory now, how different all their days will be from this point on.
Eve lets out a long sigh. ‘We’ll have to start thinking about the funeral.’
‘Lucy left a list. She had some firm ideas of what she wants.’ Tom’s blue eyes swim, but he manages a wry smile. ‘And what she definitely doesn’t want.’
Margot remembers the rows and tensions surrounding the wedding. ‘Of course she did.’ A robin hops in a hedgerow, rustling the foliage. Margot turns and notices the flash of its red breast. The colour reminds her of Lucy’s wedding dress – how beautiful she had looked – and the thought makes the ache in her chest throb.
Tom rests his head in his hands. He sits silently for a moment, then seems to pull himself up, rubbing his hands over his face. ‘I’m so tired. I almost forgot. Lucy wrote letters to you both,’ he says. ‘She asked me to give them to you … after.’ His voice cracks. He reaches into his jacket and pulls out an envelope. ‘Margot’ is written on the front in Lucy’s looping handwriting. There is another for Eve. Margot takes up the envelope with her name on and grips it tightly as Tom heads back inside the house.
Through the window, she watches Tom enter the kitchen, where Kit, Ted and Sibella sit at the table. Ted stands to greet him. He shakes Tom’s hand, then pulls him closer, drawing him into a half-pat, half-hug embrace, the type certain men perform in times of high emotion. Tom moves as if to pull back, then collapses, leaning into his father-in-law, his shoulders heaving. Ted, after only a second’s hesitation, holds him more tightly, and after a while, Margot realises she is no longer sure which of the men is holding the other up.
Her eyes welling with tears, she turns her gaze to where Kit sits nearby, her mother’s head bowed low. Though perhaps as if sensing the weight of Margot’s attention, Kit shifts in her chair and raises her face to the window. Margot sees her mother’s small nod of acknowledgement and the saddest of smiles breaking on her lips. Margot returns the nod. Lucy had told them that she wanted her wedding to bring them all back to each other. If the wedding hasn’t, perhaps her death will, for here they all are at Windfalls again, connected in their love and their grief.
‘I’m not sure I can read it yet,’ says Eve, taking her envelope from the table and stowing it carefully in her coat pocket. ‘I think I might save it for another time. When she feels too … far away.’ She shivers. ‘I’m going in. Are you coming?’
The robin hops between the hedgerow branches, rustling the leaves, before taking off with a sudden flutter of wings into the valley below. Margot glances at the envelope. ‘Not yet,’ she says, turning to look beyond the orchard, to where the water glints through the trees.
36
All is still beside the river. Silence hangs in the air. Ma
rgot folds the letter carefully into its envelope and sits on the jetty, looking out over the mirrored water.
To read Lucy’s letter, to hear her voice, brings an ache of longing. Grief grips her heart like a fist. Already, she feels the absoluteness of her sister’s absence. Where once there were shared jokes, stories and experiences, only she holds them now. The sisterly language that belonged to them both is hers alone. No more, do you remember the time … ? The thought brings intense pain.
Tomorrow will be the first full day that she will live without Lucy. Tomorrow, she will wake and after a split second of peace – that moment between sleep and consciousness – she will have to remember that Lucy is no longer in the world. How many mornings will it take for her to accept the impossible truth? How long before Lucy’s death has become a part of her, a sad fact in the string of moments making up her life?
She grips her sister’s letter in her hand and looks down into the slow-moving water. It takes courage to love, she had written. But where there is love – and I know there is love here – there is also hope. Don’t give up. Talk to Mum.
Margot closes her eyes. Sitting there on the jetty a carousel of memories revolve. Behind her closed lids, a wire of bobbing light bulbs glints and sways. Her tongue tingles with the remembered fizz of cider. She hears the echoes of laughter, remembers the grip of fingers pressing into her neck. She opens her eyes and refocuses on the deep green of the water. She lets out a breath. She will tell Kit. She will honour her sister’s last request. She will find the strength to sit down with her mother and explain what happened that summer, and in the months that followed. She doesn’t know how Kit will respond, but she will give her the opportunity to hear her, if nothing else. Maybe, just maybe, Lucy was right. Maybe the truth will be the bridge they can finally meet upon.
The River Home : A Novel (2020) Page 28