The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘For the sake of auld lang syne,’ said Lou, and then she blushed, as though realising that the phrase had sounded more sarcastic than she’d intended. Like the kind of snippy thing she’d have said at sixteen, Kitty thought. ‘It’s great to be here, Mum,’ she said then. ‘I’m not sure I can cope with many more days as action-packed as this one, but . . .’

  ‘A quiet day tomorrow,’ agreed Flora. ‘It’ll take them a while to clear up the mess from the storm, anyway. We can lie low.’

  She looked at Landon, just a quick glance, but Kitty knew she was hoping he’d stay longer, and hoping they wouldn’t notice her wishing it.

  But then it was Landon’s turn to feel the tug on the thread, to react, to deflect the conversation onwards. His eyes passed over Lou, and Kitty guessed that he’d been told about Alice and wouldn’t raise the subject in public. She knew before his gaze reached her that it was her he’d light on, and that he was going to quiz her in the way older men thought was acceptable, flattering even, to young women. She felt a flush rising in her cheeks, fuelled by emotions she hadn’t had time to prepare for. She hadn’t thought about Daniel all afternoon, that was the irony. The lake and the storm had occupied her fully enough to keep him at bay, and her defences were down.

  In the second before Landon spoke she looked up at the botanical prints that hung on the wall behind him, hoping they might steady her nerve, but the delicate realism of stems and petals and furled leaves offered no protection. Suddenly the room was full of Daniel, his face and smell and voice, a distorted mass of sensations that reminded Kitty of the teratomas in Flora’s pathology book, those tangled tumours of teeth and hair and bone that she and Lou used to terrify themselves with.

  She didn’t hear what Landon said, not properly. Some cliché, intended to be harmless. She didn’t try to form a reply, or to stop the tears; she simply sat and let them fall. So be it, she thought. Let it all come out now, Daniel and Henry and everything. She imagined a terrible drama, the room split apart, the paper flowers tumbling from their frames. But instead there was complete silence for a second or two, and then Lou jumping up and proposing some music and Landon agreeing, even Flora joining in. All of them feeling her distress and wanting to stop it.

  Kitty didn’t know whether to feel relieved or dismayed. In the hall, Lou put a hand on her arm and said, ‘You look worn out, Kitty. Do you want to go to bed?’ But she shook her head and pressed her hands against her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Being silly. Let’s go and sing.’

  They found Schubert’s Winterreise, an edition in the right key for Landon. While Kitty buried herself in an armchair Lou set the score on the piano and flicked through the opening pages.

  ‘I can manage the first one, at least,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a go.’

  How long was it, Kitty wondered, since Lou had played the piano? It was a long time since Kitty had heard these songs too, the gentle precision of their unhappiness designed for just such a setting as this, a few people gathered in a room at the end of a day. Lou might be out of practice but she played well, better than well, with the confident placing of phrases that Kitty remembered. And if Landon felt put upon, if he would have preferred not to sing, there was no evidence of it. From the first note his voice was miraculous, a thing of touch and warmth and intoxication, calling every cell of Kitty’s body to attention.

  When the shift to the major key came in the final verse, Kitty felt the relief and desolation of it flooding through her. How much better expressed in music than it could ever be in words, she thought, that knowledge that sorrow and happiness are inextricable, that one can’t exist without the other. How perfectly and painfully that was conveyed by the dying Schubert. Landon understood it, Kitty thought; and Lou; and surely Flora.

  She looked at her mother, then, and knew she couldn’t tell her about Henry and Daniel. It was as if, at that moment, the whole tumultuous saga of her parents’ marriage was spread before her, complex and tortured but complete. She could see the balance and the shape of it, like a symphony. Lou was wrong, she thought; Flora didn’t have to know. She already knew quite enough.

  And then, as the song came to an end, Flora moved a little, shifting her weight forward in the chair. Only Kitty saw her: a tiny movement, as though she was reaching for something, bracing herself. There was a pause, Lou not yet lifting her hand to turn the page and Landon still standing where the last phrase had left him, his eyes on Lou, locked into their shared performance. Kitty watched her mother, saw her chest rising and falling as though she had to remember to breathe, and waited for what was coming. Lou lifted her hand to turn the page, and then Flora spoke.

  ‘Kitty darling,’ she said – and then she faltered. ‘Lou . . . Landon.’

  ‘What is it?’ Lou asked. ‘Shall we stop? Sing something else?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Flora, ‘really lovely, but I’m afraid the day’s catching up with me.’

  ‘Of course.’ Lou shut the score. ‘You must be exhausted. We should have thought.’

  Flora didn’t look exhausted, Kitty thought. She looked agitated. And Lou didn’t look apologetic, either; she’d been enjoying herself and she didn’t like the interruption. Her expression reminded Kitty suddenly, sharply, of Henry.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ said Flora, ‘there’s no need to stop’ – but there was a hiatus now, a breach in the flow of the evening. Kitty had the sense that four invisible currents had been brought to a sudden halt, four luxuriant tumbles of thought reeling up against a breakwater. She could feel petulance rising where something nobler had been a moment before. None of them met each other’s eyes.

  Flora stood up.

  ‘Do go on,’ she said, with even less conviction.

  Kitty hesitated. It was her name Flora had started with. Surely she hadn’t imagined that, or mistaken the sense that some irresistible momentum had caused her mother to speak it? And then Flora’s gaze cut across to her, and before another conscious thought could interpose itself Kitty got to her feet and followed her out of the room.

  44

  She had the advantage, Flora thought, of having heard Landon sing only a few days before. She was glad of that, of not coming to this impromptu recital completely raw, but even so there was more to take in, more to think about in this little scene than she could quite bear. Kitty curled in an armchair, her face marbled with weeping and her hair a golden tumble. Lou at the piano, an entirely unexpected twist. Landon, taller and more distinguished in this little space than he had seemed on stage. All three of them, Flora realised, sharing something she lacked: an instinctive understanding of the music.

  It wasn’t that Landon’s performance left her unmoved; far from it. It was more that it felt like listening to a foreign language, enjoying the sounds but not knowing what lay beneath them. The song was in German, of course, but it was the musical language she badly wanted to grasp: the emotions generated by the pattern of notes. Watching the others, she wished her education hadn’t been so narrow. But perhaps this was an innate ability she lacked – a missing link in her brain?

  And then something changed in the music: a shift of mood, like a brightening in the sky. Suddenly there was a suggestion of hope to mitigate the sadness – or perhaps, Flora realised, listening intently now, a reminder that pleasure is possible even in the depths of misery, and that misery is all the more acute for the knowledge of pleasure. Those were things the summer should have taught her. The summer, and four decades with Henry. She looked at her daughters, each bearing their burden of grief, and then at Landon, and she saw in his face something sadder still: his forbearance, his kindness, his dignity. As the music came to an end she realised that she had to speak now, before the spell was broken.

  ‘Kitty darling,’ she said, when the silence had held for a second or two – but then she stopped. The words she’d hoped would follow had dried in her throat. This wasn’t the right way; she couldn’t do it in public. Dear God, how could she misjudge this moment
after keeping her secret so carefully for so long? How could she of all people be seduced by a song into thinking this was a good idea?

  ‘Lou,’ she said, scrambling to cover herself, ‘Landon . . .’

  The girls were both looking at her; not Landon.

  ‘What is it?’ Lou asked.

  ‘I’m afraid the day is catching up with me,’ Flora heard herself say.

  ‘Of course; you must be exhausted,’ said Lou. ‘We should have thought.’ The words were sympathetic, but there was something else in her face that caused Flora pain.

  ‘Don’t stop.’ Flora smiled, hoping to reassure, to defuse. She might have waited, she thought; but she knew she couldn’t have done. She hesitated for a moment longer, fearful that the opening she’d created would be wasted, the singing stopped for nothing, and then she stood up. ‘Do go on,’ she said. She glanced at Kitty – and to her joy and terror Kitty got to her feet too.

  ‘Me too,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  At that moment Landon met Flora’s eyes at last, and his expression almost floored her. He raised his eyebrows, just very slightly, and Flora nodded: two tiny movements, each impossible to be sure of.

  Landon turned to Lou then. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘are you game for one more number?’

  Crossing the few yards to the door, Flora didn’t quite dare to believe that Kitty had followed her deliberately. But when they reached the bottom of the stairs Kitty stopped.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ she asked. ‘I could make us some.’

  August 1991

  August, thinks Flora, as she and Henry make the long journey down to the West Country before the funeral, is not a time for mourning. How typical of her mother to die when there are no sharp winds to drive home the chill of mortality, just balmy skies by day and the smell of hay lingering in the air even at night.

  Flora’s operating list overran today, so they are late. Lou is fast asleep in the back of the car as the road winds away from them, stubble gleaming in the moonlight on each side. It’s after eleven when they arrive, but Jean is on the doorstep when the car pulls up, smart in a skirt and jacket, a dark silk scarf at her neck.

  ‘That woman has the hearing of a cat,’ Henry says.

  His voice is jovial, relaxed, but Flora isn’t deceived: not by his tone, nor by her sister’s smile. Henry has barely spoken since they left home, and Jean was expecting them at eight. As they pull through the gate, she thinks with longing of the shining cool of the operating theatre.

  Henry parks behind Jean and Derek’s Volkswagen and opens the car door.

  ‘Hello, Jean,’ he says. ‘Good of you to wait up.’

  ‘Little mite,’ says Jean, peering through the window into the back seat. ‘Her bed’s all made up.’

  Flora feels little connection with this grey stone house their mother moved to three years ago, but Jean has been a frequent visitor: she has its cupboards and crannies well under control. She raises her eyebrows when they refuse the soup she has kept warm on the back of the Aga.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d have time to stop for food,’ she says, to show that she knows they did, and that they’ve kept her up, therefore, later than they needed to.

  ‘A cup of tea would be very welcome,’ says Henry. ‘You must put us to work tomorrow, Jean. We’re behindhand, I know.’

  This is partly, Flora knows, an attempt to protect her – getting in before Jean does, he’d call it – but it’s also setting the tone, making it clear that he has no intention of letting their squabble (his preferred term) spill over into the serious family business of the funeral.

  Infuriatingly, Jean smiles at him. She has always been susceptible to Henry’s charm, despite her undeviating conviction that he’s a wastrel, and no more than Flora deserves.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘There’s plenty still to do.’

  *

  The next morning Flora wakes early, and she slips downstairs and lets herself out of the back door before anyone else appears. Compounding her sins, she knows, but she needs to let things settle in her head, and there certainly won’t be any peace later on.

  The village is quiet, swathed by the gauzy mist of a late summer morning, and the air is sweet. Filled with the satisfaction of an early harvest, Flora thinks fancifully, and she laughs at herself and feels a little better. She passes the pub and the Post Office, then halts at the corner to look at the church. She hadn’t meant to go in, but gazing up at the square tower and the broad flanks of the transepts she feels herself drawn through the lych gate, and then pushing at the door, which – to her surprise – is open.

  She has been asking herself why her mother chose to move down here when the cancer must already have been well established, but it strikes her now, standing in the empty nave, that the prospect of an elegant funeral in this extraordinary church must have occurred to her; must have appealed. A ludicrous explanation, of course, but there is something utterly recognisable in it that pierces the calm surface of Flora’s grief. She can picture her mother sitting in one of these pews, wearing the same kind of scarf as Jean. She can hear her confiding with defiant wit that she’d been mindful of the quality of her funeral when she chose this village. There was always something barbaric beneath that cultured exterior, Flora thinks, and she feels tears and laughter catching in the back of her throat.

  Sliding into a pew, Flora leans back against the smooth wood. Her mother didn’t tell anyone about her illness until near the end. She gave them very little notice: just a straightforward summons a few days before she died, which Jean answered at once and Flora too late. Flora, who is used to death and familiar with its forms, was nevertheless startled by the sight of her mother’s stillness against the pillows; grateful and angry that the body had been left where it was until she finally arrived. She shuts her eyes now, remembering. She came straight from the hospital, driving through the night to get down here and back again before morning, in time for a list that included a case she couldn’t leave to her Registrar. And for what? For the paying of respects; the marking of dues. For some primitive need to see her mother dead.

  She’s not sure whether her mother was a believer. Her life, Flora thinks, was governed by precepts rather than beliefs. Christianity was part of the framework she lived by – but looking up at the surprising angels gazing down from the roof, Flora admits that she knows almost nothing of what her mother thought, about God or anything else. Did she take pride in Flora’s accomplishments, for instance? Did she admire the balancing of marriage and motherhood with a surgical career, or regard it as an evil she had to accept? No opinion was ever ventured, after Flora’s marriage. Her mother surely expected her to stop work after Lou’s birth, but she never said so; never expressed surprise or reproach when Flora went back to the hospital six weeks later. She must have meant this as a gift, Flora thinks, but she wishes she knew what her mother really thought. No doubt Jean would have an opinion, but Flora is sure her mother would not have spoken to Jean about it. She realises, now, that there are things she and her mother had in common: fortitude, determination, a sense of honour. Sitting in a patch of morning sunshine that falls without warmth from the clerestory windows, Flora feels the first tears rising in her eyes.

  Henry is washing up breakfast dishes when she gets back to the house, and Jean is on the phone. Lou is sitting at the table in her pyjamas, finishing a piece of toast.

  ‘I walked to the church,’ Flora says, when Jean puts the phone down, although she knows it looks defensive to account for her movements before her sister has asked where she’s been.

  ‘Derek’s gone to the florist,’ Jean says. ‘I wasn’t sure whether you’d want to have a say.’

  ‘In the wreath?’

  ‘And the church flowers.’ Jean frowns. ‘There will have to be flowers in the church.’

  There will have to be flowers in the church. Were those exactly her mother’s words, before her wedding? Flora smiles, despite herself. ‘There are flowers in the chur
ch,’ she says. She takes a plate and a knife from the rack by the sink and sits down opposite her daughter. ‘Rather nice flowers, I thought.’

  Jean hasn’t moved from the phone. She leans against the dresser, her face tight.

  ‘I had hoped,’ she says, ‘that we could work together, just for a few days. Would that be too much to ask?’

  *

  Flora doesn’t see Landon until the wake. She hadn’t even thought about whether he might be among the hordes of friends and strangers who have shown up for the funeral, but when she goes into the kitchen to check on the caterers there he is, standing by the back door, as though he’s just arrived or is wondering about leaving again. He swings round when she comes in, and beams at her.

  ‘I thought this might be the place to catch you,’ he says.

  Flora has forgotten his speaking voice, the hint of the operatic baritone about certain vowels. She looks at him for a moment before moving forward to accept his embrace.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you,’ she says, her voice tremulous. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘My poor Flora.’ Landon’s tone is cheerful for the caterers, but he clasps her more tightly than he needs to. Flora can tell that he understands; that he knows, at least, that there is a good deal to understand.

  ‘Henry’s out there somewhere,’ she says. ‘Everyone’s out there. Jean and Derek.’

  Landon lifts her gently away from his shoulder and holds her at arm’s length, studying her face. Flora notices his clothes for the first time, the extravagant cravat and the dark red carnation in the lapel of his linen jacket. This is how she remembers him, always a little larger than life. ‘How are you, Flora?’

  ‘I’m a Consultant,’ she says. ‘Did you know?’

  ‘I did. The first female surgeon at St Backwards.’

  She laughs. ‘And I heard you on the radio last week.’

  ‘Wagner?’ he asks. ‘How did it sound?’

  ‘Compelling.’

  She heard him singing, in fact, the night she drove down to see her mother lying dead. She won’t tell him that, Flora thinks. She isn’t sure that she could explain what it meant to hear him on that particular night. She was just glad Henry wasn’t with her, Henry who loves Wagner so much.