The Missing Letters of Mrs Bright (ARC)

by Beth Miller

  ‘You sentimental old dag. He was very handsome, but from what you wrote to me, I don’t remember him being all that nice to you.’

  We looked at each other, the secret flickering between us.

  ‘Have you ever…?’ Bear said.

  ‘No. I wanted to talk to you about that. About…’ I hesitated. ‘Whether it was a mistake, keeping it to myself.’

  She nodded. ‘Well, we have plenty of time to discuss it.’

  ‘And discuss going to Venice? Carpe diem and all that.’

  She laughed. ‘I’ll think about it, OK? I like your crazy side. I like you showing up here all mad and full of life.’ She pushed her full plate away. ‘I’m stuffed. Better get going. School night. But we could meet tomorrow afternoon, say four, and do some touristy things.’

  ‘That’d be brilliant. Shall I collect you?’

  ‘Nah, I’ll come to you. Let’s do the Manly Ferry tomorrow, that’s a great little trip.’

  She insisted on paying for our dinner – ‘You’ve trekked all this way to see me!’ – though I’d eaten three times as much. She got a cab outside, and I walked to the hotel, pleased that I knew where I was going this time.

  I lay on my bed and texted the kids, even though Stella was angry with me and Edward had gone silent. I’ll never sleep, not after that massive nap earlier, was the last thing I remember thinking before morning. Leaving my marriage certainly seemed to have improved my sleep. I wasn’t quite sure what the significance of that was.

  Letter written on 29 September 2002

  Dearest Bear,

  * * *

  That is one adorable baby. Congratulations, darling. I love the name Charlie. He is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen – you are so clever! What does Murray think of his gorgeous little son? I’ve put the photo you sent on the fridge, and Stella, who is currently baby-mad, blows a kiss at it each time she goes past.

  Hope labour wasn’t too grim. We can compare war stories now. Tell me as much as you want to. I remember when I had Edward I didn’t know anyone who’d had a baby and there were lots of things I found quite shocking.

  It’s very busy here. Now that Edward’s old enough to collect Stella from school on his way home, I’m in the shop full-time. Richard has his hands full now he has two other shops. Sometimes I wish he was an accountant or civil servant, someone who comes home at six every evening and has weekends off. I’d never say this to Rose, but sometimes I too feel like a single parent. I know it’s not the same, she’s on it 24/7 with her kids and they are a lot younger than mine. Plus Tim is still behaving like an absolute shit over their house sale. And Richard is around now and then, of course. I guess sometimes I feel kind of lonely, Bear.

  But you don’t want to hear me whingeing when you’ve got gorgeous Charlie asleep (I hope!) in your arms.

  Hope you get a decent time off with him. I don’t have any advice really, other than get all the sleep you can, no matter what time of the day. Prioritise sleep over a clean house, getting washed, hell, prioritise it over everything except keeping the baby alive. Give him a squidgy hug from me. Now mine are older, I miss the baby stage. That lovely smell. Edward smells of Lynx deodorant.

  Till next time.

  Miss you.

  * * *

  Always, Kay

  Thirteen

  Kay

  I spent a lovely few days wandering round Sydney, feeling so dislocated from my ordinary life that it was like being another person. The Friday ferry trip was gorgeous; arriving into Manly at dusk and watching the lights sprinkle across the harbour was something I’d never forget. I was looking forward to spending the weekend with Bear, but unfortunately she was involved in organising an inter-school sports competition thing, which took up much of her time. I got in a routine of a leisurely breakfast on my own in one of the many cafés near my hotel, then some exploring while Bear was working, taking everything in: the Museum of Contemporary Art, a backstage tour of the opera house, and an organised walk round The Rocks district. What a beautiful city, what an amazing country.

  Around four o’clock each day, Bear would text and we’d meet up. We went all over, and saw the famous sights, which were famous for a reason, but my favourite thing was to see the unsung ordinary places Bear knew about. Something that hadn’t changed since we were young was her love of thrift shops, or ‘op shops’ as she said they were called here. On Saturday afternoon she took me to an amazing warehouse-style one where I supplemented my meagre running-away wardrobe with some beautiful new things. I got jeans, two dresses and some tops for little more than pennies.

  I took them to the counter, gloating over them. ‘Best shop ever!’

  ‘It really is,’ Bear said. ‘I come here a lot.’

  A man was in front of us, buying a vinyl single. I glanced over his shoulder: ‘Ace of Spades’ by Motörhead. It seemed an unlikely choice for the fellow, who looked like an accountant.

  ‘That’s seventy-five cents,’ the woman behind the counter told him.

  ‘I’ll give you fifty for it,’ the man said.

  ‘I’m afraid seventy-five is the price,’ the woman said.

  ‘It’s not worth it,’ the man said.

  I was feeling oddly skittish after a day in the warm Australian sunshine, and an afternoon of trying on pretty clothes. I tapped him on the shoulder, and he whirled round.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you think Lemmy would have quibbled about twenty-five cents?’ I said. ‘May he rest in peace.’ I sensed that Bear, who’d been standing next to me, had moved away in embarrassment.

  ‘Who?’ said the man, looking puzzled.

  ‘Lemmy! The lead singer of Motörhead, you philistine.’

  The man grinned. Then he glanced past me, and his smile dropped. ‘Ursula!’

  I turned round. Bear was standing in the shadows by the dressing-room cubicle. ‘Oh, hello, Frank.’

  ‘God, Ursula, I heard from Murray about—’

  Bear shook her head. Just once, a tiny movement, but it clearly meant ‘shut right up’, and he stopped instantly. After a pause, he turned back to me.

  ‘You’re right, lady,’ he said. ‘It’s cheap to quibble about 25 cents. In fact,’ and he handed some money to the saleswoman, ‘here’s a dollar.’ He picked up his record. ‘Bye, Ursula, good to see you,’ he said, and went out.

  The saleswoman began folding my new clothes.

  ‘Who was that?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, an annoying friend of Murray’s. Always gossiping about something, like an old woman.’ Bear slapped down her credit card. ‘Let me buy these for you.’

  ‘No, Bear.’

  ‘My treat. I want to. Such a thrill, to see you here, and decked out in proper good Aussie gear. Put your money away, it’s no good here.’

  ‘Well, that’s really kind of you.’

  ‘Wear that green dress tonight, we’ll go dancing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Nah, but I know a nice little Blues club.’

  The club, called The Basement, was amazing, and the next afternoon we visited the stunning botanic gardens. On Monday, my last day, I discovered a huge stationery shop in Darling Harbour, and found an Ohto multi-function pen with two different colour ballpoints plus a propelling pencil. You hardly ever saw Ohto pens in Britain. I could imagine Richard’s face if he could see it. I took a photo of it, but of course he didn’t have a phone to send it to. If I sent a picture to Stella to show him she might delete it.

  When you come back, even if Dad takes you back, I won’t.

  The pen was sixty dollars but I bought it anyway. When would I see something like that again? I had a sandwich lunch in a café, and wrapped the pen in brown paper, and wrote a little card to go with it. The woman in the café directed me to the nearest post office and I felt strangely elated when, with help from a cashier, I managed to send it. It was the first time in my life I’d sent anything more complicated than a postcard from a foreign country. I pictured Richard’s face lighting up
as he opened the parcel.

  As I walked back towards town, I passed a huge secondary school, and realised it was the one where Bear worked. It was nearly three, so I thought it might be nice to collect her for once. I buzzed on the intercom, and explained myself to the friendly sounding receptionist, remembering to call Bear by her proper name. There was a pause, and the receptionist said, ‘Please give me a moment.’

  I waited for a couple of minutes, wondering if she’d forgotten about me, then she buzzed back. ‘I’m so sorry, Ursula isn’t here right now.’

  ‘Oh!’ I couldn’t think where she might be. ‘Is she in a meeting?’

  ‘No,’ the receptionist answered, ‘she’s not currently on school premises.’

  I thanked her, feeling puzzled, and went back to the hotel. Perhaps she was at an off-site meeting, or had gone home early. But the text I received a little while later gave no hint of anything unusual:

  Phew, just finished. Got a few things to do. Purple Kangaroo at 7 p.m.?

  I lay on my bed, staring at the telly, though I hadn’t turned it on. I wondered what was going on with her, what she wasn’t telling me, and what it was about the vibe she gave off that made it impossible to ask. I had two hours to kill before we met. Was this my future? Solitary meals, solitary travel, solitary hotel rooms. Richard hadn’t exactly been a constant companion, but at least I’d usually had him to talk to at dinner time.

  ‘I like my own company,’ I told myself out loud. And then replied, also out loud, ‘Yes, but not all the sodding time.’ Great. I was starting to talk to myself.

  ‘There are worse things than being lonely,’ I remembered Mum saying to me, when she was ill and living in her flat in a rather unfriendly sheltered-housing block, ‘but I can’t think of them right now.’

  Get a grip, I told myself, silently this time. Man up, Kay! Tomorrow you’ll be heading back to England. I’d leave Venice for another time.

  I worked out it was 8 a.m. in the UK, but Imogen was an early bird, so I decided to risk phoning her. Look at me, calling all the way from Australia, and it wasn’t even a World-Class Emergency!

  ‘Hello, Imo dear,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose lovely Bryn Glas is free…’

  ‘Kay, my dear! You’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! Weren’t you just staying there?’

  ‘I was, and it was wonderful as always! I’m abroad, coming back tomorrow. I wondered if I might take the cottage again, for a bit longer this time?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, chérie,’ Imo said. She sounded upset. ‘My sons are insisting I get a permanent tenant in. They’re putting it with a letting agency, can you believe? It’s a “compromise” as I refuse to sell. Their decorators are going in next week, apparently it needs “blitzing” before they put it with an agency. You never minded the wallpaper, did you? I hate that you can’t go there. It always felt like it was meant to be your place, really.’

  ‘How much?’ I blurted.

  ‘Pardon, dear?’

  ‘How much rent do they want?’

  ‘Oh goodness, something ridiculous. I’m very cross about it, but they say I’m in need of regular income! Apparently I’m starting to run out! Isn’t that silly!’

  ‘The thing is, I’ve, er, I’m looking for my own place.’

  ‘Are you, chérie?’ There was a pause, but Imogen was too well-bred to ask why. ‘Hang on, my sweet, I wrote the silly rent down somewhere.’ There was a rustle of papers. ‘Here we are. Yes, you won’t believe it, the agent says they can ask for eight hundred pounds a month.’

  I swallowed, and said, ‘If you’re able to let me have first dibs, Imo, I’ll make sure I can pay that.’ I’d worry about how another time.

  ‘I’ll try, my dear, but I don’t seem to have much say in things at the moment.’ Her voice, usually so strong, sounded frail and uncertain.

  I said some nice things, I don’t know what, and hung up, feeling that a rug had been pulled out from under me. I dreaded the thought of Bryn Glas slipping away, and was still thinking about it when I slid into a booth at the Purple Kangaroo next to Bear.

  ‘Tough day?’ I asked her. She was looking rather tired.

  ‘No worse than usual.’

  I didn’t want to spoil our last evening by asking why she wasn’t at the school earlier. If she didn’t want to tell me, I didn’t want to push it. She rattled off our order to the waitress, who knew better, by now, than to try to be our new best friend.

  Bear said, ‘Our first evening here, you said you wanted to talk about He Who Can’t be Named, or is that Voldemort? You know who I mean.’

  ‘He Whose Name I Shall Never Utter Again,’ I said. My heart did the weird flip-flop it always did when I thought of David abruptly, without building up to it first. ‘I might prefer this conversation to wait till I have a glass in my hand.’ I looked around, and the waitress was already coming over with our bottle of wine. When she’d poured me a glass, I took a sip, and said, ‘I’d always thought there was absolutely no need for Edward to know.’

  ‘You were pretty adamant about that, if I recall.’

  ‘There were Richard’s feelings to consider, after all. And we haven’t spoken about him ever since, we always swore we wouldn’t. But then when I was leaving, Rich suddenly decided that I must be going off with him.’

  ‘I can’t believe he mentioned David, after all these years.’

  ‘It was so strange. And he started to say something about Edward, I don’t know what. I’ve been wondering if I was wrong, not to talk about it.’

  ‘Well, David made it pretty clear he wasn’t interested in being part of Edward’s life.’

  I took a larger sip. ‘Yes. But it was a long time ago. We were kids then. I’ve been wondering if I should think about giving them a chance to get to know each other.’

  Bear looked at me strangely. I couldn’t read her expression. ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Hmm, what?’

  ‘Just as long as it’s Edward you’re hoping to connect with David, and not yourself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re fresh off the separation boat, lady. Fair game to fall for the “my life would have been so different if I’d stayed with my first love” fairy tale.’

  ‘It probably would have been.’ I took a large gulp of wine. Painful feelings swirled round my gut whenever I thought about what amount of the truth I owed to Edward. And I had to say, as the only person I could talk to about it, Bear wasn’t exactly being super-helpful.

  ‘I’m so sad it’s my last day here,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘I won’t half miss you, Ursula.’

  ‘And I you. It’s been great to catch up.’

  Our food arrived, and we started eating, one of us with more enthusiasm than the other. We were silent for a while, busy with our own thoughts. Then Bear put her hand on mine, and startled, I looked up.

  ‘Listen, Kay, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘“Do you think Lemmy would have quibbled about twenty-five cents?”’

  I laughed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Venice. If you’re still in, I’m in.’

  ‘Really? You mean it?’ I pressed my hand to my chest, trying to stay calm. ‘You’re serious?’

  There was a pause, and I thought she was going to start laughing and say that of course it was a joke. But she said, ‘I’m dead serious.’

  Fourteen

  Stella

  I slept so late that by the time I got downstairs, Gran was preparing lunch. She raised an eyebrow at me, while continuing her astonishingly speedy chopping. ‘Good morning! Or afternoon, should I say.’

  ‘Sorry, Gran. I was completely exhausted, I don’t know why.’

  ‘I’ll pop on a bit of toast for you, shall I?’ Without waiting for a reply, she put two slices of bread in the toaster, then picked up her knife and returned to massacring the vegetables. ‘So are you going to enlighten me, dear heart?’

  ‘About what?’
r />   ‘Why you came back here last night, rather than to your Essex pied-a-terre? Not that it isn’t lovely to see you, of course.’

  ‘Ah, well, I wanted to see how the shop was. And how you and Dad are doing. ’

  ‘We’re doing fine, dear, so there’s no need for you to be here any longer. We both want you to get on with your own life, and so, I’m sure, does that wayward mother of yours.’ She put down her knife. ‘Do you know, I think I’ve missed my vocation in life. It’s almost too much fun working in the shop!’

  ‘But is this a long-term thing, Gran?’

  ‘Stella, at my age, nothing is a long-term thing. But for now, I’m very happy to be Queen of Quiller Queen, and it means your father can stop worrying. You know how he feels about those shops. They’re like the Windmill to him.’

  ‘What windmill?’ I felt as if I was being dragged along with the conversation, barely clinging to the coattails of meaning.

  ‘The Windmill Theatre,’ Gran said. ‘We Never Close.’ She tipped the contents of her chopping board into a pan, and smiled at the satisfying sizzle that instantly rose up. ‘But never mind that. I want to know why you’re here and not with Theo. Love’s young dream, what a thing it is, to be sure, to be sure.’ She lapsed into a shockingly bad Irish accent.

  ‘OK.’ I took a breath. ‘We’ve split up.’

  If I was hoping for a little sympathy, I was disappointed. Gran nodded, and said, ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Never liked him. Shifty eyes.’

  This was so exactly how I now felt about Theo’s eyes that I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. ‘Gosh, Gran, why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘Well, you liked him. I didn’t want to be rude.’

  I laughed. ‘Since when do you mind being rude?’

  Gran coaxed the vegetables around with a wooden spoon, then lowered the heat under the pan. ‘Not to people I love, dearest.’ She took my hand in hers. ‘Are you all right?’