by Cathy Lake
Clare left the hall then and headed for home, Goliath at her side, the weak October sunshine warming her in spite of the chill in the air. Little Bramble was getting under her skin in more ways than one and she was starting to think that she might stay for more than just a few weeks.
Chapter 10
‘I am so relieved that everything’s OK with Goliath,’ Elaine said as she handed Clare a mug of hot chocolate, then placed her own on a side table.
‘Me too.’ Clare pulled the soft blanket she’d found in the airing cupboard over her legs, then sipped her hot chocolate. The lounge was warm and smelt of rosemary and pine from the twigs and pine cones that her mum had put on the fire. They crackled in the grate and tiny sparks flew up the chimney, pinpricks of red and gold that flashed and popped. Goliath was stretched out on the hearthrug, his favourite spot, snoring gently, mouth vibrating with each exhalation. There was something hypnotic and incredibly soothing about the regular sound and it was making Clare feel very relaxed.
After returning from the vets’ she had decided to take a nap as she had no other commitments that day – or any day soon – and was feeling quite emotionally drained. An afternoon nap was a luxury and one she really appreciated being able to enjoy. As she had slipped from consciousness, her thoughts had hopped from her concerns about her mum, to the village hall, to Goliath and then to the handsome vet, Sam, who had turned out to be not such a horrid person after all.
When she’d woken, she’d come downstairs and found her mum knitting, so Clare had made them dinner – simple baked potatoes with cheese and beans, the ultimate comfort food for her. After she’d filled the dishwasher, she’d taken a shower, then put her pyjamas straight on and come through to the lounge, where the fire had been lit and the lamps cast a warm golden glow in the corners of the room. The TV was on, some soap opera flickering across the screen, the volume down low, so that the clicking of her mum’s knitting needles, the crackling of the fire and Goliath’s snoring were the main sounds. When her mum had offered her a hot chocolate, Clare’s mouth had watered. What else could make such a lovely evening more perfect?
Clare’s mind was busy, occupied with plans and ideas, and she knew that it would help if she let her subconscious work it all through. As she sipped the delicious drink, she thought about the village halls – old and new – and about the differences between them, about her mum and dad and how they had enjoyed treading the wooden boards of the stage together and how happy they had been.
‘Mum, where are the photo albums?’
Elaine looked up from her knitting. ‘Oh, I haven’t looked at them in ages, but they should still be in the chest behind you. Unless they’ve grown legs and walked away, that is.’
Elaine gave a small laugh at her own joke and Clare smiled in response, then she nodded. She’d hoped they would still be there, just as they always had been.
She slid her legs out from under the blanket and walked around the sofa, then moved the tray of small china containers that her mum had collected over the years and the tiger doorstop (that for some reason sat there instead of holding a door open) from the lid, then pushed it open. The aromas of lavender, chamomile and spice floated into the air, reminding her of soap, curry and her childhood all at once. The chest had belonged to her paternal grandmother and when her parents had married, she’d given it to them as a housewarming gift. Apparently, it was very old, a valuable antique, and as a child, Clare had loved to look inside it, often included it in her games, pretending she was on a medieval ship and that the chest contained many treasures. And it did contain treasure, but of the sentimental kind.
Family photographs, birth, death and marriage certificates, school reports, love letters (her parents to each other, not that she’d read them, but they were there, tied with red ribbons), her Christening gown and shawl, her grandmother’s silk wedding gloves and more. Memories overwhelmed Clare as she gazed at the contents, the years of life and love swimming before her eyes, the physical evidence that people she’d loved and lost had existed, that she hadn’t imagined them.
She blinked hard and sniffed. What was it with the senses and nostalgia? She’d been catapulted back to her childhood by the familiar aromas and experienced myriad emotions as she looked at things she’d seen many times before. What would happen to these things in the future? She shuddered. That was not something she even wanted to consider, but one day, she might have to.
But not now . . .
‘There they are.’ She reached for the top photo album and pulled it out, then sat back and rested it on her lap. It was filled with pictures of Kyle, from not long after his birth to more recently when he’d turned eighteen. For some of the photographs, her mum had been present, but others had been sent by Clare or Kyle himself, enclosed in birthday or Mother’s Day cards. Clare flicked through the album, enjoying seeing her beautiful boy’s condensed journey from babyhood to adulthood, although it was missing more recent photographs, so perhaps she had been remiss and forgotten to send them, bound up as she was in her own problems, or perhaps her mum had been too distracted to place them inside.
She put the album down and reached for the next one. It was older, the plastic cover wrinkled as if someone had rested a hot mug on its surface, the red paisley print underneath hinting at its seventies origins. On the cover, her mum had, long ago, cut the letters for Our Family out of silver foil then glued them to the cover. As Clare carefully opened the front cover, the sweet musky smell of old paper, a bit like stale coffee and cocoa, rose to greet her nostrils and she was again hit by waves of emotion.
As a child she had looked through this album practically every day, fascinated by the images of her parents with their old-fashioned haircuts and clothes, her mum’s beehive and green polyester mini dress and her dad’s brown bell-bottom trousers, paired with a rusty orange waistcoat over a blue and white striped shirt with an enormous collar. Her dad’s face was almost swallowed up by his thick sideburns and handlebar moustache and she ran a finger over his face, wishing she could hold him again, hug him tight and smell his woody cologne just one more time.
‘Clare? Bring them here and we can look together.’
‘OK.’
She grabbed two more albums and carried them to her mum and sat next to her. It had been many years since they’d looked at photos together and Elaine had rarely displayed any kind of sentimentality, but even so it would be nice to share these memories, to reminisce and, hopefully, make her mum smile again.
An hour passed with them looking at photographs, pausing after each one so Elaine could tell Clare who it was of, if she didn’t remember, and when it was taken. There were photographs in the garden, in the cottage and on holidays in locations like West Wales, Scotland and Cornwall. Clare’s face changed from chubby toddler to plump ten-year-old to awkward teen, but always there was a smile and a sense of belonging to a family unit. Even though her mum could sometimes border on cold, Clare had known she was loved, and whenever her mum’s attitude had upset her, her dad had been there to smooth it over and provide her with the security she needed. It was as if Elaine had felt she needed to be tough on her daughter . . . Perhaps that was her way of trying to get Clare to avoid making mistakes. Although Clare didn’t believe her mum was ever knowingly unkind, she could be quite unnecessarily blunt.
As well as photographs of Clare, there were ones of the village, of her parents’ friends and the shows at the village hall. It was in these photographs that she saw a difference in the mum Elaine had been in family life. Gone was the reserved teacher smile, the guarded look in her eyes, and instead there was a glow to her cheeks and a shine to her gaze. She came alive when she was acting, singing and directing. Clare knew that feeling from being a mum to Kyle; he had been her world, her focus, her joy since the day he was born, but she also knew that the sense of loss she had experienced since he’d flown the nest was down to the fact that she didn’t have much else in her life to focus on. She had enjoyed her time at the library, had
looked forward to each day there and found arranging events such as author appearances and book clubs exciting, but she wasn’t sure that she’d ever had the same enthusiasm for those things that her mum had had for her shows. And now that Clare had lost her job, was a divorcee, and her son was grown and someone else was living in her home, what did she have left? She was lost, adrift, bordering on bereft. Did her mum feel like that too since she’d lost the village hall and her drama society? In life, people have different anchors, and if they lose them, they drift as if on open seas.
There were so many ways in which Clare and her mum were not alike and yet, here, today, they shared a common condition. They both needed something else in their lives to feel fulfilled, to bring them out of the ruts they had fallen into. Was there a way of combining their needs to reach a common goal?
‘And look at this one.’ Elaine pointed at a photograph and Clare peered at it, taking in the festively decorated stage, the casts’ costumes in red and green, and the tinsel draped around their necks, pinned to their hats, wrapped around their ankles. They beamed at the camera, arms around one another’s shoulders, cheeks rosy, eyes filled with joy. And at the centre of it all was Elaine, wearing a damson dress made of crushed velvet, her hair pulled back from her face with a gold headband, her face the most beautiful Clare had ever seen it.
‘A Christmas show?’ Clare asked.
‘Yes. From two years ago.’
‘So quite a while after Dad –’
‘Yes.’ Her mum nodded, her lips curving upwards. ‘But that evening, as with every show, I felt happy. I lost myself in preparation for the show for weeks, rehearsing with the cast, decorating the hall, selling tickets, making costumes. I got involved in every way I could and it was bliss.’
‘And since the old hall was lost you haven’t had that sense of fulfilment from anything else?’
Her mum closed the photo album softly and sighed. ‘I miss it . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
Her mum reached out and covered Clare’s hand with hers. ‘It’s certainly not your fault, Clare, and you’ve your own issues to deal with.’
‘Life can be tough, can’t it?’
‘Very.’ Her mum nodded. ‘But it can also be wonderful. Good times come and good times go. People come and people go. At the end of the day, we have to rely on ourselves to keep going through the good and bad. But sometimes . . . sometimes it’s just harder than others.’
Clare turned her hand and squeezed her mum’s fingers.
‘It’ll get better, Mum.’
Elaine smiled at her then, but it was a sad smile and it didn’t reach her eyes. Oh, there had to be a way to give Elaine back what she’d lost, a way to make the new village hall become what the old one had meant for her mum and for the community.
Christmas was just around the corner, but far enough away to put a plan into action. It was worth a shot. Anything was worth a shot if it brought the joy Clare had seen in that photo back to her mum’s eyes.
Sam placed the oblong dish on the kitchen table, then removed the oven gloves and went to the fridge to get the salad he’d prepared while the fish pie was cooking. Scout was sniffing around the kitchen, clearly drawn in by the delicious aroma. Sam smiled at her. He’d been lucky with Scout because she’d always been well behaved, had never given him any grief, except perhaps for when she was a pup and had a few accidents indoors. He’d heard plenty of stories over the years about dogs that had jumped onto tables and stolen whole roasted chickens, or freshly baked loaves of bread, that had torn apart their new beds or dug giant holes in the lawn. There were no good or bad dogs, just dogs, and each one was as unique as its experiences and its start in the world; just like humans.
The back door opened and Alyssa came in with a gust of cold air and a waft of perfume. She sniffed loudly.
‘Mmm . . . What’s for dinner?’
‘Fish pie.’
‘Did you put cheese on top?’
‘And breadcrumbs, then grilled it to perfection.’ He gestured at the table. ‘If Mademoiselle would like to take her place, I’ll get the wine.’
‘Wonderful.’
Alyssa wheeled her chair across to the table, then tucked in neatly. Sam watched her for a moment, admiring her easy smile and hearty appetite. There had been a time when he’d thought she’d never smile again, when she’d barely been able to swallow a bite of toast, when he’d thought he’d lost her forever. But ten years on, after several surgeries and rounds of physio, sleepless nights and many tears, she was more like the happy young woman she’d been before that terrible day. And yet she was different: stronger, more resilient than he remembered her being before the accident. She was incredible.
He opened the fridge and reached for the bottle of sauvignon blanc. Back at the table he poured some into two glasses.
‘Do you want anything else with it?’ he asked.
‘No, this is fab. Now sit down.’ She tapped the table. ‘Let’s eat!’
He sat down, sipping his wine while Alyssa scooped up steaming portions of pie and set them on their plates. Sam helped himself to salad, then handed the bowl to Alyssa.
‘So, how was your first day?’
Alyssa nodded while pointing at her mouth, her way of letting him know she’d tell him when she’d finished chewing.
‘Just brilliant! I had so much fun,’ she eventually said.
‘Glad to hear it. What did you do?’
‘I learnt all about safety practices and how to clean and sterilise the equipment and how to take bookings and payments.’
‘Right.’ He took a drink from his glass.
‘And I watched some of the tattooists inking people and –’
‘Inking?’
‘Tattooing.’
‘OK.’
‘And it was all really impressive.’
‘Good.’ He nodded. ‘When do you start inking people?’
‘Oh, not for ages. I’m there to learn through observation. And I got this.’ She shrugged out of the loose black cardigan she was wearing and his stomach sank as he saw the cling film wrapped around her left wrist. She peeled away the medical tape holding it in place and held out her arm.
Sam took a deep breath, then peered at it.
‘It’s a dragonfly.’
‘Yes! Isn’t it beautiful?’
He bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself jumping to respond.
‘It’s . . . certainly a dragonfly.’
‘Sam!’ She rolled her eyeballs. ‘Get over it, please. I’m thirty-four, I have a new job, I’m entitled to get some ink if I want to.’
‘I just don’t see why you’d put yourself through that after everything else you’ve been through.’
She slammed her fork down on the table. ‘Will you just not do this today? Please, Sam, for once can we not talk about everything I’ve been through and see who I am now?’
Sam winced. ‘I’m sorry. I just hate the thought of you having more needles in you, hate the thought of you being hurt in any way. I mean, didn’t it hurt?’
She shrugged. ‘A bit, but not anything I couldn’t handle. And let’s be honest, it was nothing compared to what I’ve experienced in my life.’
‘I know. But surely that didn’t exactly tickle?’
‘In a way it did. It was like a stinging tickle and some areas were worse than others, but you know what? I love it. I love that I chose to have it done and this time having a needle pierce my skin was my choice and not because I needed to have it done.’
Sam did understand what she meant. She’d spent so long with her life on hold, having blood taken, steroid injections, surgery to try to make her more comfortable, and this time it had been her choice to have something done to her body.
‘I get what you’re saying, Alyssa, and I’m sorry if I seemed disapproving in any way but I care about you so much and would have saved you every single thing you went through if I’d had the chance.’
‘I know, Sam, I real
ly do. But that’s all behind us now. I have a new job that I think I’m going to love. I have a new tattoo that is just so pretty and for me it symbolises transformation, independence, wisdom and growth. Sam, life lies ahead of us, not behind.’ She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to living without fear and hesitation and not just existing.’
He tapped his glass against hers then drank.
‘To living.’
It sounded like a wonderful idea; he just wasn’t sure how it would work in reality.
Clare rolled over in bed and opened her eyes. The room was dark apart from a weak grey light that seeped through the gap in the curtains so she guessed it was early morning. So why had she woken?
Then she realised: somewhere there was banging. Someone or something was banging. She pushed the duvet back and went to the window, then opened the curtains. The shadowy garden appeared eerie, as if she was living inside a negative from an old-fashioned camera.
More knocking! Frantic now.
Opening her window, she leaned out.
Someone was hammering on the front door.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ she called out, and the person stepped backwards and peered upwards.
‘Mum?’ He pushed the hood from his head and in the pale light, his face was white, his eyes black holes.
‘Kyle?’
‘Let me in, please, Mum. I need you!’
Her heart fractured at the desperation in his tone. It was her baby boy and he’d come to her. At a very strange time and he sounded upset, but he needed her.
‘I’ll be right down.’
‘Hurry up, Mum, please, because the VERY worst thing has happened!’
Chapter 11
Clare grabbed her dressing gown and threw it on as she hurried down the stairs towards the front door, trying not to trip over her own feet in her haste.