Prodigal Daughter

by Jane Carter

  ‘Rosie!’

  They hadn’t spoken for months, not since Peg’s funeral, but Diana didn’t hesitate. She opened her arms wide. ‘Rosie, I don’t believe it! What are you doing here?’

  It was a long hug. Rosie still hadn’t said anything, just rained tears down her face and onto Diana’s T-shirt. Diana pulled her gently inside the door.

  ‘Di, I’m so sorry,’ Rosie hiccupped. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘You dope. I’m so glad you’re here. Why didn’t you tell me? Damn, did everyone know except me? Where’s Mal? Did he come too? I can’t believe this.’

  ‘Mal’s here. He’ll be back in an hour. I just wanted to clear up, you know, everything first.’

  ‘And we both know he hates the waterworks. What a coward.’

  ‘Di, I honestly don’t know what got into me. I was so awful.’

  ‘It’s fine, don’t worry, it’s all forgotten. Now what are you doing here?’

  Rosie sat on the sofa. ‘We’ve got so much to tell you.’

  Diana just looked at her expectantly.

  ‘Mal and I are leasing a restaurant in Holbrook. Organic food, the whole shebang, meat, vegetables, bread, wine … everything.’

  ‘What? Who’s cooking?’

  ‘That’s the best part. Mal. We’ve got our feelers out for a chef, just to begin with and then Mal’s going to do some courses, and I’m going to grow the vegetables. I must say I think I’d be good at the front of house stuff, don’t you think?’ Rosie laughed at the expression on Diana’s face.

  ‘And honestly, I haven’t seen Mal so excited. It’s like someone has released him from jail.’

  Diana was speechless.

  ‘It really is the best thing we’ve decided to do and we’re so happy, and really it was all because of you, and I want to be talking to you again but I am so ashamed and I wasn’t sure if you could forgive me.’

  ‘Rosie, don’t be an idiot,’ said Diana. ‘Mum didn’t breathe a word of any of this.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t tell them till just a couple of weeks ago and it’s nearly killed her to keep it a secret, I know.’ Rosie dimpled. ‘But I had to tell you in person.’

  Her parents would be here tomorrow, and now this. It couldn’t get much better, could it?

  * * *

  Muted conversations, every single person a critic. Diana knew exactly what the little experts were saying—how they’d have done it differently. How she hated them all. Before six o’clock she’d been chewing her fingernails, totally convinced no one would turn up. She’d be sitting there with all that champagne and food and not a soul to eat and drink it.

  It was always like this.

  Diana nursed her champagne and looked glumly round the small gallery. It was quite a coup to have got this gallery, Sebastian was right. The gallery owner had been very helpful. Grudgingly she admitted there was a satisfying amount of people here. A lot were relatives. Her children were behaving beautifully and were spending all of the time with their grandparents—all four grandparents—and it wasn’t hard to see they were all jockeying for position. Who was the favourite granny?

  It would be interesting to quiz her mother later, on what she thought of Charlie’s pictures. They were looking good, she thought. Patrick was talking to Sebastian; it looked like they were discussing the pictures.

  ‘I am so proud of you, Diana.’ Her dad came up behind her. ‘Everyone is rapt. I’ve been going round listening in on conversations.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t believe you. You look so much better, Dad, I can hardly believe you’re the same person.’

  ‘Diet and exercise. Worked a treat, I can tell you. I can’t believe I could so easily have missed this—and I wouldn’t have, not for the world. Congratulations.’

  ‘I just get so nervous, and hate it all so much. It’s like standing naked in front of everyone.’

  ‘You must feel better when those little red dots start appearing … and there goes one now.’ Tom nodded to the table behind her.

  Diana frowned. ‘I hope Patrick isn’t doing it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t need a sympathy vote.’

  ‘I think it would be more like a case of getting in first.’ He grinned. ‘Or missing out.’

  * * *

  Stella pinched herself. She was at Diana’s exhibition in London. Actually. Here. Seeing her daughter, her daughter, in this setting. The buzz, the excitement, all these arty people. Arty people were always the same, no matter whether you were in London or the local art gallery in her home town. She couldn’t resist a little smile.

  ‘Watch it, Stella, you’re looking like the Cheshire cat.’

  ‘What does the Cheshire cat look like, Tom?’ she whispered back.

  ‘Wasn’t it the one that swallowed all that cream?’

  ‘No actually, but it doesn’t matter, I get the idea. You’re not half wrong. Where are the girls?’

  ‘Over with Patrick. Let’s join them.’

  Stella put an arm around the girls and gave them a smile. ‘My goodness there’s a lot of people. Tom, you should take the girls and get them a drink.’

  ‘It certainly looks like a good crowd,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m interested in how these occasions work. Is it the quality of the purses or quantity of people in the door that works better?’ he mused, as they watched Tom shepherd the girls over to the bar.

  ‘Neither,’ said Sebastian. ‘It’s who’s here that’s most important. See the tall thin man over there—he’s one of the most voracious collectors in Europe. For him to have come is very good.’ Sebastian was almost trembling with satisfaction.

  ‘So Diana should be pleased. How are Charlie’s pictures going?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t my top priority,’ Sebastian said confidentially. ‘Diana insisted, and it took a lot of time yesterday to get them hung. The headaches—I tell you. But it’s all looking good now.’ He reached for another glass of champagne as a tray passed by.

  ‘So what do you think of Charlie’s pictures?’ Patrick asked Sebastian.

  ‘Well, just between you and me, Charlie was running a bit behind Diana, always had. And people were starting to notice, if you know what I mean. Diana was always sticking up for him, but Charlie was getting very jealous of her success.’

  ‘A pity.’

  ‘I asked her a couple of times but Diana wouldn’t ever say there was a problem. Strong lady, she is. Always covered up for him and pushed him as much as she could.’

  ‘Did you like Charlie?’

  ‘Ah, everyone liked Charlie. Patrick, I want you to meet a friend of mine. Excuse us, Stella.’

  Stella stood for a moment, thinking. It hadn’t been easy for Diana. But, she looked around, it hadn’t been all bad—their decision to get Diana to England. Look what she’d accomplished. But she had to wonder—how much had she wanted this for herself? Had she pushed Diana into coming because it was what she had wanted, so many years ago?

  ‘You’re looking pensive, Mum,’ Diana came up beside her. ‘I’m the only one who has an excuse to be worried tonight.’

  ‘I’m so thrilled for you, but I am worrying if you still blame us for not talking it out with the two of you. Just assuming you would come here and Rosie would stay at Mog’s Hill. Did we make the right decision?’

  ‘Looking at it from twenty years on is very difficult. Circumstances have changed, we can’t assume things are the same as they were then.’

  ‘I just hope it wasn’t some crazy wish to see you succeed, take up the chances I missed out on when I decided to marry your father.’

  ‘In the end, Mum, I have to take ownership of the decision to accept that ticket and get on that plane.’ Diana chinked her glass against her mother’s. ‘And here I am, for whatever the reason, so thank you.’

  Stella watched her eldest daughter wander through the crowd. Yes, they’d given her a hefty push. And paid the price. No. She wouldn’t change anything about her life. And then she wondered, given it to do
all over again, would Diana have done the same thing too? Her children for a start, how could she even think of life without them?

  ‘Brought you a champagne.’ Tom arrived beside her.

  She looked at his bright blue eyes behind the glasses. At the kindness and the honesty in that so familiar face. She rubbed her cheek against the roughness of his jacket. Breathed him in.

  ‘Thank you, Tom Crawford.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Gospel Oak, London, February.

  The pot Diana was throwing began to get the death wobble. Her concentration was poor today. Frustrated, she clumped it down, scraped it back into the pugmill and waited for the clay to emerge as a fresh cylinder, ready to start again. Potting appealed to her frugal nature—mostly everything could be used again, all the rejects and end bits. Listening to the drone of the screw as it worked the clay back into a malleable form, Diana looked around her studio. It was all so comfortingly familiar—the recently fired set of bowls with the Chinese lettering, twenty large and twenty small, were ready to pack and be sent to China to the family that had commissioned them; some porcelain dishes she’d been experimenting in with an iron glaze; the kiln, cold and empty, waiting for her to finish the range of pots decorated with dancing figures that Sebastian said he could never get enough of. Well, he’d just have to wait a little longer.

  Would spring never come? The winter she had dreaded had been dragging on and on and London was freezing, hopefully in the last cold snap before spring. They’d all had colds and coughs, and she was sure she’d bought the last bottle of cough syrup available in the UK. Pulling her cardigan round her and opening the window of her attic studio wider, she ignored the rush of cold air and looked out over the slate-grey roofs across to Hampstead Heath, the tracery of the leafless trees breaking up the monotony of the woolly sky. She could see the gorse bushes halfway up the hill and a few brave figures striding upwards.

  Slowly she had come to accept Charlie’s death as an accident. She’d been able to stop blaming him for being so careless, throwing away his life and leaving them. He’d been a great dad. And she’d begun to forgive herself, on a good day. There were still plenty of bad ones. Johann rang her often to remind her. Telling Milo on the beach that day had been the beginning for her. Accepting that it was an accident, that it could have happened to anyone. She’d had a bad time with Milo for a while but they’d come through it, with lots of hugs. It hadn’t been her fault. It hadn’t been his fault. That’s what an accident was—nobody’s fault.

  A big change for her had happened just before Christmas, when Janet, Charlie’s mother, had rung to ask what she wanted to do with Charlie’s ashes.

  Charlie’s ashes hadn’t been on her list. She’d left them with the Suttons. Or had she asked them to pick them up from the crematorium? It was all a bit of a blur and she couldn’t remember exactly. Diana had sat looking at the phone for quite a while. The only sound she could hear was the relentless tick of the clock. It was one-thirty. She had an hour before the kids would be dropped off after various play dates. She didn’t know what you did with ashes.

  She didn’t want to think about it.

  Outside, it was iron grey skies and very cold. There’d been no snow yet. She started walking, head down, hands in her pockets to keep warm. Counting the odd dead leaf that hadn’t blown away or been sucked up by the street sweepers. She set off on her favourite, well-trodden path, up the hill, past the brown gorse bushes, not wanting to think about what she should do.

  All right, Charlie, what do you want me to do?

  Silence. Unfortunately he wasn’t answering her any more.

  Cremating Charlie had been quite traumatic. And all those questions from the kids. Will it hurt? Does Daddy know? That had been hard to answer. She’d done it for him, so she’d hoped like hell he knew and appreciated the fact he’d been cremated. He would have hated being buried in the ground. Well, only half the job was done, she realised, suddenly stopping, watching as two matching poodles in tartan coats trotted past her, noses in the air.

  It was time to let him go.

  * * *

  She’d turned the telly off, a very sure sign that something serious was afoot. Three faces warily looked up.

  ‘Do you remember that Daddy was cremated? We said goodbye to Daddy in the church and then his body was taken away and he was cremated.’

  Silence. Not a sound. Worse, they looked terrified.

  Try again. ‘When people die, you can do two things, bury them in the ground or have them cremated, burned. Then the people give you back the ashes in a container and you do something with them.’

  ‘What do you do with them?’ Milo found his voice.

  ‘Well that’s what I’m asking you. We have to decide what to do with Daddy’s ashes.’

  ‘Where are they?’ Milo again.

  ‘Pa and Grandma have them. They’ve been keeping them for us, but now I feel, they feel, it’s time we said goodbye properly.’

  ‘What do they look like?’ Saskia asked wide-eyed, obviously imagining a life-size pile of ashes in Pa’s backyard.

  Diana didn’t know either. She hadn’t seen them. She’d quickly read the book upstairs about grief counselling when she’d got home, and although it hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about this situation it had said, above all, be honest. ‘I can’t really remember, but its only small, a box about this size.’ She shaped it with her hands. ‘I’ve asked Grandma and Pa over to talk about this. They’ll be here soon and then we all have to make a decision.’

  Charlie’s ashes were in an urn which Pa placed on the mantelpiece. The children couldn’t take their eyes off it. Neither could Diana.

  ‘I was thinking in the wall at the crematorium.’ Janet Sutton sat managing her cup of tea with the two little girls cuddled up to her. ‘So I know where he is. And if you go off to Australia to live, you’ll know where to find him when you come back.’

  Diana stared at her mother-in-law.

  ‘Don’t look so surprised, Diana. We know you’ll probably go back there one day. And take that disapproving look off your face, Bill. I know I wasn’t to say anything first but no one else had any suggestions. It’s a starting point, that’s all.’

  ‘What about the Heath? We had some lovely picnics there—there’s space and trees and grass,’ Diana offered slowly.

  Bill looked over his glasses at her. ‘Diana, think about it, you were the one who needed space and trees. Our Charlie was a Londoner, through and through. I’m thinking the old Highbury Stadium.’

  ‘It’s not their ground anymore,’ said Milo. ‘They’ve built houses all over it.’

  ‘I don’t want him closed in.’ Diana was adamant.

  ‘But, Diana,’ Bill said gently, ‘don’t you see he’s not closed in, he’s with us all the time. This is just a resting place, where he loved to be.’

  Milo sat there with a set expression on his face and said simply, ‘The ocean. Then we can share him. He’ll be over in Australia or here, whenever he wants to be.’

  The Atlantic Ocean it was then, or rather the English Channel. Hopefully Charlie would be able to find his way, Diana thought, as they piled into two cars and headed for the coast. Navigation had not been one of his strong points.

  The day was beautiful, the sea a special vibrant blue, quite flat, looking as if it might go on forever, all the way to Australia. They’d hired a boat at a marina and all clambered in. Pa was quite at home with the controls. Sienna had written a poem and Saskia brought a jar of Charlie’s favourite olives and his beloved old sable paintbrush. He’d always called it the magic one. Grandma and Pa brought a jumper he’d worn at school. But it wasn’t till just after they’d scattered Charlie’s ashes in the ocean that Milo pulled out Charlie’s football scarf and dropped it in the water.

  No sighs, no goodbyes, tossed around in the fresh breeze.

  After that it all started to get better. They’d settled back into Saturdays being grandparents’ day—the girls usually went
off with Grandma and Pa took Milo. Sometimes they went to the football. It used to bring such a lump to her throat watching the two of them, Milo and his grandfather, setting off wreathed in Arsenal red.

  Now her days were filled with kids’ stuff, an eternal round of dropping off and picking up, washing clothes, cooking meals and working. Lots of work, trying not to think too much of home, Australia and Patrick. But that was a bit of a lost cause.

  And then he’d ring or text. She loved those phone calls. Patrick would ring when it was late at night for her and he’d be at work somewhere, telling her about the pub and his day, or Lost Valley. That was fun, but the best ones reached her in the middle of her day when he was going to bed. She’d be full of chat and tell him about the kids and make him laugh.

  She’d rung him just the other night before she got into bed.

  ‘I hope this is a good time for you.’

  ‘Sure, it’s quiet today, I’m filling in for one of our bartenders and I’ve got three old pensioners sitting here, looking at the cricket, telling me all about the good old days when West Indies were king.’

  ‘Jeez, that was a long time ago.’

  ‘How’re the kids?’

  ‘Good. I have to tell you, though, what Milo said to me this morning. Out of the blue, it was, “Mum, you know how I’m going to play for Arsenal when I get big?” And I said “Of course,” because we all know that’s his main aim in life.’

  She could hear Patrick laugh down the other end of the phone. ‘I thought it depended on whether it was the cricket or football season?’

  ‘And it’s obviously football now. But then, he said “It’s okay, Mum, because in my contract they can put, if Australia gets into the World Cup, they can release me, so’s I can still play for Australia. Isn’t that good?” You could have knocked me over.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with dreaming.’

  ‘Of course not. But it was an interesting thing to say, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Very interesting.’

  ‘How would he know that?’

  ‘Boys his age are obsessively manic about sport, they pick up a lot more than you think.’