It was Sarah. She pressed the little red icon denying the call as she sighed; to speak to her right now would be no good at all. In fact, it would ruin everything.
Messages from Daksha and Mrs Joshi had come in bright and early, along with the obligatory jokes about her age, and with birthday cake emojis tagged on for good measure. Even Gerald had popped a card in the post, which she opened, noting it was a scene of the Lake District, the same he had sent in sympathy when Prim had died. She set it on the kitchen table.
Victoria,
Rave on.
Gerald X
It made her laugh far more than it should have. And Bernard-the-handyman had picked her a bunch of flaming orange dahlias and set them in a vase in the garden room. She liked to hear him pottering, going quietly about the chores that kept Rosebank ticking over, just as he always had.
Nineteen! She missed Prim today with an ache in her heart, knowing she would have come down the stairs to a smartly laid breakfast table and her favourite pancakes with lemon and sugar.
‘I miss you, Prim.’ She closed her eyes and pictured her glamorous gran.
The cab pulled over in the busy street and Victoria climbed out, hitching her carpetbag up on to her shoulder. She paid the driver before pushing on the door of the building and walking inside, where she trod the shiny marble floor and took the lift up to the fourth floor.
The first thing she noticed as she stepped out into the space was that the reception was busy. Two sofas pushed into a corner were crowded with people and a low table in front of them was home to stacks of magazines. Victoria waited for the man behind the front desk to finish his call. And she thought of Jens – the man with a list of wishes for the wife he so loved . . .
‘Sorry to keep you waiting. How can I help you?’
‘I am here to see Sarah Hansen.’
‘Right, do you have an appointment?’
‘I don’t, but if you could tell her that I am here.’
The man picked up the phone, she assumed to make the call.
‘Who shall I say is here?’
She looked up from the front desk and saw a glass-fronted room, and standing in it was Sarah, the shape of her so familiar, one she had known since before she was born. Sarah was busy with papers on a desk, but as if called by a sixth sense she looked up and stared through the glass. Victoria saw her reach for the edge of the desk, as if needing to steady herself.
The two held each other’s gaze, and Victoria could not help the swell of tears that she did nothing to hide. Sarah, too, she noticed, although she was in her place of work, let her distress fall and yet smiled through the sadness, because she recognised what this was. It was the middle of the bridge, the place they met where the past was left behind, and from that point on they knew they would journey forward together.
Victoria’s own words came back to her now, words uttered at a time when her head was spinning with confusion. ‘I always thought that if it was ever possible to meet my mum, in heaven or whatever, I would run to her and fall into her arms and she would hold me tight and we’d never let each other go. And it would feel like coming home . . .’
‘Sorry, could I ask?’ the man pushed. ‘Who shall I say is here?’
‘Can you tell her . . . tell her it’s her daughter. Her daughter, Victory . . . and I’m here to see my mum.’
EPILOGUE
Victoria guessed that, for some people, the graveyard on the Ekeberg slope might be a strange destination for a family hike, but not for her. Not only was the view one of the most beautiful and worth making the climb for, but also, she had lived for so long with the lines between the living and the dead a little blurred that she felt quite at home here.
The three of them climbed the last of the incline and Victoria sat down hard on the wooden slatted bench, breathing in the clean, fresh air that invigorated. Her husband caught the edge of her coat under his bottom, trapping it against the seat. She let her eyes sweep the blue vista below, marvelling at the treeline, where the pointed green spires of the birch and spruce reached up into the sky as they stood like sentinels along the bank of the fjord. It was on a much grander scale, of course, but nonetheless reminded her of the lake at Rosebank, the family home they had sold some years ago. It had been cathartic moving on, and quite joyous selecting which pieces of art and furniture to hang and keep in their own wooden cottage with its wonderful parcel of untrained land.
‘I like it up here.’ Stina kicked her long legs, inherited from her pappa, against the side of the bench, sitting between her parents, who she knew liked to sit here and natter, and had been doing so since long before she was born.
‘Why do you?’ Victoria thought it was a strange choice for a six-year-old, who some might think would have an aversion to graveyards.
‘I like the view and I like all the dead people.’
‘You like all the dead people?’ Victoria laughed and exchanged a look with Vidar, who raised his eyebrows.
‘I think it’s nice to chat to them,’ her little girl explained. ‘And tell them what’s going on, because they can’t read papers or see a computer when they are under the ground, can they?’
‘No, they can’t.’ Vidar nodded earnestly. ‘You are absolutely right. So, what would you like to tell them today? Anything in particular?’
Stina seemed to give this some thought. ‘I would like to say we have nice weather.’ She twirled the end of her long blonde braids, a habit that was beyond cute and something she did when she concentrated.
‘Always a good talking point.’ Vidar nodded his approval and Victoria felt a rush of love for the man who would never mock but always embraced his daughter’s ideas and thoughts, giving her a wonderful confidence that Victoria, at the age of twenty-eight, would like a pinch of. It was just one of the reasons she loved the man she had fallen for on her nineteenth birthday, a day when she and her mum had rushed home from her office and he had been invited to a small party where four people had sat around the table in the flat across the hallway from his and eaten a very grand home-made chocolate cake as they sipped champagne. She had blown out the candles on the cake and made a wish, a wish that had come true. She twisted the gold band on the third finger of her left hand, taking comfort from it.
Vidar was a man who essentially liked her for her, all of her: warts and all. His love provided a kind of universal acceptance that was the greatest of comforts. And once she recognised it as love and knew she was loved in return, she stopped worrying about the future. In fact, she stopped worrying about most things, because she knew that with Vidar Larsen by her side everything would be just fine. In fact, so certain was she of that future that she had waved goodbye to him one cold, sunny day to travel the world with her best friend, Daksha. The time with her best friend, spent wandering the planet with a pack on their backs and sturdy boots on their feet, still provided some of her very best memories.
It was a great source of joy to everyone, other than Dr and Mrs Joshi, that Daksha had decided, after seeing the world, that university wasn’t for her after all, puncturing their dreams of her medical career, and she now lived in the south of France, running a bakery school and patisserie with her wonderful wife, Margaux. Where cake was always on the menu, of course.
Stina leaned back against her and Victoria folded her form into hers like a warm and comfortable cushion. Proximity to her child made her heart beat a little faster and a smile form on her face. She might be a tutoring assistant in mathematics at Universitetet i Oslo, but being Stina’s mamma was still her very best job.
‘And I would also like to tell the dead people that it is not nice to make anyone eat vegetables they really don’t like. And I would tell them that Bestefar Jens agrees with me.’
‘Give it up, Stina. Firstly, Bestefar Jens is your grandfather and therefore agrees with whatever you say and do – you have him wrapped around your little finger; and secondly, we have talked about this – you have to eat vegetables!’ She looked over her little girl’s head
and tried to stifle her laughter.
‘Anyway’ – Victoria reached along the back of the bench and held Vidar’s hand – ‘people aren’t really dead if you still talk about them.’ She looked down over the fjord that swept to the left. The wispy clouds seemed perfectly placed in the clear blue sky and birds, with wings stretched, hovered on the breeze, low on the water as they scanned for fish.
‘Like you still talk to Prim?’ Stina asked, quite matter-of-factly.
‘How do you know I still talk to Prim?’
It made her laugh to hear her little girl talk so confidently about the woman she had never met, her great-grandma, who had shaped all of their lives in ways her little girl could only guess at.
‘I hear you. You say things like, “Prim, you should see Stina” – that’s me!’ She touched her fingers to her chest. ‘“She is so like you it’s scary: a bossy little thing with her dad’s beautiful blonde hair but Grandpa’s twinkly eyes!”’ The funniest thing about the retelling was the way Stina put on her mum’s very British accent, masking her own Scandinavian tones.
Vidar laughed. ‘She’s a mimic.’
‘She’s a horror is what she is!’ Victoria leaned over and kissed her daughter on the cheek, each kiss a gift . . . It was quite unimaginable to her to think of their time being limited, knowing that one hundred and eighty kisses would never have been enough. Since becoming a mum herself, this fact had burned itself into her mind. The very idea was unthinkable, it was cruel, it was brave and it was crazy, and something she could not in a million years imagine; having to wave off her darling girl and play dead. She doubted she would ever fully understand Prim’s motivation, but accepted that, as a mother herself now, she knew she would do whatever was necessary to keep Stina safe, out of harm’s way.
She and Sarah had fallen in love over the years, and what they shared now was a deep friendship and a healthy respect for the journey the other had taken from the other side of the bridge. They talked daily, saw each other weekly, and she knew the novelty and joy of this contact would never wane.
Vidar squeezed her arm. ‘Jeg elsker deg så mye.’ (I love you so much.)
‘Jeg elsker deg også.’ (I love you too.) ‘Come on!’ She stood up from the bench and yanked her coat free, wiping the damp residue from the seat of her jeans. ‘We need to get home, Mormor Sarah has made lunch!’ It was a regular occurrence, Sunday lunch with her mum and Jens, all swapping stories they had read in the weekend papers and laughing, laughing, and laughing some more, because life was so damn good!
‘Sarah won’t mind if we are a bit late,’ Stina asserted, and again she and Vidar laughed.
A couple walked by, a boy and a girl, hand in hand, stopping only to kiss and then resume their stroll again.
‘Yuck!’ Stina said, without paying attention to her volume.
Vidar gave his now familiar eye roll and took her hand. ‘Come on, you.’
Victoria watched her beautiful husband and her little girl start the descent to the main road, where they would jump on a tram. They always took the tram. I mean, who would ever choose a car over the tram?
‘It’s not yuck, baby girl!’ she called after them. ‘I love to see people in love. I think it is one of the most hopeful sights known to man. I think as long as people love one another, then there is hope.’
‘Hope for what?’ Stina asked, with that perfect little wrinkle to the top of her nose, this pretty little girl who was born full chip.
‘For everything!’ Victoria beamed. ‘For absolutely everything.’
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
Discuss whether it is ever okay to tell a big lie in the way that Prim did.
How did you feel about Sarah coming back into Victoria’s life? Do you think she had the right to do that?
Discuss the conflict that Victoria must have inevitably felt – how would you advise her?
This book made me lament the loss of letter-writing in this world of email and push-button communication. Have you kept any precious letters and, if so, why?
I know I would have really liked a friend like Daksha. Did you ever have friend like that and, if so, how did she help you through a hard time?
I think this book proves that home is not always a place; home can be a person too. Discuss.
Do you think Victory would have had a better life had Sarah not turned up and she had lived none the wiser? Which would you prefer?
I love the way that Stina’s personality reflects that of the grandma she never knew. Has this happened in your family? Is there anyone who is the absolute embodiment of someone they never knew?
I love the way Sarah and Victoria both had such precious memories of Rosebank; I still find it hard to drive past our old family home and see someone else living in it – tell me I’m not the only one.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2012 Paul Smith of Paul Smith Photography at www.paulsmithphotography.info
Amanda Prowse likens her own life story to those she writes about in her books. After self-publishing her debut novel Poppy Day in 2011, she has gone on to author twenty-five novels, six novellas and a memoir about depression co-authored with her son, Josiah Hartley. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages and she regularly tops bestseller charts all over the world. Remaining true to her ethos, Amanda writes stories of ordinary women and their families who find their strength, courage and love tested in ways they never imagined. The most prolific female contemporary fiction writer in the UK, with a legion of loyal readers, she goes from strength to strength. Being crowned ‘queen of domestic drama’ by the Daily Mail was one of her finest moments. Amanda is a regular contributor on TV and radio but her first love is, and will always be, writing.
You can find her online at www.amandaprowse.com, on Twitter or Instagram @MrsAmandaProwse, and on Facebook at: www.facebook.com/AmandaProwseAuthor.
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