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The Stone Roses went on, the early album with all the good tracks. Not even her music really, but an old boyfriend at uni’s. Somehow she’d adopted his music taste as her own and had never really moved on.
Mum had been even worse today.
‘Isn’t it nice of Kathleen to come and see me,’ she’d said, before lapsing into one of many long and intricate conversations with herself. It was ironic. Mum had never been chatty. Now you couldn’t shut her up.
Janet, The Cedars’ manager, had shrugged apologetically. As if to say, What can you do? Lizzie had shrugged back. If Janet didn’t know, she certainly didn’t.
Kathleen was her mother’s cousin, dead for ten years. Lizzie had been Kathleen for months now. At first she’d thought Mum did it on purpose, to punish Lizzie for not being Karen. Now she knew it was the illness at work.
The next call to Karen was going to be grim. Lizzie needed to tell her The Cedars felt Mum needed specialist care. For which read expensive.
‘What’s wrong with the NHS?’ Karen would say. And Lizzie would reply, ‘They’ll pay for Mum when we can’t afford to any more.’
And Karen would say, ‘We can’t afford to now.’
So predictable. So pointless. So why bother? Because Karen was the eldest, that was why. It had always been that way, Lizzie’s entire life.
Turning the corner into the cul-de-sac, Lizzie saw instantly that their three-bedroom house was dark, the only unlit house in the loop of exclusive three-and four-bedroom New England-style properties. Everyone else was in, doing whatever Lizzie’s neighbours did in the evenings. Watching television, having dinner parties, drinking too much white wine.
Wherever Gerry’s silver Audi Quattro was, it wasn’t here.
She knew she should have felt cross, that she should have wanted Gerry waiting here to greet her. Instead she felt relieved. Pulling up in front of their glossy garage door, she grabbed her bag off the passenger seat and locked the car, watching lights blink as the alarm set itself. Wanting time alone – even on Sunday evening – wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She could indulge her secret passion for Countryfile, open a bottle of something cold and white, instead of drinking the Rioja that Gerry preferred.
She could drink white wine, hog the bathroom, use all the hot water. She could even make headway into the damn gardening books she’d taken out of the library.
Having drawn the curtains, she flipped on the television – in that order, always in that order – and peered in the fridge. So much for the wine choice: half a bottle of Pinot Grigio and two cans of Peroni.
One eye on the television, she settled onto the sofa and picked up Alan Titchmarsh’s The Gardener’s Year.
The phone inside began ringing precisely as David’s house alarm started peeping. Thirty seconds and counting to disable the beeping, before all hell broke loose. The phone would have to wait. There probably wouldn’t be anyone on the other end anyway.
By the time he’d keyed in the security code the phone had fallen silent and he felt his shoulders relax. Head down, he ran back to the car, hoisted first one child, then the other, and carried them into the house, depositing one on each sofa, before heading back to grab their bags and lock the car.
As he did, the phone started up again.
‘Da-addy . . .’
‘I’m here,’ he promised them. ‘Just let me get rid of this.’
‘Hello?’
‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I’m looking for David Morrison.’
The voice belonged to a woman. Not old, but certainly not young. She sounded anywhere from fifty something upwards. What she didn’t sound like was a cold caller.
‘That’s me,’ he said.
‘Ah, um, good. I mean . . . it’s good that I’ve found you,’ the woman said. ‘It’s taken weeks. And then I wasn’t sure I had the right number.’
‘Da-addy!’
Christ, David thought, cut to the chase. ‘Well, you’ve found me,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Well, um. You don’t know me. But you might know my name. It’s – well, it was – Lynda Webster.’
David racked his brains. He didn’t know anyone by that name.
‘Lynda Webster?’ the woman repeated, her voice a question now.
When it became clear the name meant nothing to him, she cleared her throat and when she spoke again the nerves had been replaced by sadness. ‘David, I’m Nicci’s mother.’
David put down the phone. He didn’t intend to. It was instinctive.
The telephone rang again almost immediately.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’
‘Nicci must have told you terrible things about me . . .’
‘She didn’t tell me anything,’ David said. ‘You weren’t a welcome topic of conversation. I didn’t even know you were still alive.’
Brutal, he thought. Before deciding he just didn’t care. There was a silence at the far end of the line, as if the woman was considering that. And then a sigh.
‘You did know she had a mother?’
‘Da-addy!’
‘Look, the girls—’ David stopped; suddenly aware he was talking for the first time to his children’s grandmother. ‘I can’t talk now. Give me a number where I can reach you and I’ll call you back when they’re in bed.’
A silence said the woman didn’t believe him.
‘I will, Lynda,’ he said. It sounded weird; over-familiar. ‘Look, Mrs Webster . . . apparently you know where to find me. It’s not like I have a choice.’
He heard her mutter something.
‘Give me your number,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll call back. It won’t be before seven, maybe later. Depends how long it takes to persuade them to go down.’
‘What are their names?’ the woman asked, tentatively.
David hesitated.
‘Charlie and Harrie,’ he said, before hanging up a second time.
Chapter Twelve
Bedtime was a nightmare, as if all the stress of the day at Whitstable had seeped into Harrie and Charlie’s pores, along with the salt, grit and tar. When the girls finally went down, after two stories and endless grizzling, David barely had time to pour himself a large brandy before the phone rang again. This time he knew there would be someone on the other end.
‘I said I’d call you,’ he said, without waiting for her to speak. ‘The girls are, tricky, at the moment. It took a while.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ Lynda Webster said. ‘They’ve not long lost their mother. I expect they’re confused.’
‘That’s one way of describing it.’ David took a slow sip of the Courvoisier and felt its warmth slide down his throat. ‘Sad, mainly.’
‘You’ve really never heard of me?’
‘I knew you existed. But no more than that. She didn’t tell me you were dead, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘It wasn’t,’ the woman said tightly. ‘That’s all?’
‘You fell out before university. That’s it.’
‘That’s the truth at least.’
‘I’d like to be able to tell you something different,’ David said. ‘But Nicci never talked about you. It was one of her conditions, right from the start. She didn’t know her dad, and you and she had a huge row in her teens and hadn’t spoken since. End of subject.’
‘End of subject?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘You didn’t ask?’
‘Of course I asked!’ David struggled to hang on to his temper. Who did this woman think she was?
‘I didn’t mean to suggest—’
‘You did,’ he snapped, cutting her off. ‘Of course I asked about her family. I was married to her, for Christ’s sake.’
Was. Tears threatened to burst through.
Am, he thought. Am married to her.
Closing his eyes, David took a deep breath and then another. ‘I only asked a couple of times,’ he said, when his voice was steady again. ‘Near the start, before I learnt it was on Nicci’s Don’t Go There list.
‘Don’t go there . . . ?’ The woman’s shock was clear.
This wasn’t like him, David thought. Why was he jabbing away at her? Whatever this woman was to blame for, Nicci’s death wasn’t on that list. But she’d asked, and for some reason he felt obliged to tell the truth.
‘Listen,’ David said. It wasn’t quite an order. ‘Once, at uni, when I asked, she got up, walked out of my room and wouldn’t speak to me or even see me for a week. When she came back she told me it was on the condition that I never asked again. I thought I’d lost her. So I decided right there that it wasn’t worth the risk. I didn’t like to see her hurt, I loved – love – her.’
‘And when you had your babies, she didn’t . . . ?’ The woman took a deep breath. ‘You didn’t ever . . . ?’
‘I know what you want to hear,’ David said quietly. ‘But it would be a lie. Nicci never mentioned you. Not once. Not when we married. Not when we had Charlie and Harrie. Not even when she was . . .’
He couldn’t bring himself to complete that sentence.
‘I guessed as much. That’s why I called. When I read she’d died I thought . . . well, I’d wait to hear. I thought she might have left me something.’
David tensed, his fingers clenching the phone. It must have been somehow audible.
‘Oh, not like that,’ Nicci’s mother said. ‘I don’t mean money. Although I know she was well off. By my standards, anyway. I don’t want you to think that’s why I called. I thought perhaps a letter, or something.’
‘Something?’
‘A brooch . . . ?’
It was not quite a question, and they both recognised she already knew the answer. Her voice had risen on the word more in hope than expectation.
David shivered at a memory of Nicci and he on the shingle near the beginning, in mid-winter. She’d pushed her hand into her pocket and pulled out a silver brooch. A very ordinary brooch. So ordinary, it could have passed for tin.
‘What’s that?’ he’d asked.
She hadn’t answered. For a moment, he’d thought she was going to hurl it straight into the cold grey sea. Instead she’d put it back into her pocket, almost as if deciding throwing it wasn’t worth the effort. He wasn’t meant to notice when she’d dropped it into a bin on their way back to his rooms. Another lover, he’d thought. And he’d kept thinking that, until now.
When David didn’t say anything the woman sighed.
‘The reason I’m calling . . .’ she paused as if seeking the right words, ‘. . . I thought . . . I’d like to know my granddaughters.’
‘Your granddaughters?’
‘If you don’t mind. I mean, obviously I understand you’ll need time to think it over.’
In a way he’d been expecting this from the second the woman announced herself. But now she’d come out with it, he could hardly contain his anger. If he didn’t mind? Of course he bloody minded. And, more importantly, Nicci would mind.
Nicci would mind violently. If Nicci had wanted Charlie and Harrie to know their grandmother, she’d have introduced them long before now.
‘Oh, not right away,’ the woman said, sensing David’s mood. ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking that. I thought maybe you and I could meet, for a coffee or something, So you can see I don’t have two heads. Or whatever Nicci told you I had.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ David said curtly. ‘Nicci never told me anything at all.’
Once he’d put the phone down on her for the third time that evening, Nicci’s mother didn’t call back. Or maybe she did. David pulled the jack from its socket so he didn’t have to find out, refilled his glass and retired to the bedroom. Now he sat on his side of the bed, brandy long since drained.
Their room was lit only by the orange glow of the street-light through open curtains, and the nightlight’s glimmer from the children’s room next door. David didn’t need any extra light to see the photograph he was holding. He’d looked at it so many times since he’d put down the phone, the image was imprinted on his brain.
Seven weeks Nicci had been dead. Seven weeks, two days and twenty-one hours. And already he knew more about her than he had in the sixteen years they’d been together.
The square lay in the palm of his hand, corners bent upwards from over-handling. It was a Polaroid, the white frame daylight-faded to creamy yellow, the image itself washed opaque.
Snuffling came through the baby monitor as Charlie – or was it Harrie? – turned over in her sleep. Nicci had deemed the monitor redundant almost a year earlier, but since her death David had reinstated it. He found it comforting. The sound of his daughters’ slow breathing got him through most nights.
The photograph had been in her bedside cabinet all along.
He’d found it a couple of weeks back as he bagged up the last of her medicine to return to the hospital, unable to bear the sight of her cancer paraphernalia any longer. It had been at the bottom of the drawer, book-marking a page in one of the cancer memoirs that had become her favoured reading. Now they sat in a bag under the stairs waiting to go to Oxfam. Where the Polaroid would have gone too, if it hadn’t slipped from the paperbacks as he carried them downstairs. He only knew who it was now because of a scrawl in an unfamiliar hand across the back.
Lynda and Nicola.
It was a very seventies Polaroid, Nicci’s mum all Suzi Quatro hair and denim flares, standing beside a small girl – three years old, maybe four – squinting warily into the camera. Red gingham dress bunched up, revealing skinny legs, white socks and red T-bar shoes. The girl stood half on, half off a blue trike with a yellow seat and handlebars.
If only he’d known it was there before, he could have asked Nicci about it. Only Nicci wouldn’t have told him. But now he knew someone who would. If he’d let her.
