After Forever Ends (67 page)

We made such a masterpiece in the kitchen that holiday. It was wonderful, as Ana had said, having everyone under one roof again. No one fought, no one got angry, no one complained or took anything personally. We just sat snowed in at Grandmum and Granddad’s house and enjoyed the company of the people we loved the most. We were there for three days and two nights. What an absolute blessing that was.

Oliver and I slept in his old bedroom in his old bed. It was really too small for two people, but it didn’t matter. I liked having to be too close to him. He lay there on the second night awake and much too quiet. I waited for him to tell me what he was thinking, but after an hour or so when he didn’t I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Ollie, what’s up?” I rolled over and put my hand on his chest, “Talk to me.”

“I’m just thinking.”

“About what?”

He drew a breath, hesitated, and then spoke, “Did you notice Adam pull me aside after we had supper?”

“No. Was I in the kitchen?”

“I think so.” He answered quietly, and then said, “He wants to marry our daughter.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes,” I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I could tell he was staring at the ceiling, “He loves her. I could see it in his eyes. It was in his voice. He asked me for my blessing. Can you believe that?”

“Wow. Old fashioned of him.” I said. Ollie nodded. He said nothing. I moved closer and laid my head on his shoulder, “She loves him, too. She has for a long, long time. He’s good to her. Do you see the way they look at each other?”

“She looks at him the way you look at me,” He answered.

“I know. It’s a dead giveaway, isn’t it? I’ve always tried to pretend that I’m not mad about you.”

“Yes, me, too. Wouldn’t want anyone to know, yeah?” He pulled me close, “God, I’m glad I’m married to you.”

“Me, too, Sweetie. Me, too.”

It was a week later when Carolena called and told us on speakerphone that she was getting married. Oliver stood with an odd grin on his face and listened to her tell the story of how Adam had proposed to her spontaneously in the middle of Trafalgar Square. “We were just walking through and suddenly he stopped and dropped to his knees. You know how nasty Trafalgar Square is with all the birds. I honestly thought he’d fallen down or something, but what had happened was he’d been fingering the ring and he’d dropped it! So he was on his hands and knees crawling around and I was standing in front of him asking him if he was all right and he looked up suddenly and said, ’Carolena Mariana Dickinson, I love you! Will you be my wife?’ He was holding out the ring! I was a bit surprised, but I said yes, of course! And the moment I did a group of tourists came the square from the other side and they sent the pigeons into flight! They came right at us and we had to run!” She giggled, “It was so unromantic! It was terrible! One of them shit right on my coat!”

“Well,” Oliver consoled, “You won’t ever forget it, will you?”

“No, I won’t! You know, I’ve thought about it and I don’t want a big wedding. Adam doesn’t have a large family and most of our friends are just casual. It seems like a lot of work and a lot of money for one day having a big fancy do. We can keep it small and simple, I reckon, if we keep our wits about us.”

“You can,” I told her, “Lucy’s wedding was beautiful and it was just a couple of people.”

“I remember bits of it,” She was quiet for a second, “I was wondering…well, I was thinking…do you think it would be all right if Adam and I were married in the wood?”

“Really?” Oliver’s eyes widened. “You’d want to do that?”

“Well, yes. I think it would be pretty right by the lake, yeah? At sunset maybe. You know, right when the sun goes down and the lake is so still the water looks like a mirror reflecting the trees?”

I smiled and took Oliver’s hand, “Yes, it’s beautiful then.”

“I’m thinking, if it’s all right, too, that I’d like to have a dinner in the garden afterward, lit by candlelight. It makes only eighteen people, including all of us Dickinson’s and Adam’s family and the few friends we’d invite.”

“That would be lovely, Carolena. That would make your father and I both so happy.”

“It would,” Her father agreed. He rubbed the back of my hand gently with his thumb, “That would be very special, Muffin.”

Later that evening I caught Oliver standing in the nursery staring at the mural of the children and the lambs. I came beside him and rested my cheek against the flat of his arm.

“Alexander and I painted all of this for her,” The look in his eyes was far away, “It was one of my inspired moments. I called him up and told him what we were going to do and he was over in a flash. I was so excited about her, Love. A baby. A wee little chocolate dipped cherry muffin. You knew I was wound up about becoming a dad, but the truth is I dreamed about her long before she was born. I did it with all the children.” He paused, “I knew she was a girl. I wanted her so badly. I made so many plans and so many promises to her and she wasn’t even out of you belly. We waited a long time to meet her. And then there she was, Little Carolena Mariana, my only daughter. You were both so beautiful the day she was born.”

“Are you crying?”

“So what if I am?” He put his chin on the top of my head, “When I put her in here the first night, it was in this crib right here.” He put his hand on the side, “I carried her in one arm. She was so tiny and warm all wrapped up in that fuzzy little pink blanket Mum gave her.” He was quiet for a very long time. “She grew so fast. She was only ours for a little while, yeah?”

“She’s still ours.”

“She’s still ours, sort of. She’s grown into a woman, she has. She’s an excellent and lovely woman like her mum. She’s got the Cotton brains and the Dickinson nerve. I know she’s all right. I know she can handle herself, mind, but my heart still worries for her. In my heart, she’s still that little muffin wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket and I’m just her dad hoping and praying she’s OK. I guess it never ends, does it?”

“No, loving them or wanting to protect them never ends.”

“I know Adam will take care of her.”

“He will.” I agreed, “She couldn’t have found a better man to spend her life with.”

“They all grew so quickly.” He sighed.

“In a breath.”

“Sometimes I miss them being small. I miss all the noise and the chaos and the garden being littered with toys. I miss how we used to all get together on Sundays,” He paused, “I don’t know if I ever really thanked you.”

“For what?”

“For my children. For being my wife. For putting up with me all these years. It was because of you that we were the family we became. You know that? You were really the glue that held it all together.”

“Oh, I think you had something to do with it. Lucy and Alexander, too. We raised all the children together. It was a community effort.”

He was quiet again for a moment before he said, “Let’s have another baby, Sil!” For just a split second I actually thought he was serious. I jerked my head back and stared up into his face “We could!” He insisted, “We’re only fifty or something!”

I could feel my mouth hanging open. He immediately threw his arms around me and burst out laughing. I joined him.

The wedding came on a gorgeous day in late June. Lucy, Adam’s mother, Milla, and sister, Jayne, who was Carolena’s best friend since uni, Natalie, the twins and I got Caro dressed in the nursery. How odd, yet fitting, it seemed to prepare her for her marriage in the same room she had slept in the first night we brought her home. The walls were still painted as they had been for babies, but there stood Carolena, as her dad had said, grown into a woman. Her veil was draped over the crib.

She was absolutely stunning in my mother’s wedding dress. Where Lucy had worn it once and looked like an angel, my daughter brought out majesty in the gown. Bess took Caro’s thick red curls and turned them into gorgeous plaits that she wove through a studded headband with such skill I’d have thought she’d done it a hundred times. When she was through, our Carolena looked like a princess.

When Oliver came in to tell her that the sun was beginning to set, he stopped in the doorway without a word and stared.

“Daddy?”

“You look so…” He blinked a few times, “Stunning, Caro. You look absolutely stunning.”

Alexander stumbled in behind him. He stopped dead in his step and stared as well.

“Uncle Alex?”

“I…I’m sorry,” Alex smiled, “You just look…just like your Mum did about thirty years ago. It’s like a step back in time. It took me by surprise. You look unbelievable, Muffin. Absolutely exquisite.”

“Thank you!” She ran to him like she used to as a little girl and flung herself into his arms and then turned to her daddy and flung herself into his, “I’m so happy, Daddy!”

“Stay happy, Muffin,” He held her tight and kissed her hair, “Always stay just as happy as you are right now, right this minute. Promise me?”

“I’ll try.”

“They’ll be hard times. I promise. But I promise as well that if you remember the thing that made you love him in the first place and you keep finding it again and again there won’t be a thing you can’t make it through together.”

“I’ll remember.”

“I know you will. I know.” Oliver held her tight and closed his eyes, “Don’t ever forget to laugh, even when things are a mess. It’s the secret of it all. After today, there is no one else but you and him. Just you and him and that’s all that matters. Remember that, too.”

“I will, Daddy.”

“Now, come on. Let’s get you down the aisle,” Oliver held her at arm’s length and grinned, “You’re going to have so much fun!”

Alex moved to the side to allow them to pass.

Our little girl was married as she wished beside that little pond that she and Oliver insisted was a lake. It was an elegant, simple ceremony that ended just as darkness swept across the wood. Warren, Gryffin and Nigel lit the candles and the wood was illuminated in a soft glow that made Carolena look even more beautiful than she had during the day.

After the wedding was through and the dinner was finished and everyone had left us for their homes and honeymoon, my husband and I curled up on the lawn under that old woollen blanket. We sat close and we watched the sky and we said nothing at all.

A year and a half later Carolena missed her cousin Nigel’s wedding because she’d had her first baby, a daughter she named Ekaterina Sophia, after both the baby’s grandmother’s middle names. Kitty, they called her, and she was as lovely as her mum. Caro and Adam would come and visit more often once Kitty was born. She’d send her for a few weeks in the summer and my deep seeded need to be surrounded by children was once again satisfied. Having never had a grandmother myself, I tried to be everything to Kitty that I would have wanted if I’d had one. Kitty, Oliver and I had loads of fun.

Two years after that, still in competition with Nigel, who had just had a son he called Matthew, she gave birth to a son of her own, whom she called Oliver. And then, three years later, she outdid her cousin once more. Nigel had just had another son he called James. Three days later Carolena had twin boys called Nicolas and Alexander.

Nigel had her beat on one thing, however. He and his first wife, Laura, divorced shortly after Matthew turned two. A year later, he married his girlfriend, Mary, whom was the mother of his youngest son, James. They divorced three years after James was born. Nigel stayed single for twenty years, dating here and there, until he met Carla, a cheeky, heavy set girl who was nineteen years younger than him and the daughter of none other than Nigel’s old rugby mate, the mega-fuck brain, Connor Stewart. Carla never wanted to get legally married, nor did she want children of her own, so Nigel bought her an old cottage in Kerry Village and the two lived happily ever after, more or less, “in sin and mortal peril”, as Oliver put it.

Ana Kaye McNeil Dickinson, Oliver and Alexander’s mother, crossed the veil the April after Nic and Alex were born. She’d developed a cough, which she ignored until she was sure she had pneumonia. Thinking she’d go to the doctor and get a shot of antibiotics, she went for a visit and was told after a battery of tests that what she had was cardiac obstructive pulmonary disease. She had a surgery to unclog an artery, but a few months later she suffered a heart attack and six after that, at the age of seventy-eight, she passed away peacefully in Edmond’s presence at hospital in Welshpool.

Oliver and Alexander didn’t take the time immediately to deal with their own feelings over her death. They were too busy looking after their father, whose heart was completely shattered over the loss. He’d been with Ana since they were twenty years old. Much like Oliver and I, she was what his life had revolved around. Being retired, he was at a loss as to what to do with himself in her absence.

“I was holding her in my arms,” He told me as we sat in his front room after her memorial service, “I used to tease her about greasing up her face. I told her she looked like a glazed ham. She‘d say to me, ‘Well, at least I‘ll always be beautiful‘. You know, she didn‘t have a single wrinkle on her face,” He sighed. “She really was always beautiful.”

“She was,” I agreed. I meant it, too. Ana never let herself go for even a day.

“You’re never ready,” Edmond told me, “I don’t think it matters how old you get. You’re just never prepared to be the one left alone.”

I took his hand and said nothing. There simply was nothing to say. I was there. It was the best I could do.

Oliver held himself together until she was buried. Eddie told us he was tired after the service and he asked to be dropped off at his house. Alex asked if he wanted company, but he shook his head. “I’m tired, Son. I need to go home and be alone.”

We hugged and kissed him and respected his wishes. Oliver and I left him off. As we were walking down the garden path to the car, my husband asked me if I would mind driving. “Not at all, Sweetie,” I replied and took the keys from him. I had only made it around the corner before he put his hands over his face and allowed himself to begin to mourn his mother. I took him home and I let him cry without even trying to stop him. Eventually, he fell asleep.

The night of her funeral there was a dreadful rain. It came down in all directions, filled the dips in the road, and made travel on the muddy paths to the cabin nearly impossible. Still, at about ten thirty that night someone was pounding on our door.