Lessons in Laughing Out Loud (38 page)

“I normally go around twice a day,” she heard Holly say behind her, filling the jug from her coffee machine with water. “Her sight’s all but gone at the moment. She can’t do anything for herself so I’ve got the nurses coming in, one day, one night. They’re really good, getting her up and dressed, doing her meals. But she’s not impressed. You know what she’s like. She thinks I’m letting her down by getting help, hell,
I
think it half the time.”

“There’s only so much you can do, Holly,” Willow said. “You’ve got the girls to worry about. And Graham’s away a lot. It’s not as if I’ve done anything to help. You can’t nurse her twenty-four hours a day and look after your family, you mustn’t feel guilty about that.”

“But I do, I do. I feel so guilty about so much.” Holly hesitated, and Willow knew what she wanted to say, if she could somehow find the words. “None of this is fair, none of it. When I think of what you’ve been through, I can’t understand it. If I even try to understand it I feel like the whole world will just
crumble into dust around me. Look, you need to make things right with Mum for you first of all, and for her. But if you do this, Willow, it will be for me too. Because I can’t stop feeling this constant ache in my guts unless you do it.”

Holly came to stand next to Willow as the coffee machine began to rumble and gurgle behind them. Willow felt Holly’s hand slip into her own, and for a moment the pair enjoyed that unique feeling that came only when they were together, a moment of wholeness.

“The day this last attack happened, she’d been in Ian’s study for some reason, even though it was the middle of the night. There’s still a phone in there, thank God, so she managed to get help. She said everything went completely dark, for a while, she didn’t know what time it was, or even if she was still alive. . . . She must have been so helpless, so frightened.” Holly smiled faintly. “When I got to the hospital she was sitting up in bed, treating one of the nurses like a housemaid. Still she looked so . . . small. Like a bag of bones.”

“Oh God, Holls, I’m so sorry that you have to cope with all of this alone.” Willow squeezed her fingers. “I never ask you about any of this stuff and you never tell me.”

“So I spend all day and night at the hospital,” Holly went on, brushing away her apology, “and there’s an MRI, and the tests and the scans, but we all know what it is. It’s the MS cutting off another piece of her. And I can’t help thinking what if it’s forever this time, Will? What if her sight doesn’t come back?”

“It will,” Willow said. “That’s always the way it is with Mum. It will come back. She’s as hard as nails, she’ll go on forever.”

“I hope so,” Holly said, her voice caught with the threat of tears. “What would I do if she . . .” She pressed a hand to her mouth. “I need you two to be okay before that happens. I love you both so much.”

Fear, anxiety, hope and longing jostled in Willow’s chest
for her attention. There was no point in delaying what came next, but still she wasn’t quite ready—not yet.

“Have you got the photo album handy?” Willow asked Holly suddenly.

“Always.” Holly brightened, reaching up to a cupboard above the fridge and rooting about for a moment before bringing out all that remained of their lives as small girls living alone with their mother. It was a shiny, plastic-covered photo album, illustrated with an early ’80s photograph of a cornfield at sunset. Willow remembered her mum bringing it home from Woolworth’s, smoothing her palm over the image before telling her two girls that she was going to make a book all about them. They’d spent the whole afternoon sorting out envelopes of photos of them from birth onward, carefully sticking them into the album with little tacky squares, making up captions that made them squeal with laughter.

Skipping a little, Holly took the album over to the white sofa, patting its cushions for Willow to join her. Sitting side by side, they opened the cover to see the first page, full of anticipation even though they had pored over the photos a thousand times before.

“‘Willow and Holly naked on a rug.’” Willow smiled, running her finger over the curved back of herself as a baby, probably about four months old. “Remember how we cracked up when Mum wrote ‘naked’?”

Holly nodded. “And here we are at about one. We must have just been walking.” Holly pointed at a pair of toddlers, hand in hand, dressed to the nines in smocked coats and ridiculously ornate little knitted bonnets that tied under the chin, with a ribbon, finished with a woollen pompom.
Fashion models go for a walk,
their mother had carefully written underneath the photo. “Look at us, look at our little hats! You know, I think that’s why I’ve got a phobia of pompoms to this day.”

“This one is my favorite,” Willow said. It was a cutting from a local newspaper, with the heading “School Nativity Shows Off Its Christmas Stars!” It was one of the few photos that had the three of them in it: Willow and Holly in their angel costumes and their mother kneeling between them, an arm around either girl, kissing Willow on the cheek. For a second Willow closed her eyes and felt the touch of her mother’s lips on her cheek, smelled her scent, heard her laughter, saw the sparkle of pride in her eyes as she stood up and applauded her girls, who after all had done nothing very much more than stand on the stage and remember to say, “Lo, behold!”

“The best times,” Holly said, resting her head on Willow’s shoulder. “All here in this book, safe forever.”

Willow nodded, leaning over to look a little closer at the face of that child who was now lost in time. Had she let that little girl down by growing up the way she did? Willow didn’t know the answer, but she knew one thing: she could delay seeing her mother no longer.

“Coffee’s done,” Holly said, getting up to pour it.

“I’ll have a coffee and then I’ll go and see her,” Willow said.

“I’ll come too,” Holly offered immediately.

“No, no, don’t be silly. Stay here with the girls. Have a break from worrying for a bit.”

That faint vertical line between Holly’s eyebrows deepened into a valley.

“Well, that’s impossible. Have you thought about what you’re going to say or how?”

“I don’t know,” Willow said. “I’ll work up to it, I suppose. Pick the right moment . . .”

That didn’t seem to ease her sister’s concern.

“Because you know what she’s like. If you go in all guns blazing you won’t get anywhere and if you wait for the right moment . . . well, Mum’s very good at making sure there is
never a right moment to talk about something she doesn’t want to talk about. Are you sure you are okay to go on your own, to the house?” Holly’s anxiety vibrated as strongly as words spoke out loud. “You hate going to the house.”

“I know, but . . . it’s just a house, and I’m a grown woman. I can cope with a building.” Willow heard the keys rattling in the locks of the closed doors in her mind, and she knew that Holly heard them too. What she mustn’t do, what she absolutely mustn’t do, was let those doors creak open.

“She
has
missed you,” Holly said, brightening a little. “I heard her bragging about your important job the other day. She is proud of you, and she does love you.”

“I know.” Willow said, pressing her hand against the glass, as if she could touch the cool clean sky. “And I love her. That’s what makes it so hard.”

The house that Willow and Holly had done most of their growing up in was impressive, one befitting a bank manager back in the 1970s and ’80s, when being a bank manager was still a job with the kind of gravitas that commanded respect.

From the front, which wasn’t really the front but the side of the house that happened to be the only aspect that overlooked the road, it looked like what might be a three-or four-bedroom house of indeterminate age, with a bleak gray pebble dash and a heavy, black painted front door that looked too old and too big for the building. In fact, the house was late Georgian and spread out along the banks of the river, mostly unseen from the busy road that was now lined with takeaways and estate agents. It was a house full of secrets, with a delicate wrought-iron first-floor veranda overlooking the old abbey, and a long, narrow and leafy garden where Willow and her sister had spent many happy hours skipping in and out of the shadows, lost in an imaginary world that lived and breathed
around them. The house even had its own private jetty, the same little wooden boat still secured to it, quietly rotting away. Ian had devised a system of ropes and pulleys so that he could let the twins drift quite safely out into the middle of the river to fish on a summer’s evening, never with much of a prospect of catching anything, but quite content to sit side by side in silence, watching the flies hovering above, the sinking sun turning the water amber, until their mother made them go into bed. Then Ian would winch them in again, like two little fishes themselves, snared on barbed hooks.

As Willow took the short walk from Holly’s house to her mother’s, along one of the many branches of the Stour that wended in and out of the town, and across the stone bridge by the ruined abbey, she put off thinking about the moment of arrival. Instead she decided to occupy her mind with the mystery of the shoes that seemed to sparkle with every step she took. She had no proof that they came from the same owner of the coat that flapped so incongruously around her body in the sedate seaside town and the locket nestled in the pocket. The three objects felt as if they must somehow be connected, as if when together they vibrated with some kind of resonance, with familiar memories. Willow watched the sun dazzle as it danced on her shoes, and as she had so often done as a little girl returning home from school, she daydreamed away the journey, imagining what it would be like to be the woman who had once walked in these shoes. Perhaps she had lost her childhood sweetheart to the Great War, left only with the token that he gave her, handmade in the trenches. Maybe she’d danced away the pain through the Roaring Twenties, finding her smile again in these beautiful shoes until finally she met and married a man who cared enough for her to give her a fox fur coat. A man whom she’d loved forever after, even though she’d never forget her first love.

It was a flight of fancy, a daydream—but for a moment Willow could almost picture the woman’s face, smiling at her, whispering a word that she couldn’t quite hear.

And then suddenly Willow was there, staring at the outsize front door, its crevices grimed with dirt and dust. Her heart clenched, at once fossilized by dread.

Finding it impossible to control the shaking that gripped her muscles, she stood in front of her mother’s house, unable to decide if she was trembling with fear or rage. Willow closed her eyes and thought of Holly, felt the touch of her hand and heard the admonishment that she knew her sister would say if she were here.

“She’s only a sick old lady,” Willow told the door. “She can’t hurt you.”

Unable to hesitate any longer, she fumbled for the key that she still kept on her, slid it into the grimy brass lock and turned it, pushing open the slightly sticky, ill-fitting door.

The hallway was a long, cool, dark passage, traveling the length of the house and opening out into a Victorian glass house where once her mother had obsessively grown tomatoes for her award-winning chutney. The last time Willow had visited, there were only a few withered vines in dry dusty pots remaining. Willow could see the haze of light at the dark corridor’s end; the sunlight dancing outside the glass suddenly felt like another world away.

On her left was the formal sitting room, curtains always drawn, and on her right the formal dining room with French doors that overlooked the river, a room only ever used at Christmas and Easter. Also on her left was the staircase that rose to the second floor, where Mum and Ian’s bedroom, with that lovely veranda, overlooked the river. There was the guest room, which now welcomed the night nurse, and at the back of the house, Ian’s study, which as far as Willow knew
had remained exactly as he had left it on the day he died. His hidey-hole, he’d called it. A place to get away from all the women, he’d joked.

And then another staircase to the third floor, the attic rooms. A twin pair of rooms for twin girls, who’d begged to share when they’d first moved in, a request that their mother denied, unable to believe that they wouldn’t finally want a room, not to mention a bed, of their own.

Just before the conservatory, the kitchen, large and square, with a stone floor. A room that was always, always cold even when flooded with sunshine, and before that the “television room,” as her mother had rather grandly called it, echoed across the hallway by the music room, so named because of the rickety upright piano that nobody could play, leaning drunkenly against one wall.

Willow stood on the doorstep, feeling all the empty rooms beckoning her, the door creaking inward. If the nurse hadn’t appeared at that moment she might very well have turned around and left.

“You must be Willow! The other twin, here at last!” The nurse had a clipped, possibly eastern European accent, coupled with a warm smile. “Don’t stand there, come in, come in. Mum will be pleased to see you!”

“Sorry, I was just . . .” Willow looked longingly over her shoulder at the busy road.

“I know, you must prepare yourself. A sick parent is hard for any child to cope with, even a fully grown one. I’m Magda, I’m the day nurse. I’ve washed Mum, helped her dress—she’s very particular to look nice. She ate a little breakfast. I talk, talk, talk all the time to her, so she tells me to shut up, says she doesn’t know what I’m doing coming over here, stealing all the jobs. I tell her that’s the EU for you, she is not amused.” Magda laughed. “I don’t mind, I don’t mind. Now she is in her chair
in the sitting room, listening to the TV. She thinks maybe she sees a little more light today, I don’t know, perhaps she does. The doctor says improvement will be slow, if there is to be any. So, do you come in?”