Scissors, Paper, Stone (35 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Day

BOOK: Scissors, Paper, Stone

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She was closer to her daughter now, and although Anne knew she would never quite have the depth of her love reciprocated, this realisation gave her a profound sense of calm and the calmness was edged with tentative joy. Gabriel had helped. He was a relaxing person to be around – chatty, funny and, most surprisingly, utterly sincere – and he was good for Charlotte. The pregnancy had been an accident and Anne had not been sure, at first, whether it was a good idea. She had old-fashioned notions about bringing up children out of wedlock but then Gracie arrived and she fell in love with her so instantly, so overwhelmingly, that she found herself utterly powerless to be anything other than happy.

They had cremated Charles. Both Anne and Charlotte had agreed, without ever explicitly saying so, that neither of them wanted a physical memorial to remember him by. Anne did not like the thought of visiting a grave, of being judged by its silence or reminded of her failures, and so the two of them had scattered his ashes in the river by Kew Bridge. Neither of them had known whether it was the sort of thing you had to get permission for in advance, so there was a slightly hysterical edge to the proceedings as they took turns surreptitiously throwing fistfuls of grey powder into the murky currents of the Thames. They had laughed and then felt guilty for laughing and that had made them laugh even more. After it was done they went for double whiskies at a nearby pub and they hadn’t said anything but they hadn’t needed to either and this was the necessary difference.

For a while after casting him off into the Thames, Anne had felt lost without Charles. It was not so much that she was grieving for him, because she felt that she had done that already in the weeks before he died. It was more that she didn’t know how to act in the midst of this unasked-for emptiness. She wanted to feel relieved, to embrace her new-found freedom, to begin afresh a life that she had put in neutral, but she found that without Charles she had no anchor. She could no longer define herself in opposition to something. At its most basic, she no longer had an excuse.

Part of her, the buried part that lay misshapen underground, still missed him. She despised herself for this weakness, for the abiding strength of her love despite the battering it had taken, and she tried for a long time to ignore it. She would find herself staring into space in the supermarket, bewildered by the amount of choice on the shelves around her and incapable of making the simplest decision about what she wanted for supper.

Then Janet had suggested a holiday and Anne, to her surprise, had said yes. They spent three weeks in a hire car driving around Italy, winding down Tuscan roads bordered by olive groves and walking through hilltop towns with open marketplaces and red-bricked bell-towers that looked as if they would crumble to the touch. They had eaten fresh pasta and they had drunk Chianti and Janet had arranged everything so that Anne did not have to think. By the end of it, Anne was renewed. Nothing had been said, but it felt as though Charles’s shadow had finally lifted. She was grateful to Janet for that. More grateful than she could ever express.

‘Penny for them,’ said Janet, and Anne looked across at her friend. Janet’s nose was pink with sunburn and her bifocals were speckled with dirt. Her lipstick had faded and bled slightly into the puckered lines around her mouth.

‘Do you know, I was just thinking of our Italian jaunt.’

Janet’s face suffused with pleasure. ‘It was lovely, wasn’t it?’ Anne nodded, carefully trying not to wake Gracie. ‘Perhaps,’ said Janet hesitantly, ‘we should do it again this year?’

‘Yes, Janet.’ Anne smiled. ‘Yes, we absolutely should.’ She could hear Charlotte and Gabriel inside; the murmur of their conversation and the clattering of things being washed up and put away. She could feel the weight of her granddaughter against her chest and the saturating warmth of a day’s sunshine on her skin. There was contentment here, in this place, in this garden, in this moment of time. She recognised it and she breathed it in and she felt it trickle down her throat and then she breathed it out and it split into tiny pieces that scattered over her like breeze-blown blades of grass.

‘Bedtime,’ she said, and Gracie stirred quietly at the sound of her voice. She held her granddaughter tightly in her arms and she walked back into the house.

Acknowldgements

Jessica Woollard of the Marsh Agency, for being a wonderful agent and for thoughtfully arranging to give birth only after the contract had been signed.

Helen Garnons-Williams at Bloomsbury, for her perceptive insights and clever suggestions, all of which I would like to pretend were my own.

Simon Oldfield, for being so supportive from the start.

Edie Reilly and Olivia Laing, for reading the manuscript and being kind enough not to laugh in my face.

My parents, Christine and Tom, and my sister, Catherine, for always being there.

And finally, Kamal Ahmed, for absolutely everything.

A Note on the Author

ELIZABETH DAY
is an award-winning journalist who has worked for
The Evening Standard
,
The Sunday on Telegraph
,
The Mail on Sunday
and
Elle
, and who is now a feature writer for the
Observer
. She grew up in Northern Ireland and Graduated with a double first in History from Cambridge. She lives in London.
Scissors, Papers, Stone
is her first novel.