Things I Want My Daughters to Know (48 page)

“Tell me what?”

Neither of them had seen Mark come into the garden. Hannah looked at her watch. “You’re home early.”

“No law against that, is there? It’s such a gorgeous afternoon. I came home to observe this delightful bucolic scene. I knew Jennifer would be toiling out here in the heat. I assumed she’d be getting precious little help from you, so I thought I’d come and give her a hand.”

Jennifer winked at Hannah. The wink granted permission.

“Quite right. She shouldn’t be working so hard . . . in her condition. . . .”

Hannah had never been able to keep secrets. Amanda had complained bitterly about this trait for years. She hadn’t had a surprise gift for a childhood birthday since Hannah had learned to talk.

“Very subtle, Hannah. Highly cryptic.” Jennifer laughed so that her sister knew she didn’t mind.

“You’re . . . pregnant?!” Mark put down his case and laid the jacket that had been over his arm over the back of the chair Hannah had been sitting in.

“Three months. So I suppose it’s official.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard in I don’t know how long!” He came to her and caught her in an easy, close embrace. “That’s brilliant, Jen.

I’m made up for you.”

He pulled back and smiled at her. “And so would your mum have been.”

She nodded, not wanting to cry. “I know. I know she would.”

Later, when Jennifer had gone home and the newly self-styled Auntie Hannah was doing her homework upstairs (or at least said she was, although Jennifer noticed she took both her iPod and her phone 356 e l i z a b e t h

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upstairs with her), Mark, who’d changed into shorts and an old T-shirt, poured himself a beer and went out onto the terrace. Jen had done a great job, but there was still a lot to do before July. He pondered his work schedule in his head and wondered about taking some time off in the next couple of weeks. It was dusk, so he turned the hosepipe on at the wall, and positioned the sprinkler so that droplets arced across a section of the lawn and the bed that Jennifer had been working on. Thank God there was no watering ban yet, though if the weather continued as it had been these last few weeks, there doubtless would be. He remembered Barbara, barefoot and wrapped in her robe, carrying bowls of dirty bathwater across the terrace to pour on the thirsty, cracked earth in previous summers.

He lay back in his Adirondack chair and took a long drink, enjoying the sounds and scents of his garden. The evening primroses were all open, like a yellow choir. God, she’d be pleased about the baby. A first grandchild. She’d have loved it. She’d be so pissed off she was missing it, wherever she was.

Lying there, Mark realized that he was relaxed. Really relaxed. For the first time in a very long time he had nothing pressing on his brain.

Nothing to worry him. Everyone was okay.

Barbara’s Journal

D-Day

I was reading what I’d written before—back at the beginning of all this. I said it would be sporadic, didn’t I, and I was right. I’ve no staying power. There’s not a lot to show, not a lot left behind. I hope some of it is helpful, or makes you smile or brings me back, for a second.

Because I’m going. I know that now. As of today. Don’t know when, don’t know how soon, although, truthfully, now that I know
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it will happen, I want it to happen soon. I’m afraid. I know you’re not supposed to be and I know it doesn’t help. But I am. I’m afraid of being in pain, and I’m afraid of being helpless and I’m afraid of lingering on and making everyone miserable. Since I’m going to die, I might as well get on with it. You can’t start to get better until I’m gone. And I’m your mum, so I want you to get better. I guess motherhood is the ultimate selflessness. You want to die quicker so your children can get over you.

No more treatment. No amazing hospitals in the States doing experimental medicine that might save me—eleventh hour. No miracles. No nothing. It’s ridiculous, but it is almost a relief. The treatment is so disgusting, and I’ve had enough. When she said so, today, the oncologist, when she started talking about palliative care and hospices, I almost exhaled. I think I knew it was coming. My body didn’t feel better. I don’t want to go into a hospice. I’m selfish about that. I want to be at home. I want to die at home. I was watching
Deal or No Deal
today. Won’t miss daytime television much, but I like that one. It’s like this. When you start that game, there are twenty-six suitcases to open, and all the possibilities exist, and you feel strong, and full of optimism and expectation. I was like this, at the beginning. I thought I could win the million. I won’t say beat the odds. The odds beat me. More people recover from my cancer than die from it. It’s a “good” cancer to get. Then the cases start opening, and the big numbers start disappearing, and ten minutes later you’d settle for a hundred thousand. I’ve had a horrid feeling since halfway through that my case contains the penny, and bugger me, it does. Does that make any sense? Or does comparing my relationship with this illness to a game show just prove that my morphine dosage needs looking at? I know what I mean, anyway.

Now I don’t have to worry about me anymore. I’m a foregone conclusion. I don’t have to wonder, like I was doing, whether there was any point booking a summer holiday for this year (there isn’t) 358 e l i z a b e t h

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or whether I’ll be around when Hannah starts driving (I won’t—

not all bad, then), or whether I’ll have another birthday (probably not one I could enjoy), or another Christmas, or stuff like that.

Because I won’t.

I just have to worry about all of you. And how you’ll be when I’m not here. Not just how you’ll feel about me dying. About how you’ll live your lives. About the decisions and directions and choices you’ll make. My beautiful girls. If you’ve read this, you know that it contains some—not all, but some—of the things I want my daughters to know.

And the greatest of these is love.

Please know that you had mine, unconditional, and powerful and awesome. So strong that I cannot believe it will die with me. I want to imagine it as a living thing that goes on beyond my body, and my death, as a vine that has grown and wound its way through the very core of all of you and cannot be uprooted or destroyed, but rather will hold you up erect when everything else is crumbling and withering inside you.

�

June

Lisa

The wedding was simple. Lisa had always assumed she’d be a bit of a Bridezilla. Designer dress, architectural flowers, cake with four different flavored layers—that sort of thing. Turned out, when it counted, she wasn’t at all. They’d left it too late, of course, to find a hotel that could take them. The nicest places around almost sniggered at her when she mentioned her date and suggested that if it were that date two years hence it still might pose a problem. (“Christ,” Lisa had exclaimed to Andy, “who the hell are all these terrifying people who know what they want two years before they do it?” His retort, of course, was that
he had
known what he wanted two years before he was finally going to get to do it. That earned him rolling eyes and a playful punch on the arm.) It was Mark who suggested the garden. Initially Lisa hadn’t been sure—it was so much work for him. And maybe a little weird and folksy? But the more she’d thought about it, the more appropriate it seemed. Simple was exactly the way it ought to be. Because, hadn’t she learned, love was simple. Pure and good and wonderful, and all of those other things, of course. But, above all, love was simple. Just like Mum said it was.

And this morning, in the calm before the storm, circling the marquee, open-sided and flooded with warm sunshine, in curlers and a cotton robe, Lisa was more than glad. The notoriously unreliable summer 360 e l i z a b e t h

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weather was as it had been twelve months ago—perfect—only now, that felt right and not like an affront. She stopped in front of her chair, running a pink manicured fingernail along her new name, in calligraphy, on the place card, a shy smile crossing her face.

Mum always said someone should get married in this garden. She would have, she said, if it had existed. She and Mark had married in a register office, in front of only a dozen or so witnesses, and had lunch at the pub. Lisa knew she and Jennifer had made it awkward, sucked some of the joy out of it, and she was sorry. Now it was Mum’s turn to take away some of hers—not deliberately, of course—she could never have done that. By not being here. At least they were in her garden. Jennifer had been coming out here a lot lately, working in the garden. She said it made her feel closer to Mum. Lisa felt a sudden, strong surge of joy that Mum was going to be here today.

Everyone had congregated at the house the night before.

Amanda and Ed had arrived at about six, exhilarated by some complicated tale of a missed connection and a canceled flight and the possibility, up until twelve hours earlier, that they might not make it back for the wedding. (“We were petrified—I said Jennifer would
kill us
!!”) Amanda was glowing so much that both the bride-to-be and the expectant mum felt the smallest flicker of envy. Deeply tanned, as slim as only a re-stricted budget can make you (“Blimey,” Lisa had exclaimed, “I hope your dress fits”), and lit from within by something new that both her sisters recognized as pure happiness—and probably, Lisa whispered to Jen, quite a lot of acrobatic unmarried sex; she looked fantastic.

“Don’t knock married sex until you’ve tried it, you!” Jennifer had nudged Lisa in the ribs. In return, Lisa had rubbed Jennifer’s belly.

“Works, anyway, right?!”

They had eaten lasagna and drunk Prosecco and stayed up too late, despite Lisa’s halfhearted protestations that she needed some beauty sleep, and Andy’s vociferous declarations that she didn’t require a wink.

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Mark had stopped at the top of the stairs at some point, looking down at them all: Jennifer and Stephen, Amanda and Ed, Lisa and Andy, Hannah—ecstatic to have her exams behind her, and a long empty summer ahead of her—and Cee Cee, and felt his throat constrict, and his heart ache with longing for her, for Barbara. She would have loved this so. She might have stood here beside him and squeezed his hand and said something about having got some things right after all, or about how lucky they were, and they would have had a moment, the two of them, of shared happiness, the kind of moment he would never have with her again, but which he could, standing here now, have
for
her. This year, without her, had seen her daughters cross bridges and build them, discover secrets and learn from them. She had been as much a part of this, absent, as if she had never left. The letters and the stories had seen to that. She would have loved tonight, and tomorrow.

He knew, too, that his grief was changing shape. Tears still came easily, and nights were still often interminable. His pain was still real, still sometimes very physical. But there was a future now that perhaps hadn’t been there a year ago.

Now he could see years ahead of him, and looking at them, imagining them, was not so painful as it had been. It would never go away, but it would get better, and keep getting better, until it was something he had in just one part of himself, instead of all through him, a part he could put away when he needed, and access again just as easily. But not the greater part of him, which was, he was surprised to learn, intact.

And he had her children. And he would have their children. And she would never not be with him, because they would be with him.

Satisfied that everything downstairs was as it should be, Lisa went upstairs in search of her sisters. Following the commotion, she opened the door to Hannah’s room just in time to see Amanda and Hannah executing a Diana Ross and the Supremes–esque dance move, hairbrush mikes in their hands, to “Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry.”

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Jennifer was sitting on the edge of the bed watching them and smiling.

She rolled her eyes at Lisa when she saw her.

“What are we listening to?!”

“Ed made it for some cousin of his, for his wedding. It’s a wedding mix tape. It’s got the best stuff on it. He said we should play it while we got ready.”

“Another mix tape—that boy is a real eighties throwback, you know.”

“I know.” Now Amanda was handing her a glass of champagne. There was an open bottle on Hannah’s dressing table. “But it’s great, isn’t it?”

Lisa laughed. It was. The music and the bubbles in the champagne and the walk around the garden—everything was fizzing up in her stomach, and the feeling was exhilarating and warm and . . . lovely. This was a childhood Christmas Eve magnified about a million times. She hadn’t expected to be so uncynical and so jittery and so . . . exciting.

“Let me take those curlers out. You must be suitable pre-Raphaelite by now. Come here and sit down.”

Jennifer stood behind her and started to pull out pins, gently unrolling the foam cylinders. Big round curls bounced around Lisa’s face as she stared at herself in the mirror.

“You okay?” Jennifer dropped her hands to gently squeeze her sister’s shoulders.

“I can’t wait.” They shared a knowing glance.

Amanda tapped Jennifer’s bottom with the hairbrush. “Oy. Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“You know what. The knowing glance thing. We hate it, don’t we, Hannah?”

“What do we hate?” Hannah was fiddling with her unfamiliar stock-ings now, feeling very Moulin Rouge.

“The whole ‘we’re the big sisters, we know it all’ thing. They’ve done it to us our whole lives. . . .”

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“Huh?”

“Well, no more. I’m now, officially, in a serious relationship. So you’ve either got to stop with the knowing glances, or start including me.”

“No way. That’s only one of out three, Mand. You’ve got to have a proper job and a mortgage before you’re really included.” Lisa winked at Jennifer in the mirror. “That right?”