“Blimey, girl, are you telling me that you lug this thing halfway around the world?”
“Someone has to!”
“What the hell have you got in it? Bricks?”
“No bricks, no. My entire life.”
“That explains it!” He doffed an imaginary cap at her, like Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins,
and opened the driver door. “Good luck to you, then, girl. And welcome home.”
“Thanks.”
Home.
She’d been eight years old when they’d come to live here, in the house that Mark built. She’d lived here for eleven years. And then she’d left. Not permanently, of course. She’d been back. Sometimes for months at a time, sometimes just for the night. And she’d had other places to live. Flatshares, rented flats, rooms in houses, university halls.
But this was still the place she thought of as home. Still the address she wrote in the boxes on the forms.
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This time she hadn’t been back for nearly three months. She hadn’t seen Mum when it was really bad, and she hadn’t been here when she died. That was deliberate, and at the time she believed, or she told herself, that Mum understood and that it was okay. And now she didn’t know whether she was glad or not that she had missed it. She looked back down the road to where the taxi was driving away and felt a familiar flight impulse, and then she turned back to the house, hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder, with some effort, and trudged up the path.
Mark saw her and came to the front door. Behind him, she saw her three sisters. When she reached her stepfather, Amanda put the rucksack down beside her and almost fell into his arms, and the two of them stood there for a long time, without speaking, holding each other.
After a minute, Hannah pushed past Jennifer and Lisa on the threshold and wrapped her arms around her father and her sister. “You’re home!”
Stephen, having presumably finished whatever crucial business he had been conducting in the car, was coming up the path to the front door, adjusting his tie. He sidestepped the emotional scene and went into the welcome cool of the entrance hall. “I see the prodigal daughter has returned,” he remarked wryly as he passed his wife. Jennifer threw him a withering look. “Shh.”
Behind him, a few other people were starting to arrive now. Mark’s brother Vince and his wife, Sophie, were parking behind Stephen’s car. And more cars behind them. These were the prime spaces—you could walk to the church from here. Mark remembered strolling back, flanked by friends and family, one beautiful May morning, after Hannah’s christening, as she slept in his arms. Some of the same cast would be here today.
Looking at them, Mark groaned quietly. “Christ. Should have got my trousers on earlier!” Mark released Amanda and went out into the front to say hello, and be hugged, and answer inane questions about parking.
Hannah and Lisa took the rucksack between them and set it down at the bottom of the stairs.
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“You cut that a bit bloody fine, didn’t you?” Jennifer didn’t mean it to sound as harsh as it did.
“Don’t start on her,” Lisa chided. “Not now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I
am
sorry. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”
“You never do.” Jennifer said this quietly, and under her breath. Lisa was the only one who heard.
“Go and make her a cup of tea or coffee or something, will you?”
Looking Amanda up and down, she asked, “I assume you’ve come straight from somewhere, right?”
“From Stansted. Yes, please. I’m parched.” Jennifer sniffed into flared nostrils and went to the kitchen.
“Come upstairs. We’ve got to get out of these dressing gowns. Why the hell are people arriving early? It’s not like you need a great seat. She’s in a bloody basket. Is that what you’re wearing? Please say it isn’t. Hannah, can you manage the rucksack?”
“Where the hell
have
you been? ”
They were in Hannah’s room now, with the door closed behind the three of them. Lisa was climbing into her startlingly yellow dress, not looking straight at her.
“You sound like Jennifer. And I thought you’d rescued me from her wrath downstairs.”
“I did, but only so I could subject you to mine up here. And my wrath might be less frequent, but it’s not less scary. Where the hell have you been, Mand? Mark’s got to have been going nuts.”
“Has Mark been going nuts, Hannah?”
Amanda looked to her little sister for support. Hannah shrugged.
“He just said you’d be here if you could.”
Amanda looked at Lisa, who gesticulated in exasperation.
“That’s not the point, Mand. I’ve been going nuts, okay.
I’ve
been going nuts.”
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“I wrote in that e-mail that I’d be here.”
“Almost a week ago.”
“And I’m here.”
“Just.”
“But I’m here.”
Lisa threw her hands out in exasperation, then turned to the mirror, saw her big yellow self, and snorted.
Amanda was rummaging in her rucksack. She had been, of course, wearing what she thought might do for the church. She just didn’t want to admit it.
“Bright, right?” she asked Hannah now.
“Bright.” Hannah shrugged. “Mum’s wishes.”
“Right . . . bright.” She opened another flap and started pulling creased clothes out of the pack’s dark recesses. “She’d be lucky to get clean, let alone bright. Even the stuff that started out life bright isn’t so bright now. . . .” Her voice cracked.
Lisa softened. She put a hand on Amanda’s back as she bent over a pile of her stuff. “Are you okay?”
Amanda’s eyes had filled with tears. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. Of course she wasn’t fine. Had it been a week? It could have been a month, or two minutes. Time had stopped, there in the Internet café. The world had gone weird. She’d sat for ten minutes, looking at the screen. Mark’s address. The red exclamation mark flashing urgency at her. The e-mail was dated with yesterday’s date. No heading. It didn’t need one. She knew, before she pushed the button that opened the text and made it real. Mum was dead.
She hadn’t gone far, this time. She’d been in Spain. Working at a beach bar on the Costa Calida, near Murcia. Staying with some friends of friends whose parents had a little villa out there near the sea. It wasn’t somewhere she would normally have stayed for long. But she couldn’t have gone farther. She’d been waiting. Waiting for this e-mail.
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When it finally came, she sent a one-line reply, saying that she’d be home. And now she was. In the five days between, she had drunk too much tequila, taken long walks along the beach, and resisted the urge to change her tickets home to tickets to somewhere else. Anywhere else.
It wasn’t the trouble she would inevitably be in with her sisters. It was because she found the idea of other people’s grief far more frighten-ing, far harder to cope with, than her own. She had come home to im-merse herself in it, and she was afraid it would feel like drowning. It wasn’t going to be like some film—like
Steel Magnolias
or
Terms of Endear-ment,
where the funeral marked the end of the really bad time, and the start of everyone getting better. It wasn’t going to be like that at all. It was going to be the beginning.
Hannah took her hand. “I’m glad you’re here now. I don’t really care where you’ve been.”
“Thanks, Hannah.” Amanda let herself be held. It wasn’t something that happened often. Mum had always said that she was a wriggly cuddler—unwilling to sit still and be embraced. Mum once said she’d almost enjoyed it when Amanda was sick as a young child—it was the only time she allowed her to put her arms around her and stroke her hair.
Jennifer came in without knocking. Amanda readied herself for round two.
“Listen, Jen. I know you’re mad at me, and you probably have every right. I’m sorry I took off and left it to all of you. I know it was selfish and cowardly and all that. And I’m sorry if you thought I would be back sooner. I just needed a bit of time, that’s all, to let it sort of sink in. I know—selfish again. That’s me, hey? But I really am sorry. And I really am here now. Can we leave the flagellation out, just for today. Hey?”
“What’s flagellation, anyway?” Hannah asked.
“Beating. Brought on by guilt.”
“No one wants to beat you up, Amanda.” Jennifer tried to sound less like a teacher. “I just thought we should be together for this. For all of this.”
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She was biting back. Amanda was right. Jennifer
was
mad. It wasn’t fair—Amanda had buggered off and left it to all of the rest of them. And now she was crying, damn her, and that just wasn’t supposed to happen.
Hannah stepped bodily between the two of them, facing the older sister of the two. “Please, Jennifer. Don’t be angry at her. Not today.”
She held her gaze, and Jennifer was shocked, as she often had been in the last couple of years, at how grown up Hannah looked and seemed. “Today is about Mum. Our mum.”
And she was right.
Amanda and Jennifer joined hands on either side of Hannah’s hips and pulled her into a hug, which Lisa joined, her arms encompassing all three of them and squeezing tight.
Like sisters throughout time, whatever battles raged between them, it was always, always, all four of them against the rest of the world. They emerged from Hannah’s room a few minutes later, holding hands, Amanda dressed in something Hannah found in her wardrobe, her hair pulled back from her face, and her tears dried.
The church wasn’t too bad. Amanda said they looked like extras from some cheesy musical, or a girl band scoring nil points at the Eurovision Song Contest, all dressed in their bright colors—Lisa in yellow, Hannah in pink, Amanda wrapped in orange and red, and even Jennifer in a sky blue shift dress. They stood ramrod straight in the front pew, flanked by Mark—changed now into a purple linen shirt—and Stephen, who remained resolutely and ostentatiously dressed in black, but who had at least left his BlackBerry in the car. They got there early, so that they wouldn’t have to watch everybody else file in, and they didn’t turn around. They knew it would be full. Mum had a lot of friends. Friends they would eventually have to talk to, they knew, at the wake. But not now.
It was the committal that made them break “the big rule.” Barbara had chosen a humanist site, about three miles from the church where 20 e l i z a b e t h
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they held the service. She said she couldn’t bear to be cremated, with that supermarket conveyor belt effect, and the vaguely comical curtain that opened and closed, and that she didn’t want to be put in the ground in a churchyard. So she was going to decompose gently, in a biodegradable coffin, and go back to the earth—and eventually, have a tree growing on top of her that they could come to, if they wanted to, and visit her. In an expanse of green with grass and butterflies, she said, instead of some depressing, gray field of marble and granite. She said it would save them a fortune in flowers. Jennifer remembered the night she had told them that. Remembered being jealous that she’d sorted everything out with Lisa. Why not her? Mark had squeezed Barbara’s hand, all serious and po-faced. Then he’d whispered to her, “Christ, you want f lowers as well!
Is there no end to the demands?”
Which was how the four of them, along with Mark and Stephen, came to be standing, alone except for the officiant, on a hot August afternoon, with the heat haze shimmering all around them, in a field, in front of a strange and beautiful woven willow casket containing their mother, reput-edly resplendent in emerald green Ben de Lisi, listening to Van Morrison sing “In the Garden” on a tinny tape recorder. Where every one of them cried exactly as much and for as long as their broken hearts dictated.
“God, Mark, you’re going to be eating coronation chicken for the rest of the month!”
A bunch of Barbara’s local friends had catered the wake and cleaned up, storing leftovers in clear Tupperware containers. They’d done a beautiful job. It had looked for all the world like a party—a wedding, maybe, or some family reunion. There were truckle tables set out on the lawn, draped in yellow crepe paper, and jugs and vases with roses cut from the garden dotted between the large bowls of rice and potato salads, French bread, and heirloom tomatoes. There were trays of oatmeal biscuits, and small bowls of strawberries, with dishes of clotted cream, sweaty in the heat. People had drunk Pimm’s and real lemonade. It had
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all been beautiful. Instead of the low, respectful hum usually heard at funerals, there had been laughter and stories, and, from inside the house, a soundtrack of Simon and Garfunkel and the Mamas and the Papas. The men were not shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, hands in pockets; the women did not have red-rimmed eyes. It was exactly how she would have wanted it to be—good friends, good food, good weather. Just no good reason.
Now everyone had gone, and the family sat alone in the living room, staring into the kitchen at the vast Tupperware offerings on the counter.
“Looks that way.”
The music was switched off now. Lisa had kicked off her shoes and was curled into the corner of the sofa, her legs beneath her. Hannah was almost dozy, her head on her sister’s lap. Amanda was cross-legged on the floor, her back against a stool.
At the front door, Jennifer was being hugged good-bye by Stephen. Barely. His lips were dry against her cheek, and his arms had no squeeze in them as he held her. He’d tried to take her hand, walking back from the burial to their car, and she’d let him take it, for a minute or two. She was irrationally angry with him about the black suit and tie, and the BlackBerry. And, of course, mostly about the one thing totally beyond his control. She knew that, too. She knew work was busy with him at the moment. She knew he’d missed too much, really, in the weeks before Barbara’s death. But she was mad at him, anyway. When he put his arms around her, she held herself a little stiff and wouldn’t relax into the embrace.