And Mother Makes Three

‘I will be.’

‘Good.’ She held onto his hand for a long moment, her head slightly on one side. ‘You haven’t asked who she picked out for her mother, Fitz. Aren’t you in the least bit curious?’

Claire Graham, Fitz realised, like Lucy’s friends, had made the mistake of believing that she was lying. Perhaps, under the circumstances, that was just as well. ‘I’d rather pick out my own fantasies, thanks all the same, Claire. I’ll see you on Friday.’

‘Such a shame that Brooke couldn’t make it home in time for the funeral. We don’t see much of her these days.’

‘I haven’t been able to speak to her, let her know about Mother,’ Bron said, for what seemed like the hundredth time that afternoon. Had anyone come to the funeral simply to pay their respects to her mother? Or was this huge turnout simply in hope that her famous sister would put in an appearance? She dredged up her hundredth smile. ‘She’s filming in Brazil. In the rainforest. A thousand miles from the nearest telephone.’ Although surely not from the nearest satellite uplink? She’d have got the message, she was just too busy doing her earth-mother bit to get in touch.

‘That is so sad.’ Bron was dragged back to the present. ‘You’ve taken on the burden of caring for your dear mother all these years and now you have to go through this alone, too.’

‘It can’t be helped.’

‘No, I suppose not. And she’s doing so much to help save the earth that we just have to excuse her.’ The woman smiled. ‘She’s made me think twice these days before I use the car and I’m recycling all my newspaper and glass now and when we needed a new door I wouldn’t let Reggie buy mahogany, although how she copes with the snakes and the spiders... I practically faint at the sight of one in the bath—’

‘Oh, Brooke is just the same,’ Bron, close to screaming herself, interrupted. ‘Yells blue murder at the sight of one. I have to put them out of the window for her. And earwigs give her nightmares.’

‘Really?’ Bron immediately felt guilty. She shouldn’t tease this kindly woman who had no way of knowing what Brooke was really like. ‘There’s hope for us all, then. Would you like me to stay and help you clear up, dear?’ There was a touch of anxiety in the woman’s voice as she surveyed the fine china and crystal glasses scattered about the living room.

Bron raised a wry smile. Her inability to wash a cup without the handle falling off was legendary. ‘Mrs Marsh has kindly offered to clear up for me.’ Even as she spoke that lady began to load a tray with a speed and deftness of touch that left Bron awestruck with admiration.

‘But you will call me if I can do anything, if there’s anything you want?’

Bron made up for her earlier lapse from grace with a generous smile. ‘I’d be glad of someone to help me sort through Mother’s things one day next week. I’m sure you’d know what would be the best way to deal with them,’ she said. ‘That would be such a help.’

‘Of course, just give me a call.’ She looked around. ‘What will you do now? Sell the house, I imagine. I know your mother would never have wanted to leave, but you’d be much more comfortable in a nice little flat.’

A nice little flat with no room to swing a cat and no garden. She’d loathe it. ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Brooke about that when she gets home.’

‘Well, there’s no rush. Take a holiday before you decide anything—you’ve had a rough time of it these last few weeks.’

Weeks. Months. Years.

An hour later, Bron finally shut the front door on Mrs Marsh, leaned against it, eyes closed, and the silence swept back like a wave bringing with it a feeling of utter loneliness, the realisation that there was no more cushion against the darkness. Her mother was gone and now it was just the two of them: she and Brooke.

And deep down she knew that she was glad that Brooke hadn’t come racing home. Her appearance would inevitably have turned the whole thing into a media circus. It wasn’t as if her sister were the kind of woman to put her arms around her and offer the comfort she needed. She’d simply have pointed out that their mother was no longer suffering. Brooke had always been able to see things in black and white. They were so alike on the outside it seemed impossible that they could be so different in every other way.

It took an enormous effort to push herself away from the door. She felt utterly drained. Empty. Maybe everyone was right, maybe she should go away for a few days, get right away and decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

Rest of it? That was a joke. Twenty-seven years old and she had never had a life. Maybe she wouldn’t have noticed the lack quite so painfully if she hadn’t had her sister to measure herself against.

It shouldn’t have been like that. She and Brooke had been different in character, different in every way except for their looks and their brains. She had been all set to pack her bags and follow her sister to university when their mother had been diagnosed with the illness that had finally killed her.

So she had stopped making lists of the things she would need. Called the university and told them that she wouldn’t be coming after all. What else could she have done? There had been no one else to look after her mother. One of them had had to stay at home and Brooke had already started her degree course. The assumption had always been that once she had graduated she would come home and then it would be Bron’s turn.

But with the ink scarcely dry on her degree Brooke had been offered the kind of job that only came along once in a lifetime.

‘You do see, Bron?’ she’d said, with that winning smile. ‘I just can’t let this go.’ Well, of course she’d seen. It would have been unreasonable... ‘And you’re so good with Mother. I couldn’t do what you do for her. She’s comfortable with you.’

But she loves you best. She hadn’t said it out loud, but she’d thought it, known it to be true. It was so much easier to love someone who was beautiful, successful. Loving the daughter who saw you day in, day out, struggling with pain, at your most vulnerable, was not so easy.

So, she had never had a life—or, at least, nothing that her sister would have called a life. No career, no holidays, no adult relationshp with a man. If it hadn’t been for a surfeit of champagne on her eighteenth birthday, coupled with a determination not to be the last girl in the sixth form to taste the forbidden delights of the flesh, she would probably have been that saddest of things: a twenty-seven-year-old virgin.

Probably? Who was she kidding? Who was interested in a woman whose life was devoted to nursing an invalid mother? A five-foot-eleven-inch woman, all feet and elbows, whose life was devoted to nursing an invalid mother?

And as her peer group had left town, gone to university, married, moved away, what little social life she’d been able to maintain in the early years had gradually dwindled away to visits from her mother’s friends, women who ran the WI and the Mother’s Union and did good works and were kind. But there was precious little fun. No one her own age.

Short of dragging the milkman in from the street and having her wicked way with him, she didn’t stand a chance.

Her reflection in the hall mirror suggested that even the milkman would have thought twice. Her hair, which she’d hacked off when she was ten years old and sick to death of everyone saying she looked so like her pretty sister but... hadn’t been near a hairdresser in the last terrible six months. She’d stuck it up in a bun for the funeral and it made her look nearer forty, and with an impatient little tug she pulled out the pins and let it fall to curl untidily around her shoulders.

Her skin, which until a week ago had had the pallid complexion of someone who spent too little time outdoors, was now suffering from the effects of too much sudden exposure to sunlight. She had told herself that the lawn had to be perfect, the borders weeded and neat for the funeral. Her mother had loved her garden, would have hated anyone to see it so neglected. At least that was. what she’d told herself. In truth, without her mother to care for, she had simply felt useless, unneeded...

She pulled a face at herself. ‘Feeling sorry for yourself, Bronte Lawrence?’ Then she laughed. ‘Talking to yourself, too? That desperate, hmm?’

She glanced at the mail where she had dumped it on the hall table that morning. Condolence cards mostly. She picked them up, sorting through them as she walked through to the kitchen. Then she stopped. Tucked in amongst the cards was a letter carefully addressed in a round childish hand. Miss B Lawrence, The Lodge, Bath Road, Maybridge. She eased open the flap, glanced through the letter and then, a frown creasing her forehead, sat on one of the wooden kitchen chairs and read it again, more slowly.

Dear Miss Lawrence,

It is my school sports day on Friday, June 18th and I am writing to ask if you could possibly come.

So formal. Bron frowned. So polite.

When I told my friend Josie that you were my mother she didn’t believe me and now all the girls in my class are saying I made it up...

At this point the careful formality lapsed, the neat handwriting wavered and there was a smudge that looked as if a tear had dropped on the page and been quickly dashed away. Bron’s hand flew to her throat as she continued reading.

...made it up about having a famous mother and everyone is making fun of me. Even Miss Graham, my head teacher, doesn’t believe me and that’s not fair because although I break things, I never tell lies so will you please come...

The please had been heavily underscored.

...so they’ll know I’m telling the truth? I know you’re really busy saving the rainforest and the poor animals and I don’t want to be a nuisance and if you would just do this I wouldn’t ask anything ever again, I promise

And it was signed:

Your loving daughter, Lucy Fitzpatrick

Then:

PS You won’t have to see Daddy because I put the letter about sports day in the bin so he doesn’t know about it.

Then:

PPS I don’t suppose you know that my school is Bramhill House Lower School in Farthing Lane, Bramhill Parva.

And then:

PPPS 2 o’clock.