Mia’s voice drifted up the stairs and into the bedroom which had, until today, been hers. She would now be sleeping in the small bedroom on the top floor that had once been the attic. There was concern in her granddaughter’s voice that had tried to reshape itself into something approaching normality.
‘No thanks, darling. I’m just going to make a start on these boxes. I’ll be down soon.’ Audrey pushed herself to her feet, the mattress springs creaking in sympathy. Looking around her new bedroom, she didn’t know quite where to start. She’d organised the move in such a daze that she wasn’t sure what she’d thrown out and what she’d kept or what she might find.
Ripping the tape off another cardboard box and pulling back the lid, she was greeted by a pile of carefully wrapped objects, neatly stacked. Unwrapping the first, she found a framed photograph, the colour slightly faded. As she stared at the picture she was aware of the sands of time slipping back through the hourglass.
Her girls on a beach – Woolacombe Bay, was it? – running along the shore, their arms and legs out of focus where their limbs had swept too swiftly across the frame for the shutter speed to capture them. The sun high in a cloudless sky, indigo sea greeting the horizon, the small white triangle of a boat’s sail visible in the distance. Her girls: holding hands, laughing, a shaft of light flaring across the frame to bathe them in an ethereal glow.
Audrey ran her fingers across the glass, over plaited hair, tanned limbs and sun-kissed cheeks, and could almost feel the heat of that summer’s day. She could hear the sound of her daughters’ laughter, the waves undulating against the sand, the gulls calling across the sky. She could smell the salt on the breeze, feel the sand between her toes, taste her daughters’ joy. She longed to stretch her arms into the photograph, wrap them around her children’s shoulders, pull them close and never let them go.
Audrey gripped the photograph, her heart twisting beneath her ribs.
Sometimes, nowadays, only photographs reassured her that she hadn’t made it all up, that it wasn’t just a fantasy. That once upon a time her daughters had been friends.
She breathed slowly as she thought about all the years that had been lost. Even now it still seemed unreal to her that it had been almost three decades since Jess had turned against Lily. Audrey could picture Jess now, at ten years old, face hardened almost overnight by things no child should ever have to experience, as if those events had stolen Audrey’s little girl and replaced her with a child she barely recognised. For months afterwards, Audrey had hoped it was shock that had changed Jess’s behaviour, that soon she would revert to the happy little girl she had been before. She had spent years clinging to the belief that the events of their childhood would eventually bring Lily and Jess back together. Instead, they had torn Audrey’s family apart.
Audrey’s pulse quickened as she thought about all those family meals eaten in silence: Audrey, Lily and Jess at a kitchen table too big for just the three of them, Audrey keeping her voice bright as she asked the girls about school, trying hard not to react to Jess’s monosyllabic responses. She could picture her hand, knocking on Jess’s bedroom door, asking if she wanted to come and watch TV, and hearing the same flat reply, night after night: No, I just want to be on my own. Audrey had asked herself repeatedly over the years what she might have missed and whether she could have done anything differently to change the course of her daughters’ relationship. So many times since Jess had left home and cut Lily out of her life completely, Audrey had begged Jess to tell her the reason, but Jess had refused to confide in her. Now Audrey had two daughters who never spoke and two seventeen-year-old granddaughters, born just six weeks apart, who were not permitted to meet.
Her nails dug into her palms as she remembered the last time she had tried – and failed – to reconcile her family.
‘Granny, is everything OK? Do you want me to come and help?’
‘Thanks, darling, but I’m fine. I’m just pottering.’
Fine. Audrey didn’t know why she used a word they all knew to be so far from the truth.
Looking into the dressing table mirror there was no sign, nothing to give her away. Only the most modest lines around her eyes. Her hair, salon-dried yesterday, was artificially brown but still kicked up playfully from where it rested on her shoulders. Her make-up was faultless, applied that morning before she’d even got dressed.
People often told her they couldn’t believe she was sixty-two. You look at least a decade younger, they’d exclaim and foolishly she’d allowed herself to believe there was some significance in it, that an outward appearance of well-being automatically filtered through to the inside. As though a perfectly appetising apple couldn’t be rotten when you bit into it.
It was only if you looked a little closer, as Audrey did now, that you might have detected the palest purple hue forming half-moons under her eyes, or the frequency with which the muscles across her forehead pulled into a frown. It was only watching her closely that you might have observed the shortness of breath, the small half-gasps as if some air had got left behind and was trying to catch up. But there was nothing really on her face to inform a casual observer that, inside her, cells were dividing and multiplying with unremitting speed. There was nothing to betray the truth that she was, in fact, dying.
Audrey turned away from the mirror and bent down towards the box at her feet. As she reached inside, a sharp pain sliced through the right half of her abdomen, causing her to ease herself back onto the bed. As she breathed slowly against the pain, Audrey understood why Jess had been so keen for her to move in sooner rather than later. Audrey had wanted to wait, to hold on to her house and her independence for as long as she could. She had hoped to live at home until her body made it clear that it could no longer cope. Now she felt grateful for Jess’s counsel, grateful that she had sold the house and her furniture, keeping only the essentials – both practical and sentimental – before her health deteriorated even further. Sitting on the bed, willing the pain away, she realised that had she waited she might not have been able to organise the move herself, might have imposed an even greater burden on her daughters.
Pulling another framed photograph free of its wrapping, she was greeted by Edward and his parents staring back at her. In the centre of the photograph, Lily lay swaddled in Edward’s arms, his parents standing stiffly either side of them in front of a Christmas tree. Turning over the frame, she found her handwriting scrawled across the back: Barnsbury Square, Christmas 1972. Her and Edward’s first Christmas as a married couple, their first as parents, their first in their own home.
As her eyes roamed from one person to the next she searched, as she had so many times over the years, for any hint in those time-frozen expressions of what was to come. But all Audrey could see was her father-in-law’s rigid social etiquette, her mother-in-law’s sour grimace, and Edward’s joy in the six-week bundle of perfection he held.