31
The wind was whipping up the sea, sending froth and spray through the air to wet my face. The day after my marathon journey up to Scotland, I was standing where Joan Eardley had stood all those years ago, my ears filled with the sound of shingle scraping against shingle on the beach as the tide drew the water back. Seabirds were squawking in the sky, battling with the wind. And beyond, stretching towards the distant horizon, the heaving, rolling mass of gunmetal grey that was the sea. Cold, wet, loud.
Perfect for taking every other thing from my mind, including the fact that Matt still hadn’t called me and that later that day, if everything went to plan, I’d be meeting Mum again after all this time.
Here, on the beach, with its distinctive rows of cottages standing on the cliff behind me, I recalled the images I’d seen of Joan in the 1960s, dressed for the weather in her oilskins; what I’d read about her having to battle her way down from her cottage with her painting equipment, her painting boards catching the wind like a sail. How on more than one occasion one of them had been torn from her grasp and blown away over someone’s roof and into their back garden. Even when she’d successfully got a board down to the beach, she’d had to anchor it somehow to keep it on her easel.
And the cold. This morning even though I was dressed in modern-day materials designed for inclement weather, my face was pinched and frozen, and the wind was penetrating every exposed nook and cranny of my clothing.
Come on, then; if you’re going to draw, draw.
Suddenly it was as if Joan Eardley was there with me, looking over my shoulder with impatience. So, I took out my sketchbook—a sturdy, hardback one—securing the edges of the pages with the clothes pegs I’d brought for the purpose—and balanced it on my knees to draw the shifting, crashing sea with large, sweeping strokes and scribbles.
You need paint , Joan seemed to say, and she was right. If I’d had paint, I’d have been able to splatter and smudge it onto the paper to better convey the experience of the wild, breaking waves. Later, if it was still light, after I’d been to visit Mum, I’d return here. Something told me I’d need the release of flinging paint about.
The fine spray blowing from the sea grew wetter. It had begun to rain. While I didn’t feel precious about my drawings, my pencil and charcoal wouldn’t work on wet paper, so reluctantly I packed up my things, casting a regretful glance at the sea before turning to walk back up to the inn, the coming afternoon and all it might hold casting a shadow over me.
The farm where Mum lived wasn’t easy to find. But, after turning the hire car round numerous times, not a particularly easy procedure on a narrow country road for someone as rusty at driving as I was, I drove up a bumpy track that led to a rambling, redbrick farmhouse with a hotchpotch of outbuildings.
Chickens ran towards me as I got out of the car, and a pair of eager-looking goats in a paddock drew themselves up comically on their hind legs to bleat at me over the fence. I’d never wanted to laugh less, though, comical goats or no comical goats. Was this really where Mum lived? In this place with washing blowing on the line to the side of the house and rows and rows of vegetables growing in neat ranks in the borders?
No, surely Vi’s friend must have made a mistake.
As I hesitated, wondering whether or not to go and knock, a battered Land Rover approached the farmhouse from the way I’d come. I watched its progress, one hand shielding my eyes from the sun until it reached me, and the engine died.
The driver’s door opened. A man got out, a tall man with long, faded-red hair and a red beard streaked with grey.
“Hi there,” he said in an attractive Scots accent. “Can we help you?”
The passenger door opened. Out got a woman. My heart was like a sprinter’s on the home stretch.
Mum.
Older, of course, than when I’d last seen her, slumped on her bed with a glass of wine. Grey haired. Plumper. Healthier looking. But most definitely Mum.
By the time I was sixteen, any feelings of love for her had been packed securely away. All I’d ever expected to feel towards Mum was disappointment. Disgust, when she was at her absolute worst. But now, for just a moment, my stupid mind conjured up a fantasy of Mum dropping her shopping bags to the ground, calling out to me.
“ Sweetheart? ”
Stepping over the mess of broken jars of jam and wine bottles to reach me as fast as she possibly could. Holding me tightly in her arms as if she never wanted to let me go. “ Lily! Oh, God, Lily! It’s so good to see you! ”
Then I took in her expression, and stark reality obliterated the fantasy as effectively as napalm. The gaze connecting with mine across the Land Rover’s bonnet couldn’t have been further from the sentimental fantasy. No love, no transfiguration of joy. Just horror. Fear. Desperate entreaty.
As clearly as if she’d spoken the words out loud, her gaze said, “ Please. He doesn’t know about you. Don’t tell him. ”
And I knew that she hadn’t considered either me or Vi worth mentioning.
“Are you lost, lassie?” the man asked.
Behind him, Mum shook her head at me.
“I was a bit lost, yes,” I said, stuffing down my hurt, lifting my chin. “But I don’t think I am anymore. I think I know exactly where I’m going.”
The man frowned, obviously confused. “Oh, is that right?”
“Yes, thanks. I’ll be on my way.”
Mum stepped forwards. “Would you care to take some eggs with you?” she said. “I was just about to collect them.”
I hesitated for a moment. The offer was something, I supposed. Still, I wasn’t sure whether or not I should accept. Give her the chance to explain. Make her excuses. Whatever else she wanted to do.
“They’re very fresh,” she said.
“Take the eggs, lassie,” the man said with a smile. “Sharon’s right, they are fresh. And they’re her pride and joy too. You’ll be making her day if you have some.”
When he kissed Mum affectionately on the top of her head, it was impossible not to compare the gesture to the way Kevin, Ronnie, or any of her other boyfriends from my childhood had been with her. “ For fuck’s sake, Sharon, there’s nothing in the house to eat. Talk sense, for Christ’s sake, you useless bitch. ”
This was a good man. A man who treated Mum decently.
“I’ll be inside unpacking the shopping,” he said now, taking the shopping bags from Mum before turning back to me. “Would you care for a brew before you go, lassie?”
I shook my head. “That’s very kind of you, but no. No thank you.”
He nodded. “Bye, then.”
And he went into the farmhouse, leaving us alone together.
“The henhouse is this way,” Mum said, moving off, as if the whole selling me some eggs story was the truth.
“He doesn’t know about me and Violet, does he?” I said as I followed her in front of the farmhouse towards a small wooden building.
She sighed, confirming it. “Nobody here does, no.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t say anything else at all until we were inside the chicken house, in the relative darkness, surrounded by the smell and sound of the chickens. Then, she asked, “How did you manage to find me?”
“One of Violet’s friends ...,” I started to say, then trailed off. “Does it really matter?”
She shrugged, reaching for a scoop, dipping it into a bag of chicken feed to fill it. Footsteps sounded outside. Mum stiffened, putting up a warning hand.
A woman popped her head round the door. “Oh, you’re collecting the eggs, Shaz. I was just about to do it myself.”
She looked curiously in my direction.
“Yeah, all in hand, thanks, Belle. Just getting half a dozen for this lady here, then I’ll be in. Callum’s making tea.”
“Great. I’m parched. Starving, too; I’ll break open the biscuit tin.”
Belle withdrew.
“Look,” Mum said. “We can’t talk here. Where are you staying? I’ll come to you later today. We can talk properly then, okay?”
I hesitated for a moment. Then I nodded. “All right,” I said, telling her the name of the inn at Catterline. After all, I’d come all this way. And I still didn’t know the truth about that night.
“See you at seven p.m.,” I said.
Then I turned and left the chicken shed.
Belle was still out in the yard, about to go into the farmhouse. “Oh,” she said, “did you decide against the eggs?”
“Yes,” I said, opening the car door. “I decided I didn’t need any, after all.”
Then I got in the car and drove away.
I went down to the beach with my paints as soon as I got back to Catterline. The rain had stopped now, but I would have painted down there even if it had been torrential. The end result didn’t matter. What mattered was letting my feelings out. And, after my encounter with Mum, there were a lot of feelings to release.
Working in a frenzy, I swiped, splattered and dragged the brush across the surface of the canvas. As I painted, I kept seeing Mum leaning back against the pillows on her bed when I’d looked into her room ten minutes or so before I’d gone out the night of the fire; wine glass in hand, in danger of sloshing its contents onto the bedclothes. Inebriated. And yet, somehow, because I’d willed it to be the truth, I’d managed to convince myself she was in a fit state to take care of Violet. That everything would be okay if I went out.
No, I wouldn’t think about that. I wouldn’t think about anything but putting paint onto the canvas.
When I stood back afterwards to consider my work, the results were wild and messy. Tortured. But, exuberant too. The ocean at its very worst and best, relentless power on display. And I thought once again of Joan, painting here on this beach, a reserved person expressing her emotions through paint exactly as I’d just done. Joan, whose life had been cut tragically short by cancer at forty-two. Who’d only really found reciprocated love in the last year of her life.
I wasn’t going to be like that. I wasn’t going to let my past dictate my life any longer. I was going to face it—whatever that took—and then I was going to find a way to be passionately creative and productive without being isolated and tormented. To live, with all that living involved. I was going to do whatever it took to repair and nurture my relationships with the people I loved. Inga. Vi. Matt. And I was never, ever, going to merely exist any longer.
But for now, it was time to stop painting. To go back up to the inn to take a shower. Get myself a hot drink and warm up. Prepare myself for the meeting with Mum.
When she approached me at the table I’d chosen by the window, I saw that she’d made an effort with her appearance—a warm floral dress, knee-length boots, and a hand-knitted cardigan that picked out one of the colours of the dress. Hair tied back into a ponytail. Respectable. Unremarkable in the best way. No hint whatsoever that her clothes had once been unwashed, stained with spilt drink or worse still, with vomit if she’d been on a bender.
“Hello, Lily,” she said, clutching her bag to her chest, clearly nervous.
“Hi,” I said, indicating the chair opposite me. “I’ll get us some drinks. What d’you want?”
“Apple juice, please. No alcohol for me these days.”
I nodded without commenting and went to the bar to get the drinks. When I came back, she was looking at the menu, but she put it away again when I reached the table. Just as well. I very much doubted whether we’d be eating a meal together.
“So,” she said, holding up her glass. “Cheers.”
I picked up my glass to clink it against hers, thinking what a ridiculous gesture it was for such a strained, unnatural occasion, and saw her gaze narrow slightly at my fingers. Looking down at my hands, I saw there was still oil paint under my fingernails from my painting frenzy. And it occurred to me that Mum didn’t even know I was an artist.
I took a sip of my wine and put the glass down on the table. But I didn’t hide my dirty fingers from her disapproving gaze. She hadn’t earned any explanations or consideration from me.
“I’ve been to Catterline a few times before,” she said after a moment. “Joseph at the farm grew up here; he’s full of tales about the artist painting the fishing nets on the beach. Joan something, she was called. Now, what was her other name?”
“Joan Eardley.” I spoke the name reluctantly, unwilling to share Joan with her. My Joan.
“Yes, that’s her. Joseph says he and the other kids used to go and talk to her when she was painting sometimes. She’d chat to them for a bit, then give them sweets to make them go away.” She smiled. “He said, one time she’d gone off somewhere and left her painting on the easel—she was painting the row of cottages on the cliffs that day—and one of Joseph’s friends picked up her paintbrush and painted in some smoke coming from one of the cottage chimneys. Can you imagine?”
Mum’s face was animated as she spoke, almost as if she’d actually been there at the scene, witnessing the childish act of vandalism.
Almost as if we’d seen each other only last month, not what felt like a lifetime ago, when she abandoned me and Vi at our burning house.
“Still,” she said. “I don’t suppose she was cross, do you? It would only take a few sweeps of the paintbrush to reinstate the sky.”
“Some things are easier to put right than others,” I said, tired suddenly of superficial chit-chat. In other circumstances, we might have smiled together about her tale of Joseph and his friends vandalising Joan’s painting. It might have led naturally to me talking about my own art. But the woman sitting in front of me hadn’t even had the balls to admit to the people she lived with that she had two daughters, let alone that she’d abandoned them.
“What really happened that night, Mum?”
She looked down at the table. “That’s what you’ve come for, is it? To ask me that? Not to get to know me or find out how I am?”
“What would be the point in getting to know you, even if I wanted to?” I asked bitterly. “When you’ve kept me and Vi a secret to everyone here. What did you tell your bloke you were doing tonight, anyway?”
She shrugged. “Meeting an old school friend who was visiting the area. Katie Meredith. He said it was a very pretty name and to pass on his compliments. I hated lying to him.”
I laughed humourlessly. “And yet you’ve been lying to him ever since you came here. That’s rich. Were me and Vi such a shameful secret?”
“Of course not.” She pushed a stray strand of hair that hadn’t caught into the ponytail back from her face. “Look, I ought never to have had children. I’m not mother material. No wonder, with the example my own parents set. They didn’t give a shit about me, either of them. Either ignored me or screamed at me; nothing in between.”
I shook my head. Didn’t she realise she might have been talking about herself? The way she’d treated me and Vi?
“I got pregnant with you at sixteen, Lily. Far too young. I thought it might be my passport to freedom, but it wasn’t. It was bleak. Lonely. You cried and cried, and I had no idea what to do to make you stop.”
My friend was just the same , I could have said, because of course, her words made me immediately think of Inga. But I was too busy wondering whether she’d shut me in a room to cry for hours on end. Whether my deep-rooted fear of abandonment had started right back then.
Mum was still going on, saying something else about the fact that having a baby—me—so young had ruined her life, led her to drink—effectively blaming my existence for everything—but I’d had enough of it, so I cut in.
“Tell me,” I said again. “Tell me what happened on the night of the fire.”
She sloshed her apple juice around in its glass, avoiding my gaze. “I slipped out to meet a friend after you’d gone out. I didn’t expect to be very long. But then she had a bottle of wine with her, so we had a drink. I was out longer than I meant to be.” A haunted expression crossed her face. Good. She deserved to be haunted by the events of that night.
“Only when I got home, the house was an inferno.” She looked up at me. “I couldn’t believe it, Lily, I really couldn’t.”
“Why not?” I asked bitterly. “You’d left your eight-year-old daughter alone in a house with candles burning.”
“They were tea lights, that’s all. And I didn’t know she was on her own. I thought you were home.”
I felt sick. “I told you I was going out. I said goodbye to you.”
“Well, I don’t remember. Anyway, like I say, I couldn’t believe it when I saw the house on fire. I was going to come and find you, make sure you were both okay, but then I saw you both—Violet held tight by a fireman, another fireman clutching you. And I thought ... rightly or wrongly, ‘They’d be better off without you, Sharon. You’re a crap mother.’ So, I left.”
I was back there, with smoke choking in my throat. Violet’s screams ringing in my ears. “What did you feel, as you walked away and left us there, Mum?” I asked bitterly.
She shrugged. “I don’t know, what you’d expect, I suppose. Panic. Shame. Fear that someone would spot me. It’s a long time ago; I can’t remember exactly.” She took a sip of her apple juice, wincing at the taste, as if she wished it were something stronger. “But you needn’t think I had an easy ride of it afterwards, Lily. I lived in squats. Hostels. On the street sometimes. I even had a brief spell in prison for breaking and entering. That’s what finally helped me get free of the drink in the end, though. There was a counsellor in there. She helped me to turn my life around. I’ll always be grateful to her.”
It was what I’d wished for Vi, wasn’t it? That she’d find a professional to help her. But I didn’t want to find similarities between Mum and Vi, even though they were staring me in the face.
Suddenly I was exhausted; too exhausted to cling to my anger any longer. It was slipping away from me; I could feel it going. Leaving only a deep sadness in its wake.
“Did you never think of trying to find us?” I asked, without much hope.
Mum sighed. “Honestly? Even without the drink, I still thought you’d be better off without me. That the strain of looking after you both would set me off drinking again. I found the farm by accident after I’d hitchhiked up here to Scotland. They were very welcoming to me. Nonjudgemental. For the first time in ... well, forever, I felt safe. Appreciated. So, I asked if I could stay with them for a while. I didn’t mean to lie. Well, I didn’t lie, really; I just didn’t say anything about the two of you. I didn’t expect to stay for that long, you see. Just long enough to get back on my feet. Only, somehow, it became my home, and by then, it was too late to tell them everything.” She looked at me, frowning. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever told a lie that’s got out of control, so you wouldn’t understand.”
But I had, of course. I’d lied to Inga, to everybody, in exactly the same way about Mum. And that lie, when it had been exposed, had almost blown my friendship with Inga apart.
“You won’t tell Callum about you and Violet, will you?” she said. “I couldn’t bear to lose him. He’s very important to me.”
There was a sudden intensity in her gaze. This was the whole reason she’d come to meet me tonight. To exact this promise. Not to find out about me and Violet, about how our lives had been, since she’d left us so callously that night, but to make sure I wasn’t a threat to her.
She’d been selfish and self-absorbed throughout my childhood, and she was still selfish and self-absorbed. She may not drink any longer, but her basic personality was exactly the same. She hadn’t loved me and Vi then, and she didn’t love us now.
And I didn’t love her either.
I thought of little Noah suddenly, his gorgeous face as he smiled up at Inga. Demanding, yes. A lot of work, yes. But so brim-full of potential. Destined to fill his mother’s life with joy and purpose.
What an utter waste to voluntarily give all that up.
“No,” I said, feeling pity for the woman across the table from me. A woman who could only see as far as her own needs and desires. Poor Callum. He’d come across as a good man during our brief meeting. I hoped very much he wouldn’t get hurt somewhere along the line.
“I won’t tell him. You don’t have to worry about that.”
There wouldn’t be any opportunity for me to tell Callum anything. Because I was never going to see Mum again, even if I returned to Catterline to paint every spring, summer, autumn, and winter for the rest of my life.
“What about your sister?”
Violet, I wanted to say. Her name’s Violet.
“Violet’s her own person; I can’t tell her what to do. I’ll make sure she’s aware of the situation”—I would. Oh, I most definitely would. I’d tell her exactly what Mum was like. That she wasn’t worth either of us ever thinking about her again—“but if Violet wants to come up here to meet you at some point, she will. If not now, then maybe in years to come.”
A waitress stopped at our table. “Would you ladies care to order any food?” she asked.
I pushed my chair back, giving her a smile. “Not for me, thank you. I’ll order something from my room.”
Then I stretched my hand out towards Mum with the waitress still there, waiting to see if Mum wanted to order anything. “Goodbye, Mrs. Best. Have a safe journey home,” I said.
Then I walked away.
My composure lasted until I was out of sight of the dining room. Then, halfway up the stairs, I had to pause to clutch at the handrail as reaction set in. I’d done it. I’d confronted Mum, and I’d found out the truth. I knew now that my depiction of her in Phoenix had been exactly right. And after my legs had stopped shaking and my breathing got back to normal, I’d be able to move on with my life. I would. I must. Because the woman I’d just left in the dining room wasn’t worth spoiling my life for.
A text came through as I went into my room. Matt.
Thanks for your message and calls. Sorry not to get back before. I’m a bit churned up right now about everything. I hope you’re okay? I’m back in the UK for Christmas. Talk then?
My heart swelled with hope. He couldn’t hate me if he wanted to meet. Quickly, I typed a reply.
Sure, I’d like that. Let me know when you’re back. Take care. X
Stupid to hesitate about adding the kiss. Stupid to put it in, delete it, then add it in again before I sent the message.
His reply came back.
Thanks, Lily. See you soon. X
It was something.