Chapter 16
Luke navigates us between the two stone pillars, and we drive slowly along the pathway that leads to Foxgloves. The house itself is surrounded by fields, part of a farm that has been in my father’s family for generations. The trees that line the route are lush and green and heavy, their branches almost touching overhead, their leaves and blossoms swinging against Joy as we progress.
I gaze out of the windows, waiting for the clearing I know is coming up. I glimpse the fields beyond, see the languid chewing of black-and-white cows, the darting of birds overhead. I wonder how many times I have walked, run, skipped, cycled, driven up this exact same road. This is where I learned to ride a bike, where I used to bounce on my pogo stick, where my friends and I would play. Where I snuck out to see Rob... Now I can’t even properly visualize the last time I came down it. I was furious, I was in tears, I was leaving for good. All so very long ago.
As we get closer to the house, Charlie pipes up: “You didn’t tell me you had llamas!”
I follow his gaze and find that, yes, he is correct. Off to the right, enclosed in a paddock, is a small herd of llamas. A surreal thing to find in the Cornish countryside.
“That’s because we didn’t,” I reply. “That was where the milking shed was... They must have relocated it, I suppose.”
We pass the big oak trees at the top of the drive, and I see small wooden boxes tucked into their solid branches, maybe for birds or bats. The heavy metal gate at the top of the lane is open, which is unusual—it was a cardinal sin to leave it like that back in my day.
Luke drives us through, and we park up on a new graveled area that used to house a set of storage sheds.
“Wow, that’s a really pretty house,” says Charlie, gazing through the window.
I suppose it is, now I see it through less familiar eyes. Wherever you grow up is your normal, isn’t it—and for me, it was this place. A square stone farmhouse, ivy climbing over its solid walls; a heavy wooden front door surrounded by hearty vines of wisteria, dripping with lavender flowers. It isn’t huge, but it is imposing. More handsome than pretty, I’d say.
Off to the side lies another field, this one small and wild, swathed in the deep pink of the foxgloves that give the place its name. Behind the house will, I presume, still be the small flower garden that was always my mother’s domain, where she grew roses and hydrangeas and lilies. It is so strange, seeing it again. I suppose it never really left my memory; I just chose not to revisit it very often.
“So,” says Charlie impatiently, “shall we, uh, get out?”
I nod and tell myself it’ll all be fine. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? I don’t even try to answer that question; instead I run my hands over my hair and smooth down my T-shirt and suddenly feel hideously aware of every crease in my clothing, every tangle in my ponytail, the fact that I’m wearing cut-off denim shorts and flip-flops.
“You look fine,” Luke says, taking hold of my hand and gripping it firmly. “And she won’t care about any of that anyway.”
“Ha!” I snort in reply. “You’ve clearly not met my mother. I heard a dog, by the way, so maybe keep Betty on the lead until we know whether it’s friendly or if it eats dachshunds?”
He nods and hooks her up, and I open Joy’s door. I stand on the stairs for a moment, too nervous to move, and I see that my mother is doing exactly the same. She has opened her own door and is standing at the top of the small flight of stone steps. Her posture is perfect, and her arms are folded across her chest. Our eyes meet, and there is a second where I simply cannot move.
And then she runs down those steps, and I jump down my steps, and we both fly toward each other. Within seconds, we meet in the middle, and then I am in her arms, and she is stroking my hair back from my face, kissing away tears that I didn’t even notice shedding. I can’t quite describe that feeling—the feeling of being back in my mother’s embrace. I am safe and secure and it is as though nothing could ever harm me again. All the pain, all the worry, all the anxiety of the last years are swept away, and I simply sob on her shoulder.
“It’s okay, darling,” she murmurs, rubbing my arms and holding me back so she can look at me more clearly. “It’s okay. I’m so happy to see you. I’ve missed you so much...”
I swipe my eyes clear and look at her properly in return. Her hair is shorter than it was, cut in a bob that ends at her chin. It’s now more silver than brown, and it suits her. She’s gained a little weight, feels more comfortable than she used to, and there are lines on her face that were never there before—but none of that matters. It is still her, and I don’t think I realized until this exact moment how much I have missed having her in my life.
“Me too,” I say, clinging to her hand and letting my eyes roam over her, catching up on every new line. She is returning the appraisal, and I wonder how strange it must be for her—I left here as a seventeen-year-old child, and I stand before her as a grown woman, marked by the passing of time, changed by the life I’ve led. I hope she’s not too disappointed by what she sees.
“Not so bad,” she says, smiling, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear. “I half expected tattoos!”
“No tattoos,” I reply. “You?”
“Nothing apart from a busty mermaid on my left calf,” she says, still staring at me intensely. “And the blessed face of Saint Monty Don on the other.”
I don’t remember my mum having a sense of humor, but she must have. Maybe I’ve simply chosen to block out all the good things about her; maybe that’s made it easier to stay angry with her, to stay convinced she was purely bad. To stay away.
I hear footsteps shuffling on the gravel behind me and Betty’s snuffling sound as she sniffs the ground. For a few moments there, I completely forgot that we weren’t alone.
I hold my mum’s hand, surprised to see the skin wrinkled and her knuckles more pronounced, to feel the papery flesh. I lead her to the others.
“Mum, this is my friend Luke,” I say simply, nodding at him.
She says hello and runs her gaze over him, taking in the hair, the crumpled rock T-shirt, the motorhome in the background. I have a fleeting worry that she will snub him somehow, judge him and find him wanting, and am surprised at how protective I feel. Luke treats her to the full-wattage smile, and I swear she almost sighs. Maybe she is judging him, and not minding what she sees.
“And this,” I say, looking at my son, who is suddenly all gangly arms and nerves, “is Charlie. Your grandson.” Her eyes widen, and her hand flies up to her mouth. I see tears squeezed away as she registers what I have said, and I think that this is the first time I have ever seen my mum cry. I always used to take that as a sign of her inhumanity, her harshness, her lack of empathy—but now I remember that moment in Luke’s motorhome, just after the house fell, when I had a mini-meltdown. “You never cry, Mum,” Charlie had said to me. Of course I do , I’d thought at the time. I just hide it from you. Maybe my mum wasn’t inhumane and harsh back then—maybe she was just really good at crying on her own. She walks toward him, reaches up, and holds his face in both her palms. He looks a bit like he might cry as well as she envelops him in a hug. He is a good head and shoulders taller than her, and he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his arms.
She pulls away and says: “Charlie, I’m so pleased to meet you. We have a lot of catching up to do, don’t we?”
“That’d be really cool,” he says, grinning. “This is Betty.”
He picks the dog up, and she immediately licks my mum on the face.
“What a dear! Is she good with other dogs?”
Charlie confirms that she is, and Mum replies: “Righto. Well, shall we all get in out of the sun? Cup of tea maybe? I didn’t know you were coming, but I made some lemon drizzle cake yesterday...”
“Excellent,” says Charlie, “my favorite.”
In fact, his favorite cake is Black Forest gateau, but I am impressed at his superior levels of flattery.
He walks in behind Mum, and Luke hangs back with me.
“Are you all right?” he whispers as we climb the stone steps and enter the hallway.
I look up at him and smile. “I think so,” I murmur back, “but ask me again in an hour’s time.”
As soon as we are inside, a blur of white and brown runs in and zooms around our ankles. I do a double take and remind myself that, no, it can’t really be Jem—but he looks just like him.
“Jem’s line,” Mum says, seeing my expression. “I’ve lost track of how many greats. This is Frank. He’s only eighteen months old, and a complete hooligan.”
I kneel down and stroke him, amazed at how much he looks like my childhood pet. After I left, I initially missed Jem more than I missed anyone else, and it is almost too emotional being here, in the coolness of this familiar hallway, looking into the deep brown eyes of his doggie doppelganger.
Frank breaks away from me to investigate Betty’s nether regions, which she reciprocates, and then begins to lick her ears. Frank and Betty: A Love Story.
I stand up and look around the farmhouse. It is the same, but not. The hallway has been decorated, the slightly fussy floral paper replaced with deep green paint. The phone table is still where it was, but the phone is new. I glance through the open door to the living room and see that, again, it has been decorated, and that the Chesterfield sofa that seemed almost as old as the house is gone, replaced with a beige velvet suite.
“Make yourselves at home, Charlie, Luke,” my mum says, gesturing through to the lounge. “And, Jenny, perhaps you could help me with the tea?”
I follow her through, along the hallway, and as she opens the door, I gasp.
“You’ve got a new kitchen!” I utter, turning around and taking in the shining new cabinets and ultra-modern appliances. It is completely different from the slightly shabby version I remember, with the battered pine table and the old woodburning stove.
“Yes, well—we’re not spring chickens anymore, are we? Thought it was time to enjoy a few creature comforts in our dotage... So, Charlie. How old is he?”
She is busying herself with the kettle, with getting a tray together, with retrieving milk from the enormous fridge, so I can’t see the expression on her face. Perhaps that is a deliberate thing, I think, as I realize why she is asking the question.
“He’s eighteen, Mum. He’s Rob’s son.”
“Ah,” she replies simply, slicing up the lemon drizzle cake and arranging it on a plate. “And Rob... how is he?”
We are suddenly on very dangerous ground. I can tell from the way she is holding herself, from her lack of eye contact, that she knows this as well. So much has happened since I last saw her, and I can only imagine how hard it is for her not to pin me down and interrogate me immediately. But this is awkward terrain for me too—I don’t want to lie, but perhaps the last vestiges of my pride don’t want to let me confess that she was right all along, that Rob was the ne’er-do-well they always suspected, that I made a terrible mistake and should have listened to them.
“He’s fine,” I reply breezily. “We’re not together anymore, but that happens, doesn’t it? He’s doing well. He lives in Paris. He’s in regular contact with Charlie.”
I have no idea why I am defending Rob, trying to make the situation sound better than it is, but somehow I am.
Mum turns around to face me at last, and I steel myself for judgment, for a sniping comment, for a veiled told-you-so.
“And how long has he been gone for?” she asks directly.
Now she has asked that particular question, I know that I cannot lie—apart from anything else, I can’t expect Charlie to cover for me. Charlie doesn’t even remember his dad living with us, and she will discover that.
“He left when Charlie was two,” I say quietly, biting my lip and looking at my feet. Flip-flops. Jeez. I could have at least painted my toenails.
“So you raised that lovely boy all alone? Luke isn’t... more than a friend?”
“No, he’s not. And yes, I did.”
I find it in myself to meet her piercing stare, and feel a rush of adrenaline. This is how it can be with me and my mum; this is how I remember it. Even if we both try really, really hard, we seem able to skip forward to conflict, real or perceived, within seconds.
“Well, it looks like you did a marvelous job, darling. He seems like a lovely young man, and you must be very proud—of him, and of yourself. Now, shall we go through?”
She sweeps away past me with her tray, and I am left floundering in the alien high-tech kitchen. That, I think, shaking my head as I follow her, was not what I expected at all. The adrenaline fades, is replaced with something warmer and kinder.
By the time I join them in the living room, everyone is perched on sofas and chairs, and Mum is pouring the tea. Her movements are, as ever, precise and measured, and she doesn’t even spill a drop. I remain unconvinced that I am genetically related to this woman.
Charlie bites into his cake and immediately goes into that blissed-out sugar trance I am so familiar with.
“Wow, this is amazing!” he says after the first mouthful. “Are you sure you two are related?”
It is so close to what I was thinking myself that it makes me laugh, and the low-level awkwardness of the moment is dissipated.
“Jenny was never interested in learning to cook,” my mother says, stirring her tea. “She assured me that she would be rich and famous and would always have a private chef.”
“Ha! Well, that didn’t go to plan...,” Charlie says, looking around him. It must be so odd for him, after all this time, after all these years of half-truths and evasions, to finally be here.
“So, Mum, where’s Dad?” I ask. “Is he on the farm?”
There is a terrible split second when I wonder what she is about to say—whether he is still around at all.
“Oh. Of course, you don’t know. Well, we sold the farm. We still own the fields immediately around the house, and the garden at the back, but the rest isn’t ours anymore.”
“But... Dad loves the farm! It’s been in the family for so long... and I saw the cows on the way in!”
“I said we’d sold it, Jenny, not expunged it from existence. Nice couple bought it; they’ve gone organic. Make marvelous yogurts. I know it must be a surprise, but there was no way around it really. Your father is seventy-five now, dear, and his health has been, well, I suppose you’d call it patchy. He simply couldn’t carry on doing so much of it himself, and Richard made it clear that he didn’t want to take it over. It got to the stage where we were paying more and more people to do the work for us, and it simply wasn’t viable. He was upset at first, but he’s settled into it now. It’s meant we can have a nice retirement, and a shiny new kitchen, and he was consoled by his alpacas.”
“Yeah—what’s with the llamas?” asks Charlie, leaning forward.
“Alpacas, dear, alpacas. There is a difference—alpacas are shorter, and lighter, and have different ears. Well, he saw some at a county show and fell in love with them. We started with four, and now we have fifteen. They’re actually splendid animals—very engaging, low-maintenance, immensely calming to be around. Your father takes tourists on walks with them on the weekends. Very popular it is too.”
“Really?” I ask incredulously. “Dad and tourists?”
My father was a lovely man but not always overly enamored by the many visitors our corner of Cornwall attracts in the summer. In fact, he was known to drive his tractor especially slowly on purpose just to annoy them.
“I know—he’s mellowed with age. He enjoys meeting the new people now, and it fills up his time, gives him a sense of purpose. I called him—he even has a mobile, after Richard and I bombarded him with threats! He was in the village; he’ll be here shortly. Charlie, do you like cricket? Your grandfather would love to play with you, I’m sure.”
I gulp back laughter at the thought of Charlie playing cricket—or in fact any game that doesn’t involve a screen and a handheld controller—but he replies eagerly: “Well, only a few times at school, and I wasn’t exactly at county level—but I’m willing to give it a go!”
Wow , I think. Wonders will never cease. This is a day of small miracles.
“And Richard,” I ask, “how is he?”
“He’s well. He moved to Falmouth—the lure of the big city!—and runs his own marketing company. He’s divorced, sadly, but as you said, that happens. Rebecca—you remember Rebecca?—well, she still lives here, which is lovely because we get to see a lot of his children, Ethan, who is seventeen now, and Shannon, who is fifteen.”
My brother is four years older than me, and I remember him mainly as the bane of my life. This is not uncommon with big brothers, I suspect, and from what I’ve seen of other people, the relationships usually balance out. Ours never did, because he was in his final year at uni when I walked out on the whole family. I didn’t even say goodbye to him, which I now deeply regret.
Rebecca, I do remember—she was his girlfriend all the way from year ten, and I’m not surprised they married young and had kids. I’m also, perhaps, not surprised that they’re divorced—she never wanted much more than to stay here and raise a brood, and he had bigger plans.
“Will I get to meet them?” asks Charlie, sounding thrilled. “My cousins?”
“I’m sure that can be arranged,” Mum replies, then frowns. “Although I have no idea how long you’re staying for, or even if you are... I couldn’t help noticing the magnificent motorhome you were driving, Luke. Are you on holiday? Do you need to get back to work?” Ah , I think— here we go. The very subtle questioning; a slight prod to try to establish Luke’s bona fides.
Luke smiles and replies simply: “Not at all. I actually live in the motorhome on a permanent basis, and I don’t have a job.”
He says this completely unapologetically, and I love that about him. My mother doesn’t know his story, doesn’t know what led him down the path he treads, and he has no need to explain. Good for him.
She just nods and moves back to Charlie, asking him about his exams and his plans for the future, sounding impressed at his university of choice, showing interest in his degree and generally charming him.
I catch Luke’s eye, and he gives me a quick wink. It is nice, feeling that he is on my side, feeling that I have an ally. This reunion has gone much better than I ever could have expected, but perhaps old habits die hard, and I still feel a slight prickle of guardedness around her now that the first flush of emotion has passed.
Charlie is just starting to tell his grandmother about some of our adventures on the way here when I hear the back door slam. My dad may have mellowed with age, but he still can’t close a door without a bang, it seems.
He walks into the room, and I stand up to greet him. My heart both swells and dips when I see him in the doorway, looking at me as though I’m a hallucination. It would not be overestimating things to say that he is a shadow of his former self. He was always a big man—not fat but solid, from a combination of manual labor and a love of food and beer. He played rugby in his youth and always looked like he could step onto a pitch at a moment’s notice. Now he seems a quarter of his usual size and looks as though he has shrunk in height by a couple of inches. His skin is drawn and what hair he has left is gray. He is, however, still dressed in what I think of as his uniform—baggy, blue, thick-gauge cord trousers, a check shirt, and a waterproof vest. It might be cracking the paving stones out there, but my dad never goes anywhere without his waterproof vest.
He comes over to me and grins, and some of the sparkle returns to his eyes.
“I heard a rumor,” he says eventually, “that a certain young lady had called in for tea. Come here, love, and give your old dad a hug!”
I do as I am asked, and it is a wondrous thing. He might feel different as he embraces me, but he still smells the same—a combination of Dad and Old Spice. It is the smell of home, in many ways.
“You all right then?” he says simply. “You look fantastic. Always knew you’d be a heart-stopper! And who do we have here then?” He wanders over to Charlie and Luke, listens to the introductions, shakes their hands, gives Betty a pat.
“So, Charlie, fancy a spot of cricket?” he asks, miming a batting gesture. “There’s plenty of light left in the day yet. Or rugby maybe? Luke, you look like a rugby man, am I right? What position did you play?”
“Flanker,” says Luke, nodding, “very much retired.”
“Well, I still have a ball around somewhere... or if you’re all tired, we could play tomorrow, if you like—after you meet my alpacas. You are all staying, aren’t you?”
We have not discussed this, Luke and Charlie and I. I was so focused on simply getting here, on dealing with seeing them again, that we somehow never tackled the issue of what might happen next. Did I expect to just pop in, say hi, here’s your grandson, see you in another eighteen years? Will they want me to stay here, in this house? Should I stick with Joy? Would Luke even want to stay, or is this all too real, all too awkward? Maybe he’ll find it easier to just go on his way now we’re safely deposited...
“Go on, Jen, say you’ll stay, at least for a bit?” my dad repeats. I hear his plaintive tone, and see Charlie’s hopeful face, and know that there is only one answer to that question.
“Yes, Dad,” I reply, my eyes flickering to Luke, “we’ll stay. At least for a bit.”