Fifteen years earlier
My mother picked me up from the station and I cried all the way home, staring ahead through the windscreen, allowing myself now to sob like a child.
‘I don’t understand it,’ she said.
‘You were so happy. He seemed so lovely. What can have gone wrong?’
My father placed a mug of hot chocolate in front of me, so sweet that gesture.
In the good old days it would have sorted everything out.
Not now, though. Not now I was a two-timing slut.
On the two-hour journey from Bristol I had learned the shape of self-hatred, its vocabulary, its dark internal burn.
‘Please tell us what’s happened,’ my father said.
‘What’s happened is that we’ve broken up and I hate myself.
That’s it, that’s all there is to say.
’
They knew me so well, my parents, they knew when to leave me alone.
My mother slid her hands across the kitchen table and took hold of mine.
‘We love you. We think you’re wonderful.
We know you’re wonderful.
’
You rang, of course.
You spoke to my mother twice, my father once.
On the last phone call my father asked you, politely, to leave me alone.
Then there was Liv, with her daily bulletins, phone calls that always ended the same way.
‘Please talk to him, Catherine. It’s the least you can do.
He’s going out of his mind.
’
But I knew I couldn’t talk to you, I couldn’t hear your voice, the sound of your breathing on the other end of the phone.
The moment I did, I knew I’d lose my resolve.
All I had to do was think of Jack’s words.
I think it might push him over the edge.
‘No, Liv, I won’t talk to him.
It’s over, I’ve changed my mind and now we both need to move on.
’
I spent two weeks at home in the end, shadowing my mother from room to room, to the supermarket, for painfully slow walks around the park.
Her back was very bad at that time and we were at the chiropractor’s every other day.
I used to sit on the other side of the screen, listening to her low, suppressed moans, those deep gasps of pain that didn’t seem right.
If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with my own tragedy, perhaps I would have guessed at hers.
Just before the fortnight was up, my parents went to the surgery to pick up the results of a recent X-ray.
Afterwards I would imagine their walk along the high street – past the butcher where we bought fillet steak for birthdays and our Christmas turkey, past the greengrocer, who held back purple sprouting broccoli for my father, and the florist where my mother bought her peonies – as their last moments of innocence.
I was at the kitchen table when they came back, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South open in front of me.
From the minute they walked in I knew something was wrong.
My father was all bitter and brisk, as if he was fighting back tears (a trait I’ve inherited); my mother couldn’t look at me.
How do you tell your nineteen-year-old daughter, your treasured only child, that you are dying?
So I collapsed, and the loss of you, the horrifying infidelity with Jack, became a little chip of ugliness on the infinity of pain.
My mother insisted on taking me back to the station herself, her last drive as it turned out.
‘Making mistakes is part of growing up,’ she said as we stood waiting for my train.
‘It’s not such a big deal.
The important thing is to learn from it and move on.
Promise me you’ll do that.
’
‘You know, don’t you?
You know what I did.
’
My mother paused.
We were so close, she and I, always able to communicate without words.
She would have read my silence and interpreted my guilt.
Not the who or the how, but the act of betrayal, she must have understood that.
‘What I know is that you are a good person. And you’ve stopped believing in yourself.
’
‘Oh,’ I said, and could manage no more.
Sometimes my mother’s comprehension was a dagger in my chest.
I’ll never forget the look we shared before the whistle blew and the carriage door was slammed shut.
A few hard seconds of gazing into one another’s eyes, a silent information swap, no words needed.
She saw the change in me and I saw the sorrow in her.