Chapter 2 #2
When it was over, she said her goodbyes as quickly as she could and climbed awkwardly into the back seat of the fancy car with the boys and Tiggy.
All were silent. Tiggy’s presence did little to help – not quite a stranger in their midst, but pretty close.
Nina’s thoughts were muddled; she continually reminded herself to tell Finn snippets about the day, the things she had observed that would make him laugh; his cousin Patch taking a leak in a hedge where he thought no one could see, and Kathy Topps and her husband being accosted by Finn’s great-aunt Rita who seemed to have consumed more than a couple of gins.
Her fingers flexed, wanting to take up their natural home of the last decade or so, nestling in his wide, warm palm, an act from which she always gained reassurance and confidence.
And bang! There it was again, the door slam in her mind that he was gone.
The reality still shocked her senses as much as it had ten days ago when he died.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked the boys for the fiftieth time that day.
Like automatons, they nodded the response they knew she wanted.
They were all going through the motions, but the simple truth was that they were all far, far from okay.
They were bit-part players doing their utmost to uphold the illusion of normality, for whose benefit she wasn’t sure.
Back at The Tynings, stoic-faced caterers darted in between the guests like worker bees, proffering glasses of chilled white Chablis and silver platters laden with canapés, which she had chosen from a flimsy catalogue, without energy or interest. The bellowed exchanges of reunion that echoed in the rooms reverberated painfully in her ears.
She rubbed the tops of her arms to try to chase away a chill, but nothing worked.
Closing her eyes, she wished everyone would leave.
‘Do we have to stay down here, Mum?’ Connor’s eyes wandered among the groups of adults that stood in clusters with drinks held to their chests.
‘No, darling. Do whatever makes you comfortable. Take your friends to the TV room or your bedroom or whatever.’
‘Thanks.’ He gave a brief smile.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ He looked away, as if offended by a platter of cheese-laden mini-quiches that whizzed past.
‘Me neither.’ She placed her hand over his back. ‘Dad would have been really proud of you today. He was proud of you every day.’
Connor began to walk away, then paused. ‘He crashed on the A46, right?’
‘Yes.’ As if she could ever forget or stop picturing the bend on which he had swerved off at speed, into the fence, careering down into the field below . . .
‘That’s nowhere near my school. It’s on the other side of town. He was heading out of the city. He wasn’t on his way to watch me play rugby, was he?’
She hated the disappointment in his eyes. ‘I don’t . . . I don’t know.’ This was not something she had really considered. ‘He might have been coming back after a meeting, anything could have happened really, Con. We just don’t know.’
He looked her in the eyes. Both felt the blush at how she was still covering for the man she loved.
‘Jesus Christ! I’d forgotten the size of this place,’ her sister broke in.
Connor headed for the stairs. Nina watched Tiggy tip her head back and look up at the high ceiling, casting her eyes over the wide sweep of staircase, the pale wood floor and the huge vase of white lilies on the round table.
‘It’s like a hotel.’ Tiggy shook her head from side to side in awe. ‘No hotel I’ve ever stayed in, though.’
‘Can I get you a drink?’ Nina spoke to mask her discomfort, wishing her sister would keep her voice down.
‘Yes, coffee, thanks.’
She made her way through the modest crowd to the kitchen, with Tiggy following, her big sister’s high heels clicking on the floor. ‘Holy-fricking-moly! You’ve redone the kitchen. This is like . . .’ She paused, seeming at a loss as to what to compare the room to.
Nina was glad the kids were out of earshot. She grabbed a mug from the cupboard and poured her sister some coffee from the pot on the counter. She wished, not for the first time, that she could slip away and crawl under the duvet.
Tiggy stared at her as if making an appraisal, and appeared to take in the depressed slope to her bones. ‘So what happened? He had a car crash?’
She felt her stomach flip at the question, asked so casually.
It was a reminder of the life she had stepped away from, a life where poverty and reduced horizons meant bluntness was the most expedient way to get things done, a life where there was no time or room for shying away from the topic in hand, no matter how unpleasant.
She had thought of this before; the many topics that were taboo in the world she now lived in: money, politics, religion, anything of an overly personal nature.
She had learned to be contained and not break the taboos, but it was hard.
In her old neighbourhood, in the world Tiggy still inhabited, people lived cheek by jowl and things were discussed at the bus stop or in the shop, and no one cared who heard.
It mattered little; it wasn’t as if whoever might overhear was going to be shocked or even care.
‘You’ve got no money till Friday? How are you going to get to work?
’ or ‘He was so drunk, he fell down and knocked out his two front teeth. The dog went over to lick him and I left them to it . . .’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, praying her sister wouldn’t ask for any more detail.
‘God, that’s terrible.’
She nodded. It was.
‘So how are you doing?’ Tiggy asked in a more deferential tone.
Nina shrugged. ‘Numb is the best way to describe it. One minute I’m fine, the next I’m a mess.
It still feels like he might walk through the door any minute.
’ She looked towards the hallway expectantly.
‘I think when I realise that it’s not going to happen, that’s when it will get very scary for me. ’
Tiggy nodded. ‘It always seemed like he made you happy.’
‘He really did.’
She watched her sister reach into the top pocket of her denim jacket and pull out a packet of cigarettes.
‘You’ll have to smoke on the terrace.’ Nina tried to hide her distaste as she nodded towards the French doors at the back of the kitchen. The idea of having cigarette smoke inside her home was repulsive.
Tiggy did a double take and then smiled. ‘Sure.’
As Tiggy moved towards the doors, Declan ambled into the room.
‘Your mum died too, didn’t she?’ he asked Tiggy, his mouth drooping with sadness.
The words cut with a sharp reminder not only of her other loss, but of the fact that her baby boy was trying to normalise this terrible occurrence; to be reassured that he wasn’t the only one to have suffered like this . . .
‘Yes.’ Tiggy nodded. ‘When I was very small. I was only seven and Nina here was even younger. And that’s when our dad moved us back to the UK, where he was from, and we lived with his parents while he went off to find work.’
‘Do you think your mum will see Daddy?’ he turned to ask Nina.
‘I think she might.’ She smiled.
‘Do you think they are in heaven now?’
Nina swallowed the rage that sat on her tongue, wanting to shout that she didn’t know how any just God could take away the man she loved. He had already taken her mother, when she was just a child. Instead, she drew breath and kept calm. ‘I do, my love. Do you?’
Declan nodded and played with a rubber band he had wrapped around his fingers. ‘Do you think that in heaven, your life is the same as it was when you were on earth?’
‘Mmm, that’s a good question. I’m not sure. What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure either, but I hope that people get to have a rest, either because they are very old and tired or because they were very busy, like Dad.’
‘Yes, he was very busy.’ She nodded, cursing the next wave of tears that hovered just below the surface.
‘I wish I could see him. I miss him so much.’ Declan suddenly cried, his little chest heaving.
‘Me too.’ She held him fast.
Every time Finn was mentioned it was like hearing the news for the first time. It made her heart stall and the pain was only intensified when she saw how her child suffered too.
Tiggy slowly pulled out a chair at the breakfast bar, as if wary of doing the wrong thing, and perched on it.
‘I think he’s in heaven with your mummy,’ Declan said, ‘and my other gran, Eunice, who was married to Hampy, my dad’s dad and our gun dog, Piper. And Mrs Nicholson’s husband Dick, who used to paint the lines on the cricket pitch. He had a heart attack at a barn dance.’
Tiggy stared at him, offering a slight nod of understanding. ‘Is that right?’ She toyed with the cigarette packet in her hand.
‘You shouldn’t smoke, you know,’ he sniffed. ‘It can make you get cancer and it gives you asthma.’ And with that, he walked off.
‘He’s so like you when you were a child. Confident, questioning. I remember Mamma saying you were only allowed five “whys” for everything she said, otherwise you would go on for infinity.’
Nina smiled, feeling the familiar flash of envy that Tiggy had been old enough to remember their mother, whereas her recollections were reduced to a scent, a shadow, an idea of the woman, leaving her to fill in the gaps.
‘But the main difference is that your kid is posh and you weren’t.’
Tiggy’s words snapped her to the present.
Nina placed the hot mug of coffee in front of her sister and walked to the fridge to fetch the milk, bristling at her crass remark.
She still felt that the poverty in which she had been raised marked her in some way, formed a grime that still sat on her skin, clung to her clothes and hung around her in a way that gave off noxious fumes perceptible to the more fortunate.