Chapter 11 Zoe Spring 2025 #2
‘It doesn’t have to be from your childhood. Anything,’ says Fiona, hanging up the dress on the back of the door, near the ‘to keep’ pile. Zoe leans forward from her mother’s chest of drawers where she’s sorting through her socks and tights, watching Sara.
‘Well, I guess I remember when I had Charlotte and Izzie. She came to the house when I was in labour. In fact, she’d come once before but it was a false alarm.
But this time it felt different and I called her straight away and she was brilliant.
She helped me get to hospital and stayed all the way through.
We must have been up about sixty hours by the time they were born.
John kept taking himself off to sleep, but she was constantly there.
Holding my hand, making me drink and eat, encouraging me.
And when the twins were checked over and came back, her face.
’ Sara sniffs again and her eyes fill. ‘She was so proud to be a granny.’
Zoe glances at the photo of Sara and the three girls on her mum’s bedside table. Her mum had been looking at that a few days before she died. Zoe’s stomach twists.
‘And then Katy arrived. She wasn’t with me for her, but she looked after the twins with Sheri, John’s mum. Seeing her with my girls is – was my favourite thing.’ Sara’s properly crying now, and takes a crumpled tissue out of her bag and blows her nose.
‘Mum often talked about your kids,’ says Zoe. It shouldn’t hurt to say that, but it does. Sara gave their mum something that Zoe probably never will. She thought she might with Ben, but that didn’t happen.
Steph holds up a grey Fair Isle jumper. ‘I remember Mum wearing this. I loved it, it was so cuddly.’ She looks almost wistful, thinks Zoe.
‘Your turn,’ says Sara, looking towards Fiona.
Fiona bites her lip. ‘Well, I haven’t seen much of Mum these last few years, not since we left the UK. But I did like Zooming her.’ She looks to Zoe, for confirmation. Zoe smiles. Mum enjoyed those Zoom calls, she realises that now. Fiona looks back to the dress, hanging from the door.
‘It’s actually a really small thing. Just a moment. It was a long time ago.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I was in my room playing that Bluebells song “Young at Heart”.’ She looks at her sisters. ‘Yoooouuuung at heart,’ she starts to sing quietly.
‘I remember that,’ says Steph.
Fiona glances at her and looks away. ‘Well, I was playing it, probably quite loud. I was on the bed dancing, using my hairbrush as a microphone. Don’t laugh,’ she says to Zoe.
‘Sorry, it just doesn’t fit with how you are now.’
Fiona shakes her head. ‘Anyway, she came in, and I thought she was going to tell me off. But she picked up my deodorant can and started dancing with me and singing at the top of her voice. Youuuuung at heart.’ Her voice breaks on the last note.
‘We danced and sang and when the song ended, she just put the can down as if nothing had happened and told me lunch was ready.’
‘That’s a lovely memory,’ says Sara, squeezing her hand.
Fiona grins at her. ‘I suppose she was quite young really. She was what, only twenty-five when she had you, Steph, so she spent her twenties and thirties having babies, and just when we’d started to grow up and get easier she had Zoe in her forties.
It wasn’t until she was in her fifties she could actually start to do things just for her. ’
Zoe thinks back to the conversation she overheard at the parish fete.
Her being a happy accident. ‘I have so many favourite memories of Mum,’ she says quickly.
She flicks through them in her mind but every time she focuses on one, it doesn’t seem to be enough.
It’s not perfect, there’s always a flaw.
And the memory of that woman saying she was a happy accident . . .
‘I suppose sitting with someone at the end of their life is a privilege. Not a happy memory, but it was good to be there with her right at the end.’ Zoe pushes away the thought of the plate of toast and marmalade.
‘It is a privilege. And it was so good you could be with her, that she didn’t die alone,’ says Sara, taking Zoe’s hand. ‘But think of something happier.’
Then suddenly it’s there. School sports day.
‘I was about eight and we were doing a three-legged mother-and-daughter race. We came last because we kept falling over. We were so far behind that they stopped the race before we’d even got to the halfway point.
Mum just couldn’t stop laughing. It was .
. .’ She can’t swallow the lump in her throat and falls silent.
‘It’s those small things, isn’t it? Those snapshots of memories that are wonderful, but hurt the most,’ says Fiona, sighing. ‘But it’s good to share them, to remember those times.’
‘Yes, it’s good to talk about her. Somehow it helps,’ says Zoe.
Sara reaches across and holds her hand. ‘Isn’t it funny,’ she says. ‘Although we’re all sisters, we all have such different memories of our childhood, such different experiences.’
‘I guess it was bound to be like that because we’re all spread out in ages,’ says Zoe. ‘If we’d been born every two years, it would have been very different. But I literally have no memories of Steph when I was a child and hardly any of Fi either.’
‘Your turn, Steph,’ says Sara.
Steph stares at her hands.
‘Steph? You must have more memories than any of us – you had five years with her before any of us were born.’
‘But she was the one who left the youngest,’ says Zoe. ‘What were you, sixteen, seventeen when you went to boarding school?’
There’s a long pause and for a moment Zoe doesn’t think Steph has anything to say.
‘When I was five, there was a fancy-dress competition in the church hall,’ says Steph.
They all look at her. ‘Mum and I went together as robins. She made the costumes herself – matching. Hers was especially funny because she was pregnant with you, Fi, and her belly was huge, covered in the robin’s red tummy.
I’m not sure if Dad went as anything, I think it was just Mum and me.
’ Her face is soft, a small smile on her lips.
‘Anyway, we won. And Mum was so proud. She hugged me and jumped up and down. I can’t remember if we got a prize, but when I woke in the morning she wasn’t there.
She’d gone to hospital to have you. Maybe it was the excitement. That’s my favourite memory.’
The four women are silent. Zoe has never thought about Steph having memories of their mum before any of the others were born.
Zoe was there at the end of their mum’s life.
But Steph had been there before anyone else.
She wants to talk to Mum about it, tell her what it’s like, the four of them being back in the house together.
But the one person she wants to talk to is no longer around.
Milly
1989
‘Ambulance, please.’ I can hear Paul’s breathing in the hall.
‘My wife’s cut her neck. It looks bad. Please send someone.
Quickly.’ There’s a pause. ‘Highdown Hall. In Hambrough. Please hurry, please.’ Another pause.
I close my eyes. The chill is working its way down from my neck to my hands, my arm into my body.
‘Pressure. Yes, I understand. She’s got a tea towel on it now. Yes, heavy bleeding. Thank you, thank you. Please hurry.’
He comes back into the kitchen from the hall and sits down next to me.
‘They’re sending someone straight away. What the hell happened?
’ he says, peeling up the corner of the tea towel, which I’ve been pressing against my neck to stop the bleeding.
He properly looks me in the eye for what feels like the first time in ages. ‘Are you okay?’
I try to nod but there’s a stabbing pain in my neck and I feel a fresh gush of blood.
‘Don’t move. Just put pressure on it, they said.’
‘Accident,’ I try to say.
‘Accident,’ he repeats but without any certainty.
‘Fiona, Sara . . .’ I try to say, but I’m starting to feel dizzy.
‘They’re fine, they’re in the library.’ He’s looking in the drawer, pulling out a stack of tea towels. He gently takes the one from my neck and replaces it. It’s completely soaked with blood. My blood or Steph’s blood? Or is it the same blood? She is my blood.
‘Milly, you’ve got to stay awake, you can’t drift off. That’s what they said on the phone. The ambulance won’t be long.’
‘Stay awake,’ I mumble. I’m always awake.
It’s impossible to sleep these days. I’m so tired, but it’s so hard to sleep.
And then I do and wake up like someone’s jumped out at me.
But I’m just so tired now. So cold, so tired.
Has someone left the back door open? Steph.
When she left. ‘Close the back door, it’s cold. ’
‘It is closed, Milly.’ Paul is here. Why isn’t he in the library? I can’t feel anything. My head’s so heavy, I have to lie down.
‘Stay awake, Milly, don’t close your eyes.’
I need to close my eyes. Everything is so heavy, so cold, so heavy.
Just a little sleep. A moment. Mum always used to say that if there’s a chance to sit down then take it.
And if there’s a chance to lie down, then do that.
I’d like to lie down. There’s something wet on the floor, it’s seeping into my socks. ‘Alice,’ I say. ‘The floor’s wet.’
Paul is applying pressure against my neck. Is he strangling me? Then the room is full of noise and light. I close my eyes and retreat inside.
‘She’s been very lucky, Mr Wright. The knife missed her carotid artery by millimetres. Otherwise we would be having a very different conversation.’ The nurse smiles down at me and scribbles something on the clipboard, which she puts back at the end of the bed.
‘How are you feeling, Mrs Wright?’
I try to nod but there’s something on the side of my neck. ‘I’m okay,’ I whisper.