Chapter 13 Kate
KATE
Presume not that I am the thing I was.
Kate had got up early and driven down the coast road to the National Trust parking lot that borders the nature reserve.
From there, she ran past the old windmill, following the ancient seawall, zigzagging between dog walkers and bird-watchers until she found what she was looking for: a little-known path through the reedbeds.
Now she is sitting on a grass bank looking out over this feathery world.
The sky is a pale watery blue above her, clouds stretched by a stiff spring breeze.
The long line of reeds in front of her is a band of gilded gray, striped green at the bottom near the water.
This line snakes away from her like a river, and the sound of the wind through the reeds reminds her of the rush of water.
At first, she had been conscious of this and of the calls of the warblers and larks until she became so submerged in thought that all she is now aware of is the undulating ribbon in front of her and the slow, stately progress of two egrets delicately picking their way through the shallows.
Bodies strutting, question mark heads bobbing.
She has reached a decision. There is no need to mention JoJo Rose. That is all in the past, and she has no desire to go back to that time.
She had been at art college for two years. Had been amazed that this was even an option. When her teachers at school asked her what she wanted to do, she replied, “Math, I suppose.” She was good at it. It was a sensible choice, and her parents approved.
“You can’t go wrong with a degree in math,” her father had told anyone who would listen. He was a fitter, a manual worker, but he understood the importance of numbers.
Only one teacher heard the “I suppose.” Her art teacher, Mr. Morris, had said, “You do know there is such a thing as art college.” She couldn’t believe that she could actually go to college and do the thing she loved most—not really work but more like playing.
“Oh, yes,” he had said, like he was letting her in on his favorite secret.
So, with his help, she had explored what was possible, and she had applied and got in.
Moving from Reading to London. Her dad had stopped talking about sensible choices and started talking about the danger of drugs.
Her mom pointed out that someone with a math degree working in the city could afford far more drugs than a struggling artist. Then her mom told Kate that art college is what she would have chosen.
On one of her infrequent visits, Alice had swept in wearing one of the jewel-colored peasant skirts she made and sold, and hugged her sister and told her she was proud of her. That was enough for Kate.
Art college hadn’t been quite what she was expecting.
She had thought she would be taught how to draw and paint.
But the tutors were much more interested in free expression, although she did get a good grounding in art history and critical appreciation.
She found her way with different media. Loved collage, acrylics, charcoal, and textiles, but not so much watercolors.
She wanted to know more about oils, pushed for help, but her tutor eventually confessed they didn’t have anyone on the faculty that really knew what they were doing with oils. So it remained out of reach—a mystery.
Then, after two years at college, her mom had died of a sudden brain bleed.
One minute she was seeing her husband out of a parking space in Sainsbury’s, the next they were standing around in her parents’ front room eating sandwiches Kate and Alice had made for the funeral guests, and serving tea from her grandmother’s tea set.
If she had known then what she knows now.
Kate had expected Alice to stop her life of traveling and come home to look after their dad.
At least for a while. Kate was twenty and her sister had just turned thirty.
She thought their dad needed them. He told everyone that he was okay, yet was unable to make the simplest decision.
He talked about going on a cruise, but couldn’t even find his way to the shops.
“Oh, he’ll be alright,” Alice had told her after the funeral, repacking her bag to head back to Turkey.
Alice had always been Kate’s beacon of warmth and light, a luminous dragonfly who flitted into her orbit, hinting at what might be.
You are my sister. You might fly away like me.
But Kate’s daughter, Ellie, was more like Alice than Kate was.
Was Alice the reason Kate liked Ellie to travel?
She missed her but wanted her to be who she wanted to be.
Thought if she traveled, her aunt Alice was somehow with her?
Perhaps she had been mad to expect Alice to return home, but it hadn’t stopped her resenting her when she gave up college and moved back home to cook ready-made meals for a man who couldn’t work the oven.
It was the only time they had had a real fight. Alice appeared one day—she had started working for an environmental group in London. Kate couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t help her. Alice had shouted at her. Told her she was a fool. Kate had said to think about what Mom would have wanted.
Alice had screamed, “You think Mom would have wanted you doing this! She should have done more with her life. For fuck’s sake, Katie, don’t make the same mistake she did.
” Kate can’t remember what she shouted back.
Just that Alice had told her that her dad didn’t need her.
That he would be okay, which just made her think everything was a mistake.
Her mom dying. Her sister not being there for her. Her giving up the life she loved.
And sometimes she thinks what she still hasn’t forgiven Alice for is that her sister was right.
Four months later, about the same time Sainsbury’s moved out of town, her dad was dating Maureen from the convenience store on the corner.
By the spring, they were married. Her mother’s cherry Cornishware china was relegated to the attic, and her grandmother’s tea set sat gathering dust in the sideboard that nobody ever opened.
Maureen took charge of the ready-made meals, and they started eating on their laps in the lounge, watched over by Maureen’s collection of Lladró figurines.
Kate moved out and got a job at a local firm in the accounts department. After all, you can’t go wrong if you’re good with numbers. She had reconnected with some old school friends and, through them, met Doug, who for a while seemed to be the answer she was looking for.
Then her dad died of a heart attack.
Doug had been kind. Really kind, and she would never forget that. It was perhaps the bedrock on which they built their family. And Alice had come back. There was a reconciliation of sorts, but without the words that needed to be said.
The sisters soon discovered that their father had made a will in their stepmother’s favor, and they were not to receive a single thing.
They had not expected much. Not bricks and mortar, but there was their mother’s jewelry and the beautiful rose tea set that had belonged to their grandmother, their mom’s mother.
Alice had shrugged and returned to her life in London, now working for a political campaigner.
Kate had gone to see Maureen to ask if she might have the cherry Cornishware from the attic and her grandmother’s tea set.
Maureen gave her a cup of coffee and a slice of angel cake, served on sludge-colored Denby china.
Then she said no.
The Cornishware had been thrown away, but her husband had wanted Maureen’s girls to have the tea set one day. It seemed it might be valuable.
Kate dropped her Denby teacup, saucer, and plate on the flagstone floor along with the untouched angel cake and left. As soon as she got home, she got out her paints. And that is how she became JoJo Rose.
Using gouache, which she knew from her days at college would produce beautiful pastel shades, she created a series of paintings of individual teacups.
Like her grandmother’s set, they were overly pretty.
But they meant something to her, and they were a connection to the mom she missed so much.
She signed the paintings boldly with her mother’s name, JoJo Rose.
At first, she gave them away to friends who spotted them in her apartment.
Then, eventually, local shops wanted them.
Until there wasn’t a gift shop in the county that wasn’t selling her paintings of china.
From there came the prints, coasters, mugs, bags, and aprons.
It was a fashion phase that didn’t last anywhere near as long as Cath Kidston, but it gave Kate a nest egg and the money to buy her cottage.
It also saw Doug in his element, organizing the business side.
But best of all, it brought Alice back into her life.
She might not want Kate’s china paintings on her walls, but she loved the wit of this revenge, and Kate made sure she received a share of her earnings from the paintings.
Something Doug could never understand. But Kate saw it as Alice’s inheritance too.
Together they drank wine and chatted as Alice embroidered a rose teacup on the cuff of Kate’s denim jacket.
And they laughed at the thought of Maureen seeing images of the china wherever she went.
Signed with the name of her husband’s first wife.
Then it simply went out of fashion. Doug tried to breathe new life into it with overseas sales, but Kate knew it for what it was.
A thing that was never going to live that long.
Born out of the wrong stuff. As Alice said, “It was a joke, Katie. A bloody good one, but you don’t want to keep on telling the same old joke. ”
But now there is no Alice. No laughing at the things that only they could share.
One of the last things Alice had said to her before she died at the age of fifty-eight—when they were sisters again, laughing and swimming together, and finally finding the words that needed to be said—was: “You need to paint again, Katie. But paint something that really means something to you. Show people how you see the world.”
The eight years that have passed feel more like four, concertinaed by her own illness and the pandemic, but Kate knows that Alice was right. But with her sister gone, she’s not sure she knows how to do this—or even how she sees the world.