Chapter 1
ONE
LIANE
I always knew this day would come. Like anyone, I had been fearing the loss of my beloved mother. Now it is here and despite predicting, imagining and fearing such a scenario, I feel totally unprepared for it.
My dear mum is lying in that casket that is about to be carried into the church. My dear mum, who was seventy-five years old, but who potentially had many more healthy years ahead of her. My dear mum, who helped to forge me into the fifty-year-old woman I am today.
My dear mum, Valerie.
If the sight of her casket approaching wasn’t already enough to set me off crying, the sight of some of the men carrying it into the church does the rest. There are six pallbearers here today, six males with the heavy coffin resting on their shoulders as they move slowly towards the gathered mourners seated in this church where I got married almost thirty years ago.
On that day, my mum was seated in here and she was the one dabbing at her eyes with a tissue.
But now that is me, and this is her last journey before she goes into her grave.
Therefore, this is the last chance I will get to say my goodbyes.
I find myself twirling my hair, a habit I’ve had for as long as I can remember.
I do it at times of stress, if I’m feeling awkward or anxious or afraid.
It’s no surprise I’m doing it now, wrapping an index finger around a long strand of my dark hair and curling it several times before finally letting go.
But it won’t be long until I do the same thing again.
As I watch the pallbearers approach, their steps slow and steady, oozing respect for the proud life of the woman they now carry to her final resting place, I admire each and every one of them.
I admire three of the men whom I recognise from my mum’s social club.
Just three of her many friends, and they were happy to volunteer to help today in any way they could.
But it’s the other three men who carry the coffin who are causing me to cry even more than I already was.
I see my husband, Frederik, the silver hair on his head bowed but his right shoulder strong as the coffin edge rests on it.
He’s of Nordic origin, even though he was born and raised here in England, and he certainly possesses the strength of some of his Viking forefathers.
Behind him comes my eldest son, Scott, his burly frame more down to a decade of manual labour than an ancestry from Scandinavian parts, although there will be some of his father’s DNA contributing to his broad shoulders.
Last, but not least, behind him is my youngest son, Joel, a much skinnier soul and that can be attributed to the fact that he has just returned from backpacking in Australia, where food was clearly neglected in favour of alcohol.
I have barely seen him in the past year due to his travelling exploits on the other side of the world, but he is back now, more tanned than when he left our home in the north-west of England twelve months ago. And he looks just as upset as I am.
Bless my baby. Okay, so he’s twenty-five, but he will always be my baby, just like his twenty-eight-year-old brother will be.
Scott and Joel loved their grandmother, but Joel was especially close to her, and I have no doubts that he assumed she would still be alive and well when he returned from his travels.
There is no way he thought he was saying a permanent goodbye to her when we all stood at the airport and wished him well before he strode away with nothing but his backpack on his shoulders and dreams of sandy beaches in his head.
He planned to be away for a year or two, but he also planned to return to regale us all with tales of his adventures, and Valerie should still have been alive to hear them.
But she is gone and he never got to say goodbye.
None of us did. Not after she died so suddenly.
My mother’s death wasn’t a long, drawn-out one.
There were no bedside chats on a hospital ward.
No dark, dreary days and long, lonely nights spent hoping for a miracle cure to whatever illness was slowly consuming her.
Neither was there time to gather the family around her and have everybody say whatever they needed to say before her eyes closed and she took her last breath.
There was nothing but a sharp suddenness to the way my mother’s life ended.
She fell down the stairs at home and, as I explained to the police whilst in the throes of sadness and shock, she was only found when I went to see her on a Tuesday morning like I always did. By then, it was clear it was already too late. She had lost her life, and I had lost my mother.
As the coffin creeps past the pews and several mourners bow their heads in respect as it goes, I notice one person who doesn’t make a move. One person whose head remains upright. One person who is staring at the coffin just as hard as I was a moment ago.
Her name is Haven and, just like my son, she is looking tanned and slim. That’s because she has come back from Australia, the same place where my son was.
She came back with him.
As the coffin reaches the front of the church and comes to rest beside where the celebrant prepares to officially begin the ceremony with a few carefully chosen words, I can’t stop looking at her.
This stranger to me, seated only a few spaces away from me, right at the front, with my family.
It was my son’s wish that she sit amongst us all and I couldn’t say no to that.
But I’d have preferred to keep this section of the church for close relatives who had actually met my dearly departed mother.
Yet here she is. This young woman, only twenty-five years of age and sticking out like a sore thumb amongst this sea of older, wrinkled faces.
The pews are a sea of black, as they should be because everyone knows to wear only one colour on an occasion like this.
Yet she is not dressed in black. Her attire, from the dress to the cardigan to the heels. None of it is black.
It’s dark blue.
Not black.
How dare she turn up here in anything other than the official, universally accepted colour for a funeral?
How dare she stand out amongst everybody else here, particularly when she is the only one at the service who never met my mother before her death.
How dare she do this? Where is the respect?
Where is the acknowledgement? Where is the pain on her face?
Joel tried to excuse her by saying she doesn’t own any black clothes and in the rush for them both to fly home, there was no time to shop for a more suitable outfit.
I don’t know if I believe that.
There are shops at airports, aren’t there?
But I shouldn’t be surprised. How can this young woman be grieving for the loss of an older woman she had never known?
My dear mother, Valerie, had not touched her life in the way she had touched everybody else’s here.
No, the only reason Haven is in this church right now is because she is my youngest son’s new girlfriend.
Joel met Haven in Australia, on Bondi Beach apparently, which sounds very glamorous.
The photos of them under sunny skies Down Under certainly looked glamorous, especially when contrasted to the grey English sky that I was viewing them beneath.
As I watched from afar, eagerly checking social media to see if my adventurous son had updated his account with more photos of his travels, the few images I saw told me that he and Haven were getting closer.
His messages to me and his father also indicated that.
He told us about her. Said he had met a great girl, told us her name and how they were spending a lot of time together. It sounded like it was going well.
At first, I wondered if Haven was Australian and feared for a moment that my son would marry her, gain residency in that far-flung country and then never come home.
Such a thought might have been selfish of me, especially if he was happy, but I am a mother and I love my child, so of course I’ll always be happy when my offspring are near to me as opposed to being far away.
But then he told us that she was English and originated from a town only an hour away from ours and I have to say I breathed a sigh of relief.
I hoped that my baby would return to UK shores after his adventures, so that he’d be closer to me again. I prayed that I wouldn’t lose him to Sydney’s sandy shores and skin-soothing sunshine.
Then I got my wish. He has come home and it is far sooner than I ever expected him to. But I never wanted him to come back in these circumstances. I didn’t want it to be like this. So sudden. So shocking. So sad. I didn’t want him to have never said goodbye to his dear grandmother.
Nor did I want this to be the way in which I first met Haven.
We should have met differently. In more pleasant circumstances. Either her and my son returning triumphant from their time overseas and entering my house with smiles on their faces or me and my husband jetting out to Australia to see them first.
Frederik and I had already discussed taking a trip to see how our son was living over there and the fact that we could enjoy their summer while skipping some of our winter was just an added bonus.
But neither of those things happened. As it was, it was down to Frederik to make a very difficult phone call to our youngest son to break the news that his grandmother had passed away.
We had no doubt that Joel would want to jump on a plane and make it back here to say his goodbyes to the sweet woman who had fed him buns and biscuits as a young boy. The only thing we doubted was whether Haven would be with him.
We assumed she might stay in Australia and wait for Joel to return to her there. After all, she couldn’t be expected to attend a funeral of someone she had never met, as well as meet her boyfriend’s family in such difficult circumstances.
But here she is.
Now, as the funeral gets under way and the pallbearers take their seats, I notice one other thing about this woman dressed in blue amongst a sea of black.
I notice that she is looking at me.
And then I notice that she is smiling.