Chapter 24 #2
December brought a flurry of orders and Julian worked up until Christmas Eve.
But it was a tiding-over, rather than a path out.
They were still deprived of the oxygen that money and having just enough had once afforded them.
January came with a lull that left him hopeless.
Everyone at the Old Chocolate Factory felt it.
Shops had closed, fairs were canceled, exhibitions permanently postponed.
In April, a cabinet maker who’d moved into Orla’s old studio a few years earlier took his own life.
He was found in the woods, a note in his pocket.
It seemed to make them all kinder, slower, for a while.
“You all right?” they’d ask one another, stopping, making space for something more than “fine.”
“You wouldn’t do that, would you?” Orla had said, when he told her.
“What do you think?”
“That’s why I’m asking. Because I want to know.”
“I have you and the girls,” he’d said, and she nodded—a short, clipped sort of nod—and he’d wondered if he really did have her, or if it was already over.
But, either way, it wasn’t an option for him.
His mother’s life had taught him that you do everything you can to cling to survival.
He’d realized that perhaps his answer might seem manipulative, implying his perspective could change if Orla were to officially draw a line under things, and so he’d added, “But even if I didn’t, the answer’s no.
It’s not something I’d do.” And she’d given a small smile, reassured.
But he’d carried on thinking about their conversation afterward.
Because hadn’t his mother’s life also taught him you do everything you can for your children?
That you’ll fight—really fight—to give them the best life possible, to be there for them?
He wasn’t sure he was doing that. Not in the way his mum had. Not tooth and nail.
When Julian wasn’t working, he began to return home more often.
He borrowed a sander to strip the kitchen floor, repainted scuffed walls, and started to see their home through the eyes he’d had for it eight years ago when they’d first walked through the door.
A chocolate-box house. Tiny cast-iron fireplaces and narrow alcoves, Victorian sashes framed by original shutters and window seats beneath.
He could picture Orla and the girls all over it, hear their voices.
And he wondered where they’d be if there’d been no pandemic, if they hadn’t run out of money.
If he’d found a way to be better, to do what was needed of him in time.
If love weren’t just two ordinary people, connected by gossamer-thin strands of silk, brushed away as easily as a spider’s web.
He wasn’t just devastated she was no longer there—the day-to-day tangible presence of her, of the girls—but by the reality that she could leave at all.
He’d let himself believe she was his; he, hers.
But perhaps that idea had always been too good to be true.
Some days he woke and felt as though his head were being pushed backward through the pillow at the shock of it and he’d silently question if a room was a room, if his hand was a hand, if he was lying there at all.
And without warning, while he was in that odd place of rebuilding their house around the uncertain remains of their marriage, his mother’s death hit him anew.
As though his whole childhood had been a long, dilute glass of her absence, but now he was faced with the neat concentrate of it.
The absolute nothingness of what he was left with.
Gardening had never been Julian’s thing.
Nor Orla’s. But one day as he ran a hand over a small fir, wondering where to begin, it unleashed a scent richly familiar, casting him back to the garden of the England house.
There, a thick trunk obscured most of his view, but as he peeped out, he could see his mother coming toward him, bending as she got nearer, reaching out with long, graceful arms. Her lips were moving, but it was her expression that told him she was coaxing, reassuring.
Until, “It’s okay, you can come out now.
” And then the vision was gone. And he was alone again, in the walls of his own garden.
He’d only ever had the same handful of memories, replayed so often, they ceased to move him. But here, the image was fresh, alive in his mind. Her voice surprising and real. He’d forgotten it.
In the days that followed, he worked in the garden whenever he could.
Coming home in his lunch hour and hoping to find his mother there.
He tried not to chase memories, anxious it might scare them away.
Although sometimes impatience got the better of him and he would breathe in the scent of the fir as though inhaling Olbas Oil, only to draw a blank.
Teasing a spade beneath tangled roots, emptying out terracotta pots, he tried to pretend his focus wasn’t on the space behind him, wasn’t crying out, I’m here, I’m here. Please, just come to me.
One evening, after visiting Orla and the girls, Julian unearthed a headtorch from a box of old camping paraphernalia in the shed. The beam mostly lost in shadow, he was hacking blindly at a large buddleia when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
For one irrational moment, he thought it might be his mother. But when he turned it was Maia. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I knew you must be home with so many lamps on.”
“Oh, yeah, I was trying to throw a bit of light out here,” he said, letting the blunt shears drop onto the pile of cut branches. It was a new thing, Maia letting herself in. Something she’d only done since Orla had left. But he liked it; the feeling it could be more than just him there.
They sat on the back step, mugs of tea between them.
Maia in her winter coat, even though it was mild for mid-April.
And he told her about hearing their mum’s voice.
“Oh, yes, the fir trees,” Maia said. “They were at the back of the garden. She sent us there so we’d be out of the way if she knew he was going to lose it. Do you remember the Tupperware bowls?”
“Tupperware bowls?”
“Yours was blue; mine was yellow. She always had them made up with snacks, ready to go. Raisins and dried apple rings. Stuff that would keep. Picnic Time,” Maia said, her voice heavy.
“That was Picnic Time? I remember it.” Another memory. “I hadn’t known that was why, though.” He wanted these fragments of his mum back, but they were steeped in so much sadness. Even the bits she’d tried to make nice for them. “She really loved us, didn’t she?”
Maia looked up at the sky, dark and inky but empty of stars. “Sky father,” she said.
“What?”
“Your name.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. He wasn’t sure how he knew its meaning, perhaps from his grandmother or a book.
“Imagine if you’d been called Gordon. Like he wanted.”
Julian looked up, stopped winding his teabag string around the cup handle. He hadn’t known this.
“That was the plan. But on the day she went to register you, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Afterward, she told him sky father was a tribute to him.
I even made these little moon and star decorations to go around his plate at dinner.
But it wasn’t a tribute. It was her way of saying you’d never be like him. That you’d rise above him.”
Julian didn’t say anything, just let out a long, slow breath. A breath it felt he’d kept held in for a lifetime. Maia reached for Julian’s hand in the darkness and neither let go. They just stared up, both tracking the blinking lights of a plane as it crossed the sky.
“Me too,” Maia said, when she saw him use his free hand to wipe his eyes.
“How come you never told me?” he asked.
“I’d forgotten. Well, not forgotten. I just hadn’t thought of it.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
She looked at him then, his face half lit by the room behind. “Oh, Jules. Loads of things. I was fourteen. I’ve just never known how much you’d want to know.”
Over the weeks that followed, Maia unpacked her memories of their childhood when she came over.
Without Orla, without Maia’s girlfriend, Meg, they fell into their old rhythm of being together.
As they stripped flaking paint from window frames or cooked dinner, he learned that their mother grew herbs on the kitchen windowsill; wore silver, not gold; made up stories about a gecko who lived on the bathroom ceiling to encourage him to keep his head tipped back at hair-washing time.
Do you see him? Can you hear him chirping?
Sometimes it was hard to know if Maia’s words jogged a real memory, or if he was just imagining himself into whatever scene she painted, but he felt sure he could remember warm water trickling down his back as his mother rinsed the suds from his hair with a plastic jug.
He also learned about him, the man whose name he didn’t bear.
At first, he worried the more he knew, the more he might feel tormented by the genetic link, perhaps risking embedding its code even more deeply in his DNA.
But each memory Maia revealed only seemed to highlight their differences.
They skirted around the edges of their mother’s death; Maia not offering anything, Julian not asking. Until he could wait no longer. “Can you tell me what happened? That night?”
He cried as she told him. For his mum. And for them. “Shall I stay?” Maia asked.
“I think I’ll be on my own a while,” he said. They hugged at the door. And then Julian had climbed the stairs of the small cottage and, not bothering to undress, pulled the bedcovers over him and slept for two days straight, waking only to gulp down a glass of water or to use the bathroom.