Chapter Eleven
Eleven.
Christmas. No snow, of course, but the cold weather has persisted and we wake to frost and dazzling sun, the air scalpel-sharp.
The kids open their stockings on our bed in a luminous fissure of sunlight, lengthy shadows falling from their Christmas present piles.
They look like something from a painting and my heart bursts for them, my chocolate-covered little people, shouting with excitement, pelting Robin and me with balled-up wrapping paper.
After opening their stockings, they run outside to smash the ice on the pond and Maeve, in spite of all our warnings, manages to fall in.
She screams loudly all the way back into the house and then spends twenty minutes in the shower, water flying around so wildly that a vast pool forms on the floor and drips down through the kitchen light fitting below.
We lose power in the kitchen for three hours while it dries out, which means I have to put the goose—our first ever goose—into the Aga.
Christmas dinner is unlikely to be ready before the following day as a result, but Robin tells me it’s all fine and he’s probably right.
We’re on our own for Christmas this year.
Dad isn’t up to a day with my children. I’m not sure he’s up to even an hour with them at the moment; he was very distressed when I popped around to see him yesterday.
Maya flew in two days ago and she’s spending the day with him and Nicola.
Mum is in Brighton with her friend Gail, who is one of the only people I know who seems to have a limitless threshold for my mother, and Robin, an only child, lost his parents when he was young.
So it’s just the four of us, which would be lovely if it weren’t for the fact that I have been with Dad every single Christmas since I was born.
I had to lock myself in the bathroom to cry when the kids were having breakfast.
I’m in our dark little kitchen with a head torch, peeling potatoes, while Robin does some game with the kids involving yells of “ATTACK!” In spite of my grief and worry about Dad, it’s been lovely so far.
Raffy and Maeve are high as kites on sugar and I’m high as a kite, still, on Robin’s Christmas present.
With Dell’s help, and at great expense, he got me into, and paid for, a basic surgical skills course at the Royal College, which took place last week. I loved it. I hadn’t forgotten a thing.
“ATTACK!” Robin yells, diving from the sofa into a pile of beanbags and cushions. Maeve and Raffy scream with laughter, running out from their hiding place to whack him with still-wrapped presents from under the tree.
I start peeling carrots and parsnips. Morotter and palsternacka.
I’ve been using a language app in preparation for this possible placement in Stockholm and it’s all coming back nicely.
The medical terminology has been quite straightforward, too, but it all comes with the unwanted side effect of bringing Johan to mind.
Is he at his in-laws’ today? Or his parents, Kerstin and Fredrik’s, in that lovely spacious apartment full of soft lamps and books that I never managed to visit? What presents did he buy his little boy? What’s his name? And who is his mother?
And then the inevitable: What happened?
Stop it, I tell myself, but within seconds I’m back on my phone, scouring those old newspaper reports for details I’d missed before.
But even allowing for my patchy Swedish, I can’t find anything new.
It remains a mystery that I have no hope of solving.
Unless I contact him, which is out of the question.
Can’t stop looking him up, I message my sister. Then I send the same to Dell. I’m wreathed in shame. It is Christmas Day and my children and husband are playing five meters from where I’m standing. What is wrong with me?
Just meet up with him in Stockholm, Dell replies. Find out what the craic is, get it all out of your system and then you can move on. Robin would be thinking ALL the same things if this was happening to him.
“Just meet up with him” is exactly the kind of simplistic advice I can expect from Dell, who has never really committed to anyone. Yet, in many ways, she’s right. Who wouldn’t want answers in my situation? Who would be handling this calmly?
—
We FaceTime with Mum in the afternoon, after a sandwich lunch. The goose looks to be on course for about 2 a.m.
Mum is a better grandmother than she ever was a parent, but she’s still a far cry from the grannies around here.
They’re like second parents to my friends’ kids: they pick them up from school, come to piano concerts, host sleepovers—they’re heavily involved.
My own mother, on the other hand, is like a rare bird to the children; she appears only occasionally and always brings outstanding presents.
Then months pass and they don’t hear a peep.
Robin finds it hard, at times, to keep a lid on his displeasure at her failure to show up for me or my children.
He tells me I forgive her far too easily and he’s right.
But what he doesn’t understand, in his protective outbursts, is that if I took her to task it could cause a fatal rupture that I am not willing for my children to suffer.
Besides, they don’t care. She brings a lot of chocolate when she does come and they think she’s amazing.
Mum teaches the kids a rude Malaysian song, which delights them. Then she asks to speak to me privately.
“How’s your father doing?” she asks.
“Not good. It’s definitely time for him to move, but…oh, it’s just so…” My voice trails off.
“I’m so sorry, Carrie,” she says politely, as if talking about a friend of mine she’s never met, rather than her ex-husband and the father I’ve spent every Christmas of my entire life with.
“It must be devastating. Now, look. I won’t beat around the bush.
I’m calling to say I don’t think it’s sensible for you to go to Stockholm. ”
“Oh.” I take a breath and try to pivot.
“It would bring up a lot of difficult feelings. Intolerable feelings, I’d expect. And what if you walked into Johan? Or his parents?”
I remain silent. Mum only gets involved with my affairs when she believes I’m making a grave mistake.
“I’m glad you’re ready to travel again, but do you not think there’d be a better city to visit?”
“Johan’s always going to be on the edge of my thoughts,” I say, after a pause. “Of course it’ll trigger me, being there. But, Mum, I’m going to be triggered by memories for the rest of my life. I don’t think avoiding Scandinavia is going to stop that.”
“I was talking specifically about Stockholm. Not the gigantic landmass that is Scandinavia.” Mum has never been one to resist an opportunity for pedantry.
I sigh. “You’re probably right. But there’s a surgeon there I really want to talk to. And the Roof conference felt like the perfect vehicle. It all just feels right.”
She pushes her point a while longer, because she still thinks she knows better than I do about what’s good for me, but eventually says she has to go; she and Gail are going for a bracing sea swim.
Cold-water swimming is one of many things Mum uses competitively in conversation with me.
She makes a point of swimming in the sea or the river Dart whenever she comes down, and the kids hero-worship her for it.
Robin doesn’t ask what Mum said, but he sees my face when I come downstairs and he gives me a hug. “You have always deserved better,” is all he says—which makes me feel mildly guilty because for once, Mum’s actually trying to protect me.
Later, while we’re trying to explain the King’s Christmas Broadcast to the children, Maya arrives with gifts for them and a strange look in her eye.
“Auntie Maya!” the kids yell, hurling themselves at her. Maya, who flew over to support me when they were born, has made a point of video calling them every week of their lives.
“Did you bring presents?” Maeve asks, before Maya’s even had time to wish them a merry Christmas.
“Yes, you horrible child,” Maya laughs, and Maeve jumps up and down, delighted with both the news and the insult.
“I’d really like a quiet Christmas walk with my sister,” she tells Robin, twenty minutes later. The kids are building the giant marble run she’s bought them. “Just a quick one. Is that OK?”
“Is Dad OK?” I ask, quickly.
“Yes. Well, ish. But no dramas. I just wanted to…well, have a quiet walk with my sister.”
“But I’d really like a quiet Christmas walk with your sister!
” Robin says. The marble run is already out of control and in need of extra support; he’s busy running back and forth with astronomy books and lens cases to support the teetering runs.
Thank God for my husband, who always makes their harebrained projects work.
“Dad!” Maeve yells. “QUICK!”
“OK, bye!” Maya says. She takes me by the elbow and walks me out of the door. “I’ll have her back within the hour!”
—
We climb through woods to Easdon Tor and stand on the rocks. The moor stretches out, white and crackling, while the sky is pink as a cocktail. The sun will set soon; by the time I return, Robin will have turned on the fairy lights outside and lit the fire.
I love my life here. Whatever Maya’s about to say about risking what I have is probably right.
“I got your message,” she says. “And a call from Mum, saying you’re still planning on going to Sweden.”
I don’t reply.
“Is there a part of you that still loves him?” she asks. “That’s what I want to know.”
“No! Absolutely not!”
She says nothing, just watches me.
“Is this the kind of ambush you set for your clients?” I ask. “Because you must be a very unpopular therapist if so.”
She smiles. “I have a long waiting list, as it happens. My clients pay me to ask good questions.”
“Well, here’s the thing: you’re not my therapist. And that wasn’t a good question.”
She thinks about this, poking the toe of her boot into a gap between giant granite rocks. “Fair enough. If you don’t want to talk to me about it, that’s fine.”
“Except it’s not fine. Because you’ve kidnapped me and dragged me up to a remote spot on the moor with the specific intention of interrogating me.”
Maya laughs, but says nothing.
“I hope you don’t take your clients hostage.”
“I do have to dial myself back in at times,” she admits. “For better or worse, I am still my mother’s daughter.”
I smile briefly, then look back out at the view. To me, this is the single most beautiful place on earth. A great raw wound of defiant land, thrusting up above the gentle rolling hills of Devon in ancient, weaponed peaks, unafraid of anything the gods can hurl at it.
“You know how hard I worked to put it all behind me,” I say, after a while. “I even went into therapy, at your insistence.”
“You saw her for three months! That’s barely getting started!”
“Maya. Will you please fuck off?”
“Sorry,” she says. “I just…I just love you very much, Carrie.”
“Hmm.”
“It just really worries me that you’re going ahead with this trip.” She pauses. “I know how hard you worked at moving on. But do you really think you did? Properly?”
I’ve wondered this myself at times. I was entirely ready to move on by the time I met Robin. But had Johan disappeared completely from my system? Every trace? I’m not sure. All I know is that the twins’ birth blew everything else out of the water.
Out of the corner of my eye I can see her studying me. Maya’s cut her hair short and it looks sensational, although—and I would never dare say this—it does make her look a bit like Mum. She’s wearing a beautiful woolen scarf so large it may well be a blanket, but she pulls it off.
More than twelve years have passed since my little sister went off to start her new life but she’s still glowing, while I’ve become the sort of pasty mum who says things like, Oooh, I’d pay for skin like hers.
(I would.) In spite of her radiant appearance, though, I sense something’s up with her.
She hasn’t told me what it is yet; I suspect she’s building up to it.
“Robin was not a rebound,” I say gently. “I met him years later. And I didn’t settle for him—he was my first choice. He still is.”
But I’ve played it all out in my head, of course, and she knows it. Johan and I somehow bump into each other in January, in a city of two and a half million people. I just walk around the corner and he’s there. There. A free man, walking down a street. How would I feel?
The truth is: I have no idea. I haven’t cared about him in a very long time, but she’s right: the body remembers, even if the mind’s moved on.
Last week I had a sex dream about him. I think I might even have orgasmed in my sleep.
I was devastated when I woke, but no matter how great my shame, my regret, I still cannot be sure what would happen in my body if I saw him.
“There are no grounds whatsoever for concern,” is what I tell her now. “If there were, I wouldn’t be going.”
A wall of wind punches us suddenly, flinging my hair sideways and slapping my cheeks. Maya sinks her face into her scarf. “OK,” she says. “If you’re sure.”
“Are you OK?” I ask her, as we turn to pick our way back through the bracken. Stiff graphite-colored clouds are packing in across the pink sunset and the temperature is dropping rapidly.
“Me? Yes. I mean…the situation with Dad is eating me alive. But when I can see past that, I’m essentially fine. Why?”
“I don’t know. Sixth sense.”
“I’m fine,” she repeats.
“You can talk to me,” I remind her. “I’m your sister and I care. I can even speak a bit of therapy language these days.”
She laughs but doesn’t say anything, and I decide to leave it for now. This woman is more in touch with her feelings than anyone I’ve ever met.
It’s only twenty minutes later, when we climb back into her borrowed car, that she says, “I won’t bring this up again, Carrie. But you’d better be sure about your motives for this trip. Fool me, by all means, but do not fool yourself. It never works out. I for one should know.”