31. Carly
Chapter 31
Carly
I go in through Mum’s back door, like I always do on a Saturday, but there’s no one sitting in the kitchen. I’m into the hall before I hear muffled voices coming from behind the half-open dining-room door. I guess that Anthony is here again. It will be the first time I’ve seen him since Mum told me about Pauline, and I’m not quite sure how to play it. Saying something straight away, offering sympathy, could feel very awkward and out of place, but not saying anything looks like I don’t care. As it turns out, the choice is taken out of my hands.
‘Carly,’ Mum says, standing up as I enter the room. Anthony is sitting with his back to the door, leaning forwards, elbows on the old wooden dining table, his head in his hands. ‘There’s been a bit of bad news.’
‘Oh. Do you want me to leave?’
‘No, no, come in, love, please. Anthony’s going in a minute anyway. Pauline’s taken a turn for the worse. She’s in the hospital, and he has to get back there.’
He turns to face me now. ‘Hello, Carly. Sorry to spoil your Saturday. The last thing you want to see is me sitting here blubbing.’
‘No, really, don’t be silly. I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?’ Stupid question, I know, but it’s what we’re conditioned to say, isn’t it?
‘Thank you. Nothing any of us can do, I’m afraid. Even me. Except just be there for her. I had to pop home for a few bits. Change of clothes, for me as well as her. A few toiletries, her favourite perfume. If this is it… well, I’d like her to be looking her best. It’s how she’d like to go. Clean nightie, her hair nicely brushed…’ He lowers his face again, eyes closed, then takes a deep breath and stands up. Mum reaches out a hand to steady him.
‘I could come with you. For moral support?’ she says.
‘Thank you, Joyce, but no. We went into this thing together, Pauline and I, the two of us against the world, and we’ll end it the same way. But I really do need to get back to her now. I just felt I should tell you what’s happening, in case I disappear for a while. You’ve been my rock these last few weeks, and I want you to know how much I appreciate that.’
Mum throws her arms around him and gives him a squeeze. ‘My pleasure, love. And do let me know, won’t you? If anything happens, if you need anything, anytime, day or night. I can’t bear to think of you all on your own. At least when I lost my George, I had Carly and Sam to help me. But I do know what it’s like, so call me, please. I mean it.’
She lets him go and he nods. I move aside to let them through into the hall, listen to the opening and closing of the front door, and wait until Mum comes back in. She looks very tired and pale.
‘Memories of Dad?’ I ask her, thinking back to his last night when we all waited for the inevitable.
‘They never leave me, but yes, especially now. It’s never easy, is it? Saying goodbye?’ She slumps into a chair and I go and put the kettle on. A cup of strong tea has always been her go-to comfort blanket.
‘Sam at football?’ I place the tea in front of her and tip some Rich Teas – the only biscuits I could find – onto a plate.
‘Where else?’
‘I’ll stay a while today then. Until he’s back. Never mind Anthony, I don’t like to think of you being on your own either.’
‘I’ll be okay, Carly. I’m made of stern stuff, you know. And it’s not as if I ever met the girl.’
‘Sad though. What’s happened to her? If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘Pneumonia, again. There’s only so much a body can take. It’s awful to say it, but I do wonder if it will end up being a happy release, for both of them. An end to all the years of pain and stress, and her slowly deteriorating like that. Her going… well, it will give him a chance of getting some sort of real life back, while he’s young enough to enjoy it.’
‘And there’s really nothing going on between you two? No hint of a future romance brewing away?’
She leans across the table and gives me a pat on the wrist. ‘No. I’ve already told you that. It was a friendship that served us both well, but to be honest I don’t think he’s going to need me long-term. Once he’s back at work, able to mix with people his own age, no longer in need of a shoulder to cry on…’
‘I’m sure you mean more to him than that.’
‘Maybe, but once she’s gone, which sounds imminent I’m sorry to say, he’s going to have a lot to deal with for a while, and after that I hope he can rebuild his life and move on. He won’t want an old biddy like me clinging to his shirt-tails then, will he?’
‘I guess we all have to let go sometimes and move on, don’t we?’
She gazes at my face. ‘Something you’re not telling me, Carly?’
‘Nothing specific. Just coming to the conclusion that you may have been right all along.’
She laughs, almost spitting a mouthful of tea all over her lap. ‘Did I just hear you say I was right? That has to be a first!’
‘Well, with all the pearls of wisdom you’ve dished out over the last thirty-odd years, you had to strike lucky eventually.’
‘And which particular pearl has struck home?’
‘The settling down one. The one that says I don’t want to end up on my own like poor old Miss Haversham, wallowing in a wedding that never was, and it’s time I found myself a nice bloke who isn’t a total dick.’
‘I’m not sure I ever used those exact words, but yes, I do recall once or twice saying something along those general lines.’
‘Once or twice?’ It’s my turn to splutter. ‘You’ve been drumming it into me ever since puberty!’
‘Glad to know it’s finally sunk in then. But I have to wonder, why now? I thought the string of no-hopers was never going to end.’
‘One no-hoper too many, that’s why. The last in a very long line fell at the final hurdle and he’s not going to get back up again.’
‘You’re talking in riddles. You do know that, don’t you?’
‘Sorry, Mum. Just that this one was different from all the others, and I really thought I could love him and live happily ever after, but I can’t, and I won’t. So that’s that. End of.’
‘Ah, I see.’
‘Do you?’
‘Married man, by any chance?’
‘How did you know?’
‘All those pearls of wisdom have to come from somewhere, you know. Call it experience. Or a mother’s intuition.’
‘Anyway, I didn’t… you know. I didn’t allow it to go too far. Only in my stupid head. So now, I’m going to do what you told me to do all along. Find a nice, steady, faithful, and most of all available man and try to find what you and Dad had.’
‘You don’t just find that, Carly. It’s not an instant thing, no matter what you might hear about all that love at first sight nonsense. You have to build it, work on it, make it what you want it to be. Yes, it helps to have the right man to do it with, but love really doesn’t grow on trees. Once you have it, though, there’s nothing else quite like it. I’d rather have comfortable and trusting over all the angst and fireworks exploding passion any day.’
I remember something Jack said a while back, about his life with Molly being comfortable and easy until I came along. He made it sound dull, lacking in some way, but suddenly it sounds very much like love, even if neither he nor I had realised it.
‘A man you can share all your hopes and dreams with,’ Mum goes on, oblivious to my brief lapse in concentration. ‘To live with side by side every day, faults and problems and all. That’s real love, Carly. What your father and I had. What Anthony has with his Pauline. And then, one day, all too soon, it’s gone, snatched away, and your life is never the same again.’
‘Poor Anthony.’ I reach for her hand and feel it shaking. ‘And poor you.’
I stay for the afternoon, watching some TV and reading Emma for what must be at least the fourth or fifth time, while Mum potters about with a duster and plumps cushions that absolutely don’t need to be plumped. I guess she’s just keeping busy, finding things to do to keep her mind off whatever’s going on at the hospital. We realise neither of us has eaten since breakfast and make up a quick late lunch, just sandwiches and a piece of cake, and I finally persuade her to sit down and watch a film with me until Sam comes back. I don’t like the idea of leaving her on her own and, to be honest, I don’t have anywhere else to be.
‘What shall we plump for?’ she says, rummaging through her shelf of old charity shop DVDs, and I laugh to myself at her use of the ‘plump’ word as visions of her perfectly placed chubby cushions jump into my head. ‘ Pretty Woman? ’
It’s the film she always picks, mainly because she has a not-so-secret crush on Richard Gere. And I’m a sucker for a romance, especially an unconventional one. Obviously.
‘Good choice. Got any popcorn?’
‘Not the sort of snack I tend to have stashed away in the cupboard, but I can probably run to a cheapo supermarket choc ice in the interval.’
We laugh, and the spectre of a dying Pauline temporarily leaves the room.