The man sitting behind stood up then, his considerable backside nudging our table so that everything upon it quivered. I smiled distractedly at his apology, focused instead on preventing our cups and our conversation from toppling. “Were you and Juniper friends, Mum?”
She picked up her coffee, seemed to spend a long time running her spoon around the inside of her cup to tidy the froth. “You know, it’s so long ago it’s difficult to remember the details.” A brittle, metallic noise as the spoon hit the saucer. “As I said, I was only there a little over a year. My father came and fetched me home in early 1941.”
“And you never went back?”
“That was the last I saw of Milderhurst.”
She was lying. I felt hot, light-headed. “You’re sure?”
A little laugh. “Edie—what a queer thing to say. Of course I’m sure. It’s the sort of thing one would remember, don’t you think?”
I would. I did. I swallowed. “That’s just it. A funny thing happened, you see. On the weekend, when I first saw the entrance to Milderhurst—the gates at the bottom of the drive—I had the most extraordinary sense that I’d been there before.” When she said nothing, I pressed: “That I’d been there with you.”
Her silence was excruciating and I was aware suddenly of the murmur of café noise around us, the jarring thwack of the coffee basket being emptied, the grinder whirring, shrill laughter somewhere on the mezzanine. I seemed to be hearing it all at one remove, though, as if Mum and I were quite separate, encased within our own bubble.
I tried to keep the tremor from my voice. “When I was a kid. We drove there, you and I, and we stood at the gates. It was hot and there was a lake and I wanted to swim, but we didn’t go inside. You said it was too late.”
Mum patted her napkin to her lips, slowly, delicately, then looked at me. Just for a moment I thought I glimpsed the light of confession in her eyes, then she blinked and it was gone. “You’re imagining things.”
I shook my head slowly.
“All those gates look alike,” she continued. “You’ve seen a picture somewhere, sometime—a film—and become confused.”
“But Iremember—”
“I’m sure it seems that way. Just like when you accused Mr. Watson from next door of being a Russian spy, or the time you became convinced you were adopted—we had to show you your birth certificate, do you remember?” Her voice had taken on a note I recalled only too well from my childhood. The infuriating certainty of someone sensible, respectable, powerful; someone who wouldn’t listen no matter how loudly I spoke. “Your father had me take you to the doctor about the night terrors.”
“This is different.”
She smiled briskly. “You’re fanciful, Edie. You always have been. I don’t know where you get it from—not from me.Certainlynot from your father.” She reached down to reclaim her handbag from the floor. “Speaking of whom, I ought to be getting home.”
“But, Mum—” I could feel the chasm opening between us. A gust of desperation spurred me on. “You haven’t even finished your coffee.”
She glanced at her cup, the cooling gray dribble at the bottom. “I’ve had enough.”
“I’ll get you another, my shout—”
“No,” she said. “What do I owe you for the first?”
“Nothing, Mum. Please stay.”
“No.” She laid a five-pound note by my saucer. “I’ve been out all morning and your father’s by himself. You know what he’s like: he’ll have the house dismantled if I don’t get back soon.”
A press of her cheek, clammy against mine, and she was gone.
A SUITABLESTRIPCLUB ANDPANDORA’SBOX
FORthe record it was Auntie Rita who made contact with me, not the other way round. It so happened that while I was floundering, trying without success to find out what had happened between Mum and Juniper Blythe, Auntie Rita was getting revved up to host a hen night for my cousin Samantha. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended or flattered when she phoned the office to ask me the name of an upmarket male strip club, so I went with bemused, and ultimately, because I can’t seem to help myself, useful. I told her I didn’t know off the top of my head but that I’d do some research, and we agreed to meet in secret at her salon the following Sunday so I could pass on my reconnaissance. It meant skipping Mum’s roast again, but it was the only time Rita was free; I told Mum I was helping with Sam’s wedding and she couldn’t really argue.
Classy Cuts squats behind a tiny shopfront on the Old Kent Road, breath held to fit between an indie record outlet and the best fish and chips shop in Southwark. Rita’s as old-school as the Motown records she collects and her salon does a roaring trade specializing in finger waves, beehives, and blue rinses for the bingo set. She’s been around long enough to be retro without realizing it and likes to tell anyone who’ll listen how she started out at the very same salon as a skinny sixteen-year-old when the war was still raging; how she’d watched through those very front windows on VE Day when Mr. Harvey from the milliner’s across the road stripped off his clothes and started dancing down the street, nothing to know him by but his finest hat.
Fifty years in the one spot. It’s no wonder she’s wildly popular in her part of Southwark, the busy chattering stalls set apart from the glistening dress circle of Docklands. Some of her oldest clients have known her since the closest she got to a pair of scissors was the broom cupboard out back, and now there’s no one else they’d trust to set their lavender perms. “People aren’t daft,” Auntie Rita says, “give ’em a bit of love and they’ll never stray.” She has an uncanny knack for picking winners from the local racing form, too, which can’t be bad for business.
I don’t know much about siblings, but I’m quite sure no two sisters have ever been less alike. Mum is reserved, Rita is not; Mum favors neat-as-a-pin court shoes, Rita serves breakfast in heels; Mum is a locked vault when it comes to family stories, Rita is the willing font of all knowledge. I know this firsthand. When I was nine and Mum went to the hospital to have her gallstones removed, Dad packed me a bag and sent me to Rita’s. I’m not sure whether my aunt somehow intuited that the sapling in the doorway was way out of touch with her roots, or whether I besieged her with questions, or whether she just saw it as a chance to aggravate Mum and strike a blow in an ancient war, but she took it upon herself that week to fill in many blanks.
She showed me yellowed photographs on the wall, told me funny stories of the way things had been when she was my age, and painted a vivid picture with colors and smells and long-ago voices that made me starkly aware of something I’d already opaquely known. The house where I lived, the family in which I was growing up, was a sanitary, lonely place. I remember lying on the small spare mattress at Rita’s house as my four cousins filled the room with their soft snores and fidgety sleep noises, wishing she were my mother instead, that I lived in a warm, cluttered house stretching at the seams with siblings and old stories. I remember, too, the instant rush of liquid guilt as the thought formed in my mind, screwing my eyes tight shut and picturing my disloyal wish as a piece of knotted silk, untying it in my mind, then conjuring a wind to blow it away as if it had never been.
But it had.
