‘All of this smells wonderful. Freya darling, you’re just fantastic. What would I do without you?’ She plants a kiss on my temple. ‘What can I do to help?’
‘Sit down,’ I command. ‘you do enough.’
‘No really, I mean—’
‘No, just sit, or go out and potter around the garden for a little while with a cup of tea to wake you up.’
Mum loves the garden, although she hasn’t much time for it lately. But I know it’s a place of great refuge for her, where she can walk slowly through the quite often overgrown bits where weeds grow frantically, strangling all her beloved plants. But neither Maura nor I know anything about gardening, so we’re afraid to go out in case we pull up the wrong thing and besides, we keep hoping that Mum will get a chance to go out and do it.
‘Weeding is terribly therapeutic,’ she’d always said, although I couldn’t see it myself. But she sits down on the kitchen chair. We listen together to Eddie’s voice coming over the monitor from the living room as he reads his latest grisly ‘true facts’ book with great relish.
Bridget chatters as I cook but Mum says nothing, which is unusual because normally when we’re together we always have a million things to talk about. But she is tired today – that much is obvious.
Bridget goes off to sit with Eddie and my father, and Mum hovers until she’s safely installed in the other room.
‘Call if you need me,’ Mum says.
She never stops. She does not have one of those fitness watches but if she did, I imagine herstep-count per day would rival a marathon runner’s.
‘Will I make you a snack, Mum?’ I ask when she comes back and I turn away from the stove top so I can really look at her. This time there’s no mistaking it, the glitter of tears in those beautiful eyes and one solitary tear sliding down her cheek.
‘I never thought it was going to be like this,’ she says. ‘I knew exactly what it would be – that’s not what I mean, but the grief, Freya ... the grief is so hideous. It’s as if I’m grieving and he’s not gone because he’s there in front of me but I am anticipating grief. Waiting for it. And living it at the same time. I’m so busy taking care of him and Mum and Eddie and yet, I look at your father and there’s nothing there. He’s still there physically but he’s not there and I think of what it’s going to be like when he’s gone.’ Her voice breaks.
I pull my mother into my arms and let her sob. Then, with one yell into the other room to say we are going into the garden, we head for the back door: the garden is the only place I think we can go and not be interrupted.
Outside, it’s gloriously sunny and under normal circumstances, Mum would be out here in it if she had a spare moment. But there are no spare moments in her life now.
I get her to an old bench seat that’s been there my whole life, from where we can see the now defunct vegetable garden – an old project of Dad’s – and the stalks of plants that should no doubt have been pulled up, cut back, whatever.
I’m ready to deliver my speech, the one that’s formed in my head in just a few moments, but she beats me to it.
‘Freya, darling,’ she says, sitting upright, wiping her eyes with one hand. ‘Forgive me. I’m tired. You know how hopeless I am with naps. Some people can do it and wake up refreshed. I wake up feeling as if I’ve been bashed by a couple of heavy books.’
Her smile is bright, she’s breathing deeply, determinedly.
‘But Mum—’ I begin.
‘No.’ She takes my hands. ‘I’m fine. Honestly. I feel so guilty at all the cooking you’ve done.’
‘But—’
‘But nothing, darling. Go. It’s time you got home to work. That book won’t write itself!’
This is all delivered with a beaming smile.
My mother has pulled up the drawbridge.
On the way home, I think about my social media feeds and the muchworked-upon ‘happiness’ I am displaying with every photo of me making muffins, bashing the stems of lemongrass, having coffee in Giorgio and Patrick’s. None of us feel we can be honest anymore. My mother is hiding her pain and so am I, from behind the screen of myso-happy life on Instagram.
What if I posted something totally different?
‘Devastating day – my father’s so ill and it’s destroying my mother.’
I could illustrate it with a picture of hands: four pairs of hands holding on to each other – my father’s limp ones, Eddie’s and Bridget’s elderly ones, my mother’s thin and veiny ones from overwork. That would be real.
Not ‘aspirational’ as bloody Nina would call it. But does Nina know everything, I think?
Does she know anything at all?asks Mildred.
