The russet door opened slowly and Aunt Gloria looked every inch of her eight and a half decades as she appeared before them.
‘Come in, my girls,’ she said, her voice shaky and her face even more lined than usual with sleeplessness.
She held out her arms to Lou, who embraced her gently.
‘Oh Louise,’ Gloria soothed.
Lou was determined not to cry, even now with Gloria holding her, but she felt the comfort of her aunt’s embrace. It helped with the fear. Gloria loved her. That was unchanged.
‘Lou has some questions,’ said Toni, shutting the door. ‘Shall I put some coffee on?’
Her voice sounded over-bright against the wrought atmosphere in the hallway, and Gloria shot her a look over Lou’s shoulder. Gloria missed nothing.
‘Are you feeling all right, Antoinette?’ she asked.
Lou turned to look at Toni, too, wondering what Gloria had noticed that she hadn’t.
‘Fine,’ said Toni, smiling widely and leading the way through to the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’
‘I only have decaf, I’m afraid. I think real caffeine would kill me nowadays.’
When the decaffeinated coffee was made, the three of them sat in Gloria’s front room and the radio in the kitchen could be heard gently in the background playing the classical station that Gloria preferred. Sugar, Gloria’s little rescue dog, perched on a pink fluffy dog bed at her mistress’s feet with her tiny nose delicately between her paws.
Lucky to be a dog, Lou thought. Dogs didn’t have to worry about things, except for where their next meal was coming from. Dogs didn’t feel the way she did: shaky and unreal.
‘I feel ...’ Lou paused, as if trying to sum up how she felt. Broken, scared, hurt ... ‘I feel as if my world has fallen apart.’
‘It hasn’t,’ said Gloria at once, ‘not really, Louise. The essentials are the same: we all love you.’
‘They’re not the same, Gloria,’ said Lou shakily. ‘Nothing is the same. The essentials are totally different and I feel I’m on the edge of a cliff right now. With one step I could fall off it. Do you know how terrifying that is? I couldn’t sleep last night.’
She turned her gaze on both of them.
‘Not a wink. I kept going over it in my head – the way that everything in my childhood was a lie and nobody told me – not Lillian, not Dad, not even you, Gloria. And it’s not just that: everything’s falling apart.’
She stared into the distance bleakly. ‘Ned didn’t buy me anything and that shouldn’t matter, and it doesn’t. It’s a first world problem for sure but it’s what it says about him and me. It says I don’t matter. That’s what Lillian was saying last night at my party – I don’t matter so she can ruin my party because she’s in a bad mood. How could I have never seen that in her before? She was horrible.’
Nobody spoke.
‘I didn’t get the job in Blossom,’ Lou blurted out. ‘I’m basically the office manager but when I went for this new job they’ve come up with – strategy person working out where the company goes in future, well, Oszkar told me I couldn’t have it because I don’t have the right degree. I’m under qualified. I didn’t even argue with him,’ she added, and there was a hint of crazy in her voice. ‘I didn’t want to upset him. Imagine – he wasn’t giving me the job I was already doing, and I’m so stupid, I was worried abouthimbeing upset. I thought being kind meant kind things happened in return. I thought the universe would provide. And look where that’s got me.’
Finally, Lou’s stream-of-consciousness was over and she sat back against the couch, empty and bleak.
Gloria and Toni exchanged a look.
Toni was not sure what to say. She’d never believed in the inherent goodness of the universe, like Lou. She loved the notion of this magical thinking, but it never seemed to work for, say, people trapped in endless poverty. If they, desperately wishing for something, couldn’t manifest more money and a job, then desperate hoping was clearly not the simple key to getting things. Employment law – now that was a force she could believe in. Oszkar deserved being hit with a lawyer’s letter to put manners on him.
‘You could always sue ...’ Toni began, but Gloria shook her head.
‘Not the time for that,’ she murmured, and moved so that she was sitting beside Lou on the faded purple velvet couch. Gloria took Lou’s hands in her own thin, aged ones.
‘My dearest darling Louise,’ she said. ‘Not everyone recognises the talent of people under their noses. That Oszkar doesn’t see how much you do for the company is an example of this. It’s nothing to do with the universe, sadly. I do like to think that the universe provides some things, but we have to provide a lot of the rest. The trick is knowing which is which. I ...’ Gloria paused, considering her words.
‘I want to share something with you both. It may help. I was deeply in love once and then...’ She paused again. ‘My heart got broken the way women’s hearts do, and there was no other man for me because I’d loved this man so much. Neither was there any point in spending my whole life regretting him. I had to live, Lou. Not wait for another man, no. But have a happy, fulfilled life. I have done that,’ she said, smiling at the idea of her very full life. ‘My friends, my choir, my charity work in Whitehaven, you two, my dear nieces and darling Emily –youhave become my life. Better that than waiting for the universe to provide another man.’
Toni listened silently. She’d never questioned why Gloria wasn’t married. She’d simply assumed that her aunt was one of those older ladies who’d never bothered with the male of the species, happy with charity work and her garden, her rescue dogs and the choir where her delicate soprano was such a feature. What a foolish assumption that had been. Of course Gloria had once been young and vibrant. How insensitive of her not to think of that.
‘I’m so sorry, Gloria,’ Lou said, her instinctive kindness pulling her out of her fugue state. ‘You didn’t deserve to have your heart broken. I don’t understand why people do hurtful things. I hope he knows what he lost. All these secrets—’ She broke off miserably. ‘Did you know, Gloria? Did you know about my father not being my father? Is it true?’
