‘She is a woman, and young! You will get on with her and help her!’ I know how wonderful you are at helping people, and she will need help because the job will have such long hours. I think it would be too much for you or me! Bettina had beamed as she spoke, her youthful face full of pleasure at how things in her world were working out, and how she obviously felt that Lou was too old for such a strenuous new position. Lou had been momentarily lost for words. They’d already hired someone, it seemed, before telling her she hadn’t got the job, and thought that Lou would assist the new – young – company strategist who would move Blossom into a whole new dimension. Lou would even help her understand how the company worked. Fantastic!
Lou buried this mortifying information safely inside her and did her best to ignore it. But she couldn’t.
‘Universe, I do hope you know what you’re doing,’ Lou said out loud as she drove, negotiating the winding Pine Hill in the evening light. ‘Mim, could you keep an eye on Universe in case She’s busy and has forgotten about me?’
Lou never told anyone that she still talked to Mim, but the one-sided conversations gave her comfort. Mim had been such a unique person that Lou knew she’d never be able to think up what Mim would say in any given situation, but she could intuit it. Mim was still with her, she knew that.
Lou pulled in at the peeling white gates to her mother’s house and parked behind Lillian’s car, an elderly SUV that was perfect for transporting oddly shaped wire and iron sculptures, but not so perfect for parking. The car, once blue, was now dotted with silver and white from the myriad dents and scrapes where the paint had been bashed away. Lillian was blasé about her parking accidents.
What was the point of leaving notes on people’s cars telling them she bumped into them.
‘People don’t care,’ she’d say cheerfully. ‘What’s a little scratch when the world is falling around us. We need perspective. Look at...’ and she’d draw everyone’s attention to whatever the important world events were and make everyone see that a car – a mere car – hardly mattered.
Emily, child of two careful drivers, had always been fascinated by her grandmother’s blithe disinterest in the state of her own car or anyone else’s.
‘Lillian’s funny,’ the little Emily had said.
Unlike Ned’s mother, Ruth, who was Nana, Lillian was never calledGranny.
‘I’m a feminist! I can’t be defined by my relationship to other people!’ Lillian would say. ‘Perish the thought of a child calling me Granny. I’d rather die!’
Lillian had made her daughters call her by her given name once they’d been teenagers.
Mummy had sounded soold, she’d said once.
‘Women are defined by words. Grandmother would define me as old in a way grandfather does not. No, I choose to define myself,’ she’d said regally, and had later repeated it in an interview with a local newspaper when she opened an art exhibition for one of her friends.
Lillian Cooper made excellent newspaper copy because she always had an opinion on everything.
‘When I’m a grown-up, I won’t have a car,’ Emily said when she was little, ‘but if I did, I’d have one you can bump into things with, like Lillian’s.’
Lou got out of her own never-dented old Nissan and carefully avoided the nettles that grew happily beside the dog roses to one side of the driveway.
Valclusa was on a corner, a two-storey farmhouse that had expanded over the fifty years that Lillian had lived in it. Early photos had shown a neat house with sparkling windows and a tamed garden. In one of her favourite pictures, Dad was holding the toddling Lou’s hands as she made her way around the garden. He’d been a tall man with a kind face, fair wavy hair and the sparkling sea green eyes that Toni but not Lou had inherited. He was always smiling in the photos with his first-born, pride and sheer happiness all over his narrow, thoughtful face.
Then came photos with little Toni: being carried around, then toddling, while Lou looked on proudly. She’d adored being an older sister.
Initially, she’d wanted a rabbit instead of a baby but Toni, a fair-haired little sprite with those curious cat eyes and tiny little fingers that clamped onto Lou’s hands trustingly, had been the best gift ever.
Lou still loved those photos and had an entire family wall on her upstairs landing covering her and Toni’s childhood and long after, right up to Emily’s twentieth birthday party last year, with Christmases, holidays and school plays amid it all.
Family was where the heart was.
People who said differently just didn’t understand.
That thought often held Lou together. She was so lucky. She had a wonderful family, people who needed her. The job was just a job, after all.
Thanks, Mim,she said mentally.That’s just what I needed to think. It was just a job. I have so much more in my life than a mere job.
Being at her old home solidified this notion in her head.
Of course, Valclusa looked different these days than it had in her childhood.
For a start, since Dad had died, the tidying regime had gone out the window. Lou’s mother was excellent at making a mess but had no interest in cleaning up. That was her artistic side, Lou thought fondly.
The garden was no longer tamed unless Lou had a go at it. Lillian had built a slightly ramshackle studio onto the side of the house. A wooden structure with two huge windows, it had been bitterly cold the previous winter and talking to a builder about insulation was on Lou’s never-ending to-do list. Her mother would never get round to it and Lou felt it was her duty to do so. Lillian also had a plan to build a giant rockery, though Lou wasn’t sure at what stage of planning this was. It was amazing having this wonderfully creative person as a mother, but creative people had marvellously inventive ideas about their surroundings and naturally expected other people to bring them to fruition.
‘Lillian!’ she called as she reached the black kitchen door, where several dying plants, still in their garden centre pots, were sitting haphazardly beside an old Belfast sink that Lillian had rescued from a skip.
