‘Can I?’ he asks her.
Jo’s mum laughs as if Wilbur has told a good joke. But Jo knows that her uncle is completely serious.
After Jo hangs up, she sits for some moments thinking about Wilbur and her mum. Her uncle’s quick descent into confusion makes her feel like crying. It is thethreat of tears that reminds her: she wouldn’t be here in London now if her mother hadn’t cried. Again, tears had a lot to answer for.
It was nearly four months after she had broken up with James. She had opted for voluntary redundancy and he had moved out of the cottage they were renting. James divided the money they had been saving up as a deposit for a house. She got a little less than half. He explained this was due to the extra contribution he had made at the beginning. It was only later she remembered she had matched this when her bonus came in. She had tried to raise this, but James talked of timings and interest rates, which ended up sounding reasonable. And James was always reasonable.
Throughout all this, Jo visited her mum weekly, finding respite in her large, undemanding presence. Her mother was an uncomplicated woman; she loved her daughter and wanted her to be happy. She didn’t have much idea of what Jo did for a living, nor did she enquire into the intimate details of her relationships. Jo was grateful, and in her mother’s simple platitudes she found comfort and relief.
Her parents still lived in the farmhouse near Northallerton, which had been in her father’s family for generations. Each year, more and more of the management of the farm was being passed on to her eldest brother, Chris, who lived with his family in one of the larger farm cottages. She imagined that one day Chris and her parents would swap houses. She liked Chris, in a vague kind of way, but she wasn’t sure how she would feel about this.
Her younger brother Ben ran the local livestock market, but still maintained an active interest in the farm, much to his elder brother’s annoyance. Chris and Ben could not have been more different: Chris, as solid as a hay bale, was round and squat; Ben was lean and tall, like an elongated scarecrow. Jo’s mum often shook her head over the boys (who did not have the easiest of relationships). They in turn barely noticed Jo, so focused were they on their brotherly rivalry. If they did spot that she was around, they both teased her, calling her ‘Average Jo’: neither tall like Ben, nor solid like Chris and, in their opinions, never really amounting to much. Her mother would then pull her daughter to her in a huge hug, laughing, ‘Thank goodness for my Average Jo.’
And she was average: neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin; her hair somewhere between blonde and brown. She did pretty well at school, never winning any prizes but never the bottom of the class. At university she achieved a 2:2 degree in Human Geography. She had never been in trouble with the police or contemplated doing anything that was extraordinarily adventurous. She left university, travelled for a brief while to safe places around the world, then found a position in a bank where she worked with databases. She had expected to marry her long-term boyfriend and have an average number of children.
Now, she realized that she envied those women who had more of a plan, who had taken control of their lives – or, she had to admit it, Lucy, who had no plan, but who ambled through life dressed in the clothes of the past, living entirely in the moment.
Jo was considering this– and wondering whether to ring Lucy about something she had just seen on Instagram – when she arrived at her parents’ house for her weekly visit and found her mother sitting on the floor between the wall and the kitchen table, crying. The family dog was on the floor beside her, his nose wedged into the crook of her arm.
She dropped to her knees and hauled her mother to her feet, steering her to a chair by the Aga. She instinctively reached for the kettle, with an anxious, ‘Mum, what’s wrong?’
Jo had only ever seen her mum cry twice before in her life. Once at her grandmother’s funeral, and once when she had fallen while helping to move a sheep pen and had broken her ankle. On that occasion her dad (as short as Chris and as thin as Ben) had run full pelt across the field, before lifting his wife into his arms (and her mother was not a small woman – it is where her sons had got their height and bulk from). He had carried her to the farmhouse as if she were a mere featherweight. Jo still thinks it is one of the most romantic things she has ever seen.
But when her mother was quietly crying in the kitchen chair, this image was very far from her mind. She was thinking of cancer (her mum or her dad?) and of whether Uncle Wilbur had died.
It turned out that her Uncle Wilbur was the source of the tears.
He couldn’t manage that shop.
He’d had a nasty fall.
He needed proper care until he could get back on his feet.
And now, look at her, tripping over the dog.
Bloody dog.
No, she didn’t mean that, Winston.
She was that worried.
Wilbur wouldn’t come and stay with them (was there ever a more stubborn fool), but she thought they could get him into a good care home nearby. He might be persuaded to come North for a bit, but what to do with the shop and the flat? He was fussing about leaving them empty.
Would there be any chance …
Jo immediately said, ‘Yes.’
There was no other answer to the woman who loved her so well and asked so little.
Afterwards, Jo thinks she would always have said ‘yes’ to her mum, but maybe the fact she had just seen James and Nickeeey on Instagram made the decision easier. At least in London there was no chance of bumping into this new, brightly smiling couple.
8
Dear Giana
The Viking is back. This time he is not drawing rectangles in the air; instead he is snapping his fingers and thumbs together like two hungry mouths.
‘You know, big thing, like … holds things together. Clippy thing …’
