‘Yup.’ She stood and rinsed the cups under the tap and placed them on the sideboard, as she had done many times before.
‘It’s Tawrie’s birthday. And her mother’s and her gran’s,’ he informed her.
‘Well, that’s quite something!’ She tried to work out how old Annalee would be and how long it was since she’d seen her – at least twenty years.
‘That means it’s the Gunn Fire tonight.’ He looked thoughtful.
‘The Gunn Fire?’ She was curious. ‘What’s that?’
‘A party where no one needs an invite, Mum, luckily for me.’
Again she sent a silent prayer over the chimney tops that she hoped might land in Tawrie Gunn’s ear.Please be kind...
His actions were slow as he reached out and took the book under his fingers, sliding it across the tabletop, until he could grip it easily and opened it up. Without preamble or discussion, he read aloud:
July 2nd 2002
A diarist!
Who even am I?
I jest but there’s truth in it. I hardly recognise the person sitting here in this pretty sitting room ...
He paused to look up at her. It was jarring and confronting to hear her words spoken by her son, and she was suddenly wary of what else was about to be revealed.
‘I thought we were calling it a night?’ She stifled a yawn.
‘Or you could put the kettle on?’ He smiled and turned back to the page.
It was an hour later that Bear fell asleep with his head on the cradle of his arms on the tabletop. Carefully, she removed the diary from beneath his hand and took it into the sitting room, finding the leather chair familiar and comfortable. She ran her fingers over the cracked leather of the arm. It felt only right to be reading it here where so much of it had been written. Most of it was nostalgic – painful, yes, but with the glorious benefit of knowing how things had turned out for her, it was as if she carried a cushion to protect herself from the written truth, recognising that her fear of being alone had helped to curate some of the content. There was one conversation that had stuck in her mind and she now remembered the evening so clearly.
Hugo had explained her role in their demise, leading her to the conclusion that the very things that first attracted him to her were the very things he had come to dislike. It had felt unjust and cruel then and time had not changed her mind. The revelation that he had simply felt the grass might be greener and had wandered, almost without question, down the road of infidelity, his actions casual, seemingly unconsidered, had only added to her distress. His casual admission of how he had been ‘lured’ into adultery with no more than a kind word was incendiary, and with it the understanding that they never had been and never could be stable. It also made it likely that nothing she could have said or done would have prevented his decision to stray.
Harriet sat back in the chair and folded her hands over the diary in her lap. That evening had been a moment of reckoning; the point at which she had pictured a small cage and mentally placed itaround her heart, locking it tight, knowing that if she could so misunderstand her marriage, misjudge her family life and mistrust her husband, then nothing else in her life could be taken for granted. A tear fell down her face at the memory of how alone she had felt and how dangerously close to the edge, realising how easy it would have been to fall ... Her tears were also for a new realisation: it had felt entirely necessary to construct the little cage that kept her safe at a time of vulnerability, when she was fearful of what the future held; what hadn’t occurred to her until this evening was that she had failed to unlock it, forgotten to remove the contraption that stopped her heart from being fully open. What had Charles said?
‘No matter how deeply I love you, if there’s even a thin coat of armour that you wear as a shield close to your skin, around your heart, no matter how tiny, almost invisible, it’s still a barrier between us.’
‘Oh, my love!’ she whispered into the darkness. ‘It’s time I found that key.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TAWRIEGUNN
14 SEPTEMBER2024
‘It’s my birthday! Oh, it’s my birthday!’
Tawrie smiled at the sound of her nan yelling loudly downstairs, hoping that when she got to seventy-four, she’d have a similar level of enthusiasm for the day. In fact, it wouldn’t go amiss right now. She’d smile broadly anyway, knowing it meant a lot to Freda and knowing that if her plans became a reality, this time next year things might be very different. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she grabbed her duffel bag and raced down the stairs.
‘Well, whaddya know? It’s my birthday too!’
‘Twenty-nine! How is that even possible! I must have blinked and look at you, Tawrie Gunn, look at the beautiful woman you are!’
‘Hardly!’ She ran her hand through her locks, which needed to feel the slosh of a good shampoo, and over her skin, which was sun burnished in places.
Freda pulled her into a tight hug. Annalee’s absence was obvious, but that was just too bad. And why, after all, would today be any different? Her mother would, as ever, be languishing in bed, no doubt nursing a headache and letting her body settle after a night of soaking it in booze.
A month after her tumble down the stairs and their subsequent row, there had been a shield of discomfort that sat between them at every encounter. This, Tawrie found, was far harder to live with than the vague indifference that had been their norm for as long as she could remember. When in the kitchen, she noted how Annalee would approach quietly, and after spotting her, scurry back upstairs like a scolded mouse. When contact was unavoidable, they passed awkwardly on the stairs, or looked towards the floor as they crossed at the bathroom door. A small, almost imperceptible nod was the standard greeting if their paths collided in the street.
