Sylvie drove back to the farm whooshing quickly around the lanes, the last of the blackberries dotting the high hedgerows, and giving herself a loud talking-to all the way. Not only was she embarrassed about being a little tearful, she had also finished off with being deliberately rude to a man who had been nothing but pleasant. She could catch up with him after school. Shewouldcatch up with him after school and welcome him to the community rather than run away from him. If anyone knew what being an outsider felt like, it was her.
As she pulled into the drive, she realized that this new slightly blubby behaviour could be exactly what she had been wishing for. She hadn’t been able to cry for months, not since the funeral. And she really wanted to. Not because she was some kind of masochist but because she was carrying her grief as a tight, heavy bundle; ever present and whispering that she was a bad daughter for not having sobbed and sobbed.
Maybe she should take these two hours to go and sit in her mother’s room, find the strength to start packing some things up. Not everything, just make a start. Her tears over Sam’s first day could be the catalyst for shifting a smidgen of this numbness.
As she entered the farmhouse through the kitchen she saw Tom sitting in the big old rocking chair near the range. The range was an absolute beast, cast iron, Victorian, black and bleak and somehow still working – it was probably the most modern thing in the kitchen. Or certainly felt like it at times.There was something about the farm, perfectly encapsulated by the cooker, that hung over this place, and as much as it was home Sylvie knew she needed to get some more work and look into moving her and Sam out for good.
Tom, her uncle, would not say anything directly, but he too had had his life put on hold, hanging, waiting, stopped from making the progress he had hoped for. And Sylvie knew that her presence in the farmhouse was unintentionally continuing that pattern. Both of them needed to move forward, Sylvie from this place and Tom fully into it, with the woman he had loved, to take his turn.
Tom and Sylvie had a good relationship, both wanting to cling to the last of family as they knew it. But they were poles apart in their world views. Sylvie knew Tom thought of her as flighty and could never understand why she would leave Cornwall for London to do something as capricious as dance. He had very firm views about a woman’s role, and they seemed to centre largely around marriage and baking. Taking to the stage in a tutu and tights was not what he considered proper. But then he probably felt that the Corn Laws should never have been repealed and that her returning home pregnant and voluntarily single was the natural conclusion to such a career choice.
Despite this Sylvie couldn’t help but smile when she saw him perched there basking in the warmth thrown out, all seasons, by the range. He might be a taciturn old bastard, but he was hers.
‘Hey, Tom, Sam’s first day at school started well. I have to go get him again in a couple of hours. I’m just going to put the kettle on, can I make you a cup as well?’
‘Seems a bit daft, maid. Not much point ’im being there for that then, is there? Will cost you a fortune on petrol, should’a waited in the village.’
‘Well, they like to start them off slow, get them used to it. I’m sure they know what they’re doing, and it’s only a couple of miles. Tea?’
‘Aye, full day’s wages for half a day’s work. Bleddy get them used to it, society gone soft. Why, I was practically working a full day on the farm at his age.’
‘Mmm-hmm. Tea?’ Sylvie grinned wider but knew not to argue and was now highly skilled at non-committal noises. She was fairly sure one day he’d progress to telling her that he was working in the tin mines when he was two and a half.
‘I’ll make me own bleddy tea, maid. I’m not so old that I can’t use a kettle.’
‘I know, you moody old bugger, but I’m making one for myself so it’s no harm to do you one too. Then I thought I’d go and look through some of Mum’s things today, maybe start sorting them out.’ Sylvie quite liked the way her accent became more pronounced Cornish whenever she was near her uncle; she certainly hadn’t had that twang in London, where her voice matched her life, fast-paced and excitable.
‘Good idea. ’Tis about time, maid. She wouldn’t want us keeping it like that for ever. You know she liked things fresh.’
Sylvie took a look around the kitchen and knew Tom’s idea of fresh was wildly different from hers, but it was true that as dark as the house might be, her mother did keep things as citrus sharp as possible. It was simply that Margaret preferred function and utility to frippery and would no more have thought of giving the heavy dark wood a lick of white paint than she would fly through the air, and Sylvie loved her for it. Why waste the money and time on paint when there were cows to milk and ballet shoes – her daughter’s dancing her only indulgence – to buy? Margaret was very sure where she stood when it came to fuss or fripperies; indeed, Sylvie remembered her mother had a whole host of go-to sayings –fussing makes a fool not a fighterwas one of them. Applied equally to child-rearing as it was to furniture.
There had been a solidity to her mother, as there was to Tom, that gave them and her roots – a security that allowed Sylvie to take the path she had, that freed her to take risks, knowing that she could explore the world as she wished and home would be always there and never changing.
Until it wasn’t. Young and with her head only ever in the world of dance, Sylvie had forgotten to take note that no matter how solid and secure her mother might be, there was one thing no one could fight and win.
And now as she opened the door, the stale air hit her nostrils and the guilt welled up. She should have come in here sooner. Once the hospital had taken all their equipment back she had rested her hand on the door handle more than once, but never got any further. It had all seemed too final, too much. But Tom was right, it was time, and the very least she could do was give the room a good dusting now, air it out, make it sparkle and honour her mother that way.
She went back to the kitchen to grab cloths and sprays and the hoover, nodding at Tom as he left again, the dogs by his side. Knowing that in the dip of his head was approval, a gentle unspoken indicator that he thought she was doing right.
Scrubbing and brushing and dusting and shaking, making the room smell of lemons and finishing it by popping some blue hydrangeas from the garden by the side of her mum’s bed was cathartic, and blew away the inanities of the morning. Getting worked up because her son had hit a milestone and embarrassed by the presence of a man she barely knew was senseless.
Sitting here on her mum’s coverlet, breathing in and out, she looked at the things that had been ever present in her life – the silver-backed hairbrushes, the photos of her as a child next tothem on the dresser. A bottle of Tweed, still half full, sat next to a large pot of Nivea and as Sylvie lifted the lid of the cream she could breathe her mother in and see her clear as day when she had been little and her mum would pop a splodge on her cheeks and rub it in for her. ‘All grown up now, Sylvie-bear.’
She sat there for a couple of minutes letting memories of being a small child in the fields and on the beaches of Cornwall envelop her. Still no tears, but a feeling of warmth, of gratitude at how lucky she had been.
Moving over to the wardrobe door, a clunky dark wood affair that had been sitting in this farmhouse for probably long before her mother was, she pulled open the door. Yanked it as it stuck and saw her mother’s clothes, not many for her mother didn’t see the need, not when she could spend her pennies on gauzy ballet clothes and pretty silken slippers for her only child instead.
There were dresses, skirts and trousers hung neatly on a short forward-facing rail, and stacks of jumpers and some shoes in the little wooden shelves to the side. There were the heels she would wear whenever she had anywhere special to go to. Next to that was a little carved box that Sylvie remembered tracing her fingers over the top of as a child. It was a fanciful thing for her mother to own and Sylvie wasn’t sure of how it had come into her mother’s possession.
So many things she wished she had asked.
Sitting back on the bed she lifted the lid and saw all that her mother held dear in one small place: there was a sepia photograph of her and Tom’s parents, stern faced and dressed in their Sunday best; a clutch of all of Sylvie’s school reports from Penmenna, and then the Royal Ballet School from eleven on; a sheaf of photos of Sylvie dancing, from child to adult – many taken from the audience where Margaret would sit bursting with pride in her pleated skirts and best court shoestelling all who would listen that that was her daughter – as well as newspaper clippings of reviews of all the shows she had been in.
The tears fell full, warm and heavy, spreading into circles upon the yellowed paper.
Chapter Five
Rosy looked up from her teaching activity to see Marion Marksharp bustling in through the doorway. She was head of the PTA and fearsome with it – there was a rumour circulating the playground that she was actively trying to get pregnant again so that when her youngest child, Rufus, left Penmenna School she could hooch another one in and maintain her crown. Rosy and Marion had grown close over the last few months, but even she accepted that it was a possibility.
