To My Best Friends

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Jo said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t. Nicci adored you. She loved us all. She was just worried what would happen when she . . . when we found ourselves where we are now.’

‘Maybe,’ said David, hoping he could keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘Or maybe Nicci just wanted to make sure we did it her way.’

Perhaps he should have been the one who went to the bereavement counsellor. Were you allowed to be furious with your wife for dying on you? She’d wanted the house, she’d wanted children, she’d wanted the business, she’d wanted their life. Then she’d left it. Was he allowed to be angry about that? Because he was. So gut-wrenchingly furious that thinking about it brought tears flooding to the surface.

‘She left my garden to Lizzie, my children to you, and me – her husband – to Mona. What the fuck, Jo? I mean, seriously, what the fuck was she thinking?’

Pulling out the end of a bench, Jo sat next to him and slid her arm around his shoulders. And felt, rather than heard, him begin to sob. She didn’t know what to say. So she held him tight and let him slip down and weep against her.

The house was quiet now, but alive with sound the way old houses are: pipes creaking as they heated and cooled, floor-boards moaning with memories of past footsteps. Jo had circled the house, turning off the countless lights and electrical appliances, before returning to the kitchen to collect her bag.

‘Will you start coming back now?’ said David. ‘The three of you? And Si, and Gerry, and Dan? You still eat Sunday lunch, don’t you?’

‘Wild horses wouldn’t keep us away,’ Jo said. ‘Except maybe Mona.’

She smiled, to show she was joking, and he forced a laugh.

Now she’d gone, David punched 1471 for the fifth time in as many days, only to be greeted with the same message: number withheld. Despite what he’d said earlier, David didn’t think it was a call centre or a fault on the line, not really. In his darkest nights he’d started to fear Nicci had been keeping more from him than he’d realised. That she’d even – he could hardly bring himself to think it – been having an affair. No, he knew she wouldn’t do that. Not his Nicci.

In an attempt to calm his brain, David made himself sit and listen to the quiet. Many, many times he’d yearned for this silence. Well, now you’ve got it, he thought. This is it. Better start getting used to it.

Outside next-door’s tabby tortured the last drop of life from a small undeserving rodent, a car passed the end of the road, music so loud he could almost hear the words, teenagers shouted abuse as they made their way home from the town centre. He forced himself to listen to it all.

Floodlights came on suddenly, triggered by a small creature using his garden as a shortcut. Almost April, and still the soil was cold and bare, the grass straggly, beds bedraggled and neglected, the remnants of last autumn’s leaves rotting where they’d fallen. It had been this way for months.

When the lights turned themselves off again two minutes later, he was grateful. It had been like looking inside himself, and finding nothing there.

Chapter Ten

Sunday lunch didn’t happen. David knew it wouldn’t.

‘It’s Mona, isn’t it?’ he said when Jo called on Friday night and suggested they take a rain check. ‘She nixed it.’

‘No,’ Jo said. ‘It’s Lizzie. Something’s come up with her mother. She needs to go and see the staff at the care home.’

‘What about her sister?’ David asked, already knowing the answer.

‘What about her?’ Jo’s shrug was almost audible. Lizzie’s sister, Karen, lived in the States and was conspicuous by her absence at the best of times, particularly when there was a mother-related issue.

‘Look, David, I promise, it’s nothing sinister. Nobody’s avoiding you. Not even Mona. Lizzie does have to go to Croydon and she doesn’t know how long it will take. But next weekend, Easter Sunday, if you’re free, it’s a date. I’ll shop, Lizzie will cook. You get the booze in. And Mona can bring desserts that come out of a packet.’

He’d had to be satisfied with that. He understood; after all, they hadn’t even begun to resolve the ‘what to do about Nicci’s bequests’ problem.

Common sense said the whole thing was ridiculous. Everyone agreed on that. You can’t go leaving people to other people. Clothes, yes. Patches of garden, at a push. Even the shed, but not people.

Emotionally, though, it wasn’t that straightforward. Emotionally, morally, ethically . . . Put like that, the less he saw of Mona the better. And he tensed every time he thought he heard Lizzie unlocking the side gate. Only the idea of Jo mothering his girls, for now at least, didn’t bother him. After all, somebody had to.

The sound of Peppa Pig sloshing through the muddy puddles echoed from the sitting room. Harrie and Charlie were happy, sitting side by side on the floor in front of the TV, clutching their blankies. But it wasn’t yet 9 a.m. The whole day stretched ahead.

If not going to the park or on play dates, Nicci would have baked cakes, done potato prints, or made dresses for their dolls, applying the same focus to making and baking on Saturdays and Sundays as she did to her other baby, Capsule Wardrobe, during the week.

‘No one ever regretted time not spent cleaning the house,’ she’d been fond of saying (about pretty much anything she didn’t like doing), which was why they’d got a cleaner. ‘But if I don’t spend time with the girls, I’ll regret that.’

As it turned out, Nicci was right. Of course, they hadn’t known then just how little time with the girls she had left.

David once asked where Nicci had learned it all, the sewing and cooking and making, hoping she’d tell him about her childhood, but she just shrugged. ‘I taught myself,’ she’d said. Now he wished she’d taught him too.

Wandering back to the kitchen, David flicked the radio on, then off again. He’d promised himself he’d dispense with the white noise, but it was instinctive. Another weekend stretched before him. Another weekend of not doing the right voices, of eating shop-bought cookies. He had to do something.

‘You know you can always come to us,’ his mother had urged, from the very first weekend, and his father had clapped him on the shoulder in silent agreement.

He knew. He’d been to his parents five out of the last six weekends. The last time, Charlie had announced, as he lifted her from the car, ‘Not Granny’s again!’ in a voice that carried all the way to his mother standing beaming on the doorstep. She sounded so much like Nicci, he barely held it together.

There was always the swimming pool. Si might be there, with his boys. Although last time David had tried getting Charlie and Harrie changed and into the baby pool, he’d lost Harrie for a full minute and nearly had heart failure. And he’d been able to see what all the mums were thinking: typical weekend dad, can’t be left alone for five minutes. The ones who recognised him were worse. There were days he feared he might drown in other people’s pity.

Then it dawned on him: Whitstable. The beach hut had been one of Nicci’s favourite places, especially in the winter. (‘Fewer tourists, more personality,’ she’d said, neatly sidestepping the fact that owning a beach hut in Whitstable didn’t exactly make her a local.) They hadn’t been since the end of last summer. Once the chemo started, and the radio, Nicci wasn’t well enough to go back.

‘Let’s go to the beach!’ he announced, tiggering into the living room in his best children’s TV presenter manner.

Two small blond heads turned to watch him, two pairs of brown eyes gave him a look of withering contempt, usually reserved for idiots who thought they might eat green stuff.

Harrie cocked her head on one side, Charlie the other. ‘But, Daddy,’ they said, ‘it raining.’

* * *

Angry waves lashed the shingle just short of the row of weather-beaten huts. There was no horizon that David could see. The unforgiving grey of the North Sea merged with a steely, rain-laden sky. Only the occasional tuft of green showed where feisty blades fought their way through spits of land, only to wonder what the point was when they got there. The usually cheerful pastel pinks and blues of the beach huts failed to inject any joy into the landscape.

He tried to see what Nicci would have seen if she’d been here. Spirit! Nature! A challenge! Without her to show it to him, all David could see was a cold beach; nature in the grip of the meanest of mean reds.

He’d come here looking for comfort. But there was nothing comforting on this bleak stretch of shingle.

The beach was empty in both directions. Not so much as a dog scavenging for scraps. Even the oyster stalls weren’t open, not that David would be using them if they had been. The memory of trying to force-feed the girls oysters – working on Nicci’s theory that they should get them used to everything early – and the look of disgust on their faces as they spat five quid’s worth of seafood across the table gave David his first smile of the day. ‘Heathens!’ Nicci had declared.

The only tourists dumb enough to brave the Kent coastline in the coldest March for thirty-one years had taken refuge in Nicci’s favourite café, Tea & Times, nursing steaming mugs and the papers. This was where David and the girls had been, eating cheese on toast and drinking hot chocolate until half an hour ago. And where, it was painfully clear, they should have stayed.

His was the only beach hut open, and David was rapidly wishing he hadn’t bothered. The interior – which in his mind’s eye was a stylish combination of nautical blue and white – was, in reality, drab and faded, the rattan sofa coated with grit that had crept through the cracks in the clapboard. The Calor Gas heater was empty. And he hadn’t thought to bring a new bottle. The beach hut was as desolate inside as it was out.

‘Need a wee-wee,’ Charlie announced.

David counted backwards from ten. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, when he reached zero, ‘you just had a wee-wee in the café. Come and help me tidy Mummy’s hut.’

‘Need one now.’

‘Right,’ David said. ‘We’d better go outside then.’

‘Co-old,’ Harrie said, plonking herself heavily on the gritty sand at his feet, as David helped Charlie crouch. ‘Harrie need a wee.’

Any second now the grizzling would start. Who could blame them? The afternoon was cold and wet and, frankly, no fun at all. Given the chance, he would happily sit down next to them on the damp shingle and grizzle along with them.

‘Come on, girls,’ he said, trying to sound convincing. ‘Let’s go for a walk. It’ll be fun.’

They weren’t fooled. ‘Cold, Daddy!’ Their little faces looked pinched and blue.

David closed his eyes and prayed for help; for a hot-water bottle, thicker coats for the girls, a teleporter, brandy, anything to get him through this.

‘Excuse me, are you OK?’ A kind voice out of the blue.

The woman’s trench coat was so wet it had turned dark grey, her cheeks were red with cold and her hair stuck to her face in tendrils. Not exactly the angel of mercy he’d had in mind.

‘No . . . I mean, yes. Thanks. I’m just, erm, regrouping.’ He forced a smile.

There was a yelp from behind. They both turned to see a black and white mongrel sniffing Harrie’s Peppa Pig lunch box, the only pink thing Nicci allowed houseroom, except pink wine.

‘Stop it, Norman,’ the woman yelled, tugging at the dog’s collar. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘He’s such a piglet. He thinks there might be second lunch in there.’

David’s smile was weak. ‘Afraid he’s out of luck. Nothing in there but dolls, clothes and KitKat wrappers.’

‘You’re David, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I thought I recognised you. Your girls have got so big.’

He racked his brains. The woman was vaguely familiar, but only in the way people you see in the street or on television are.

‘Jilly,’ she said. ‘Three huts down from yours. Usually see more of you guys in the winter. How’s Nicci? Seems like an age since you were here. Must have been what, September?’

‘August Bank Holiday,’ David said.

It was only seven months ago, but his mood could scarcely have been more different.

Back then, they’d known Nicci was ill. The cancer had been given a name and a stage. There was still hope. Not a lot, but it was there. The date for Nicci’s operation was just days away. So this was their last family weekend away before the unavoidable weeks of treatment and, they hoped, recovery. This time, next August, they’d be back, they told themselves, drinking ice-cold rosé, David barbecuing Cumberland sausages, Nicci unpacking tubs of salad and olives, tearing crusty French bread into a basket. Far too much food for the four of them.

The girls had been crouching on the sand, wearing pants and Hello Kitty T-shirts, their shorts and crocs long discarded, faces comical masks of concentration as they built sandcastles for their Baby Alives, which Nicci had let David’s mother buy them. She’d stalled at the accoutrements. Fortunately, Jo and Lizzie hadn’t. The sky had been a perfect August blue, broken by a smattering of cartoon clouds the twins could have drawn.

Despite the Choos, and the Chanel, and the designer jeans that replaced her vintage frocks and Doc Martens, Nicci was the same girl he’d fallen in love with the moment he saw her. The knackered denim cut-offs with a hole in the bum where, if he looked hard enough, he could see a flash of black lace knickers, were gone. And so was the faded Stone Roses T-shirt – the one he’d bought her the first birthday after they’d got together. Although, knowing Nicci, it was folded in a box or bin bag somewhere. She’d worn it to grey and with sleeves rolled up to reveal slim tanned upper arms. The peroxide had been replaced by a pricey, professional dye-job, and the skinny tanned legs ended in orange toenails and clashing pink Havaianas, not the battered Docs she’d lived in when they first met. But she was still his Nicci.

He could see now that her face that day had been brave. With hindsight, her exhaustion and fear were obvious, but at the time it had been easier not to see. Kinder too. To both of them.

Too often he’d complained that they didn’t spend any time alone. Never did anything together, just the four of them, as a family.

‘The house is always full of your friends!’ he’d snapped, more than once, when the twins had gone to bed, and Sunday was about to slip into Monday, when they’d both be back at work without a private word spoken. ‘Why can’t we be just us? If I’d known I was walking up the aisle with all four of you—’

She’d put her hand in front of his mouth and he’d let her shush him.

‘They’re not just my friends. They’re my family,’ she said, as she always did. ‘You know that.’

And she replaced her hand with her mouth.

He missed her face and her smile. Her scent, the texture of her hair, the taste of her skin. She’d been what let him be him: David, the thoughtful one. He missed her body, and he missed feeling her naked skin as he fell asleep, and their hands clutching as they sometimes did when they both awoke.

The woman was staring at him, looking anxious. The rain was heavier now, slicking dark curls to her forehead.

He remembered her now. Well, he didn’t. But Nicci was always striking up conversations. Standing up to the rims of her Hunters in the freezing surf, chatting with strangers, as if it was July. You never knew who you might meet, she said. Better to waste ten minutes talking to a dull person than miss a chance of meeting an interesting one. To her, three huts down was almost family.

Always open, always looking. His exact opposite.

Nicci collected: people, things, clothes . . .

‘Oh!’ The woman’s face was ashen. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve said the wrong thing, haven’t I? You two haven’t . . . you haven’t split?’ Mortification crossed her face. ‘I can’t believe it. You always seemed so, happy . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

David shook his head, finally glad of the rain blurring his vision and trickling down his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We haven’t split.’

Oblivious to the rain, the girls sat at his feet petting the dog, content for the first time that day. ‘I’m sorry,’ David said. ‘I told everyone I could think of. Everyone in Nicci’s address book . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . She had cancer. It . . . the end . . . was quick.’

Quick, but not painless.

The expression that crossed the woman’s face was agonisingly familiar. He’d seen it before, many times, over the last two months. In the months before too, when the end became inevitable. But that didn’t make it any easier, for either of them. As the woman hastily made her excuses and strode off down the beach, dog in tow, head down, into the rain, David decided he could hardly blame her.

Nicci’s Dead. It was a hell of a conversation stopper.

They packed up soon after. There was no point staying. He’d come here looking for Nicci, but he hadn’t found her.

She wasn’t here to be found.

Chapter Eleven

The only good thing about Croydon is leaving it, Lizzie thought, as she pulled her second-hand Renault out of The Cedars’ car park.

It wasn’t Croydon’s fault. She didn’t have anything against the place. In fact, it wasn’t Croydon she hated at all. It was Sanderstead, and The Cedars in particular.

The Cedars had been Lizzie’s mother’s home for two years now and Lizzie’s elder sister, Karen, had only managed to visit once. OK, so Lizzie lived an hour’s drive away, and Karen’s journey involved an eight-hour transatlantic flight, but even so, Lizzie thought, stomping her foot on the brake as a bus pulled out, would it kill her to visit her mother a couple of times a year?

‘I only get two weeks’ holiday,’ Karen reminded her when Lizzie called from the car park to give her an update. ‘And anyway, what would be the point of begging unpaid time off work? She wouldn’t recognise me anyway.’

Lizzie’d had to resist the urge to hurl her mobile onto the gravel. She couldn’t afford to replace it. ‘You think she recognises me?’ she said instead.

Before the home there had been the memory loss. The missing door keys, the lost handbags, the returning from school to twenty-five voicemail messages from her mother, all checking she hadn’t been killed in a car crash reported on the local news thirty miles away.

Doctors’ appointments, specialists’ appointments, MRI scans and CAT scans, had swiftly followed those calls. Lizzie handled it largely on her own. Gerry was in meetings. Entertaining important clients. Away on business/at a training course/being fast-tracked. Gerry was off being Gerry.

And then they had the care home row.

I wouldn’t be any help, babe. What do I know about care homes?

‘The same as me,’ Lizzie had said. Fuck all.

She didn’t add that bit. Just as she never gave her sister a piece of her mind. Just as she’d never properly quarrelled with her mother. The stand-up knock-down row she should have had at nineteen or twenty-one had somehow gone astray.

Instead she visited countless care homes, each more depressing than the last, and then found an estate agent to sell the family home to pay for her mother’s care. Each step of the way she religiously called Karen in Brooklyn so she’d know exactly what was going on. And each time Karen had been too busy with work, with her husband and children, to come and help.

Eventually, after Lizzie threatened to give every last stick of furniture to charity, Karen took unpaid leave from her job on Wall Street. The forty-eight hours she stayed at the Gatwick Hilton and systematically tried to ‘put right’ every decision Lizzie had made were topped off by their mother’s glazed lack of recognition. No, Lizzie was pretty sure Karen wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. And who could blame her? Lizzie only wished she had the same option.

In a way, she was glad. Sometimes doing everything yourself was simply easier . . . As she pulled onto the M23 and put her foot down, she felt her spirits lift. It was done.

The Stone Roses went on, the early album with all the good tracks. Not even her music really, but an old boyfriend at uni’s. Somehow she’d adopted his music taste as her own and had never really moved on.

Mum had been even worse today.

‘Isn’t it nice of Kathleen to come and see me,’ she’d said, before lapsing into one of many long and intricate conversations with herself. It was ironic. Mum had never been chatty. Now you couldn’t shut her up.

Janet, The Cedars’ manager, had shrugged apologetically. As if to say, What can you do? Lizzie had shrugged back. If Janet didn’t know, she certainly didn’t.

Kathleen was her mother’s cousin, dead for ten years. Lizzie had been Kathleen for months now. At first she’d thought Mum did it on purpose, to punish Lizzie for not being Karen. Now she knew it was the illness at work.

The next call to Karen was going to be grim. Lizzie needed to tell her The Cedars felt Mum needed specialist care. For which read expensive.

‘What’s wrong with the NHS?’ Karen would say. And Lizzie would reply, ‘They’ll pay for Mum when we can’t afford to any more.’

And Karen would say, ‘We can’t afford to now.’

So predictable. So pointless. So why bother? Because Karen was the eldest, that was why. It had always been that way, Lizzie’s entire life.

Turning the corner into the cul-de-sac, Lizzie saw instantly that their three-bedroom house was dark, the only unlit house in the loop of exclusive three-and four-bedroom New England-style properties. Everyone else was in, doing whatever Lizzie’s neighbours did in the evenings. Watching television, having dinner parties, drinking too much white wine.

Wherever Gerry’s silver Audi Quattro was, it wasn’t here.

She knew she should have felt cross, that she should have wanted Gerry waiting here to greet her. Instead she felt relieved. Pulling up in front of their glossy garage door, she grabbed her bag off the passenger seat and locked the car, watching lights blink as the alarm set itself. Wanting time alone – even on Sunday evening – wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She could indulge her secret passion for Countryfile, open a bottle of something cold and white, instead of drinking the Rioja that Gerry preferred.

She could drink white wine, hog the bathroom, use all the hot water. She could even make headway into the damn gardening books she’d taken out of the library.

Having drawn the curtains, she flipped on the television – in that order, always in that order – and peered in the fridge. So much for the wine choice: half a bottle of Pinot Grigio and two cans of Peroni.

One eye on the television, she settled onto the sofa and picked up Alan Titchmarsh’s The Gardener’s Year.

The phone inside began ringing precisely as David’s house alarm started peeping. Thirty seconds and counting to disable the beeping, before all hell broke loose. The phone would have to wait. There probably wouldn’t be anyone on the other end anyway.

By the time he’d keyed in the security code the phone had fallen silent and he felt his shoulders relax. Head down, he ran back to the car, hoisted first one child, then the other, and carried them into the house, depositing one on each sofa, before heading back to grab their bags and lock the car.

As he did, the phone started up again.

‘Da-addy . . .’

‘I’m here,’ he promised them. ‘Just let me get rid of this.’

‘Hello?’

‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I’m looking for David Morrison.’

The voice belonged to a woman. Not old, but certainly not young. She sounded anywhere from fifty something upwards. What she didn’t sound like was a cold caller.

‘That’s me,’ he said.

‘Ah, um, good. I mean . . . it’s good that I’ve found you,’ the woman said. ‘It’s taken weeks. And then I wasn’t sure I had the right number.’

‘Da-addy!’

Christ, David thought, cut to the chase. ‘Well, you’ve found me,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’