To My Best Friends

‘Well, um. You don’t know me. But you might know my name. It’s – well, it was – Lynda Webster.’

David racked his brains. He didn’t know anyone by that name.

‘Lynda Webster?’ the woman repeated, her voice a question now.

When it became clear the name meant nothing to him, she cleared her throat and when she spoke again the nerves had been replaced by sadness. ‘David, I’m Nicci’s mother.’

David put down the phone. He didn’t intend to. It was instinctive.

The telephone rang again almost immediately.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’

‘Nicci must have told you terrible things about me . . .’

‘She didn’t tell me anything,’ David said. ‘You weren’t a welcome topic of conversation. I didn’t even know you were still alive.’

Brutal, he thought. Before deciding he just didn’t care. There was a silence at the far end of the line, as if the woman was considering that. And then a sigh.

‘You did know she had a mother?’

‘Da-addy!’

‘Look, the girls—’ David stopped; suddenly aware he was talking for the first time to his children’s grandmother. ‘I can’t talk now. Give me a number where I can reach you and I’ll call you back when they’re in bed.’

A silence said the woman didn’t believe him.

‘I will, Lynda,’ he said. It sounded weird; over-familiar. ‘Look, Mrs Webster . . . apparently you know where to find me. It’s not like I have a choice.’

He heard her mutter something.

‘Give me your number,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll call back. It won’t be before seven, maybe later. Depends how long it takes to persuade them to go down.’

‘What are their names?’ the woman asked, tentatively.

David hesitated.

‘Charlie and Harrie,’ he said, before hanging up a second time.

Chapter Twelve

Bedtime was a nightmare, as if all the stress of the day at Whitstable had seeped into Harrie and Charlie’s pores, along with the salt, grit and tar. When the girls finally went down, after two stories and endless grizzling, David barely had time to pour himself a large brandy before the phone rang again. This time he knew there would be someone on the other end.

‘I said I’d call you,’ he said, without waiting for her to speak. ‘The girls are, tricky, at the moment. It took a while.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ Lynda Webster said. ‘They’ve not long lost their mother. I expect they’re confused.’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’ David took a slow sip of the Courvoisier and felt its warmth slide down his throat. ‘Sad, mainly.’

‘You’ve really never heard of me?’

‘I knew you existed. But no more than that. She didn’t tell me you were dead, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘It wasn’t,’ the woman said tightly. ‘That’s all?’

‘You fell out before university. That’s it.’

‘That’s the truth at least.’

‘I’d like to be able to tell you something different,’ David said. ‘But Nicci never talked about you. It was one of her conditions, right from the start. She didn’t know her dad, and you and she had a huge row in her teens and hadn’t spoken since. End of subject.’

‘End of subject?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘Of course I asked!’ David struggled to hang on to his temper. Who did this woman think she was?

‘I didn’t mean to suggest—’

‘You did,’ he snapped, cutting her off. ‘Of course I asked about her family. I was married to her, for Christ’s sake.’

Was. Tears threatened to burst through.

Am, he thought. Am married to her.

Closing his eyes, David took a deep breath and then another. ‘I only asked a couple of times,’ he said, when his voice was steady again. ‘Near the start, before I learnt it was on Nicci’s Don’t Go There list.

‘Don’t go there . . . ?’ The woman’s shock was clear.

This wasn’t like him, David thought. Why was he jabbing away at her? Whatever this woman was to blame for, Nicci’s death wasn’t on that list. But she’d asked, and for some reason he felt obliged to tell the truth.

‘Listen,’ David said. It wasn’t quite an order. ‘Once, at uni, when I asked, she got up, walked out of my room and wouldn’t speak to me or even see me for a week. When she came back she told me it was on the condition that I never asked again. I thought I’d lost her. So I decided right there that it wasn’t worth the risk. I didn’t like to see her hurt, I loved – love – her.’

‘And when you had your babies, she didn’t . . . ?’ The woman took a deep breath. ‘You didn’t ever . . . ?’

‘I know what you want to hear,’ David said quietly. ‘But it would be a lie. Nicci never mentioned you. Not once. Not when we married. Not when we had Charlie and Harrie. Not even when she was . . .’

He couldn’t bring himself to complete that sentence.

‘I guessed as much. That’s why I called. When I read she’d died I thought . . . well, I’d wait to hear. I thought she might have left me something.’

David tensed, his fingers clenching the phone. It must have been somehow audible.

‘Oh, not like that,’ Nicci’s mother said. ‘I don’t mean money. Although I know she was well off. By my standards, anyway. I don’t want you to think that’s why I called. I thought perhaps a letter, or something.’

‘Something?’

‘A brooch . . . ?’

It was not quite a question, and they both recognised she already knew the answer. Her voice had risen on the word more in hope than expectation.

David shivered at a memory of Nicci and he on the shingle near the beginning, in mid-winter. She’d pushed her hand into her pocket and pulled out a silver brooch. A very ordinary brooch. So ordinary, it could have passed for tin.

‘What’s that?’ he’d asked.

She hadn’t answered. For a moment, he’d thought she was going to hurl it straight into the cold grey sea. Instead she’d put it back into her pocket, almost as if deciding throwing it wasn’t worth the effort. He wasn’t meant to notice when she’d dropped it into a bin on their way back to his rooms. Another lover, he’d thought. And he’d kept thinking that, until now.

When David didn’t say anything the woman sighed.

‘The reason I’m calling . . .’ she paused as if seeking the right words, ‘. . . I thought . . . I’d like to know my granddaughters.’

‘Your granddaughters?’

‘If you don’t mind. I mean, obviously I understand you’ll need time to think it over.’

In a way he’d been expecting this from the second the woman announced herself. But now she’d come out with it, he could hardly contain his anger. If he didn’t mind? Of course he bloody minded. And, more importantly, Nicci would mind.

Nicci would mind violently. If Nicci had wanted Charlie and Harrie to know their grandmother, she’d have introduced them long before now.

‘Oh, not right away,’ the woman said, sensing David’s mood. ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking that. I thought maybe you and I could meet, for a coffee or something, So you can see I don’t have two heads. Or whatever Nicci told you I had.’

‘You’re missing the point,’ David said curtly. ‘Nicci never told me anything at all.’

Once he’d put the phone down on her for the third time that evening, Nicci’s mother didn’t call back. Or maybe she did. David pulled the jack from its socket so he didn’t have to find out, refilled his glass and retired to the bedroom. Now he sat on his side of the bed, brandy long since drained.

Their room was lit only by the orange glow of the street-light through open curtains, and the nightlight’s glimmer from the children’s room next door. David didn’t need any extra light to see the photograph he was holding. He’d looked at it so many times since he’d put down the phone, the image was imprinted on his brain.

Seven weeks Nicci had been dead. Seven weeks, two days and twenty-one hours. And already he knew more about her than he had in the sixteen years they’d been together.

The square lay in the palm of his hand, corners bent upwards from over-handling. It was a Polaroid, the white frame daylight-faded to creamy yellow, the image itself washed opaque.

Snuffling came through the baby monitor as Charlie – or was it Harrie? – turned over in her sleep. Nicci had deemed the monitor redundant almost a year earlier, but since her death David had reinstated it. He found it comforting. The sound of his daughters’ slow breathing got him through most nights.

The photograph had been in her bedside cabinet all along.

He’d found it a couple of weeks back as he bagged up the last of her medicine to return to the hospital, unable to bear the sight of her cancer paraphernalia any longer. It had been at the bottom of the drawer, book-marking a page in one of the cancer memoirs that had become her favoured reading. Now they sat in a bag under the stairs waiting to go to Oxfam. Where the Polaroid would have gone too, if it hadn’t slipped from the paperbacks as he carried them downstairs. He only knew who it was now because of a scrawl in an unfamiliar hand across the back.

Lynda and Nicola.

It was a very seventies Polaroid, Nicci’s mum all Suzi Quatro hair and denim flares, standing beside a small girl – three years old, maybe four – squinting warily into the camera. Red gingham dress bunched up, revealing skinny legs, white socks and red T-bar shoes. The girl stood half on, half off a blue trike with a yellow seat and handlebars.

If only he’d known it was there before, he could have asked Nicci about it. Only Nicci wouldn’t have told him. But now he knew someone who would. If he’d let her.

The other person in the photo.

Chapter Thirteen

‘Marking homework?’

Lizzie jumped. She’d been so engrossed in her gardening books she didn’t hear Gerry’s key in the lock. She’d only just reached April and the things that should have been done by now already stretched to three pages of an exercise book.

‘A gardening book?’ He looked surprised.

With one sock-clad foot Lizzie kicked a half-eaten packet of chocolate HobNobs under the coffee table and out of Gerry’s line of sight. Only that morning he’d grabbed her bum as she struggled into size twelve jeans – jeans that now cut into her middle, forcing a roll of flesh over the waistband – and made some comment about her ‘filling her jeans’.

How had that happened? Only last autumn she’d been comfortable in her favourite size tens. Now she was on the verge of swapping the twelves for the fourteens she kept under her bed for just such emergencies. Some people, people who mostly didn’t need to lose weight in the first place – Nicci, for example – responded to life’s traumas by losing their appetite. The heartbreak diet.

Lizzie was the total opposite; her emotional history mapped out in junk food. Recently, this ran:

1) Mother with Alzheimer’s – one packet of chocolate HobNobs.

2) Row with sister, over Mother – whole tube of Pringles. 3) Best friend’s funeral – bottle of dry white and a bowl of peanuts with takeaway pizza chaser, repeat as necessary.

4) Fight with Gerry about giving up teaching to become a proper wife/mother; her timekeeping; what she/he was doing at the weekend* (*delete as applicable) – that happened so often it barely merited more than the bar of Sainsbury’s cooking chocolate she’d hidden from herself at the back of the freezer.

Hunger had nothing to do with it.

Closing the gardening book, Lizzie stretched her cheek up to receive his kiss. Gerry had the kind of whiskers that meant if he shaved at 8 a.m., he had a beard by lunchtime. It was early evening now. There were days she felt she could get a rash just by looking at him.

‘Pooh,’ she said. ‘You smell beery.’

Gerry winked. ‘I am beery,’ he said. ‘Nineteenth hole.’

‘Thought it was rugby today.’ She didn’t need to glance at her watch to know he’d spent far more hours in the clubhouse than he had on the course.

‘Golf. Told you this morning. Anyway, I knew you’d be out so I went for a late lunch with the guys after.’

And drove home? Lizzie wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, she reached for her book, flicking to a boxout on compost.

What was the difference between peat, loam and ericaceous compost? Who cared and why would it matter? She couldn’t believe Nicci had. Nicci had to be more of a ‘shove it in and see what grew’ type of gardener. Didn’t she?

‘How was your mum?’

‘The same,’ she said. ‘Still thinks I’m Aunt Kathleen, though . . . Thanks for asking.’

Crouching down beside her chair, Gerry slipped both arms around her, fingers grazing her breast as they passed. His breath was yeasty on her ear. Lizzie forced herself not to tense.

‘I’m glad you’re not down,’ he said, as his left hand crept back up, cupping her breast.

Lizzie wasn’t in the mood, not really. Some people lost themselves in sex, used it as a release. Mona, for one. And Nicci too, when they were first at college.

Not Lizzie.

She’d always felt a bit out of it like that. A bit uptight – frigid, some git who played rugby had called her in sixth form – but that was just her. She had to feel close, loved and liked to want sex. And she had, with Gerry, in the early years, but now . . .

‘Come upstairs?’

Closing her eyes, Lizzie emptied her mind, forcing herself to go with it as Gerry began kissing her neck, his free hand deftly unbuttoning her shirt. After all, you didn’t get babies without sex and they hadn’t ‘done it’ in almost a month.

They used to have the ‘There’s never a right time to have babies’ row every second month. Back then, Lizzie was the one arguing to start a family. Gerry was too busy, he was in line for another promotion, he wanted to wait until next year when they’d be able to afford another, bigger, house . . . The only argument he never used back then was her job. Because he knew she’d throw that up in a second. It was a job – teaching at the local primary – and she enjoyed it, but it wasn’t her life’s work, not like her sister’s career. Something she’d be willing to ditch when they started a family. Lizzie was positively old-fashioned like that. It was another thing she and Karen didn’t agree on.

Then it changed. Gerry started talking about babies and she – Lizzie hardly dared say it – began to wonder if the time was right.

But she’d always wanted a family.

Lizzie could remember her elation the first time she’d mentioned babies over breakfast and he hadn’t flinched. That had been a couple of years ago.

The other night, he’d made some comment about the pre-prep school his boss sent his son to. So now he was willing to talk babies; but the local school at which she taught was no longer good enough.

Gerry groaned as his hand eased into her bra and stroked her nipple until it stiffened. His other hand slipped inside her jeans.

No babies without sex, Lizzie reminded herself. And she did want to start a family . . . didn’t she?

Chapter Fourteen

‘Where’s the roasting tin?’

‘Same place as usual, I imagine.’

‘Nu-huh.’ Lizzie shook her head. ‘I’ve looked there, and all the other likely places.’

The two women looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

Jo threw open the kitchen window. ‘David,’ she yelled. ‘What have you done with the roasting tin?’

‘What have I done with . . . ?’ he shouted over the shrieks of two small girls. Having hunted Easter eggs, provided by Jo and hidden by David after they’d gone to bed the night before, Charlie and Harrie were on a carbohydrate high, taking turns to be pushed on the tyre hanging from the old apple tree.

‘Higher, Daddy, higher!’

‘In a sec . . . Nothing. Haven’t touched the damn thing. Do I look like a man who’d know what to do with a roasting tin?’

‘More than Gerry does,’ Lizzie muttered, looking for a cupboard she hadn’t yet searched. ‘Who else would move it? The kitchen ghost?’

She caught Jo’s eye. Jo raised a quizzical eyebrow.

Jo looked tired, Lizzie thought, nothing like herself. The roots were visible in her usually flawlessly highlighted hair and her fringe kept falling into her eyes. She was dressed as if for a ramble: battered biker boots; knackered, not-for-going-out jeans; and what looked suspiciously like one of Si’s fleeces. A fleece? Nicci would have had something to say about that. Maybe that was the point. Nicci couldn’t see them. For the first time in years Jo was at liberty to wear whatever she wanted. They all were. But it was Easter Sunday and the first time they’d all been here, together, since Nicci’s funeral. Lizzie had assumed that meant they’d make an effort. But no.

She felt painfully overdressed. Glancing down at her floral dress and heels, she wondered if there was time to nip home and change.

‘You OK?’

Lizzie snapped back to see Jo looking concerned. ‘Yeah, fine, just spooked myself with the ghost comment,’ she lied. ‘But I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway, if it was Nicci – which it isn’t, obviously – at least she’d have put it back in the right place.’ Jo started to laugh, and after a moment Lizzie joined in.

It was shaping up to be a beautiful Easter weekend, exactly as Jo had hoped. Late April sunshine crept round from the front and in through south-facing windows to throw a strip of gold across the oak table Nicci and David had lovingly sanded and varnished. The Chinese slate floor beneath the table reflected a rainbow of bronzes and gilts. The kitchen was warm from the Aga, the scent of coffee lingered, and the Archers squabbled amongst themselves in the background. Everything was as it should be.

Almost.

When Nicci became too tired to cook Sunday roast for ten, back in the autumn, the others had taken over, with Nicci presiding over the proceedings, passing judgement on the consistency of their stuffing or the sweetness of the apple sauce. And they smiled and gritted their teeth and let her. It was better to go on pretending nothing had changed. All of them – friends, partners and children – had lunched there every Sunday without fail, unless Jo and Si had his kids for the weekend; then they’d appear in the late afternoon after dropping the boys back at their mother’s. Usually just in time for pudding and to help with the third or fourth bottle of wine.

Jo shook the image from her head. ‘Got it!’ she said, emerging from under the sink, roasting tin aloft. ‘Suspect kitchen ghost’s offspring put it there.’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Mona said, shouldering her way through the back door and kicking it shut with her heel. ‘No reason,’ she added, pre-empting the question. ‘Just late.’

She had once been a year late for Lizzie’s thirtieth birthday party, since when anything less was considered minor.

‘Good to see you.’ Tossing the roasting tin on the side with a clatter, Jo threw her arms around Mona, coat, bags and all; ignoring the look of surprise that flickered across Mona’s face. ‘It’s been too long.’

It had only been a couple of weeks, but that was long by their standards. Lately they weren’t sure which of them was meant to be holding it together. Jo was trying, but it didn’t come naturally. She preferred to watch from the periphery: not so much outside looking in as standing on the edge, with both choices open to her. She wasn’t Nicci; didn’t have that magnetism, the sort that made others gravitate to her.

‘Where’s Dan?’ Lizzie asked. ‘I bought him a tub of Celebrations. He is coming, isn’t he?’

He’s there.’ Mona jerked her head towards the back garden, where her son was already kicking a football. ‘I got organic crumble, real custard, profiteroles and crème fraîche. And organic hot cross buns, just in case.’

‘In case of what,’ Jo laughed. ‘Famine? Apocalypse? Terrorist attack? We’ve got enough food here to feed the entire street.’

Mona’s inedible cooking was the stuff of myth. Since no one could remember ever tasting it, Jo suspected the myth was urban, created by Mona to avoid having to do any. Like Jo’s brother’s famously crap washing-up.

Dumping her coat on the back of a chair, to reveal an embroidered smock over narrow dark jeans and ankle boots, Mona began emptying the contents of her carrier bags into the fridge.

‘What needs doing? More coffee?’ The others shook their heads but Mona filled the kettle anyway. ‘Peel spuds then?’ she offered, and took up position at the sink overlooking the back garden.

For a few minutes the three women worked in companionable silence, Lizzie salting the pork for crackling and slicing apples for apple sauce, Jo chopping nuts for nut roast and Mona peeling a mountain of King Edwards. Bags of carrots, parsnips and broccoli were lined up beside her.

‘Is it me,’ Mona said suddenly, ‘or is this weird?’

‘Is what weird?’ Lizzie said. Her tone made it clear she wished Mona hadn’t put the thought into words.

‘This . . . the three of us preparing Sunday lunch in Nicci’s kitchen, as if nothing’s changed. David and Si and Dan in the garden, Gerry . . .’ Mona frowned. ‘Where’s Gerry?’

‘Rugby. Be here later.’ Lizzie didn’t look up from slicing apples, but Jo noticed her back tense in preparation for the Gerry-related onslaught. Nicci might be gone but clearly Lizzie didn’t think that was about to change.

Jo loved Lizzie. She just wished Lizzie had married someone different. Someone who deserved her.

Mona opened her mouth to say something – probably exactly what Jo was thinking. Jo shot her a warning glance. Back off, she mouthed.

‘It’s you,’ Lizzie said testily. Mona looked at Jo and raised her eyebrows so they vanished into her hair. It was her party trick. Jo stifled a giggle.

‘It’s me what?’

‘You said, is it me or is this weird? It’s you.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Reckon,’ Lizzie snapped. ‘We’re old friends having Sunday lunch together. What’s wrong with that?’

‘You know what Mona means,’ Jo said gently. Where was this coming from? Lizzie was normally resident peacemaker, the one smoothing the sheets and making the tea, not the one lobbing rocks. Maybe Nicci’s spirit was lurking around, hiding roasting tins and making trouble.

‘Come on, Lizzie, you have to admit, it is a bit weird,’ Jo said. ‘Especially the Mona-David thing.’ She glanced around, double-checking little ears – and big ears – were safely outside. ‘I mean, what are we supposed to do about the letters?’

‘Ignore them, that’s what I plan to do,’ Mona banged the potato peeler on the worktop. ‘It’s just another of Nicci’s mad schemes.’ She raised her eyes to heaven, and Jo could have sworn that if Mona had been Catholic she’d have crossed herself.

‘We don’t have to do it.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ Lizzie sounded thoughtful. ‘I feel like we do.’

‘Lizzie!’ Mona said. ‘All you’ve got is a bit of gardening! If Nicci has her way, I have to, well, you know . . . with David!’

‘Mo . . .’ said Jo, but Mona was in full swing.

‘C’mon, Lizzie. Admit it, you got away light.’

‘It might be just a bit of gardening to you,’ Lizzie said tightly, ‘but Nicci knew I can’t even grow a weed! And have you looked out there? It’s a wilderness. How can I get it looking right for David, for Harrie and Charlie?’

Jo and Mona followed Lizzie’s gaze.

It wasn’t strictly true. Although Jo had to admit she’d seen Nicci’s garden in better shape. Not that she could remember even noticing the garden since last September, when Nicci had sat her down in this kitchen, put a large glass of red wine in front of her and told Jo she had cancer.

Since then, the leaves shed in autumn had been swept aside, but not cleared, and were mouldering on the flower-beds. Occasional spring bulbs had fought their way through, but their leaves were straggly as if, with no one to appreciate their efforts, they’d given up trying. Even Nicci’s beloved vegetable patch beyond the apple tree was little more than mud and blown-over runner bean tepees.