The last piece, p.23
The Last Piece, page 23
She flopped down on a chair, her face drawn. ‘How do you do this being-pregnant thing over and over again, Lils? I’m knackered, and I’ve only got me to worry about.’
Lily gave a modest little shrug.
‘Thank your lucky stars that you’re not carrying twins, Julia,’ her mother said, and she gave Lily a conspiratorial little wink.
‘Well, there is that,’ Julia agreed. ‘So, Fliss said that she and Marnie got on well yesterday, so that’s good. Hopefully she’ll have built us some bridges. It was all a bit awkward on Sunday.’
Bearing in mind how fragile their mother was, Lily didn’t want the conversation to slip into another character assassination of Marnie. ‘We were just saying how hard it must have been for her,’ she said. ‘But hopefully it’ll be easier today, and meeting Fliss is bound to have helped.’
Julia opened her mouth to speak, but Lily knew exactly what she was going to say and hushed her with a glance. Julia closed her mouth. And then the door opened again.
‘They’re here,’ said their mother, leaping to her feet and smoothing her skirt with the flat of her hand. She looked so uncharacteristically anxious, Lily thought, and just for a moment she felt a flicker of resentment towards Marnie; but she shook it away. It wouldn’t help.
‘Shall we sit in here?’ her mother asked in a low voice. ‘Your father’s in the sitting room and anyway it feels a bit cosier in here somehow. Would you put the kettle on please, Lily? Julia, you stay where you are. You look exhausted.’
Julia smiled gratefully, and Lily busied herself with cups and teapots.
Then the door opened and in came Felicity with Marnie close behind. They looked so alike, Lily thought, although Marnie looked a good deal more than twelve years older than Felicity. Where Felicity’s dark hair shone in glossy waves, Marnie’s was frizzy and unstyled. She also wore no make-up. There were broken veins on her cheeks and deep grooves running from nose to mouth and around her eyes where Felicity had only slight creases, expertly disguised by foundation and highlighter. Marnie’s was the face of someone whose life had been a challenge which was, Lily realised now, very much in contrast to the other four Nightingale women.
Their mother went straight over and moved to hug her, but Marnie pulled away. It wasn’t a huge gesture but it was enough to stop their mother up short, and instead she just put her hands on Marnie’s shoulders.
‘Welcome, Marnie. So lovely to see you. I hope everything’s been going well at the conference.’
Lily noticed a look that passed between Marnie and Felicity, but Marnie just nodded. ‘Fine thanks.’
‘And you two had a nice time last night?’
This time Marnie nodded rather than replying and so Felicity stepped in to fill the gap. ‘Yep. We had a proper old chinwag, didn’t we? It was great.’
‘Well, sit down, sit down. The kettle’s on. Would you prefer tea or coffee, Marnie?’
Marnie pulled a face that suggested that she’d actually prefer something stronger. ‘Tea,’ she said.
The urge to say ‘please’ for her, as she did with her children, was so strong that Lily had to put her hand across her mouth to stop the word from accidentally escaping.
Then they were all sitting at the table with steaming mugs of tea and a packet of shortbread fanned out on a plate before them. Nobody spoke. Julia, often the person to provide conversational gambits, seemed to have decided that she wasn’t going to oblige this time; she sat, hands curled around her mug, and examined the table top.
Lily finally took the plunge. ‘You mentioned someone called Sofia when you were here before.’
Her mother, grateful to have got things started, leapt on Lily’s words. ‘Oh, Sofia’s lovely,’ she said. ‘I met her at the retreat. She’s so beautiful too, and slim and very bendy with all that yoga. Is she part-Spanish, Marnie?’
Marnie nodded her head. ‘Seville,’ she said, as if that were the answer to everything about Sofia.
‘And you two work together?’ Lily pressed on.
‘Yes. And sleep together.’
She said it so bluntly, as if challenging Lily to criticise her, and it took Lily by surprise. All she could manage at first was a crisp ‘Oh!’ She hoped that she didn’t sound all narrow-minded and suburban, because she really wasn’t; it was just that she hadn’t been expecting such a bare reference to Marnie’s sex life. It wasn’t how conversations generally progressed in her world. And then she added, ‘That’s lovely,’ which she suspected actually made things worse. She could feel her cheeks burning. ‘And whereabouts in London are you?’ she managed, to move things on.
‘Finsbury Park,’ replied Marnie.
Lily was generally good at chatting with strangers. It was one of the very few things that she thought she did well, but this was like getting blood from a stone. She knew next to nothing about London and she hadn’t even heard of Finsbury Park, let alone what that might say about the pair of them. ‘Is it nice there?’ she asked weakly.
Marnie shrugged. ‘Suits us. It’s nothing flash but it’s handy for Sofia’s studio.’
‘Oh, that’s good then,’ Lily replied. She wished Julia would help out but she seemed determined not to.
‘Do you do yoga too, Marnie?’ their mother asked, and Lily was relieved to be able to step down from the hot seat for a moment.
‘I don’t go to her classes. But I do some. When I get time.’
‘I’ve never really tried yoga,’ said their mother, ‘apart from that class in Greece, but I enjoyed it very much. You go, don’t you, Lily? And didn’t you and Richard both start going once, Fliss?’
The atmosphere shifted very slightly, and Lily saw Julia look up.
Felicity opened her mouth. ‘Yes, but we didn’t go for long,’ she said dismissively.
‘And you won’t be doing any more now that you’ve given him his marching orders, eh Felicity,’ said Marnie.
Confusion leapt from face to face like a forest fire. The only person who didn’t look confused was Marnie, and she was grinning.
Julia put her mug down and straightened her spine. ‘We prescribe yoga a lot at work,’ she said, her tone sharp. ‘It’s good for all kinds of conditions. Back and joint pain, obviously, but also anxiety and other stress-related issues. Meditation and mindfulness, too.’
‘That’s interesting, Julia,’ their mother said, taking Julia’s lead and steadfastly avoiding looking at Felicity. Lily looked, though. Her sister’s cheeks had flushed scarlet and she was biting her bottom lip. Lily glanced down at her sister’s left hand but she had it well hidden beneath the right one.
‘My yoga teacher was telling me about this technique,’ Lily said, also keen to give Felicity time to recover, ‘where you just hold the same pose for five minutes and then move on to the next one. She runs classes by candlelight. It sounds so relaxing. I’m planning to go. I just need to make the time.’
‘Well, you’re so busy with the children, Lily. I don’t know how you find time for anything else,’ their mother said. She looked longingly at Felicity as she spoke, and it was obvious to Lily that all she wanted to do was comfort her. Now was not the moment, though.
‘Did I tell you that I’ve signed up for an upholstery course, Mum?’ Lily added, more to distract her mother than anything else. ‘I’m really looking forward to it.’
‘Not sure why you’d bother,’ said Marnie, ‘when you can clearly afford to buy new stuff rather than just tarting up old.’
Julia bristled. ‘That’s hardly the point, is it?’ she snapped. ‘I think that’s a great idea, Lily,’ she continued more gently. ‘I’ve got that hideous old chair that the cats trashed. You can practise on that if you like. Heaven knows it could do with a new lease of life.’
Lily wasn’t sure how much more of this she could stand. Generally she used the children as a way of escaping situations that she didn’t like, but she couldn’t just run away from this and leave the others to deal with it by themselves.
But then Felicity spoke. ‘So, when are you going back to London?’ she said to Marnie, her face closed and hard. ‘I suppose you could leave at any time, seeing as the conference isn’t actually real.’
Now it was Marnie’s turn to look uncomfortable, but only for a split second. ‘Actually, I’m going tomorrow. It’s been nice, this little wander into the frozen north, but I need to get back to my real life.’
Lily saw a look of panic cross her mother’s face, but then something else replaced it. Resignation, maybe? Sorrow?
‘Well, you must come and visit us again, very soon,’ her mother said. ‘You know where we all are now and our door is always open. You know that, don’t you?’
Marnie looked at her untouched cup of tea and then looked up at their mother. ‘I do,’ she said carefully.
Lily worried about what would come from her mouth next, and she could see Julia sitting a little forward in her seat as if she thought she might have to protect her family from a physical attack.
Marnie was looking straight at their mother as she spoke, as if the rest of them had just faded into the floral wallpaper. ‘It took me a long time to decide that I wanted to find you, Cecily,’ she said. ‘I always knew that I didn’t fit with my adopted mum and dad. I didn’t really match up with their expectations and neither did they with mine. But just replacing them with another set of disappointing parents? I wasn’t sure that that would do me any favours either.’
For a moment, Lily thought that Marnie was going to tar her parents with that same brush, accuse them too of being somehow lacking, but before she could leap in to defend them Marnie continued. Her voice was low but despite the bitterness of her words, Lily couldn’t detect any anger in it.
‘I’ve never felt whole, complete. It’s like some part of me has always been missing. I’ve floated through life not really getting close to anyone. Well, until Sofia, that is. But I wasn’t sure I could march in on someone else’s life, your lives, and expect you to welcome me with open arms. But then I thought, why should it always be me that gets the shitty end of the stick? So I sent that letter. I think I wanted you to be damaged by what you did to me, just like I was. I was looking for some pain, something to prove to me that giving me up hurt you as much as it hurt me. And obviously I needed you to tell me what was so wrong with me that you wanted to give me away in the first place.’
Lily heard her mother start to speak. ‘There was nothing wrong with . . .’ she began, but Marnie put up a hand to silence her.
‘I can see that now,’ she continued. ‘So I’m going home. I’ve seen what I needed to see here.’ She stood up. ‘You have my number, Cecily, so if you really have to get in touch with me for anything then you can.’
Then she strode across the kitchen and out into the hall. Lily heard the front door open and close. And then she was gone.
A stunned silence filled the space as each of them digested what had just been said.
Then Julia spoke. ‘I’m sorry, Mum, but who the hell does she think she is? She drops on us like a bloody atom bomb, does the most damage she possibly can, and then saunters off without a care in the world. Nothing that has happened to her is the fault of any of us. She’s got a chip on her shoulder so big that I’m surprised that she can even stand up straight, but that doesn’t give her the right to come here bandying her accusations around. You were a child when you had her, Mum. A child. And none of it is anything to do with the three of us, so I just don’t get why she needs to be so vile.’
Their mother opened her mouth to speak, but Julia shook her head. ‘No, Mum. Don’t defend her. As far as I’m concerned the whole episode is over, and if I were you I would be thinking along the same lines. Close the book, Mum. Move on.’ She slumped back in her chair as if the effort of giving her speech had drained her entirely.
Lily’s gaze flicked from her mother to her twin and back again, and she was about to say something, although she had no idea what, when her mother spoke. ‘I’m sorry, Julia, but I can’t agree. Just because Marnie looks at the world differently from us doesn’t make her wrong. None of us has the first idea about what she has been through or what it took for her to get in touch with me after all this time. I’m not about to abandon her simply because she has sharp edges to her. She is my daughter. Mine and Ralph’s. I can’t just abandon her.’
‘You did once,’ said Felicity darkly.
Lily gasped. ‘Fliss!’ she said. ‘You can’t say that.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ Felicity continued. ‘It’s all very well, Mum having this attack of conscience now, but the time to do something about this was fifty years ago. I’m afraid the damage has been done and I can see no point wasting any more time or effort in trying to sort it out. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’
Lily looked from her mother to her sister and back again. They were staring at one another. At first their mother looked shocked and upset by what Julia and Felicity had said, but then her face hardened. ‘Neither of you has the first idea what I went through. How could you? You weren’t there and you cannot possibly begin to understand. You don’t even have a child, Julia.’
Julia curled her arm around the swell of her stomach as if she was trying to protect her baby from hearing what was being said.
‘So,’ continued their mother, ‘I don’t know what you think gives you the right to speak like that to me. How Marnie and I deal with this is up to us. Obviously I would prefer that you all got on, but actually it has nothing to do with you, and what you think makes very little difference. I’d like you all to leave now. I want to talk to your father. I’ll see you all at the weekend.’ She stood up and looked, stony-faced, at each of them in turn. She meant it, it seemed.
Lily was horrified. She couldn’t bear arguments and certainly not amongst the four of them – not something like this that was so raw, so personal, so damaging.
Julia pushed her chair back noisily and stood up. ‘Fine,’ she said, her tone cold. ‘If you want to choose her over us then that’s up to you, Mum.’
Their mother seemed to weaken a little at this suggestion and her expression softened. ‘I’m not choosing. It’s just that . . .’
But Julia put up her hand. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I get it. I’ll speak to you soon.’
And then she left the kitchen. Lily heard her go into the sitting room to their father and there was the murmur of low voices.
Lily was torn. Should she stay and make sure her mother was all right, or show solidarity with her twin? And what about Felicity? Had she really kicked Richard out, and why hadn’t she told them? Instead it appeared that she had chosen to share that with Marnie, a woman she barely knew and who had just single-handedly decimated their family.
Lily chose Julia. ‘I’ll ring in the morning, Mum,’ she said as she turned to follow her twin out, but something held her there; she wasn’t quite able to leave.
Felicity had also stood up now and was putting on her jacket. Lily saw her bare ring finger as her hands flashed backwards and forwards. Their mother stepped towards her and made to put her arm around her, but Felicity sidestepped her embrace.
‘Not now, Mum,’ she said simply, and then she too left the room.
‘Oh, Mum,’ said Lily when there were just the two of them left.
A fire was burning behind her mother’s grey eyes and her lips were pursed tightly into a little knot. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Lily,’ she said shortly, and then she turned to put the tea things in the sink. Lily was dismissed.
9
Cecily couldn’t remember ever feeling as angry as she did right then. She had to get out. It was dark and cold but she didn’t care. She couldn’t stand to be in the house for another second.
She grabbed her coat and struggled her arms into it, wrapping a scarf that Lily had knitted for her so tightly around her throat that it might have been a noose.
‘I’m going out,’ she said, without popping her head into the sitting room. Norman would only try to talk her out of it and anyway, she didn’t want any kind of conversation. Not now. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She just wanted to get out.
‘But it’s dark,’ objected Norman. ‘You shouldn’t go out on your own. Would you like me to come with you?’
She could hear him getting to his feet but she didn’t wait. ‘No, thank you,’ she said crisply, and then she left, slamming the front door behind her.
Outside it was dark and so cold that she felt it burn the inside of her chest as she breathed in. She should fasten the coat before she set off, but she worried that Norman would catch her so she let it flap open and headed down the drive with no clear idea of where she was going. At the end of the road she turned right, away from the town and towards the open countryside, took a couple of steps and then turned round and headed down the hill instead. She might be angry, but she felt safer walking towards people rather than away from them. But then again, what she wanted was solitude. She needed time to simmer with her anger and her hurt. She turned round again and went back the way she had come, striding past their gate and out into the night.
How could they have been so unkind and uncaring towards Marnie? She was her daughter and their sister, for God’s sake. Cecily was furious that each one of them, even Lily, seemed to have closed ranks against Marnie and had refused to see her side. Yes, Cecily had to admit that Marnie was proving more difficult to get to know than she had hoped. She didn’t seem to be slotting into the Nightingale family quite as easily in real life as she had done in Cecily’s daydreams, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t belong. Just because she had not embraced them all with open arms and squeals of delight didn’t mean that she had no place amongst them.
If her girls would only stop for a moment and put themselves in Marnie’s shoes, then they would surely be less quick to judge. This was never going to be easy, for any of them, but that was no reason to turn back for port at the first sign of rough seas. She thought she had brought her children up to be more resilient than that.
