Before We Say Goodbye – Chapter One

I knew the moment Lindy opened the door that there’d been a change. Her eyes were several tones paler, the usual warm optimism drained right out of them.

‘What is it?’ I demanded. ‘Oh God, she hasn’t …?’

‘No, not that.’ Her hand was on my elbow, reassuring and ushering in one. ‘But something’s not right, Olivia. She seems to be feeling a lot more pain than usual. I’ve just called for the nurse.’

I barely glanced beyond the herringbone parquet of the hallway before turning left into the ground-floor room where my mother had been cared for these last months. I hardly thought now of the atmosphere that had reigned in the house when Alec was alive, when you’d come through the door and be tugged at once in this direction or that, drawn by a gale of laughter or some sudden whoosh of calamity. Now, in this home-cum-hospital, all voices, all gestures were designed to deter such excitability. Sometimes it felt as if the mood was controlled by a switch.

‘How was the drive?’ Lindy asked me. These days, she paid almost as much attention to my welfare as she did Maggie’s.

‘Fine, it’s always better coming west-’ I started, but was quickly distracted by signs of motion from the patient’s bed. ‘She’s awake?’

‘Olivia … here …’

Now I saw the change in her – or, rather, heard it – for Mum’s voice was not so much a whisper as a shatter, as if the original had been dropped on the floor and broken into a hundred pieces. As a small child I’d felt protected by that voice, by its depth and swell and all-powerful presence; as an older one I’d listened only for its insincerities.

Lindy withdrew, pulling the door shut behind her, and I slipped into the bedside armchair. ‘How are you feeling, Mum? You’re not in too much pain?’

Her right arm, the one not attached to the IV drip, was tucked under the bedclothes but I quickly found the shape of her hand through the linen and gave it the gentlest of squeezes.

‘I’m … alright …’ She didn’t see well now and as she spoke her eyes strained through heavy lids, the skin puffed and discoloured. Despite the deterioration, I seemed to have caught her in one of her urgent, lucid moments, which meant there would be no small talk required of me this evening, none of the commentary of routine events at home that always seemed to offer more comfort to me than it did her.

‘I wanted to say … there are things I feel uncomfortable about …’

‘OK.’ In spite of the circumstances, I couldn’t help smiling at that. ‘Uncomfortable’ was Mum’s word for guilty. She also favoured ‘misguided’, which had the added benefit of passing the buck to someone else (or, better still, to some other, higher power).

‘You and him … I shouldn’t …’

But each word was rasped so painfully that I couldn’t bear to let her continue.

‘Who? You mean Dean?’ At the thought of my brother my chest tightened and I wished that he was here beside me. For this was surely it, the scene we’d never really believed would come: the big apology. Maggie Lane was finally ready to tell her children she was sorry.

But the voice that spoke next was mine, ‘It’s all right, Mum, you don’t need to say it,’ and we both looked a little surprised at that. It was the kind of platitude that belonged in a movie, and God knew I hadn’t rehearsed it. After all, wasn’t this the plea for forgiveness I’d craved my whole adult life?

The truth was, she didn’t need to say it. Yes, she’d been a difficult parent; yes, she’d let us down, especially Dean, who’d begun as her favourite and had further to fall, but what did her crimes amount to, really? If I broke it down – and I didn’t mean in a court of law, but in my heart – then there was actually just one thing I knew I couldn’t forgive her for, one true betrayal.

And it was a betrayal that I couldn’t even be certain had happened in the first place.

Her hand moved under mine – it had all the strength of a trapped butterfly – and her mouth struggled open once more. ‘No, it’s important I tell you both …’

Again my voice easily smothered her broken efforts. ‘Mum, don’t worry, honestly, it doesn’t matter. And I’m sure Dean feels the same.’ That was an outright lie and I could see his incredulous face in my mind’s eye, his hissed protest in my ear: Why are you letting her off the hook? After all this time! Why, Olivia?

But I wasn’t letting her off the hook, not exactly, for there was still that one unanswered question. Suddenly it burned hot in my throat. If I didn’t expel it I would be suffocated by it. ‘There’s something I need to know,’ I said, in a low, urgent voice. ‘It’s about something that happened a long time ago.’

There was a pause in her breathing and a faint widening of those waterlogged eyes – she had no control of her tear ducts now. Under my hand the butterfly lay quite still. In the silence I became conscious of the sound of water splashing from the taps in the kitchen next door; Lindy filling the kettle. She’d soon be back to offer me coffee.

I leaned closer to Mum’s face. ‘Did you keep us apart? That’s all I want to know.’

She didn’t reply, but I read the guilt in her eyes.

‘Just say it, please. Yes or no?’

The tension between us could almost be smelled, until she at last made an attempt at movement – unmistakably a shake of the head. No. But she was not answering my question, I realised, she was simply feigning confusion.

‘I know you remember!’ I cried, the sound abrupt and violent in the calm of the room. ‘Did it happen like you said it did? Why can’t you just tell me, one way or the other? Don’t you think I deserve that?’

My cry had attracted Lindy and I turned to find her standing just inside the doorway, doing all she could to mask her alarm. Everything about her manner and appearance was gentle, from the slope of her nose to the curl in her auburn hair; I’d come long ago to rely on her as the pacifying antidote to Maggie, just as I’d previously relied on Alec and, in the beginning, Dad. But for once her presence did nothing to soothe me.

‘We were just talking,’ I said, breathlessly. ‘She was answering my question, weren’t you, Mum?’

But she had turned her face away, straining on the pillow to escape me, her throat making a noise like the whimper of an injured animal.

‘Maybe she’s a bit tired for conversation,’ Lindy said, kindly choosing not to point out that a seventy-year-old patient in the middle of a pain management crisis might not be best suited to drama of this sort. And if I weren’t so worked up still, I’d have been mortified to have created such a scene at anyone’s bedside.

‘Why don’t you just sit with her for a while, while she sleeps? She’d like that.’

Indeed, when I turned back, Mum did seem to be slipping into sleep. I couldn’t allow myself to suspect that that was feigned, as well. Now, with no chance to apologise, I felt like the worst kind of bully. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t know the rule – don’t say something you might regret in case you don’t get the chance to take it back – one I had followed assiduously until now.

‘I ought to go,’ I said, rising. ‘You said you’ve got the nurse coming, I don’t want to be in the way.’

Lindy was dismayed. ‘Not yet, surely? You’ve only just got here. Stay and have a cup of tea, at least?’

‘Thank you, but I won’t.’

She watched me leave without further protest. And though she couldn’t possibly have known what had caused this unscheduled bedside flare-up, her eyes let it be known that I had her sympathies.

Often as I drove home alone from my mother’s I would see her face in the windscreen in front of me, crushed and cold, like a reproach, though a reproach for what I was never quite sure. For having left her house so soon (I was in the habit of keeping visits short where I could so as not to disrupt my family’s schedule too much)? Or for not having forgiven her her faults, when this was so obviously the proper thing to do, the right time to do it? Well, tonight I’d at least got halfway there. You don’t need to say it. Before I’d gone and ruined it with all that sourness.

But this evening it was a different Maggie Lane who appeared in front of me as I drove: it was the full-powered original, the ringmaster with the bright, all-seeing eyes. There were voices, too, beginning with my own, decades younger and painfully shrill: ‘I need to know, did you make it up? Did he really do it?’ And then my father’s, puzzled and anxious: ‘What’s she saying? What does she mean?’ Last came Maggie’s reply, full of false tenderness: ‘I think she must be hallucinating or something, poor love. We’d better talk to the doctor in the morning.’

I blinked the face away, my thoughts returning to the scene that had just passed. There were no two ways about it: I was in the wrong. A dying woman had been trying to make amends and I’d interrupted her, allowing old feelings of rivalry to rise at exactly the point where she couldn’t be expected to fight her corner. Fight? She could scarcely speak! Well, I’d be the one to make amends tomorrow. I’d come back and I’d listen to whatever it was she wanted to tell me, however long it took. I’d let her be the judge of what needed to be said. As for my own question, the one that still had the power to keep my life in a suspended sentence, well, she hadn’t answered it the first time and I had to accept that she wasn’t going to answer it now.

On the passenger seat beside me, my phone was ringing. I pulled over at the next service station and checked the display: MISSED CALL: LINDY. Still with the engine running, I dialled.

‘Olivia, I’m so sorry, but is there any chance you could come back tonight? She’s woken up and is asking for you.’

‘I’m almost in London,’ I said, sighing.

‘It’s just that she’s quite distressed.’

Lindy never did this; she had to consider it exceptional. The problem was that my body was heavy as lead and I wasn’t sure I could find the strength to finish the journey in either direction. Home was closer. ‘I need to see the boys,’ I said, at last. ‘Why don’t I come back in the morning? And Lindy, I’m really sorry if I upset her earlier. I didn’t mean to, I just …’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said, hushing my distress. ‘There’s no knowing how she’s going to react at any given time, we all know that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Tomorrow then,’ Lindy said. ‘Can I tell her you’ll be here in the morning?’

‘Yes. I’ll set off as soon as the boys have left for school.’

I told myself afterwards that there was no way I could have known that was the night Maggie would succumb to her last – and fatal – haemorrhage. It happened in her sleep, an eventuality Lindy described as ‘merciful’.

I told myself there was nothing to feel guilty about, that that was not what she would have wanted.

The problem was, with Mum, you never knew.