As Audrey reached the end of her solo she realised that this was it: this was how it felt to be free.
She sang her final line and then her solo was over and the rest of the choir were joining in. Her head felt light, her legs weak and her palms damp, as though her body was only now recognising the magnitude of what she’d done. But now that she had, all Audrey could think was that she wanted to do it again. She wanted to turn back the clock sixty seconds to the moment the pianist had struck those first two iconic chords, to relive every single note in the knowledge of how quickly they would pass.
Singing along with the rest of the choir, Audrey looked out into the audience. She could see people smiling in the front rows, could hear a note of optimism reverberate around the hall.
Then the song came to an end and there was a fragment of silence, a splinter of time in which anything seemed possible. And then the silence was shattered by a sound so thunderous Audrey almost clamped her hands over her ears. Not just the noise but the feel of it: an eruption of applause that vibrated through the soles of her feet.
Audrey turned to see Phoebe two rows behind her, flushed and beaming. And then she felt someone taking hold of her hand and she turned to find Ben leading her towards the front of the stage, gesturing for her to stand there, alone.
Hands clasped behind her back, Audrey stood listening to the applause before bending her head in an unrehearsed bow. When she straightened up again, it took her a few seconds to understand why the audience looked different: closer, bigger. They were on their feet, not just clapping but cheering.
She turned around, in need of a cue from Ben as to what she should do next, but when she looked behind her, Ben and the rest of the chorus were applauding her too.
Audrey beamed at the audience, savouring every second.
And in that moment she didn’t think about the fact that her life was going to end so much sooner than she wished. She didn’t think about the grains of sand slipping through the hourglass, nor that she had had to wait so long to experience something like this. What mattered to Audrey as she took her fourth and final bow was the incontrovertible knowledge that even at her age – even this close to the end – life still had the capacity to surprise her.
Chapter 42
Jess
‘Did you know Granny could sing like that?’
Jess looked at Mia over the top of her menu. Around them, waiters delivered pizzas, salads, bottles of wine and jugs of water to neighbouring tables, the restaurant noisy with Saturday night concert-goers.
She closed the menu, not feeling hungry. She had known she wouldn’t be at ten o’clock on a Saturday night, but Mia had been so keen for them to have dinner together that they were seated in one of the restaurants inside the Royal Albert Hall, waiting for her mum to join them.
‘Not really. Having heard her tonight, I remember her singing to us when I was little, but I don’t think I’ve heard her sing since I was a child.’ Jess thought back to all those lonely nights she had lain on the bottom bunk, Zoe having moved into the spare room next door as soon as she’d got ill, listening through the wall to her mum singing ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ or ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. On days when Zoe was well enough, in the weeks she was allowed home from the hospital during the fourteen months of her illness, their dad would carry her downstairs and they would make up a bed for her on the sofa. Jess would slip under the far end of the duvet, careful not to take up too much space or sit on her twin’s spindly legs, and together they would watch The Wizard of Oz for the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth time. Zoe would laugh at the Tin Man, shout at the Cowardly Lion and tell Jess not to be silly when she got scared of the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys. And no matter how many times the two of them watched it together, the same thought always went through Jess’s mind: that perhaps somewhere at the end of a rainbow was a pot of gold that could make her sister well again.
A thought skittered through Jess’s head, a thought so familiar it ought not to have hurt as much as it did: the question of what Zoe might have done with her life had she lived. And the same answer was waiting for her as it always was: that funny, fearless, spirited Zoe would have achieved so much more than Jess ever had. Sometimes Jess couldn’t help feeling that when the egg had divided in two, the wrong half had been given the faulty cells.
‘I can’t wait to watch the whole concert back on TV. I hope they did a close-up of Granny during her solo. They probably did, didn’t they?’
Jess was about to reply when, over Mia’s shoulder, she saw her mum walk through the doorway to the restaurant. She was about to stand and wave when she registered two figures following closely behind, a sight that caused her stomach to twist into knots.
‘For God’s sake, what are they doing here? What’s Mum playing at? Mia, get your things, we can’t stay.’
Jess rose to her feet and grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair as her mum, Lily and Phoebe crossed the room towards them. She turned to Mia in preparation to leave. ‘Mia, didn’t you hear me? We’re leaving. I can’t believe Mum has done this. What on earth is she thinking?’
Mia stood up. But instead of picking up her bag and edging away from the table, she turned to the trio walking towards them and waved. And all at once Jess realised she’d been duped.
Chapter 43
Lily
It was too late to turn back. Lily glanced at her mum and saw in her face a quiet determination. She looked across the restaurant to where Jess was grabbing her bag from underneath the table, felt time stretch as though it knew, before the next second struck, that she had to make a decision.
She looked again at her mum, saw the naked desire to fix what was broken. And then she was following her mum and Phoebe through the thoroughfare of tables to where Jess was standing with her jacket draped over her arm, her face stony with rage or hatred, Lily wasn’t sure which.
‘Why are you doing this, Mum?’
It was strange how one forgot. How time or self-preservation eroded the memory of Jess’s brusqueness: the accusatory tone and the clipped consonants.
Lily looked at Jess, unsure whether she wanted her sister to meet her gaze or not. She remembered all those times after Zoe’s death that Jess had left the room whenever Lily had entered, when her questions had been met with monosyllabic answers. She thought about all the occasions she had apologised to Jess without knowing what she was supposed to have done wrong. All the times she had wished – for their mum’s sake, if no one else’s – that Jess could cast off her anger, like a caterpillar shedding its skin. Mostly what Lily thought as she stood opposite her sister, feeling the heat of Jess’s rage, was that she wished she could turn back the clock twenty-eight years to the morning she had stood on the landing with her hand on the doorknob to the spare bedroom, and choose not to go inside.
‘I’m just doing what I should have done years ago, Jess. I’m trying to make things better.’
Chapter 44
Audrey
As she waited to see how Lily and Jess might react, Audrey imagined what the scene might look like now if there were three daughters standing opposite her rather than two. Whether all three might be smiling, rather than one looking thunderous and the other wary. Whether there might be more grandchildren to join Mia and Phoebe, chatting among themselves, rather than looking on anxiously to see how the adults might next choose to make a mess of their family.