The front door slammed and Lily called out Phoebe’s name only to be greeted by silence.
She walked out of the bedroom, down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of water, hoping to flush herself clean of memories. But as she stood alone, looking out of the window into the darkness, Lily acquiesced to the bitter regret that she had not known all those years ago, lying in bed just the two of them, that all her efforts to protect her little sister would be in vain.
Chapter 4
Audrey
Audrey sipped her cup of tea and drew the curtains against the faded light. She looked around the room: only half a dozen boxes to go. Tearing off parcel tape from the box at her feet, she found her jewellery, perfumes and various trinkets, none of which she felt inclined to unpack. She opened the packing crate next to it, wedged between the dressing table and the wardrobe. Inside were dozens of diaries in a rainbow of colours, their hardback spines cracked and fraying.
She had always kept a diary, ever since her tenth birthday. Audrey could picture it now, the bright blue journal her mum had given her the day she’d entered double figures, all those clean white pages waiting to be filled with her hopes, fears, disappointments and dreams.
She picked one up at random.
1969. The year she’d turned sixteen.
As she flicked through the pages, nostalgia leaped out at her in sprawling blue biro. There was her unmistakable looped handwriting, plump and eager, as though the letters were yet to lose their childhood puppy fat. And then the sight of a particular date caused her to pause.
9 December 1969. Her sixteenth birthday.
She smoothed her palm over the page and then held the two corners between her fingers as if handling a prayer book, before allowing her eyes to cast down onto the writing below.
Had the best birthday. School was nothing special except Sandra and Val had clubbed together to get me a brooch we’d all been eyeing up in Woolworths last weekend, which I wanted to put on straight away, but I knew Mr Gibbons would just confiscate it if I did.
When I got home, Mum and Dad were in the kitchen, waiting for me. I don’t know how Dad managed to get out of the factory early because they never let you out early for anything, but when I asked him, Dad just winked and said he’d told his foreman it was a very special occasion. Mum had cooked a steak and kidney pie for tea and she’d bought some white paper doilies to put the plates on so it all looked really pretty. And then they gave me my present, which was the best present ever – Nina Simone’s Silk & Soul. I’ve been listening to it loads round at Sandra’s house, but I never thought I’d have a copy of my own. Then Mum brought out a gigantic Victoria sponge she’d made and Dad reminded me to make a wish when I blew out the candles. I wished I’d get good enough O-level results to stay on at school for A-levels, and that I’d get good enough A-level grades for university, even though you can count on one hand the people from our school who’ve gone to university, and Mr Gibbons is always pointing out that not a single one of those has ever been a girl. And I wished that one day I might get to sing on a stage like Nina Simone or Aretha Franklin, and that when I’m older I’ll go to America because New York is the city I most want to see.
After I’d eaten two slices of cake Mum said I didn’t have to help clear up the dishes because it was my birthday, so Dad and I sat in the front room listening to Nina Simone and while I was singing along to ‘The Look of Love’, Dad reached over and squeezed my hand and said I was every bit as good a singer as Nina Simone. I laughed and told him he was being daft, but I couldn’t help hoping that maybe there was a tiny bit of truth in it and that perhaps one day I might actually get to sing on a stage.
Now I’m lying on my bed, thinking about the fact that it’s true what people say – you do feel different when you’re sixteen. Before today I felt as though everything was fixed, as though my entire life had already been decided for me. But now I feel as though the whole world is out there waiting for me, just as long as I’m brave enough to go out and grab it.
Audrey read the extract three times, her hands shaking. She remembered writing that entry as if it were yesterday: lying on her bed, diary propped up on the pillow, pen in hand and feet crossed at the ankles, the voices of contestants on Call My Bluff filtering through the flat’s thin partition wall from the sitting room next door.
Where, she wondered, had that optimistic sixteen-year-old girl gone? What had happened to her hopes and dreams, her belief that anything was possible? When had her aspirations evaporated?
Audrey scanned the diary entry again, cataloguing the ways in which she’d let down her sixteen-year-old self. She had no university degree, nothing to service the promise of her A-level results. She’d never been to New York, hadn’t managed any international travel beyond the occasional family camping holiday to France. She’d never sung on a stage, in America or anywhere else. Instead she’d spent her life as a wife, a mother and a school librarian, and as much as she’d enjoyed her job, there was no deluding herself that her career had set the world alight.
Staring at the diary, Audrey felt as though somewhere in those pages were the answers to questions she wasn’t yet able to articulate. There seemed to be such an immeasurable distance between the life she had imagined for herself and the life she had led.
How, Audrey thought, do you get to the end of your life and feel as though you’ve barely begun?
There were so many things Audrey would change were she afforded a second chance. But that wasn’t how life worked, she knew that. She’d had her chances and now it was too late. The lump in her breast had made certain of that.
Perhaps, with treatment, she might have been able to extend the time her consultant had predicted she had left. Perhaps she might survive twenty-two months, or twenty-four, rather than the eighteen months she had been given. But Audrey had her reasons for refusing chemotherapy and no amount of cajoling – by Lily, Jess, her granddaughters or her consultant – would persuade her to change her mind.
Audrey closed the diary and clutched it to her chest. It was too late to repair so many of the things in her life that had been broken: Edward’s untimely death; the grief they had all suffered; the estrangement between Lily and Jess she had been unable to heal. Audrey no longer knew if she accepted her daughters’ rift as the status quo or was wary of probing too deeply for fear of what she might discover at its root.
She picked up the photograph of her girls on Woolacombe Beach. She knew she couldn’t wave a magic wand and bring back loved ones she had lost or undo anyone’s pain. But as she looked again at her daughters’ smiles – their happiness untainted by events that would devastate their lives less than two years after that picture had been taken – she was aware of her heartbeat accelerating, and a quiet determination slipping between her ribs.
If she had eighteen months left to live then she had eighteen months to uncover the cause of Jess’s animosity towards Lily.
‘Granny! Dinner’s nearly ready. Mum says she’ll be home in ten minutes.’
Audrey placed the photograph on her bedside table, understanding for the first time why she had chosen to move in with Jess rather than Lily: this was her chance to get close to Jess, to find out the reason for her unhappiness. This was her chance to put her family back together.
As she walked out of the bedroom and onto the landing, Audrey called down the stairs to her granddaughter below. ‘OK, darling. I’m coming. I’m ready now.’
Part Two
March
Chapter 5
Audrey