One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [148]
‘Biba, wash your hands and face. You’ve got mud all over you from the dogs. Seffy, wake your grandmother. Tell her all’s well and that we’re going to the pub.’
Lunch was originally to have been in the little lodge in the woods where two ladies from the village would have been ready and waiting with shepherd’s pies, a trestle table laid for the jolly shooting party, carafes of wine. But Hugh would have rung ahead and cancelled, so now, here was Dad making alternative arrangements: buoying everyone up, restoring equilibrium.
‘What about Maggie, is she still here? Go tell her to come.’
‘No, I saw her go,’ Biba was saying, washing her hands at the sink. ‘She asked me to thank Mummy. Said she didn’t want to be in the way. I think she’s gone back to London with Kit.’
‘Kit! Our man of God. The one we might have needed in a crisis. Jumping ship.’
‘I’m sure he just didn’t want to be in the way, Grandpa.’
‘I’m joking, my sweet. Kit would be here if we’d needed him, but he doesn’t like to lurk portentously in his cassock at such moments. And I don’t blame him. Oh, look – here’s your grandmother.’
More hugging and exclaiming as Mum appeared, looking slightly creased and dishevelled, but the light had returned to her eyes.
‘So relieved,’ she kept saying quietly as she was embraced. ‘So relieved.’
Biba found her handbag for her, and someone else – Seffy – popped back upstairs for her shoes, which she’d left in the bedroom: ‘By the bedside table, I think, darling.’
I watched him go, marvelling at how normal he looked. But then, he hadn’t just had his life turned upside down. That was my province.
Mum sat at the table and got her compact out, powdered her nose. Then she popped some lipstick on, listening as everyone chattered around her, as Laura and Dad told her how Luca had said a few words, was conscious, had squeezed Hugh’s hand, was really quite compos mentis. At length she smiled; stood up.
‘Right!’ She snapped her handbag decisively and hung it over her arm. ‘Well, I for one need a very large gin and tonic. Are we off?’
They were. Trooping out to the car, talking excitedly. Dad was saying that Laura had texted him, that she and Daisy were going to come on from the hospital, meet them at the pub. Hugh would stay with Luca, and Laura go back after lunch to relieve him. It was all arranged. All organized through the miracles of modern science, he said waving his mobile incredulously, the technological powers of which never ceased to astound him.
‘Coming, Hattie?’ he turned.
I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. ‘Um would you mind if I didn’t, Dad?’
‘Not at all,’ he said, quick as a flash, catching something in my voice.
‘I think I’d just like to be on my own for a bit. Might go for a walk.’
‘A splendid idea, very restorative. But we need you, Hal. You’re our driver. I can’t work that damn Land Rover of Hugh’s and my little Datsun hasn’t got belts for all these good people. Would you oblige?’
Hal hesitated, then: ‘Of course,’ he said politely, for what could he do but agree to transport everyone in his much larger estate car? Only the set of his shoulders betrayed the fact that this hadn’t been in the script.
Out they went. I watched them go from the window, wondering how it was that my father could do that: know instantly that, for some reason, I needed some space – from Hal too, I realized guiltily – and then achieve it for me, with no questions asked, no enquiring looks, even. And none later either. He’d wait. Bide his time. And then be silent as I told him, as he always was. Never butted in with questions, knew how to listen. But what a story. I’d be changed for ever in his eyes. I shrank from that. Knew I’d be changed in everyone’s eyes, but my dad’s, after Seffy’s, I feared the most. Would it be too much for him, I wondered. Would it – not kill him – but age him, considerably, to know what I’d done?
The demons were huge again now, that growth bulging to life in my head, popping up with its leaping veins,