Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [42]
“And the matriarch of all this?” Amanda had forgotten that he didn’t know.
“My mum died. Last summer.”
“Fuck.”
Amanda laughed. That was an honest response. She hated the people whose eyes glazed over with pity as they immediately started apologizing, as though her mother’s death were in some way connected to them. What could you say to that?
“Fuck indeed. She had cancer. Of course. She was sixty years old.”
“What was she like?” She loved him, really loved him then, for an instant. This, this was easier.
“She was…she was amazing. She was larger than life—you know? Lots of people say that about lots of people, but it’s true of relatively few, I find. It was true of her. She was loud and funny and irreverent and wicked, and contagiously happy, and the most loving person you could ever know, and she was fierce about us, passionate about us…and…and…” Amanda wasn’t, for once, horrified at her own tears. It was okay. “…and I miss her. I wasn’t there when she died, because I’m cowardly and stubborn and selfish, and I should have been, I should have been there, with her and with all the others and it’s really, it’s really come back and bitten me in the arse, you know, since. I wish I had been there.”
“To say good-bye?”
She nodded, tears rolling now, down her cheek and into the gravy plate in front of her. Ed had a handkerchief. How old-fashioned and wonderful of him. He pulled it out of his pocket and pressed it into her hand, and she dabbed at her face with it.
“To say good-bye.”
For a while, he just held her, which was all that she wanted. When she had composed herself a little, she sat back, and blew her nose. “Sorry. S’pose you don’t particularly want that back now?” He winked, and shook his head. She crumpled the handkerchief and shoved it into her pocket.
“She left a kind of journal. Things she’d been writing, on and off, from the time she was first diagnosed. Thoughts and stories and stuff. Things she wanted us to know, I suppose. And we all got these letters. She left these letters for each of us.”
“What did yours say?” From anyone else, that might have been an intrusive question. From Ed, it didn’t seem to be.
“I haven’t read mine.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. He was the only person in the world who knew she hadn’t opened it. She carried it everywhere—it was with her right now, in her bag, tucked into the front of her diary. “I’m afraid to.”
“Why?”
“I’m afraid that she was angry with me, at the end.”
“Because you weren’t there?”
She nodded slowly.
Ed leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table. When he spoke, his voice was gentle and slow.
“I didn’t know your mother, of course. Sounds like I missed out there. But I very much doubt that someone—someone’s mother—would go to all the trouble of writing a deathbed letter simply to give someone a bollocking from beyond the grave. Particularly the mother you just described. To the daughter I’m just beginning to get to know.”
Amanda smiled at him, grateful as a child being told of course there’s a Santa Claus.
“You think?”
He nodded. “I think.”
The bell rang. The landlord was looking specifically at them. Since the pub was empty.
“I also think we should leave now….”
THE STREET OUTSIDE WAS DESERTED. IT WAS STILL COLD, AND their faces, which had been turned red and hot by the fire, were stung by it. Ed put his arm around her and pulled her toward him.
“Will you stay tonight?”
She was a little taken aback. She realized she hadn’t for a moment considered doing anything else. A tiny seed of doubt sprang up in her head. Did he want her to stay?
“Is that okay?”
He kissed her, hard. “That is so much more than okay. I don’t think I’d let you leave, matter of fact. I may never let you leave…”
It was probably just talk. But it felt really good.
That second night was less Judith Krantz,