Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [69]
She looked a little surprised at her own outburst.
“Now listen to me prattling on. You haven’t come all this way to hear me moaning, have you, love?”
She filled the pot with boiling water and carried it over to the kitchen table, with a couple of mugs and a bottle of milk from the fridge.
“How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
Kathleen poured the tea and pushed a mug Jennifer’s way.
“And your stepdad, your sisters? How are they doing?”
“Mark’s okay, I think. He’s thrown himself into work, as the expression goes, keeping himself busy, I think. Hannah’s better than the rest of us, I reckon. She misses Mum a lot, obviously, but she lived with her, and I think we all underestimated, maybe, how difficult that was for her, for all those months. She is definitely a bit relieved, too, and I don’t blame her for that. Those last bits were pretty ghastly. They’re looking after each other—it’s nice to see. They’re very close. Lisa’s around a lot lately. Mand is in and out of our lives, like she always was, but she seems okay. We’re all okay. You have to be, don’t you?”
Kathleen peered at her closely. “You’re not. And you don’t have to be. I was nearly forty-five years old when my mum died. Practically middle-aged myself. I had my three kids, my own home. Hadn’t lived with her for more than twenty years. I cried like a baby, for months, every chance I got, when she died. Mad, isn’t it? Took me a long time to stop missing her. I still do. I used to tell her everything—even when we didn’t see each other—we’d talk on the phone. Brian would make such a stink about the phone bill. But I told him talking to her was my only hobby and that if he didn’t like it, we could get her to move in, so I could talk to her in person. Funnily enough, he stopped going on about the bill after that. Brian, the kids, work, money—I’d talk to her about everything. Then all of a sudden I couldn’t do it anymore. She never lost her marbles or anything, you see. She wasn’t even that old. Sixty-eight—that’s nothing these days, is it? It was a major stroke that killed her. Just like that. She was sharp as a tack until the very last and the next day she was gone.”
She put her hand across Jennifer’s on the table. “At least, with your mum, ghastly though it was, you had the chance to say what you wanted to say to her, you know, before it was too late.”
BARBARA HAD BEEN IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR THE last four or five days before she died. The morphine pump was keeping her pain under control, but it was also making her sleep. Someone sat with her all the time during the day, holding her hand, and at night, Mark shut the door on them all and climbed into bed beside her. No one ever knew, nor should they, what passed between the husband and wife on those long nights. Mark looked exhausted. His hair was too long, and he shaved only when he appeared to remember, which was not daily. His eyes were sunken into dark patches, and they were washed red—the sure sign of a person who cried when he was on his own. The windows were open, and the curtains stirred in the breeze. You could hear life, outside. By mutual agreement they kept the radio on in the room, all the time—very quietly. She liked it, she said. It marked the passage of time. Mostly it was Radio 4, with Woman’s Hour and the Archers and Loose Ends. Sometimes they changed it to Radio 2 so she could hear Terry Wogan’s breakfast show, if she was still listening. It reminded Jennifer of her childhood, sitting at the kitchen table eating Rice Krispies. Could he really still be doing it after all these years?