All the thoughts she skirted away from, shoving them ruthlessly away, were flooding back now. Back to the source. The last year of her mother’s life.
In some ways those eleven months had been wonderful. Margot deferred her fashion degree for a year, hopeful that by that time, Judy would be better and the gnawing fear that clawed at Margot’s stomach would be a thing of the past.
They spent all their time together. Yes, there was the relentless monotony of hospital appointments and chemo sessions, but Judy also wanted to set Margot up for the rest of her life: she taught her how to make a béchamel sauce, how to change a plug, how to weed out the good men from the bad.
Then when the drugs didn’t work and diagnosis became prognosis, and treatment became palliative, Judy didn’t fight on. She didn’t decide to spend the last months of her wild and precious life ticking off items on a bucket list or reserving her strength. Instead she cleared out the house in Gospel Oak so Margot wouldn’t have to do it, then sold it. Sorted out pensions and investments. Dealt with solicitors and accountants and estate agents.
It was why Margot didn’t think she’d ever move, because her mother had seen her flat, had come to view it in between the last chemo appointment and going into the hospice. ‘Yes, I think you’ll be very happy here, Margot. Very happy indeed,’ she’d said, her smile shot through with relief that she’d done right by her daughter; had done everything in what was left of her rapidly depleting power to ensure that Margot would somehow cope without her.
She’d done all that for Margot and how had Margot repaid her? Margot was still standing outside the clinic, letting herself be buffeted by the merciless, hurrying Londoners pushing past her as she shied away from the memory of her mother’s last weeks in the house in Gospel Oak before they moved out; Margot to the flat in Highgate and new beginnings, Judy to the hospice and the inevitable end. Those long, endless nights, separated from her mother by a wall and her own cowardice. She’d done something so awful that the shame of it made her shiver despite the sultry heat of high summer.
Margot would much rather think about her own uncertain present and future than the sickening secrets of her past. And what if she wasn’t destined for longevity either? What if she ended up having children in her forties like her own mother, then left them before they’d grown up, before they’d had a chance to become the people they were meant to be?
When Margot thought of it like that, and she thought about it more and more often, then she might be better off not having children at all.
On the bus back into work, Margot concentrated really hard on not crying, on pushing down the fear again, the bitter bad memories. She was ready for them on birthdays, significant anniversaries, but they always managed to take her by surprise when she was at her most vulnerable. That last year. That awful, terrible, devastating year. Margot brushed back the single tear that had dared to fall and by the time she reached Ivy+Pearl she was dry-eyed. She felt shell-shocked and could barely blink at the news that the internet was down.
‘Is it?’ she asked without any interest.
‘It is,’ Tansy shouted from her office. ‘Bloody Blossom chewed through the cable of the router.’
That shocked a gasp out of Margot. She’d left Blossom at work – she could hardly ask Will to look after her – knowing that Blossom was always a model employee.
‘Are you sure it was Blossom? Maybe we have mice,’ Margot said aghast. ‘I can’t believe you’d accuse Blossom. She never chews anything she shouldn’t.’
‘Caught her red-handed,’ Derek said. ‘Or red-pawed. Then I put her in a timeout in your office and she howled the place down.’
Blossom acting out? She wouldn’t even look at Margot, but made a big show of turning her back on her devoted owner and doing one of her unsettlingly human huffs of annoyance. As if it were Margot who was in the wrong.
It was the last thing that Margot needed. But was it any wonder that Blossom was acting out of character when her routine, her happy little life had been completely disrupted?
It was time for Margot to get her house in order.
40
Will
‘You’ve got a face like a wet weekend in Wigan,’ Mary said on Thursday afternoon when Will got back from ‘touching base offline’ with Josh from Blue Sky Solutions. ‘Was it a bad meeting?’
‘It was all right,’ Will assured her, but Mary also had a face like inclement weather had ruined a mini break in the Greater Manchester area.
‘So, you’re leaving us then?’ She was in the back room of the shop and steadied herself on the worktop as if the prospect of Will’s imminent departure had left her light-headed.
Will shook his head. ‘No. I’m not leaving. I told him that I was interested in doing no more than thirty hours of consultancy work a month, I wouldn’t work with any arseholes, then I wrote my hourly rate down on a piece of paper, added another nought to it, but he didn’t seem that phased by the figure and said he’d be in touch.’
‘Thirty hours a month is a lot . . .’
‘It’s four days . . .’
Mary sighed. ‘But you have to do what makes you happy. Are you happy?’
Will grunted in response. He was far from happy. It was Margot’s week. Because it seemed that they were back to simply being two people who shared a dog. No more walks together. No more hanging out together. No more holding her in the dark still of the night. No more sharing each other’s secrets. Would there be a brief, terse handover every Sunday?
He looked up to see Mary giving him an assessing glance as if he were a bunch of flowers on the turn and destined for the half-price bucket. ‘Well, I’ll be happy if you can give me a lift home in the van. Marek from across the road is picking it up for its MOT in the morning.’
‘Why can’t Marek pick it up from the mews?’ Will asked, but got a scowl by way of a reply.
Mary didn’t say anything else until she was getting out of the van. ‘Come in a second, I want to show you something.’
There was obviously some minor household repair that needed Will’s attention while Ian was cycling to Paris for charity. The day before last it had been a colour-fast sheet caught in the washing machine pump. Will followed Mary up the garden path. Now that it was June, the wisteria bush that climbed up the outside of the house was in full bloom. Sage had gone completely overboard with the #wisteriahysteria pics on Instagram.
‘Shall I go and get the toolbox from the garage?’ Will asked once they were inside, but Mary shook her head.
‘Said I had something to show you, not something to fix. Not anything in the house, that is,’ Mary said, reaching up to tap Will’s head with one finger. ‘In the lounge.’
Mary made a beeline for the G-plan sideboard, bought by Bernie and Mo when they first got married, which had survived being hideously old fashioned for decades and was now bang on trend in all its mid-century splendour. Rowan was always dropping hints that she’d take it off Mary’s hands if she fancied getting something more modern.
Mary slid open one of the cupboard doors to reveal a stack of photo albums. ‘Now, which one is it?’ she muttered to herself. There was a huge quantity of them in there. This was obviously going to take some time.