Cathy burrowed further into her mum’s arms and let those words wash over her. It was almost enough to make her feel better, almost enough to make her believe that perhaps the mum she thought she’d lost to an emotional vacuum had finally found her way home. But not quite. What she needed to truly believe it was for something normal to happen, something that the real mummy would have done.
After a few moments of silence in her arms, Cathy’s mum peeled away to look down at her. She’d stopped crying now, though her face was puffy and her eyes red and swollen. ‘You ought to be in bed – you’ll be exhausted tomorrow and it’s going to be a long day.’
‘Can’t I stay with you?’
‘No – I have too much to do here.’
‘Please, Mummy.’
‘No; it’s bedtime. Don’t make life hard for me right now, Catherine; I’ve got enough people trying to do that.’
Cathy stared at her mother. She rarely called her Catherine. The strangeness of it started her bottom lip trembling. ‘I don’t want to go to bed. Please can I stay with you?’
‘Why don’t you want to go to bed?’ her mother asked wearily. ‘I wish I could.’
Cathy shook her head, eyes wide. ‘I’m scared.’
‘What are you scared of?’
Cathy paused. She was scared but she couldn’t understand what she was scared of, let alone articulate it. Had she been thirty years older perhaps she still wouldn’t have been able to. She shook her head again. ‘I don’t know.’
Cathy’s mother studied her for a moment. But then she gave her head a firm shake, as if coming to a decision.
‘Alright,’ she said in a voice steeled with determination once again, all trace of the emotional wreckage she’d been only moments before gone. ‘If you’re staying up you can make yourself useful and help me. I have to roll some pastry for cheese puffs – do you think you can do that?’
Cathy gave a mute nod. As long as she was close to her mum she didn’t care. She was handed the rolling pin and together they got back to work.
Cathy’s mind returned to the forest of here and now, her eyes glazed with tears that she sniffed hastily back. She’d often felt guilty herself since her mum’s death, even if she could have felt no more than helpless over her dad’s, for all the times she’d complained or been less than patient. Her mother had been cursed with a hard life and Cathy had rarely appreciated that as fully as she ought to have. If she’d had to do it all again she would have, only this time, knowing what the aftermath would feel like, she’d have done it willingly, without complaint, always with a smile on her face. She’d have told her mum more often that she loved her, that she was grateful for the years she’d spent bringing her up, that it was now her turn to care and that there was no reason to feel like a burden. Cathy had felt those things, of course, but sometimes articulating them had been much harder to do.
She thought back now to what Fleur had said the day before, how it had been laden with subtext. Did everyone see Cathy as fragile or vulnerable? She didn’t feel it – if anything she felt strong, she felt like a survivor; after all, look at what she’d survived so far in her life. She didn’t want people to see her that way or feel sorry for her.
Her eyes stubbornly filling with tears again, she took Fleur’s wreath from the carrier bag and laid it at the foot of the tree.
‘Hope you like it, Mum,’ she said.
She lingered a moment longer, and then turned to find the path out.
Cathy got off the bus a few stops early. It had been a last-minute decision, a sudden urge to walk home via the canal path, even though the sky was darkening and it would soon be dusk. If she hurried, though, she’d make it back long before then, and you never knew who you might meet on the way. It had been a strange and melancholy day of reflection and she really needed something to cheer her up; something to give her hope. But almost as soon as she’d watched her bus drive on she regretted her decision. It started to rain, heavy and freezing, and she still had a good thirty minutes’ walk before she could get out of it. It was at times like this she wished she’d kept the car she’d sold; after her mother’s death she’d decided that she didn’t go far enough to warrant keeping it on.
Pulling the hood of her coat up and fastening the top button, she shoved her hands deep in her pockets and did her best to stay dry as she began the trek home. She allowed herself a wry smile, despite the cold and wet. There was only one reason she was adding this extra time to her journey and, when she really looked at it, it was a very silly reason. She looked for him anyway as she walked the path, even though it had always been morning when she’d seen him before with his dog, and even though she had no reason to believe that he was always going to walk his dog in exactly the same place every day.
As she walked she scanned the path. The rain smashed into the water of the canal, the surface a mess of tiny solar systems radiating from each drop. If she hadn’t been so cold Cathy might have taken a moment to appreciate how pretty it looked, or how the town was shrouded in a heavy grey blanket of cloud that somehow softened its hard edges, or how the clouds whipped across the horizon, throwing the landscape into a fast-moving patchwork of light and dark.
But she was cold and she barely gave these things a second thought, and she was soon annoyed at herself because it was clear that nobody else was stupid enough to be out on an afternoon like this. By the time she’d reached the turn-off, where the path led back to a housing estate that led to her own home, she’d seen not another living soul.
Stupid, she thought as she looked down at the mud on her boots.
Still, at least she hadn’t spent the day sitting in the house waiting for life to happen to her.
Twenty
Even though the rain had cleared overnight and the morning was brighter, Cathy made a conscious decision not to walk the canal path today. She had a lot to carry for cookery club, for one thing, and if she was going just to try to bump into her mystery man, it was silly, and maybe a little bit desperate too. So she walked through her estate and on to town, and in a funny way she was glad she did, because some of her neighbours had started to put up their Christmas decorations and the road looked bright and cheery.
As for her own decorations, it hardly seemed worth getting them down from the loft this year, not just for her to look at and be reminded that it was Christmas but that this year she was looking at them alone. Her mum would have wanted them putting up around now, and she’d have been tapping her foot along to Christmas songs as she told Cathy where she wanted streamers and plaques and wreaths to hang.
What Cathy could get excited about, as she walked to St Cuthbert’s, was her recipe book. She’d had replies to her post on Facebook and she was looking forward to seeing what recipes people had brought in to contribute. She’d also had a message from Beth saying she was bringing her older sister to give it a go, and Cathy was looking forward to welcoming a new member to the club. She knew the vicar wouldn’t make his appearance this week – although, that might be a good thing because him being there would make Iris so star-struck that she’d be absolutely useless, and Cathy still relied a great deal on her assistance when it came to things like knowing where keys and switches and pieces of equipment were. Cathy liked him, of course; the problem was, Iris liked him just a bit too much. And goodness only knew what sort of mischief it would provoke in Dora, who loved to tease Iris almost as much as Iris loved to follow the vicar round.