Change of Life (19 page)

Then she looked at me and when she spoke it was slightly more calmly than before. “I’d had actually planned to phone you later and ask you to call in, so I could tell you before I tell the children. But you know now.”

She looked terrible and I knew I should go, if that’s what she wanted. I asked if there was anything I could do for her before I left, but she said no and that she’d probably go back to bed and rest.

Once I was in the car, I just sat there, in shock, gripping the steering wheel as if it was some sort of lifebelt. I’d never felt so powerless. I’d never felt so lost or so fearful. But most of all, I’d never before felt such complete self-loathing.

Chapter Twenty

I don’t know how long I sat there. At some point I’d leaned forward and put my head on top of my fists which were still clenching the wheel. I must’ve got strange looks from passers by, but I didn’t notice. It was bad enough that Rosie might not come back to me because she no longer trusted me, but the thought that she might die was unbearable. I also couldn’t bear that, whatever happened, Rosie was going to suffer and I wasn’t going to be allowed to help.

As on the day Rosie left, I was horrified to find that I wanted to cry – to give in to all the hurt and rage. Once again, I fought to keep a grip on myself.

I’m not in the habit of crying. Rosie had always said I wasn’t in touch with my feminine side.

My father had disapproved of crying. He’d made that very clear to me and my brother, Dan, when we were children. He said it was a sign of weakness and that Britain would never have won the war if men had sat around like cissies crying. If he caught either me or my brother shedding tears we were belted. Weeping, he said, was for women.

But I cried when we left him. I was nine and Dan was seven. My mother bundled us in the back of her Mini Clubman. She’d given us each a box to fill with our favourite toys and she’d filled a couple of suitcases with clothes for us all. She said we were going to stay at Grandma’s for a while and then we’d be going to a new house. She told us our father would not be coming with us. I cried as we drove away and I looked back at the big grey house where I’d spent my life so far. My father stood at the window watching us go. I waved. He didn’t wave back.

Shortly afterwards my father arranged for us to go to his old school – a long-established, private, all-boys school in Edinburgh – that he said would make men of us. Neither we nor my mother appeared to have any say in the matter. He paid for our fees, uniforms and books. We rarely saw him after that. I learned to keep a grip on my emotions. I certainly didn’t cry when he died.

But that day, in the car, faced with the prospect of losing Rosie permanently, I came close to letting go.

There was no one in when I got home. Toby got out of his basket as I opened the front door. He waited expectantly. When he saw it was me and not, as I’m sure he was hoping for, Adam, his head went down. He’d been pining a bit since Adam left.

I couldn’t face going into work in the afternoon, a feeling I’d never experienced before. I called Sheena and said I wouldn’t be in after all. I didn’t explain or even make much in the way of excuses and Sheena didn’t probe.

I decided to go for a run. Toby came too, but without his usual excitement. I went to the beach and ran down between the dunes and onto the sand. The tide was out. I ran eastwards without stopping, until I got to the natural barrier of seaweed covered rocks at the far end. Toby took his time, stopping to sniff at rock pools and to greet other dogs. I got the impression he didn’t want to be seen with me. “Et
tu
, Toby,” I said.

As I jogged back along the shore, I could see Edinburgh along the coast. I wondered what Rosie was doing now. I wondered if she’d ever come back to me - and the wondering set off such a painful longing, that I pulled up and bent over. The pain of missing her took my breath away and I felt sick. I sank to my knees, retching, as the words ‘Rosie’ and ‘cancer’ went round and round in my head. I threw up until I had nothing left. It was some moments before I could stand. I was relieved that the other occupants of the beach - the kite-fliers, wind-surfers and dog walkers – seemed unaware of my predicament as I did my best to bury the evidence.

When I got back to the house it was still empty. I wandered through the downstairs rooms. I paused beside the piano in the dining room. Debussy’s Claire de Lune was propped open on the music holder. This was a favourite of mine from Rosie’s repertoire – but I couldn’t remember the last occasion I’d taken the time to listen to her play.

Jenny was as accomplished as her mother on the piano, but Jenny’s instrument of choice was the violin. Rosie often played the piano accompaniment when Jenny was perfecting a piece for a recital. Standing there that day, in the too quiet house, I’d have given anything to hear them play together again.

I also realised, as I stood there, that Max had done little, if any, piano practice since Rosie left. I made a mental note to mention this to him.

Previously, before Rosie left, there would usually be music coming from several quarters of the house by the time I got home. It could be Jenny or Rosie playing, or even Adam on his guitar, or one or more of the children listening to loud music in their bedrooms. Rosie nearly always had music on in the kitchen and often sang along. She had a beautiful, rich, alto voice. I tried to bring it to mind, to hear it. I couldn’t. The house remained unbearably silent.

The children weren’t expecting me back until dinner time. Max was going to Ruby’s, with Neil, after school. Sam was having a much deserved afternoon off and Jenny never got in from school before five.

I called my mother to ask if she was free and if I could go over to see her. She’d just arrived back from the library and said she’d be delighted to see me.

Chapter Twenty One

I felt a slight lifting of my spirits as I approached Holdfast Cottage.

My mother remarried after I went away to university in 1972. Maxwell Calder was my housemaster at school. He was a quiet, gentle man who taught classics. He was a childless widower and Dan and I nicknamed him Mr Chips. He and my mother met at some school function and carried on a very discreet relationship while I was in my last year, so discreet that Dan and I knew nothing about it until they announced their engagement. They had a strong and very loving marriage. My stepfather didn’t mind that my mother kept the McAllister name so that, as she put it, her name could remain the same as her boys. He was a good man, a good father. Rosie and I named Max after him – something that seemed to touch him very deeply. They had twenty seven years together until his death in 1999. The cottage had been a very happy home for all of us. My mother had now lived in it for forty years.

She was at the front door as I got out of the car. She came up the path to meet me.

“Hello, son,” she said, reaching up to give me a hug.

“Hello, Ma,” I replied. I kissed her cheek. She cupped my face in her hands.

“You look done in,” she said. “Come through to the back garden. We can sit there and you can tell me what the matter is.”

While my mother went to fetch the tea tray, I sat back on one of the garden chairs and closed my eyes for a moment. It was a warm June day. There was a strong scent coming from the roses and birds fluttered and chirped in the trees. I could feel myself starting to drift off.

“Tom,” my mother spoke quietly and gently pressed my arm. I opened my eyes and stretched.

“Sorry, darling, were you falling asleep there?” She sat down opposite me.

“Not really, just dozing. That looks good.” I nodded at the tray on the garden table between us. There was a plate of sandwiches and some home made cake, as well as a pot of tea. I realised that the emptiness I felt was, at least, partly physical. Not only had I not eaten since breakfast, but I’d thrown up whatever remained of that meal onto the sands of Gullane beach. I was starving.

My mother smiled and poured the tea. “Dig in,” she said.

I demolished most of the sandwiches and then set about the sponge cake. I downed two mugs of tea. All the time that I was feeding, my mother watched me intently. She chatted about this and that – about the dogs,
who
were snoozing at her feet, about the garden and about the choir she was a member of, but I knew she was watching me. When I could consume no more, I sat back and stretched.

“Better?” she asked.

“Oh yes. Thanks, Ma.” And I did feel better for having eaten, but the ache in the pit of my stomach was still there.

“Now tell me why you’ve come. It wasn’t just to get fed, I assume. It’s lovely to see you, but this is the middle of a working day. What’s wrong, Tom?”

“I hardly know where to start,” I said. “Everything’s such a mess.”

I began by telling her about Adam and then about having to tell Rosie of his departure. My mother was shocked to hear about Adam, of course, but she was typically stoical and reassuring about it.

“I agree with Ruby,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll come home when he’s ready, Tom.”

“But that’s not all, Ma,” I said. “Rosie, Rosie’s got…she’s got…” I couldn’t say the words.

“Oh, my darling, she’s told you then, she’s told you she has breast cancer?”

“Yes, yes she has.” My mother was beside me in an instant. She’d pulled a little footstool over and was perched on it at my feet. She reached up and put her arms around me. I cried on her shoulder for quite some time. She patted and soothed for as long as it took. The garden became very still around us, even the birds seemed to have stopped singing. Eventually I sat back and Ma slowly got to her feet. The sun had vanished behind a cloud. I shivered.

“Come inside, Tom,” she said. “I think we may be in for a shower and I, for one, need a comfy seat.”

We moved indoors. My mother sat beside me on the sofa, in the room that looked out over the garden. She took my hand in hers.

“You knew, Ma. You knew about Rosie having cancer and you didn’t tell me.”

“Yes, I knew. I promised her I wouldn’t say anything - but I did urge her to tell you herself.”

“When did she tell you?”

“The day she came to see me and stayed overnight – she told me then – about Robbie, about the cancer and about her moving out for a while.”

“But if you’d told me, maybe I could’ve stopped her moving out. I could’ve organised the best people to look after her. I could’ve protected her at home.”

My mother shook her head slowly. She put a hand up to my face and stroked my cheek. “Oh, son, don’t you see? That’s precisely why she didn’t want you to know. She didn’t want you taking over – organising her treatment. She doesn’t want or need your protection. It’s her body, her life – she wants to make her own decisions.” She spoke even more gently now.

“Yes, yes – she said all that to me herself.”

“You need to trust her to take care of herself. Maybe you should’ve trusted her when Robbie was born. Maybe you shouldn’t have kept all that from her.”

“Was it wrong of me? What’s wrong with wanting to protect your wife? What could she have done about Robbie? She’d just had the twins. She was totally disabled with postnatal depression. We couldn’t have taken him in, could we? So what would have been the point of telling her?”

My mother shook her head and stroked my hand.

“When Heather died I thought Rosie would go too,” I continued. She threatened to, you know – at the time – she threatened to kill herself too. I couldn’t tell her, Ma. It would’ve been cruel. I had to think about her and Sam and the twins. I had to protect them. I wanted to be a good husband and a good father – I never wanted to hurt them. I always promised myself I wouldn’t be like – like…”

“Like your father? You know, Tom - your father never meant to hurt you or Dan, or me. He was – damaged. He saw unspeakable things during the war. He needed help, but there was no recognition of post-traumatic stress in those days. He did love us in his own way. Even Dan sees that.”

In the ten years since my father’s death, my mother and I’d regularly had this conversation. She tried to get me to understand him better – to forgive him – to see he was a broken man. But I could never see past his coldness and his bullying. I couldn’t understand how Dan could forgive him. My father never spoke to Dan again after my brother came out as homosexual when he was in his thirties. I shook my head at her.