Something in Common (40 page)

Navy
jacket, grey skirt, flat black shoes, hair as dowdy as it had always been. No makeup, apart from a stripe of too-dark lipstick. Nothing to look at, this woman who had stolen Neil, this middle-aged widow who had welcomed him into her bed and turned all their lives upside-down. Alone again now, looking empty and defeated in her funeral clothes.

‘If you knew,’ she went on, ‘how much I’ve regretted—’

Sarah turned abruptly into the pew and clattered through it, and made her way up the centre aisle, not daring to look back. She lowered herself into a pew a few rows from the front. Christine glanced back and looked at her questioningly, and Sarah gave a small nod, unable to summon a smile.

She felt no triumph, no sense that she’d achieved any kind of victory. Neither of them had won – they were both losers. She didn’t turn around to see if Noreen had left. She closed her eyes and breathed in slowly, hands resting on her abdomen, and she realised that all she felt was shame.

‘You OK?’

She opened her eyes. Christine stood in the aisle beside her.

‘Did you talk to her? What did she say?’

She could see Brian ushering the boys out of the pew. She took her sister’s arm and heaved herself to standing.

‘Nothing,’ she told her. ‘She said nothing. We didn’t talk.’

They walked down the aisle and out into the pouring rain.

H
er
mother’s hand trembled slightly as she filled their cups. How long had that been going on? Still, to be expected at eighty-four.

‘So Alice arrives on Tuesday.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’re getting your hair cut, are you?’

Helen smiled. ‘Yes, Mother, on Wednesday. And I’m getting married on Friday.’

Her mother poured cream, a tiny amount that barely coloured her coffee. ‘I’m just asking, that’s all. Your hair grows quickly, and it looks better with a tidy-up.’

There was a short silence. Helen sipped her coffee, welcoming its bitter strength. Her mother had always made the best coffee, ground her own beans too.

She wondered what her parents’ wedding day had been like. Had her mother been happy? Had she lain in bed the night before too excited to sleep? Hard to imagine it – in their wedding album she looked mostly solemn and terrified – but her parents had loved one another, she was sure of that. And they’d lived more than half of their lives together, forty-seven years of wedded bliss. So much more than she’d got with Cormac.

‘I must see your dress,’ her mother said. ‘Red always suited you. And what colour shoes did you say?’

She was
looking forward to it, Helen realised. She wasn’t being polite; she wasn’t making small-talk. Maybe for the first time in her life, Helen was doing something that her mother truly approved of.

‘The shoes are black,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring them over, and the dress.’

‘I was thinking,’ her mother said, ‘that you might like to borrow some jewellery. Just … if there was anything you wanted.’

‘Thanks. I’ll have a look.’

Every day they were leaving more and more of the past behind them. It was a comfort; it pleased her.

***

N
eil
rummaged in the fridge. ‘Where are the lunchboxes?’

‘On the worktop by the fridge.’ Sarah was closing Stephen’s duffel coat. ‘Leave this on you until you get into school,’ she told him. ‘Not in the yard, all the way into school. Did you brush your teeth like I asked you?’

‘Sort of.’

‘There’s a stone in my shoe,’ Martha said.

‘You can take it out in the car. Neil, give me that comb. Martha, do
not
take off that shoe – you don’t have time. Neil, make sure you’re back by half twelve at the latest. We need to leave at one for the train.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

A minute later they were gone, and Sarah was alone in the kitchen. She cut a slice of the brown bread she’d baked the previous evening, but as she was spreading it with butter she realised she didn’t want it. Her stomach had been in a knot since she’d woken, which was ridiculous: if anyone should be nervous it was Helen, the star of the show today.

But it was their first meeting, after writing to one another for the best part of twenty years. They’d never said hello, never shaken hands, never come face to face. The only photo she’d seen of Helen was the tiny one that was still used with her articles, which really didn’t show her at all – and Sarah’s publicity shot for the cookbooks, all Helen had to go on, was equally vague. Visually and aurally, they were strangers.

What
if they didn’t click? What if they found they had nothing at all to say to one another? What if Sarah came across as gauche and naïve to Helen, her nervousness making everything she said come out wrong?

She looked out of the window at a sky the colour of tinfoil. Not a hint of sun, but hopefully it would stay dry. She would be glad when they got to the restaurant after the ceremony, when everyone would be a bit more relaxed. No doubt she’d be hungry then, ready for a good meal.

She massaged her abdomen absently, the butterflies still very much alive. Another scan due in a few days, everything fine according to her doctor. Seven weeks today she was due, the day she turned forty-five. In her sixties when this one would be graduating from university, the oldest mother in town.

She wished Neil had taken the day off, instead of arranging to do a morning’s work on his current project about fifteen miles away. She would have welcomed his presence now, needed something to distract her, to make the time pass faster.

She thought about going back to bed for a couple of hours, but lying there trying to sleep would be worse than mooching around the house. At ten o’clock she tidied up the kitchen and hauled herself up the stairs. She’d have a bath, paint her nails, take her time putting on her face and getting dressed.

When she’d finished, barely an hour later, she eyed herself critically in the full-length mirror on the landing. At this stage she wasn’t going to look remotely glamorous – not that she’d ever looked particularly glamorous, pregnant or otherwise – but the pink empire-line dress was pretty, and didn’t draw too much attention to her bump, and the blow-dry she’d had the day before was holding up well, even if it was glued together with spray. She’d have to do.

As
she walked downstairs, she felt another fluttering in her gut. Great, the baby had decided it was time for some gymnastics. A few minutes later, as she was polishing the knives and forks – anything to pass the time – it came again, stronger, forcing her to drop the knife and lean against the table. Had she picked up a stomach bug? Of all days.

As the spasm subsided, she felt a strong urge to urinate. She turned wearily for the stairs – but before she’d put her foot on the first stair something gushed from her, drenching her legs and splashing onto her flat grey shoes.

A
lice
twisted the bottle slowly and eased the cork out with a gentle
pop.
Helen watched as she poured the champagne, wishing it was brandy to settle her stomach, which had been churning since she’d got up three hours earlier. That was the thing about curry: tasted fine at the time, made its presence felt later.

‘My mother’s wedding day,’ Alice said, handing her a glass with a smile. ‘You look beautiful, by the way.’

‘I do not.’

But Helen had been pleased enough with what she’d seen in the wardrobe mirror. The red dress was far from designer – she’d never paid more than fifty pounds for a dress, usually a lot less – but it suited her dark colouring, and fell in a smooth line to just below her knee. The lines on her face, deeper every year, couldn’t be helped, but Frank knew his way around them all and hadn’t been put off.

‘Are you nervous?’

‘Not in the least.’

Her hair had been given the same trim it always got from Ray, who’d repaired the hatchet job she’d given herself twenty years ago, and who’d been keeping her curls at bay ever since. ‘What are we doing for the wedding?’ he’d asked, when she’d made the appointment. ‘Fresh flowers, veil, a little colour rinse?’ When Helen had told him just the usual, he’d thrown up his hands in despair.

The
new shoes that she’d forgotten to break in, higher than she normally wore, were sure to cause problems later on. She’d bring plasters, and kick them off anyway once they got to the restaurant.

‘Have you spoken to Granny this morning?’ Alice asked.

‘No.’

‘Maybe I’ll give her a quick call.’

‘Do if you want, but there’s no need – she knows we’re picking her up.’

Alice, who was insisting on calling herself the bridesmaid, wore a jersey top and skirt in a rich violet that she’d bought in an Edinburgh charity shop for seven pounds – ‘You wouldn’t believe what some people throw out.’ She had a little black feathery hat, also second-hand, and flat black velvet pumps. She looked sweet, and too thin.

Shocked to discover that Helen hadn’t given any thought to a bouquet, she’d gone out the day before and come home with two identical sprays of white rosebuds. She’d tipped out the bric-à-brac from Breen’s blue bowl and filled it with iced water and left them propped in it overnight.

‘Right, your dress is new and your bag is old. Have you got something borrowed?’

Helen indicated her mother’s heavy gold neck chain. ‘And your watch.’

‘Oh yes – and something blue?’

‘Certainly not – blue does nothing for me.’

‘Mum, you’re hopeless. You should have got a garter with blue ribbon. I could have brought one for you.’

She’d wanted to get a cake, but Helen had been adamant that none was required. Bad enough to be parading around as a newly-wed at her age; producing a wedding cake would be ridiculous.

‘This is making me a bit tiddly,’ Alice said. ‘We’d better eat something.’

‘You go ahead, I’m not hungry. There are Danish pastries in the fridge – Frank got them yesterday.’

He’d
slept in his own house, determined to observe all the wedding superstitions. ‘I’ll see you there,’ he’d told Helen the evening before. ‘Don’t be too late, I’ll be a nervous wreck.’ Kissing her on the doorstep, murmuring that she’d made him very happy, lingering so long that in the end she’d pretended a tiredness she didn’t feel.

Unsettled had been how she’d felt, memories of Cormac filling her head earlier as the three of them had eaten Alice’s lamb curry and sat in front of the television afterwards. More and more she’d been thinking about him lately, snatches of her first wedding day catching her unawares.

A huddle of neighbours standing at the gate, waving her off to the church as she’d stepped into her father’s car. The scratchy feel of her dress’s net underskirt, the sprays of red flowers attached to the ends of the church pews, Cormac’s face as he’d turned to watch her walk up the aisle.

‘Are you thinking about Dad?’

She looked at Alice, who smiled at her. Alice, who’d turned out far better than Helen deserved. ‘Just a bit,’ she said, holding out her glass for a top-up she didn’t want.

‘H
old
on,’ Christine said, ‘hold on, dear, everything’s going to be OK—’ but Sarah knew that nothing about this was OK, not the frantic drive in Christine’s car to the hospital, Sarah hunched over and sobbing wildly in the back seat, not the trolley she’d been lifted onto in her ruined pink dress, not this rush down the corridor now, trying to hang on to Christine’s hand as her sister half ran alongside her, not the faces of the men in white uniforms who didn’t speak as they raced Sarah to wherever they were going.