The Other Half of My Heart (10 page)

She'd taken trouble to find the right care home. She agreed a care plan that involved respect, activity, a room that looked over a garden, and an agreement that her mother's life would not be needlessly prolonged when the time came.

In her heart, Bettina thanked her father for his investment in health insurance, his well-ordered filing cabinet, and for the enduring power of attorney he'd had couriered to her in France to sign. She signed the contract with the care home and then she went immediately to buy a stone bird-bath and a wooden bird-table and had them sited outside her mother's window. She went systematically through her parents' home, getting rid of almost everything. All the photograph albums had moved with her mother, so she was spared looking at those.

Bettina had the bungalow stripped, refitted and painted, and engaged a letting agent to lease her parents' old home. She put her own few things into storage, and she returned to France. A little bronze of a horse and an old grey dressing gown were the only things she took back with her.

Apart from the grief, and the guilt, of course. She knew that her heart, already smashed twice before, was broken three times again, once for each of her parents, once for the way she wasn't the daughter she might have been. And then there was the old space where Sam wasn't, gaping open once more. Her bread began to show her strain. But it wasn't anything like as bad as it was when she had first come to France, all those years before. In the interim, she had learned how to bring her love for her craft to the kitchen, and so there was always something good and honest to knead and roll from her heart to her hands to her dough.

‘What is it telling you?' one of her colleagues had said when he came into the kitchen at the end of a shift, to find Bettina standing with a loaf in her hand, breaking it slowly, scrutinizing the crust.

‘It's telling me it's time to go home.' As soon as she'd said it, she felt relieved, and could admit that, since her return, she had been bothered by things that had never bothered her before. Suddenly she didn't like the way the language disconnected her, ever so slightly, from her surroundings, although she was now fluent enough to think and dream and count in French. She longed for and missed 6.30pm English television local news programmes, which in her parents' house had been the signal that the evening had begun, her father coming in from the garden and her mother setting the table, she and Sam putting their homework away until after supper. She baked hot cross buns and Eccles cakes and they came from the oven reproachful in their perfection.

After seven months, when the letting agent emailed to ask her instructions now that the initial six-month contract was up and her tenants had moved out, Bettina stopped fighting her fate. She packed up what she needed, gave away what she didn't care about and returned to the dreary suburb of Guildford where her parents had lived when Missingham became unbearable. She travelled to the nursing home and sat with her mother in the mornings, when the light seemed more likely to catch a facet of the woman she remembered. She learned to dissemble and distract when her mother didn't recognize her. She resisted the urge to talk about her father, knowing that her mother would give her nothing more than a puzzled look that would make her feel as lonely and cold as the first snowdrop of January.

On Bettina's thirty-fourth birthday, she made her visit early, taking gingerbread still warm from the oven. Her mother greeted it with a simple delight that made her daughter, shamefully, envy her for a moment. And then Bettina took three trains and got herself to Throckton, and met an estate agent who showed her round a café that seemed as empty and forlorn as she was, a kitchen whose grime made her blanch, and a flat that would do if it wasn't quite so dark. Here was work, and plenty of it. Here was a place that didn't know her. Here was home. Bettina shook hands on a three-year lease that afternoon, and on the day she got the keys and stood in what would be her home and her business, she realized that it had been almost fifteen years since she had spent as long as three years anywhere.

And now here she is, sitting on the floor, crying.

It's almost a relief when morning comes and it's time to go to see Alice. Bettina takes the
Throckton Warbler
article about Adventures in Bread to show her mother, even though she knows it's a redundant exercise. The photoshoot had been horrendous. The photographer, as unpleasant as Verity had been kind, had posed Bettina in the kitchen, where he'd complained about the light, then the shop, where he'd complained about the limited space. In the end she'd stood, struggling to smile, in the street outside, clutching an armful of baguettes while the photographer had knelt on the ground in front of her, trying to get the bread, Bettina and the shop sign into shot. Bettina's only comfort was that the angle made her virtually unrecognizable, all chin and cheeks and little points for eyes. As her eyes were the thing that everyone seemed to recognize first about her, the fact that they were as good as absent from the photograph meant that she was pretty much in disguise.

It takes a while to get to her mother's nursing home, which is only one of the reasons that she makes the journey just once a month. She goes by train, taking the branch line into Marsham, travelling a couple of stops on the main line, and then taking another branch line out again, which is a two-and-a-half-hour door-to-door trip at best. ‘I know you get travel-sick,' Rufus had said, when he was still trying to please her, ‘but going by car would only take an hour and a half. We could go very gently, and you could try magnetic bracelets – Kate uses them with Daisy—'

‘I've tried that,' Bettina had said.

‘Ah, but you need one on each wrist …'

‘Really, Rufus, no,' she'd replied, more sharply than she'd meant to, ‘I like the train, it gives me time to think. And anyway I just don't like cars. I get sick, really sick, and it's not worth it. Believe me, three hours on trains makes much more sense than one hour in a car if you're throwing up twice a mile.' Which was true, and he'd nodded, and dropped the subject.

But she does like her time on the train, so long as she keeps her thoughts on the right track. She manages the journey carefully, keeping busy with lists and emails, spreadsheets and planning, so she doesn't focus on where she's going and what she might find when she gets there.

Before she has had time to think about her mother very much at all, Bettina is stepping from the train and starting the walk that will take her twenty minutes, although she often does it in ten when she's coming the other way, because she cannot help but scurry for the safety of life as she now knows it.

On the walk, though, she does think about the mother who brought her and Sam up: the bright heart of their family, their power and their sunshine, not perfect by any means but always fun to be close to, always ready to be roped into an adventure or, more likely, to rope them into one of hers. Bettina remembers being woken before five to hear the first cuckoo, standing blearily in the garden and hearing the sound that made her mother beam, even if she couldn't easily differentiate it from that of a pigeon.

She remembers her family, as it was then, having dinner at their house in Missingham, on the day she announced what she thought her future was going to be.

‘I'm going to apply for a job at the stables,' she had said.

‘Of course you are, darling,' Alice had said with a smile, then, ‘I wanted to be an actress, or a singer. The nuns didn't like it. Secretary or nurse were your options, as far as they were concerned. Until you got married.'

‘Those were the days,' Howard had said, bracing for the outrage.

‘Oh, you're hilarious,' Alice had said.

‘Didn't you have the option to be a nun?' Sam had asked.

‘Well, they never asked me about being a nun, darling,' Alice had said. ‘I don't suppose they thought I had the …' she had searched for the word, ‘the knack. And to be fair, they were right.'

Now, hand on the nursing-home door, Bettina wants to step back and tell that Tina to remember, to treasure those memories, because her mother won't always be rushing from work as a school secretary to home for tea to the amateur dramatics rehearsal, via a kiss for them all and a moment to watch the birds at the kitchen door.

Today, Alice won't know who she is, for a start, and will prattle about the young Bettina as though the daughter before her is a stranger. Or she will talk about things that make no sense. Or she will doze in her chair while Bettina watches her and wonders how the mother who was once so bright that being embraced by her was like being tumbled into a rainbow now sits as frail as one of her beloved fuchsias in February.

But none of these is the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is the one where Alice May Randolph, mother of Bettina May, is enough of herself to ask where Samuel Randolph is. If that happens, Bettina will make a choice. She will dissemble, lightly, changing the subject or telling what she has heard described as a ‘therapeutic fib': she will say something like ‘Sam can't come today', and talk about something else. This has the advantage of making for a peaceful afternoon. It has the disadvantage of making Bettina rage at herself for cowardice.

Her other choice, and, in Bettina's mind, the Right Thing if not the easy one, is to tell the truth, which has unpredictable results, none of them pleasant. If she does this, the visit can go many ways. One is the inconsolable sobbing which is not, in essence, any different to the way her mother would have first received the news. Her mother will wail and keen and Bettina will watch her, unable even to hold her mother's hands as they fight free of her own and grasp and pull helplessly against each other. Sometimes, Bettina finds herself wailing too. More often, more painfully, she sits quietly and thinks thoughts that shame her: that this reaction, horrible as it is to watch, shows her that somewhere in there is a mother still. And so the times when Alice responds to the news-that-isn't-news with a blank expression, because she's already forgotten the question that she asked, are easier, but also worse. So Bettina hopes that she won't be asked the question about Sam, because none of the options open to her then lead to a good place, and because once the question is asked she has only choices she doesn't want. And even after sixteen years, the pain isn't that far removed from her mother's when she does choose to tell the truth, and Alice chooses to understand it.

The air in the nursing home is always slightly too hot, and a bit too dry. So Bettina is glad to be told that her mother is in the garden. For all that Alice Randolph has forgotten, she has remembered that she loves wildlife, and flowers, and so she sits quietly on a bench in the feeble sunshine, eyes following the birds as they move from tree to lawn. Bettina almost turns and goes, because her mother looks so happy, so relaxed in her own orbit. She knows that as soon as she goes to talk to her she will move her from a world that is unchanged since the days when she sat in her own garden with her twins asleep in their great unwieldy pram, still young and lovely and blessing her life, to this new world that she knows must seem wrong, where everything – even her own hands, the wedding ring she looks at as though it is part of a puzzle – will be unfamiliar.

Alice seems so much older than her sixty-seven years, but so much younger too. She always seems a little too small for her clothes, and try as Bettina might, she cannot help but think of her mother as she imagines she would think of a child, someone she must coax and praise and be perpetually patient with. Someone who has an endless, although unconscious, ability to make her feel guilty, because there is always more that she can do for her.

But Bettina doesn't go. She approaches. She says, ‘Mum, it's me.' By and by, she will wonder whether what happens next is caused by the fact that her mother looks away from bright sunshine to her daughter, who must be silhouetted in the change of light. But in the moment, her heart dances when her mother says, unexpectedly, matter-of-factly, ‘Oh, hello, Bettina, I wondered if you would come out to the garden.'

The care home manager does report ‘occasional lucidity', but it's been a long time since Bettina has been witness to it. Her mother speaks less, does less, eats less these days. She's shrinking out of existence. The daughter sits down on the bench, afraid to speak, to look, in case in doing so she breaks this crackling line of communication. Her mother reaches out a hand, and clasps Bettina's own. Bettina notices that her mother's nails are short, shaped, clean; remembers how they used always to be painted red or pink or purple. The house would smell of nail varnish and acetone on a Saturday afternoon, and her mother would sit in a dressing gown, hair in a towel, arms and legs outstretched, toes separated by kitchen roll folded into strips and woven in and out of the spaces, and sing out, ‘You can fend for yourselves tonight, you two, because your dad is taking me out. I don't know where, and I don't much care, so long as I'm not doing the cooking.' And later, she and Sam would open the fridge and find that their mother had, in fact, left a pizza or a pie to go with the beer that they'd pilfered from the cupboard under the stairs. Bettina wonders whether, next time, she should bring nail varnish with her, or whether seeing the colour she used to love on the hands she didn't recognize might make her mother distressed.

Bettina holds her breath as her mother turns to look at her. But her mother's smile doesn't change; there's no confusion in her eyes. The precarious path between them grows wider. The scent of early lavender is in the air.

‘Hello, Mum. How are you today?'

‘Me? Oh, I'm fine. I'm just watching the world go by. Are you growing your hair?'

Bettina sometimes has a dream not dissimilar to this one, when she arrives at her mother's care home and is greeted by the mother of old. This was the mother who, when Bettina was awake, she didn't dare think of, but her dreaming self clearly longed for. The dream-mother, always ready to cheer and defend her children, was made of memories: facing down the headmaster when Sam had been up to mischief, then grounding Sam for a week and confiscating his walkie-talkies for a month. Plaiting Bettina's hair before gymkhanas, driving for hours to stand in the rain for more hours, waiting for her little daughter to catch her eye when she came into the ring ready to start her three-minute showjumping round, talking all the way home as though Bettina had won, rather than being unplaced again.