Out on a Limb (4 page)

Twenty minutes later, I’m sitting in the kitchen, when the silence is shattered by a bone-shaking scream. I climb the stairs, breathlessly, three at a time.

She’s sitting up in bed, with a hand clutched to her nightie. ‘What on earth’s
happened
, Mum? Are you okay?’

She’s still a little shaky. She’s had a nightmare, I imagine. But she’s certainly wide awake now.

‘It’s understandable you’re having bad dreams,’ I tell her gently. ‘What with everything that’s happened. Your mind’s probably teeming with horrible thoughts.’

‘It’s not
that
!’ she snaps. ‘It wasn’t a
dream
! It was opening my eyes and seeing
THAT!
’

I fetch the ladder, move the bed out, climb the treads, get my balance. And then I carefully remove Jordan from the ceiling.

Chapter 4

A
TEXT
!

Hi M . Hi J . Hi S. Got yr txt. Sorry bout Hugo. Wot a shock! Poor nana. Hope she bearing up. Give her hug 4 me. Madrid 36 degrees 2day!!! Hope Barcelona cooler. XXX.

It was a terrible day for a funeral. And not just because it was also the day I should have been starting my new job and now couldn’t (irksome though that was). It’s because funerals, to my mind, demand a bit of meteorological gravitas. Roiling black cloudscapes. Squally rain. Hail. None such on this day however. All elbowed out of the way by the sun. You never did see such a big blue sky (except perhaps in Madrid, of course). There wasn’t so much as a cobweb of a cloud, and the heat was so fierce they had to keep spraying all the wreaths. My mother was fanning her face with her order of service – a hastily compiled pamphlet with a cross on the front that had been printed on paper in that washed-out shade of green that made it look like an old take-away menu.

‘I told you I should have worn my lilac,’ she hissed at me. ‘I’m melting in this wretched thing.’

‘Shh. We’ll be inside soon,’ I hissed right on back at her. Why is it that, however much you don’t think you ever will, there always seems to comes a time when you start speaking to your parents as if they were your children?

To be fair, i t’s not that you can’t wear lilac to a funeral if you want to. Some people even make a point of stipulating that they’re sent off by mourners in colourful clothes. It’s just that the ‘lilac’ to which my mother referred – she’d shown me – was a boat-necked affair with a slit up the thigh and an explosion of lace at the way too high hem. The last time she wore it, as far as I can remember, was to her friend Celeste’s seventieth bash. But though the evidence from the photos made it clear it wasn’t remotely out of place on that occasion – there were as many pastel wash-n-wear crystal pleats as there were bottles of Cristal – here she’d just look like she’d mistaken St David’s crematorium for a branch of Castle Bingo.

‘Well, I just hope they’ve got air-conditioning in there,’ she muttered crossly. ‘Or, believe you me, I shall be dropping dead as well.’

In order to make the most of what little breeze there was, I took the wheelchair for another quick turn around the guests. Because of her knee replacement-replacement her right leg shot out in front of her horizontally, like a ladder on a window cleaner’s van. I perhaps should have tied a bit of rag around her ankle, because it preceded her at crotch height and kept jabbing people’s bottoms. She looked a bit like a short prow maiden minus the prow. Which was fitting, at least, because she met Hugo on a boat.

Oh, I so didn’t want to be at a funeral. I particularly didn’t want to be at this funeral. I knew I had to support my Poor Dear Mother, of course, but already it was beginning to look like there was going to be trouble, because everyone DNA-related to Hugo seemed alien, hostile, from an entirely different clan. And none of them seemed to want to talk to us. Which was odd. His daughter Corinne, who I had now spoken to on the phone and who I also recognised from various photos, was shooting us looks of such naked hostility that even the peonies between us were wincing.

So it was with a powerful sense of things being not quite right that I picked up the sounds of raised voices in the distance, and noted the vicar, who must have been roasting in his funeral frock too, hurrying across the lawn at the behest of the undertaker, who seemed to be in a very un-undertakerly state of flap.

Pru, who had been in a state of flap herself all morning because Chloe and the boys (my niece and nephews) had been rollicking around on the garden of remembrance ever since we got here, rushed across now, eyebrows raised.

‘What on earth is going on?’ she panted, pointing at the entrance. There was some sort of to-do happening over near the crematorium gates, partly obscured by the planting. Members of the other clan were beginning to peel off towards it. From what we could see the vicar was involved in some sort of minor altercation.

‘Wheel me over there,’ my mother commanded, her view of events clearly not commanding enough. But my grip remained steadfast on the chair.

‘Good Lord,’ Pru said. ‘Do people really
do
that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Take photos at funerals.’

My mother harrumphed. ‘Nothing would surprise me. He did have some fearfully common friends.’ But then she started in the chair. ‘Good Lord! Pru! Abbie!
Look
! Good grief! You know who that is, don’t you?’ We followed her gaze. She’s sharp-eyed, our mother. All those years of scanning dimly lit audiences for scouts. And two seconds ahead of us, for sure. We both saw what she saw simultaneously.

‘God!’ said Pru (though he probably wasn’t listening). ‘That’s Lucy Whittall! What on earth can Lucy Whittall be doing here?’

None of us knew, of course, but Lucy Whittall’s being here did explain the hoo-hah in the entrance. Lucy Whittall being one of the most famous of our famous TV stars right now. On screen she plays one of the leading characters – a nurse, funnily enough – in the long running soap-drama
A & E
, and off screen she fills more column inches of glossy than just about anyone else you’d care to name. From the contents of her handbags to the labels on her thongs, to her protracted and much documented battle-with-drink-and-drugs. No wonder the paparazzi followed her here. They follow her pretty much everywhere.

‘And him,’ my mother added. ‘I know his face as well.’

‘Whose face?’ I asked.

‘Him! That man with his arm round her.
Him
.’

I didn’t know who the him was. Tall, broad-shouldered, wavy goldy-blond hair, and – yes, I was right – a slight limp. I always spot limbs that aren’t working on message. Another knee was my guess. Though I suspected that this one was a real one. They moved on then. Were walking arm in arm towards Hugo’s daughter.

‘I know who that is,’ said Mum’s friend, Celeste, who’d come to join us, swishing festively across in a strawberry two-piece. ‘He’s that new weatherman off the telly. Always wears such lovely ties. They’re an item, they are. I read it in
Depth
.’

‘
That’s
it!’ said my mother, whose state of animation by this time was beginning to border on the unseemly. ‘I knew I knew the face,’ she said, fanning her own. ‘Goodness! How exciting this all is!’

But the excitement was soon over. Once the photographer had been ejected, and the celebrity contingent ushered into the crematorium (without reference to us at any point – we were beginning to feel like a bunch of local peasants who just showed up at a hanging on the off chance), the service itself went pretty much as services at funerals do. We sang a bit, the vicar spoke a bit, and someone (in this case a someone called George) told a couple of anecdotes that were in somewhat bad taste. But it was a gathering that lacked any real sense of gravity, because so many heads kept swivelling around to try and clock the stars in our midst. To her credit, my mother did weep copiously as the casket rolled off stage, but even then I detected a slight touch of the theatricals, which should have alerted me, though it didn’t, that all was not quite as it seemed.

And it seemed I wasn’t wrong. We filed back out into the sunshine. We filed past all the flowers. We stopped to read the notes. We were just moving off to get back into the car when a tell-tale plume of smoke started spouting from the chimney. My mother glanced up at it and stabbed a finger in the air. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish!’ she said firmly.

‘Honestly,’ said Pru, as we hastily wheeled her back to the car and bundled her inside. ‘What a thing to say! Supposing someone had heard you?’

‘No one heard me,’ my mother replied testily.

‘God did, Nana,’ observed Chloe.

‘God will understand,’ Mum told her, patting her knee. ‘God sees and hears
everything
. God
knows
.’

Unless you’re God , and I’m not, it’s never a good idea to think you’ve seen and heard everything. Mainly because God moves in mysterious ways, and we’re fools if we think we can predict them.

But the many mysteries of the universe are the last thing on my mind when we get back to Mum and Hugo’s, occupied, as it is, with that most delicate of delicate social occasions, the post-funeral gathering over tea. As is often the case (unless you’re Irish, of course) nobody seems to know quite how to be.

And this gathering – this non-party – is even worse than most. Peopled, as it is, by two factions of mourners who were it not for certain parties’ late forays into matrimony (and the presence of celebrity, of course), wouldn’t have anything to do with one another, let alone engage in tea and Battenburg.

I’m not sure quite why it is that the atmosphere feels so uncomfortable; whatever our private thoughts about our respective parents’ spouses, we have, as far as I can tell, no reason to feel any antagonism towards each other, yet Corinne, who was perfectly civil during our phone calls, still seems decidedly disinclined to engage with either Pru or I.

‘Her father did just die, I guess,’ comments Pru, ever the sage.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘But even so… Don’t you think she’s being a bit, I don’t know, offish?’

‘Offish?’

‘Well not offish so much, as just a bit anxious to avoid us, you know?’

She shrugs. ‘I guess she’s just not that bothered about speaking to us. Chances are, after this, she’ll never clap eyes on us again.’

Which thought seems to sum up just how arbitrary some relationships can be. We’re just connected by circumstance and now the circumstance has changed. I wonder who’ll end up with the sideboard.

Of course, sideboard aside, I’m not remotely aware of just how very much the circumstances
have
changed at this point. Not a bit of it. I am too preoccupied with the circumstance in hand; the one where I’m stuck in a house with a bunch of people I don’t know, who I don’t particularly want to know, who certainly don’t seem to want to know me – which is fine – and wishing the whole tedious business was over, so I can get back to the much cheerier and also necessary business of taking up residence in
my
life again. But for now I must cut cake and make tea.

Thus it is that I’m holed up in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil so I can make a pot. Jake’s mooching round the garden, trailed by his cousins, and chatting to someone on his mobile. Likewise, I’m chatting to Dee on mine. She’s called to update me on Charlie (I keep telling her not to, but she takes absolutely no notice) and to make arrangements for badminton next week. Can I make Tuesday okay? Yes, I can. Post-Charlie, Tuesday badminton has become my new black. I’m not very good at it. I’m actually quite bad at it. But it’s one hundred percent better than
being
bad, for sure. Plus it’s very efficacious on the bingo wings front, which, looking at my mother when she’s in her triangle stand, is clearly a matter about which to be concerned. ‘You won’t believe what Mum said,’ I’m telling Dee as I empty out the teapot. She says oh yes she will. So I tell her.

‘Come to think of it,’ I’ m saying. ‘It’s exactly the sort of thing she would say. God, but my mother is incorrigible.’

The kettle boils then, so I ring off and reach for tea bags. Humming to myself and with my back to the kitchen door. So it’s no surprise that I don’t know someone else is in the kitchen. Not until it speaks to me, at any rate.

‘I suppose,’ the voice says, ‘that she did have a point.’

As the voice says this at least five seconds after I last spoke, I assume for a moment that it must be engaged in conversation with someone else. But when I wheel around, it’s to find myself face to face with the face of the weatherman – who, now I think about it, does look vaguely familiar – and I realise there’s no one else in here. So he must have been talking to me. He sort of smiles but not quite, as one tends to at a funeral. ‘Gabriel Ash,’ he says equably, proffering a hand.

I wipe my own hands on a tea towel and then extend one to shake his. He’s still looking sort of smiley, in a faintly self-reproving way. He’s got that kind of face. Animated. Changeable. A bit like the weather. Adjustable according to the season.

‘Oh, God,’ I say, flustered, realising that he’s probably – no, definitely – referring to my mother. ‘How embarrassing. You didn’t hear her, did you?’

‘I didn’t need to,’ he says, equally equably. ‘I just heard
you
, didn’t I? But I can’t say it was any sort of shock.’

As I’m still not sure who he is (well, apart from a television weatherman with a celebrity girlfriend), I’m not really sure how to respond.

‘You knew Hugo, then?’ I plump for, because I guess he must have – or
she
must. He may be showbiz – he certainly has the usual smooth patina – but he’s nothing to do with my mother. He nods.

‘In a manner of speaking. I’m his son.’

Now I’m really embarrassed. ‘His
son
? Hugo’s? I didn’t know he
had
a son.’ Didn’t know much about him at all, when it comes down to it. And the same might be said of my mother. Has she ever mentioned a son at any point? No, she most definitely hasn’t. How
excruciating
. But then I have a thought. ‘And why d’you say “in a manner of speaking”?’

‘In the sense that we hadn’t actually spoken in twenty years. Shall I rinse out some of these for you?’

He moves purposefully towards the sinkful of crockery and I move aside to let him. ‘Er, yes. Yes, thanks.’ I’m not used to television people offering to wash things up. It almost doesn’t seem seemly. But then perhaps things have changed since my mum’s day. Though I still can’t imagine Lucy Whittall with a tea towel. But then I imagine she’s doing what she probably does best. Standing in the living room being quietly adored. And why not? It’s made half the guests’ day, that’s for sure. But now I know what I know, why are they here at all? Specifically, why him? Twenty years is a very long time. And would explain why we were all unaware of his existence. I don’t know quite what to say to him, so ‘Oh dear,’ is what comes out. ‘Oh, dear. That’s so sad.’ But he’s shaking his head.

‘Not really,’ he says, filling the washing-up bowl with water. ‘Washing-up liquid in here?’ He opens the undersink cupboard.