Page 13 of A Midlife Gamble

I have to collect some personal items from my mother's house. Would you come with me?

His response had been swift.

Of course.

Shook, Kay’s neighbour. The man who had found her that night in August last year, had driven her and Libby’s baby back to Helen’s house and had been there for her ever since. Always answering the calls she hadn’t been able to stop herself making, the late-night, one-glass-of-wine-calls. And more recently the weekend walks, followed by quiet pub lunches, that had come to feel as necessary to Caro as sunlight. Silly texts, saying nothing and everything.How are you today? Think I’m too old for New York.Sometimes sending a photo of the fancy restaurant meal where she was about to eat, (Shook, it turned out, was a foodie. Even so. Photographs of food? ). So much so that now, as she turned the key in the lock of her mother's house, and a familiar panic swept through, she found herself turning back to him for reassurance.

He was a couple of feet behind her on the path, hands in his pockets, watching.

'I'm nervous,' she laughed.

Shook looked at her.

He wasn't, she knew, fooled. Neither was she. She was so much more than nervous. She was eleven again, lingering at the door, afraid to open it.Forty years ago,Caroshe murmured. She was fifty-one, her parents were gone and finally, there was nobody inside, snapping at her to go around the back, asking where she’d been, judging, criticising.

After the stroke, her mother never had come home. She hadn't in fact woken up. And the irony for Caro was, that it hadn't mattered. Through the last few weeks, she had spent many many hours by her mother's bedside, talking through the years of her life, talking through the years of her mother’s life. She had said everything she’d wanted to say, including a few things she hadn’t known she’d wanted to say and once, just once, was sure she had felt a squeeze of her hand. The doctor had said it was highly unlikely and the nurse had shaken her head and given Caro a sympathetic smile, but her faith, so new, had been untouchable. She knew she had felt her mother's touch, and that had been enough.

The moment had carried her through all the times she had taken a soft-bristled brush, the type designed for a baby, to untangle her mother’s sparse hair, the afternoons she had helped change her mother’s nightdress and, most frequently of all, the long hours she had sat, in silent company, shouldering winter shadows that threatened to swallow them both.

Leaning forward to press her forehead against the front door, she breathed in.It’s ok,she whispered to the little girl that lived inside her, the child destined to remain forever on edge, nervously trying to second-guess the mood of the house. The key grated, metal against metal, one hard quarter turn and the door opened. She looked back at Shook. He nodded, and she turned and stepped inside.

Everything was as it had always been. The spotted mirror above the mantle, the bookcase and the unopened books, the ceramic cats waiting on the window ledge for an owner who would never return. The table and chairs which would never again be sat on, the sofa and the old-fashioned glass cabinet with its cheap crystal glasses, free gifts from a fuel campaign. A room as cold as a coffin. Arms crossed, Caro stood, an island, in the middle of an ocean of memory.

'Ok?' Shook said softly.

‘Yes… I…’ Helplessly, Caro waved at her surroundings, hot tears streaming down her face. The first time, in three weeks, that she had cried. ‘I wasn’t close to her,’ she managed, the back of her hand pressed to her nose as she walked to the window and looked out at the street. Her tears had been sudden and warm, a heat of emotion that she hadn't been prepared for. Last summer, in the immediate aftermath of her mother’s stroke, coming back to her childhood home had felt familiar, but manageably distant. As if the furnishings and fixings of the house were shrouded in nothing more permanent than imaginary dust sheets. A covering that could be removed, behind which she would still be able to hear the voices, sense the life she had once been a part of. But it did not feel like that now. It was very different, and watching the movement of the street outside, she felt the sense of finality inside. Those voices were no longer distant, they were gone. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and held it to her eyes. Death, as it is prone to do, had fundamentally changed things. Alienated what was once known. The gloves of her bereavement were off. She turned back to face the room. These weren’t her books, or her chairs, or her crystal glasses. And now that her mother was dead, they weren’t anyone’s.Now do you see?they seemed to say.Now do you understand? It’s over.

The house had sold within a week of going on the market. Which was exactly what everyone had expected. In less than a month, the sale would complete and the home she had grown up in, that had shaped such a large part of her psyche, would be unrecognisable. Walls gone, wallpaper stripped, cupboards ripped out. She could almost sense the violence coming, the annihilation of everything that had gone before, and the strength of her grief astonished her. Hadn’t she spent half her life trying to escape these bonds? Why then was she so devastated to understand how finally and irrevocably they would now be broken? She was an orphan, taking her place with all the millions of other middle-aged orphans, and she hadn't understood, because even at the height of their estrangement, her mother had been more reachable than she was now, or ever would be again. She turned to Shook. ‘When my mother was seven years old, her mother,mygrandmother, pushed her into a bomb shelter. There wasn’t room for both of them. That’s always seemed odd to me, don’t you think? I mean how could therenotbe room?’

Shook didn’t answer. He dropped his head to one side and looked at her.

‘And then she never came back.’ Caro looked down at her sleeve, brushing away an invisible fleck. ‘Caroline,' she said, as she looked back up. 'That's what her name was, and my mother spent the rest of the war at the garden gate waiting for her to come back. In fact,’ and with this, Caro sighed and turned back to the window, ‘I’d say she spent the rest of her life waiting for her to return.’ Now that the words were out, now she’d finally given voice to an idea, nurtured and nourished for so long, they stunned her with their perfect sense. She stared outside. Across the street two small girls were standing on the pavement. They were pointing at something on the ground that she couldn’t see, their heads touching, absorbed in a shared moment of concentration.

She took my hand, Caroline. I can still feel her doing it. She took my hand and pushed me in.

How many times, growing up, had she heard the story? And how many times, as a young girl, had she then watched as her mother stared into the eye of memory, as lost to her child as her own mother had been to her? The battle had lasted a lifetime. The battle for her mother’s attention and affection, waged between her and her dead grandmother. A fight, she understood only now, she’d never had a chance of winning.

A dog barked and the two girls broke apart. Arms pressed against her chest, like a shield, Caro watched as, a few feet behind them, a man walking a Labrador came into view. He caught up with the girls and the group walked on, one child either side of him.

Were they friends, those little girls, or sisters? Her thoughts went to Helen, because, ever since yesterday, she hadn’t been able to stop seeing the look on Helen’s face when she’d mentioned that she was coming down to clear the house. The glassy tears Helen hadn’t allowed to fall. How little she had understood of what Helen would have gone through when her mother died. Three years? Was it only three years? A hard lump formed at the back of Caro’s throat. Was this shame? She’d offered platitudes of course, sent flowers, called… but she hadn’t understood. She’d thought she had, but she hadn’t. How could she? How could anyone, until they’d walked in the same shoes? Her eyes were hot again with unshed tears. Now it was Kay she was thinking of. Would it be Kay next? Flowers and platitudes? Condolence messages on social media? She put her hand to her nose and turned a half turn and no further, and then Shook was standing in front of her, with his hands on her shoulders, guiding her to the sofa, saying, Sit down.So she did. And then his face was level with hers and he was crouching in front of her.

‘I’ll make a cup of tea. Is there tea in the house?’

Dabbing at her eyes, a rash spreading up her throat, Caro nodded at the kitchen.

He put his hand on her knee. ‘I’ll make tea.’

‘Is that what you call it?’Caro joked minutes later when she was holding a cup of milky-white hot water.

‘Try it.’ Shook smiled.

She did and it was so unexpectedly sweet it was like drinking warm honey. She took another sip and another, feeling it warm her blood. ‘I don’t…’ she started and then stopped.

‘You don’t what?’

‘I don’t normally take sugar.’

‘I know.’

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