Page 18 of Lessons in Love at the Cornish Country Hospital

‘I’d like that.’ It was a simple statement, but there was a chance it could change Clifford’s life. Physical pain was almost always easier to treat than the emotional kind, but when Danni went home from work at the end of every shift, she wanted to know she’d done all she could to alleviate both.

12

The smell that greeted Danni as she opened the door to Castaway Cottage on Friday evening made her stomach rumble. Charlie was making his famous Thai green curry and the scent of spices in the air reached her just seconds before Maggie and Brenda came hurtling down the hallway, overjoyed to see their mistress and hailing her arrival with loud howls of delight.

‘Oh hello, girls, yes, yes, I love you too.’ Leaning down slightly, she patted the dogs, who weaved their way around her in tighter and tighter circles, as if they were trying to deter her from suddenly attempting to leave again.

‘Is any of that love reserved for me?’ Charlie’s voice was deep and warm, and the most welcome sound she could possibly have heard.

‘Any love not already used up on these two is always reserved for you.’ Danni couldn’t help smiling when she looked at him. Sometimes she still struggled to believe she’d found Charlie in a twist of fate, in such a great, big, world where their paths might so easily never have crossed. It was incredible that after coming so close to losing everything for someone like Lucas, she got towake up every day with the best man she’d ever met instead. ‘I’ve really missed you, but I didn’t think you’d be home this early.’

‘I missed you both too much to stay on any longer.’ Charlie gently rested one hand on her bump and put the other arm behind her back, which was the closest he could get to hugging her and the baby for now. ‘I finished reviewing the scenes they wanted me to look at, then had a quick detour to Hanham on the way home to pick something up.’

‘Hanham?’ Danni shook her head, trying to dislodge the sensation of it being stuffed with cotton wool. There were only two people she knew who lived in Hanham, and she couldn’t even begin to imagine why Charlie would need to go to the village, let alone why he might actually want to visit them. ‘That’s where Mum and Paul have their barge moored at the moment.’

‘I know. Come on, I’ve got something to show you in the other room.’

‘But why on earth were you in Hanham?’ She had no idea why Charlie was acting so mysteriously, but all he did was shrug.

‘You’ll understand when I show you.’ He put his hand in the small of her back, applying gentle but insistent pressure to get her to move along the hallway.

‘If it’s my mother’s body, I want you to know that I love you enough to help you hide it. I even understand why half an hour in her company would be plenty of time to drive you to murder. But after the shift I’ve had, I’m not digging the hole.’ She might be laughing, but she couldn’t push down the nagging unease that was building up inside her. If her mother was sitting waiting for them on the sofa, it was going to ruin Danni’s evening. All she wanted was to have dinner, and curl up with Charlie and the dogs. She couldn’t face her mother without prior warning; it was something she needed to mentally prepare for at least a week in advance. Once upon a time she’d have dreamt of her motherturning up as a surprise, but her reaction to the news she was going to be a grandmother had driven an even bigger wedge between them than there had already been.

She’d been tempted to tell her mother that she was the last person she’d want to babysit her son, but instead she’d just nodded, adding their latest encounter to the catalogue of painful memories between them. If death could come from a thousand small cuts, so could the death of a relationship and it felt like that day was getting closer and closer. As much as she wished her mother’s reaction to the baby news could have been a turning point in their relationship, she had to accept that the less contact they had, the better Danni felt about herself. It was why the idea of her mother sitting waiting in their living room, was almost as unwelcome as it was unlikely.

‘What’s in the box’? Her eyes were drawn to it as soon as she went into the room. It was a battered-looking cardboard box, with the name and logo of her father’s favourite brand of wine stamped on the side of it. She could suddenly picture him so clearly, with a glass of red in his hand, the way he always seemed to relax after work, telling her the latest story he’d made up about two explorers called Danni and Joe, who went on a seemingly endless series of adventures. She’d always loved those stories, far more than anything she’d ever read, and for far longer than most kids her age would have done. She’d been ten when he died, and bedtime stories had long since been forgone by her peers. But Danni would happily still listen to them now if she could, and she wished he’d recorded some of the stories, so that she could hear his voice again. But none of them could have known he wouldn’t be around to retell them to his grandchildren, let alone not even living long enough to see his daughter go to secondary school.

‘Something I hope you’ll like. Sit down and take a look, although you might need these.’ Charlie pushed a packet oftissues closer to the box as he spoke. ‘I’m going to pour you a nice cold drink, and I’ll be ready if you need me for anything else, but I think you might need this moment alone.’

‘Okay.’ Danni’s hand shook slightly as she followed Charlie’s instructions, sitting down and reaching for the lid of the box, when he disappeared towards the kitchen. As soon as she saw the words written on the top, in loopy handwriting, she wanted to call after Charlie again and ask him to tell her what she was about to see. But he’d said he thought she needed to do this alone and she trusted him completely. It meant she was ready to face whatever was coming, even if the sight of the words: ‘J&D – the early years’were making her heart race so fast she could feel it.

Undoing the flaps on the top of the box, which were tucked into each other as a makeshift seal, she caught her breath as she peered in. There, right at the top, was a yellowing heart-shaped photo frame, which must once have been white, containing a picture of her father, with two children on his lap. One a toddler, dressed in navy blue shorts and a T-shirt covered in pictures of tractors, and the other, a little girl, in a forget-me-not blue dress, with a cloud of curly black hair that the ribbons attempting to contain it had no chance of keeping under control.

‘It’s me.’ Danni said the words aloud, unable to keep the wonder out of her voice. It was like discovering the Holy Grail, or seeing a unicorn suddenly gallop past the window. Something she’d thought didn’t exist any more, that had been lost forever, was staring her in the face. Putting the photo to one side, she began sorting through the rest of the contents of the box. There were more photographs, about thirty in total, some of them in frames, and others loose. They were all of her and Joe, either with or without Danni’s paternal grandparents. There was only one with her mother in, and from what Nicola had said, there’d been no love lost between her and her in-laws. It was a groupphotograph, from what must have been Danni’s first Christmas. They were all sat at a table laden with food, a Christmas tree in the background. Everyone was smiling, except Nicola, who looked as though she’d rather be almost anywhere else in the world. It wasn’t a picture of motherly love by any stretch of the imagination, but she was cradling Danni in her arms, while Joe sat next to them on their father’s lap, and it was obvious they were a family. Or at least that they had been once upon a time. If Charlie had given Danni a winning lottery ticket it wouldn’t have meant as much, and she’d probably have been less surprised. By the time he came back into the living room, there were tears streaming down her face and she was screwing up her eyes and opening them again, half in an attempt to blink the tears away, and half to check that she wasn’t imagining things, and the photographs would suddenly disappear again. Maggie had her head on Danni’s knee, the way she always did when she sensed someone was upset. And Brenda had hauled herself on to the sofa, edging as close to Danni as she could possibly get without actually being on her lap.

‘Are you okay, sweetheart?’ Charlie sat down on her other side, putting an arm around her shoulder, and she nodded a couple of times, unable to speak at first. It took several attempts to try and get hold of herself, before she finally managed to respond.

‘This is amazing, but I can’t believe it. I don’t understand, how did you…?’ She couldn’t even finish the question. Instead, she picked up one of the loose photographs, gently smoothing out one corner that had been folded over somewhere along the line.

‘I rang your mum the day after the baby shower. I always knew that not having any photographs of you and Joe when you were young got to you. So, I asked her if there was any chance there were some she’d forgotten about.’

‘She always said she had to chuck out anything that wasn’t essential when she sold the house and moved on to the barge.’ Danni had challenged her mother more than once about it, reminding her that most people would consider photographs of their children the one thing they’d save in a fire, never mind hold on to when they downsized. But Nicola had claimed that sorting through all the stuff was still too painful, even eight years after losing her husband. Danni had been in her last year of boarding school at the time her mum had moved in with Paul, and hadn’t thought that much as a teenager about wanting photographs that documented her own history and, by the time she did, a few years later, it was too late. Whatever photographs had once existed, they’d all been thrown out. Along with the rest of the precious mementos that marked the most important events in her family’s life, everything from her parents’ wedding photographs to the last holiday they’d all had together, in Port Kara, before her father’s sudden death.

‘She did and it doesn’t sound like her own mother was much more sentimental than she was.’ Charlie was clearly trying to do his best not to sound judgemental, but he couldn’t quite stop the slight curl of his lip. ‘And if there had been any photos at her parents’ house after they died, I’m guessing they’d have gone the same way as the others, if your mother had had a hand in clearing the house.’

‘The only photographs I ever got were passed on by my great aunt’s son, after she died, when I was still at uni. But they were just a handful of school photographs, nothing like this.’ Joe and Danni had been at boarding school when their maternal grandparents died, and their other grandmother was a widow who’d passed away about a month after they’d lost their father, so that had been a dead end too. Danni narrowed her eyes as she looked at Charlie again. ‘Which leaves me still completely clueless about where you found them.’

‘It was a bit of a mission. The truth is, I finished up the last of the work in Bristol late on Wednesday evening, and went to see your mum first thing Thursday morning, but there’s a reason I still didn’t make it back until this afternoon. It’s also why I said I might not be home until tomorrow, because I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take.’

‘You’re going to have to tell, because right now the only solution I can come up with is that you went and rummaged in every landfill site in the South West trying to unearth these things.’

‘Not quite, but it might have been my next step if Paul hadn’t said something. I was asking your mum if there were any friends she could think of from back when you were young who might have a photograph of you as a baby, and she said no. But then he mentioned Audrey. It turns out she was your paternal grandmother’s best friend, and with your dad gone it was Audrey who had helped your great aunt clear out your nan’s house when she died. As you can imagine, Nicola had told them at the time that she didn’t want anything from the house. But about five years ago, Audrey’s daughter reached out to your mum on Facebook, to tell her that Audrey had passed away too and that there were a couple of boxes of your grandmother’s things in her loft, mostly old photographs. Apparently, Audrey and your great-aunt had split the things they didn’t want to throw away between them, in case Nicola changed her mind one day. Audrey’s daughter asked your mum if she wanted them now that her mother’s house was being sold, and…’ Charlie’s mouth turned down at the corners, and she reached out for his hand.

‘It’s okay, I think I can guess what her response was.’ Danni’s heart was thudding in her ears now. He’d said ‘a couple of boxes’; that might mean there was more.

‘It was a long shot that Audrey’s daughter would still have the boxes, but I had to try. Paul managed to find the old messageon your mum’s Facebook account, and he messaged her back explaining. I must admit I hugged him when she replied to say they were now in her loft, because she hadn’t been able to bear to throw them out. She said I was welcome to collect them, but she lives on the Llyn Peninsula, or she could post them on. I couldn’t bear to think we might get this close and then risk them getting lost. I still didn’t know for sure whether there’d be any of you and Joe.’

‘That’s in North Wales, isn’t it? You drove all the way up there?’ Danni would have sworn that she couldn’t love Charlie any more than she had that morning, but she could feel it growing and making sure that all those empty spaces that had left her hollowed out for so long were now full up.

---