Page 28 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon
‘And yet it’s not.’ Ingrid has a faraway smile. ‘He was a marvellous dancer, your father.’
Anna restrains herself from sighing, because Ingrid loves to retell the story of how she met her husband, and Anna knows it inside out. That’s not the point, though, is it? Anna recognised long ago that Ingrid’s retelling is like a talisman, warding off the full impact of the past. If Ingrid keeps retelling the old stories it’s as if she hasn’t moved on from them. As if she’s still there, at the dance, seeing Ingrid’s father for the first time as he crossed the floor, bowed, held out his hand and asked her to join him.
‘Such grace,’ Ingrid says.
Anna could take the story from there because it doesn’t change in the retelling. However, she knows better: the talisman only works if it’s Ingrid who wields it.
‘He hated being in that chair,’ Ingrid goes on, and that’s part of the story too – the back-and-forth between past and present.
Today, though, Anna isn’t in the mood for indulging it. ‘We all hated it,’ she says.
Her mother blinks as if she’s coming out of a trance. ‘What?’
‘Mama, we all hated him being in that chair. Especially you. And me.’
More blinking. ‘I didn’t …’ Ingrid purses her lips and turns her head away.
Anna glances down at the headstone.Barnaby Powell. Loved and missed.
‘Of course you did,’ Anna says. ‘Between work and home duties, you barely slept until he died.’ She swallows, preparing to say something she never has before. ‘Nor did I. We were both exhausted.’
She leaves it hanging there: the implication that her brothers didn’t endure the same thing. It’s what she and Ingrid have never talked about, this bald fact of their family, that Anna was sacrificed to her brothers’ futures. It’s not the sort of thing a daughter can raise with her mother unless she wants to risk never being spoken to again.
‘We were,’ her mother concedes with what sounds like sadness.
Anna clears her throat. ‘And my brothers were not.’
There’s a sharp sniff and while Anna doesn’t look at her mother she knows there will be a glare so piercing it might put a hole in her.
‘They needed to be their best,’ Ingrid says. ‘They had to get to university. To achieve.’
There’s silence between them for a few seconds. Maybe thirty. Maybe more.
‘And me?’ Anna asks, trying not to sound like she’s begging. Now she turns to meet her mother’s eyes.
‘You?’ Ingrid says. ‘What did you need university for? You have Gary.’
It hits Anna like a punch to her chest, this stark admission that her husband was seen as her be-all and end-all. As if she needed nothing and no one else. As if she didn’t need herself.
‘HadGary, Mama. He’s not around any more.’
‘Yes. Well.’ More lip-pursing. ‘You could fix that.’
‘So I could go back to what I was when I was young – taking care of other people and never of myself?’ She tries not to sound angry but it’s hard.
‘That’s what we do,’ her mother says. ‘That’s our place.’
Anna has always known her mother thought this, because it’s how the situation arose originally, but it still hurts to hear it said.
‘I want to be alone with my husband,’ Ingrid says tersely.
Anna stares at her for a second or two, seeing her mother’s irises waver just a little.
Then she turns and walks back to the car, leaving Ingrid to converse with a man who is long dead, and who left them in spirit even longer before that.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ Evie says as she creates a nest of pillows on the couch in the back room, Billy standing by the door, wan and listless.
