Sam Baker - To My Best Friends

Instead she visited countless care homes, each more depressing than the last, and then found an estate agent to sell the family home to pay for her mother’s care. Each step of the way she religiously called Karen in Brooklyn so she’d know exactly what was going on. And each time Karen had been too busy with work, with her husband and children, to come and help.

Eventually, after Lizzie threatened to give every last stick of furniture to charity, Karen took unpaid leave from her job on Wall Street. The forty-eight hours she stayed at the Gatwick Hilton and systematically tried to ‘put right’ every decision Lizzie had made were topped off by their mother’s glazed lack of recognition. No, Lizzie was pretty sure Karen wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. And who could blame her? Lizzie only wished she had the same option.

In a way, she was glad. Sometimes doing everything yourself was simply easier . . . As she pulled onto the M23 and put her foot down, she felt her spirits lift. It was done.

The Stone Roses went on, the early album with all the good tracks. Not even her music really, but an old boyfriend at uni’s. Somehow she’d adopted his music taste as her own and had never really moved on.

Mum had been even worse today.

‘Isn’t it nice of Kathleen to come and see me,’ she’d said, before lapsing into one of many long and intricate conversations with herself. It was ironic. Mum had never been chatty. Now you couldn’t shut her up.

Janet, The Cedars’ manager, had shrugged apologetically. As if to say, What can you do? Lizzie had shrugged back. If Janet didn’t know, she certainly didn’t.

Kathleen was her mother’s cousin, dead for ten years. Lizzie had been Kathleen for months now. At first she’d thought Mum did it on purpose, to punish Lizzie for not being Karen. Now she knew it was the illness at work.

The next call to Karen was going to be grim. Lizzie needed to tell her The Cedars felt Mum needed specialist care. For which read expensive .

‘What’s wrong with the NHS?’ Karen would say. And Lizzie would reply, ‘They’ll pay for Mum when we can’t afford to any more.’

And Karen would say, ‘We can’t afford to now.’

So predictable. So pointless. So why bother? Because Karen was the eldest, that was why. It had always been that way, Lizzie’s entire life.

Turning the corner into the cul-de-sac, Lizzie saw instantly that their three-bedroom house was dark, the only unlit house in the loop of exclusive three-and four-bedroom New England-style properties. Everyone else was in, doing whatever Lizzie’s neighbours did in the evenings. Watching television, having dinner parties, drinking too much white wine.

Wherever Gerry’s silver Audi Quattro was, it wasn’t here.

She knew she should have felt cross, that she should have wanted Gerry waiting here to greet her. Instead she felt relieved. Pulling up in front of their glossy garage door, she grabbed her bag off the passenger seat and locked the car, watching lights blink as the alarm set itself. Wanting time alone – even on Sunday evening – wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She could indulge her secret passion for Countryfile , open a bottle of something cold and white, instead of drinking the Rioja that Gerry preferred.

She could drink white wine, hog the bathroom, use all the hot water. She could even make headway into the damn gardening books she’d taken out of the library.

Having drawn the curtains, she flipped on the television – in that order, always in that order – and peered in the fridge. So much for the wine choice: half a bottle of Pinot Grigio and two cans of Peroni.

One eye on the television, she settled onto the sofa and picked up Alan Titchmarsh’s The Gardener’s Year .

The phone inside began ringing precisely as David’s house alarm started peeping. Thirty seconds and counting to disable the beeping, before all hell broke loose. The phone would have to wait. There probably wouldn’t be anyone on the other end anyway.

By the time he’d keyed in the security code the phone had fallen silent and he felt his shoulders relax. Head down, he ran back to the car, hoisted first one child, then the other, and carried them into the house, depositing one on each sofa, before heading back to grab their bags and lock the car.

As he did, the phone started up again.

‘ Da-addy . . . ’

‘I’m here,’ he promised them. ‘Just let me get rid of this.’

‘Hello?’

‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday. I’m looking for David Morrison.’

The voice belonged to a woman. Not old, but certainly not young. She sounded anywhere from fifty something upwards. What she didn’t sound like was a cold caller.

‘That’s me,’ he said.

‘Ah, um, good. I mean . . . it’s good that I’ve found you,’ the woman said. ‘It’s taken weeks. And then I wasn’t sure I had the right number.’

‘Da-addy!’

Christ , David thought, cut to the chase . ‘Well, you’ve found me,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Well, um. You don’t know me. But you might know my name. It’s – well, it was – Lynda Webster.’

David racked his brains. He didn’t know anyone by that name.

‘Lynda Webster?’ the woman repeated, her voice a question now.

When it became clear the name meant nothing to him, she cleared her throat and when she spoke again the nerves had been replaced by sadness. ‘David, I’m Nicci’s mother.’

David put down the phone. He didn’t intend to. It was instinctive.

The telephone rang again almost immediately.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’

‘Nicci must have told you terrible things about me . . .’

‘She didn’t tell me anything,’ David said. ‘You weren’t a welcome topic of conversation. I didn’t even know you were still alive.’

Brutal, he thought. Before deciding he just didn’t care. There was a silence at the far end of the line, as if the woman was considering that. And then a sigh.

‘You did know she had a mother?’

‘ Da-addy! ’

‘Look, the girls—’ David stopped; suddenly aware he was talking for the first time to his children’s grandmother. ‘I can’t talk now. Give me a number where I can reach you and I’ll call you back when they’re in bed.’

A silence said the woman didn’t believe him.

‘I will, Lynda,’ he said. It sounded weird; over-familiar. ‘Look, Mrs Webster . . . apparently you know where to find me. It’s not like I have a choice.’

He heard her mutter something.

‘Give me your number,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll call back. It won’t be before seven, maybe later. Depends how long it takes to persuade them to go down.’

‘What are their names?’ the woman asked, tentatively.

David hesitated.

‘Charlie and Harrie,’ he said, before hanging up a second time.

Chapter Twelve

Bedtime was a nightmare, as if all the stress of the day at Whitstable had seeped into Harrie and Charlie’s pores, along with the salt, grit and tar. When the girls finally went down, after two stories and endless grizzling, David barely had time to pour himself a large brandy before the phone rang again. This time he knew there would be someone on the other end.

‘I said I’d call you,’ he said, without waiting for her to speak. ‘The girls are, tricky, at the moment. It took a while.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ Lynda Webster said. ‘They’ve not long lost their mother. I expect they’re confused.’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’ David took a slow sip of the Courvoisier and felt its warmth slide down his throat. ‘Sad, mainly.’

‘You’ve really never heard of me?’