Sam Baker - To My Best Friends

‘I knew you existed. But no more than that. She didn’t tell me you were dead, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘It wasn’t,’ the woman said tightly. ‘That’s all?’

‘You fell out before university. That’s it.’

‘That’s the truth at least.’

‘I’d like to be able to tell you something different,’ David said. ‘But Nicci never talked about you. It was one of her conditions, right from the start. She didn’t know her dad, and you and she had a huge row in her teens and hadn’t spoken since. End of subject.’

‘End of subject?’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘ Of course I asked! ’ David struggled to hang on to his temper. Who did this woman think she was?

‘I didn’t mean to suggest—’

‘You did,’ he snapped, cutting her off. ‘ Of course I asked about her family . I was married to her, for Christ’s sake.’

Was . Tears threatened to burst through.

Am , he thought. Am married to her .

Closing his eyes, David took a deep breath and then another. ‘I only asked a couple of times,’ he said, when his voice was steady again. ‘Near the start, before I learnt it was on Nicci’s Don’t Go There list.

‘Don’t go there . . . ?’ The woman’s shock was clear.

This wasn’t like him, David thought. Why was he jabbing away at her? Whatever this woman was to blame for, Nicci’s death wasn’t on that list. But she’d asked, and for some reason he felt obliged to tell the truth.

‘Listen,’ David said. It wasn’t quite an order. ‘Once, at uni, when I asked, she got up, walked out of my room and wouldn’t speak to me or even see me for a week. When she came back she told me it was on the condition that I never asked again. I thought I’d lost her. So I decided right there that it wasn’t worth the risk. I didn’t like to see her hurt, I loved – love – her.’

‘And when you had your babies, she didn’t . . . ?’ The woman took a deep breath. ‘You didn’t ever . . . ?’

‘I know what you want to hear,’ David said quietly. ‘But it would be a lie. Nicci never mentioned you. Not once. Not when we married. Not when we had Charlie and Harrie. Not even when she was . . .’

He couldn’t bring himself to complete that sentence.

‘I guessed as much. That’s why I called. When I read she’d died I thought . . . well, I’d wait to hear. I thought she might have left me something.’

David tensed, his fingers clenching the phone. It must have been somehow audible.

‘Oh, not like that,’ Nicci’s mother said. ‘I don’t mean money. Although I know she was well off. By my standards, anyway. I don’t want you to think that’s why I called. I thought perhaps a letter, or something.’

‘Something?’

‘A brooch . . . ?’

It was not quite a question, and they both recognised she already knew the answer. Her voice had risen on the word more in hope than expectation.

David shivered at a memory of Nicci and he on the shingle near the beginning, in mid-winter. She’d pushed her hand into her pocket and pulled out a silver brooch. A very ordinary brooch. So ordinary, it could have passed for tin.

‘What’s that?’ he’d asked.

She hadn’t answered. For a moment, he’d thought she was going to hurl it straight into the cold grey sea. Instead she’d put it back into her pocket, almost as if deciding throwing it wasn’t worth the effort. He wasn’t meant to notice when she’d dropped it into a bin on their way back to his rooms. Another lover, he’d thought. And he’d kept thinking that, until now.

When David didn’t say anything the woman sighed.

‘The reason I’m calling . . .’ she paused as if seeking the right words, ‘. . . I thought . . . I’d like to know my granddaughters.’

‘Your granddaughters?’

‘If you don’t mind. I mean, obviously I understand you’ll need time to think it over.’

In a way he’d been expecting this from the second the woman announced herself. But now she’d come out with it, he could hardly contain his anger. If he didn’t mind? Of course he bloody minded. And, more importantly, Nicci would mind.

Nicci would mind violently. If Nicci had wanted Charlie and Harrie to know their grandmother, she’d have introduced them long before now.

‘Oh, not right away,’ the woman said, sensing David’s mood. ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking that. I thought maybe you and I could meet, for a coffee or something, So you can see I don’t have two heads. Or whatever Nicci told you I had.’

‘You’re missing the point,’ David said curtly. ‘Nicci never told me anything at all.’

Once he’d put the phone down on her for the third time that evening, Nicci’s mother didn’t call back. Or maybe she did. David pulled the jack from its socket so he didn’t have to find out, refilled his glass and retired to the bedroom. Now he sat on his side of the bed, brandy long since drained.

Their room was lit only by the orange glow of the street-light through open curtains, and the nightlight’s glimmer from the children’s room next door. David didn’t need any extra light to see the photograph he was holding. He’d looked at it so many times since he’d put down the phone, the image was imprinted on his brain.

Seven weeks Nicci had been dead. Seven weeks, two days and twenty-one hours. And already he knew more about her than he had in the sixteen years they’d been together.

The square lay in the palm of his hand, corners bent upwards from over-handling. It was a Polaroid, the white frame daylight-faded to creamy yellow, the image itself washed opaque.

Snuffling came through the baby monitor as Charlie – or was it Harrie? – turned over in her sleep. Nicci had deemed the monitor redundant almost a year earlier, but since her death David had reinstated it. He found it comforting. The sound of his daughters’ slow breathing got him through most nights.

The photograph had been in her bedside cabinet all along.

He’d found it a couple of weeks back as he bagged up the last of her medicine to return to the hospital, unable to bear the sight of her cancer paraphernalia any longer. It had been at the bottom of the drawer, book-marking a page in one of the cancer memoirs that had become her favoured reading. Now they sat in a bag under the stairs waiting to go to Oxfam. Where the Polaroid would have gone too, if it hadn’t slipped from the paperbacks as he carried them downstairs. He only knew who it was now because of a scrawl in an unfamiliar hand across the back.

Lynda and Nicola .

It was a very seventies Polaroid, Nicci’s mum all Suzi Quatro hair and denim flares, standing beside a small girl – three years old, maybe four – squinting warily into the camera. Red gingham dress bunched up, revealing skinny legs, white socks and red T-bar shoes. The girl stood half on, half off a blue trike with a yellow seat and handlebars.

If only he’d known it was there before, he could have asked Nicci about it. Only Nicci wouldn’t have told him. But now he knew someone who would. If he’d let her.

The other person in the photo.

Chapter Thirteen

‘Marking homework?’

Lizzie jumped. She’d been so engrossed in her gardening books she didn’t hear Gerry’s key in the lock. She’d only just reached April and the things that should have been done by now already stretched to three pages of an exercise book.

‘A gardening book?’ He looked surprised.

With one sock-clad foot Lizzie kicked a half-eaten packet of chocolate HobNobs under the coffee table and out of Gerry’s line of sight. Only that morning he’d grabbed her bum as she struggled into size twelve jeans – jeans that now cut into her middle, forcing a roll of flesh over the waistband – and made some comment about her ‘filling her jeans’.