Out on a Limb Read online

  Pru, who had been in a state of flap herself all morning because Chloe and the boys (my niece and nephews) had been rollicking around on the garden of remembrance ever since we got here, rushed across now, eyebrows raised.

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ she panted, pointing at the entrance. There was some sort of to-do happening over near the crematorium gates, partly obscured by the planting. Members of the other clan were beginning to peel off towards it. From what we could see the vicar was involved in some sort of minor altercation.

  ‘Wheel me over there,’ my mother commanded, her view of events clearly not commanding enough. But my grip remained steadfast on the chair.

  ‘Good Lord,’ Pru said. ‘Do people really do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Take photos at funerals.’

  My mother harrumphed. ‘Nothing would surprise me. He did have some fearfully common friends.’ But then she started in the chair. ‘Good Lord! Pru! Abbie! Look ! Good grief! You know who that is, don’t you?’ We followed her gaze. She’s sharp-eyed, our mother. All those years of scanning dimly lit audiences for scouts. And two seconds ahead of us, for sure. We both saw what she saw simultaneously.

  ‘God!’ said Pru (though he probably wasn’t listening). ‘That’s Lucy Whittall! What on earth can Lucy Whittall be doing here?’

  None of us knew, of course, but Lucy Whittall’s being here did explain the hoo-hah in the entrance. Lucy Whittall being one of the most famous of our famous TV stars right now. On screen she plays one of the leading characters – a nurse, funnily enough – in the long running soap-drama A & E , and off screen she fills more column inches of glossy than just about anyone else you’d care to name. From the contents of her handbags to the labels on her thongs, to her protracted and much documented battle-with-drink-and-drugs. No wonder the paparazzi followed her here. They follow her pretty much everywhere.

  ‘And him,’ my mother added. ‘I know his face as well.’

  ‘Whose face?’ I asked.

  ‘Him! That man with his arm round her. Him .’

  I didn’t know who the him was. Tall, broad-shouldered, wavy goldy-blond hair, and – yes, I was right – a slight limp. I always spot limbs that aren’t working on message. Another knee was my guess. Though I suspected that this one was a real one. They moved on then. Were walking arm in arm towards Hugo’s daughter.

  ‘I know who that is,’ said Mum’s friend, Celeste, who’d come to join us, swishing festively across in a strawberry two-piece. ‘He’s that new weatherman off the telly. Always wears such lovely ties. They’re an item, they are. I read it in Depth .’

  ‘That’s it!’ said my mother, whose state of animation by this time was beginning to border on the unseemly. ‘I knew I knew the face,’ she said, fanning her own. ‘Goodness! How exciting this all is!’

  But the excitement was soon over. Once the photographer had been ejected, and the celebrity contingent ushered into the crematorium (without reference to us at any point – we were beginning to feel like a bunch of local peasants who just showed up at a hanging on the off chance), the service itself went pretty much as services at funerals do. We sang a bit, the vicar spoke a bit, and someone (in this case a someone called George) told a couple of anecdotes that were in somewhat bad taste. But it was a gathering that lacked any real sense of gravity, because so many heads kept swivelling around to try and clock the stars in our midst. To her credit, my mother did weep copiously as the casket rolled off stage, but even then I detected a slight touch of the theatricals, which should have alerted me, though it didn’t, that all was not quite as it seemed.

  And it seemed I wasn’t wrong. We filed back out into the sunshine. We filed past all the flowers. We stopped to read the notes. We were just moving off to get back into the car when a tell-tale plume of smoke started spouting from the chimney. My mother glanced up at it and stabbed a finger in the air. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish!’ she said firmly.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Pru, as we hastily wheeled her back to the car and bundled her inside. ‘What a thing to say! Supposing someone had heard you?’

  ‘No one heard me,’ my mother replied testily.

  ‘God did, Nana,’ observed Chloe.

  ‘God will understand,’ Mum told her, patting her knee. ‘God sees and hears everything . God knows .’

  Unless you’re God , and I’m not, it’s never a good idea to think you’ve seen and heard everything. Mainly because God moves in mysterious ways, and we’re fools if we think we can predict them.

  But the many mysteries of the universe are the last thing on my mind when we get back to Mum and Hugo’s, occupied, as it is, with that most delicate of delicate social occasions, the post-funeral gathering over tea. As is often the case (unless you’re Irish, of course) nobody seems to know quite how to be.

  And this gathering – this non-party – is even worse than most. Peopled, as it is, by two factions of mourners who were it not for certain parties’ late forays into matrimony (and the presence of celebrity, of course), wouldn’t have anything to do with one another, let alone engage in tea and Battenburg.

  I’m not sure quite why it is that the atmosphere feels so uncomfortable; whatever our private thoughts about our respective parents’ spouses, we have, as far as I can tell, no reason to feel any antagonism towards each other, yet Corinne, who was perfectly civil during our phone calls, still seems decidedly disinclined to engage with either Pru or I.

  ‘Her father did just die, I guess,’ comments Pru, ever the sage.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But even so… Don’t you think she’s being a bit, I don’t know, offish?’

  ‘Offish?’

  ‘Well not offish so much, as just a bit anxious to avoid us, you know?’

  She shrugs. ‘I guess she’s just not that bothered about speaking to us. Chances are, after this, she’ll never clap eyes on us again.’

  Which thought seems to sum up just how arbitrary some relationships can be. We’re just connected by circumstance and now the circumstance has changed. I wonder who’ll end up with the sideboard.

  Of course, sideboard aside, I’m not remotely aware of just how very much the circumstances have changed at this point. Not a bit of it. I am too preoccupied with the circumstance in hand; the one where I’m stuck in a house with a bunch of people I don’t know, who I don’t particularly want to know, who certainly don’t seem to want to know me – which is fine – and wishing the whole tedious business was over, so I can get back to the much cheerier and also necessary business of taking up residence in my life again. But for now I must cut cake and make tea.

  Thus it is that I’m holed up in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil so I can make a pot. Jake’s mooching round the garden, trailed by his cousins, and chatting to someone on his mobile. Likewise, I’m chatting to Dee on mine. She’s called to update me on Charlie (I keep telling her not to, but she takes absolutely no notice) and to make arrangements for badminton next week. Can I make Tuesday okay? Yes, I can. Post-Charlie, Tuesday badminton has become my new black. I’m not very good at it. I’m actually quite bad at it. But it’s one hundred percent better than being bad, for sure. Plus it’s very efficacious on the bingo wings front, which, looking at my mother when she’s in her triangle stand, is clearly a matter about which to be concerned. ‘You won’t believe what Mum said,’ I’m telling Dee as I empty out the teapot. She says oh yes she will. So I tell her.

  ‘Come to think of it,’ I’ m saying. ‘It’s exactly the sort of thing she would say. God, but my mother is incorrigible.’

  The kettle boils then, so I ring off and reach for tea bags. Humming to myself and with my back to the kitchen door. So it’s no surprise that I don’t know someone else is in the kitchen. Not until it speaks to me, at any rate.

  ‘I suppose,’ the voice says, ‘that she did have a point.’

  As the voice says this at least five seconds after I last spoke, I assume for a moment that
it must be engaged in conversation with someone else. But when I wheel around, it’s to find myself face to face with the face of the weatherman – who, now I think about it, does look vaguely familiar – and I realise there’s no one else in here. So he must have been talking to me. He sort of smiles but not quite, as one tends to at a funeral. ‘Gabriel Ash,’ he says equably, proffering a hand.

  I wipe my own hands on a tea towel and then extend one to shake his. He’s still looking sort of smiley, in a faintly self-reproving way. He’s got that kind of face. Animated. Changeable. A bit like the weather. Adjustable according to the season.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I say, flustered, realising that he’s probably – no, definitely – referring to my mother. ‘How embarrassing. You didn’t hear her, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t need to,’ he says, equally equably. ‘I just heard you , didn’t I? But I can’t say it was any sort of shock.’

  As I’m still not sure who he is (well, apart from a television weatherman with a celebrity girlfriend), I’m not really sure how to respond.

  ‘You knew Hugo, then?’ I plump for, because I guess he must have – or she must. He may be showbiz – he certainly has the usual smooth patina – but he’s nothing to do with my mother. He nods.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. I’m his son.’

  Now I’m really embarrassed. ‘His son ? Hugo’s? I didn’t know he had a son.’ Didn’t know much about him at all, when it comes down to it. And the same might be said of my mother. Has she ever mentioned a son at any point? No, she most definitely hasn’t. How excruciating . But then I have a thought. ‘And why d’you say “in a manner of speaking”?’

  ‘In the sense that we hadn’t actually spoken in twenty years. Shall I rinse out some of these for you?’

  He moves purposefully towards the sinkful of crockery and I move aside to let him. ‘Er, yes. Yes, thanks.’ I’m not used to television people offering to wash things up. It almost doesn’t seem seemly. But then perhaps things have changed since my mum’s day. Though I still can’t imagine Lucy Whittall with a tea towel. But then I imagine she’s doing what she probably does best. Standing in the living room being quietly adored. And why not? It’s made half the guests’ day, that’s for sure. But now I know what I know, why are they here at all? Specifically, why him? Twenty years is a very long time. And would explain why we were all unaware of his existence. I don’t know quite what to say to him, so ‘Oh dear,’ is what comes out. ‘Oh, dear. That’s so sad.’ But he’s shaking his head.

  ‘Not really,’ he says, filling the washing-up bowl with water. ‘Washing-up liquid in here?’ He opens the undersink cupboard.

  I nod and then shrug. ‘If you say so,’ I answer. What a curious turn of events. I start to fill the tea pot. ‘It seems pretty sad to me.’

  He says nothing for a moment. Just swooshes mugs in the water. Then he glances up. ‘You’re one of his wife’s daughters then? Abbie, isn’t it?’

  I grimace. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  He looks at me carefully. ‘No,’ he says, ‘it’s not. My sister pointed you out.’

  He doesn’t say it pointedly, but there exists, between the words he’s just spoken and the ones I might be tempted to respond with, a certain mutual but unspoken acknowledgement of relations not being quite as they might be in that department.

  ‘It’s all been very difficult,’ I say carefully. ‘Well, not difficult so much as uncomfortable, really. Here we all are at the same funeral and we none of us really know each other. Not properly. It’s not been –’

  ‘I know. Corinne told me.’ He finishes rinsing out the mugs and cups and now he reaches across me to pick up the tea towel. He smells of coconut.

  ‘Parents, eh?’ I say.

  And then I wish I hadn’t, because the sort of person who has not had a relationship with at least one of his parents for two whole decades (two , even – how would I know?) is probably someone with a whole different take on the concept of parents and their foibles than someone like me, who is all foibled out.

  ‘Your mother’s disabled, then?’ he asks me politely.

  My mother’s disabled many things in her time. Stage sets, hearts, marriages, cars, at least one washing machine, a mobile phone. I shake my head. ‘Only temporarily, we hope. She’s had a knee replacement. And then she broke it, so she’s had another one.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he says. ‘I didn’t even know you could break knee replacements.’

  ‘Most people can’t.’ I point then, his comment having made me remember. ‘What’s the matter with your knee? If you don’t mind me asking. Anterior cruciate ligament?’

  ‘You already worked that out?’

  ‘An educated guess. And a fairly safe bet. I’m a physiotherapist.’

  ‘I know.’ He nods. ‘Your mother told me. She said you were –’

  ‘Ah, there you are, Gabriel!’

  We turn, as one, to see Lucy Whittall framed in the kitchen doorway, clutching a bottle of something with a corkscrew in the top. ‘Be an angel and get this open for me, will you?’ She winks conspiratorially, and it’s mainly at me. Then she tosses her head back. ‘None of those old codgers in there have got the strength, bless ’em. Though, fair play, they all had a damn good try.’

  I’ll bet. Close up, she is jaw-droppingly beautiful, with hair that really does have the colour and form of a field of wheat in a breeze. And whatever ravages her lurid past have writ on her features, the pen has been gently, even lovingly applied. She’s about thirty, I imagine – younger than me and him, certainly – with intelligent, sparkling, been there-done that eyes. And she glows – in that way that beautiful women do, in that way that can’t help but immediately alert me to my great age, my lacklustre, not-quite-any-colour hair, my insignificant bosom, my lack of lipstick, my pinny (no – my mother’s pinny), my chronic inability to get noticed in bar queues and the fact that the polish on my fingernails and toenails (the former hastily applied to go with the funeral get-up), don’t just not match, but positively clash. Oh, and that I wish I hadn’t taken my shoes off in the first place, because not only do I look like the Hispanic housemaid, but I am also a good foot smaller than them both. Yes, yes, yes, I know people get paid for grooming the likes of Lucy Whittall, and to the n th degree, clearly, but it still makes me feel like a wizened old hag.

  Which is a shame, because immediately I like her.

  Gabriel Ash takes the bottle and does the job in seconds, and there follows a wordless but still obvious exchange, involving his eyebrows (raised), her eyebrows (furrowed) then an expression on her part that seems to say ‘I won’t !’ and one on his that seems to answer ‘make sure you don’t! ’ I could be wrong, obviously, but I don’t think I am. It’s related to the contents of the bottle.

  She sashays back out and we get on with the drying, while her aura lingers fragrantly in the air. I wonder again quite why they’re here. Why he is. Why now? After two whole decades of non-contact? What a day this is turning out to be. ‘She seems very nice,’ I say, because I have to say something. He grins. ‘And beautiful,’ I add. ‘You know, in the flesh, as it were.’ That the grin becomes a smile is, I assume, because he much enjoys hearing that said.

  And then it occurs to me that I’m silly feeling inadequate, because Charlie thinks I’m beautiful, too. But it’s a dozy kind of thought, and I’ve no business thinking it, because however grateful I am to have been briefly thus adored, what Charlie thinks no longer matters.

  *

  By the time we’re ready to leave the house, having dispatched the last of the guests, cleared everything away, assembled yet another cache of maternal essentials (this is beginning to feel like moving house by correspondence course), checked the doors and windows, fed the fish and the parlour palm and waved off Pru and the children, my mother has become really quite jolly.

  Outrageously and highly inappropriately jolly. I’m only grateful she’s kept it buttoned up thus far. ‘Fancy that!’
she trills gaily, as we get into the car. ‘I was flabbergasted! Absolutely flabbergasted! Who’d have thought we had such a celebrity in the family?’

  I note the ‘we’. And her somewhat loose interpretation of the word ‘family’. They are certainly no longer a part of ours. ‘Who indeed?’ I reply.

  ‘Oh, it seems such a terrible shame!’ she twitters on.

  ‘What does, Nana?’ asks Jake, who hasn’t up till now been listening, on account of having been plugged into his iPod for as much of the duration as possible.

  ‘That I never even knew about him! Such a terrible waste.’

  Unlike my mother, who is patently not brooding on the loss of a potential stepson, but rather on the perceived lost Career Enhancement Opportunity (it was ever thus), Jake, naturally, is wholly unimpressed. Unsurprisingly, he’s never even heard of the weatherman, and though by now hormonally awakened to the charms of girls’ squashy bits, he doesn’t know who Lucy Whittall is either. Mainly on account of a television diet of twenty-four / seven MTV and Kerrang . And to him she must seem fairly aged, I guess.

  Indeed, he even seems a little pre-occupied. When we get home, he goes straight upstairs to his room, and doesn’t emerge for an hour. When he does finally reappear downstairs he still looks lost in thought, and I wonder if the funeral’s upset him. But no. He’s got something in his hand, which he thrusts at me.

  ‘What d’you think,’ he asks me, ‘of this as a plan? I thought I could put it up in Pearson’s.’

  It’s a postcard. On it is written ‘Vocalist/rhythm guitarist (must be committed !) to join established band ‘One Black Lung’. Pontcanna area. Our musical influence’s are Metallica, Metallica and Metallica.’

  One Black Lung are called One Black Lung because Ben had pneumonia last Christmas. Neither of his lungs went black as far as I know, but it’s a catchy kind of name, even so.