look as though you’ve recovered properly yourself.’
The car rolled forward again.
‘How could you be here? There would have been nothing you could do, anyway. And I’m fine, thanks.’
‘It hasn’t been much of a year for you, has it?’
Annie watched the road intently. ‘It has had its ups and downs.’
There was nothing else she could say to Phillip, however searchingly he stared at her. Not to this broad, red-faced man who had stepped briefly out of an unknown world, even if he was her brother.
They reached the hospice, and went upstairs to Tibby’s room. Jim had been sitting by her bed, and he stood up now and hugged his son. Tibby opened her eyes.
‘Hello, Mum,’ Phillip said. ‘I’ve got some leave, so here I am.’
Tibby looked at him, unmoving. For an instant Annie glimpsed the same clear awareness in her face, and it heartened her. Then her mother smiled faintly, and lifted her shrunken hand.
‘Hello, darling. Come and sit here by me.’
Annie watched Phillip sit down, and take hold of Tibby’s hand.
Her sense of relief intensified, making her feel light, almost weightless. Of course Tibby knew that she was dying. Her way of confronting it was natural, for Tibby. Admiration of her mother’s bravery blazed up inside Annie.
‘I’ll call in later,’ she whispered, and she left Tibby with her husband and son.
It was early evening when she drove back again and the houses and shops and parks glowed in the rich, buttery sunlight. Annie parked her car in the hospice visitors’ park and walked up the steps past tubs of shimmering violet and blue and white petunias.
Tibby’s room was shadowy behind drawn curtains. Annie thought at first that her mother was asleep, but she turned her head at the click of the door.
‘Did I wake you?’ Annie murmured.
Tibby shook her head. ‘No. I was thinking. Remembering things. I’m very good at remembering now. All kinds of things that I thought I had forgotten for ever.’
Annie smiled at her. She knew just how it was. The fragments of confetti, precious fragments.
‘Shall I open the curtains a little?’ she asked. ‘The light outside is beautiful.’
Tibby shook her head. ‘It’s comfortable like this.’
Tibby didn’t want to see the light any more, Annie knew that. Her world had shrunk to the bed, and the faces around it. She nodded, with the tears behind her eyes, and for a moment they were quiet in the dim room.
Then Tibby said, ‘Thank you for calling Phillip home.’ Her eyes had been half-closed but they opened wide now, piercing Annie. ‘I know what it means.’ She smiled, and then she added, as if Annie were a child again, and she was comforting her after a childish misunderstanding, very softly, ‘It’s all right.’
The mixture of pain, and relief, and love that flooded through Annie was almost too much for her. She sat with her head bent, holding Tibby’s hand folded between her own. They were silent again. Annie thought that Tibby was pursuing her own memories, piecing together the confetti pictures as she had done herself with Steve.
But Tibby said suddenly, in a clear voice that startled her, ‘Is it something between you and Martin? Is that why you are unhappy?’
Denials, placatory phrases and soothing half-truths followed one another through Annie’s mind. She had opened her mouth to say, Of course not, we’re very happy, but she raised her head and met her mother’s eyes.
I was the one who wanted the truth, she thought.
‘I fell in love with someone else,’ she said simply. ‘A stranger.’
‘When?’
‘After the bomb. We were there together.’
Tibby nodded. ‘I guessed that,’ she said. The maternal intuition took Annie back to girlhood all over again. She tightened her fingers on her mother’s. Don’t go, Tibby. I’ll miss you too much.
‘What are you going to do?’
Annie looked at her hopelessly. ‘Nothing. What is there to do?’
Suddenly she could see how bright Tibby’s eyes were in the dimness. The corners of her mouth drew down, an economical gesture of impatience, disappointment, all that she had the strength for. Annie knew that she had given the wrong answer.
There was a long, long pause before Tibby spoke again. ‘I did nothing,’ she said. ‘Don’t make the same mistakes. Don’t.’ The last word was no more than a soft, exhaled breath. The confession hurt her. Tibby closed her eyes, exhausted.
Annie saw it all, the sharp outlines of the story, even though she would never know the details. Tibby and Jim had failed each other somehow, in the course of the years. Perhaps there had been another man. Perhaps a path of a different kind had offered itself. Annie remembered her mother’s wedding picture, with Tibby in her little tilted hat, her lips vividly painted. Whatever had happened, the two of them had stayed together. For her own sake, perhaps, and Phillip’s. Tibby had taken on the protection of the house and the big corner garden, and Jim the routines that commanded his days.
Annie felt the sadness of it, drifting and settling, as silent and as endless as the dust on her mother’s furniture. What reason was there?
Don’t make the same mistakes.
But no one’s mistakes could be the same. They were all different, and the permutations of their mistakes stretched on into infinity.
Annie lifted her mother’s hand, feeling the bones move under the skin. Some things were right. So many of Tibby’s. Those were the ones to hold on to.
‘You’ve got us,’ she whispered. ‘I love you, Tibby.’
Tibby smiled, without opening her eyes. Her head was heavy against the pillow.
‘I know,’ she said.
Annie stayed with her until she was sure that she was asleep. Then she laid her hand gently back on the covers and went out into the light again. The brightness made her blink and she stood for a moment on the steps, watching the intensity of it on the frilled trumpets of the petunias. Then Annie climbed into her car and drove back through the streets to Martin, and the boys who were waiting for her under the rucked-up shelter of their bedcovers.
Tibby died the same night, peacefully, in her sleep.
She left no will, other than the joint one she had drawn up with her husband years ago, for Annie and Phillip’s benefit. There were no instructions about her funeral. Annie was sure that her mother would have preferred to be buried, but she said nothing when Jim and Phillip agreed on cremation.
‘That seems sensible,’ Phillip said briskly and Annie had turned away with her grief, unable to comprehend how anything connected with her mother’s
