Page 6 of Annabel and Her Sisters

‘Tea for the moment, Mum. It is, yes, and I get it, I really do. Selling this place is a good idea, particularly now…’

‘You mean before I get too old,’ she finished, eyeing me beadily. She put the kettle on the ancient Aga in the blue Formica kitchen that hadn’t changed for thirty years.

‘Yes, OK, before you get too old. But it’s not buying something smaller, a flat of your own, that bothers me.’ I perched on the old Windsor chair, stroking Hippo the Norfolk terrier who’d bounced up on to my lap.

‘A flat? With the dogs? Can you imagine it, Annabel?’ she cried in horror.

‘Well, with a garden, obviously, a ground-floor one with your own terrace, and a communal one. I’ve checked– that over-fifty-fives place where Sylvia is allows dogs and has a huge garden. And Battersea Park is just across the river.’

‘Over-fifty-fives– it’s full of old dears!

Sylvia says she’s surrounded by ghosts; the living dead, she calls them.

I went to have tea with her recently and she’s right, they’re geriatric.

Plus the corridor smells of boiled cabbage.

’ She shuddered. ‘No, this is just splendid. And don’t think,’ she turned sharply as she got the china tea service out of the cupboard as she always did, ‘that it means I’ll always be with you because you’re in London.

This is to be divided equally between the three of you– as is the money.

Think of it, darling. I’ve had an extremely good pair of offers already– think what that would mean for Polly and Luke! ’

‘Leaving nothing for you,’ I went on doggedly, sticking to my guns. ‘And giving you no real base.’

‘Oh, I’ve got your father’s pension, more than enough. The judiciary were generous in those days. Plus, my base will be with the three of you. As long as you don’t mind?’

She glanced round from spooning loose leaf tea into the pot, her eyes wide with anxiety suddenly, at the only daughter who had thus far demurred.

‘God no, I’d love to have you. So would the children.

’ Both of these statements were true and may seem strange, so let me explain.

My mother was absolutely no trouble. You wouldn’t know she was there when she came to stay.

She’d take herself off to the park in the morning, then pop back for a quick sandwich she’d make herself, before retiring upstairs with a book on her bed, her dogs curled up beautifully in the kitchen in a large, collapsible cage she always brought with her in the back of her car.

At three she’d appear downstairs for another long walk in the park, and a wander round town.

She called on friends– the dogs waited obediently in their gardens– she shopped, and left them outside, sitting in a row, much to the amusement of passers-by.

She was known and loved wherever she went.

A character. A joy. ‘Queen Lea’, my local greengrocer, a charming man from Sri Lanka, told me, showing me a cardigan she’d knitted for his baby daughter. ‘I love her. She’s so good.’

Good was indeed what my mother was. A good woman.

Never tricky or difficult and she never spoke ill of anyone.

A thoroughly dislikeable person was at most ‘tedious’.

A disaster or a crisis ‘disappointing’. Such was the language and attitude of her generation.

A four-hour traffic jam was never ‘a complete nightmare’, but ‘boring’, for to be jolly and good-humoured she saw as her duty, her role in life, what she’d been put on this earth to do.

Pammy, her greatest friend, whom she also rang daily, and who’d lost her own husband young, was the same.

‘Too dreary, darling,’ she’d say with a dismissive wave of her heavily jewelled hand, holding a ciggie, if anyone dared to get intense, mention some terrible news story or someone’s illness.

‘Have you seen that wonderfully fat man on Strictly ? So game– such fun!’ Fun, for the pair of them, was essential.

She and Mum believed one should sing for one’s supper and my mother certainly made everyone laugh at ours when she stayed, rising from the table when Polly and Luke were still wiping their eyes with mirth, and saying it was her bedtime.

Nine thirty, every night, after the dogs had been down the road, with the news on her tiny portable TV in bed, until Luke had talked her into a laptop.

She enlivened every house she entered. So why was I so against it, when Ginnie and Clarissa weren’t?

It wasn’t that their houses were larger– that didn’t bother me.

It was the lack of security it would afford my mother and I explained this to her now as we sat either side of the kitchen table, sipping from china teacups and eating a freshly baked Victoria sponge.

‘If you’ve had enough, you’d never be able to say– time to go home!’ I told her. I’d rehearsed it in the car. It was one of her favourite phrases, and said quite abruptly, before rising like a phoenix and sweeping out, the dogs in her wake.

‘Well, I would,’ she retorted, pouring more tea, her finger on the lid. ‘It would just be another house I’d be going to. Ginnie’s. Or Clarissa’s.’

‘With Derek,’ I reminded her.

‘Now Derek’s got a kind heart. He’s just a bit bluff. I know how to charm him.’

‘He’s already bought a tractor!’ I squeaked.

‘Has he?’ Her face lit up. ‘Oh good. I hoped he would. You know that will save the farm, Annabel. It means they can stay there, and it would break their hearts to leave.’ She looked truly joyful.

‘They could diversify,’ I said stubbornly. ‘Like every other farmer. Run a camp site or something.’

Even I looked doubtful as I said it and my mother threw back her head and roared, that gloriously silvery peal, right up to the heavens.

‘Can you see it?’ she squealed, wiping her eyes.

All Fanshawes weep when they laugh. ‘He’d be like a furious headmaster.

Striding around at dawn, barking about litter and camp stoves left out.

Remember when they had that film crew making some TV show when Ginnie persuaded them to because she’d had one at hers?

He pulled all the plugs out and told them to bugger off and keep their three grand he was so livid! ’

‘Livid,’ I echoed, undeterred. ‘Always. And he’s only going to get worse, you know that.’

‘But he’s out all day, darling, you know he is. And Hugo’s lovely.’

‘Hugo is lovely,’ I conceded. But Hugo too was pretty set in his ways, particularly in his own house, and particularly about mess– and who could blame him?

It was his house. Yet it felt ungenerous and disloyal to be criticizing my brothers-in-law– not to mention my sisters, who we hadn’t even got on to yet.

I sighed. My mother took it the wrong way.

‘And obviously I’d go to Ginnie first, and then Clarissa; give you time to put the extension in, and even then, since your house is smaller, spend less time with you?’ she said hopefully. There was a trace of fear in her eyes and I felt sad.

‘No, Mum, you’re missing the point. This isn’t about me, or Ginnie, or Clarissa. It’s about you. Your independence. How you might miss it.’

‘Your children live with you,’ she pointed out. ‘Or will do, when Luke comes back. Which is unusual.’

‘Not in London these days with colossal rents, but yes, they do.’ Because we all loved each other dearly. As I did my mother. I felt myself being backed into a corner.

‘And David, I know, would have approved.’

I glanced up, surprised. My mother didn’t do emotional blackmail, so this had to be correct.

‘Really? Why?’

‘Because he said to me, before he died, that he hoped you wouldn’t be alone.’

‘David had a heart attack– how could he possibly have said that?’

‘You and I both know he’d had a warning the year before. A minor one. At work.’

In court. He’d felt… odd. Fainted. Or something.

We’d dismissed it, the pair of us. But wondered.

I met her blue eyes across the table. So he’d known.

And given his permission for me to find someone else, to my mother, as I know he would have had the grace to do: as both my children assured me he would have wanted, too.

Knowing I was too young to be alone. She’d never told me this before. She reached out and took my hand.

‘Obviously he didn’t mean me,’ she said softly. ‘But if you insist on staying as you are…’

‘As you did too,’ I reminded her firmly.

‘But I was older.’

‘Not much.’

‘Ten years.’

I glanced down. ‘I can’t,’ I told her in a small voice. ‘I just can’t. And I don’t want to.’

‘I know,’ she agreed. ‘And I felt the same. But sometimes, Annabel, and I would only say this to you, not the others, sometimes I wonder if I was right.’

I glanced up, astonished.

‘Honestly. I sometimes think that. Not now, of course, not at eighty-two, but I look back and wonder if it was right to spend thirty, and probably forty years of my life alone. You still have time. It will never be David, just as it would never ever have been anyone remotely as good a man as your father. But if I don’t say these things to you now, having been in your position, I feel I might regret it one day. More cake?’

She calmly cut another thin slice and slid it, surreptitiously and gently, like all her words and deeds, on to my plate.