Page 15 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘You look lovely, Mama,’ Anna says as she comes to stand behind Ingrid and they glance at each other in the mirror.

Anna knows how mirrors work, of course, yet she always finds it a little odd that you can meet someone else’s eyes in a mirror.

You’re not looking right at each other outside of the mirror, yet you are in the mirror .

Isn’t that odd? Doesn’t that seem like it goes against the laws of science or nature or something?

Maybe she’s overthinking it. ‘You are thinking too much,’ her mother likes to say to her, and it takes all of Anna’s self-control to not bite back when that happens, because she can’t believe her mother doesn’t realise that she has relied on Anna to do the thinking for so many years now.

Like this morning: Ingrid said she wanted to buy a new outfit.

‘The bridge ladies have seen all my clothes,’ she said.

Anna has seen the bridge ladies and doesn’t think they’ll notice if Ingrid is repeating outfits, but her mother likes to look smart.

Anna used to like to look smart and she’d quite like to look smart again, except it’s a muscle that has to be used constantly to work effectively and she’s let hers atrophy.

Which is not her mother’s fault, even though Anna sometimes resents her for looking so put-together all the time.

Can’t the woman slip, just once? Of course not.

Appearances have to be maintained, just as they did when Anna’s father had his accident.

Back then Ingrid relied on Anna to help her with that maintenance – and she’s still doing it.

The outfit-shopping needed some organisation.

For Ingrid, buying clothes does not mean pitching up at the local shops and hoping for the best. It’s a mission, so it needs planning and targets.

Anna did a recce in Gosford and found a boutique she thought Ingrid would like, and that’s where they’re standing now, with Ingrid in a matching cerise jacket and skirt with blue trim – possibly too dressy for bridge, but then again Ingrid has her own standards.

‘The colour isn’t too … loud?’ Ingrid asks, scanning herself up and down, her blonde helmet of hair barely moving as she does so.

Anna shakes her head. ‘Nuh-uh. Hot pink would be too loud.’

‘Unless it’s shocking pink.’

They smile knowingly at each other. Anna has learnt some fashion lore at her mother’s metaphorical feet, and Ingrid worships at the altar of Elsa Schiaparelli, who was synonymous with shocking pink.

Their little in-jokes remind Anna they have things in common outside of just trying to make it through each day, which is what has marked most of their lives together.

‘We’re decided, then,’ Ingrid declares, then disappears into the change room to put on her slacks and turtleneck.

Back in the car, Anna looks at her watch, considering all the other things that need to be done today.

‘You wanted to go to Noraville,’ she states as she starts the engine.

‘If you have time.’ Ingrid puts on her Jackie Onassis sunglasses and Anna stops herself from laughing, as she usually does.

Her mother is not at all like the soignée Jackie.

Ingrid is elegant in her own way, but it’s a very different way to Jackie, so the big, dark sunglasses don’t fit her overall look.

But she loves them and Anna supposes that’s all that matters.

Noraville is the cemetery where her father lies in ashes.

The advantage of only having ashes to bury is that one plot can fit a whole family, and given their straitened circumstances at the time of his death, it made sense to just buy the one plot and make plans for them all to go in it, also in ashes.

He died when Anna was twenty-three, far too late for her to go to university with her friends from school – she hadn’t been able to even think about it before that, because she had to be at home to help.

In that time after school, though, she took up sewing, and became good at it.

She did piecework for a local dressmaker and sometimes dreamt of starting her own fashion business.

Now she only makes the occasional dress she designs herself, and Ingrid’s never asked her to make one, which is why Anna was surprised to hear her talking about them at the salon the other day.

The drive takes a while and they pass it mostly not talking, listening to classical music on the radio. There’s no need for a mother and daughter to talk all the time, Anna supposes, although she’d like to think she and Renee would always have something to talk about.

When they arrive, Anna follows Ingrid to the grave.

‘It seems like a long time,’ Ingrid says as they stand, both with their hands folded in front of them. It’s something Anna does when she’s standing still; no doubt she learnt it from her mother.

‘It is a long time, Mama,’ Anna murmurs.

‘And yet it’s not.’ Ingrid has a faraway smile. ‘He was a marvellous dancer, your father.’

Anna restrains herself from sighing, because Ingrid loves to retell the story of how she met her husband, and Anna knows it inside out.

That’s not the point, though, is it? Anna recognised long ago that Ingrid’s retelling is like a talisman, warding off the full impact of the past. If Ingrid keeps retelling the old stories it’s as if she hasn’t moved on from them.

As if she’s still there, at the dance, seeing Ingrid’s father for the first time as he crossed the floor, bowed, held out his hand and asked her to join him.

‘Such grace,’ Ingrid says.

Anna could take the story from there because it doesn’t change in the retelling. However, she knows better: the talisman only works if it’s Ingrid who wields it.

‘He hated being in that chair,’ Ingrid goes on, and that’s part of the story too – the back-and-forth between past and present.

Today, though, Anna isn’t in the mood for indulging it. ‘We all hated it,’ she says.

Her mother blinks as if she’s coming out of a trance. ‘What?’

‘Mama, we all hated him being in that chair. Especially you. And me.’

More blinking. ‘I didn’t …’ Ingrid purses her lips and turns her head away.

Anna glances down at the headstone. Barnaby Powell. Loved and missed.

‘Of course you did,’ Anna says. ‘Between work and home duties, you barely slept until he died.’ She swallows, preparing to say something she never has before. ‘Nor did I. We were both exhausted.’

She leaves it hanging there: the implication that her brothers didn’t endure the same thing.

It’s what she and Ingrid have never talked about, this bald fact of their family, that Anna was sacrificed to her brothers’ futures.

It’s not the sort of thing a daughter can raise with her mother unless she wants to risk never being spoken to again.

‘We were,’ her mother concedes with what sounds like sadness.

Anna clears her throat. ‘And my brothers were not.’

There’s a sharp sniff and while Anna doesn’t look at her mother she knows there will be a glare so piercing it might put a hole in her.

‘They needed to be their best,’ Ingrid says. ‘They had to get to university. To achieve.’

There’s silence between them for a few seconds. Maybe thirty. Maybe more.

‘And me?’ Anna asks, trying not to sound like she’s begging. Now she turns to meet her mother’s eyes.

‘You?’ Ingrid says. ‘What did you need university for? You have Gary.’

It hits Anna like a punch to her chest, this stark admission that her husband was seen as her be-all and end-all. As if she needed nothing and no one else. As if she didn’t need herself.

‘ Had Gary, Mama. He’s not around any more.’

‘Yes. Well.’ More lip-pursing. ‘You could fix that.’

‘So I could go back to what I was when I was young – taking care of other people and never of myself?’ She tries not to sound angry but it’s hard.

‘That’s what we do,’ her mother says. ‘That’s our place.’

Anna has always known her mother thought this, because it’s how the situation arose originally, but it still hurts to hear it said.

‘I want to be alone with my husband,’ Ingrid says tersely.

Anna stares at her for a second or two, seeing her mother’s irises waver just a little.

Then she turns and walks back to the car, leaving Ingrid to converse with a man who is long dead, and who left them in spirit even longer before that.