We finished our salmon in silence. I waited for the roast venison to arrive before pressing on.
‘What was it like, living there?’
Sister Claire carefully chewed and swallowed. But in her sidelong glance I saw the first real glimpse of my mother since she’d arrived. ‘I left, aged seventeen, and never went back. I think that tells you enough.’
‘Why?’
She put down her knife and fork and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. Bent her head for a long moment.
‘Please, Mum. Why did I never get to meet my grandmother?’
Another minute or two ticked by. While the rest of the table tucked into the Brussels sprouts and chestnut stuffing, chatting, clinking crystal, tipsy hands gesticulating wildly, my mother and I sat in some sort of bubble.
Finally, she gave a slow, determined blink, and turned to me. ‘Your grandmother and I did not get on. She was a… difficult woman. Controlling. Rigid. I thought she blamed me for your grandfather leaving. I blamed her for driving him away. And I couldn’t forgive her. So instead I spent the next thirty years trying to forget.’
She wiped away the tear running down her cheek. Speechless, I handed her a napkin.
‘Thank you.’ She blotted her face, took a couple of slow breaths. ‘I have made my peace with God, but I can never make peace with her. And I must live with the pain I caused. The unanswered questions.’
She clenched her hands together in a fist on the table. ‘Whatever has gone on between you and Zara, please sort it out. Whether we like it or not, family matters.’
‘I take your point, Mum. I’ll try and talk to her before we go. Maybe not on her wedding night, though.’
I sat back, unable to eat any more. Braced myself.
‘I don’t want that to happen to us.’
Mum frowned. ‘What to happen?’
‘I don’t want us to end up never seeing each other again. I want to be able to forgive you.’
I picked up my water glass to take a gulp, the contents sloshing as my hand shook.
‘Forgive me for what?’ Sister Claire had gone. Isobel Meadows, proud socialite, stared back at me.
‘Don’t you think that the damage caused by your childhood might have affected me and Zara? Mum, I can’t ever remember you telling me you love me. Giving me a proper cuddle. When I was ill or upset you mostly told me to grow up and get over it.’
I had more to say, so much more, but the hot pain in my lungs and throat was too much to bear. I pushed back my chair. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t handle the rising panic. Then Mack, laughing with the woman on his other side, took my hand in his and gently squeezed it, coaxing me back towards the table.
‘Excuse me one moment.’ He turned to me, keeping hold of my hand, and bent his head close to mine. ‘You’ve got this,’ he whispered, the kindness in his eyes so deep and beautiful it struck my very soul.
After the longest, tensest, most despairing silence of my life, my mother slowly reached out and took my other hand, pulling it up between us on the table.
‘You’re right. And I’m sorry. I have not been a wonderful mother. I perhaps failed you in more ways than most. But I knew no better. And all I can do now is ask for your forgiveness.’ She took a long, juddering breath. ‘I love you, Jennifer.’ I managed to meet her eyes for maybe a fraction of a second before the pain got too much. ‘I love you. With all my heart. Surely you knew that?’
No, Mum, I didn’t know that.I would have been surprised to find she loved me with a teensy cranny of her heart.
We sat in frozen silence through dessert, and then the speeches, which I didn’t hear a word of, although Mack later assured me that was probably a good thing, and the choreographed first dance to Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’, interrupted by one of the bridesmaids starting to bop in the corner with her husband, at which point Zara stopped the music, screeched for seven minutes about how it was her day, and no one was going to steal her limelight however jealous they were, then insisted on starting again from the beginning.
‘I need to tell you something else,’ I managed to croak out, once the Celtic band had got under way. ‘Can we go somewhere quieter? Maybe the library?’
And there, I told my mother about the brother she’d never known. More tears spilled over as I tried to explain what I’d learnt about Charlotte from the diaries.
We wept for secrets untold, the brother never mourned – the family that could have been, had Charlotte Meadows got support, spoken up, talked to her daughter, been brave enough to dare to love her. We wept most of all for the bright young girl who became a lonely old woman, unable to let go of a single memory, a scrap of her past, as if surrounding herself with things could replace what she’d lost, those who had abandoned her. Dying as she had lived: alone, unloved, estranged.
And we wept for a family still here, yet utterly broken.
As we sat together on a sofa, my mother leant over and hugged me and, however much I’d pretended I didn’t care, it was the hug I’d been waiting for my whole life.
