Forget Me Not (The Ceruleans: Book 2) (19 page)

When I stirred the next morning a niggling feeling
superseded my first conscious thought. Something was wrong. Something had
happened.

A clock was ticking nearby. I must have fallen asleep on the
sofa, I thought groggily; the grandfather clock downstairs was the only
timepiece in the cottage. But the tick was off, somehow – lighter, more
musical. And then, in the brief gap between two ticks, I remembered, I
remembered all of it, and my eyes flew open to see not the living room of the
cottage but the bedroom of my childhood.

I lay still, waiting for the tears to come. But my eyes
remained dry. I lifted my head a little, tested it for dizziness or pain. But
though it was heavy, it was clear.

I’d slept, I realised. I’d expected a long, lonely night
haunted by the memory of Luke’s white face in my bedroom doorway and a pair of
tiger eyes watching me. But bright light was leaking around the thick velvet
curtains at the windows and the hands on the mantelpiece clock were at eleven
o’clock.

A pill, I remembered – Mum had given me a pill to take. After
she’d sat me down in the living room and coaxed the basics from me: that Luke
and I had rowed, and broken up. After she’d handed me tissue after tissue while
I cried it all out. After she’d led me up to the bedroom and helped me into
pyjamas and tucked me under the covers. But before I’d started to drift away,
and then panicked, begging her not to let me go, and she’d lain down beside me
and stroked my hair and promised to keep me safe.

And I had felt safe with her. That she would be there for
me. That was a new feeling – all these years, she’d been the one in pain, and
I’d been the one comforting her. I’d expected that at the door. Probing,
chastising, ramping up the drama. But there had been none of the usual madness.
She was quiet, compassionate. Sensible.

On the way here, there’d been nothing but gloom inside me.
God, there’d even been those seconds when I’d imagined

Agony

Blood

Flames

Black

White

Gone.

But now, there was a glimmer of light, enough to make me
want to get out of bed and get dressed and hurry downstairs to meet its source:
my mother.

I found her in the kitchen, sitting at the oversized pine
table engrossed in papers laid about before her. She looked up at the sound of
my footsteps and smiled warmly.

‘Morning, darling. How are you today?’

‘Calmer,’ I said, sitting opposite her. Our housekeeper,
Marnie, brought over a coffee, and I thanked her.

‘The staff are back?’ I asked Mum. Last time I’d been here,
right after Father had left, she’d sent them all away.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But not for long.’

She gestured at the papers on the table, and I looked down
to see they were estate agent marketing sheets for houses.

‘I’m thinking a cottage in the country someplace. On a hill
with a view. Little privet hedges. A wishing well.’

‘You’re moving?’

‘Selling up,’ she declared proudly. ‘Moving up. Moving on.’
Then her face fell: ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry – I never thought. This is your
home. Do you mind?’

I grimaced. ‘This old mausoleum? Not in the slightest.’

‘I never realised – you don’t like it here?’

‘Hate it. It’s cold. It’s bleak. It’s way too big.’

‘And too ostentatious by a mile,’ she added. ‘It’s Hugo all
over.’

‘So, you’re getting rid.’

‘I’m getting rid. Hey, do you have to get back? Or will you
stay a while? Maybe you can look at some places with me. I mean, if you want. I
understand if –’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I can stay.’

‘Good. Good! For how long?’

I thought about it. ‘A week.’

‘A week. I can squeeze a lot into a week.’

She looked so happy. Something twisted in my stomach. To
have found her at last, and then lose her again...

‘Oh, darling,’ she said, plucking a tissue from a nearby box
and blotted away a lonely tear snaking down my cheek. ‘I’m so sorry you’re
hurting. Luke – I thought he was a lovely boy.’

‘He is,’ I said. ‘The best.’

‘The best?’

‘Yes.’

‘The one?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you can’t be with him?’

‘No.’

‘Is it…’ She looked worried for the first time since I’d
arrived. ‘That boy in the hospital.’

‘Jude?’

‘Yes. I wondered whether...’

‘He’s nothing to me.’

I waited for her to say, ‘So what is it then? Why are you
here instead of with Luke, if he’s the one? What happened between you?’ But
instead she said, ‘Come on. Outside. There’s something I want to show you.’

In the hallway, she tutted at the thinness of my jacket and
hustled me into one of her own – a thick, white duck-down parka with a
fur-trimmed hood. Then she pulled on a matching hat, gloves and scarf, dressing
me carefully as she had when I was a toddler. Once she’d donned another of her
coats, we headed out into the murky rain. Arm in arm, we walked through the
rose garden – bereft of colour now – and past the stables. I thought, by our
trajectory, that she was leading me to the pool house, and I was about to
protest that I really wasn’t in the mood for a swim, when we took a sharp left
and walked along past vegetable patches and the gardeners’ shed. Beyond was a
clearing that was designated for waste disposal, and there, in the centre of
it, was a massive mountain of vibrant fabrics over which a frame of branches
had been built in the shape of a teepee.

Mum was clutching my arm to her side in excitement. ‘Isn’t
it brilliant?’ she breathed.

‘What is it?’

‘A bonfire! Hermes. Chanel. Chloe. Dolce & Gabbana. Marc
Jacobs. Versace. Burberry. Poof – up in smoke!’

I gaped at her. ‘Mum! Those clothes must be worth a fortune!
You can’t just burn your entire wardrobe!’

‘Can actually,’ she said. ‘It’s all part of letting go.’

An old man appeared from around the back of the bonfire:
William, the groundskeeper. He was dousing the clothes and wood with lighter fluid.

‘Morning, Scarlett,’ he called cheerily when he saw me.
‘Elizabeth, you about ready?’

My jaw dropped. What had happened to Miss Scarlett and Mrs
Blake, or ma’am?

‘Ready!’ cried Mum.

‘Stand well back then,’ said William, and as Mum pulled me
further back he took a box of matches from his pocket, removed one,
back-stepped, lit the march and threw it with relish at the pile. The wood
caught alight instantaneously, and with an audible
whoosh
the whole
bonfire went up in flames.

Mum shrieked in delight. ‘Yes! Wonderful! Burn, you
bastards!’

I’d known it was too good to be true. She was utterly mad
still. As William shuffled away, smirking, I turned to deal with Mum. But the
eye that caught mine wasn’t crazy; it was just happy.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘If you wanted a new look, why not
just donate all your clothes to charity?’

‘Oh, I did, darling,’ she assured me. ‘Enough to fill
William’s van to bursting. But this lot – these are the ones I hated most. The
tight suits. The awful dresses I wore to garden parties when I was newly
married. My wedding outfit. I’ve always had a flair for the dramatic, as you
well know. I thought this would be cathartic – and I was right! Fire, fire,
fire!’

I smiled at her then. I had to. She
was
right. I was
so proud of her.

‘Why are we just standing here?’ I said.

‘Well, I wanted to watch –’

‘We can do better than that.’ I dug in my jeans pocket for
my phone. Ignoring the missed calls on the display – ten, all from Jude – I
searched through my music playlist until I found what I was looking for, and
then I pressed play and slid the volume control to maximum.

‘Oh!’ said Mum. ‘Can we...?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes!’

And that’s
how, on a grey and miserable October afternoon, on a waste site beside one of
the most stately homes in the county, two women came to be dancing, heads
thrown back, arms wide, around a designer inferno, belting out the lyrics to
Adele’s ‘Set Fire to the Rain’.

That night, my mother built another fire – this one less
controversial but just as transformational. We curled up together on the sofa
by the hearth in the living room and let the flames melt away the last of our
defences. We talked. We really talked.

Every word my mother said was a revelation to me. Gone was
her old insatiable grief, replaced with a quiet sadness over the death of her
daughter and the loss of her husband, and a hunger to make something of herself
now. Beyond the plans to move, she spoke about using some of the proceeds of
her upcoming divorce as seed capital to start her own business. She’d always
wanted to have a career, do something with her life, she told me – but she’d
met Father so young, and he’d thought it improper for her to work.

It was amazing listening to her talk about herself in this
way. In the firelight she morphed from being an actress playing poorly the role
of mother, and became a real person with a past and a future and hopes and
dreams and yearnings. And the shift created room for me to step off the stage
too, to cast off the role of dutiful daughter. I could share something of
myself as well, something real.

It was a test, I suppose, telling her about the surfing.
Because she’d always totally flipped out at the thought of me anywhere near
water. I started gently, describing the night surf in Newquay, where I’d been
spectator, not participant.

‘It sounds amazing!’ she said. ‘Would you do that, if you
could?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I can.’

‘Can what?’

‘Surf. I learned this summer. In Twycombe.’

Her eyes widened, and I braced myself for her outburst. But
then she grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Why should my
fear hold you back?’

She wanted to know all about surfing then. So I told her the
story of how I learned. I told her how it felt out on the waves. I told her
about the cove and the surfing culture there. And then, although she didn’t
ask, didn’t probe, I told her about the people who’d mattered to me there.
Bert, Si, Cara. And Luke. I told her about him and me – the good stuff, the
happy memories.

‘You hold on to those memories,’ she said softly when I
stopped to wipe away a fresh cascade of tears. ‘They’ll last you a lifetime.’

I sniffled. ‘That’s it? Just live a life remembering when
times were good?’

She smiled. ‘You expect me to say, “Go to him. Fight for
him. Be with him.” I see that.’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘Do you want me to? Is being with Luke right for you?’

Slowly, I shook my head.

‘You see – that’s why. Fighting for love is a noble and
beautiful ideal in a film or a book. But real life’s not that black and white.’

‘You mean all the years you stayed with Father, you
shouldn’t have?’

‘Actually, I wasn’t talking about Hugo.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She sighed. ‘It’s not something I talk about, but then…
maybe it will help now. I don’t know.’ She slid off the sofa, onto her knees,
to stoke the fire. ‘A long time ago,’ she said, ‘before I had you and Sienna,
before I knew Hugo, there was another man.’

I stared at her as, back to me, she nudged logs into place.
She’d had Sienna at twenty; it had never occurred to me to think about the guys
she might have dated before my father.

‘Who was he?’ I asked.

‘My saviour. That’s who I thought he was.’

Leaving the poker on the hearth, she sat back on her heels.
Her face, when she turned it to me, was pink from the heat.

‘I was eighteen when he found me. He was like no one I’d
ever met before. Strong. Passionate. Determined. I was just a young girl,
terribly naive from growing up in that isolated little cove. To me, he was so
worldly and fearless; everything I wasn’t but wanted to be. I fell for him so
hard and so fast. I barely knew him, but I loved him.’

‘What happened?’

‘It just wasn’t meant to be. We were too different.’ She
stood up and came to sit beside me again. ‘It hurt terribly when it ended, and
I let it haunt me for a long time. But it was for the best, I know that. It was
the right thing for me, and for you and Sienna.’

‘We weren’t even born then.’

‘Yes. Of course. But Scarlett, even if you haven’t known it,
I tried to give you and your sister a good life. Here, with Hugo. Safe. Easy.
Better than you would have had. You look confused. I’m sorry – I’m muddling
this all up. All I mean to say is that there’s a future ahead for you – a life
after this love. You just have to be brave and go find it.’

‘I’m working on that,’ I said. ‘In fact...’

‘Yes?’

I hesitated. She had been so honest with me, more open than
I could ever have expected, and so accepting of me, of anything I told her. I
longed to confide in her now. If not about Jude and Sienna and the Ceruleans,
then at least about the real reason I’d had to let go of Luke. At least I could
tell my mother the secret it was agony to keep from her: that our time together
would be short and final.

In a moment, I tried to imagine how it would be to stay
here, with her. To spend my last moments as I’d spent my first in this life, in
my mother’s arms. She seemed so together now, so emotionally centred. Perhaps
she would cope with my death. Perhaps she would value the chance to be there
for me as she’d never been able to be there for Sienna. Or perhaps my death would
be the thing that finally broke her, that blew away every scrap of peace and
hope she’d worked to achieve, that decimated all her potential.

‘Scarlett?’

‘Speaking of being brave and finding a new life, that’s
exactly what I plan to do. Travelling. I’m going to go travelling. Find myself,
you know.’

She did know. She’d been thinking of a holiday herself, she
said, for the very same reason. She flew out of the room and came back with a
stack of travel guides under her chin, and began excitedly talking me through
destinations.

‘I know you – you’ll want to travel alone,’ she said. ‘But
we could meet up somewhere. Somewhere amazing! We’ll do lunch by the Coliseum,
or Times Square, or the Taj Mahal.’

I reached over and hugged her awkwardly over a Lonely Planet
guide to Thailand. I didn’t say anything, I just hugged her. And we may not
have been somewhere exotic, but that moment, I was sure, was as meaningful as
any we could have had out in the big, wide world.