Page 15 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘And they never have? Been reissued?’

‘Well, that’s up to whoever is in charge of her estate now… I haven’t seen new copies of hers come this way though and, to be honest, if I picked up an old copy, I’d probably hang onto it.’

‘If you picked up two, would you let me have the second one?’ Heather asked.

‘Sure, if you’re knocking about.’

‘Better than that,’ Heather said and she gave the woman her mobile number.

‘Perhaps we should set up a club? The Maggie Macken Appreciation Society?’ The woman threw her head back and laughed at this suggestion, but strangely, Heather found herself wondering if it wasn’t such a bad idea at all. ‘You know what you could do?’ the woman said later as Heather passed by her again, having drunk a coffee strong enough to make her head swim. ‘You could contact her publishers, see if they have any old copies lying about or if… Well, you never know, it might make them sit up and take notice.’

‘I might just do that.’ Heather smiled and thought it was nice to feel as if she’d had something important to do for a few hours at least. And then, just as she was catching a bus back to the flat for the night, she thought about her mother’s house. If there was anyone in London who would have a shelf full of Maggie Macken books surely it was her mother.

She was too exhausted to go looking for a tube connection or a bus to take her and so she sank into the first taxi she came across and was glad to speed across the city and watch the evening crowds dawdle on the footpaths as she passed.

The house felt even emptier when she pushed through the front door. It was desolate and chilly too. Perhaps she should have left the heating on at low? She’d switched everything off, fearing the chances of fire thanks to the dated wiring and the number of papers and soft furnishings in the house. Now, she shivered and the first thing she did was reach under the stairs and switch on the radiators throughout.

She stepped into what had been the sitting room up until a few years earlier, when her mother could no longer make the stairs and it had been reappropriated as a downstairs bedroom. Even though they’d hardly been close, the sight of her mother’s empty bed, the old alarm clock on the bedside table and the walking stick leaning across the chair brought a knot of grief to Heather’s chest. For a moment, it felt as if she couldn’t breathe, such was the swelling of pain that pushed between her heart and her throat. She closed the door quickly. It did no good to think of what might have been. Their relationship was what it was, not because Heather had given up on it, but because her mother had pushed her away before she even had a chance to start.

She walked into the little kitchen, where a small bookcase had been squeezed behind the kitchen table after being evicted from the sitting room. Her mother’s bed now stood empty along the wall that it had always leaned against. Heather switched on the light and pulled out the kitchen table so she could check the shelves and there, within a few minutes, she managed to find a dozen copies of Maggie Macken’s books. They looked as if they had been read many times over. Had her mother returned to them again and again for the comfort they could offer? Heather understood what it was to return to a place, if only between thecovers of a book. She had found such consolation inNever Lose Heartwhen she read it.

Suddenly, she began to pull them out, book after book, and they landed on the floor by her knees. She was feverish in grabbing them, each one faster and more frantically than the last, and now her eyes filled with tears and she wiped them harshly. Her hair was spilling into her face and it was hard to see what she was pulling out, what was being thrown on the ground. But she knew she wanted to read every single one of those books, to feel as if she was somehow closer to her mother or maybe to a world where everything was the way it should be. It was stupid of course. The world that Heather craved might never have existed. Still, she was desperate to catch hold of her mother, before it was too late. At this point she’d settle for drawing closer to the Dotty her mother had been before she’d sunk into bitterness and alcoholism.

Eventually, Heather slumped back on her knees, sitting on her folded legs beneath her. Suddenly, the hunger for something she didn’t understand began to subside. A raging emptiness within her felt as if someone had pulled the plug from its power, so it ebbed from her, more like a bath emptying of emotion than a woman coming to terms with her grief.

She had no idea how long she sat there, touching each of those novels carefully separating the Maggie Macken editions from other books that had once belonged to her father and one or two of her own childhood books also. By the time they were sorted through, she had three piles to lift up onto the kitchen table. There were too many to carry home on the tube. She looked around the dreary kitchen. Perhaps it was time to stop running away and thinking that the path she should take would somehow magically present itself to her if she kept moving.

Of course it wouldn’t. She was an intelligent woman, she’d always known that the future was there to be chased or plannedand then, when the unthinkable happened, to make another plan. And so, she sat in the club chair that had been her mother’s position for years, picked up one of the paperback books and settled down to read.

By eight o’clock she was starving. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast and the coffee she’d had earlier felt as if it had turned to acid in her stomach. There was a fish and chip shop just around the corner. It had been there for years, only the name over the door had changed, but any time she’d passed it, the aroma of fresh oil, salt and vinegar and cooking batter still smelled as good as she remembered from her childhood.

She set off with her bag in her hand. Ten minutes later, she brought her fish and chips home with her and a few groceries from the corner shop.

Later, much later, she sent Ruth a message. She was going to stay in her mother’s house tonight. She appreciated the fact that for months now, her friend Ruth had watched over her as if she was a young duckling in her care, but perhaps it was time to start facing up to things. She needed to stand on her own two feet and she needed a purpose.

That thought struck a chord deep within her. Why hadn’t she seen it before – she needed a purpose and now she knew it, it felt as if something shifted within her. She wouldn’t find that shut away in a flat, moving from sessions in the gym to endless days browsing in bookshops. She needed to move forward. Her mother had passed away a week earlier, it was time to face up to things. She reached into her bag and took out the envelope that contained her mother’s will. She opened it slowly, carefully, as if she could somehow preserve some part of her mother’s presence by keeping it intact. She was wrong, it wasn’t a will. It was just a letter, a short letter in her mother’s handwriting. Strange, she recognised the script immediately and her heart tumbled over in her chest with an unexpected stab of loneliness.

Wednesday, 15th…

Dear Heather,

Today, I came across a photograph taken of you when you were just a small kiddie one summer long ago on Pin Hill Island. I’ve been thinking of the old place a lot recently, my age, I suppose, I’ve come to that stage where there’s more to regret than to look forward to. Sorry, I’m trying to be more optimistic, more to remember – that’s better.

I’ve been thinking about people too, about my parents, my mother mostly, buried so far away, about Constance and Maggie; probably all gone now. I don’t expect you to understand this, Heather, I know it wouldn’t have made any sense to me years ago, but I dearly want to be buried next to them all, not in some place where I’m just another faded headstone. When I die, I want you to bring me back to the island, there’s money to pay for it in my account and you’ll have the house, of course, but this is my only request.

Well, there’s one other small thing. The little letter box, beside my bed; if by some miracle Constance outlasts me (that’ll be down to all that fresh air and clean living!) that’s for her. I want you to take it to her. There are letters inside, I’d like you to open them together, but not until I’m gone. I don’t think I’m brave enough yet to face you both with all I have to say.

I know I have no right to ask, but I also know that you won’t refuse, you have too much of your father in you to say no!

Take care,

Mum.

Heather read the letter again, not entirely sure what to make of it. She could hear her mother’s deprecating humour, but there was a clarity to the words that felt at odds with the woman she’d become over the years. And the letter box? She had no idea what the letter box was, should she remember it?

She got up from the table, walked into the bedroom and checked in the locker next to her mother’s bed. There, tucked in on the bottom shelf, sat a long slender box, antique certainly – it looked Edwardian, maybe art deco. It was very pretty, a rich handsome wood with a black lacquered fanning leaf design across its top. It was locked and Heather turned it over. Surely there should be a key to fit it around here somewhere. And then she remembered, everything here would have to be organised and gone through, it was something she couldn’t put off forever, especially now if she had to organise an Irish burial also.

Tomorrow she would begin to sort through her mother’s belongings. It would be a step in the direction of her future and at least she had Maggie Macken’s books for company if it all got to be too much to bear as she put things straight.

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