Page 99 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
Cecilia shook her head with the vigour of youth and certainty. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, and Grace Maud knew enough to not press the point.
She puts her book down. It isn’t holding her interest the way it did last night. Perhaps because she feels guilty about lying in bed while the sun is up. Her father has been dead a long time but the guilt he instilled is as alive as ever.
She hears noise in the kitchen, then the phone rings. Cecilia’s singsong ‘Hello’, then silence, then her tone changes. Is she upset? No, she’s cross. The phone slams down; now there are heavy footsteps coming closer.
A tentative knock on the door. ‘Grace Maud?’
Cecilia would know she’d be awake because she’s always awake by eight o’clock.
‘Yes. Come in.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t think you’d still be in bed.’
‘It’s fine. What’s wrong?’
Cecilia sits on the end of the bed. ‘That was Mum. She says if I’m not at mass at nine o’clock she’s never speaking to me again.’
‘That sounds rather dramatic. I know you’ve missed a couple of Sundays, but that’s to be expected. You have other things in your life.’
Cecilia sniffs and her eyes shift around the room. ‘She saw me with Luca,’ she says. ‘At the marina. We were only holding hands!’ She sucks in a breath.
‘I take it she didn’t know you have a boyfriend?’ Grace Maud enquires gently.
‘No. Why would I tell her? He’s not Catholic so she’ll say he’s not suitable.’
‘She probably only says that because she had to marry a Catholic boy, and her mother would have too,’ Grace Maud says. ‘But it’s a hard thing to enforce in a country with people from as many different places as this one.’
‘I know!’ Cecilia huffs. ‘And she’s never even met Luca!’
Grace Maud carefully considers what she should say next. She doesn’t think Cecilia wants to stay estranged from Eva, but she wants Eva to accept her on her terms, just as Eva wants Cecilia to submit to what she wants. There is love there – obviously, otherwise neither would care so much – but they don’t have the mechanism to make their relationship work. It is a difficulty now, but it could become a heartbreak.
Grace Maud had ample time to think about this while she and Tom weren’t speaking. She was stuck in the quagmire of wanting to have her own way, yet loving him so much she wanted him to have his way too. It’s a problem that has existed, no doubt, for as long as there have been parents and children. Each wants what they want; each wants what the other wants so the other can be happy. Sometimes it seems easier to give up and leave each other alone. But it never is, because there is nothing left in this life if we give up on love. That love will always remain, even when you’re not speaking to each other. You may not be conscious of it, but it will sit in your cells, so much a part of you that there is absolutely nothing you can do to be rid of it. Denying it may kill you – Grace Maud is convinced of that. When something is so fundamental to your person – to your actual physical being – it has the power of life and death over you. Those are the stakes. This is what it means to be alive. It has taken her almost four score years to realise it, and she doesn’t want Cecilia to wait that long.
‘Do you miss your mother?’ Grace Maud asks.
Another huff from Cecilia, then she says, ‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you think she misses you?’
‘No, she just wants to control me!’
Grace Maud can’t help a little smile escaping. ‘I’m not sure that’s true. I think perhaps Eva is talking in code. She wants you to go to mass so she can see you. She thinks that if she asks you to do something else – meet her for coffee, for example – you’ll say no. But if she tries to make you feel guilty enough to go to church, that may work.’
Cecilia folds her arms tightly against her chest. ‘That’s silly. She should just say what she wants.’
‘If only we were all so straightforward.’ Grace Maud gazes towards her window, with its curtains slightly open to reveal the frangipani tree in the front garden. ‘Some of us are brought up to never say what we want. Girls, in particular. It’s not polite to say what you want. You have to learn what other people want and do that. Say that. We all think it’s madness. Yet those are the rules.’
Cecilia looks less defiant.
‘From what you’ve told me,’ Grace Maud goes on, ‘Eva was brought up in a very strict, traditional family.’
Cecilia nods.
‘She didn’t bring you up so strictly, did she?’
‘No,’ Cecilia admits softly.
‘She changed. For you. But it might be too much to ask her to change everything.’
