Page 6 of Second Act at Appleton Green
She would have to tell her the truth sooner or later.
‘Hi, Mum,’ she said, sitting down on the sofa. She was ready to tell her how terrible it had been, that maybe she wasn’t meant for this life of hustle. That she really needed to stop for a moment and get her bearings.
‘Gran’s in hospital.’ Denise’s voice was tight and strained. ‘A fall, they said. The woman, Mrs Harris or Mrs Douglas, I think, the one who delivers her bread and milk found her. She had knocked herself out. She’s fallen out the front of the house. Badly grazed her face, needed stiches on her nose and she’s put her dentures through her lip.’
‘What? Oh my God,’ Lily said, her misery gone with fear replacing it. All thoughts ofLes Misevaporated. She needed to be with Gran immediately.
‘What hospital? I’ll go and see her.’ She stood up and started to look around for her things.
‘She’s in St Vincent’s but she’s awake now and insisting on going home. Your father tried to talk some sense into her and suggested that perhaps she might think about moving into an assisted living home, but she won’t hear about it or even consider any help.’
Lily wasn’t surprised. Granny Violet was the most fiercely independent ninety-seven-year-old in all of Britain. People were surprised when they learned Gran was still independent at ninety-seven but Lily said that no one argued with Gran, not even time. If she had decided something, that was it.
‘I’ll come up tomorrow,’ said Lily realising she needed to sort her life out here and now.
‘She’s going home tomorrow,’ Denise almost screeched down the line. ‘It’ll be too late.’
‘Then I’ll go and see her at home,’ said Lily. ‘Maybe I’ll stay a few days.’
Denise sighed. ‘Okay. That’s probably a good idea. I don’t want her to be alone and have another fall. You can see how she is and then let Dad and I know.’ She paused and then her voice changed to something synthetic, a forced brightness. ‘Now give me some good news. How did the audition go?’
Lily felt the weight of her mother’s expectations on her shoulders, as though she was being pushed into the sofa, and then she thought about this moment and how much being a professional musical theatre performer meant to her mother and made a choice.
‘Fine, I haven’t heard yet. There were some good voices there though, so I’m okay if I don’t get it,’ she lied, keeping her voice bright. Who said she wasn’t a brilliant actress? ‘There were some real talents there.’
As she spoke, she felt the lies almost burn her tongue but now wasn’t about her and the last thing she wanted to do was tell her mother that her voice had disappeared today.
‘None so talented as you,’ her mother said proudly. ‘Okay, well we’re at the hospital now and we’ll take her back to Appleton Green tomorrow and maybe you can come in the afternoon, so she doesn’t feel ambushed.’
‘Okay, I’ll come tomorrow. Bye,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive up.’ She was grateful for her little hatchback that she used when she needed to go to auditions out of London and sometimes she loaned it to friends for a small fee, which kept the insurance paid.
‘Bye, love, let me know if you hear from theLes Mispeople,’ Denise said before she ended the call.
Lily looked around the flat. The need to be out of it was all-encompassing. She needed to be somewhere else to work out what was wrong with her voice and the flat in its current state was suffocating.
A few weeks in her grandmother’s cottage in Appleton Green would be the perfect place to get away from London and work out what her voice and mind were doing.
She opened the iPad on the coffee table and typed into the Backstage website where performers put up rooms or flats to rent while they were on tour.
Two-bedroom flat available to rent for 4 weeks.She typed fast and found some photos of the flat when it was clean when she had put up the room on the same website before Nigel moved in. She added the price and particulars and then pressed post.
‘Right,’ she said as she looked around. She put the soundtrack fromAnnieon the stereo and then rolled her sleeves up and tried to sing along but nothing came out.
She turned off the music, feeling tears forming again, and she wiped her eyes with her new dress.
She would clean the flat so it was spotless, and hopefully the sun would come out again tomorrow and somehow, her voice would come back to her.
4
Appleton Green was a small village, almost too pretty for its own good, plonked in the middle of the Derbyshire Dales with nothing around it for miles. You had to drive to the next town for any more than basics and even further to Silverton for schooling, hospitals and specialist appointments, but those who lived there loved it and had dug their heels deep into the loamy soil. It wasn’t a long drive but, still, it was too far for many of the residents to bother unless they had to.
The village looked like a postcard, of which the tourists bought plenty when they came to take their picture on the old packhorse bridge across the Dove River. But they didn’t stay long because there wasn’t much for tourists to do in Appleton Green, besides go to the pub, and that was only open four days a week and after three in the afternoon. The village residents were middle-aged, older and old, and they all knew each other’s routines.
For example, they knew when Mrs Douglas walked Wallace her corgi, or when Mrs Harris closed the post office for her lunch, which was usually cold meats and salad in summer and soup and bread in winter. They knew when Mr Sharma would be spending extra time in his garden to ensure his roses would be show-ready for the Silverton Flower Fair and when Mrs Hughes would be heading to her daughter’s house in Mallorca for the winter, as her joints played up when it snowed.
The oldest resident of the village was Violet Baxter, ninety-seven years young, who refused to admit she was getting older and that she needed a cleaner in her little home, Pippin Cottage, or that she needed help with meals or a walking frame. At most, she would use the walking stick that had belonged to her husband Martin, who had died thirty-five years earlier, and sometimes she would accept meals from Mrs Harris who might have extra soup for Violet, and she would always accept shortbread from Mrs Douglas.
Now she was being taken back to her cottage by her son Peter and her daughter-in-law Denise, who were chatting as though she hadn’t just taken a tumble on the path outside and didn’t have a huge graze on her nose, stiches and an ugly new silver walking frame to lean on when she walked.
