Page 37 of How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?
Meg erupts with laughter.
‘He did what?’ I ask. ‘Did you ask him to stop?’
‘My darling, I didn’t want a fuss. I had to sit next to him for another four hours. So I kept the clippings that fell my way and put them in his tea on the next drinks service.’
Meg continues to giggle in disbelief. Linh is like this – she has a wonderfully mischievous streak and an energy and kindness in her eyes which make her impossible not to love.
‘So Grace tells me you want to go down to Brighton on this trip?’ Meg asks.
‘Yes, I have a friend who lives there now and owns a cafe. I’d like to see her and the pier. Maybe we can take the girls.’
‘That can be arranged,’ I say.
‘You still have friends here?’ Meg asks her, her elbows on the table to take in the detail like a bedtime tale. There is a wonderful sense of storytelling with Linh and this draws me back to nights around her kitchen table, sitting on a lime-green plastic stool as she fed me beer and stories well into the late hours of the balmy nights I spent in Vietnam.
‘A few dotted around. I went to nursing college in London, I still have friends who work in your NHS. I was here for nearly twenty years.’
‘Wow. And so what made you return to Vietnam?’
‘Cam. She was wildly introspective about who she was and where she came from. She wanted to track down her father’s family but she was also a teacher, a nurturer, and she wanted to do that in a place she could connect with. I came along for the ride. Her willingness to help people was infectious.’
‘She sounds like a wonderful girl,’ Meg says.
‘She was. She reconnected me to a home I thought I’d lost. I was so lucky to have her help me find my roots again. I was lucky to have her, full stop.’
This is what always gets me. To have lost a husband is heartbreaking but to have lost a child, to have not seen her full potential unleashed on the world, even more so. But Linh deals with it all with such serenity and dignity, and the grief she feels is warming, never sad or despairing. The emotion hits Meg hard and she looks away for a moment. Linh senses this and turns to her.
‘So you are the eldest?’ Linh asks her.
‘I am.’
‘Meg, is it short for another? Like Megan? Margaret?’
I choke a little on my cappuccino. I think Meg may have murdered our mother as a toddler if she’d named her Margaret.
‘No, I think my mum had literary aspirations. I’m told I was named after Meg March fromLittle Women, so was Beth. Lucy was Narnia and Emma was Austen.’
Linh looks to me, confused. ‘Grace was different,’ Meg continues. ‘She bucked the trend. She was premature and we weren’t sure if she was going to survive so she became our amazing grace.’
Linh seems happy with that. I always thought it a little corny, especially when Lucy sings it to me. Drunk. On the Tube. Like a deer caught in a trap.
‘I’ve seen your husband,’ Linh says to Meg. ‘He doesn’t have a lot of hair.’
That’s another thing you get with Linh, a brave sense of honesty.
‘It’s going that way,’ Meg says, slightly embarrassed.
‘Baldness is a sign of virility. I like a bald head on a man. You can rub it for luck like Buddha.’
Meg flares her nostrils to hear her Danny compared to a bald, overweight deity. ‘I’ll try that.’
‘So Emma is the doctor with the bastard husband who now has the Indian boyfriend with the nice skin.’
‘Yes,’ I confirm.
‘And I’ve met Beth and your parents.’
It was lunch at my parents’ house. Mum didn’t know what to cook. I told her chicken. She served it with boil in the bag rice. The crux of the meeting was to welcome Linh into our family in the same way Joyce is an honorary aunt but I also knew Mum was curious to meet the woman who gave up two granddaughters. In her mind, she didn’t believe it was possible, to let two girls go, but after that meal she understood the sacrifice, the security Linh wanted to give those girls for the future. This floored our mother completely. Linh didn’t want to abandon her daughter’s work in Vietnam but she didn’t want these girls to be alone if she wasn’t there. Linh loved meeting everyone but the rice was a huge disappointment, so much so she made me drive her to a large oriental hypermarket in Wembley and buy my mother a rice cooker.
