Chloe threw back the bedclothes, padded quickly to the window and opened the curtain.
She hadn’t dreamed it. There was a crack in the glass. Heart thudding, she looked down to the pavement, and saw a familiar face with a hand pressed to her mouth; whether suppressing shock or a smile, it was impossible to tell in the dark.
‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ her mother said when Chloe got downstairs and opened the door. ‘I’ll get it fixed for you in the morning. You should really get a bell, you know.’ She began to move bags from the doorstep into the hall. Chloe counted one, two suitcases, and some smaller luggage. How long was her mother planning on staying? she thought with alarm.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said.
Her mother looked up at her sternly, as if she were stupid. ‘You called me, Chloe, don’t you remember?’
‘Yes, but,’ Chloe stammered, ‘I didn’t mean you had to come immediately.’
‘Well, I didn’t come “immediately”, did I – I tried to get a train but I couldn’t get one until tomorrow morning, and I didn’t want to wait that long. So then I called June, because I was worried about my car lasting the distance, and so I’ve swapped and they’ve got mine and I’ve got George’s…’ she gestured behind her at a pristine BMW standing proudly against the kerb, ‘… it was lovely to drive. And I have to say that – no, don’t lift that, dear, I don’t want you lifting anything for now, I’ll do it myself in a minute – yes, I have to say that even without much traffic, it seemed to take forever. I hadn’t realised just how long you would be spending in the car, because although the train takes a long time, well, that’s just because it’s the train, isn’t it -’
‘Mum, stop!’ Chloe was feeling giddy from the torrent of words rushing from her mother’s mouth so quickly there was barely time to digest them. ‘But you never drive on strange roads?’
‘My daughter needed me,’ Margaret said, reaching forward to kiss Chloe’s cheek as they stood crowded against the cases in the hallway. ‘And so I’ve come.’
Margaret was still wired from the drive, and Chloe was wide awake, so she let her mother make them some tea.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me that Alex has gone,’ her mother said. ‘You should have told me, Chloe.’ She looked reprovingly at Chloe over her glasses.
‘I didn’t want to make it real by telling anyone,’ Chloe replied, her voice soft. ‘I thought if I kept it to myself…’
‘He might come back and you could pretend it never happened?’
‘Well… yes,’ Chloe said, thinking it now sounded a bit daft. ‘But things have changed – I’ve made a decision after today – it’s me and this baby first, and everything else second.’
‘Why do you have to do that?’ Margaret moved across the room and sat down on a chair.
‘What?’
‘Come to a momentous, entirely narrow-minded decision, and close the door to all other possibilities. I swear, it must be a lawyer thing.’
‘How can it be narrow-minded? I just can’t continue letting him rule my life, Mum, my emotions, everything.’ Chloe gestured manically as she spoke, almost spilling her tea. She was unnerved – she’d felt much better since making that decision, and didn’t want to change it.
‘He doesn’t have to, Chloe.’ Her mum moved the mug a little further from the table edge, and sighed. ‘Why do you try to see things in black and white when there’s a whole kaleidoscope of colour in between?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘That people do things for all sorts of reasons – whether good or bad, right or wrong, misguided or not – and that to have any hope of understanding what’s going on, you need to find those reasons. You don’t have to agree with them, or accept them, but you need to know what they are. There’s no difference between living a life based on lies that other people have told you and living one that’s based on a lie you’ve told yourself.’
Chloe had to stop herself from laughing at her mother’s brief turn as a sage. ‘Okay, Mum,’ she sighed. ‘Well, if he ever gets back, I’ll hear him out.’ She took a sip of tea and slammed the mug back onto the table.
Her mother put a hand on her arm. ‘Calm down, Chloe love.’
‘It’s just…’ Chloe rubbed her neck. ‘I’ve finally decided to move forwards. I don’t want anything to get in the way – to make me feel like I’ve felt for this past month.’
‘Chloe, you’re not moving forwards. You’re running around closing doors as fast as they open until you’ve only got one direction to go in. But you’re still frightened of what’s behind all those other doors. If you’re not prepared to take a look through them all, and accept what’s there, then you’ll never be able to move on. You’ll always be scared of what’s chasing you.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Chloe was startled. Her mother never talked this way.
‘Because I think I do it myself, every day, with you,’ Margaret admitted, holding her daughter’s gaze. ‘It’s why I prattle on at times. If I leave too much of a silence, I worry what that might mean – what you might say to fill it that I don’t want to hear.’
Chloe just stared at her mother, open-mouthed. ‘What could I possibly -’ she began, then stopped herself. She was realising that her mother hadn’t always been so twittery and fretful; that when she thought back to being a little girl, her mother had always seemed so strong and self-assured. She’d noticed the change in her teenage years, and it had become more obvious since then, but she had decided her mother had always been like that and as a child she had just been too young to notice it properly. But maybe this wasn’t the case.
‘Look what happened with Anthony.’ Her mother gave a sad smile. ‘I feel… oh, Chloe, now is the last time I should be talking to you like this. You should be up in bed, and I should be looking after you, not bringing up all this baggage.’
‘No,’ Chloe said, ‘it’s okay. Go on.’
‘Well…’ her mother began softly. ‘I feel like I failed Anthony, but I look back and I can’t see where I made the wrong turn. Of course, I could have never married your father – but then neither of you would have been brought into the world, and I wouldn’t like that at all either.’
Chloe was beginning to feel uncomfortable. ‘I don’t think you failed Anthony,’ she said.
‘We’re in an awful deadlock now,’ Margaret replied. ‘I don’t even know my own grandchildren.’
‘Well, America’s a long way away.’
‘It’s not that,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s that for Anthony to understand, I have to be honest with him about his father. And I can’t do that.’
There it was. Margaret had laid the subject on the table. Chloe knew she was meant to ask about her father, but she didn’t want to.
‘Mum, surely honesty is the best policy. This is
‘Chloe,’ Margaret said, looking alarmed. ‘Don’t get yourself worked up, love.’
‘Why not?’ Chloe banged a hand on the table, and tea slopped over the edges of both their mugs. ‘Why the hell not, Mum? Why couldn’t he have just told me the truth from the beginning?’
‘Chloe,’ Margaret said, leaning forward. ‘What if he felt that the truth might be the most painful thing you could hear? Yes, Alex is being quite unfair on you now, but does he want to be? Probably not. Even I know Alex well enough to say that. He may not be making good decisions, but you don’t know what his motivations are. And yes, it’s difficult for you, I’m not denying that, but maybe Alex is trying to protect you, had you ever thought of that?’
Chloe was taken aback. ‘From what?’
‘From his past? From the parts of himself that might make you doubt him, or make you love him less? From pain? From involvement in something that will only cause you grief?’
‘By going off with another woman? More likely, he’s trying to protect himself from the consequences. Running away is never the right thing to do.’
Margaret shook her head sadly. ‘Don’t you remember, Chloe?’
‘What?’ Chloe said, unease beginning to stir within her.
‘We ran away once. We had to. And I think that, somewhere inside you, you remember everything. That’s why you can’t bear to speak with me about your father. It’s so much easier to pretend you don’t know.’
