The Honey Queen

She’d have liked one of those business-class beds now, but at least she was on the outside of a row, so she could get up and walk around the plane between her intermittent periods of dozing. It had grown quieter, more peaceful, once the food had been served, the lights had been dimmed and people began to fall asleep. The stewards and stewardesses were finally sitting down, taking their break. With most of the plane quiet, she didn’t feel quite so alone as she stood outside the bathroom waiting her turn, stretching her legs and wriggling her ankles the way the video they showed had told her to do.

Inside her head, Lillie found herself talking to Sam again.

I hope this is a good idea, Sam, she told him. You’ve got to look after me. Please, my love, I need you. I wish that you were a presence beside me. I wish I was a psychic so I could feel that you’re there instead of this nothingness: that’s what scares me. You’d have told me to do this. You’d have told me to go and see Seth and Frankie, meet the family. You’d have loved it, you’d have come too and it would have been so different. The fun we’d have had. We might have stayed over in Singapore for a couple of nights in a posh hotel, done the tour. I don’t want to upset you. You wanted me to be OK and I said I would be. I told you to go. But it’s so hard without you …

The toilet door clicked open in front of her and somebody stumbled out. Lillie didn’t really want to go to the loo but she locked herself in anyway, put the lid of the toilet down and sat, just to be here on her own and cry. Was she mad, coming on this trip?

She coped at home because she was among the familiar things, among familiar people, but so many thousands of miles away from home, how could she not feel lost?

Worst of all, that niggling thought that she’d been deftly shoving to the back of her mind kept wriggling its way to the fore: what if she felt bitterness when she met Seth? What if all she could think of was that their mother hadn’t given him up for adoption?

Lillie had never been a bitter person, but then, she’d had her beloved Sam. While he was alive, she’d had so much love in her life, that she was able to give love and kindness to other people.

‘You’re an earth mother,’ Sam told her once, ‘always finding lost souls to help and pulling them close.’

‘Do I drive you mad with my schemes to help people?’ she asked thoughtfully. Sam had never said anything like that before and she felt a hint of worry that he was tired of her endless good works. A colleague in the charity shop had once given her advice on balancing healing other people with taking care of her family: ‘Lillie, you’re one of life’s givers. Mind that you don’t neglect your own family. Much as they’ll admire you for being a good person and helping others, they still want to know that they come first. They’d rather have you home making dinner than out saving the world.’

Lillie had tried always to bear that in mind, but when Sam told her she was an earth mother she wasn’t sure whether this was a good or a bad thing in his eyes. So she’d asked him.

‘No, chicken,’ he said, smiling. ‘I love you for it. You can’t stop yourself: that’s what you do. Why should I change you?’

In the cramped plane toilet, she dried her tears and hoped she was still the earth mother her husband had loved. She’d hate it if his death had changed that and she no longer had anything left to give.

Seth Green drove to the airport with so many thoughts and feelings crowding each other that he had to force himself to concentrate on the road ahead.

The whole business of finding out he had a sister had reawakened the huge sorrow at the loss of his wonderful, kind mother.

He’d always adored her. Even when other boys muttered in school about how their mothers drove them mad, and were always wittering on about wearing coats in cold weather and having a decent breakfast, Seth had never had a bad word to say about Jennifer. She was gentle and endlessly calm. He could picture her now with her strawberry-blonde hair framing that round, smiling face and those beautiful flower-blue eyes.

It was hard to believe that this loving woman had given up her first child and then carried that huge secret locked inside her the rest of her life. Of course, she’d given birth to Lillie a long time ago, a time when the past wasn’t just another country, it was more in the line of another planet altogether. A planet where women did not give birth to children outside marriage and keep them. Such babies were symbols of shame to be bundled off as quickly as possible, regardless of the mother’s feelings in the matter.

He’d often wondered how the young Jennifer McCabe had summoned up the courage to marry Daniel Green – a Jew, though admittedly non-religious, when her family were Catholic. That, too, must have been scandalous at the time. Perhaps in light of the ‘sins’ she’d committed according to the tenets of her own unforgiving Church and society, Jennifer had simply resolved to defy convention and marry the man she loved, irrespective of religion.

Seth pulled up at a set of traffic lights and checked the clock on the dashboard. He still had plenty of time.

The secrecy of it all was what had shocked him the most. He couldn’t imagine his mother as a scared teenager because the woman he’d known had always been so strong. She’d dealt with many things through the years, even taking in his father’s elderly aunt Ruth, a woman who’d never recovered from her years in a concentration camp. Ruth had somehow survived but a huge part of her spirit had been crushed. When she’d become old and frail, it had been Seth’s mother who’d taken such care of her, understanding the nightmares and the fear that never left. Jennifer was the one who’d go in to comfort Ruth in the middle of the night, changing her nightgown, being gentle and kind, sitting with her until Ruth drifted into sleep.

His mother had also been a very honest, straight person: ‘Be truthful, Seth,’ she would tell him. ‘Whatever it is you’ve done, always tell the truth.’

Yet she hadn’t told him the truth – or rather, she’d avoided telling him the whole truth – about herself.

When the email arrived from Lillie’s son, carefully worded, trying to find out information about his mother, Seth had been astonished. Frankie, of course, had been thrilled, fascinated and full of enthusiasm. It was the way his wife was.

‘You’ve a long-lost half sister!’ she’d said delightedly. ‘How wonderful! Do you suppose your father knew? I doubt there was any way of knowing where the baby went or if there were any records linking her to your mother. It’s an amazing thing to happen now though, isn’t it, finding out?’

‘I suppose so,’ he said, although, as with so many things involving his wife, it was taking a little longer for the information to sink into his head than into hers.

Frankie responded to everything so readily, her quicksilver brain processing facts at high speed. His no longer seemed to work so fast – something that he suspected irritated her these days. Seth felt that these days, his very existence irritated his wife.

He knew their marriage was going through a bad stage – something that they’d never encountered before – but he felt too broken to attempt to fix it. All he could do was let things take their course and hope that he and Frankie would come through it all.

And then the email had come with news of Lillie’s existence.

Frankie had been so … well, Frankie-like about it.

‘Lillie must come to stay. I know this place isn’t great for guests, but we can fix up a room for her somewhere,’ she’d said firmly.

It was only when Frankie began searching for the phone book, saying, ‘What’s the dialling code for Melbourne? We must ring this Martin now, and then get Lillie’s number and phone her,’ that Seth found his voice and said Stop.

He had a sister – ‘half’ didn’t matter: she was his sister – and she’d been out there in the world all along when he thought he was an only child. He thought he was pleased, although it was all still being processed in his head, but he wanted to do things slowly, all the same. He needed time to get used to the idea.

‘Her son emailed. He might get a shock if we just ring,’ he said to Frankie. ‘Plus, there’s the time difference. We can’t ring now. Let’s email back.’

‘Well, she obviously wants to get in touch or she wouldn’t have agreed to her son doing this. It’s only natural that she should want to meet you, that must be the whole point of it, that’s what people do,’ said Frankie eagerly. ‘Who better to tell her about your mother? She’s sure to have lots of questions. And aren’t you curious to see her – find out what she’s like, what she looks like? I can’t wait to tell Emer and Alexei. They’re going to be so excited – just think, a whole new branch of the family they never knew existed. I’ll send them an email right away.’

‘We should probably take it slowly,’ Seth counselled. He worked out the dates. ‘Lillie’s sixty-four, ten years older than me.’

Frankie frowned slightly. He’d noticed that she didn’t like hearing how old he was. She’d suddenly become touchy about anything to do with age. When her driving licence had come up for renewal the previous month she’d been tight-lipped as she filled in the form, attaching an admittedly not very flattering photo of herself.

‘Bloody photo machines,’ she’d said, staring at it crossly. ‘Makes me look as if I’m about ninety and sitting on a stool of nails.’

‘You’re a mere sprite of forty-nine,’ Seth had said, trying to cheer her up. ‘Talking of which, we should organize something for your fiftieth next—’

‘No!’ Her shout startled them both. Recovering, she said lamely: ‘Sorry. I just meant that we don’t have the money, that’s all. It’s a lovely thought and all, darling. But no.’

So Seth added age to the list of things he and Frankie didn’t discuss any more.

Age, the house, the state of the garden, and how it was no use him even trying to get a job, because who would want to employ him? That in particular drove her insane. She refused to accept that losing his job had transformed him from a man with a career to a man with nothing.

It was so enormous, so emasculating. Frankie simply didn’t understand. The discovery of Lillie’s existence was all the more wonderful, because at last they had something they could talk about.

When Lillie’s son responded to their email by saying that his mother didn’t do emails, and that a letter would be the best way to talk to her, Frankie had flung her hands up in despair.

‘A letter,’ she groaned. ‘Nobody writes letters any more.’

‘Lillie probably does,’ said Seth, smiling. He wondered whether his sister’s handwriting would resemble the curling, light hand of their mother, as though an angel had danced across the page. And then he realized that, without his mother to teach her, Lillie probably wouldn’t write like that. Wasn’t handwriting a product of environment?

‘We’ll ask her to stay,’ Frankie went on. ‘He doesn’t mention whether other members of the family would be interested, but we should invite them too. We’ll have them all,’ said Frankie, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

‘Let’s start with Lillie,’ Seth said firmly.

His wife had always been generous and enthusiastic. Frankie’s glass wasn’t just half-full, it was brimming – and she wanted to share it with everyone. It was what made her so good with people and so good at her job. Nobody could resist an HR boss like Frankie.

It didn’t make her so easy to live with when you didn’t have a job, though.

He knew she couldn’t help contrasting his handling of the situation with the way she’d behave if her job was suddenly snatched out from under her. Frankie would go at it like a whirling dervish, turning everything upside down, tossing aside any obstacles that planted themselves in her path.

Her enthusiasm for Lillie’s visit had swept aside Seth’s reservations. But now that the time had arrived, they were starting to creep back into his mind. After all, this wasn’t a long-lost relative returning after a time away. This woman had never known her birth father and mother. She had been cast out of her homeland and sent to the other side of the world for adoption. What was she going to make of Seth, the child her mother had kept close?