Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming

Lily’s pale, lined face didn’t flicker.

Anneliese didn’t know if she was present or not. Were people in comas there? Even so, talking to an almost-not-there Lily still surpassed talking to everyone else.

‘The oddest things occur to me about it all. Like the fact that Nell was so bitter,’ Anneliese whispered. ‘She said I must have known about her and Edward. That was almost the worst thing. She kept insisting that I knew and allowed it to go on. I didn’t. I swear on the Bible, Lily, I didn’t. How could I let Edward have an affair and not say a word to him about it? I wouldn’t, and not with Nell.

‘She was my friend. Was,’ Anneliese added bitterly. ‘Nobody’s going to believe me if she’s my best friend and she says I knew all along. I won’t be believed and, if I deny it, she’ll say I’m just a vengeful ex. She might even tell Edward that she and I had talked about it. She could tell him anything, and how would he believe me over her?’

It wasn’t a relief to say these horrible things. They hurt as much in the telling as they did in the thinking. The ache was still there, the ache of aloneness.

What was worse was how she’d become alone.

The evening before, she’d sat on the verandah and stared out at the sea, trying not to think about the beautiful trapped whale still circling sadly in the harbour, and she’d thought about her Worst Case Scenarios.

It was a trick of hers when she felt depression looming: to think of the very worst things that could happen and visualise herself coping with them. A person could cope with anything, she knew, making herself think of people who’d gone through every pain possible from torture to seeing people they loved murdered.

Edward’s death was one of her Worst Case Scenarios.

She remembered seeing an interview with a woman who’d been widowed in the World Trade Center attacks and it had almost hurt to watch it. The woman’s pain was so raw, so open and she spoke of how her life had changed and now, she expected the worst.

Her words had resonated with Anneliese for two reasons: because she was speaking of widowhood, and Anneliese knew too many widows of her own age not to fear it, and secondly, because Anneliese had felt that sense of fear all her life: that pain was just round the corner, waiting its time. She’d felt like that for ever. Waiting for the blade to fall.

She’d been so cautious, pushing Edward with his healthy heart and his healthy diet to have blood tests every year at the doctor’s. She’d cooked giant lumps of broccoli, bought him fish-oil tablets, stocked the fridge with blueberries. She’d done everything to keep him with her, warding off disease.

He’d been taken anyway. He might as well have died. It was like he had died, in a way.

‘How did you manage, Lily?’ Anneliese asked. ‘How did you manage when Alice and Robby died? Forgive me, but I keep thinking that death is almost easier. You can grieve. How can I grieve?’

And then she checked herself: Lily had done her grieving privately because she’d had to keep calm for Izzie.

‘Forgive me, Lily,’ she said now. ‘That was terrible of me. Nothing could be worse than losing Alice. I’m sorry. There’s no comparing my loss to yours. I’m sitting here whining and I haven’t had as much taken from me as you. But I can’t help feeling devastated. I only wish you were here. You could make sense of it all for me before I go totally crazy.’

‘Good morning. How are we all doing here?’ said a cheerful young voice.

Anneliese looked up, startled by the interruption. A nurse hovered and from the ultra-friendly set of her face, Anneliese guessed she’d heard the end of the monologue. Anneliese was too sad to feel embarrassed. She guessed that nurses were used to hearing people murmuring hidden thoughts at hospital bedsides.

‘I just want to check on your mother-in-law’s vitals,’ the nurse said, still smiling.

Anneliese nodded and moved out of the way, not bothering to correct her. Aunt-in-law sounded ridiculous. ‘Will you be long?’ she asked.

‘We might be a while. You should take a walk outside,’ the nurse said, resiliently cheerful. ‘It’s a lovely day.’

‘Yes,’ said Anneliese. Lovely day for throwing yourself over a cliff. What would the poor girl do if she said that? Probably find the on-call psychiatrist and tell him there was a mad woman in-house, and could they find her a bed, a straitjacket and a needleful of benzodiazepam.

She collected her bag and went into the corridor, not knowing quite what to do with herself. Somehow, she ended up in the small hospital coffee shop, at a table with a cup of frothy white coffee and a scone that looked hard enough to bounce off the walls. She wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry, but she buttered the scone anyway and bit into it.

Keep putting the fuel in, she remembered someone saying to her once. But why? Old worn-out cars got scrapped. Why couldn’t old, worn-out people get scrapped too? Why bother putting fuel in when the engine was gone?

She shoved the scone away and, to occupy herself, switched on her mobile phone. Brendan had sent her a text message. He was hopeless with phones, spent so long sending the simplest message that the time involved far outweighed the benefits of texting versus actually phoning.

Once, she, Beth and Izzie had laughed gently with him over his hopelessness in this area. Now, Anneliese wondered if she’d ever laugh at anything again. What did laughing actually feel like? Would she ever do it again?

Marvellous news. Izzie has arrived. She will be at the hospital by four.

No text shorthand for Brendan.

Anneliese thought of Izzie, who was strong on the outside and soft as a marshmallow on the inside, and how she’d cry at the sight of her darling Gran in the hospital bed. Then, she thought of Beth, who’d sobbed when she’d heard the news on the phone, but who couldn’t come until the weekend.

‘Of course, don’t rush,’ Anneliese had reassured her. Reassuring her daughter was what Anneliese did best. ‘Gran will be OK.’

Another lie. Who knew if Lily would really be all right or not? But there was method to her madness: the longer Beth stayed away, the more time Anneliese would have before she had to tell her daughter the horrible news about her parents’ separation.

It was ridiculous that she still hadn’t told Beth about her and Edward, ridiculous. Beth would be furious with her, but Anneliese just hadn’t had the heart to do it. As if telling her daughter would make it all true.

Anneliese knew she could not be strong enough for both Izzie and Beth.

That was what she’d wanted to tell Lily before the nurse interrupted them.

‘Beth doesn’t need me,’ she half-whispered to herself in the hospital coffee shop. ‘She has Marcus to look after her and he adores her. Nobody needs me any more. I don’t have to be here. For the first time ever, I don’t have to be here.’

It was both liberating and terrifying at the same time.

She didn’t need to be there. Be anywhere. She could jump off the cliff or walk into the sea and keep walking, and it wouldn’t really matter.

‘How did you manage, Lily?’ she wondered out loud.

She partly knew the answer: Lily had thrown herself into raising Izzie. She’d had to bury her own grief and deal with her granddaughter’s instead. But Anneliese had nobody to take care of. She had only herself and, right now, she didn’t care what happened to Anneliese Kennedy.

The first person Izzie saw when she went into the four-bed ward was Anneliese. Sitting by a bed with knitting on her lap and a far-away look on her face, she seemed so wonderfully familiar that Izzie had to bite her lip to stop herself crying again and ruining all the repair work she’d done with make-up on the way there.

Then she saw her grandmother, tiny and frail as a child in the bed, with no hint of the vital woman she’d known all her life. Shock leached the colour from Izzie’s face and her emotional armour came tumbling down.

‘Anneliese,’ Izzie gasped, grabbing her aunt’s hands in horror and stopping beside the bed. ‘Oh God, poor Gran, my poor Gran.’

Anneliese could do nothing but pat Izzie’s shoulders as the younger woman held on to the little body in the bed, sobbing ‘Gran.’

It was almost too private to watch, Anneliese thought, and she began to turn away, hoping nobody else would approach so that Izzie could mourn in peace.

‘Anneliese! She’s talking!’

‘What?’ Anneliese rushed to the other side of the bed. ‘She hasn’t woken up, Izzie, not since…We should call the doctor.’

‘Yes, Gran.’ Izzie wasn’t listening to Anneliese. She was bent close to her grandmother’s face, trying to decipher the faint words.

Lily’s mouth was moving and her eyes were open, shining out of her face with a vitality undimmed by nearly ninety years of life.

‘We’re here, Lily,’ Anneliese said gently. ‘You’re in hospital. You had a stroke, love, but you’re going to be all right.’

Lily stared up at the ceiling, as if she was looking at somebody neither of them could see.