Seven Days of Us(31)
Emma
THE BACK STAIRS, WEYFIELD HALL, 7:00 A.M.
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Emma had always enjoyed doing her daughters’ stockings. When the girls had been little (well, until they’d been teenagers), she used to creep into the room they shared wearing a special red dressing gown. Laying their stockings at their feet, bending to look at their sleeping faces, she remembered feeling overwhelmed with tenderness. Now that they were grown up they all opened their stockings together, over breakfast. For years, Phoebe had sweetly made stockings for Andrew and Emma, too, so that everybody had one. Emma had gone to extra effort with Olivia’s this year. She had put in several tubes of swanky hand cream, a Georgette Heyer that she thought would make cozy reading, and some leather gloves she grabbed in a kind of daze in John Lewis, after meeting Nicola. When she looked at Olivia’s raw, red hands, she felt that same tenderness flood her—except she knew it wasn’t welcome now. All she could do was try to spoil her and will her to open up. She hoped Phoebe wouldn’t mind that Olivia’s stocking was bigger than hers. Phoebe could be silly in that way. With luck she would appreciate that Olivia had missed out for the past few years.
Emma yawned. It had taken her an age to fall asleep, talking herself down from a ledge of anxiety at 2 a.m. During the day she could banish thoughts of the lump quite successfully, but they lay in wait—pouncing in the horizontal quiet of the night. She’d only been asleep for a couple of hours when her alarm went off. Andrew had already been awake. He slept so badly these days—perhaps it was all the rich food he had to eat. There was a time when she’d have felt duty bound to make love on Christmas morning, but not now. For the past eighteen months Andrew seemed to have stopped even trying. She didn’t particularly mind, in fact it was rather a relief not to be pestered. But it wasn’t like him. Funny how the more you went without sex, the less you missed it. She held the rustling, multijointed stockings in her arms like babies, to stop them from stretching all over the place. The stairs by the kitchen smelled of last night’s borscht. She opened the door, and let out a little yelp of surprise. Phoebe was sitting at the table looking at Emma’s iPad, crying. Emma’s first thought was that she’d argued with George. “Phoebs! What’s wrong?”
“You have cancer!” Phoebe was sobbing extravagantly now, her lips turned down like a sad clown’s face.
Emma sat sideways on the bench to hug her, and for a while they rocked together, Phoebe weeping into Emma’s neck. She smelled of sleep and shampoo. Emma’s side was killing her, but Phoebe was clinging to her neck like a toddler.
“I’m OK, darling, I’m OK,” Emma kept saying, until Phoebe emerged.
“I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have read your e-mails, but I was putting out your stocking, and I wanted to check something on that Delling link, so I went to your history and then I saw all the searches. All the Hodgkin lymph stuff. So I looked at your e-mails and I saw one from Nicola. Why didn’t you say, Mummy? Why didn’t you tell us?”
Bother, thought Emma. If only she hadn’t left her iPad lying around.
“I was going to. I was. I was just waiting until this quarantine is over. I wanted us all to have a nice Christmas. No point ruining Christmas!” she said.
“You wouldn’t be ruining it. You can’t keep something like that secret.”
“But I feel fine, sweetheart. This is Olivia’s week.”
Phoebe hiccupped. “Still! What are you going to do?”
“Well, I’m . . . I’m with a very good doctor, angel, the best doctor for these things. I will probably have to have chemotherapy, but he says I should make a full recovery. It’s not a very bad cancer.” She knew this wasn’t quite what Dr. Singer had said, but protecting Phoebe was a reflex. She was still so vulnerable, so young, compared to Olivia.
“Will your hair fall out?”
“It may do. But that’s a small price to pay.” She forced her face into a bright grin. “I’ll save a fortune on haircuts.”
Phoebe gave a valiant smile. “Will it have grown back for the wedding?”
She hadn’t thought of this. What an image—mother of the bride, bald as a vulture. That is, if she was here at all.
“Hopefully. Just as well one wears a hat!” she said. “Now come on, stop this; I’m going to be absolutely fine. I need to be—you’re getting married!”
This didn’t seem to fortify Phoebe as she’d hoped. Her daughter sat staring at a poinsettia on the windowsill, sniffing.
“Daddy knows, right?” she asked.
“Not yet,” said Emma, trying to keep her tone light.
“What? But shouldn’t he—shouldn’t you two—”
“I’m going to tell Daddy and Olivia when the quarantine is over,” Emma said, before her daughter could offer any marital advice. “I want Christmas to be happy. It’ll only upset them. All of us sitting here fretting, cooped up with nowhere to go. I’ll get the next test results in a few days—that’ll be the time to discuss it.”
“But—”
“Please don’t say anything, will you, Phoebs? Can we keep this just between us, for now?”
Making Phoebe feel special had always been the way to win her over, even when she was very small. Her forehead softened.