The Day She Came Back(88)

Victoria shook her head. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I wish I did.

‘I have survived on the thought that you might somehow have sensed me, remembered me in some way for all these years.’

‘I didn’t.’ She spoke softly.

‘I knew I had to give you up.’ Sarah was crying now, and didn’t bother to address her tears, as though the state was as natural to her as breathing. Victoria found it hard to hear. Sarah sniffed. ‘I thought I would die. I wanted to die. And I knew you deserved more and so I kissed you twice a day, every visit until my time ran out. Prim let me hold you one last time and left me with some money, and she took you back to Rosebank and I went even further off the rails . . .’ Sarah looked at her. ‘That was all I got of you. Three months, twice a day. One hundred and eighty kisses. And I cherish each and every one. No one expected me to survive, especially not me.’

Victoria sat, stunned, watching mothers with small children walking or cycling along the quayside on this bright, bright morning. She tried to imagine the scenario, almost unable to equate the woman Sarah described with the neat, smart lawyer sitting opposite her. She tried to picture herself in Prim’s arms, being carried up the stairs to a grotty bedsit where her junkie mother was behind a door, in what state, Prim could only have been able to guess. It was brave. It was unthinkable. Victoria took a sip of her coffee.

‘I think losing your mum is one of the worst things imaginable. It doesn’t feel right. And I thought I had gone through it, but I was thinking today that I am going to have to lose you again one day, when you really die, and I don’t know if it will be easier or harder the second time around.’ She was glad of this openness and the seemingly calm manner in which they were now talking. It felt real, and it felt a lot like progress.

‘I hope it will be easier, because I don’t want you to have a day of sadness, but I also hope it will be harder because I hope by then you might feel a bit more favourably towards me. I know you are angry at me, doubtful of me, which I understand, I do’ – she put in the caveat – ‘but I would like some of that anger to have gone.’

‘I have been angry at Prim too, since I found out, and it has stopped me mourning her properly, I think. But today, I don’t know. I think she tried her best.’

‘She did,’ Sarah acknowledged. ‘She tried her best; I was not easy.’

‘Things seem a bit clearer right now, and missing her not quite so painful. I found her, you know, on the day she died.’

‘Oh!’ Sarah sighed. ‘I did not know that. That must have been terrible.’

‘It was. Even though she was older, I still never expected her to die, not really.’

‘I felt the same,’ Sarah reminded her. ‘I thought we would always have time to make things good. I shall regret it for the rest of my life. My consolation is that I know you would have brought her so much joy, so much joy . . .’

‘Daksha and I went shopping and for a coffee, and Prim asked me to buy her a balaclava—’

‘A balaclava?’ Sarah interrupted with a note of surprise.

‘Yes!’ Victoria laughed. ‘But she meant baklava, the Greek pastry!’

‘Oh, makes more sense.’ They both laughed.

‘I came home, and there she was in the garden room . . .’

‘Her favourite place.’

‘Her favourite place,’ Victoria concurred.

There was a moment or two of silence which felt a lot like peace as the two women, connected by blood and history, looked out over the water, where big ferry boats came and went, taking people out to the islands around Oslo. ‘I wanted to ask you something, Sarah.’

‘You can ask me anything.’

‘Why did you decide to tell me you had died? Why that?’ And there it was: the big question. The one that pained her the most. ‘It was so final and so brutal.’

‘I have avoided—’ Sarah stopped abruptly.

‘Avoided what?’ Victoria sat forward in the chair.

Sarah’s voice now sounded a little sticky, as if the words had to pass through a dry, nervous passage to reach her.

‘I have avoided telling you this because I didn’t want you to feel badly towards Prim. You are the most amazing human being, and that means she did it right! She did a good job. And I can’t, hand on heart, say that I would have done the same, had you been in my care, and it’s important to remember that.’

‘Avoided telling me what?’ Victoria pushed, her pulse now racing.

‘I didn’t know that Prim had decided to tell you that I had died. It was a dreadful, unbelievable shock to me. It still is.’ She toyed with the handle of her coffee cup.

‘You . . . you didn’t know?’ Victoria didn’t know what to think. This information told her that Sarah had not been complicit in the deception, but that Prim . . . her beloved, flawed Prim had deliberately chosen this act . . . this lie to . . . Oh, Prim! She steeled herself for what might come next.

‘I made contact with her when you were a toddler to say that I was trying to get myself straight, that I had met Jens and that things were looking up for me. And what I told you at the airport was the truth – Mum said she was doubtful of my sobriety, and I don’t blame her! I can’t blame her. All she had ever seen was me promising to get clean and then falling straight back into my old habits. She said she would only risk giving you back to me if there was a cast-iron guarantee that I wasn’t going to disappear, relapse or kill myself, as she was not willing to put you through that, and that you deserved more. I told her the truth – there were no cast-iron guarantees – and she said it wasn’t worth the risk, as you were happy, and she was right. And so I worked hard at getting back on my feet and then, when you were six, I contacted her again, and that’s when she told me you thought I had died.’