Haven't They Grown(44)

‘Cot death?’ I say.

‘Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, I believe they call it. Georgina wasn’t the strongest baby to begin with. There were various complications. She was born six weeks premature, and there was something wrong with her right eye. She would have needed surgery to correct it at some point, or perhaps an eye-patch would have done the trick. She wasn’t as robust as both Thomas and Emily were as babies.’

‘Flora didn’t …’ Of course she didn’t tell you, idiot. She didn’t tell you any of it. Don’t you remember the sequence of events?

‘She stopped being Flora,’ says Rosemary. ‘The old Flora – the real Flora – would never have cut us off. Never. We’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all.’

‘Which of course is what parents who deserve to be ostracised would say,’ her husband adds. ‘But we didn’t deserve it. Not a bit.’

Then why? Why did it happen?

I can’t bring myself to ask them if, before she died, Georgina’s nickname was Chimpy. It probably makes no sense that I still have the urge to ask this question. If Georgina is dead, how could Flora have been talking to her on the phone last Saturday?

‘Would you like a hanky or a tissue?’ Rosemary asks me.

‘No, thank you.’ I sniff and wipe my eyes quickly with the back of my hand.

She says, ‘When Flora and Lewis told us that Georgina had died, I looked at Flora and I knew straight away: she was gone. As gone as Georgina was. Somebody else was there instead. A different woman.’

‘We only saw them twice after Georgina’s death,’ says Gerard. ‘Once when they told us the terrible news and the second time when Lewis said we would never see them again and that we mustn’t try to contact them.’

‘But why would Flora want that?’ I blurt out. ‘You say she’d changed – anyone would change after a tragedy like that, but to push away your own parents …’

‘Please.’ Gerard raises a hand. He’s telling me, as politely as he can, to shut up. ‘All the questions you’re likely to ask are ones we asked ourselves, again and again. We didn’t understand. Of course we didn’t. After such a tragedy, to be bereaved again so unnecessarily – and if you think it’s too dramatic to call being cut off by your daughter and remaining grandchildren a bereavement, I can assure you, that’s exactly how it felt and how it still feels.’

‘I can imagine,’ I say shakily.

But it can’t have been Flora’s fault. None of it can. She’d never have cut you off if she’d had a choice.

How the hell am I going to manage the long drive home after this?

Gerard says, ‘Since I’m no longer in touch with Flora, I obviously can’t ask her why she made the decision that she made. I have my suspicions, if you’d like to hear them?’

‘Only if you don’t mind telling us,’ says Zannah.

Thank you, Zan. Thanks for speaking when I can’t. If Zannah or Ben ever cut off contact with me, I’d throw myself off a bridge there and then. I wouldn’t try to be brave for anyone else’s sake. I couldn’t live in a world where my daughter didn’t want to know me.

Gerard says, ‘I think … well, I know, from my own experience, that most people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid unbearable pain. It’s what we’ve done since losing Flora and the children. It’s the reason your visit, and your mention of Flora’s name, caused us such, uh, consternation, shall we say? Flora and Lewis knew that every time they saw us, every interaction they had with us in the future, they would have to confront our loss, the grief that we felt at losing Georgina. I don’t think they could face that prospect. I must say, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that they’ve moved to America. It fits with my suspicion: they want to surround themselves with people who have no memories of Georgina. It will make life easier for them. Perhaps it’s the only way they can face living at all.’

People who have no memories of Georgina … Not me, then. I remember Georgina very clearly, from her one visit to my house. Even if I’d never met her in person, there was no chance I would ever forget her.

Thoughts and memories crash-land in my mind, one after another: Flora on the phone, ending the call as soon as she could, promising to ring back and then not ringing back. Flora running away from me in a Huntingdon car park, Lewis on the phone from Delray Beach, Florida – happy to chat at length, confident he could sustain his lies for as long as I could keep him talking.

Flora wasn’t confident or happy to talk, though she did her best to pretend to be. She could only stretch out her lies for a finite amount of time. And then she couldn’t risk ringing back. When she saw me in the car park in Huntingdon, she didn’t brazen it out, as Lewis would no doubt have done. She turned and ran.

She was scared. Of me. Shit, how can this not have struck me before? She was on her way back to her car, presumably strolling along in a reasonably normal frame of mind, and then she saw me and she freaked out. Ran away. I was the thing that caused that rush of fear – because she knew I’d ask after Georgina and she didn’t want to have to talk about her death? But …

No. That can’t be it. You might try and avoid an old friend in those circumstances, but the fear I saw in Flora’s eyes, the way she turned and ran … that wasn’t just reluctance to talk about a past tragedy. It was more and bigger than that. And then, to send that other woman back to the car park wearing her clothes …