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And here it is, autumnal weather. Some of the leaves are already on the turn. From far away, the trees still look overwhelmingly green. The dark spots are too few to show, the leaves are otherwise vibrant and reflecting the sunshine. Even the oak tree looks resplendent. But when you scrutinise them, you can see the decay is setting in. The decline has begun, there are darker days ahead. I can’t help but let it affect my mood. I’ll keep telling stories but they may not be as light or as amusing for a while, perhaps not until spring resurges.
Autumn is not all gloomy though, it brings its own paintbox. Green doesn’t pass directly to brown, it whirls through several shades of reds or yellows on its way. There are haws in the hedge now, and they’ll be wild blackberries and sloes mixed in, if you care to forage for them. These are the colours of food, attractive and designed to spark interest, a final finale before the slumber that’s coming. I have my own blackberry bush which seems to be producing well this year. I’ve not enough to share with others, or to worry about storage through the winter, it’s only good for keeping me in snacks. But it has put on lots of new growth this summer, so I know it will be bountiful next year. It’s such a shame I won’t be here to enjoy it, but I know I can’t take it with me. It is better not to brood on what happens to our favourite things when we aren’t around to see them for ourselves. I have done my best for this bush while I’m able to do so, that will have to be enough.
At least the sun is shining, and I don’t know about you, but I intend to stay out here until it stops. The season change means I refuse to miss a ray if I don’t have to. In August you can be relaxed about the weather, you expect the sun to shine, become frustrated if it doesn’t. But as soon as the season turns, every sunny day is a bonus, a reminder to cherish every moment as they will soon cease. It is like getting older. You come to expect less, but you make more effort to enjoy basking when you can. If I’ve learned anything over the last few decades, it’s how to make the most of those moments when they present themselves. That’s how I’ve managed to keep myself from descending into a very dark place.
*******
My birthday is in September, I try not to focus on the exact date anymore. In prison, visiting is structured to suit the guards rather than the inmates, and I became used to celebrating on a day nearby. Of all the restraints being in prison created, my inability to host parties, to celebrate an occasion, was one of the most painful. I was unable to bake a cake, to blow up a balloon, to drape a home-drawn banner above a fireplace. If visitors wished to make a fuss of me then they could, provided it was a visiting day. Unfortunately, I could not return the favour.
My first birthday in prison was my fortieth, only seven weeks after my trial, and it was the hardest time of my life. The shock of the lengthy sentence was reverberating with the jolt of moving from the remand cells to the main block. I was not to know then that I would only spend three years in the maximum-security prison, I thought I would fritter the rest of my life away with those hardened criminals, with nothing to look at but bars and concrete. I was missing my girls, and I struggled to accept I wouldn’t be there for their next phases, for their marriages and their children. I don’t wish to dwell on those first few weeks because they were frightful. Suffice to say, I had not been considered well enough to receive guests. That’s how they phrased it, as if I were a lady recluse on some country estate somewhere. I wasn’t consulted, any attempts to contact me were declined, supposedly in my best interests. But my birthday fell on a visiting Saturday, and my children were determined to see me. I was grateful they were insistent but, given what happened, it may have been better if I had delayed seeing them until I felt stronger.
The visiting hall was nicer than most of the prison, though that wasn’t saying much. The tables were off-white laminate, the chairs were scratched red plastic, and the room reeked of disinfectant. At least some effort had been applied to make the place more welcoming for children. There were crayon drawings stuck to the walls, and a toy box in the corner. There were a handful of under-fives poking their noses into it. I hoped they were visiting aunties rather than mothers. I had a flash vision of Lucy visiting with a baby in her arms. My memory of it is so vivid, it is hard for me to believe it isn’t true. I was lucky my girls were now adults, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be missing out on their lives.
Lucy looked thinner but no less tanned, her gauzy yellow dress didn’t disguise her growing belly as she sashayed her way through the tables towards me. In that prison, I had to stay seated the whole time, I couldn’t get up, couldn’t run to them, couldn’t hug them, I had to let them cross the room to me. Some of the other inmates turned to watch Lucy as she walked past them. These women, convicted of evil deeds, judging my girl for her choice of outfit. Carol looked more sombre, she worked at a bank and always dressed appropriately, wearing a longer skirt, matched with a blue cardigan with shoulder pads, over a white blouse. She looked well put together, as always, whereas Lucy looked carefree, and behaved in that way. I don’t think she’d seen the looks she had attracted, but Carol noticed.
Lucy reached me first and bent over to embrace me, enthusiastic compared to Carol’s sedate and proper kiss on my cheek. They sat opposite me, dragging their plastic chairs close to the table that must stay between us. Lucy held my hands in hers, which stopped me from wiping my eyes. I felt a single tear, tracing its route from the inner edge of my eye along the side of my nose, drooped as my head was. I couldn’t hide from them though, I didn’t want to, and so I lifted my eyes to meet theirs. Lucy beamed back at me, but not Carol. With one hand, she worried at a strand of her hair which had worked itself loose, trying to tuck it back into the bun at the back of her head. She examined the room as she did so, nose pinched as she took in the details of my fellow prisoners. Older, younger, white, black, they were all of a one in the most important respect. They were all condemned women.
“Oh Mum, it is great to see you, oh, you’ve lost so much weight, why, you look positively bone-ey in that outfit, what on earth is that, are they dungarees?”
I lightened up. Lucy had a way of putting people at their ease and relaxing them. It’s a skill neither Carol nor I ever had, we tended towards prattling when nervous, or being quiet and reserved. We lurched to extremes, but not Lucy, she was as charming as her father when she wished to be. In front of them was a small tin with yellow flowers on it, one I recognised from Mother’s kitchen.
“Lily sends her apologies but she made you this, hopes you understand, she’s off on an anti-war march to Greenham Common, some women’s peace thing about the missiles.”
Lucy opened the lid to present the cake, which was drenched in a lemon icing which looked delicious but unfortunately smelt too similar to the disinfectant they used in the prison. The cake had been pre-cut, of course, and Lucy placed slices on linen napkins in front of each of us.
“Happy birthday Mum, glad we could be here with you.” Lucy barely paused as she took a large bite. “Oh, a bit dry I’m afraid. Anyway, I hope they are treating you well in here but don’t get too used to it now, we’ve a plan to get you out, you won’t have to stay long. We’re here to save you, Mum.”
*******
That was the comment which sparked my anger, ‘we’re here to save you, Mum.’ My nineteen-year-old child, my pregnant teenaged daughter, presumed to know enough about life to be able to rescue me? Did she not believe me capable of thought, of strategy, of survival? It is possible, of course, that I missed the significance of this remark at the time she made it, and I’ve imbued it with more emotion each time I revisit the memory, trying to work out how I could have handled it differently, how I could have prevented myself from becoming so furious. Perhaps it was only as Lucy outlined her plan that my sorrow, or my self-pity if I’m being truthful, was replaced with indignation. Hindsight alters how we interpret events, and I’m sure Lucy will have her own version of our conversation.
I did not need rescuing. I had thought of nothing else but my predicament since I arrived in prison, those many months I spent awaiting my trial, not to mention the years I waited for Frank’s body to be discovered. The weeks after his death, when I pretended he was only away for a short while, that he was about to return. The months of pitying looks from other mothers, believing I had been abandoned by my husband. The trepidation of waiting for someone to find out Frank was dead, and the terror that someone would work out how it had happened. All that was now over, and while it could have been better, it could also have been worse, and I was ready to call it a draw. The one thing I did not need was rescuing. But Lucy wasn’t to know that. I wish I’d had more patience, and found a way to help her appreciate why that was how it must be. But I already knew that Carol understood, and I wrongly assumed that Lucy would follow where she led.
*******
“Look,” said Carol, interjecting, probably seeing my face and realising that Lucy was taking the conversation off track before she’d even begun, “we’ve got forty-five minutes and much to talk about, why don’t you start.” She was staring at me, her cake lying untouched, her words clipped. “How are things here, how have you been coping? Tell us all about it, we can come to these plans later.”
“No-no-no.”
I heard Frank’s echo and I missed him for a moment. I took this as a sign that I was feeling low and I needed to be careful. I made an effort to show my girls my brave face, helped by my realisation that they didn’t recognise his phrase.
“There is very little I want to say about this place. Take it from me though, I’ll be alright.”
Carol gathered my meaning, she nodded and seemed satisfied, but Lucy was sparked back into battle.
“You won’t be alright, we won’t be alright, you need to come home.”
She didn’t say ‘I need you to come home,’ but it was close enough for my tears to well again and my irritation with her to ease a little. She would not be easily diverted from her path.
“I’ve been talking to your lawyer and we have a plan, an appeal we can lodge. It might not work, of course, but it was a ridiculous sentence and we can’t leave it like this.”
Lucy still held my hands with one of hers, but her other, the left one, was waving about around her head as she spoke. It was a habit she shared with Mother, and it was distracting. It helped to lessen the intensity of the conversation, edging my guard down, luring me towards danger.
“I’ve spoken about it with Gary and he agrees, he supports your appeal.”
I squeezed and twisted her wrist, too sharply, she yelped and I had to let her go before she attracted more attention to us. As it was, a guard sauntered closer, near enough to see that Lucy was rubbing her wrist, but paying less attention as she saw that I remained in my seat, no fight breaking out. I was livid though.
“What did you say to him?”
Lucy took her time responding. “Not much, Mum, I swear. But he’s sorry. He knows he made a mistake and he’s so sorry, he says to tell you he wants to make it right again.”
“Did you know about this?” Somehow, I was even sharper with Carol than I was with Lucy.
“No, I’ve no idea what Lucy’s been up to, or what possessed her to talk with Gary after what he did, but then, who knows what she gets up to with whom these days, let’s be honest.”
“Don’t frown Carol, you’ll wrinkle.” Lucy responded before I could intervene and so I let Carol’s jibe go. “Anyway, Mum, as I was saying, Gary wants to help with your appeal, so we’ve talked it over and come up with ideas. He thinks the best thing you can do to help reduce your sentence is to say what happened to Dad. That’s what’s bothering everyone so much, as they don’t know, they’re imagining the worst.”
They weren’t the only ones.
“Please, please say you haven’t told him, Lucy. Please say you haven’t been that idiotic.”
The tingling of dread ran through me, and yet, even as I moaned, I knew she couldn’t have done, or we’d all have known about it already. Carol was calm, and this reassured me further, she wouldn’t be relaxed if she thought Lucy was sharing our secrets with others, even someone as close to our family as Gary. Besides, Carol had never trusted Gary. Prophetically, as it turned out.
“Of course not, Mum, I know better than that.”
I tried to nod warmly at her and turn the conversation back to more pleasant matters, but the situation was too dire for any intervention to succeed. I busied myself with a mouthful of cake, she was right, it was too dry. Lucy waited until she was sure I wasn’t going to respond before she carried on pushing.
“I do think that we can trust Gary though. I mean after all these years he’s practically one of the family. He’s only trying to help us, he didn’t mean to make things worse, and he feels guilty. Surely we shouldn’t let him keep thinking that this is his fault?”
“You can’t please everyone.” I was past caring what Gary thought but Lucy needed more from me, so I tried to explain. “My lawyer will never agree to an appeal that lets the police off for not protecting us. No matter how much we pay her, that’s not what she wants to spend her time doing, my dear, she has an agenda, just like the rest of us.”
“But Mum, why don’t you tell the truth! Tell everyone about Dad, about how he died. They know you buried him, you’ve admitted you killed him, why won’t you say what happened?”
I didn’t know what to say so I shushed her, trying to get her to keep her voice down. It made her more upset, and no less quiet.
“I want you to come home. Don’t you want to come home? Don’t you want to be a grandmother, to help me with this baby? Are you really leaving me all alone?”
She was upset and I was cross. I can only attribute my behaviour to the stress of those first few weeks in prison, and my own dismay at realising I would miss my first grandchild growing up. What should have been the ultimate bonding experience was instead the wedge which drove us apart. I’m not proud of myself, but I admit I snarled at her.
“Are you going to stay at home this time then? Are you going to spend all your time with me?” I let go of her hand, started tidying the cake up to give me something to do. “Do you want someone to bring up your child for you while you galivant off again without a care, without a thought to those you’ve left behind?”
She stared at me as if I’d slapped her, and so I resorted to broadening my attack to both my girls.
“You are adults now, you’ve got your own lives. You can visit me here just as easily as you could visit me at home.”
“But Mum, you’re being ridiculous,” Lucy said. It was true, I know, but saying it never helped anyone. “Why have you allowed them to convict you of murder when we all witnessed him choke on the lamb stew?”
She’d gone and said it, and she said it loudly. We were lucky that no one was close enough to hear us and be interested enough to care. I was stunned, unsure how best to respond. Carol was less hesitant. She reached her arms up behind Lucy, and pushed her head down towards the table, holding it there while leaning over her and whispering in her ear. I couldn’t hear and I didn’t want to, it was between them now. Carol had one hand wrapped in Lucy’s hair and was stroking her back with the other. To the unknowing observer, she appeared to be comforting her as she cried, no doubt distraught at having to visit her mother in prison. I didn’t interrupt their ritual.
When Carol let Lucy rise again her eyes were wet, and she scoured them, trying to drive her tears away and compose herself. Her hair was bigger than before. With her swollen cheeks and buoyant locks, she could have been posing for a photograph. I knew better though, she was incensed, but all I could feel was disheartened. She eased her chair back, and deliberately, with dignity said the last words I’ve ever heard her say.
“If you won’t tell the truth, you may as well rot in here.”
*******
Carol lingered with me while Lucy flounced out. She stopped playing with her hair, put both her hands together, clasped on the table in front of her, and took a deep breath, looking at her hands rather than at me. It was a gesture I recognised both as forced, an attempt to maintain control of herself, and as mine, one I often made myself. I waited, placing my own hands together in my lap to resist the temptation I felt to mirror her actions.
“I understand now, you know. Thank you,” she blurted out.
“Oh, my dear, you’ve nothing to thank me for. You hear me? Nothing at all.”
“Lucy will come round, it’s the baby, it’s making her hormonal, or so Nan says.”
Mother thought everything was related to hormones, although she was probably right in this instance, and Carol’s reference made me smile.
“Whatever Lucy says, she can’t be trusted not to have another outburst like that. I won’t be appealing, and I don’t wish to discuss it again.”
“Okay Mum.”
She so rarely called me Mum anymore, I didn’t want to break the spell that settled over her. I reached across the table, took both her hands in mine, and held her gaze while I tried to tempt her with some more cake. She squirmed but she returned her face to her more usual arrangement, that of appearing to think something somewhere smelled a little off, and she pushed the tin back towards me.
“Here, I can’t stay any longer I’m afraid. You hold onto this, they said you could keep everything they let us bring in.”
And with that, she left.
*******
That’s the other frustrating constraint with prison life, you don’t get to choose when your guest leaves, nor can you decide that it’s time you were going, only to have someone try to encourage you to stay longer. No such niceties exist, no matter how well you try to acclimatise yourself to your surroundings, to accept your situation, there are these tell-tale signs. A prison might be where you live, but it cannot be your home, no matter how hard you try to think of it as such.
It must seem difficult for anyone, outside the three of us, to comprehend how dangerous Lucy’s comment was. She had every right to feel upset, to be worried about being pregnant, and concerned about not having her mother around to help her. But that didn’t mean she could talk about what happened that night. We hadn’t spoken of it since the morning after Frank had died. I had sworn them both to secrecy, a pact which had survived the intervening years and the police investigation intact. The reasons for it remained as valid as they had been when the agreement was reached and, to the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been spoken about since. Until now, of course, but I have my reasons, as I’m sure will become clear the more we speak.
If nothing else, how else to understand why Lucy and I are estranged? I assume people think it’s about Frank’s death, and in many ways that’s true. Her words that day had such a disastrous impact, they ripped our family apart. I haven’t seen her again after that, not once have I lain eyes on her. And I could hardly go looking for her, I barely heard from her and, even when I did, it appeared to be forced, as if she were acting from a sense of obligation. The occasional photograph of a grandchild, for which I was very grateful, I must be clear, and a birthday card each September. I haven’t got an address for her so I try to send notes and news via Mother, but I’m not convinced much of it gets through, or that Lucy is interested in hearing it, even if it does.
Carol, on the other hand, has stood by me, she sorted everything out. Even though she was only young, she took care of my affairs. She looked after the house and arranged all the legal documents so all I had to do was sign some papers. I was so proud of her. She also dealt with my lawyer, passing along my refusal to appeal. I declined her visit request, not because I didn’t like her, because I did, she’d always amused me, but because I didn’t trust myself not to be talked into appealing. Carol has dealt with all that sort of stuff for me since, I don’t know what I’d have done without her. You wouldn’t believe how many people contact my lawyer wanting to speak with me, to try to get my story out of me. I have them turning up here unannounced sometimes, pretending to be an old neighbour or a schoolfriend of Frank’s, anything to give them an excuse to ask me about his death, hoping I’ll share all my secrets with them. It is one of those crimes, you see, that sort people think is a miscarriage of justice, that there’s some conspiracy here to expose. Of course, we know that it is, but not in the way that everyone else thinks it is. I’m not sure how easy it would be to explain, so better I keep my own counsel, so to speak.
Carol always visited me, she never stopped, no matter what else was going on, she continued to come through pregnancies, childhood sicknesses, even Joel’s redundancy and the worrying time when it looked like they’d need to move away. And I was glad that she often brought her children with her. It meant I could get to know them as they grew, that I didn’t appear as a stranger to them once they were older, even if it was heart breaking to see only a fraction of their lives.
It was more than Lucy did for her children. She might have had her reasons, I’m not going to start speaking ill of her to you, I accept I haven’t always been a perfect mother. But she hasn’t made any effort to build bridges as far as I can see. I would very much like to hear her say that she understands better. Not that she fully appreciates the situation I was in, or approves of the decisions I needed to make, but that she blames me a little less. However, I’m not holding out much hope. She made herself plain when she came to see me on my first birthday in prison. I haven’t seen her since.
*******
Look, the great flocks have arrived. It’s too easy to forget about them during the summer, when each bird is an individual. But at this time of year, and especially with these broad skies, the flocks can be huge. The sky is peppered with birds. This particular flock have arrived overnight, appearing between blinks, from one moment to the next. Unfortunately, these are pigeons, not the most graceful or attractive of flocks, more like a horde of winged rats devouring the farmers’ seed. By tomorrow, there’ll be a bird scarer exploding episodically, I’ve no doubt. Nonetheless, I like the sight of them, especially when they lift off together as I walk alongside the field to my patch. They remind me that I’m never alone out here, and as they come back every year, they’ve proved to be my long-term companions.
Autumn may be bearing down upon us, but there’s a second showing this year, holding it off. It doesn’t always happen, it seems to depend as much on the weather in August as it does in September. If it has not been warm enough for long enough, the plants don’t think they’ve bloomed enough, and they come back for a second go. It’s as if their wings had been clipped too soon and they’re rebelling. Whatever causes it, the evidence is abundant, my dear, look at this rose bush, a shower of orange petals where the new growth has budded. The raspberry cane continues to produce plump berries. Okay, technically speaking, those are the autumn raspberry canes which are fruiting now, and the spring ones blossomed earlier, but my point is valid, even if it isn’t strictly accurate. There is one last hoorah. It will all die as soon as the weather changes. There’s a metaphor for life here, do you bloom while you can, but then perish in the coming of cold? I can tell you, never miss an opportunity to prosper, however harsh the change in temperature may later prove to be.