Nancy told herself that breaking up with Jim was for the best. After the phone call—which was the full-stop she needed and had been pending for weeks—she made a singular effort to close down her feelings, force the man she loved into a box pushed to the back of the attic. And she didn’t find it as difficult as she might have supposed, because she wasn’t feeling anything much at the moment, except a dull numbness, which had gradually spread, like a spill of gray, across her consciousness, beginning shortly after her mother died.
It wasn’t that she had no hope for the future: it was more that the future was a muted blank, a nothingness into which she was unable to project any feelings, any hopes, not even herself.
Even spending time with the girls did little to elevate her mood. She plodded through their care, smiled when she had to, hugged them when it was appropriate, listened to their chatter with one ear. And when she was alone, she cried. Long into the night sometimes, but without heat or hope of relief. It became a familiar process, which ended in exhaustion and sleep.
She hid her depression well. Louise was too busy to notice and Ross had his own problems. She avoided Lindy and canceled her students, saying it was unlikely she would be able to teach them again in the near future.
*
“Where’s Jim, Nana?” Jazzy took her thumb out of her mouth to ask as she lay in bed in Nancy’s house one cold February night, sleepily clutching her battered giraffe, whose neck was hanging by a thread from years of cuddles. I must mend that, she thought.
“He’s in France,” Nancy said quickly, as she sat on the edge of Hope’s bed, preparing to read them another installment of George’s Marvelous Medicine—anything by Roald Dahl got the girls’ vote.
“When’s he coming back?” Hope was sitting up, clean hair—both girls had just had a long-overdue shampoo—falling round her shoulders, fiddling with two little Shopkins figures.
“I’m not sure . . .”
“But he promised he’d teach us the chicken song,” Jazzy complained.
Hope was looking at Nancy quizzically. “He’s still your boyfriend, isn’t he, Nana?”
The unexpected question hit her in the pit of her stomach. It was almost a month since she’d talked to Jim and every day she made a point of carefully battening down the memories. They were memories now. Jim was a memory. But with Hope’s brown eyes gazing at her so intently, she found her own filling with tears. “I’m afraid he’s not anymore,” she said, swallowing hard and bending her head to the book so the girls wouldn’t see her tears. Hope hesitated, then pushed the duvet back, crawling down the bed until she was close to her grandmother, snuggling into her side to give her a tight hug. A hug that was like a beacon in her bleak world: so loving, so understanding was the child’s embrace that it broke through Nancy’s haze of indifference and made her want to cry out in pain. Jazzy glanced uncertainly at her sister, then at her grandmother, but didn’t move.
“Don’t worry, Nana,” Hope said, a very grown-up expression on her young face. “I’m sure he’ll come back soon.”
“Maybe.” Nancy managed a smile, clearing her throat as she tried to get herself under control. But her granddaughter’s touching concern made it all the harder. Hope would be nine in a couple of days—she was growing up fast.
“He’s going to teach us the chicken song,” Jazzy muttered again, with the innocent certainty of a six-year-old.
“Right, come on, it’s getting late. We’d better get on with George.” She dropped a kiss on Hope’s head, gave her a grateful squeeze, reluctant to let her go, then shooed her back under the duvet.
*
Ross jumped when Nancy appeared, although she’d knocked before letting herself in at the front door. It was early evening, already dark outside, and she was dropping back Hope’s gym bag, which her granddaughter had left at her house the previous day. She knew Louise had gone to fetch the girls from Adventure Club and she hoped Ross was otherwise engaged—she wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone.
But her son-in-law was in the kitchen, a pile of chicken pieces on the island worktop, which he was chopping with a scary-looking cleaver. Nancy, despite her desire to avoid him, was pleased to see Ross back in his favorite place. Louise said he hadn’t gone near the kitchen in the weeks since his breakdown.
“Hey, Nancy.” He stopped what he was doing and gave her a smile. She thought he’d lost weight, or maybe it wasn’t actual bulk that he’d lost, rather the chutzpah that had made him seem so much larger than life. And his big dark eyes still looked weary, lacking their usual spark.
“How’s it going, Ross?”
“Yeah, better, I guess.” He leaned against the worktop. “You?”
She shrugged, put Hope’s bag down on the kitchen table.
He gave her a knowing smile. “You look like I feel.”
“Not good, then.”
He reached for the bottle of red wine, open on the side, waved it at her. She nodded. He went over to the sink and washed his hands, then found a glass in the cabinet beside the stove. “Have a seat,” he said, picking up his own glass and coming round the island to sit opposite her at the table. “Is it your mum?” he asked.
Nancy hesitated before replying. “I suppose . . . partly.” She wasn’t certain that was true: the different elements of her life seemed such a mish-mash, so indistinct yet intertwined, that she had lost the energy to unpick any one root cause. “I never got on that well with Mum,” she found herself saying. “I loved her, but we didn’t have much in common . . . about life.”
“She kept people at arm’s length, that’s for sure.”
“I can’t help wondering if I should have done more to persuade her to get treatment . . . If I’d loved her more, would I have insisted?” Nancy swallowed. The bloody tears, which sat waiting to ambush her minute to minute, would not win this time.
“You can’t think like that. She’d made up her mind, Nancy, and she was a tough old bird. Nothing short of tying her up and carting her off would’ve worked.”
She smiled. “I tell myself that.”
They sipped the fruity Cabernet, Nancy rolling the soothing, dark, blackcurranty liquid across her tongue.
“And Jim?” Ross asked, without the awkwardness her daughter had brought to the question when she’d asked about him the previous week. Nancy had just said he was in France and Louise had accepted her answer without further probing.
Nancy swirled the wine gently, watching the light catch the surface. The cool, smooth roundness of the glass felt good against her palm and she cherished it as something simple and solid that she could understand in this baffling world. She finally looked up to meet Ross’s eye. “We’ve split up.”
“No! When?” He seemed shocked, which caught Nancy by surprise. To her, the knowledge was just part of the dull indifference that cloaked her life these days.
“Oh, about a month ago . . . maybe longer.”
“God, Nancy, why?”
And while she formulated her reply, he went on, “Lou never said.”
“Lou doesn’t know.”
Ross frowned. “So what happened?”
“I—I couldn’t . . . I don’t know . . . It’s been difficult, what with Mum . . .” She didn’t add that it had also been difficult seeing her daughter and son-in-law fall apart, the restaurant go bust, her granddaughters bewildered. But Ross knew that.
“Was he putting pressure on you?”
“No, God, nothing like that. He wanted to help.”
“So . . .”
She shook her head. “I can’t do it all, Ross. I can’t be with Jim and with the family. I can’t make everyone happy. Go to France, not go to France, have him cramped in that house first with Mum, then with the girls. It just won’t work.” Her voice crescendoed as she spoke, the words spilling out in a rush of frustration.
Ross, eyebrows raised, thought about this for a moment. “No, I suppose I see. Sorry about that. I thought you two were in for the long haul . . . Feel a bit responsible for making such a fuck-up of things, causing so much trouble.”
“Not your fault,” she said, because finally it wasn’t. It was her fault, her decision.
“It is. I’ve been such an arse,” he said, rubbing his hand across his face. “I don’t deserve your daughter. She’s been so fucking good to me, even when I was . . .” He stopped, guilt flushing his cheeks. “Even when I was so vile to her.”
Nancy didn’t know what to say.
“You—you’ve been amazing too, Nancy. Just amazing. I can’t thank you enough. I honestly don’t know how we’d have got through this without you. And now Louise’s dad . . .”
Which was one miracle that had come out of the last few weeks. One that Nancy still didn’t quite believe. When Louise had finally called her father, Christopher—perhaps suffering from an excess of benevolence brought on by the warm glow of new fatherhood—had offered to bail them out, pay off the staff and suppliers, and give them a small amount to cover the mortgage on the house until they were back on their feet. A gift, he insisted, not a loan. Louise, despite saying she would never take a penny from her father, had been bowled over.
“Jim must be gutted,” Ross was saying. “You must be, too.”
Nancy didn’t want to think about that. In fact, she spent a lot of time forcing herself not to. She longed to change the subject but didn’t know what else to talk about, her mind a weary blank. Luckily they heard car doors slamming, the front door opening, the girls piling into the house, filthy from head to foot with mud, hair straggling, huge grins on their pale, exhausted faces.