To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

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      ‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . .’ David’s anger was gone. Dragging out a chair, he slumped at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. ‘No, Jo, she didn’t tell me. She didn’t consult me. She left me two letters. The first was instructions for delivering your letters; the second, to be read after I had, told me what she’d done. That she’d planned my future for me. Because she didn’t trust me to do it myself. Like an idiot, I did what she asked, it didn’t occur to me not to.’

      ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Jo said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t. Nicci adored you. She loved us all. She was just worried what would happen when she . . . when we found ourselves where we are now.’

      ‘Maybe,’ said David, hoping he could keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘Or maybe Nicci just wanted to make sure we did it her way.’

      Perhaps he should have been the one who went to the bereavement counsellor. Were you allowed to be furious with your wife for dying on you? She’d wanted the house, she’d wanted children, she’d wanted the business, she’d wanted their life. Then she’d left it. Was he allowed to be angry about that? Because he was. So gut-wrenchingly furious that thinking about it brought tears flooding to the surface.

      ‘She left my garden to Lizzie, my children to you, and me – her husband – to Mona. What the fuck, Jo? I mean, seriously, what the fuck was she thinking?’

      Pulling out the end of a bench, Jo sat next to him and slid her arm around his shoulders. And felt, rather than heard, him begin to sob. She didn’t know what to say. So she held him tight and let him slip down and weep against her.

      The house was quiet now, but alive with sound the way old houses are: pipes creaking as they heated and cooled, floor-boards moaning with memories of past footsteps. Jo had circled the house, turning off the countless lights and electrical appliances, before returning to the kitchen to collect her bag.

      ‘Will you start coming back now?’ said David. ‘The three of you? And Si, and Gerry, and Dan? You still eat Sunday lunch, don’t you?’

      ‘Wild horses wouldn’t keep us away,’ Jo said. ‘Except maybe Mona.’

      She smiled, to show she was joking, and he forced a laugh.

      Now she’d gone, David punched 1471 for the fifth time in as many days, only to be greeted with the same message: number withheld. Despite what he’d said earlier, David didn’t think it was a call centre or a fault on the line, not really. In his darkest nights he’d started to fear Nicci had been keeping more from him than he’d realised. That she’d even – he could hardly bring himself to think it – been having an affair. No, he knew she wouldn’t do that. Not his Nicci.

      In an attempt to calm his brain, David made himself sit and listen to the quiet. Many, many times he’d yearned for this silence. Well, now you’ve got it, he thought. This is it. Better start getting used to it.

      Outside next-door’s tabby tortured the last drop of life from a small undeserving rodent, a car passed the end of the road, music so loud he could almost hear the words, teenagers shouted abuse as they made their way home from the town centre. He forced himself to listen to it all.

      Floodlights came on suddenly, triggered by a small creature using his garden as a shortcut. Almost April, and still the soil was cold and bare, the grass straggly, beds bedraggled and neglected, the remnants of last autumn’s leaves rotting where they’d fallen. It had been this way for months.

      When the lights turned themselves off again two minutes later, he was grateful. It had been like looking inside himself, and finding nothing there.

      Chapter Ten

      Sunday lunch didn’t happen. David knew it wouldn’t.

      ‘It’s Mona, isn’t it?’ he said when Jo called on Friday night and suggested they take a rain check. ‘She nixed it.’

      ‘No,’ Jo said. ‘It’s Lizzie. Something’s come up with her mother. She needs to go and see the staff at the care home.’

      ‘What about her sister?’ David asked, already knowing the answer.

      ‘What about her?’ Jo’s shrug was almost audible. Lizzie’s sister, Karen, lived in the States and was conspicuous by her absence at the best of times, particularly when there was a mother-related issue.

      ‘Look, David, I promise, it’s nothing sinister. Nobody’s avoiding you. Not even Mona. Lizzie does have to go to Croydon and she doesn’t know how long it will take. But next weekend, Easter Sunday, if you’re free, it’s a date. I’ll shop, Lizzie will cook. You get the booze in. And Mona can bring desserts that come out of a packet.’

      He’d had to be satisfied with that. He understood; after all, they hadn’t even begun to resolve the ‘what to do about Nicci’s bequests’ problem.

      Common sense said the whole thing was ridiculous. Everyone agreed on that. You can’t go leaving people to other people. Clothes, yes. Patches of garden, at a push. Even the shed, but not people.

      Emotionally, though, it wasn’t that straightforward. Emotionally, morally, ethically . . . Put like that, the less he saw of Mona the better. And he tensed every time he thought he heard Lizzie unlocking the side gate. Only the idea of Jo mothering his girls, for now at least, didn’t bother him. After all, somebody had to.

      The sound of Peppa Pig sloshing through the muddy puddles echoed from the sitting room. Harrie and Charlie were happy, sitting side by side on the floor in front of the TV, clutching their blankies. But it wasn’t yet 9 a.m. The whole day stretched ahead.

      If not going to the park or on play dates, Nicci would have baked cakes, done potato prints, or made dresses for their dolls, applying the same focus to making and baking on Saturdays and Sundays as she did to her other baby, Capsule Wardrobe, during the week.

      ‘No one ever regretted time not spent cleaning the house,’ she’d been fond of saying (about pretty much anything she didn’t like doing), which was why they’d got a cleaner. ‘But if I don’t spend time with the girls, I’ll regret that.’

      As it turned out, Nicci was right. Of course, they hadn’t known then just how little time with the girls she had left.

      David once asked where Nicci had learned it all, the sewing and cooking and making, hoping she’d tell him about her childhood, but she just shrugged. ‘I taught myself,’ she’d said. Now he wished she’d taught him too.

      Wandering back to the kitchen, David flicked the radio on, then off again. He’d promised himself he’d dispense with the white noise, but it was instinctive. Another weekend stretched before him. Another weekend of not doing the right voices, of eating shop-bought cookies. He had to do something.

      ‘You know you can always come to us,’ his mother had urged, from the very first weekend, and his father had clapped him on the shoulder in silent agreement.

      He knew. He’d been to his parents five out of the last six weekends. The last time, Charlie had announced, as he lifted her from the car, ‘Not Granny’s again!’ in a voice that carried all the way to his mother standing beaming on the doorstep. She sounded so much like Nicci, he barely held it together.

      There was always the swimming pool. Si might be there, with his boys. Although last time David СКАЧАТЬ