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  I realise that I still haven’t replied. She’s staring at me, waiting, and the longer I delay in accepting her offer, the more it looks like I don’t quite trust her somehow. I see doubt start to flicker across her face and I leap in before it has time to take hold.

  ‘Well, if you really don’t mind, then that’d be fantastic,’ I say, smiling as widely as I can to show her how much confidence I have in her ability to care for Dad while I’m away. ‘I don’t normally need to go on such short notice. This is a bit of a one-off. But if you could step into the breach . . .’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ she says. ‘We’ll be just fine here without you. There’ll be less mess for a start.’

  This pulls me up short, but when I look at her I can see the joke playing around her hazel eyes and I know that this is going to work out just fine. Then I remember Dad, who is sitting waiting for someone to tell him what to do next. He has not been following the conversation flying in the air over his head.

  ‘Would that be okay with you, Dad?’ I ask him. ‘If I go away for a night and leave you here with Mrs P?’

  ‘We’ll get along just fine, won’t we, Joe?’ Mrs P adds.

  Dad looks from one of us to the other. I’m pretty certain that he’s not grasped what we said but I am not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. If this doesn’t work then I won’t get a chance to speak to Michael and suddenly this is the only thing that matters.

  ‘That’s great then,’ I say before he has a chance to catch on.

  Dad’s blank face just stares up at me.

  ‘I’ll just go and pack a few things and then check the train times,’ I say. ‘Thank you so much.’

  I have to stop myself from bouncing up and down. Mrs P nods and I race from the room and into my workroom, where I have loaded up the train website and worked out when I need to leave before you’ve had time to say ‘Jack Robinson’. Then, suddenly, I start to doubt myself. What will I say to Michael? It’s not like I have any real proof that our mother isn’t dead. A box of unsigned postcards and the lack of a death certificate is a pretty good starting point but what does it actually tell me for certain? At the moment, all I have is some circumstantial stuff and a feeling in my gut, and I’m going to need more than that to convince my brother.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As I leave the house, my overnight things hastily stuffed into my bag, I turn back to see Dad sitting in the front-room window, watching me. My heart lurches, seeing him there like a little boy waiting for his daddy to come home, until I realise that he sits there every morning while he waits for Brian and the minibus to take him to the day centre. Any emotional agenda placed on top of that is entirely of my own making. Dad will have forgotten that I’m going anywhere. He won’t give me a second’s thought until he gets back and finds I’m not there for tea – and maybe not even then.

  The train pulls into Wakefield and I toy with how best to approach Michael. I sent him a hasty text message before I left, just to make sure that he was going to be there.

  Hi. In town today. Any chance of a bed? Arriving around five. C x

  Michael texted back, his message curt but saying I’m welcome. He’ll have been slightly surprised but not thrown by my short notice. As long as they are at home, their door will always be open to me. As the train races towards Doncaster, I think through how the evening will pan out. I picture dinner with Marianne and their twin girls, my nieces. They all eat together much later than we ever did at home, testament I suspect to the new life that Michael has built for himself in the south. The children call the meal ‘dinner’, not ‘tea’, which always makes me smile. I suppose I would have been the same if Dad hadn’t raced us up north, leaving our London life and all trace of my mother behind. After we’ve eaten I’ll need to get Michael on his own for a bit. Much as I like Marianne, I can’t do this in front of her. It needs to be just Michael and me. Maybe if I tell her that it is something to do with Dad she’ll be happy to absent herself on the pretext of getting the children into bed.

  At this point, my plan falters. When I do get Michael to myself, what will I say? How do you tell someone that you think their mother, dead for the last thirty years, is actually alive? It’s hard to imagine how that can be casually dropped into the conversation. As I play this all out in my head, I can feel moist patches forming under my armpits and beginning to seep into my top. But beneath this anxiety there’s a frisson of excitement. I try to imagine how Michael will react. He won’t believe it, not at first, but he’ll have to wonder when I show him everything I’ve found. The idea that I know something that he doesn’t makes me feel a bit smug. Being the baby sister never really leaves you.

  The train pulls into Doncaster. It is a tall, old-fashioned station. It makes me picture soldiers with sweethearts, steam and bustle. A woman gets into my carriage. She must be around sixty, although I’m not great at guessing the age of anyone more than ten years older than me. I’m going on her hair, which is shot through with steely grey, and her clothes, which are mainly various shades of beige apart from a resolutely red polyester scarf tied around her neck.

  The woman is quite heavily built and has to turn herself sideways to get down the narrow aisle between the seats. I am sitting alone at a table and there are plenty of free seats so I am annoyed when she stops next to me and squeezes herself into the seat opposite. Her legs bang mine as she tries to get herself comfortable in the limited space. It’s only when she has arranged herself that she looks up at me.

  ‘No one sitting here, duck, is there?’

  I am tempted to tell her that my travelling companion has just gone to the buffet car and will be back shortly but then I’ll be embarrassed when she moves and my companion never reappears. I shake my head and turn to look out of the window, hoping to avoid any further conversation. The woman steadies her breathing – she must have been running late for the train – and then starts to get things out of her bag. Despite my fear of catching her eye, I can’t help but watch surreptitiously. First she finds a dog-eared book of logic problems and a stubby pencil with a well-worn eraser on the end and then a rather squashed Eccles cake in a cellophane wrapper. She opens the Eccles cake and starts to eat the sugar from the top by licking her finger and pressing it down on the sparkling little clusters. I want to look away but I find my eyes drawn to her. As if sensing my gaze, she looks up at me and smiles. Then she blushes and wipes her sticky finger on the fabric of her skirt.

  ‘Ooh, what must you think of me?’ she asks, shaking her head. ‘Eating my Eccles cake like that.’ Her eyes twinkle as she shrugs her shoulders. ‘Still,’ she adds. ‘It’s the only way to eat ’em. Next you have to bash the top in and pick out all the currants.’

  As if to prove her point, she gently taps at the pastry and the crust breaks, revealing the shining, dark fruit within.

  ‘When me mam made ’em, she always used to stick a sprig of mint inside before she baked ’em. Tasted marvellous. You don’t get that in these shop-bought ones but they’re nice all the same. Want a bit?’ she says, pushing the flattened cake towards me.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Don’t blame you, duck. Doesn’t look that tasty, does it?’

  She goes back to picking at the top of the cake and putting tiny, mouse-sized portions into her mouth. I see her catch sight of my hand. I could pull it out of sight but I have learned that the best way to deal with the staring is to face it head-on. I leave it on the table in front of us. The woman doesn’t snatch her gaze away, as people usually do. Instead she studies the rough contours of my skin.

  ‘That’s a terrible scar you’ve got there, duck,’ she says. ‘Does it still give you any bother?’

  I am touched that she asks about the aftermath rather than how it came about. Usually those who can’t resist asking are entirely focused on how I ended up with such an injury.

  ‘It can get sore if it gets too hot, and the damp weather sometimes sets it off,’ I say.

  ‘Well you’re living in the wrong
part of the world if you want to avoid the damp,’ she says with a wide, open smile.

  Then she opens the puzzle book, pressing it down along the spine, and sets to reading the clues. She takes the pencil and bangs it gently against her forehead as she reads. Two minutes later she puts the pencil back down and sits back in her seat.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m bothering,’ she says to me. ‘I can’t make head nor tail of it. My daughter says I need to do puzzles to keep me brain active. I think she’s worried I’ll go doolally and she’ll need to look after me. She seems to have forgotten all those years that I spent looking after her. Still, she has a point, doesn’t she? There’s a lot going senile these days. They say it’s getting worse and worse.’

  Even though she is a stranger, there is something about this woman’s straightforward, direct chatter that draws me in. We are here, stuck on a train together. What harm can there be in striking up a bit of a conversation?

  ‘My dad’s got dementia,’ I say. ‘Well, Alzheimer’s actually.’

  ‘Is there a difference?’ she asks. ‘I thought one was just the posh name for the other.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, reluctant to get into too many details and already wondering whether I’d have been better keeping my mouth shut. ‘Dementia is like an umbrella term. It covers lots of different kinds of illness. Alzheimer’s is just one of those.’

  She nods as if she’s processing what I’ve said.

  ‘I never knew that,’ she says. ‘And is he bad, your dad?’

  I’ve never really thought of Dad’s illness in terms of good or bad. It just is.

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘There are others who are worse, I suppose, but we’ve got to the stage when he can’t be left on his own.’

  ‘Is he in a nursing home then?’ she asks, her head tipped to one side sympathetically.

  ‘No. He’s still at home with me.’

  She looks confused and even looks around to see if there is any sign of Dad elsewhere in the carriage.

  ‘I have some help,’ I add. ‘A nurse who comes in. She’s with him today.’

  ‘You see, that’s great, that is,’ says the lady, breaking off a piece of the pastry from the bottom of the Eccles cake and popping it into her mouth. ‘That’s how it should be. Children looking after their parents. That’s how they do it on the Continent. They’ve got the right idea, those Italians. My daughter’ll put me in a home as fast as look at me if she thinks there’s any chance of me not coping by myself.’

  I nod and try to ignore the fact that I’ve had the same discussion with myself many a time.

  ‘And where’s your mum?’ the lady asks.

  ‘My mum died when I was a little girl,’ I reply.

  The answer just trips out of me as it has done hundreds of times over my life. As the woman nods at me kindly, it occurs to me that this might be the last time that I ever say it.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ the woman says. ‘You poor little mite. A child needs its mother, make no mistake. A man is all well and good but there’s some things when it just has to be a mum. No wonder you’re taking such good care of him, your dad. There must be a real bond between the two of you.’

  And that is when it hits me. There, in the train full of strangers, talking to this woman with her Eccles cake and her puzzle book. If my mother is not dead then where the hell is she? How could she possibly have left Michael and me to fend for ourselves when we were so tiny? And where has she been since? Did she think that a few postcards were enough to discharge her maternal duties? If so, then she was wrong.

  The Eccles cake woman is looking at me, her eyes searching out mine, her head cocked to one side again, and I realise that she is expecting me to speak.

  ‘Your dad,’ she prompts. ‘You must have a really special bond. Are you all right, duck?’ she adds, as concern spreads across her round face.

  I try to close my mind to the new ideas that are rampaging around.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say to her. ‘Yes. We are quite close. If you don’t mind, I just need to . . .’

  I stand up and slide myself out from behind the table and set off towards the electric doors that separate this carriage from the next.

  ‘Is everything all right, dear?’ I hear her call out behind me.

  I ignore her. I need to get away. I need fresh air. I need space to clear my head of this alien idea that has infiltrated my thoughts. It’s like a virus. Now that it is in there, I can feel it spreading, corrupting everything that it touches. I want it to stop. I want to hold tight to the excitement that I felt when I was sitting at my computer, that I felt when I boarded the train, but it’s too late. It’s already tainted. Now, I can barely believe that it has taken so long for the thought to occur to me. How dare she leave us? Where did she go? Where has she been for thirty years?

  I lean against the wall in between carriages, close my eyes and take deep breaths. I feel my body being gently jolted by the train and it calms me, like a baby being rocked. I don’t know how long I stay there, but when I head back to my seat Eccles cake woman has gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I arrive at Michael’s place feeling grubby and somehow violated by the busy tube journey. Their house, a semi with pointed gables and big bay windows, is built in tawny London brick. The gentle light of evening dances over it, pulling me in like a beacon to a ship lost at sea. It couldn’t be more different from the blackened millstone grit of our house in Yorkshire. The front garden, now gravelled over for ease of maintenance, is dotted with pots that I assume once contained summer bedding but which are now stripped to bare compost. An encircling flower bed is home to various nondescript shrubs, which, in keeping with their anonymity, are neatly clipped. The garden is the embodiment of my brother – practical, efficient and understated – and it makes me smile.

  I knock on the door and almost at once hear little feet running to open it.

  ‘Auntie Cara’s here!’ my nieces shout through the wood, their voices far more excited than my appearance on their doorstep can possibly merit.

  There is the clicking of bolts being pulled and then the door opens to reveal two small, dark-haired girls. Their initial excitement seems to desert them as soon as the door opens. They shuffle close to one other and eye me shyly.

  ‘Hello, girls,’ I say. ‘Can I come in?’

  They step aside in unison to let me enter and as I pass them, I feel a small hand being gently slipped into mine.

  Marianne comes through from the kitchen at the back of the house. She is wearing an apron, which immediately makes me think of her as a mother. Her dark hair is pulled away from her face with a padded Alice band of the sort that you rarely see these days. She has flour on her hands and forearms.

  ‘Cara. How lovely to see you. Did you have a good journey? Girls! Girls! Let your aunt get over the threshold.’

  Her voice still harbours the sing-songy cadences of her Welsh roots despite her years in London. She bustles towards me, looks as if she is going to kiss me and then holds back at the last moment. We have never been very demonstrative, Michael and I, and I am grateful to Marianne for remembering this.

  ‘Thanks for having me at such short notice,’ I say. ‘I needed stuff in town and, as usual, left it all too late to get it delivered. I could just have gone back home this evening but . . .’

  ‘Of course you couldn’t,’ Marianne interrupts. ‘Coming all this way and not calling in. We’d never forgive you, would we, girls?’

  The girls, Zara and Esmé, shake their heads. They are like little miniatures of their mother. I can see no trace of my genes in their upturned faces.

  ‘Michael isn’t back from work yet but he said to tell you that he won’t be late. Come in, come in.’

  She motions towards the front room with her floury arm.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘A cup of tea would be great,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you go in there and make yourself comfortable while I put the kettle on. Girls, give Auntie Cara a bit o
f space.’

  The girls have got over their initial shyness and are now clinging to a hip each, making it almost impossible for me to walk. They seem very small but I don’t really have much to compare them with. I can’t even quite remember how old they are – six, maybe, or seven?

  ‘Yes, you come with me, girls, and I’ll see if there might be something hidden in my bag for you.’

  The girls bounce up and down, jostling my elbows.

  ‘Oh, there was no need for that,’ says Marianne, but she is smiling in a way that tells me that the gifts had been anticipated and I am relieved that I thought of it. I produce two striped paper bags and hand one to each niece. They look at each other with wide eyes before opening the bags and peering in and then in moments they’re on the floor comparing the spoils. Each bag contains a selection of silk ribbons in bright, rainbow colours, a twist of paper holding tiny buttons in the shape of baby animals and a retractable tape measure with a case that looks like a ladybird. They are afterthoughts, hastily gathered at the haberdashery I was in earlier, but the girls seem delighted and Marianne, who has been loitering in the doorway, mouths a silent ‘Thank you’ over their heads.

  I watch the girls barter over their buttons while Marianne makes my cup of tea. Obviously, I don’t have any children. To have children you usually need a partner and I can’t see that happening any time soon, but I can’t help marvelling at what a great job Michael and Marianne are doing of bringing up theirs. It must be Marianne’s influence. What experience does Michael have of creating a happy home life? When Michael proposed to Marianne, I was surprised by his choice. She’s a plain woman, which immediately stood her out from his other girlfriends. She is quiet, too, though not in a shrinking-violet kind of way. It’s more that she doesn’t speak unless she has something worth saying and there’s a kind of inner calm about her, an element of self-possession that is very comforting. As I get to know her better, I begin to understand exactly why Michael has chosen her to spend his life with. I’m not entirely sure why she has chosen Michael.