‘Over my dead body,’ murmured Tara. ‘Even if she appears not to be allergic to cats, think of all the other animals at your place that could bring on an asthma attack.’
Adam ignored her and turned to me. ‘You are welcome to visit your cat whenever you like. The phone lines are down over Becket’s Wood, but I’m sure the phone company will fix it as soon as the snow clears a bit. Then you can give me a ring—or else just pop over.’
‘Th-thank you.’ What was it about him that made me feel so tongue-tied?
Vincent gave a start, suddenly remembering his manners, and saw his neighbour to the door. ‘I’m sorry you had a wasted journey over here.’ He watched as Adam set off into the snow, his dog leading the way. ‘We’ll be in touch when things get back to normal.’
Rubbing my hands together as the door closed on the cold and snow, I wondered how long it would be before anything got back to normal for me. I wasn’t sure what normal was, anyway.
Pushing away a nagging worry that my memory might never return of its own accord, I found myself wondering what the protocol was in such cases. Would I have to go to a hospital once the roads were clear and suffer lots of probing and questioning? Would I end up on a psychiatric ward enduring endless tests? The idea didn’t appeal, but I knew from the look on Tara’s face that my welcome in this house was wearing decidedly thin.
After Adam left I spent the rest of the morning playing Monopoly with Jadie while Tara cooked and cleaned and fussed over Jadie’s medication. The child appeared to need endless feeding, and Tara brought her fudge brownies and milk shakes mid-morning, then produced a huge meal at lunchtime with which Jadie had to take extra vitamins. I tried to offer my help but Tara was adamant that this was her job and that I was a guest.
Vincent had returned to his study to catch up on his paperwork. It seemed that being cut off from the rest of the world didn’t stop him working.
After lunch, which Vincent took in his study, Jadie lounged on the sofa watching children’s TV and I insisted on helping Tara clear the kitchen. ‘Please,’ I entreated, ‘I won’t get in your way. Just tell me where things go and I’ll get on with it.’
Tara was standing at the sink with her back to me and I thought she was going to refuse again, but to my relief, she told me to fetch a tea towel and dry the things that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. Standing next to her I was able to gaze out of the window at the garden with the snowman still standing where Jadie and I had left him. Despite the sunshine it was obviously still cold enough to prevent him from melting.
‘Tell me about Jadie’s illness,’ I said as I dried a large stainless steel pan. ‘How come she eats so much? She looks as if a gust of wind would blow her away.’
‘That’s the nature of CF.’ Tara bent to scrub an ovenproof dish, her elbows darting back and forth with the effort. ‘Her body has trouble digesting food. She has a poor appetite and would hardly eat at all if I didn’t keep offering her snacks like the chocolate brownies. It’s a constant battle to keep her weight up because her pancreas has impaired function. Most of what she does eat doesn’t get absorbed.’
‘What causes cystic fibrosis?’ I asked, pausing in my drying to watch a squirrel run across the snow-covered lawn.
‘It’s hereditary.’ Tara blew soap suds from her wrists as she scrubbed. ‘But both parents have to be carriers for a child to be born with it. Even then, there’s only a twenty-five per cent chance of a child actually having the disease.’
‘Surely if Amber was diagnosed with it there must have been some sort of test during pregnancy to check whether Jadie had it too?’
Tara fell silent and I glanced sideways at her. ‘Amber was late being diagnosed with it,’ she said at last. ‘Apparently she seemed fine as a baby, a bit wheezy now and then and prone to getting colds, but her digestion wasn’t such a problem as it is with Jadie. She was over a year old when Vincent and Cheryl took her to the doctors and CF was diagnosed. Cheryl was already pregnant with Jadie by then and she wouldn’t have the baby tested in case she miscarried. They asked me to come and work for them so that Cheryl could concentrate on the baby and get plenty of rest.’ Tara paused, holding the scourer in mid-air. ‘I don’t think either of them realised how bad CF could be and how ill Amber was going to get. If they had, well…’
‘If it’s hereditary,’ I puzzled, ‘why didn’t Vincent or his wife know they’d got it? Surely someone else in the family must have had it?’
‘One in twenty-five people are symptomless carriers,’ Tara explained. ‘They live their whole lives without knowing they’re carrying it and it’s only when two carriers produce a child with CF that they find out it exists in their families.’
We continued in silence, both lost in our own thoughts.
‘You’re very protective of her,’ I ventured. ‘It’s almost as if she’s your own child.’
‘I’m all she’s got.’ Tara wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. ‘And I’ve grown very fond of her.’
‘But she’s got her father, and there’s a grandmother too, isn’t there?’
‘One’s a workaholic and the other is…well, you don’t want to know.’
I remembered the gin bottle I’d found in my room. I took the last dish from the draining board and dried it to a shine. ‘Where does this go?’
Once the kitchen was spotlessly tidy she turned to put the kettle on. When she’d made the tea, she took a cup down the passage to Vincent and then returned to sit at the kitchen table with me.
‘It’s not that Vincent doesn’t love Jadie,’ she said, taking a sip of the hot tea and staring at me as if willing me to understand. ‘I think he loves her too much and can’t bear the thought of losing her. After Amber…and then Cheryl going, he became more distant. He’s a good employer, don’t get me wrong, but he leaves everything to me and sometimes the responsibility is enormous.’ She gave me a rare half-smile. ‘That’s why I overreact a bit sometimes, I suppose. I’m sorry for getting so angry at you over the cat.’
I smiled back. ‘Don’t worry about it. If I was in charge of Jadie’s health I’d be wary of anything that could hurt her too.’
We spent the afternoon making tissue-paper flowers as Jadie had tired of Monopoly when she’d started to lose. Jadie was a dab hand at folding the tissues and tying thin green garden wire round the middle, then peeling the layers apart to make very realistic-looking carnations.
‘We learned how to do this at school,’ she told us as we struggled with bits of tissue and Tara found vases for our creations. ‘I like school, but it’s fun being off today. Usually if I’m at home it’s because I’m not well and then I don’t feel like doing anything.’
It should have been idyllic, sitting at the kitchen table with the sun streaming in and the garden stretching away white and bright outside the window, but for the frustrating fact that I didn’t know who I was or if there was another life waiting for me somewhere else. Maybe there was another family somewhere sitting in this same wintery sunshine, grieving because they didn’t know where I was or what had become of me. I was in limbo, waiting for something to happen, for my memory to return, the snow to melt or someone to come and claim me.
I glanced up to find Vincent leaning against the kitchen doorframe watching us, a smile playing upon his lips. I was about to return it, when I realised that Jadie and Tara had seen him too and were smiling up at him, on both their faces an expression of love. My heart sank. I was an interloper, an outsider who had no place here. Wrenching my gaze away, I concentrated on the half-made flowers on the table in front of me and vowed not to get involved.