Usually Opal said no to these offers, but today she thought how good it would feel to lean back and have somebody gently massage shampoo into her hair, letting all her cares and worries drift down the sink with the suds. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Thank you, I’d love that.’
‘Great,’ said Bobbi. ‘Let’s get you started. You’re not to worry about the wedding.’ Behind her back, Bobbi crossed her fingers. ‘It’ll all be fine. At least Brian and Liz are right for each other.’
They glanced at the red-eyed girl sitting on the sofa, still talking earnestly on the phone.
Chapter Five
When she got to Singapore, Lillie emailed Doris. She tried phoning first and left a message on her friend’s cell phone because Doris didn’t pick up. Lillie had felt terribly lonely on the flight from Melbourne to Singapore and now she was there with three hours to hang around, she felt like a lost soul walking around the airport. She kept seeing couples everywhere, people the same age as her and Sam enjoying themselves. The plane had been full of them, laughing happy people flying all over the world together and she was there alone feeling herself growing smaller and tighter like a little gnarled nut.
And so she found a seat and typed out an email:
Hi Doris
I’m glad we had those silver surfer lessons at the library, at least I can use this thing. You’re only about my fifth email ever. Just thought I’d drop you a line … that sounds wrong, doesn’t it? That’s what we used to say with letters. I decided to say hello because I’m in Singapore airport on my own. It’s very lonely and I’m sorry I’m here. I’m sorry I came, sorry, sorry, sorry. I know Martin and Evan mean well and everything but I’d be better staying at home. Travelling alone is a very sad thing. Sorry to be dropping all this on your head, Doris, but you did say I could.
Love,
Lillie
The second part of the flight wasn’t as bad, partly because she was so exhausted trying to get comfortable in the upright seat that she actually fell asleep for a while.
The boys had wanted to upgrade her to business class.
‘Mum, you’re sixty-four, you need to stretch your legs out. You could get DVT,’ said Evan, but Lillie wouldn’t hear of it.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a ridiculous amount of money. I’ll go the way we—’ She stopped herself. ‘I’ll go the way your father and I always went: economy.’
She’d have liked one of those business-class beds now, but at least she was on the outside of a row, so she could get up and walk around the plane between her intermittent periods of dozing. It had grown quieter, more peaceful, once the food had been served, the lights had been dimmed and people began to fall asleep. The stewards and stewardesses were finally sitting down, taking their break. With most of the plane quiet, she didn’t feel quite so alone as she stood outside the bathroom waiting her turn, stretching her legs and wriggling her ankles the way the video they showed had told her to do.
Inside her head, Lillie found herself talking to Sam again.
I hope this is a good idea, Sam, she told him. You’ve got to look after me. Please, my love, I need you. I wish that you were a presence beside me. I wish I was a psychic so I could feel that you’re there instead of this nothingness: that’s what scares me. You’d have told me to do this. You’d have told me to go and see Seth and Frankie, meet the family. You’d have loved it, you’d have come too and it would have been so different. The fun we’d have had. We might have stayed over in Singapore for a couple of nights in a posh hotel, done the tour. I don’t want to upset you. You wanted me to be OK and I said I would be. I told you to go. But it’s so hard without you …
The toilet door clicked open in front of her and somebody stumbled out. Lillie didn’t really want to go to the loo but she locked herself in anyway, put the lid of the toilet down and sat, just to be here on her own and cry. Was she mad, coming on this trip?
She coped at home because she was among the familiar things, among familiar people, but so many thousands of miles away from home, how could she not feel lost?
Worst of all, that niggling thought that she’d been deftly shoving to the back of her mind kept wriggling its way to the fore: what if she felt bitterness when she met Seth? What if all she could think of was that their mother hadn’t given him up for adoption?
Lillie had never been a bitter person, but then, she’d had her beloved Sam. While he was alive, she’d had so much love in her life, that she was able to give love and kindness to other people.
‘You’re an earth mother,’ Sam told her once, ‘always finding lost souls to help and pulling them close.’
‘Do I drive you mad with my schemes to help people?’ she asked thoughtfully. Sam had never said anything like that before and she felt a hint of worry that he was tired of her endless good works. A colleague in the charity shop had once given her advice on balancing healing other people with taking care of her family: ‘Lillie, you’re one of life’s givers. Mind that you don’t neglect your own family. Much as they’ll admire you for being a good person and helping others, they still want to know that they come first. They’d rather have you home making dinner than out saving the world.’
Lillie had tried always to bear that in mind, but when Sam told her she was an earth mother she wasn’t sure whether this was a good or a bad thing in his eyes. So she’d asked him.
‘No, chicken,’ he said, smiling. ‘I love you for it. You can’t stop yourself: that’s what you do. Why should I change you?’
In the cramped plane toilet, she dried her tears and hoped she was still the earth mother her husband had loved. She’d hate it if his death had changed that and she no longer had anything left to give.
Seth Green drove to the airport with so many thoughts and feelings crowding each other that he had to force himself to concentrate on the road ahead.
The whole business of finding out he had a sister had reawakened the huge sorrow at the loss of his wonderful, kind mother.
He’d always adored her. Even when other boys muttered in school about how their mothers drove them mad, and were always wittering on about wearing coats in cold weather and having a decent breakfast, Seth had never had a bad word to say about Jennifer. She was gentle and endlessly calm. He could picture her now with her strawberry-blonde hair framing that round, smiling face and those beautiful flower-blue eyes.
It was hard to believe that this loving woman had given up her first child and then carried that huge secret locked inside her the rest of her life. Of course, she’d given birth to Lillie a long time ago, a time when the past wasn’t just another country, it was more in the line of another planet altogether. A planet where women did not give birth to children outside marriage and keep them. Such babies were symbols of shame to be bundled off as quickly as possible, regardless of the mother’s feelings in the matter.
He’d often wondered how the young Jennifer McCabe had summoned up the courage to marry Daniel Green – a Jew, though admittedly non-religious, when her family were Catholic. That, too, must have been scandalous at the time. Perhaps in light of the ‘sins’ she’d committed according to the tenets of her own unforgiving Church and society, Jennifer had simply resolved to defy convention and marry the man she loved, irrespective of religion.
Seth pulled up at a set of traffic lights and checked the clock on the dashboard. He still had plenty of time.
The secrecy of it all was what had shocked him the most. He couldn’t imagine his mother as a scared teenager because the woman he’d known had always been so strong. She’d dealt with many things through the years, even taking in his father’s elderly aunt Ruth, a woman who’d never recovered from her years in a concentration