An industrial dishwasher stood in one corner next to the cast-iron splendour of a traditional Aga cooker. The flagstone flooring had been scrubbed clean. The door to the pantry – which had once housed an antique printing press – now stood open to reveal shelves groaning under jars of home-made preserves, while a collection of potted herbs stood in aromatic abundance on the windowsill over the sink.
The delicious smell of garlic and melted cheese drew Ellie’s gaze to the home-baked lasagne and tray of roasted vegetables resting on the Aga’s hot plate.
Ellie blinked, expecting Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to pop out of the pantry at any moment and start demonstrating how to make sloe-gin ice cream.
‘What happened?’ Had she slipped into an alternative reality?
‘What happened to what?’ Her mother turned from the cooker, where she’d been taking another tray of vegetables out of the oven.
The light from the window illuminated the streaks of grey in her mother’s dark blonde hair. In the shaft of sunlight, Ellie noticed for the first time the speckle of sun blemishes on her mum’s skin and the slight thickening around the waistband of her gypsy skirt. But otherwise, Dee Preston, unlike her kitchen, had hardly changed. With her sky-blue eyes, the thick tangle of hair tied up in a topknot, the collection of bangles on her wrist jingling as she basted the vegetables, she looked a good fifteen years younger than her fifty-nine years.
‘To the kitchen? To the whole place?’ Ellie felt a bit ridiculous when her mother sent her a quizzical look, as if she couldn’t imagine what Ellie was getting at. ‘It doesn’t look anything like I remember it.’
‘Oh, well, yes.’ Dee glanced around, attempting to locate the differences. ‘I suppose it is a bit less cluttered these days.’
‘Mum, it was a shit-hole,’ Ellie said. ‘There was that feral dog that lurked in the corner like the three-headed hellhound from Harry Potter.’
‘Fluffy?’
‘That dog was called Fluffy?’ Clearly someone back then had a sense of humour she’d been unaware of.
Her mum smiled. ‘No, the three-headed dog in Harry Potter’s called Fluffy. Laura’s Irish wolfhound was called Scargill, I think.’
That figured, because Art’s mum had been in the forefront of all the revolutionary bollocks Ellie remembered from the bad old days.
‘He died years ago,’ Dee supplied helpfully. ‘He’s buried in the back pasture.’
‘But it wasn’t just the dog,’ Ellie continued, silently hoping the Hound of the Baskervilles had died in agony, because it was the least the cantankerous old beast deserved. ‘No one ever washed up or cooked anything remotely edible, except you. The whole place stank of unwashed bodies and stale marijuana and it was a hotbed of born-again hippie anarchy.’ She swept her hand to encompass the scene before her now, which could have illustrated a feature article in Country Living. ‘Not home-grown herbs and home-made preserves and home baking. The place looks as if it’s been given a makeover by the Shabby Chic Fairy. Seriously, what happened?’
Because she wanted to know.
‘Well, Laura left us a few months after you did. And most of the activist element left not long after that, too.’
Laura Dalton had left? Nineteen years ago? So why was her son Art still hanging about? Ellie stopped herself from asking though, because she wasn’t interested in what had been going on with Art.
‘Where did Laura go?’ she asked, deciding that was a safe question.
‘She ran off with the local Lib-Dem member of the county council. His name was Rupert something.’
‘You are joking?’ This was beginning to sound like a Little Britain sketch. And not in a good way.
‘We were all a bit surprised to be honest, given that Laura had insisted even New Labour were traitors to the cause.’ Dee’s smile became rueful.
‘I thought Laura was a lesbian?’ She’d never managed to get to the bottom of how Art had been created, because no one had ever spoken about his father. But given how demonstrative Laura had always been with Delshad, her partner at the commune, Ellie had begun to suspect Art might have originated from a petri dish in a sperm bank.
‘So did Laura, I suppose.’ Dee tucked a stray tendril behind her ear and picked up a dishcloth to wipe the already pristine table. ‘But apparently she wasn’t. Or not where Rupert was concerned. She left a note for Art, explaining why she’d left, but he never told me what it said.’
Had his mum just left him behind then? With a note? He’d only been fifteen.
The spurt of sympathy though was blasted into submission by a disturbing memory flash of Art at fifteen. His lean wiry nut-brown body lying in the long grass by the millpond, the bloody ink on his left bicep rippling as he held his…
Heat blossomed in her stomach and crawled over her scalp, the same way it had all those years ago, when she’d watched him unobserved from her vantage point in the derelict mill house and realised what he was doing.
She cut off the memory. But the heat refused to subside as she had another memory flash, closer to home, of the same ink peeking out from the rolled-up sleeve of Art’s overalls a few minutes ago.
Note to self: jet lag, a failed marriage and a year with only the occasional duty shag can seriously mess with your mental health. Enough to delude you into fixating on an arsehole like Art Dalton and his tacky tattoo.
She needed to crash, and soon.
‘So Laura never came back?’ she said. ‘Delshad must have been devastated.’
Any sympathy for Art on the other hand would be misguided. She couldn’t imagine him being devastated. His mum had probably run off with Rupert the Lib-Dem – and jettisoned her political beliefs and her sexual identity in the process – to get shot of him. After all, he’d been more wild and feral at fifteen than that bloody dog.
‘Actually she did come back in a manner of speaking,’ Dee said, throwing the dishcloth into the sink.
‘Oh?’
‘A young man called Jack Harborough turned up five years ago with her ashes in a Tupperware container. He said he’d been living with her in a squat in Tottenham. He had photos of the two of them together. Apparently she died of lung cancer. She did look terribly thin in the photos. Like someone from a concentration camp. Awful,’ Dee said mildly. ‘That’s what roll-ups can do to you.’
Ellie was still trying to get her head around the thought of Laura coming back in a Tupperware container. The thought of the stunningly beautiful radical socialist looking like a Belsen victim simply wouldn’t compute.
And she thought her life had become a soap opera.
‘Where’s Pam?’ Ellie heard herself say, deciding she would have to kick the elephant in the room eventually. And getting sidetracked with Laura’s story had given her a headache. And some memory flashes she really didn’t need to go with the foggy feeling of exhaustion.
Dee’s smile didn’t falter, but the warmth in her eyes died. ‘She’s dead, darling. She died four years ago.’
‘I didn’t know. I’m… I’m sorry, Mum.’ The words felt inadequate. And somewhat hypocritical, given the emotion arriving on the heels of the revelation was a massive surge of relief. ‘Why didn’t you tell me in any of your emails?’
Was Pam’s death the reason why Dee had decided to get in touch again out of the blue? Surely it had to be.
Ellie’s spine stiffened a bit more. Get over it.
It was churlish to feel cheated that her mother’s grief had been the only thing