‘Any word from Dad?’ he asked lightly, not really expecting there to be.
‘Actually, I was speaking to him during the week,’ she said and she dropped her fork as if the effort of relaying the conversation was too heavy to share her energy with eating at the same time.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled, a little too brightly. ‘He’d love to have you out there, just as we thought. There are things to organise of course, but he suggested perhaps going out near the end of the summer, if that suits?’
‘So, I’m going to Sydney? To live?’ He couldn’t quite believe it, a new life opening up before him, with his dad far away from this place.
‘Yes, if it’s what you really want,’ his mother said. Her smile was almost wooden. ‘But of course, you know that if you want to come back, if it’s not what you expected…’ She bent her head down now, played with the food on her plate for a moment. ‘I just want you to be happy, Niall.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ he said and he did something he hadn’t done in a very long time; he reached across and put his arms around her shoulders. ‘I can’t wait.’
Part 4
July
21
Jo
Jo always thought she was that rare breed, both lark and owl. Quite simply, she went to bed late and got up early – all her life. She smiled sadly now, thinking of one of her favourite mantras when Lucy was a teenager: There’ll be time enough for sleeping when we’re dead. Well, it looked like she’d know the truth of that either way soon enough. She wasn’t being negative, but she knew, not just in the early hours of the morning, but rather with every ticking second that her time was drawing to a close much more quickly than either the doctor or Lucy would admit.
She was tired all the time. A trip down to the cove for a midnight swim now took days to recover from and a full day’s bed rest to prepare for. It was worth it. Apart from when Niall came and sat on the end of her bed and tried to coax her into a game of cards, the sea was her one true joy. Swimming with Lucy and Elizabeth had become the oxygen she needed to carry on. It was cathartic and invigorating, even if it left her physically depleted for days afterwards.
Lucy understood and Jo was just grateful that her daughter had managed to discard her doctor’s knowledge and allow her mother to carve out what remained of her time as she wished. There would be no operations or chemotherapy or any other kind of interventions that would lessen the quality of the time she had left. Jo had insisted there would be none of that pretending that everything was going to be all right, when it so clearly wasn’t. She couldn’t bear the notion that tears would be bottled up now, so that the people she loved would be flooded with sadness when she left them. She wanted them to get it over with, so when she was finally gone, they could start again.
‘I want to be celebrated,’ she said as they swam in temperatures that seemed to her to be icier than mid-January. Of course, she knew, the water was perfect for July, but everything about her body was letting her down at this point. ‘None of this nonsense with people going about with long faces; I want people to remember me and smile.’
‘We’ll certainly do that,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Do you remember that day when I bumped into Eric leaving the Maynard house?’
‘What’s this?’ Lucy asked.
‘Oh, dear,’ Elizabeth said then, realising that she would have to share the memory with Lucy also. ‘Your mother was there the day I realised that Eric was…’
‘He was paying out-of-hours visits to a man who lived in the square.’ Jo tried to be diplomatic.
‘It turned out, he’d been seeing Bobby Maynard for years,’ Elizabeth added sadly. ‘I only realised when I saw him leaving the house and righting his jacket on the way.’
‘We were coming out of old Mr Abbott’s bookshop.’ Jo smiled, remembering well the day. The sun had been breaking through after days of rain and she’d felt oddly optimistic that perhaps summer might finally be about to arrive. ‘He had the bloody cheek to tell you to go home and not spy on him, if I remember rightly,’ Jo said.
‘Thank goodness your mother was there,’ Elizabeth said a little wistfully to Lucy. It had been the start of their real friendship. That day, Jo had learned the secret at the heart of Elizabeth’s marriage and she’d proved herself a loyal and strong friend over the years afterwards.
‘Oh God. I can imagine, poor old Eric.’ Lucy laughed now, knowing only too well the tongue-lashing Jo would have given him for treating her friend so badly.