It was certainly no place for an eleven-year-old. Karen had decided that the moment they parked the car. The public gardens facing the hotel, which Father insisted were delightful, were ringed with dozing pensioners propped up on the benches like wrinkly babies. The hotel itself, which he kept calling charming, was cluttered and dusty, all drooping dried flowers and finger-marked paint. The prospect of a week there was worse than a maths test.
Karen had crossed the fingers on both of her hands when they arrived in the gloomy reception hall, willing her mother to wrinkle her nose at the fusty smell. To take Father to one side and suggest they switch to somewhere less rotten. To even have one of the silent crying attacks that Karen hated so much but Father couldn’t ignore and would do anything to mend. Mummy hadn’t done a thing. She had followed Father up the stairs without so much as a glance at the muddy brown drapes shrouding the windows or the orange-swirled carpet stuck to the floor.
Remembering that now, sitting in her perfectly matched pale pink and cream room, Karen realised how odd that lack of any reaction had been.
Mummy had always hated anything ugly. She’d loved pretty fabrics, especially the soft ones, like velvet, or the expensive ones that were threaded through with silver or gold. Nothing in their neat little house had been allowed to be plain. The curtains were daisy-covered, the cushions striped and spotted. Her mother had been such an expert seamstress, she’d made dresses and skirts for most of the women in the village. Mrs Hubbard had said she was clever enough to have her own shop. She’d made all Karen’s clothes too, although Karen had started wishing she wouldn’t. Karen had desperately wanted a pair of blue jeans and a skinny-fit T-shirt with stripes, like Cathy Creggan showed off in. She had asked for those. No, she hadn’t, she had demanded them.
Another tear dropped. She wished now she had asked nicely and not crumpled up the bib-fronted pinafore Mummy had offered instead. She would gladly have worn a dozen of those hand-sewn dresses if her mother was still here to make them.
Karen blinked hard, wondering if the memories would ever come without the pain. Wondering if she would ever be able to filter the good ones out from the ones she didn’t want resurfacing. Wishing there was someone she could ask about that too.
She remembered that Mummy had loved pretty fabric – that was a memory to hold on to – and also pretty smells, how particular she was about those. The long walks she dragged Karen on always turned into treasure hunts. The two of them would return clutching armfuls of plants and berries that they would pin up to dry. Sprigs of wild mint and lemon balm, jasmine and lavender. But never lilac: Mummy had said that went sad if you cut it and left only a ghost of its scent behind. Karen gathered that memory up too and hugged it to her like a blanket. How they would sit together at the kitchen table, mixing the gleanings with toasted orange peel and gnarled sticks of cinnamon; how her mother would fill every room with the scented bowls. On winter nights, when the fire was lit, the house smelled like a storybook Christmas.
There wasn’t one of her bowls left now. There wasn’t a dress left in her wardrobe or a coat on the hall stand. And there wasn’t a photograph. Not that there had ever been many of those.
Mrs Hubbard’s house was stacked with them; every surface groaned under their stiffly posed weight. Karen had spent more of her mother’s headache days than she could count in Mrs Hubbard’s front room, happily rearranging the photographs.
There were only two pictures in the Cartwright house, both black and white and plainly framed. One of them was of Father’s parents, who had died long before Karen was born. She didn’t like it: the old man in a drab uniform, awkwardly linking arms with a tightly curled woman, had a rather menacing air. The other one was of her as a baby, lying on a rug and looking cross-eyed. There were no other grandparents on display and there wasn’t a single one of her parents, not even a wedding snap. Mrs Hubbard had generations of those, in increasingly elaborate frames. When Karen had asked Father why, he hadn’t answered; his usual strategy.
During the Hove holiday, on their less-than-successful day trip to the far more thrilling town of Brighton, Karen had begged for a photo of the three of them together. The cameraman on the promenade had a monkey wearing a tiny red hat and she was desperate to hold it. She’d got quite upset when Mummy refused, had ‘made a scene’, which was Father’s cardinal sin. She had made quite a few scenes that day. Wanting to eat candyfloss and chips and visit the arcades on the pier and ride in the little yellow train that weaved along the pavements. Wanting some of the fun everyone else was noisily having. Maybe ‘all your ridiculous fuss’ was why her mother had needed to go alone to the beach. Father’s brusque ‘it’s a bit late to worry about that now’ when she ventured the question had seemed to suggest it.
‘Five minutes, Karen! Breakfast is waiting.’ Father’s voice rang up the stairs like a trumpet.
Such a stupid thing to say. Where would it go if she didn’t turn up? This bright version of Father was no better than the gruff one; if anything, it was more exhausting. Not that it would last. If Karen was two minutes late to the table, he would be back to rules and regulations, wearing his soldier’s uniform even when he wasn’t.
He doesn’t mean it. He’s just doing his best to keep us all running.
The voice flew back so clear, Karen looked round for her mother.
That was the last thing she’d said when she came to say goodnight. The last thing she’d ever said.
Picking at the words now, Karen wondered what her mother had meant. She had made it sound as if they were a car needing petrol, not a family. Another confusion to add to a list that was growing, that Karen couldn’t stop picking at. That started with her not being woken up bright and early as usual on the beach-visiting day but left to sleep late. And the silence when she did wake up, so deep she thought she’d been magicked home in the night. That there was none of the hotel’s usual morning chorus was another oddity. There had been no clattering feet on the landing, no echoing gong announcing breakfast. She hadn’t heard water burping through the pipes or smelled bacon crisping its way up the stairs. Everything had pointed to something gone wrong, but Karen, for all the Famous Five mysteries she’d ploughed through, was blind to every clue.
Patting her damp face dry with the corner of her skirt, Karen rummaged back through her memories, her daily task since the whole horrible mess had happened, as she tried to push the disjointed images into shape.
She remembered the shock of waking up late and waking up alone. Wondering why her mother wasn’t sitting by her bed, stroking her hair and whispering that the world was awake and waiting for her. Wondering if that meant today was a bad day, a headache day. And she remembered scrambling into the day-before’s clothes; knocking on her parents’ door and getting no answer. Thundering down the staircase, wondering if Mummy was sick, or if she was still in trouble from the day before. She remembered crashing into the breakfast room and the white faces turning. Her father slumped on a sofa as if someone had removed his bones. And the policewoman who took her into a separate room and came back empty-handed when Karen screamed for her father. Who tried in vain to talk over the bellowing ‘No, I can’t come; don’t ask me’ that was all Karen could hear.
Things blurred after that, although the black dress which itched like sacking jumped out. And the hard lines of a funeral in the army church on the Aldershot base, with soldiers snapping to a salute she had instinctively known her mother would have hated.