who cared to sit in the snug at the Rose and Crown and play backgammon with her, drink copious amounts of vodka and listen to her quiet, upper-class voice and her throaty laugh could learn a lot. I loved her refreshing take on life. ‘When I am old I shall wear purple’ could have been written for Peggy, although I suspect she’d always worn purple: it was just that these days it was diamanté-studded.
As we all trooped away from the church and across the green for coffee and sandwiches at my house, my father fell in beside me. He linked my arm.
‘Well done, old girl.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
He tactfully left it at that. I might not have rushed to complain to him in the early days of my marriage, but I was close to my dad, and recently he’d known Phil and I had had problems.
‘And I’m sorry you’re missing Tick-a-Tape run.’
This, my father’s horse, or leg of a horse, the one he owned in a syndicate, and for whom he hadn’t missed a race since he bought him. He was running the biggest one of his life today, in a steeplechase at Kempton.
‘Don’t be silly, it’s only a race. There’ll be others. He was my son-in-law, for God’s sake.’
Teetotal, fiercely competitive and allergic to horses: everything Dad was not. We walked on in silence.
‘Got the beers in, love?’ By now we were following the procession up the path, into the house.
‘Well, I thought coffee. And a few bottles of sherry?’
Dad stopped; looked appalled. ‘Right. Well, no worries. I’ll nip to the offy and get a bit more, shall I? Just to be on the safe side. Back in a tick.’
He turned and shot off across the road to his mud-splattered pick-up, bound for Leighton Buzzard, and a tick was all he would be, I thought, since he drove at the speed of light. It was one of the things my mother had despaired of. Mum. What would she be thinking now, I wondered, as I carried on into my house, glancing briefly heavenwards as I crossed the threshold. What would she think of this fractured little family of hers, this widowed husband, this only child, now a widow herself? Mum had never met Phil, her own car, which she drove as thoughtfully and carefully as she lived her life, having been involved in a pile-up on the M4 long before he’d been on the scene. That terrible Boxing Day evening when I was eleven, and she’d felt compelled to go and see Auntie Pam, who was on her own, and then come back to give us cold turkey and beetroot for supper; generally packing too much into one day, splitting herself too many ways. The pilot light in Dad’s life and mine had all but gone out for a long time, but gradually we’d lit the fuse together, with shaky hands. She might recognize Dad, I thought as I turned to watch him go, haring off in an all-too-familiar fashion, one hand tuning the car radio into the racing, but would she recognize me? This hitherto headstrong daughter of hers, who’d sat on her hands in a bad marriage for years? She wouldn’t think me capable. But then, she wasn’t to know the after-effects of her death; wasn’t to know I was a different person. Wasn’t to know I now had a very scared, conventional side, one that didn’t want to be the one left without a mother, or a husband; one that didn’t want to be last. Or perhaps she did know that. Perhaps I’d been like that all along, and maybe she would recognize me, after all.
My tiny sitting room was packed, and some people I swear I’d never seen before in my life, but with Mum still on my mind I greeted them warmly, gratefully, as she would have done, before going to the kitchen, where more familiar faces were busy taking cling film off sandwiches, boiling the kettle. Jennie and Angie turned as I came in; gave me sad little smiles. Perhaps she’d met him, I thought with a start as I went to the fridge. I stopped, in the light of the open door, heart pounding. Perhaps Mum was even now up there shaking hands with Phil, on a cloud somewhere? I felt a hot flush creep up my neck. I hoped not. I could see her lovely generous smile, see her being studiously warm and kind to him, but, underneath, might she be thinking: heavens,