Mothers and Daughters Read online

  ‘Sorry,’ she improvised, ‘it’s a bad line, I didn’t hear you.’

  There was a frustrated sigh in her ear.

  ‘Try turning the taps off and you might hear a lot better.’

  Willow did as her sister said, and Martha went on.

  ‘My idea is for us to go down to Mum’s at the weekend and take her out for lunch and then put forward our plan.’

  ‘What plan?’

  Another sigh. ‘The one about encouraging Mum to sell Anchor House.’

  Willow frowned. She had hoped Martha had forgotten about that. Her sister had first mentioned it a few months ago, but Willow hadn’t taken it seriously, or given it any more thought. She just couldn’t imagine Mum wanting to leave Anchor House and all her friends down there in Tilsham. And apart from anything else, it was home.

  Not just any old home, but their home. It was where Willow and Martha had grown up and where Willow’s every happy childhood memory revolved around Anchor House and the pretty harbour village that was squeezed in between Bosham and Chichester.

  Her memories were full of days spent playing on the beach, of crabbing in the rock pools, of squelching around the mudflats in her wellingtons, of lying in the sand dunes, and of hours spent walking through wheat fields and along narrow flint-walled lanes lined with pretty cottages. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the cry of seagulls and smell the salty sea air.

  How could her sister ever think that Mum would leave all that to live near Martha and Tom on the outskirts of Cobham? There was nothing wrong with Surrey, of course there wasn’t, but it wasn’t Tilsham. It wasn’t what Mum was used to and where she was happy.

  ‘So are you free at the weekend to spend the day with Mum?’ asked Martha.

  ‘Nothing planned as far as I …’ Her words trailed off. ‘Can you smell burning?’ she asked her sister.

  ‘What do you mean can I smell burning? Of course I can’t!’ ‘Burning,’ repeated Willow, her nose twitching. ‘I can definitely smell—’ She broke off again and leant over the side of the bath.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, realising now what she had tipped off the stool when she’d reached for her mobile. On top of the towel she’d put ready to use was the tray of aromatherapy candles she’d lit earlier.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ she said again, ‘I seem to be on fire.’

  Smoke was indeed coming from a blackened circle and small flickering flames were just taking hold with rivulets of melted wax running everywhere.

  ‘What?’ demanded Martha in her ear while Willow dithered. ‘What do you mean you’re on fire?’

  Tossing her mobile to safety and wincing as it went skittering across the tiled floor, Willow scooped up a handful of water and doused the flickering flames. She then stepped out of the bath, but in her clumsy haste she somehow missed her footing as she reached for another towel and ended up falling sideways and nearly putting a hand down the loo as she tried to keep her balance. All the while she could hear her sister’s voice calling to her from under the radiator asking if she was still there.

  A towel now wrapped around her, Willow rescued her mobile.

  ‘It’s okay, Martha,’ she said, ‘no need to call for any hunky fireman, I’ve put out the fire.’

  ‘How big a fire?’

  ‘No more than a flame or two.’

  ‘But in a bathroom? How is that even possible?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it when I see you down at Mum’s. By the way, Saturday or Sunday? Either is good for me.’

  ‘I’ll check with Mum which day is best for her and get back to you. Just don’t go planning anything else meanwhile.’

  The conversation finished, Willow emptied the bath, dried herself and put on her pyjamas. She then folded the ruined towel to take downstairs to put in the bin, grateful that that was all she’d damaged. The thought of having to tell her friends, Lucy and Simon, that she’d burnt down their house made her vow never to light another candle while she was housesitting for them.

  She wasn’t living here entirely for free; she paid her friends a nominal amount of rent on the grounds that she took good care of the house while they were away. They’d decided that once it was safe enough to travel again they would spend their last year of freedom before starting a family travelling the world. They had jacked in their jobs and simply taken off. They were currently in Kyoto in Japan before going on to Vietnam.

  It was the kind of thing Willow would love to do if she had the money. Although knowing her, she’d probably get hopelessly lost.

  ‘Bloody risky if you ask me,’ her boyfriend, Rick, had said when she’d explained to him why she was lucky enough to be living so close to Victoria Park in London and in such a great house, considering her lack of funds.

  Lucy and Simon could have earned far more money renting out the house through a letting agency, but then they would have had to get rid of their two beloved Siamese cats, Sirius and Cedric.

  Every week Willow had to email Lucy with an update on the cats and her biggest fear was that one of them might escape through a door that she had accidentally left open. They were strictly indoor cats, apparently too pampered and valuable to be allowed to roam the neighbourhood.

  Thinking about it, confessing to Lucy that she had nearly set the house on fire by falling asleep in the bath would be far easier than admitting she had lost one of the cats.

  With her precious charges on her mind, she went to look for Sirius and Cedric. She found them curled up together in the shallow log basket by the radiator in the sitting room. They had proper beds to sleep in but rarely used them, preferring instead the empty log basket with a blanket to lie on.

  When Rick came here, she had to keep the cats away from him because he was so allergic to their fur; it made him sneeze and his eyes itch. Which was why he liked her to spend time at his place, or for them go out.

  They had met almost four months ago back in December last year – in the way that so many people met these days, by swiping right on Tinder.

  He was the one who had swiped right first and after checking out his profile and liking what she saw (he had a nice smile that lit up his eyes), she swiped right to make a match. They then started messaging each other and a couple of weeks later they arranged to meet in a bar. The rest, as they say, is history.

  But given how bad at sticking with a relationship she was (she could never get beyond the six-month mark), was Rick destined to be part of Willow’s history, and not her future?

  It was too soon to tell.

  Those of her friends who had met Rick said he was a great catch, and even Martha, who never approved of any of Willow’s boyfriends, described him as a keeper. Mum liked him too, and no doubt Dad, if he were still alive, would have given him the thumbs up too.

  So why then could Willow not allow herself to believe that maybe she deserved this chance to be happy with Rick?

  Chapter Three

  It was a beautiful spring morning and with the tide out, wading birds were busy searching the mudflats for cockles to prise apart with their long probing beaks.

  Coffee cup in hand, and aching in places a woman of sixty-three years of age had no right to ache, Naomi Miller shielded her eyes from the April sunshine and made herself comfortable on the bench at the end of the garden. The silvered wood of the seat gave her the best view of the shoreline; from here she could observe all the comings and goings of the beach, as well as the birdlife.

  She and Colin had bought Anchor House thirty-two years ago, shortly before Willow was born and when Martha was already three years old. Back then she and Colin couldn’t believe their luck in being able to afford a spacious five-bedroom Edwardian house like this with a large garden that stretched down to the beach. It had been a dramatic leap up from their terraced house in south London, and they had taken to life here in Tilsham Harbour like … well, like ducks to water.

  That’s what Colin used to say when anybody asked how they were enjoying their new life out of London.

  ‘Oh,
we’ve taken to it like ducks to water,’ he’d tell them.

  Not that Colin had been here all the time. From Monday to Friday he’d stayed in a small studio flat in London while working in the City, then straight after lunch on Friday he would drive down to Sussex to be with Naomi and the children. A lot of his weekends were spent sailing and he loved being out on the water, nothing gave him more pleasure. It was the sense of freedom he’d enjoyed, that and pitting himself against the elements.

  It had been a great disappointment to him that his wife had never shared his love of sailing. Naomi had shown willing from time to time and gone out in the boat with him, but too often he would bellow some order or other which she would misunderstand and do entirely the wrong thing. She much preferred pottering around their little harbour, no more than an inlet really, in a small rowing dinghy. She was not a natural sailor, and to Colin’s further disappointment, neither were his daughters.

  It used to exasperate him that she didn’t know one sailing boat from another. To her they were just boats with sails. Yes, she could tell the difference between the older craft made of wood and the fibreglass ones, but she couldn’t put a name to them. And never saw any reason to do so. Perhaps it had just been her being stubborn and bloody-minded, which she knew she was apt to do.

  Her interests lay more on terra firma, in particular the garden at Anchor House. Before they bought the house, the garden had been left to its own devices by the previous owners, an elderly couple no longer able to keep on top of it all.

  Much of it had been overgrown and unusable, not to say unsafe with the smashed glass of the greenhouse and tumblingdown sheds. But gradually over time Naomi took it in hand and turned it into a garden that was her sanctuary as well as somewhere for the children to play, when they weren’t on the beach.

  Through her love of gardening, Naomi also developed another passion, for collecting old gardening tools and equipment. She used to scour auctions and charity and second-hand shops for bits and pieces – old terracotta pots, galvanised watering cans and laundry tubs, wooden-handled tools, wicker baskets and trugs, stone troughs and urns, and old ornate wirework tables and chairs.

  At first, she bought specifically for her own garden, but then, after amassing far more than she needed, or had room for, she decided to make a business out of it and rented a small shop in the village that had become available.

  She called it All Things Gardenalia and oh, how she had loved that little shop. With the fashion for recycling and anything remotely vintage, she did surprisingly well and was constantly having to source new stock.

  It had been a sad day when she’d taken the reluctant decision to close the shop because of the coronavirus crisis that had so devastated the world. She had sold some of the remaining stock online, but a lot of it still remained in the garage. One day she would get around to having a sort out and sell what she had left.

  Colin would be appalled to see the state his once tidy garage was in now. It had always been his domain, where he had religiously put away their cars to spare them from the peril of being exposed to the salty air. Naomi was not so particular about such things and regularly left her car out to fend for itself.

  ‘Standards have been allowed to slip,’ she could imagine Colin saying.

  More than two years on since his death and she could still hear his voice as clear as if he were right next to her.

  She supposed she always would.

  They had been out for dinner with friends in Chichester when he died. They’d been celebrating his sixty-sixth birthday, and when it was over, when they were putting on their coats, Colin had looked at her with a strange puzzled look on his face as though he’d suddenly remembered something important to ask her. Then thumping a hand to his chest, he’d closed his eyes with a grimace and gasped.

  A big man – a bear of a man was the way he was often described – there had been no way of catching him, and he’d slammed against the table at which they’d just eaten, tipping it over on top of him as he dropped heavily to the floor.

  The memory of Colin lying there amongst the debris of their empty wineglasses and coffee cups haunted her for months afterwards. It was such an undignified end to a man’s life.

  He had been warned by their GP, a personal friend of the family, to cut back on the amount of alcohol he consumed. He’d been told to watch his diet too. But he was old-school and refused to moderate what he ate, no matter how much Naomi nagged him. He was the kind of man who believed the usual rules didn’t apply to him; he was untouchable.

  ‘I’m going to die of something,’ he would say when she tried to make him see sense, ‘and I hope to God it happens before I go gaga!’

  The perfect end for him would have been falling asleep in the conservatory after a day of sailing in his beloved boat, the Marlow. The name, at Naomi’s suggestion, had been a combination of Martha and Willow’s names.

  The absence of his larger than life presence had taken some getting used to when he’d died, but she had not been what you would call heartbroken. Her life had not ground to a halt as people might have believed it would when they were paying their respects at the funeral. The way they’d offered their sympathy it was as if they thought she couldn’t exist without Colin, that he had been everything for her.

  The truth was, once the funeral was behind her, she had felt a gradual transformation of her old self into a new and stronger self. Her genuine self, she liked to think.

  While it was true Colin had been the one to make all the financial decisions, which was his area of expertise after all, him being an associate director of an international investment company, she was the one who ran the show behind the scenes at home.

  Yes, he was the star performer on stage, the one who held court and entertained their friends and his numerous work colleagues and clients, but she was the one backstage directing, producing and changing the scenery. She had accepted a very long time ago that there could only be one star performer in their marriage, and that was Colin. That was how some partnerships had to be.

  She had been widowed for just over two years now and there wasn’t a day when she wasn’t reminded of Colin, but she refused to live in the past. Life changes and acceptance of that fact enabled a person to adapt and change as well. Maybe even for the better.

  Her coffee finished, she saw that the curlews in the mudflats had now been joined by a couple of industrious redshanks. Dig, dig, dig, went their beaks.

  Redshanks always reminded Naomi of her eldest daughter, Martha. It was the purposefulness of the bird that did it, the way it went about its business with such conviction. That was Martha all over – determined and focused. She set herself a goal and applied herself to it with unwavering intent. She was a doer, just like her father had been. In contrast, Willow was more like a wren – dainty and hopping around without any real direction.

  As sisters they really couldn’t be more dissimilar. It never ceased to amaze Naomi that two children from the same parents could be so utterly different.

  Whereas Martha was dark-haired and tall with an oval face and hazel eyes, and a nose that she claimed was too long, Willow was smaller with a more petite build and her heart-shaped face was framed by blonde hair. Her eyes were blue, like Naomi’s, and set wide apart. As a child she had always been picked to be an angel in the school nativity play, a role Martha had never been interested in playing. She always wanted to be the innkeeper announcing in a commanding voice that there was no room at the inn.

  ‘Ahoy there!’

  Leaning forwards, Naomi turned her head to the left from where the voice emanated. She knew without actually seeing him that it was Ellis Ashton, the new tenant of Waterside Cottage, her nearest neighbour.

  Ellis had moved in at the end of February, just over two months ago. He was sixty-four years of age, widowed with a grown-up stepson living in Los Angeles and had recently retired as a client director for an asset management firm. His work had taken him to Frankfurt, Brussels, New York and latterly L
ondon, where he’d been temporarily renting a house in Richmond. He’d then moved here to be nearer his mother, who was being looked after in a local care home.

  ‘Ahoy to you too,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Permission to come aboard?’

  ‘Permission granted.’

  Lifting the latch on the wooden gate, he pushed it open.

  Now directly in front of her, Naomi could see that his denim-blue eyes matched the colour of his shirt and the sky above him. Bending at the waist, and in a very courtly manner, he kissed her cheek. Then with a smile – a smile that had not changed from the one she remembered a long time ago – he produced a bunch of pink and cream tulips from behind his back.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m guilty of stealing them from my landlord’s garden,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to give you something for making last night so special.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, blushing like a teenage girl at the memory of him cooking dinner for her and what happened afterwards. And which was the reason for her aching in so many places this morning.

  Goodness, what would Colin have thought!

  More to the point, what would Martha and Willow think?

  Chapter Four

  Tom Adams was on his way to work. It was now two days since Martha had secretly tested herself to see if she was pregnant.

  He knew that his wife kept things from him, but then he kept things from her. Every couple kept shtum about something, he believed. Those who said otherwise were not being honest with themselves. To his way of thinking, it just wasn’t feasible, or sensible, to pour out every worrying thought one ever had.

  It was because he loved Martha as profoundly as he did that he didn’t want to burden her with half of what went on inside his head. She had enough to cope with as it was with her longing to have a baby. They were only ten months into the process and already it was beginning to take its toll on her.

  On him too.