Читать книгу The First Time Lauren Pailing Died - Alyson Rudd - Страница 14

Vera awoke in a panic. She had dreamed she had taken pills and it had been so vivid. She clutched at her flabby stomach but she felt fine, just disorientated. Bob walked in holding their baby.

‘I’m glad you were able to nap, love,’ he said, ‘but she needs a feed.’

Vera wriggled herself upright against the pillows. It was the most beautiful thing in the world to feed little Hope, and the most emotionally cruel. Hope had been conceived in a frenzy of desperate, angry, escapist lovemaking after the death of Lauren. She had promised herself she would kill herself if she could not have another child and she had doubted it would happen, but it had. The sibling had come along. She was too late to be a real sibling. But she was real.

She looked like Lauren but not too much for constant tears. Hope made everyone happy. Vera and Bob had asked Karen and Julian to be godparents and they had cried and cried and cried about it for days afterwards. Debbie ran endless, unnecessary errands for Vera. Aunt Suki had moved in for a fortnight to ease the load, which meant she made lots of tea and toast and answered the phone and the door and reluctantly pegged out washing.

‘Oh, Bob, I’m so grateful and so angry all at the same time,’ Vera said, ‘and I’m worried Hope will know, she will be scarred or withdrawn or frightened of me or something.’

‘Nah,’ said Bob, smiling. ‘She’s the most loved child in Cheshire and we’ll tell her about her big sister in the right way, of course we will.’

Hope needed to be loved. Her name had the ring of optimism but was drenched in tragedy. Her full name was Hope Lauren Pailing.

Hope’s christening was in the same church as…

That was how they all spoke of it. ‘It’s in the same church as…’ There was no need nor desire to finish the sentence. The service was intimate, and conducted at pace, as if those present were pushing against a great weight and they could only hold their arms aloft for so long to avoid being crushed.

There were more guests back at the house, where Vera was complimented on how slender she looked in her new dress. She even summoned a little twirl for Debbie, who was particularly entranced by the crêpe fabric that fell Hollywood style to reach the floor and the way ribbons of silvery silk were woven through it.

‘You look so lovely in your silvery silky dress,’ Debbie told Vera, in a low voice to avoid making her own mother jealous and she wondered why, when she said so, Vera had blinked rapidly.

Later, sat on the edge of her bed, Vera ran her fingers along the dress which now lay across the bedspread like a willing bride. The silver ribbons glistened in the light from the pair of chintz bedside lamps and she closed her eyes. She had bought the dress three weeks ago. Now she remembered that seven years ago, maybe eight, Lauren had mentioned a silvery silky dress.

Vera smiled sadly. She did not know it while in the shop but she had bought the dress to please Lauren. To fulfil her daughter’s idealised image of her, perhaps. To keep their relationship a tangible thing, not just a painful memory.

Peter Stanning drove over with a hand-carved rocking horse and bundles of strawberry jam. He would have done more, but for the fact that he went missing when Hope was three months old.

Vera and Bob had no idea how helpful Peter Stanning had been until he disappeared from their lives.

‘You know what, Bob,’ Vera said when Peter’s vanishing was less of an intriguing piece of gossip and more a fear for the man’s life. ‘Lauren would have cared about what happened to him. She was so mature, so caring, and she loved a puzzle. She would have been asking us every day, “Any news about Peter Stanning?”, wouldn’t she?’

Bob accepted all his wife’s reminiscences regardless of whether they tallied with his own, but in this instance he really did agree. Lauren would have been fascinated, he was sure of that.

Hope grew up loving her big sister. It was a peculiar kind of love, the sort a teenager has for a distant pop star she has never met. Hope celebrated Lauren’s birthday with enthusiasm, blowing out the candles her sister could never breathe over, eating the cake her sister could never taste, singing the songs her sister could never hear. Her favourite bedtime stories where the ones in which Lauren played a starring role. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ became ‘Little Lauren in a Red Cloak’. Rapunzel had a name change too. And every night Vera would hold out a photograph of Lauren for Hope to kiss before kissing it herself.

Aunt Suki thought it all sickly sweet and unhealthy, but said nothing. She had kissed a photograph of her niece just the once and it had made her maudlin, uneasy and embarrassed. The role of the dead was unclear, especially when it was a child that had died. There was something both touching and terrible in the way Hope would randomly grab at a framed picture in the lounge and plant wet kisses on the face of her sibling. But it made Vera and Bob smile, so Aunt Suki said nothing.