Read (1990) Sweet Heart for Free Online Page B

contained few of her mother’s possessions. A couple of armchairs from her flat, a chest of drawers and the television that was never on. Two three-winged picture frames were on the bedside table, one showing Charley taking her first bath, Charley with a monkey on Brighton seafront, Charley in her wedding dress grinning exuberantly and Tom, subdued in a morning suit. There was a faint tangof urine, and stronger smells of disinfectant and fresh laundry.
    Charley lifted the roses to her nose. Their scent brought a memory from childhood of her adoptive father pruning the bushes in the garden, and then another: they were in his greenhouse and he picked a ripe tomato and gave it to her. She bit into it and the seeds squirted on to his shirt and down her dress and they both laughed.
    He had died when she was seven, of cancer. She remembered his eyes best, his large watery eyes that always looked so gently at her, eyes she could trust implicitly. They had looked out from his skeletal figure as he lay dying, and they looked out now from the other frame beside the bed.
    Sadness welled for the frail woman who had worked so hard for many years to look after her, and was rewarded with Alzheimer’s for her efforts.
    All their money had gone in caring for her father, and after his death they had moved from the house to a flat. Her mother had etched a living making soft toys at home for a company in Walthamstow, and Charley had gone to sleep to the whirring of the sewing machine in the living room. In the holidays she had earned them extra money, sitting on the floor packing hair bows into plastic bags for the same company. There was a white van that came round twice a week to bring work and collect it. Their lives were run by the van’s timetable.
    After her mother had been admitted to the nursing home Charley had gone to clear out the flat in Streatham. She had listened to the rumble of traffic outside and the bawling of a baby on the floor above as she sifted through the drawers, pulling out tights that smelled faintly of perfume, a Du Maurier cigarette tin filled with hairpins, a brown envelope stuffed with early love letters between her adoptive parents. She had beensearching for something, she wasn’t sure what; some small affirmation of her past, some hint about her real parents, maybe a newsclipping of a death notice, or an obituary. But there was nothing.
    She arranged her roses, their crimson and white petals like satin in the brilliant sunlight.
    ‘Pretty, aren’t they, Mum?’ she said, then sat and held her mother’s limp, bony hand, gripping it tightly, trying to find some warmth in it, wishing she could again snuggle into her arms.
    Life seemed sad, finite and pointless when you could fit a person’s possessions into a suitcase or a trunk or a crate. When you could simply pack away a life. A life that had probably once, like her own, been filled with hope and endless possibilities (expressed in the love letters), and gone nowhere.
    She blinked away her tears. ‘We’re moving, Mum,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ve bought a house in the country. Elmwood Mill. Doesn’t that sound romantic? It’s got an old mill in the garden, and a real millstream, or race as it’s called, and a barn, and an Aga in the kitchen, and we’re going to have our own hens. I’ll bring you eggs. Would you like that?’
    Her mother’s hand was trembling; it seemed to have gone colder, clammy.
    ‘What’s the matter, Mum? You needn’t worry — it’s only forty-five minutes on the train. I’ll still see you just as often.’
    The trembling was getting worse.
    ‘You can come and stay with us. We’ve got plenty of room. How about it?’ She looked at the old woman, alarmed. She was shaking, her face had gone even whiter and perspiration was streaming down it. ‘It’s OK, Mum, don’t worry! It’s no distance away at all! It won’t take me any longer to get here from Elmwood than from Wandsworth.’
    The door opened and a nurse came