48
Courage calls to courage everywhere.
Harriet didn’t believe in any Cosmic Architect who directed events, an interventionist God. Given the loss of her parents, it’d be pretty strange if she did. Her jaw muscles tensed when any well-meaning person said: ‘Everything happens for a reason’, and reflected they’d obviously not had anything very bad happen to them.
Nevertheless, the night before the wedding felt like such a huge, psychic game of swing ball, where her refusal to face down and defy Scott and his legacy, her entrenched habit of conflict avoidance, was coming back to haunt her in the most preordained, scripted drama way.
Standing up and annihilating someone’s wedding ceremony? Her ex? The Man Who Should Not Be Named, for so long? Describing, to hundreds of people, what he’d done to her? Publicly identifying herself with that experience?
It was like asking a nun to streak.
Harriet was contemplating a daredevil stunt, a parachute jump, some sort of towering feat of adrenaline junkiedom. Telling yourself to hurl yourself out into the thin air at a great altitude, when it went against every survival instinct you had.
It was mind over body, executive function at war with your lizard brain.
No matter how many times Harriet rehearsed: Marianne wanted this, Scott should be stopped, and Nina would grab her, mid-dive – it was a completely aberrant thing to do. She might be justly vilified. The nuclear blast might be so big that Leeds would forever be irradiated for her.
This, after a lifetime of going foetal around threat. Yet she finally swore at Jacqueline Barraclough, demanded explanations from Cal, and even steamed round to read Jon his Miranda rights. Maybe change was possible.
What else was she avoiding?
Harriet had been listening to Jazz FM, lying on her bed. She was suddenly galvanised, struck by something that until now, had never had such a clear and obvious sense of its timeliness. The second it occurred to her, she knew this was it. Hadn’t Cal said she’d know? She’d thought that was consoling mysticism, but he was right. She knew.
Or perhaps, she was dressing it up in a thunderbolt, but her reasons were incredibly prosaic – there was finally another fear on the horizon that made this fear seem manageable by comparison. Maybe she simply needed a monumental distraction.
Harriet sat up and unthreaded the necklace from around her neck with shaking hands, and put the key pendant in the lock on the jewellery box.
What if the letter had degraded to the point it was unreadable or something? She would have let her mother down? What if the letter contained such a shock that it rendered her unable to function, to go through with tomorrow’s promise?
Harriet knew that even so, this didn’t matter, as she was going to do it anyway.
She picked the delicate envelope open with great care and pulled out a single page of paper, wrapped around a photograph, an old-style colour floppy. The notelet was only a few paragraphs long.
Harriet examined the photo first, one she’d never seen before.
Her parents were walking down a tree-lined street she didn’t recognise, bundled in padded coats that indicated it was the depths of winter. Her laddish, scarily youthful, dark-haired father had hold of one her hands, her mother the other, and they were swinging her up in the air. Her mum, with strawberry-blonde long bob, had her lips formed in an open-mouthed smile, and Harriet could imagine her making a ‘wheeee’ noise.
Harriet must be about three, her dangling chunky legs in grey ribbed woollen tights and blackcurrant-coloured Mary Jane shoes. She was whooping ecstatically, a full set of peg-like teeth on show, pure toddler monkey-delight. Her hair was a rust-coloured pageboy cut.
On the back, in her mother’s girlish handwriting, was printed:
This is my favourite one of the three of us. Keep it somewhere safe and close, and we’re always with you. Yes cheesy I know but if I can’t be cheesy now! Lots of love, Mum xx
She stared and stared at the neatly printed handwriting, tried to force herself to accept that the person who had thought those words and held the pen and leaned on the photo to transcribe them, wasn’t here anymore. Harriet was already streaming with tears, so God knows how she was going to cope with the letter.
She unfurled the sheet of paper and read it, eyes racing across its few sentences in a split second, and gasped a sob. She read it six more times, then a seventh.
Acts of kindness, acts of thoughtfulness: they could echo down the years long after the person who had offered them was gone. This was worth knowing. Her mother wasn’t here but this feeling was here with her, in the room. Its effect was real.
Harriet splashed her face with cold water until she was halfway presentable and went downstairs to find Cal, who was stood eating some toast in the kitchen and absent-mindedly reading his phone. He glanced up as she came in, his eyes lighting on her face with a lively expression.
‘Hey up, it’s the wedding crasher.’
She had told him of tomorrow’s escapade last night.
‘It’s got a real shit-or-bust feel to it. It’s either the best idea or the worst idea, and nothing in-between,’ Cal said.
‘You think I shouldn’t do it?’ Harriet asked.
He’d said, in a lower voice, with directness: ‘I think you can do anything.’ She’d had to find something else to say, fast, before it risked becoming A Moment between them, which she had no spare bandwidth to handle.
‘Cal,’ she said now, trying to conceal her chest heaving, as if she’d run a mile. ‘You know how you said to wait until the right time to read my mum’s letter? That I’d know when the right time was?’
He chewed and swallowed. ‘Yes?’
‘It was true. I knew. This evening. I read it. I suddenly needed my mum tonight, so badly, so I read it.’
Harriet was stumbling over her words: she’d meant to say ‘needed to hear from her’ but as soon as she heard herself speak, she knew it was inadvertent honesty. She’d never let herself say she needed her mum before. What was the point in that plea, if it would never be answered? Except maybe it being answered had not been the point. Perhaps there was value simply in admitting it.
‘I don’t know how, but it said exactly what I needed it to say. I didn’t even know there was a particular thing I needed to hear from my mum, and there it was … How mad is that?’ she finished, somewhat anti-climactically.
‘Bloody hell, Harriet!’ A giant grin lit up his face. ‘I’m so pleased for you.’
‘Thank you. I wanted to tell someone. To feel like I’d taken a photograph of this moment, somehow. Recorded it.’
‘Sure. Glad to have been the person here to tell.’
Harriet radiated elation and Cal smiled again, warmly.
‘Do you want some toast?’ he said, after a pause.
‘Hah no, I’m alright thanks. You crack on, I’m going to …’ She gestured to the door. She wanted to go back upstairs and be with her picture and her letter, and Cal nodded a goodbye, mouth full again. She noticed the class and judgement in the way Cal didn’t ask what her mother had said.
She wanted that to stay between the two of them.