Eloise
Authors: Judy Finnigan
Judy Finnigan is an author, television presenter and columnist. In 2004, Judy’s name became synonymous with discovering and sharing great fiction, through the Richard and Judy Book Club, where authors including Kate Mosse, Rosamund Lupton and Victoria Hislop were championed and brought to the attention of millions of readers. This is her first novel.
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-7481-3260-7
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Judy Finnigan 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
For Richard,
with all my love and thanks for his patience,
support and unfailing enthusiasm when I
thought I’d never finish this book.
I love you.
Yesterday I almost saw her. I was standing on the sun deck, looking out to sea, revelling in the unexpected warmth of the February sun. A butterfly trembled on a nearby buddleia and suddenly I smelled her perfume, fragrant, drifting, elusive. The same fragrance which infused the little pink silk pouch in my bedside drawer. I touched the beads round my neck; perhaps the scent lingered on them. They were hers, given to me by her mother, and I kept them in the pouch.
Then a distant shiver of motion. They had put an old rowing boat in their garden, its prow vertical against the sky,
secured in an alcove to use as a summer seat. Glancing past it I saw a shimmer, a translucent shift beside the lavender. It was as if her clothes, always wispy, drifted on the breeze: a glimpse of red, a swirling skirt, a gorgeously coloured silk scarf. The way I had so often seen her dressed.
She wasn’t there, of course. How could she be, when I had seen her lying in her coffin just two weeks ago, the day before she was buried, her casket surrounded by the scented candles she loved. She lay in Cornish ground, now.
There was no possibility of her ever coming back.
The sea mist plays strange tricks in Cornwall. By the time we got back to Talland Bay it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. The sea lay invisible on the smoky-grey horizon and the trees loomed and dripped over the steep and slippery steps down to our cottage. Inside, we switched on the lights and Chris fetched logs from the little slate-roofed store tucked around the side path. Once the fire was blazing I sat on the rug, staring into it, trying to find comfort in remembering all the bedtime games we’d played with the children when they were little. With them cuddled
on my lap in their pyjamas, we wove stories about the pictures we saw in each fiery nest of coals: jewelled caves glowing fiercely red, scary black petrified forests, witches’ cottages and princesses’ castles all cast their shadowy spells, and we watched, enchanted.
But today, as Chris brought more logs for the basket, all I could see in the flames were dark tombs, embers of death, coffins consumed by fire.
Chris watched me. I could feel his growing impatience but I ignored him. He poured two glasses of red wine, handed one to me and, with a loud sigh, sat on the sofa behind me.
‘Come on, Cathy. Stop doing this to yourself. If you’re not careful you’ll get seriously depressed again. If I’d known you were going to get this upset, I wouldn’t have come down here so soon after Eloise’s funeral, and I certainly wouldn’t have let you go to their house.’
‘Let me?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice light.
‘You know what I mean. I’m only thinking of you,’ he said with studied patience.
‘Yes, well, don’t, Chris. I don’t believe you anyway. If you were
really
worried you’d stop trying to tell me off. You could try asking me why I’m so upset instead of lecturing me.’
‘Cathy, I
know
why you’re upset. Eloise has died. But we’d been expecting it for years. We’re all sad because yes, it’s
terrible, and she was so young; but there’s nothing you – nothing
any
of us – can do. Let it go, honey. You know you’re not strong enough for this.’
‘There speaks my resident psychiatrist,’ I said bitterly. ‘Could you just stop practicing your profession on me?’
‘Cathy, you’re tired and overwrought—’
‘You bet I am! Friend dies, I get upset – that really makes me a basket case, doesn’t it? Well, go on, Doctor Freud. Because once a loony, always a loony in your eyes,’ I raged, getting to my feet. ‘I’m going to bed.’
He stood up and held me by the arms, looking at me intently.
‘Cathy, don’t. Tell me what’s
really
making you so unhappy.’
‘I’m frightened, Chris, that’s why I’m unhappy – desperately unhappy. She’s dead – Ellie’s dead, and she was the same age as me. And I thought she would beat it.’
He shook me slightly. ‘No, you didn’t. None of us did. We’ve been playing a game of let’s pretend for years so as not to upset her. But there’s no reason to be frightened, honey. It’s not an omen that you’re going to die. These terrible things just … happen.’
Beneath my misery and anger I knew he was right, but just because he was calm and rational didn’t mean everything was all right. It wasn’t. I was scared, yes, but not just of dying.
There was something else. Something very wrong. Something that gnawed at my gut like a restless rat, only I didn’t know what it was, couldn’t put it into words, and if I said it was ‘a feeling’, it would simply confirm Chris’s fears that my depression was back.
Eloise had been ill for five years, her cancer diagnosed six months after her twin daughters were born. What she had confidently assumed was a milk lump was an aggressive tumour. At first she had conventional treatment: surgery, chemotherapy. But the lump in her amputated left breast refused to be vanquished. It reappeared in the right one, and Eloise fled into a fairy tale, a story she wove in a defence against the doctors whose grave faces terrified her every time she kept her hospital appointments.
It didn’t work. So she stopped going for check-ups. Instead, she read dozens of self-help books, which told her the disease was rooted in her own anger and that if she exorcised the past fury from her mind, she would recover. She went to faith healers, visited spas in Europe where the water and the treatments promised miracles. She created her own sanctuary of denial, believing she could cure herself with coffee enemas and green tea. And the rest of us – her husband, her mother, her closest friends – the rest of us, to our shame, let her believe it. Crippled by pity, afraid to puncture
her fragile sense of hope, we kept silent about her increasingly irrational routines, her avoidance of scans, doctors, hospitals. We allowed ourselves to think that keeping her spirits up was more important than insisting on proper treatment.
And for five years she seemed invincible. Still beautiful, still vibrant and full of energy, she convinced herself – hell, she almost convinced us – that she would beat the cancer, that she would live.
Of course, she was wrong.
I went up to bed, leaving Chris to lock up and make sure the fire was out, but before I slept I pulled out my bedside drawer and immediately her scent floated softly into the room. I opened the little silk purse, impregnated with the perfume Ellie had loved, and gently drew out the beaded bracelet her mother had given me to accompany the necklace I’d been wearing earlier. Without waiting for Chris who, I thought sourly, would have given me a lecture on being morbid, I drifted off to sleep with Eloise’s enamelled runes clasped close in my hand.
I wish I hadn’t. Because I slid into the mist-edged landscape
that I knew only too well would haunt me, and it had held me in its thrall for too long already. Whenever I felt my mind blackening, my thoughts darkening, I knew I had to hold on tight to my sanity. And bad dreams, nightmares that were almost Gothic in their horror, were often the first sign that my depression was returning.
In my cloudy dream I stood on a seashore. I was very small and distant, looking out toward the ocean; the night was dark and starless but there was a weak moon and, as I watched, a shadowy form pushed a wheeled stretcher across the sand with slow stateliness. Beyond this figure, shrouded in a long hooded robe, lay a calm sea rimmed with silvered moonlight, and I saw that on the stretcher lay a coffin.
The coffin was open, lined with white silk, and the body inside was my father’s. His gaunt, cancer-ravaged profile was suddenly bathed in a deathly pale glow as the cloud and mist cleared and then, to my left, fire erupted from countless chimneys I hadn’t seen until now.
I knew, because I first had this dream twenty years ago when my father died, that these were charnel houses, dozens of them, littering the rocky cliffside. Back in the Middle Ages these places had been used as repositories for dead bodies and bones; but in my nightmare they blazed with burning horror, infernos promising a passage to hell.
I also knew, though, as my father’s corpse made its inexorable progress towards the furnaces, that its eventual destination did not lie in those flames, but across the black stillness of the sea. My father was going somewhere else, pushed by the hooded boatman, the guardian of the underworld, who would ferry him across to the land of the dead.
I woke up, my heart racing, my head pounding. I remembered my dad’s death, his cremation, how I would dream for months afterwards of his slow, stately passage over the sands; how I would sometimes dream that I went downstairs in my parents’ house to find my father grotesquely hunched up in the fireplace, half alive, half dead. I would wake, shaking and shouting for my mother, until Chris put his arms around me, hugged and shushed me until I calmed down and I would sob on his shoulder as he gently soothed me.