Recipes for Melissa (30 page)

Suggestions: pureed, cooked carrot; broccoli; cooked apple, pear; mashed banana + avocado is fab too (can’t remember if this freezes well!). You can also freeze cooked dinners into little cubes once baby is weaned but DO NOT ADD SALT to these meals.

Happy freezing…

Eleanor had wanted it to be Max who held her hand at the end. But it was not. Laying in the hospital bed she kept going over the book – handed to the lawyer now – in her head. Over and over. All the tips and the recipes and the letters and the secrets. And she couldn’t quite remember what she had written and what she had not.

‘Is he on his way? My husband?’

‘He’s on his way.’ The nurse was kind and sat right by the bed holding on tight to her hand. ‘They’ve paged him. His mother is picking up Melissa and he’s on his way.’

Eleanor realised that it was her fault. Leaving it all too long. Too late.

‘I need to speak to him. To my husband,’

‘Yes I know. Shhh now. You need to rest.’

The nurse watched closely as Eleanor winced. ‘We need to give you something stronger for that.’

‘No. I need to stay awake. I need to speak to my husband.’

Eleanor closed her eyes, furious with herself. She was trying to remember if in the baby section, she had warned Melissa about salt? Had she put that in? Would Melissa know this? Would somebody else think to tell her? Had she ever told Max that he was not to put salt in a baby’s food?

The secret pages. Were they still in? Or had she taken them out?

And the test results. Where would they go now? Some filing cabinet?

‘Do you have children, nurse?’

‘Two boys. You?’

‘A daughter. Melissa.’ She kept her eyes closed but could feel the bed moving. Drifting.

‘Shhh. You really need to rest.’

‘I’m afraid she will never forgive me for something. My Melissa.’

Eleanor felt the nurse’s hand smoothing her hair back from her face, over and over.

‘Of course she will.’

‘You think so?’

The stroking of her hair was soothing and Eleanor was thinking of different hair. Melissa sitting up in bed, chin on her knees. Warm and golden brown hair in a ponytail, reaching out to feel the hair, so warm and silky in her hands that it made her smile.

‘Will you tell them I love them very much?’

‘Of course I will.’

38

MELISSA – 2011

Anyone who has ever waited for a test result that could change their life will know that there is only one thing worse – and that is watching someone you love waiting for a test result that could change their life.

Sam and Max drove together to collect Melissa from Cornwall after she sent them a text telling them simply and suddenly that she was so very sorry she had run away.

And she needed them.

She told them later, standing in the same kitchen where her mother had once been baking and innocently brushed flour from her jumper, that she had decided to have a breast cancer gene test. Sorry. That’s why she ran away. She had suddenly decided that she needed to know one way or the other, given her mother’s history. She did not tell them the truth. About the baby. About the three pregnancy tests from the corner chemist’s which had each produced a clear blue line.

Melissa had gone to Cornwall, imagining that it might be kinder to leave Sam. To set him free of this and to make sure he would never be in her father’s shoes. It was the moment she realised that love is about the person you love and not your own happiness. She could give up the option of motherhood also – for keeps. She was young and ambitious and could throw herself into her career instead. She didn’t even have to have the gene test. If she wasn’t to become a mother, she couldn’t pass it on. She would simply have scans every year. She could take the contract in London. Try a job abroad.

And then just two days later the whole world had changed. She was leaving Cornwall with the man she would always call her father driving her car in convoy behind while she sat alongside Sam, secretly carrying his child already. It must have happened in Cyprus. She had an upset stomach for a few days which must have affected the pill. And even this early and even though she was still quite young and was afraid and would not have chosen it this way, she suddenly felt that it was no longer about her and knew for the first time exactly how her mother had felt in those final weeks. And it completely broke her heart into pieces. Because the only thing which thundered through Melissa’s head, over and over as she sat in her bubble and looked out on a different world, was that her child must not have this thing.

Fifty, fifty.

Heads.

Tails.

Melissa made another very difficult call. She decided not to tell Sam about the baby until she had the gene test result. Though she had decided she would have the child, whatever the results, she wanted at least one of them to have the small chance of hearing the news in a better way. Having a child with a person you loved, even by accident, was supposed surely to be a wondrous thing. It was not meant to feel like this.

To speed things up, Melissa decided to pay for a private referral. She informed her GP, using the same clinic and labs that the NHS recommended. Just hopefully a little faster. Around four weeks. She saw a genetics counsellor twice who referred her also, despite Melissa’s initial resistance, to a grief counsellor.

‘There is a lot of unfinished business,’ was what she said after their first session. ‘How about we deal with it, Melissa?’

The genetics counsellor also made inquiries about her mother’s oncologist to see if the original test result could be traced. It was a long shot but would apparently greatly help the accuracy of Melissa’s test if they could know what her mother’s had revealed. James Hall the lawyer was using the book from Eleanor as evidence of consent – that Melissa’s mother wanted her to know the result. Melissa went along with all of this on the strict condition that Max was not to be told that her mother had secretly taken the test. Her mother had carried a lot to spare him this distress. It would not be right to tell him now.

And so they all faced four long weeks of waiting – each coping very differently but with the same exaggerated pretence at normality.

Over and over, Melissa apologised to Sam for bolting. For putting him and Max through that. She should have talked to him, she said. Shared. She knew that. But she was just so terribly afraid. All she told him was that the journal included information which suggested there was a stronger chance of a gene fault than anyone had realised.

In response Sam was almost unbearably upbeat. ‘It will be fine. Negative,’ a strategy which was meant kindly but to Melissa seemed somehow to diminish what she was feeling. The terrible fear.
They couldn’t know that it would be fine. She might have to have her breasts cut off. How could that be fine?

And then she would feel terribly guilty and remember that he did not know about the baby; just how much there was at stake now.

‘I’m sorry, Sam. I’m just afraid.’

‘I know.’

Max upped the running. Morning and evening. He took Anna to dinner – their first proper date – and tried very hard not to mention any of this and then ended up spending an hour pouring out his heart.

‘I am so sorry, Anna. All this baggage. You don’t need this. It is selfish and completely insensitive and unfair—’

She had reached out then and suddenly kissed him.

‘I’m sorry.’ She looked as surprised as he did.

‘Goodness. Don’t be.’ Kissing her back.

And she had confessed then, still blushing and awkward, that she was flattered that he trusted her and wanted to share this. Had been drawn to him from their very first meeting and realising how inappropriate this was –
her boss after all
– she had overcompensated by behaving so bonkers. She told him that she got this odd feeling in her stomach whenever she saw him.
Ridiculous, I know – but there it is. Seeing as we’re talking honestly here.

And so there were more dinners and walks and he told her all about Sophie, then went to pick up the gift from Sophie’s gallery which was a painting of him and Melissa on a beach in the rain – in the distance a rainbow of purples and pinks and clashing blues.
A tad sentimental, some might think. Not at all her usual work
– the owner of the gallery had observed
. But there is the foil that the rainbow colours are deliberately wrong. Out of sequence. Rather clever, actually. Yes. You have a rather nice piece there.

Max put the painting on his wall and in the fourth long week of waiting, Anna began to join him running. Max knew then, running alongside her, silent but in rhythm, that if it were not for the cloud hanging over his daughter, he would be happy. Yes. He could actually imagine being happy again.

They could not know – Anna and Max – just how far they would come to run together over the years and decades ahead. Marathon after marathon.

None of this they could yet know. And so Anna would not yet stay overnight at Max’s – too afraid to upset her son – and instead they lay in bed in daylight, long hours after making love because neither of them could bear to get up and go back to the world.

Marcus was in turn a surprise. The shock of Melissa’s circumstance – like a wake-up call. He put in long hours to try to get his business back on track and took up his father’s offer of a bridging loan plus the rental of a flat to get him on his feet. Each of the four Fridays he invited Melissa and Sam for supper with an update on his progress.

While back in her own kitchen, Melissa cooked also – slowly working her way through all of her mother’s recipes. The scones, the Easter biscuits, the soda bread and with it even an attempt at the jam, which though it set too hard that first time was still delicious.

She made the boeuf bourguignon again, serving it this time with rice. And secretly she began drafts of her blog, detailing her efforts and her thoughts. The sense of connection and comfort, using her mother’s treasured mixer and her little box of biscuit cutters.

Not everything went well – but she remembered the advice in the journal.
We bake, we learn, we get better…

And then one day she decided to cook the cupcakes again, nipping to the nearest supermarket for cream cheese and rather dubious out-of-season strawberries for the topping. Melissa creamed the butter and sugar by hand this time, using a wooden spoon. Her mother used to do this sometimes when they were not in a hurry and she liked the sound. The crunch as you pressed the caster sugar against the bowl, coaxing it into the butter. It was on this occasion, reaching for an orange to zest, that something very special happened. So that by the time Sam came home early, with the cakes in the oven, she was sitting on the floor of the kitchen, back against the cupboards, her eyes red.

‘Oh God. Are you alright, Melissa? What’s happened?’

‘No. It’s OK, Sam. Something nice. I remembered something really nice…’

After that Melissa returned to the computer a bit too. She claimed illness for missing the appointment with the London editor and was surprised to be given a second chance. The meeting went better than she could have hoped and so she took the contract, reasoning that it did not matter now that it was only temporary and freelance. She would be giving up work for a bit soon anyway. The baby. And OK – it would mean a new career plan, to have a baby this young, but the beauty of writing was she could work from home some of the time. Freelancing would actually be better.

Through all of this the imperative – to try to stay as positive and as busy as possible. Cooking pretty much every day and sitting up to read her mother’s journal over and over when in the middle of the night she could not sleep and needed to hear her voice.

Sam noticed that she had given up coffee and alcohol but Melissa used the script of a whole new healthy way of living. The worry of this cancer cloud.

The appointment for the result was a Thursday. Sam drove and Max came too although Melissa insisted that her father must wait outside the consulting room.

None of them said a word on the journey.

It was a cold but clear day with a sky so blue that Melissa felt it was somehow much too beautiful. Out of sync.

‘You ready?’ Sam asked as they stood outside the door on the first floor.

‘No.’

Heads. Tails.

She was wondering now whether she should have opted for the results by telephone. ‘Do you want me to ask them to wait a bit? Go for a walk?’

Would it have been worse or better by phone? She couldn’t decide.

‘No.’

Inside finally, they sat side by side, waiting for the counsellor who came through from an adjoining office. She was smiling.

‘The news is good, Melissa.’

It was Sam who made the loud noise. A weird noise which wasn’t a word and wasn’t exactly a cry either.

‘I’m sorry.’ He was embarrassed.

‘Don’t be sorry. It’s a big ask. Waiting for this.’

‘You’re sure?’ Melissa became aware suddenly of the sky again. Through the window. True blue. Not a trick after all. She would remember it always, she told herself – this very blue and very beautiful sky.