excuses he could concoct. These friends of his needed a safe harbour too.
Her parents had always been good at maintaining an outward façade, their public face so different to that behind closed doors. She was sure that some of her father’s colleagues suspected that there was more than met the eye. No-one could be quite as delicate as her mother allegedly was, although they nodded sympathetically when she had to go home early because she had a dizzy spell. It was usually the quarter bottle of vodka in her purse that made her head spin, but most times she would make it through the main course before succumbing to one too many trips to the bathroom.
Mia paused at the nurse’s station. She was outside of visiting hours but hoped for a sympathetic hearing. A bare-faced lie about having been away and rushing back as soon as she could earned her a pat on the shoulder. A kindly nurse ushered Mia into the private side ward her mother was in. She swallowed hard and braced herself before crossing the threshold. Her mother looked small in the bed, propped up stiffly with too many pillows, her plaster-encased leg raised in a sling to keep the weight off it.
She hadn’t seen her since Jamie’s funeral when a furious Nee had shoved her into the back of the car and driven off with her after a visibly drunk Vivian had staggered into a floral display in the crematorium and knocked it over. It had just been another horror in a day of epic shocks and horrors, and Mia had been too distraught to care much. Those who had mattered on the day already knew all her family’s secrets and she didn’t have the energy to care about the opinion of those who hadn’t.
Mia stepped closer and studied her mother, looking for the beauty beneath the swollen eyes and broken veins on her cheeks. Vivian had been a stunner in her heyday, turning all the boy’s heads, including studious, unworldly George Thorpe. He had been totally captivated by her, obsessive and relentless in his pursuit, according to one her mother’s rambling reminiscences. Vivian had only agreed to go on a date with him because he wouldn’t leave her alone and she hoped to let him down gently. He’d been so attentive and flattering that Vivian had been caught up in his image of her as this siren, this creature of myth that was drawing George to his doom.
He had been so unlike her other boyfriends and his outlandish comparisons of her to goddesses and heroines of the past had fed her ego to bursting. Her parents had encouraged the match, glad that their daughter had found a serious, worthy man and not some rake who would fleece her considerable inheritance.
Before she knew it, Vivian was married to George, pregnant and living in a small house that was attached to his junior teaching position at the university. No servants, no parties or holidays while he was busy climbing the academic career ladder. Worse still, not having had a lot of money growing up, George had fastened his grip firmly on her money and tied it up in investments and savings bonds.
Vivian’s new allowance barely cover her regular hair appointments—never mind the shopping sprees she’d been used to. George didn’t understand why she needed so many clothes. Who was she dressing up for? Who was she trying to impress? Terrified that Vivian would be lost to him, he desperately tried to change all the things about her that had attracted him in the first place.
Vivian wasn’t a scholar; she was a beauty. It was all she was, all she knew how to be from a young girl when she had been dressed up and primped and presented to her parents’ friends like a perfect little doll. She didn’t possess much of a personality or wit; no-one had ever had any expectations of her other than as a decoration and Vivian didn’t know how to do anything other than be pretty and spend her time doing all the things that went into making her pretty.
The more paranoid George became, the more distant he grew, and Vivian had no defence against it, having only ever been cossetted and spoilt. She sought solace in her evening cocktails, which soon became lunchtime martinis and then bucks fizz or vodka and orange with breakfast.
She had never bonded with Mia. Suffering from a mild case of the baby blues and not used to being the responsible party in any situation, she had been totally out of her depth. She had never wanted to be bothered with the baby and could only lament at the changes to her body. The other two girls had followed; Kiki less than a year later had been a complete accident—something Vivian made a point of repeating over the years. Nee had followed some three years after. At that point, Vivian had moved to her own room and refused to let George near her again.
She had been a distant figure throughout their childhoods. A succession of housekeepers had kept them clothed and fed and settled into a routine, but there was no-one to kiss a scraped knee or check their homework or soothe them after a bad dream. Vivian had spent more and more time in her room and George had spent more and more time at work. His distance from his wife extending to his girls as he sought solace in his studies. His reputation grew until he had become one of the foremost scholars of ancient Greece in the country.
‘Hello, Vivian,’ Mia said quietly and her mother blinked and tried to focus on the intruder in her room.
‘Who’s that? Alice, is that you?’ Mia moved closer and leaned in so her mother could see it was her daughter and not her own sister.
‘No, it’s Mia; how are you, Mother?’ She rarely called her by that title, her mother preferring Vivian as they grew up. She hadn’t wanted her own age to be judged by that of her children.
‘Oh, Mia, where have you been? Where’s that lovely husband of yours?’
Mia glanced upwards and supressed a shiver. It seemed like Vivian had finally drowned her memory in the bottom of a glass. ‘Jamie’s dead. He died more than two years ago in a car accident, remember?’ The words came out harsher than she intended, and she softened slightly at the confusion on Vivian’s face.
She perched on the edge of the bed and took her mother’s hand. ‘How are you feeling, Vivian? What happened to your leg? Did you take a tumble?’ Her mother started to thrash on her pillow and Mia leaned closer and pressed a hand to her shoulder, trying to still the restless movement.
She watched helplessly as Vivian’s face crumpled and tears spilled over her cheeks. ‘He pushed me; Georgie hates me so, he pushed me, he pushed me,’ she muttered and Mia reared back in shock.
A nurse bustled in at that moment without even a knock on the door frame. She strode over to the bed and fiddled with the drip that was plugged into the back of Vivian’s hand. ‘Pay her no mind, now. Your poor father, it breaks his heart when she comes out with such things. She doesn’t know what she is saying half the time, sees people from the past he reckons. People she hasn’t seen since she was a girl. She calls me Katherine; your father says she was her best friend, but they haven’t seen each other in years. Try not to let it upset you. The doctor says it might just be the shock of the fall.’
Mia tried to gather her wits about her as the nurse rambled on. Was it true what the nurse was saying—that her mother was just talking nonsense? Or had her father somehow been the cause of her accident? It wouldn’t be the first time Vivian had taken a tumble due to the amount of alcohol in her veins and her father had never raised his hand to his wife. Not that she’d even seen. She watched as the nurse fiddled with the gauge feeding the drip on her mother’s hand and Vivian soon began to calm. Her lashes fluttered close across the paper-thin skin of her face and her grip on Mia’s hand slackened.
Mia rose and gathered her bag and jacket, desperate to be out of the blank impersonal room and away from the smell of antiseptic and illness. She briefly considered kissing Vivian’s cheek, but only because she knew the nurse would expect a show of daughterly affection.
Mia was past pretending that all was sweetness and light in the Thorpe family. It was time to stop caring so much about the judgements of strangers. She thanked the nurse for making Vivian comfortable and took her leave. It was time to face the second unpleasant visit on her schedule.
Mia dropped her head wearily onto the kitchen table and knocked it against the wood a few times in frustration. It had been a horrendous day and she knew it wasn’t over yet. Bill placed his hand