And Mother Makes Three. Liz Fielding

it would be Bron’s turn.

      But with the ink scarcely dry on her degree Brooke had been offered the kind of job that only came along once in a lifetime.

      ‘You do see, Bron?’ she’d said, with that winning smile. ‘I just can’t let this go.’ Well, of course she’d seen. It would have been unreasonable... ‘And you’re so good with Mother. I couldn’t do what you do for her. She’s comfortable with you.’

      But she loves you best. She hadn’t said it out loud, but she’d thought it, known it to be true. It was so much easier to love someone who was beautiful, successful. Loving the daughter who saw you day in, day out, struggling with pain, at your most vulnerable, was not so easy.

      So, she had never had a life—or, at least, nothing that her sister would have called a life. No career, no holidays, no adult relationshp with a man. If it hadn’t been for a surfeit of champagne on her eighteenth birthday, coupled with a determination not to be the last girl in the sixth form to taste the forbidden delights of the flesh, she would probably have been that saddest of things: a twenty-seven-year-old virgin.

      Probably? Who was she kidding? Who was interested in a woman whose life was devoted to nursing an invalid mother? A five-foot-eleven-inch woman, all feet and elbows, whose life was devoted to nursing an invalid mother?

      And as her peer group had left town, gone to university, married, moved away, what little social life she’d been able to maintain in the early years had gradually dwindled away to visits from her mother’s friends, women who ran the WI and the Mother’s Union and did good works and were kind. But there was precious little fun. No one her own age.

      Short of dragging the milkman in from the street and having her wicked way with him, she didn’t stand a chance.

      Her reflection in the hall mirror suggested that even the milkman would have thought twice. Her hair, which she’d hacked off when she was ten years old and sick to death of everyone saying she looked so like her pretty sister but... hadn’t been near a hairdresser in the last terrible six months. She’d stuck it up in a bun for the funeral and it made her look nearer forty, and with an impatient little tug she pulled out the pins and let it fall to curl untidily around her shoulders.

      Her skin, which until a week ago had had the pallid complexion of someone who spent too little time outdoors, was now suffering from the effects of too much sudden exposure to sunlight. She had told herself that the lawn had to be perfect, the borders weeded and neat for the funeral. Her mother had loved her garden, would have hated anyone to see it so neglected. At least that was. what she’d told herself. In truth, without her mother to care for, she had simply felt useless, unneeded...

      She pulled a face at herself. ‘Feeling sorry for yourself, Bronte Lawrence?’ Then she laughed. ‘Talking to yourself, too? That desperate, hmm?’

      She glanced at the mail where she had dumped it on the hall table that morning. Condolence cards mostly. She picked them up, sorting through them as she walked through to the kitchen. Then she stopped. Tucked in amongst the cards was a letter carefully addressed in a round childish hand. Miss B Lawrence, The Lodge, Bath Road, Maybridge. She eased open the flap, glanced through the letter and then, a frown creasing her forehead, sat on one of the wooden kitchen chairs and read it again, more slowly.

      Dear Miss Lawrence,

      It is my school sports day on Friday, June 18th and I am writing to ask if you could possibly come.

      So formal. Bron frowned. So polite.

      When I told my friend Josie that you were my mother she didn’t believe me and now all the girls in my class are saying I made it up...

      At this point the careful formality lapsed, the neat handwriting wavered and there was a smudge that looked as if a tear had dropped on the page and been quickly dashed away. Bron’s hand flew to her throat as she continued reading.

      ...made it up about having a famous mother and everyone is making fun of me. Even Miss Graham, my head teacher, doesn’t believe me and that’s not fair because although I break things, I never tell lies so will you please come...

      The please had been heavily underscored.

      ...so they’ll know I’m telling the truth? I know you’re really busy saving the rainforest and the poor animals and I don’t want to be a nuisance and if you would just do this I wouldn’t ask anything ever again, I promise

      And it was signed:

      Your loving daughter, Lucy Fitzpatrick

      Then:

      PS You won’t have to see Daddy because I put the letter about sports day in the bin so he doesn’t know about it.

      Then:

      PPS I don’t suppose you know that my school is Bramhill House Lower School in Farthing Lane, Bramhill Parva.

      And then:

      PPPS 2 o’clock.

      Bron turned over the envelope, for a moment wondering if she’d misread the name, opened a letter addressed to someone else.

      No. The handwriting might be that of a child but it was clear enough. Miss B Lawrence. Bronte Lawrence. So what on earth...? Then the penny dropped. ‘...a famous mother...saving the rainforest...’ The letter wasn’t meant for her, but for her sister. It was an easy enough mistake to make. It had happened fairly frequently in the days when they had both lived at home but it was a long time since anyone had written to her sister at this address.

      But she still didn’t understand.

      Brooke had never had a baby. This must be from some poor child who had no mother, who had seen Brooke on the television and had fallen under her spell. Well, didn’t everyone?

      She read the letter again. ‘Dear Miss Lawrence.’ If it hadn’t been so desperately sad it would have made her smile—as if anyone would write to their mother in such a way. And the idea of her sister as a mother, now that was funny!

      She read it again. For heaven’s sake, how could Brooke have had a child without any of them knowing? How could she have kept the fact hidden all these years, because it must have been years—the careful lettering had to have been the work of a child of eight or nine years old.

      Yet even as she was discounting the possibility, her busy brain was doing the mental arithmetic, working out where her sister had been eight or nine years before. She would have been twenty, or twenty-one—and at university.

      Bron read the address at the top of the letter. The Old Rectory, Bramhill Bay. Bramhill was on the south coast, just a few miles from her sister’s university. Then she shook her head. The whole idea was ridiculous. Impossible.

      She went upstairs, changed out of her black dress and into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, tied her hair back with an elastic band. Then she picked up the letter from the dressing table, where she had dropped it.

      During her third year Brooke hadn’t come home after Easter even though their mother had been going through a crisis, had been asking for her. And Easter hadn’t been much fun for any of them. Brooke hadn’t been feeling well, had moped about complaining about feeling cold all the time, wrapped up in a huge baggy sweater, eating practically nothing.

      Bron sat on the bed, her skin prickling with foreboding. Easter. After that she’d stayed away, pleaded fieldwork that she hadn’t been able to put off. Then after her finals she’d been offered a chance to take part in some project in Spain. Not that they’d had any postcards from her. She’d be too busy, Mother had said.

      And she hadn’t been exactly tanned when she’d come back on a flying visit, high on her first-class honours and the offer of a dream job with a television company famous for its natural history programmes. She’d spent the next two months on some Pacific island and, naturally photogenic, had been an instant hit with viewers. After that the visits had been few and far between.

      Hand to her mouth, she read the letter through again. It was polite, formal even, for a little girl at a primary