Daphne by Justine Picardie

girl, who accepted the need for a good grounding; and when I got into Cambridge, I knew it would make my mother happy, because she'd studied English there and remembered it with affection. She had just retired by then, and once I'd started at college, it was as if she decided that I was in a safe place, and she allowed herself to leave me, very quietly, in death, as in life. She died in her sleep, the doctor told me. It was in the early hours of a Monday morning; and I'd spoken to her on the phone just a little while previously, as we always did on Sunday evening, it was part of the new routine we'd established since I'd started at Cambridge.
    'Are you feeling OK?' I said to her, towards the end of the phone call, because she sounded tired, and her voice was slightly slower than usual.
    'I'm fine,' she said, 'don't worry. I've just got a little headache.'
    It was a brain haemorrhage, the doctor told me. She was in bed asleep, he said, so she wouldn't have felt anything. But I couldn't help wondering if he just told me that, to make me feel better, which it didn't. I imagined her brain filling with blood, and her lying there, awake, but unable to move or speak; silenced, in that silent flat . . .
    Afterwards, my tutor at Cambridge said to me, 'If ever you need to talk about it, come and see me, OK?' I nodded, but I wasn't sure what the 'it' was; it was too enormous to be reduced to such a small word, or any words at all, so talking wasn't really an option. My mother was dead, and I was alone in the world, which was an embarrassment and an inconvenience to others, as well as cataclysmic to me. I dealt with this situation by not dealing with it; so that the awfulness of 'it' was put away in a box, leaving me to get on with each day, though getting on meant staying put in the place that my mother believed would be safe for me. If anyone asked how I was coping, I'd say, 'I'm taking each day as it comes.' And eventually, they stopped asking, and those days turned into weeks, and months, and now it's three years since my mother died, and here I am . . .
    'I am here,' I just typed into my laptop in the attic. 'Is anybody there?' I thought about sending it as an email to everyone in my address book: my old tutor, my current one, my scattered school friends, and so on. Actually, 'and so on' is a euphemism. My computer address book is pitifully sparse, because I've lost touch with most of the girls I knew at school, apart from one who's teaching English in Prague, and none of them are living in the area where we grew up.
    As for the people I knew at university: well, there were no proper boyfriends, no lovers, not until that astonishing night when I first slept with Paul. But I did have two close friends, both of them studious, bookish girls like me, and about the time I got married, one of them, Jess, moved to America, on a scholarship to an Ivy League college, and the other, Sarah, went back home to Edinburgh, to do teacher training. I could ring them or email them or write, I know, and sometimes I do, but less and less, because neither of them was convinced that I was doing the right thing in marrying Paul; both of them said, in the gentlest of ways, that they thought it was far too soon, that I should have waited. 'I understand why you want to get married,' Jess said to me, 'and I also understand why it might seem you need to get married - to feel safe, to have a home, all those things that other people might take for granted. But why don't you see how it goes with Paul, before actually marrying him?'
    'I love him,' I said, as if that were as simple as that. And I did think it was simple at the time, but it's only now that I've realised that loving someone isn't enough; that it's not enough to make everything safe and secure.
    I haven't said this to Jess; I haven't really told her or Sarah anything about what's been going wrong with Paul. It's not that I used to tell them everything - I never talked to them about my mother's death, I