Birmingham Friends

Synopsis

Book 2

Anna has always been exceptionally close to her mother, Kate and as a child, was captivated by the stories her mother would tell of her childhood in Birmingham with her best friend, Olivia. Olivia and Kate seemed to have a magical friendship. But when Kate dies, she leaves her daughter a final story, one that this time tells the whole truth of her life with Olivia Kemp. As Anna reads, she is shocked to discover how little she really knew about the mother she felt so close to. With Kate's words of caution ringing in her head, she goes in search of the one woman who can answer urgent questions about her mother's life, and about her own...A remarkable, stirring novel, "Birmingham Friends" perfectly captures the complicated intimacy of female relationships.

ANNIE MURRAY

Birmingham Friends

PAN BOOKS

In fact in almost every family, one sees a keeper, or two or three keepers, and a lunatic.

Florence Nightingale

Prologue

ANNA

Birmingham, 3 August 1981

My mother is dead.

Anna repeated these words to herself, still trying to make it real as they walked along the cemetery path under the dripping trees: rain had fallen briskly after a hot day, clouds piling suddenly across the blue. Smoke was still wafting from the squat chimney of the crematorium. These places removed death so far from you.

But she had seen Kate dead. The day of the Royal Wedding, when the hospital was festooned with red, white and blue, flags waving on the ward TV and everyone carrying on about Diana’s dress. The nurses put a yellow rose between the papery flesh of Kate’s hands. And they prepared Anna for days before by avoiding her eyes, by which she knew for certain Kate was dying. It was obvious anyway. The cancer sucked her down to a tight-skinned puppet, eyes closing against the world. Astonishing that a woman as big as her mother could ever shrink so thin.

She sat quietly touching Kate’s arm for an hour or more after she died, though the moment it happened she knew her mother was gone, absolutely. Mom. Strange and silent. She didn’t know then that the changed form on the bed was more of a stranger than she imagined. Kate was the one person of whose past she thought she could be certain. She had known it the way a child knows the rhythm of a fairy story, secure and unchanging for thirty-four years. Until yesterday. Why couldn’t she have said something before it was too late?

‘Sure you wouldn’t like me to drive you, my dear?’

Anna smiled, squeezing the fleshy arm that was linked with hers. ‘No, I’m fine thank you, Roland. And I’m sure it’s me who should be offering you. You’re the one who’s been of most support to her.’

The chubby cheeks next to her creased into a melancholy expression. Now his hair was so thin on top, Roland’s face seemed even more naked and expressive. ‘Not a lot I wouldn’t have done for the old girl – you know that.’