Cover

Dedication

For Chus, with all my love

Epigraph

Who can stop grief’s avalanche once it starts to roll?

EURIPIDES, Medea

Prologue

It’s odd because everyone always calls her beautiful. Her beauty has become a fact; it has been said enough times for any doubt to have been forgotten. But the first time I saw her in the park all those years ago, I have to say she didn’t strike me that way; her beauty took a while to floor me. She was small with wispy blonde hair and pale blue veins that ran down her temples. She had dark bags under her dark eyes – which I know is just called parenting – and from a certain angle her freckled nose looked like someone had given her a good punch. She had a peculiar way of looking at you from the corners of those big dark brown eyes. And she blinked too much. All in all, she struck me as an anxious sort of person. No, I wouldn’t have called her beautiful at all. Not then.

I’d been late picking Annie up from nursery and had found my daughter sitting alone on the bench underneath the empty coat hooks, holding a wooden lollipop stick with a scrunched-up piece of red tissue stuck on to the end.

‘Darling, sorry I’m late,’ I said sitting down next to her, glad to get my breath back. ‘What have you made?’ I asked, looking at the lolly stick in her hand. Karl was better at this sort of thing than me; every shite offering they brought home from school he marvelled at as if the kids were little Leonardos. Left to his own devices, the house would look like one of those hoarder’s places you see on TV, full of clay rubbish and splodges of paint on crinkled paper.

‘It’s a poppy.’

Of course it was. Remembrance Day was coming up and Annie’s nursery never missed a chance to get creative. ‘That’s lovely! Do you know why you’ve made it? Who is it for?’ I might be late, forget carol concerts and barbecue days, but my God, I do a bit of educating when I can.

She looked up at me and passed me the lolly stick. ‘For you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean, why have you made it? Who is it for?’

‘It’s for remembering,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’ She was a genius, my child. ‘Remembering who?’

She had no idea. She shook her head, her cherubic curls bouncing this way and that. Not for the first time I marvelled that such a sweet being came from me.