Where the Light Gets In Read online

  About the Book

  ‘You know those cracks in your heart, Lorna, where things didn’t work out, but you picked yourself up and carried on? That’s where the fear gets out. And where the light gets in.’

  It was Betty, defiant to the end, who sent Lorna back to Longhampton. If Lorna’s learned one thing from Betty it’s that courage is something you paint on like red lipstick, even when you’re panicking inside. And right now, with the keys to the town’s gallery in her hand, Lorna feels about as courageous as Betty’s anxious little dachshund, trembling beside her.

  Lorna’s come home to Longhampton to fulfil a long-held dream, but she knows deep down, there are ghosts she needs to lay to rest first. This is where her tight-knit family shattered into silent pieces. It’s where her unspoken fears about herself took root and where her own secret, complicated love began. It’s not exactly a fresh start.

  But as Lorna – and the little dog – tentatively open their cracked hearts to old friends and new ones, facing hard truths and fresh promises, something surprisingly beautiful begins to grow around the gallery, something so inspirational even Lorna couldn’t have predicted the light it lets into her world…

  An inspiring, life-enhancing novel that will make you see your life afresh … Fans of Jojo Moyes, Katie Fforde and Lucy Diamond will love it.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  The Cinnamon Trust

  About the Author

  Also by Lucy Dillon

  Copyright

  To Jane Steele, with grateful thanks

  for all the time you gave us

  Prologue

  Betty Dunlop wasn’t scared of death, but then she hadn’t been scared of the Luftwaffe, the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear winter, salmonella, cholesterol, or any of her three varyingly awful husbands.

  Lorna Larkham, though, wasn’t quite so relaxed about it. And the closer death glided towards Betty’s bedside in St Agnes’s Hospice, the faster Lorna’s own heart beat inside her chest, so hard she had to force her legs from twitching, and getting up and running away.

  The carriage clock beside her seemed to have stopped; how could it still be just seven o’clock? Lorna had arrived at six to start her volunteer shift, and the ward sister had intercepted her before she’d even got her jacket off, to warn her that Betty – ninety-three the week before and still roller-set and Ellnetted to the nines – had started to decline overnight.

  ‘We knew something was up when she didn’t ring for her cocoa.’ The nurse put a hand on Lorna’s arm, seeing panic freeze her face. ‘She’s still with us, though. Keep the music going, chat even if she doesn’t reply. Let Betty know she’s not on her own. I’m just down the hall if you need me.’

  Discreetly, Lorna lowered her knitting to check Betty’s hooded eyelids. Knitting had been one of Betty’s hobbies too, something they’d chatted about when she’d first dropped in, to offer an hour or so of company. Lorna always brought her wool bag along with her to the hospice; she found the rhythmic clicks and loops helped to fill the moments when the residents she was sitting with were half there, half not. Familiar noises for many of them, a childhood sound of mothers, aunties, darning and knitting, nattering away. As Lorna worked the rows, something of their characters seeped into the pattern: later, scraps of wool stuck between the needles reminded her unexpectedly of June’s knowing eyes or Mabel’s silk flowers. Betty, she already knew, would always be moss stitch: textured and Kelly green, the clean smell of Pears soap. She was about to turn her work round when an invisible nudge made her glance up.

  Rudy, Betty’s anxious dachshund, was stirring in his basket. Outside, the fat white moon had slipped out from behind a cloud, and the room felt chillier, as if someone had opened a window.

  Lorna’s pulse throbbed in her throat, alive and hot and determined. The music – some bland classical piece chosen by the last nurse – had finished, but Betty hadn’t breathed out.

  Panic tightened a notch in her chest with every hum of the self-levelling bed. Was this it? Was this it? She blinked, searching for clues she didn’t want to see. Lorna had had ‘end of life’ training from the nurses, but she’d never been here before, not for real. The seconds in the room hung – then the sheets over Betty’s shrunken frame rose, and the world carried on. For the time being.

  Lorna let out a breath, a shuddery echo of Betty’s, and gently touched the liver-spotted hand lying on top of the blanket, feeling the skin move under her fingertips. It was soft, and papery. Until quite recently, Lorna hadn’t believed death would ever catch up with Betty. She was so bright-eyed, firmly engaged with life even in the hospice. But last week, they’d talked about Christmas, just gone. Lorna had told her about her surprisingly funny nights in the homeless shelter (more volunteering to avoid her sister Jessica’s in-laws and their competitive board games) and Betty had confided what she’d been doing with her children, Peter, Susie and Rae. Her face had lit up as she described Rae’s delightful Christmas cake and Peter’s smart wool coat, but when Lorna had asked the nurse on duty when they’d called in, Debra had shaken her head. No visitors. Maybe that had been an early sign that Betty was beginning to slip away, like a sandcastle slowly falling back into the lapping tide.

  ‘We’re still here, Betty,’ she said more bravely than she felt. It rattled Lorna, the sense of the outward Betty and her inner self invisibly detaching from each other. ‘Me and Rudy. It’s OK.’

  Betty herself certainly wasn’t afraid of what was coming. Her stories – and she had hundreds of stories – sparkled with careless courage: not just her nights shivering on West End rooftops, firewatching during the Blitz when she was barely older than Lorna’s niece, but afterwards, when she’d married a soldier, upped sticks to Canada, only to ditch the soldier and his fists for an alcoholic Italian chef; then she’d run a bar and sold Avon make-up, had a ‘surprise’ baby at forty-four with a slick lawyer called Herb, moved back to Hendon with his cash when he died. Betty’s life had been one exuberant leap of faith after another, landing on her small feet each time like a cat.

  Lorna watched Betty floating back into the shadows of her memories, and heard that smoky voice in her head. ‘Fear’s good for you, darling,’ she’d laughed, when Lorna blanched at her anecdotes. ‘Shows you where the edges of yourself are.’

  ‘I don’t want to see my edges, thanks,’ Lorna had said, chicken that she was.

  ‘Why not?’ Betty’s eyebrows were magnificent, haughty like Joan Crawford’s. ‘Your edges might not be where you think they are.’

  Lorna flipped through the CDs by the bed. Betty had her nailed. She didn’t know where her edge
s were. In fact, she wondered a lot of things about herself, questions that she’d never ask because there was no one left to answer. Mum gone, Dad gone, and, with that, their little world had closed up behind them, leaving her and Jessica more alone than ever. Who was she meant to be? What traits or weaknesses, already brewing in her blood, might emerge as the years passed and she overtook her parents into middle age and beyond? Questions, and the blankness of never knowing, crept up on Lorna while she was sitting up late on nights like these, when the air swarmed with memories, hers and Betty’s mingling in their shared silence.

  Rudy circled in his basket and laid his head on his paws. Lorna slid Glenn Miller’s big band orchestra into the player. If Betty’s train was departing the station tonight, she’d want something with a bit of swing to take her on to the next destination. She pressed play and picked up her knitting, bracing herself for the last half-hour. Only thirty minutes. It wouldn’t happen on her watch. Betty was too much of a dame for that.

  She knitted and listened, two rows, three rows, four. ‘I can never get moss stitch right,’ Lorna murmured, just so Betty would know she was there. ‘It always goes too lumpy.’ But as the light moved across the room, she looked up and saw immediately something had changed. Betty’s nose and cheekbones were sharpening as her breathing became phlegmy, and a metallic taste began to rise in Lorna’s own throat. She glanced across to the button that would summon the nurse, but then steeled herself. Not yet. She could do this.

  The old lady exhaled deeply, loudly, and Lorna wondered if she was seeing someone in her dreams that warranted a sigh. Someone stepping out of the wailing sirens and broken walls and dusty tea of her youth, where terror made everything vivid and fleeting, and ripe for the taking, right now. Holding out a hand, with a smile.

  ‘Little Brown Jug’ turned into ‘Moonlight Serenade’, Betty’s favourite, and her hand twitched on the sheet. Lorna watched: which of her husbands would come for her? Which would she choose? Were her relatives approaching, her mother and father, a Victorian grandmother? That thought was comforting. That even if you were lying alone somewhere, or in a sterile hospital bed, there’d be familiar faces there, reaching for you with love, wanting to see you again. Yearning for you more than life.

  Something hollowed inside her, dank and cold like a sea cave.

  She rested the knitting on her knee for a moment, forcing herself to stay with the darkness. Lorna didn’t know what her own mother’s last moments had been like, and it haunted her. Whether they’d been peaceful like Betty’s, whether there’d been pain, a struggle for air, regret and panic. It had been a heart attack: Lorna’s father had found Cathy in her studio, surrounded by a pool of her own spilled ink, not blood. And then he’d died too, a year to the day later. Which was either a tragic coincidence, or – if Lorna and Jess were honest with each other – no coincidence at all.

  Rudy lifted his head and whimpered. His ears pulled back, and he turned to her, quivering with fear.

  Lorna realised her eyes were full and wet, and her attention snapped back to the responsibility she had here. The parched gaps in between breaths were getting longer.

  At the start of the month, Betty had been alive enough to talk about her Agatha Christie-like plans for after her death with glee. ‘I’ve put you in my will!’ she’d confided as Lorna had been coiling her long hair under her winter hat, hurrying to catch the night bus. ‘I’m leaving you something to remind you of me.’

  Lorna had protested – there were rules about that and, besides, it wasn’t why she came. But Betty would hear none of it.

  ‘Nonsense. It’s just a little something, and I want you to have it. I’ve no one else to leave it to. It’s just to remind you to be scared once in a while, Lorna.’ And she’d squeezed her gloved hand with determination. A squeeze that brooked no argument.

  Lorna looked down at those fingers now, cold and stiff, all eight rings taken off by doctors, kept safe in a bag by the hospice staff. She’d heard all their tales apart from the ruby one, and she felt a stab of regret that she might never find out why Betty saved it till last. She didn’t want Betty to go, but she’d done all the living she wanted to. It was so quiet, too simple for such a profound moment.

  The moon moved behind the curtain, throwing a softer pool of light into the room, and the music changed again. Lorna’s skin prickled; the air seemed to fill with big-band orchestras and invisible dancers, stepping soundlessly through an ethereal spotlight, swirling in a last dance before the blackout. ‘I’m still here, Betty,’ she whispered, ‘with Rudy,’ then wondered if it was fair to try to keep Betty with her, if she wanted to go.

  She willed herself to be calm, to be a comforting presence, but the fears edged through. What if Betty’s eyes snapped open? What if she tried to speak? What if she needed help that Lorna couldn’t give? Betty, what happened with the Italian chef? Why Montreal? Did loving life more than love make it easier to start again when the romance died, or was there one, one man you never forgot, one man who made every other seem that bit duller?

  Rudy whimpered again, and then gave two short barks. And, her heart scuttling with panic, Lorna cracked.

  She fumbled for the buzzer that would bring the night nurse into the room, gripped it in one hand to be sure, and pressed it as hard as she could. But as the nurse’s footsteps clicked down the hall, followed by another swifter pair, Rudy lay down with his long nose on his paws and let out a low groan that brought tears to Lorna’s eyes.

  Her heart contracted and she longed to throw her arms open to catch the spirits in the room, which she couldn’t see or feel, and beg them to tell her that everything was all right, that everything would be fine, that everyone was still there, just in a different form.

  But she couldn’t. And there would be no answer anyway.

  As Lorna stumbled into the bright light of the corridor, she heard Betty’s voice in her head, husky and alive.

  ‘You know, Lorna, those cracks in your heart, where things didn’t work out quite as you hoped, but you patched yourself up and carried on? That’s where the light gets in.’

  She turned back, and there was a slim shaft of moonlight slipping through the curtains.

  Chapter One

  ‘Here’s to Mum and Dad,’ said Jessica, raising her cup of tea in a toast towards the distant hills. ‘Wherever they are.’

  ‘Mum and Dad.’ Lorna lifted her cup, took a sip and gagged. There had to be at least two sugars in there, and she hadn’t taken sugar in her tea for years.

  Lorna turned to her older sister to ask her if she was trying to make a point about her not being sweet enough, then saw the pensive way she was staring out into the distance, and decided to leave it. It was January, bitterly cold, and it had been quite a hike up from the car park; maybe the sugar wasn’t a bad idea. They still had half a Bakewell tart to finish – Dad’s birthday treat, brought in his honour – and the tea was to remember Mum, drunk out of her china cups with the tiny forget-me-nots, the last survivors from her mum’s mum’s massive china service. Mum had always had two sugars, maybe that was what Jess had been thinking of when she poured it. These small traditions were a bit like the cups, Lorna thought: fragments of a bigger picture. Like her and Jess. The last remnants of a family set that had dwindled, through breakages and carelessness, to just the two of them.

  The wind coming off the hills really was cold. She hugged her parka more tightly around herself, and gazed out over the rolling landscape below them, where orange-cagouled walkers and grey sheep roamed for their entertainment. The walkers were determined and sticking to the winding tracks, but the sheep seemed to be enjoying themselves more.

  Mum would have picked out every tiny detail in this, she thought, and the scene in front of her morphed into one of Cathy Larkham’s trademark pen-and-ink sketches: the stark trees, the hills serrated with paths, snow-dusted at the edges like a Bundt cake, the children wobbling along in bright wellies, the birds and the hopeful dogs, twisting back, watching for a thrown t
ennis ball. And the two women observing it all from a bench, one tall, one small, with their Thermos flask and their box of cake and their matching hats with bobbles. The bobble hats were another memorial touch: knitted by their dad’s mum for a long-ago Christmas, found by Jess while she was emptying the house after he died. Blue for Jess, red for Lorna. Fat pom-poms on each one, bobbing when they moved.

  The first time they’d sat here on this bench, overlooking the British Camp in Malvern, was the wintry day they’d scattered the ashes of Cathy and Peter Larkham, handfuls of ash mingling in the heavy casket in the same way their parents’ lives had mingled, until it was impossible to see where one began and the other ended. In death, so in life. Or possibly the other way around.

  Lorna made an effort to summon her parents in her mind. It was slightly harder every year and it bothered her that she always seemed to start now with their clothes – Mum’s grey linen shirts, her pale arms under the rolled-up sleeves, speckled with freckles; Dad’s green ‘weekend’ jumper that Jess had bought in one of her many efforts to drag him into the twenty-first century. He’d always dressed like a history teacher. Left to himself, Dad would have worn the same navy cords and two checked shirts in rotation for ever, his own school uniform. He dutifully brought out the weekend jumper every time either Jess or Lorna visited, but always with a shirt; the collar poked out of the crew neck as if it was fighting the enforced casualness.

  A thought suddenly occurred to Lorna.

  ‘Jess?’ She turned to her big sister. ‘Did Dad ever say why he wanted to be scattered here with Mum? I know they liked the area but …?’

  Jess was checking her phone – it was supposed to be on silent so they could focus on remembering their parents but Jess had three children with active social lives and a husband who referred every household decision to her, and she got twitchy if her phone didn’t beep for five minutes. ‘I think it was something to do with the view?’

  ‘The view? Why? What’s special about it?’ Lorna scanned the horizon, trying to absorb any special details, any clue from the great beyond, but it was just … a nice view. She couldn’t remember coming here as a family; they’d moved schools whenever Dad did – Brecon, Newcastle, Carlisle – but she couldn’t remember a Significant Moment here in Malvern. The closest they’d been was Longhampton, about thirty miles further west.