The Impossible Truths of Love, page 1
PRAISE FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE TRUTHS OF LOVE
“WONDERFUL. I read The Impossible Truths of Love by Hannah Beckerman in one gulp. The intrigue at this book’s heart genuinely ‘got’ me.”
—Marian Keyes
“Hannah Beckerman’s writing is utterly superb: so finely crafted. I was gripped from the start and couldn’t put it down. I LOVED this book and will be recommending it to everyone.”
—Ruth Jones, author of Never Greener and writer / star of Gavin and Stacey
“This is an accomplished, moving, and deeply felt novel. I found myself thinking of it during the days and savouring it as I read it. It’s affecting, elegiac, and highly relatable. Hannah Beckerman is the real deal.”
—Alex Michaelides, author of The Silent Patient
“A page turner of a story, deeply felt, finely woven, and sharp as a tack about the unspoken conflict and isolation within families, as well as the lengths people can be driven by both love and loss. It made me think too about the nature of memory; about what exactly we own and what we assume or even imagine. It’s an unflinching book and all the better for it.”
—Rachel Joyce
“So beautifully written, involving and utterly heartbreaking.”
—Rosamund Lupton
“Masterfully written and hugely powerful.”
—Adam Kay
“This is a beautiful and heartbreaking novel about loss, family and grief.”
—Kate Mosse
“Skilfully entwining the private lives of mother Annie and daughter Nell, The Impossible Truths of Love is not only a story of love, but also of duty, character, identity. You will turn the pages of this rich and moving novel with a full heart.”
—Louise Candlish
“Powerful, beautiful and exquisitely written”
—Joanna Cannon
“A bold and moving story of tangled family lives, the awful things that parents do to compensate for grief and the way despite all efforts, the truth comes out. Poignant, dark and horrifyingly plausible.”
—Amanda Craig
“A heartfelt story of secrets, past trauma, sorrow and love, The Impossible Truths of Love explores the true meaning of tangled family ties – impossibly tender.”
—Lucy Atkins
“Utterly beautiful, desperately moving. This book is a finely crafted emotional powerhouse that will keep you up all night, desperate to discover what happens.”
—Kate Hamer
“A gripping mystery about one ordinary family and a devastating secret. This story is compassionate, beautifully written, and had me hooked from the start.”
—Louise Hare
“This is such a beautiful book. Moving, poignant, and compassionate, it forces the reader to consider how far they would go to protect the ones they love.”
—Louise O”Neill
“Beautifully written, emotionally charged story of family and secrets that had me hooked to the end.”
—Dreda Say Mitchell
“A fast-paced family story... I couldn’t put it down.”
—Cathy Rentzenbrink
ALSO BY HANNAH BECKERMAN
The Dead Wife’s Handbook
If Only I Could Tell You
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Hannah Beckerman
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542029520
ISBN-10: 154202952X
Cover design by Emma Rogers
Cover illustration by Jelly London
For Adam and Aurelia, who make life infinitely happier:
Oh, the places we’ll go . . .
CONTENTS
START READING
PROLOGUE
NOW
THEN
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FOUR MONTHS LATER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
PROLOGUE
The baby in the cot beside her cries, shattering the silence.
The woman looks down into the crib, at the infant’s crumpled face and scarlet cheeks, at its curled fingers and jerking limbs, and her heart tightens like a clenched fist.
There is a part of her that wishes she could disappear, take nothing with her. It is a weight of yearning so strong, as though something is pressing down hard on her lungs, squeezing the air out of them like the last gasps of a spent balloon. But she does not know where she could go, to whom she could turn. There is no one she can trust. She has learnt the consequences of telling people what she knows, how she feels. She dare not say more.
The baby howls and the noise is like a shard of glass piercing her thoughts. She lifts the baby out of the crib, jiggles it up and down, and although she knows this is what she must do, the action does not seem to belong to her. There is a sensation of having slipped outside her own body, of hovering on the periphery of the scene, watching herself perform this millenniaold act but feeling no connection to it.
The noise emerging from the baby is so shrill, so demanding, that it penetrates every pore of the woman’s skin. She has to stop herself from fleeing the room, because she knows there is nowhere for her to go, nowhere to hide. There is no escape from the situation in which she finds herself. Instead, she puts the baby back in its crib, drapes a thin cotton sheet over its body. The baby looks up at her, eyes wide with disbelief that it has been returned to a place it has no wish to be, its cries filled with such need, such desire, the woman feels it may leach all the oxygen from the air and suffocate them both.
Love. She knows what this child needs is love. But whatever love she once may have possessed seems to have leaked out of her, like heat from a poorly insulated window, and she does not know how to capture it, bring it back.
The woman glances at the door, imagines herself walking towards it, through it, in search of a truth that is etched on her heart. But she knows it is impossible, that there is no one who will help her, no one who believes what she says. Instead, she sinks down on the bed, wraps the duvet tight around her and pulls a pillow over her head to muffle the sound.
In the crib beside her, the baby’s cries accelerate.
Beneath the duvet, the events of the past three months spool through the woman’s mind like a film in slow motion she has no desire to view but from which she cannot avert her eyes.
The moment of realisation. The disbelief on their faces. The impotent fury. The feeling that something is tearing apart in her chest that she fears may never be healed.
The baby wails and the woman’s heart pounds.
Gripping the edge of the duvet, she tries to hold on to the hope that one day someone will believe her, and will help put right this unforgiveable wrong.
NOW
His breath smells tired, musty, like air that has been trapped in a room for too long.
Nell leans towards her father’s sleeping face. ‘Dad?’
She waits for an answer, to feel the whisper of his words on her ear. But there is nothing except a slow, laborious inhalation, followed by a thin wisp of air wheezing through his parched lips.
From the corridor outside she hears a nurse calling for a colleague, a telephone ringing, the squeaking wheels of a gurney being trundled across the grey vinyl floor. Nell glances along the row of identically furnished beds, the uniform white sheets, blue polyester curtains and brown melamine cupboards reminding patients not to get too comfortable, not to stay too long.
Under the stiff white hospital sheets, her dad’s body is still, his eyes closed, his skin bleached of colour. Hollowedout cheeks sink into his face like the craters of volcanoes. Above his bed, his name is written in thick, blue, delible ink on a whiteboard she knows must have been wiped clean countless times before: ‘William Hardy (Bill)’.
Panic crackles inside Nell’s chest. She cannot understand how he can have deteriorated so quickly. Five days ago he had been sitting in the dark brown armchair overlooking the small front garden of Nell’s childhood home, instructing her to stop fussing and get
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to stay over? If I get up and leave early, I can miss all the rushhour traffic.’
‘Honestly, love, there’s no need. I don’t want you getting up at the crack of dawn. I’ll see you next weekend.’
Nell had nodded and kissed his cheek, told him she would visit again next Sunday.
As she had pushed open the kitchen door to say goodbye to her mum, Nell had found her leaning against the stainless steel sink, a saucepan in one hand, shaking her head, confusion pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘I can’t for the life of me think what I’m doing with this.’ Nell had taken the saucepan from her, put it away in the cupboard next to the oven, wrapped an arm around her mum’s shoulder.
Four months since the diagnosis of dementia and still Nell is shocked, heartbroken, every time she witnesses the slippage in her mum’s mind, every time she watches her stumble from the present to some unknown place in the past or future none of them are able to follow.
Now, sitting by her dad’s hospital bed, Nell wishes she had stayed last Sunday night in spite of his protestations. They could have had the whole evening together. Nell does not know now whether there will be any more evenings at home with her father.
It has been only a couple of hours since Laura telephoned to say that their father had been admitted to hospital. Cancelling her students for the last seminar of the day, Nell had not dared imagine the worst. She had convinced herself that perhaps it was nothing more than a precautionary admission, that perhaps her mum had just needed a break. It is only now, sitting by his bedside, watching a saline drip feed into the back of his hand, another delivering morphine into a vein at the crook of his elbow, that she acknowledges the falsity of hope.
Her dad’s eyelids flicker and Nell tightens her fingers around his skeletal hand, which was once solid and strong. His eyes open slowly, cautiously, as if he is peeking out from behind closed curtains, unsure of what he might find. They slide from right to left, and when they land on Nell his desiccated lips inch towards a smile.
‘Hello, love.’ The words are hoarse, scratching their way free from his throat.
‘Hey, Dad. How are you feeling?’ She knows it is a rhetorical question. She can see the answer for herself, but everything she wants to say is trapped beneath the rubble of her anxiety and she cannot find the words to set it free.
‘Oh, you know . . .’ Deep, hacking coughs interrupt him and he turns his head to one side, tries to clear whatever is in his lungs, but does not appear to have the strength to lift himself from the mattress.
Nell slides a hand under his back, is shocked to feel the angularity of his shoulder blades jutting out like stunted angel wings beneath the blue cotton of his pyjamas. As she helps him onto his side, she feels the vibrations in his chest, disease rattling through him in an unforgiving hurry, and it seems perverse to her that here is a man who was once renowned for hitting the bell on the High Striker at every school fete, winning her the biggest teddy each year, and yet now it is she who is lifting his body from the mattress of a hospital bed.
The coughing subsides and Nell lays him back down, his clavicles rising like desert ridges from the dry parchment of his skin. She notices the change in the colour of his flesh, now tinged with yellow, like oncewhite bed linen that has not been replaced for years.
‘Work okay? How long are you going to keep me waiting for that Nobel Prize?’ His lips twitch in a poor imitation of the smile that had once, not so long ago, illuminated his face.
Nell tucks the sheet back round him, pushing the loose edges under the mattress. It has been a running joke between them ever since she undertook her degree in Physiological Sciences at Oxford University. Seventeen years later, as an Associate Professor in stem cell therapies at UCL, the joke is still going strong. For the first time, Nell wonders whether it is not meant entirely in jest, whether her dad – who has worked all his life with his hands, crafting furniture from wood, and who has never been ashamed to confess that Nell’s career is like another language to him – actually believes that one day it may happen. And the thought that he might have such faith in her, that he may believe her capable of such greatness, causes a chasm to open up in her chest. ‘I’m working on it. You’d have to buy a new suit for the ceremony though.’ She can hear her attempt at levity but her voice seems to have been flattened by the truth.
He closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep. Nell watches him, strokes the back of his hand, waits to see if he will wake. A nurse stops at the end of the bed, offers Nell a sympathetic smile. Nell watches as the nurse studies the clipboard hanging on the end of the bed frame, as she walks towards the drip stand, looks at the bag of morphine hanging from it and checks the medical notes before tapping some numbers into the small electronic monitor. She smiles at Nell once more before heading to the next cubicle.
Nell sits in silence next to her father’s sleeping body, watching the rise and fall of his shrunken chest. Time seems to lose all sense of itself, as though the world’s clocks have been suspended and all Nell can do now is wait. Around her, the ambient noise of the hospital hums: beeping monitors; the murmur of voices; deep, guttural coughs from elsewhere on the ward.
‘He’s sleeping again then?’
Nell turns, sees her sister, Laura, standing behind her, still in her work uniform – navy blue trousers and matching tunic – which could easily have her mistaken as a member of hospital staff. ‘The nurse just came and fiddled with his morphine. I don’t know if she increased it a bit?’
‘Possibly. It’s all just about keeping him comfortable at this stage.’
At this stage. Nell knows that Laura will have witnessed this scene hundreds of times in the residential home where she works as a care assistant, but it is a new situation for Nell and she does not trust herself to speak without her voice fracturing.
‘Look, I don’t want to rush you but Mum wants a bit of time with Dad by herself before visiting hours finish.’
‘Of course. Where is she?’
‘In the coffee shop with Clare. Clare’s getting a bit . . .’ Laura thinks for a moment, as if searching for a word that is both truthful and tactful to describe their older sister. ‘. . . impatient.’
Nell glances down at her watch and then back at Laura. ‘Just a couple of minutes more?’ She sees a glimmer of something – sympathy or apprehension, she is not sure which – flicker behind her sister’s eyes.
‘I don’t know. Clare was quite insistent.’
Nell hesitates. She has faced Clare’s insistence enough times not to want to make Laura the gobetween. ‘I promise I won’t be long. Then I’ll come and get Mum. There’s still nearly an hour until visiting time’s over.’
Laura takes a deep breath, her wide shoulders inching up and then down again. Laura’s tall, sturdy frame is so similar to their mum’s – so different from Nell’s petite build – that her mum and her sisters might have been cast from the same mould. ‘Okay. We’re in Costa, on the ground floor.’
Nell nods and watches her walk out of the ward. She wonders how it is possible that seven months ago both her parents seemed to be in good health, and yet now her father is lying in a hospital bed while her mother struggles to remember events from one day to the next.
She turns back to her dad, studies his pale features, his face diminished as though all the buoyancy has been sucked from his cheeks.
His fingers tighten around her hand and his eyes open. ‘Nell? What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at work?’
Nell swallows against the narrowing of her throat. She shakes her head, reminds herself that it is the morphine making him confused. ‘It’s Friday evening. I’ve finished work for the week.’
He drifts off again, the skin around his knuckles puckered beneath her fingers, veins rising from the back of his hand like a sequence of river deltas. When he finally opens his eyes, he looks at her with an expression she has never seen before: something at once both troubled and urgent.
