Chapter Thirteen: Marianne

Poppy's mother arrived on the twelfth of March at ten to six, on the stopping train from Margate, carrying a cake tin, a thermos and a very small suitcase, and looking at the flat in Walthamstow the way a customs officer looks at a bag.

"You've done something with the sofa," she said.

"I've put a blanket on it."

"It's an improvement." Marianne Whitlock set the tin on the table, laid her coat over a chair, folded her scarf into a square and put it on top. She was fifty-eight, small, straight-backed, with a neat grey bob and sea-glass earrings and the stillness of a woman who had spent most of her working life sitting very quietly in rooms where other people shouted. "Many happy returns, darling. Twenty-seven. I can't think where it went."

"Mum."

"I've brought a Victoria sponge. I don't trust the ones from shops. They have an air of having been made to look like cake." She turned on the spot, taking in the room, the drying rack, the lemon magnet on the fridge with the laminated menu under it, which she read from three feet away without comment. "And the radiator?"

"Kevin's fine. He's been very good."

"I should hope so. He's cost you enough."

Poppy hugged her. She smelled of lavender and the sea, as she always did, and was thinner than at Christmas. She stood stiffly in the hug for about two seconds, the way she always did, and then put her hand on Poppy's back and patted it twice, which in Marianne's language was a whole speech.

"Now," said Marianne, drawing back. "What time is he coming?"

---

Theo came at seven, with lilies.

Poppy would remember it afterwards as one of the great comic spectacles of her life. He had changed shirts three times. She had watched him do it on a video call, holding each one up to the camera, and in the end she had told him to wear the blue one and stop. He stood on the doorstep in the blue one, holding a very large bunch of white lilies in a state of terror, and said, "I've got the wrong flowers."

"They're lovely."

"Imogen said lilies were sophisticated. I've since read that they're for funerals."

"Come in," said Poppy, "before you say anything else."

Marianne was sitting at the kitchen table with her hands folded, wearing the expression of a magistrate. She did not get up. She looked at Theo for several seconds, from his shoes to his hair, without hurry and without any visible hostility, and Poppy saw him straighten under it as if a hand had been laid flat against his back.

"Mrs Whitlock," he said. "Theo Ellison. It's a pleasure."

"Ms," said Marianne. "But Marianne will do."

"Marianne. These are for you. They're the wrong flowers."

"They're perfectly good flowers." She took them, held them at arm's length for a moment, and passed them to Poppy. "I'm told you run the company."

"I do."

"I know what it says on your card. I'm asking what you do."

A small pause. Theo glanced at Poppy. She gave him nothing, because she wanted to know what he would say too.

"I try to make sure four hundred people can do good work without being frightened," he said slowly. "I'm not very good at it. I used to be worse."

Marianne's eyebrows moved a quarter of an inch.

"Sit down," she said. "I've made a pie."

---

It was a very long dinner. It was a steak and kidney pie, in fact, because Marianne believed that people could not lie with their mouths full of gravy, and she had brought the pastry in the suitcase. She served it in thick slabs, with peas, in complete silence, and then she sat back and began to ask questions.

She asked where he had been to school. She asked how many people reported to him directly. She asked about his sister, and the wedding, and whether he had written his speech. She asked what he'd had for breakfast, which seemed to Poppy a remarkable question until she saw that Marianne was watching his face while he answered it. She did not smile. She did not need to. Her questions were quiet and exact and as precisely placed as stitches, and Theo answered every one of them, haltingly at first, and then, as the pie went down, more easily, the way a person does who has realised that he is not being attacked, only read.

"And what did you do before you were a chief executive?" asked Theo, at last, in what Poppy recognised as a brave attempt to turn the table.

"I was a stenographer," said Marianne. "Courts, mostly. Tribunals. Boardrooms, for a while." She cut a pea in half. "I took down what people said. Exactly. It's a very dangerous habit. After twenty years you stop being able to hear anyone without also hearing what they've left out."

He was silent a moment. "That must be exhausting."

"It's the reason I live by the sea," said Marianne. "The sea doesn't say anything it doesn't mean."

Poppy looked at her plate. She had known her mother all her life, and there were whole rooms in her that she had never been allowed to see. She knew there had been a job. She knew there had been a bad year. She knew her mother had stopped working suddenly when Poppy was fourteen and bought her the first black notebook on the same afternoon, and that she had never once said why. There was a father too, who had gone when Poppy was nine, and whose name had not been spoken in the flat in Margate since the day he left. These things were like furniture under dust sheets. You walked round them. You did not lift the cloth.

"Mr Ellison," said Marianne.

"Theo."

"Theo. I shall ask you a question, and I'd like you to answer it as you would answer it if I weren't her mother." She put down her knife and fork, parallel, at twenty past six. "Do you intend to make my daughter happy, or do you intend to make her useful?"

Poppy said, "Mum."

"I'm asking him."

Theo had gone very still. He did not look at Poppy. He put down his fork and looked at Marianne, and Poppy saw him consider the question seriously, the way he considered everything, with his whole face, and she thought, in a sudden rush of fear: he's going to say the nice thing. He's going to say happy.

"I'd like to make her happy," said Theo. "I'm trying to. I'm more likely than I should be to make her useful as well." He moved his glass an inch. "I run a company. She is the most gifted person in it. There will be days when it would be easier for me, and cheaper, and in some ways more sensible, to ask her for something because she's brilliant and I need it, and not because it's good for her. I'm going to try very hard to notice when I'm doing it. I'm going to say so when I do. I can't promise I'll never get it wrong." He took a breath. "But I think you asked it because you want me to say that it's one or the other. And I can't, because it isn't. I'd rather tell you the truth."

There was a silence in the kitchen. Kevin the radiator gave a single, resonant knock.

Marianne looked at him for a long, level moment. Then she picked up her knife and fork again.

"That," she said, "is the first honest answer a man in a good jacket has ever given me."

"Is that good?"

"It's unusual," said Marianne. "Have some more pie."

---

He left at ten, tactfully, with a hand on Poppy's shoulder and a small formal bow to her mother, as if he were leaving a royal presence. He murmured at the door, "She's marvellous. I'm terrified. I'll text you." The text arrived before she'd shut the door behind him. Your mother is the most frightening person I've ever met. I'd like her to run the board. She's right to ask. I'd have asked. T x

Poppy put the phone in her pocket and went back to the kitchen.

Her mother was washing up. She had her sleeves pushed back and her back very straight, and she did not turn round.

"He's a nice man," said Marianne. "I'm not sure that's the same as safe."

"Mum."

"I'm only saying."

"You've known him three hours. You gave him a pie."

"I know what I saw." She turned off the tap. "I saw a man who tells the truth when he's asked directly and is looking at the person. I'd like to know what he does when nobody's asked." She dried her hands on the tea towel, slowly, finger by finger. "Powerful men are generous, Poppy. That's the thing nobody tells you. They are very generous until the day you become inconvenient. And then they are exactly as generous as the rules require."

"That isn't Theo."

"I dare say it isn't." She hung the towel on the oven door. "I believed in a company once. I thought it was like a family. I was very good at my job, and very loyal, and I was a good deal younger than I felt." She said it without any emphasis at all, the way another woman might mention a coat she'd left on a train. "It's what I'd say to anyone. It isn't about him."

Poppy waited. She waited the way she had waited as a child, hoping that if she stood quite still the dust sheet might lift itself. It didn't.

Instead her mother went to the little suitcase on the chair and took out a small flat parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

"I was going to give you this tomorrow," she said. "But I think tonight."

It was a notebook. It was plain, black, hard-backed, with a thick rubber band around it, exactly the same as the one Poppy had carried in her handbag for eleven months, the one she had given to a grey-eyed man in a funeral blazer in October. She turned it over in her hands. It was new. The paper smelled sweet and faintly sharp.

Inside the cover, in her mother's upright script, were two lines.

Write down the day he first doesn't tell you something.

M.

Poppy looked up. Her face had gone hot.

"You don't know him," she said.

"No," said Marianne. "That's rather my point."

"It's my birthday."

"I know, darling. It's why I'm giving it to you. Not because he will. I hope he won't. I think he's rather wonderful. But you are the cleverest person I know, and you have the kindest heart, and in my experience the two of them together make it very easy to forgive a thing before it's happened." She put one dry hand against Poppy's cheek, very briefly, and took it away. "I'm not telling you not to trust him. I'm telling you to write it down. There's a difference. One is fear. The other is just good housekeeping."

---

She left at six the next morning, before it was properly light, with her scarf folded and her suitcase in one hand and the empty cake tin under her arm. She said she had a bus to catch, which was not quite true. At the door she paused. She had a look Poppy had never seen on her, as if she were about to say something and had got stuck on the first word.

"Mum?"

"Nothing. Mind the sponge. It'll go dry." She kissed her, brusquely, on the temple. "Ring me on Sunday."

Poppy watched her walk down the road in the grey early light, upright and small, with the tin held against her hip, and she thought, with a pang she could not account for, that she had never once seen her mother cry.

Then she went back inside and put the new notebook on the kitchen table. She sat looking at it for a long time.

She had, of course, already started. In the old black notebook, on a page near the back, there were two lines in her own hand, dated the thirtieth of January. She had not told her mother. She did not mean to. It felt, oddly, like the one thing in the whole room that was hers.

She slid the rubber band from the new one. She wrote the date at the top of the first page in her small neat hand, and under it she wrote, for the sake of good housekeeping:

12 March. Nothing yet.

And then, because it was the truth, and because the truth is slippery but ink is not, she sat for a moment with the pen lifted, and added, in smaller letters, below:

I hope it stays that way.