Losing Nicola Read Online Free PDF Page A

months, they sent a telegram and dispatched me back to England. Fiona seemed glad to have me home again.
    Most mornings, she inexpertly plaited my hair. The tiny tugs of pain as the silky hair was scraped back, braided, secured with rubber bands and ribbons tied over them, were as much part of my daily ritual as getting out of bed or putting on clothes. I loved those moments of intimacy, just the two of us, no noisy interfering boys, no lodgers wanting to know why their laundry hadn’t come back or to complain that the geyser had blown their eyebrows off.
    I was always eager to know about her childhood. ‘Were you like me?’ I asked.
    â€˜Not nearly as pretty, darling.’
    â€˜Did you like being a child?’
    â€˜Hated it. I was always cold and Grandfather used to make me and your Aunt Brigid and Uncle William get up at six o’clock every morning, even in winter, to learn Latin irregular verbs and Chaucer and practise the viola. And the cook was absolutely hopeless at cooking, so we always ate horrible meals, and we weren’t allowed to talk at meals except in French or Hebrew.’
    â€˜How on earth did you learn to speak in Hebrew?’
    â€˜Grandfather was a famous Biblical scholar and when we weren’t learning the violin or doing Latin, we had to learn Hebrew.’
    â€˜What’s cornflakes in Hebrew? Or marmalade?’
    â€˜We didn’t learn that kind of Hebrew.’
    â€˜But you could have talked to Moses if you’d ever met him. Or even Jesus!’
    â€˜Possibly.’
    â€˜Gosh!’ To have a mother who might have been able to discuss leper-healing and money-changing with Our Blessed Saviour threw a new light on her.
    â€˜But Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew. Besides, I don’t suppose he’d have had time to chat with the likes of me,’ said Fiona. ‘Too busy walking on water, or making two loaves and five fishes feed five thousand people. I do so know how he must have felt.’ She sighed. ‘Talking of which . . . I wish I had the slightest idea what we were going to have for supper tonight.’
    â€˜Did you want to be a mother?’ I asked her once, and she answered with her usual hapless honesty, ‘Not really.’
    â€˜What then?’
    â€˜An illustrator,’ she said, staring into space, my hair forgotten in her hand. ‘I always wanted to draw pictures – not great art, just illustrations. Magazines or books, frontispieces, endpapers, that kind of thing.’
    â€˜And why didn’t you?’
    â€˜My father didn’t consider it a proper occupation for a woman.’
    â€˜But you like writing stories, don’t you?’
    â€˜It’s an extra source of income, darling, but otherwise . . .’ She seized the hair on the left hand side of my head. ‘I swear to you, Alice,’ she said fiercely, ‘that whatever you want to be later in life, I shall support you in every way I possibly can.’
    My favourite story was about Fiona falling in love. ‘Tell me how you met Daddy,’ I’d say, though I already knew because I’d asked her a hundred times before, so much so that now it was me, not her, who cycled down the Banbury Road from North Oxford to meet the man who’d advertised in the
Cherwell
for someone willing to share the cost of buying a car with him. I was the undergraduate who leaned her heavy green Raleigh against the wall outside the Cadena Cafe in Cornmarket Street, and went into the teashop. It was me who fell instantly and forever in love with the stocky young man who rose, holding a newspaper in one hand, who spoke to me in the most beautiful voice I had ever heard, who asked me to sit down and ordered a cup of tea from the waitress in a black uniform with a little white apron tied around it.
    Fiona would insist she couldn’t remember what she was wearing, that first fateful time, ‘I might have been coming back from lacrosse,’ she