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*****
I remember clearly getting back from Auntie Christine’s and Ada saying she had a surprise for me. So I followed her upstairs and there, in a cot by Ada’s bed, was the prettiest baby I’d everseen. Ada said she was called Blossom and she was my new baby sister.
Right from the start, I adored Blossom and the feeling was mutual. I looked after her as much as I could, feeding her and changing her nappies and bonding with her, to the extent that she would often cry when our mother picked her up. She’d reach out to me and would be placated only when she was back in my arms, with me fussing over her and singing to her.
I was too young to really understand where babies came from. The first time Auntie Christine, Ada’s sister, came over to see Blossom, I burst into the kitchen and found Ada in tears, weeping over the table and her sister trying to comfort her. When I appeared, their faces changed and they smiled at me, and Ada mopped her face with a hanky and asked brightly if I’d like some hot chocolate.
I’d known then that despite having Blossom, Ada was very sad. But it wasn’t until a few years later that Skye told me what had happened to make her sad.
Ada had found real love in Edinburgh – with an Italian man called Antonio – but their relationship had been doomed from the start.
They’d met after Ada and Skye moved into a flat next-door to Antonio’s elderly parents. He was older than Ada and he had a wife who had dementia and was in a care home. Thrown together in their loneliness, they’d fallen deeply in love, and later, Ada would describe those first few months they had together as the happiest time of her life.
But then she’d discovered she was pregnant and everything changed. She told me much later, when I was old enough to understand and I was asking questions about Blossom’s father, that Antonio had been honourable in the end and stayed loyal to his poor wife in the care home. She’d wanted them to bring up Blossom together, but he’d refused, although it had broken hisheart that they could no longer be together. Ada said she’d loved him even more for making that decision, but she’d been utterly devastated by the loss of him.
Once, when I was about ten, I found her in her bedroom gazing at a photograph of Antonio in the special frame, which she kept in her bedside drawer, and she was sobbing her heart out. And I knew then that Antonio, Blossom’s father, was the true love of Ada’s life and I hugged her tightly and she hugged me back until my face was wet with her tears.
I understood then that Blossom would always be special to Ada because she was born out of real love. The love of a lifetime.
But while having Blossom in our lives brought me closer to Ada, it did nothing for her relationship with Skye, which had always been difficult. And one day, less than six months after Blossom arrived, my world was rocked again. But in a bad way this time.
Skye left home for boarding school in Yorkshire.
It came to a head between Ada and Skye one night. I heard them having a blazing row, screaming at each other, and next morning when I went downstairs for breakfast, it was already decided. Skye was going to finish her education at Ada’s old boarding school in Yorkshire.
Before she left that same week, Skye sat me down and told me that she was going away to school but that she’d be back to visit me as much as she could, and she was true to her word. She’d come back and we’d spend a whole Saturday together, then she’d get the train back up to school in Yorkshire on the Sunday.
But things continued to be strained between Skye and Ada – even more so after that terrible row the week before Skye left for Yorkshire.
Neither of them have ever talked to me or Blossom about that night.
Skye finished her education at boarding school and then earned a place at a drama school in London, and the rest – as they say – is history.
But in my mind, that row between Skye and Ada, the week before Skye was shipped off to Yorkshire, was the moment everything changed.
Something had been simmering between them. Something big. And that night, it exploded out of control. That something drove a wedge between them that’s never been resolved, even to this day.
Knowing how stubborn and pig-headed they both were, I knew it probably never would be.
Thank goodness for Blossom.
*****
Blossom was different to me. She was different to most people. From being a baby, she’d been such a sunny-natured child and that had never changed as she grew into adulthood, despite having some awful knock-backs in relationships with men. My theory was that Blossom was far too nice and forgiving of people, which meant the men she went out with tended to take advantage of her kind nature, sometimes walking all over her. (It didn’t help, of course, that she tended to be attracted to ‘bad boys’ – the extrovert type with a horde of female admirers and a roving eye.)
On many an occasion I’d instructed her to toughen up and be a little mysterious, instead of blatantly wearing her heart on her sleeve all the time. But she always laughed off my advice, saying what was the point of pretending to be someone you weren’t?
‘When I meet the man for me, he’s going to love me for exactly the way I am.’ She’d smile and shrug. ‘And if I never meet that person, I’ll be sad but I’ll still be okay.’
‘Youwillmeet the right person for you one day.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Well, by the law of averages? I mean, even the most horrible people manage to find love, so I fail to see why someone as lovely as you wouldn’t.’
She smiled. ‘You’re assuming that life is fair, and as we all know, it’s not.’
‘True.’
