What Nobody in the Group Knew About Dawn’s Mother

Dawn’s mother had gone into a home in the January.

Not a good home. An adequate one, ninety minutes away, which was where the place was rather than where Dawn wanted it, and which had been the only option available in the fortnight in which it had to be an option.

Dawn had been driving there twice a week since October, when it had become clear that this was coming, and had continued twice a week after her mother went in.

Three hours in a car. Two afternoons a week. Ten months.

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She had not told the group.

Not “had not got round to telling”. Had decided not to tell, and had maintained that decision through nine dinners, and had come to every single one of those dinners off the back of a three-hour round trip, and had booked every one of them herself.

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Nuala got it out of her eventually, in a car park, about seven weeks after the message.

Dawn’s version, which Nuala repeated to Hilary with permission much later, was this:

“You don’t want to be the person who’s always got something on.”

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Hilary has thought about that sentence more than any other part of the whole thing.

Because the six things everybody always said when Dawn cried about her mother — and she did cry, twice, at dinners, briefly, and everybody was lovely about it — were six things that Dawn had specifically engineered.

She only ever gave them the smallest possible version. Mum’s not been great. It’s a lot of driving. Anyway. And then she would change the subject, and they would let her, because she had made it very easy to let her.

And the group had responded to the smallest possible version with a proportionate amount of sympathy, which is exactly what you do, and which had confirmed to Dawn that there was no room for the bigger one.

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So the message did not only say you are tedious.

It said: the tiny amount you have let us see has been too much.

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Hilary rang Nuala after Pav told her to, and Nuala told her about the home, and Hilary sat in her own kitchen afterwards for about an hour without moving.

“I’ve never felt anything like it,” she says. “It wasn’t guilt. Guilt I could have done something with. It was more like — vertigo. I’d had an entire mental model of that woman for eleven years and it was wrong, and I’d written it down, and I’d sent it to her.”

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She wanted, immediately, to ring Dawn and say that she now knew.

Nuala stopped her, on the phone, in about nine seconds.

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll sound like you’re only sorry because of the mum,” said Nuala. “And then she’s got two things to be upset about.”

Hilary said, “But it is because of the mum.”

“No it isn’t,” said Nuala. “That’s the whole point. You’d have been sorry anyway. If you make it about the mum, you’re saying the message would have been fine if her life had been fine.”

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That, Hilary says, was the single most useful thing anybody said to her that year, and it cost her a friendship anyway.

She did not ring. She wrote once more, in the November, a short one, which did not mention the mother and did not explain anything and said only that she was sorry and that she was there.

Dawn did not reply.

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Dawn’s mother died the following August.

Hilary found out from Nuala, three days later, and spent an evening deciding what to do.

She sent a card. Not a message, a card, posted, with about four lines in it. She said she was sorry. She said her mother had been kind to her in 1993, which was true and specific and which she had thought about for a long time before including.

She did not say anything about the group or the message or the dinners.

Dawn sent back a card acknowledging it, about a fortnight later, with two lines in it.

Hilary has it in a drawer.

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By then the group had been dead for about four months, and nobody had said so out loud.