Free That Part Was True by Deborah Mckinlay

you’re finally shot of her, you’re letting that daughter of yours run you ragged. What you need are friends of your own. Not more plants, not more recipe books. Friends, flesh-and-blood people who appreciate you. You’re one of the smartest, nicest, kindest people I’ve ever met, and you’re sitting out here all alone night after night wasting your life.”
    Outside the sky was beginning to turn milky with twilight. Gwen pressed on, “What’s more, you’re an extremely good-looking woman, with a wonderful figure. You could find yourself some nice man.”
    Eve began, gently, to cry again, but she found, despite that, that she could still speak. “The thing is, Gwen, I can’t…even if I did have friends…I can’t go anywhere, I have these…attacks.”
    Gwen nodded. “Like that day at the lavender,” she said calmly.
    â€œLike the day at the lavender.”
    On the day before her mother’s funeral, Eve had decided to make lavender scones, because Izzy was due, and because she needed something to do. Something she could do without thinking. She had been feeling low. Not specifically because of the loss of her mother—Eve was not a hypocrite—but in that loss, so many other losses had made themselves felt. In the hours after Virginia died, a great amorphous ache had beset her.
    And then there’d been the funeral to deal with, a wake at the house to cook for. The life of a party girl and serial marrier tends not to gather much moss in the way of long-lasting friendships, but there was still Virginia’s doctor, Geraldine, a neighbor of Eve’s, and an old boyfriend of Virginia’s—whose name was unfamiliar to Eve, but who had seen the announcement in The Telegraph and telephoned—and also Dodo, Virginia’s old pal from her champagne days, to mourn alongside her family.
    Dodo had said she would stay at The George, although Eve had extended a cordial enough invitation to her to sleep at the house. “No,” she’d insisted. “I like my own space.” It was the first thing Dodo had ever said that Eve had felt she could relate to.
    But then, as she leaned in to cut the first of the twiggy lavender stems, wearing a white apron over her dress and cardigan, it had occurred to her that if this fellow, the old boyfriend—Ted? Ned?— had seen the newspaper announcement, then other friends of Virginia’s might have seen it, too. Perhaps a lot of people would turn up the next day after all, people she didn’t know, from London.
    Eve had imagined then a crowd of smart, ageless women with unwavering tans and well-insured jewelry arriving with their self-confident husbands. Husbands who would grill her with those sorts of questions that self-confident husbands always feel compelled to grill people with: “So, what do you do with yourself out here all day, Eve?” “Manage the garden all on your own, do you?” It didn’t matter that they would instantly forget her responses; she would still have to come up with some. It was an appalling thought. And then the women would begin comparing her to her mother. “You wouldn’t think she was Virginia’s daughter, would you?”
    She’d felt all of a sudden as if she might faint, and had stood up straight and then lowered her head again to shake it off. But the dizziness had continued and with it had come a tightness at the base of her throat. She’d sat on the gravel, still morning-damp, with the scissors on her lap, hoping to recover. But she hadn’t. Her heart had gone on crashing at her ribs as if it might explode. The early morning sky, flat and pale, had seemed to sink down and envelop her.
    Eve had, at that moment, thought she was dying. Thought she would have no life without her mother after all. No life in which to enjoy her house, to read in bed if she chose to, to wear her hair loose without attracting