“Commemorating and celebrating,” Frank says. He can see her mouth trembling and reaches out to cup her chin. “We owe it to Eleanor. We owe it to ourselves.”
Maggie turns, gently, and stares into the river. She spoons some of the biscuit base into her mouth. Half the crumbs settle in the corners of her mouth.
“Do you remember that bike ride we took where she nearly fell in here?” Maggie says, brushing away a few crumbs with the edge of her shawl.
“Like yesterday.” Frank lets out a small snort of laughter. “Trying to do an impression of—who was it? Katie’s mum?”
Maggie nods. She can see Eleanor like a mirage in front of her, both hands off the handlebars, zigzagging at an alarming speed. Eleanor was oblivious to Maggie’s protestations from twenty feet behind. When Eleanor hit a pothole, both she and Frank were braced for her to be thrown sideways into the river.
“She salvaged it right at the last minute!”
There is a pause when they know they are thinking the same thing, about the same secret they held, separately: that they both saw Eleanor in her own last minutes; that neither could save her.
Maggie looks up at Frank. “Do you . . . do you think she knew?”
“What, darling?”
“That we loved her.” Her voice is quiet, the words melting into the breeze.
“Of course, Mags. She always knew that.”
Frank bends his head to kiss Maggie. I can see Maggie lingering; she doesn’t want that contact to end. There has always been such hope in Frank’s touch, the sort that is every bit as fresh as when she first felt it forty years ago.
“She would want us to be OK, you know that, don’t you?” Frank says as he pulls away. He keeps his forehead pressed against Maggie’s and imagines he is pressing that belief right through the lines in her skin and into her skull.
Maggie blinks her eyes open and locks them on Frank. He is close enough to see the exact point at which the lashes cross, the folds at the hoods of the lids. And when he looks deep into her pupils—what there? Four decades of soaring highs and devastating lows, the fights and the routine and the joy and the light on which they have built a life. He sees everything they have been. He sees everything they are. He can see everything they can still become.
There is a scattering of pebbles around their ankles, followed by a cloud of dust, enough to cause them to pull apart and for Maggie to cough. A little girl, no more than three, rushes past on a bike. Only one wheel of the stabilizers is making contact with the ground. Her thighs are pumping and pumping, the glitter on the orange plastic frame reflecting the sunlight so that she is bathed in an amber halo.
“Tessa! Watch out for the nice people on the bench!” Her parents are jogging in her wake. Tessa’s mum has her arms spread wide at her waist, palms up, the gesture that says she will try to catch her daughter wherever she falls, if only she can. “Sorry!” she says as she trots past. “I can’t keep up with her!”
Frank and Maggie both smile. It is a knowing curl at the corners of their lips that takes them back twenty-odd years and makes them savor every second of them.
“She would, wouldn’t she,” Maggie says, when Tessa and her harried parents are out of sight. Then firmer, louder: “She would want us to be OK.”
Frank covers Maggie’s hand with his own. She can feel the wood on the slats of the bench, rough and splintered, pressing into her palms as she gathers the strength to continue. “I miss her, and I will never stop missing her, but we have to carry on, for her sake. I just wish she was still here.”
“Me too. But she is, somewhere.”
Frank gives Maggie’s hand a light squeeze and, with the other, wriggles a photo out of the pocket of his chinos. He unfolds it down the center crease, revealing a shot of the three of us. It was taken before everything unraveled. Before the darkness that settled and the years when they tried desperately to lift it and when whatever they did, however hard they tried, it was never quite enough. It is human nature to want something, someone, to blame. Sometimes that simply isn’t possible.
I am thirteen, not quite adult-size yet, and am squeezed between the two of them on the rickety bench of a fishing boat off the Cornish coast. Both of them have their arms wrapped tight around me, as our scarves all half trail into the sea. They cannot let go. They did all they could to hold on to me. Now it is up to them to do that for each other.
In turn, the two of them will kiss my face. Frank lets his forehead collapse against Maggie’s.
Neither of them says a word.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my agent, Madeleine Milburn, for your unwavering support for my writing, your ambition for it, and for all your tireless work on my behalf. Thanks to Giles Milburn, Hayley Steed, Alice Sutherland-Hawes, Anna Hogarty, Liane-Louise Smith, and Georgia McVeigh for making me feel so welcome and for being the very best champions.
I feel incredibly lucky to have not one but two extraordinary Emilys in my life—Emily Griffin at Cornerstone in the UK and Emily Krump at William Morrow in the US. Your editorial input has been invaluable and there have been times when I have felt you understood what I was trying to say better than I did myself! This book is immeasurably better for your insights and I am so grateful for your vision and determination to make this a success. At William Morrow, thank you to Julia Elliott, Liate Stehlik, Jennifer Hart, Molly Waxman, Brittani Hilles, Stephanie Vallejo, and Ploy Siripant. It is a pleasure and a privilege to work with such talented people.
Closer to home, many thanks to the friends and extended family who have endured my tall tales for long enough and who weren’t altogether too surprised when I announced, out of the blue, that I had written a novel. Not least to Sheila Crowley for her boundless faith that she would be seeing my name on the shelves before too long.
Special thanks to my mum and dad, Stephanie and David Greaves, for your generosity and good humor. I could not have wished for more supportive parents and I think I speak for both myself and my brother, Nathan, when I say we wouldn’t be where we are now without everything you have done for us both. Thank you for knowing it was only ever a case of when, not if, you would be reading my debut novel. Your faith in my capabilities means more than I can say.
And finally, my thanks to John Russell for not complaining too much about the crack-of-dawn writing starts and for delivering the porridge to sustain them. Thank you for your confidence that the future looks bright and for reminding me to leave the computer and get some fresh air every now and again. Above all, thank you for showing me a love that speaks louder than words.
About the Author
ABBIE GREAVES studied English literature at the University of Cambridge. She worked in publishing for three years before leaving to focus on her writing. She now lives in the U.K. The Silent Treatment is her first novel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the silent treatment. Copyright © 2020 by Abbie Greaves. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
A hardcover edition was published in 2020 by Penguin Random House UK.
first u.s. edition
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover illustration © Shout/Dutch Uncle
Library of Cong
ress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition APRIL 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-293386-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293384-3
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