by Ali Mercer
‘Daisy.’
I went closer. She turned round and seemed to recognise me. I went closer still and she reached out with the hand that wasn’t holding her star and slipped it under my jumper at the waist, feeling for my tummy.
That was what she did at night, when she was trying to sleep. She’d started doing it soon after I stopped breastfeeding her. It seemed to comfort her.
‘You did good, Daisy,’ I told her. ‘You did just fine.’
And for once, I felt sure that she understood what I was saying.
Then Mark came out and saw us, and froze, and I stepped away and Daisy’s cool little hand slipped away from my warm skin.
Mark said, ‘What on earth are you doing? It looks bizarre. What are people going to think?’
I shrugged. ‘They won’t care. Everybody’s just thinking about their own children. They’re not bothered about ours.’
‘Oh, come on. Everybody was noticing everything in there.’
Daisy raised her free hand to her wand and began to twirl it, rolling it steadily and watching the star as it turned.
Mark came closer and said, ‘That was one of the worst experiences of my life.’
‘Mark…’
‘It was awful. Humiliating. I don’t think I could bear to sit through anything like that ever again.’
We stared at each other.
‘She did her best,’ I said.
‘She turned her back to the audience, Paula. She doesn’t have a clue. It was embarrassing.’
‘She’s right here, Mark.’
‘Yes, and obviously she doesn’t have a clue what I’m saying. Do you remember how furious you were with my mother for saying there was something wrong? I think you owe her an apology.’
And with that he turned, struggled briefly with the catch securing the door, let himself out and was gone.
* * *
‘Daisy,’ I said. ‘We have to go back inside. They need to check that all the children are going home with the right people.’
I prised one of her hands off the wand and tried to lead her back in, but she was a dead weight pulling back and sinking her little nails hard into the palm of my hand, and shrieking as if I was trying to abduct her.
‘Daisy!’ I flung her off and shook out my hand: there were little crescent-shaped welts in my skin. ‘You don’t do that – ever!’
I was suddenly so furious I could have slapped her. She was furious, too: her little face was a snarl of rage.
At that moment Amy came in. I should have been embarrassed to be found shouting at a child who was completely out of control. Instead I felt like I’d been rescued. I had no idea what I might have done next if someone hadn’t intervened.
Amy spoke calmly over the uproar: ‘If you’d like to take Daisy straight home, Mrs Walsh, Donna says that’s fine.’
She might not have been able to hear me say thank you, but my gratitude must have been obvious. I grabbed Daisy’s coat and lunchbox and propelled her towards the door. She charged off down the ramp, and I had to chase after her again to catch up with her before she got to the gate that led out of the pre-school play area.
People were meant to shut it, but it had been left wide open. Probably by Mark, who had just spoken to us both with something close to hatred, and hadn’t been able to get away fast enough.
And suddenly it wasn’t Daisy I wasn’t angry with any more. It was him. Him and his mother, and their coldness and judgement and contempt. I was so angry it was like being lit up with a kind of power I hadn’t known I had. A power that was stronger than humiliation, stronger than fear, stronger than the desire to fit in and win approval: that drew its strength from other people’s indifference or hostility, and had absolutely no idea when to stop.
Seventeen
Ellie
One of the most dangerous things about being a kid is that grown-ups tend not to listen to you unless it suits them. Also, they’re usually so set on their way of doing things that there isn’t a whole lot of point in even trying to suggest that there might be trouble ahead. And so you end up tagging along with them, and then you feel bad twice over: not only because whatever ideas they had about the future they were heading towards have turned out to be mistaken, but because you didn’t manage to warn them. And maybe you didn’t even try.
I wasn’t at all keen on going to meet Mark’s mother. When I tried to imagine it, all I could make out was a kind of darkness all around her. But a visit had been planned, and it was obvious that Mum wanted me to go and to make a good impression, and I couldn’t bring myself to disappoint her. She was so full of hope, so keen on the new life she could see ahead of her, and she wanted us to put our best feet forward – she wanted us to reflect well on her: the two girls she’d raised more or less single-handedly, the brainy beauty and the daydreamer who always had her nose in a book.
Besides, Mark’s mother, Ingrid, was Ava’s grandmother. It stood to reason that Mum would want them to meet. I’d only ever known the one grandma, Mum’s mum, the one Ava and I shared. OK, so I had the privilege of still being able to sense her, sometimes – that benign golden presence, so kindly, so safe – but there was something to be said for a grandmother who was actually in the land of the living.
But Mum also seemed a bit apprehensive about meeting Ingrid. She hadn’t actually said so outright, but given what Mark was like, with his well-paid job and fancy car and ability to be generous, my guess was that Ingrid was well-off, and Mum was worried that she’d look down on us.
Maybe she was afraid that Ingrid would think she was some kind of gold-digger, offering up babies in exchange for bouquets of red roses and fine dining and four-star hotels. Not to mention the in-your-face engagement ring Mark had given her. When Ava had seen it, her first words had been, ‘You’d better watch it, you could take your eye out with that.’ And now I thought about that whenever I saw the diamond catch the light.
Could you take an eye out with a diamond? Probably. You could do all sorts of terrible things, and I was beginning to realise that pretty much anything awful you could think of, someone else would have thought of first. And then gone and done it. There was really very little about the real world that made it a good alternative to books, where at least all the horrible things were just invented, and there was a fighting chance that the villains would go down in the end.
But whatever Mum thought was really neither here nor there. I knew there was something close to Ingrid that was bad, something hidden away so that all you could see was the stain it had left. But at the same time, I had no idea what it was.
My instinct was to stay as far away as possible. But I couldn’t figure out a way of avoiding the visit. If I faked sick, Mum would just put it off, and if I refused to go it would just cause a drama until I gave in. Whatever was there to find, I would have to face it. And so, even though I was more scared than I had ever been in my life before, I decided to go.
Mum drove us there from London, which felt like something that wouldn’t happen very often in future; whenever we got into a car with Mark, he seemed to end up taking the wheel. But he’d been away somewhere for work and was going to meet us at Ingrid’s place, so it was down to Mum to get us there.
Actually, the whole trip felt like the end of an era, which was weird because it wasn’t, not yet. There were still several weeks to go before the wedding, so it wasn’t as if we were leaving anyone or anything behind. Still, the mood in the car wasn’t one of anticipation: it was resigned and a bit melancholy and very quiet. An autumn kind of mood, even though it was a glorious summer day.
Mum was too preoccupied to chat. She was busy concentrating on the satnav, which had a nasty habit of taking you down strange turnings if you let it, and didn’t pay proper attention to what was actually in front of you. Ava was sitting in the front next to her, and didn’t say much either. She’d been like that ever since we got back from France. In the past at least she’d always had something to say for herself, even if it was usually annoying. T
his new Ava gave nothing away at all.
Luckily, the countryside we were driving through was beautiful, and that helped to make up for everything that wasn’t quite so great. Everywhere you looked there was a view you could have painted in watercolours and hung up on the wall. I couldn’t believe that I’d lived so long in places that were jumbles of houses and people and hadn’t known all this was here. It was bizarre that there were such huge areas of land that were just fields or trees, with nobody around at all.
We followed a winding road through dense woods alongside a deep valley, then came to a town split on either side of the river Thames, which we crossed by a hump-backed bridge with the county sign displayed to one side: OXFORDSHIRE.
This was Henley, which was all pretty church towers and old, sash-windowed houses. It looked like one of the illustrations in the book of fairy tales I’d had when I was younger, of the magical town at the bottom of a lake. Everybody who belonged there carried on their business as usual, but outsiders couldn’t visit without drowning. That was the countryside for you: pretty, but not necessarily welcoming.
The town thinned out and we drove along a broad tree-lined avenue and then we were back in woodland, miles and miles of it. Eventually we descended a steep hill and passed a few low, straggly-looking cottages and a sign for Fairmarsh, and Mum said, ‘Nearly there.’ She turned off the main road and drove along a lane with a high hedge on one side and farmland on the other, and then we turned off at the sign for Fairmarsh Place and followed a narrow road through prettily landscaped grounds, shaded by a mixture of grand old trees.
‘Made it,’ Mum said as we pulled up in a parking space in front of a huge and rather intimidating red-brick Victorian building.
I recognised it immediately, even though I’d never been there in the flesh before.
I’d seen it in that dream I’d had that first night in France. It was built in an E-shape, with wings to either side and a grand, porticoed entrance. It looked like the kind of house that might have featured in one of the old classic novels that Mark had given us. A fitting home for a vengeful, ancient bride, or a locked-up wife. Or ghosts.
‘It’s huge,’ I said.
‘It’s all broken up into flats, silly,’ Ava said. ‘Mum, didn’t you say it used to be a loony bin?’
‘Don’t call it that,’ Mum said. ‘It’s a former mental hospital. You should watch what you say, because Mark’s dad used to work here, and so did his grandfather – Ingrid’s father. Ingrid’s father ran the place for years, and Mark’s dad was one of his assistants, which was how Ingrid met him.’
‘Mark’s dad died in a car crash, right?’ Ava said. ‘Under slightly suspicious circumstances.’
‘Not that suspicious. There was an inquest, and the coroner said it was an accident. His car hit a tree. But anyway, it was obviously very upsetting, so best not to mention it. His state of mind hadn’t been brilliant beforehand, not surprisingly – after all, I should think it’s a very stressful line of work. So there were some lingering doubts, for Mark at least, which the coroner’s verdict didn’t really resolve. Also, just so you know, Ingrid had a sister – Mark’s aunt – who had problems, and spent years actually as a patient at the hospital before she was moved out when it closed. Mark only found out about her after she’d died, which was back before you were born, Ava. Probably best not to mention her, either.’
Ava sighed. ‘There seems to be a lot we can’t talk about,’ she said.
I looked up at the big red-brick building and tried to imagine what it would be like to be inside it and not to be allowed out. It looked pretty spooky, though maybe that was just because I knew what it had once been used for. Or maybe it was because the windows were so very tall and narrow, as if to discourage the inmates from thoughts of escape.
In life as in the dream, it was forbidding. A place where old secrets might be shut away, to be remembered only rarely and without tenderness.
I said, ‘Did Mark grow up here?’
‘Oh, no. No, he never came near the place. There might have been a time when staff and their families lived in, but I don’t think Ingrid grew up here either.’
At that moment the face of an old woman loomed up in the car window on Mum’s side, accompanied by a sharp rapping, and all of us nearly jumped out of our skins.
Mum wound down the window. ‘Yes?’
The old woman looked at us without smiling. She had a pearl necklace on, and carefully applied pink lipstick, and nicely coiffed silver hair. She was well-groomed and not at all friendly: Miss Havisham after a makeover.
‘You can’t park here,’ she said. ‘There are visitor spaces over in the corner, by the bay trees.’ She pointed to the far side of the car park, next to a line of tall, neatly clipped shrubs in silver pots. Then, with a slight frown: ‘You aren’t Jenny, are you?’
She pronounced it as if to be Jenny was almost certainly not a good thing – as if a Jenny might be prone to wind, or to falling asleep on public transport with her mouth open and a trickle of dribble running down her chin.
Mum was looking at her in the same way she looked at our landlady during inspections – hopeful, anxious, very slightly resentful. No, not like that – more wary. The way I’d seen her once when we bumped into a client of hers in a supermarket near my school, and she’d been terrifically polite and afterwards I’d found out that the woman had complained about a cut and colour and made Mum do it all over again for nothing.
Mum said, ‘Are you Ingrid?’
Ingrid nodded. She peered past Mum to Ava, and said, ‘So you’re Ava. I’ve heard a lot about you.’
‘This is Ellie, my youngest,’ Mum said loyally, gesturing towards the backseat. ‘I mean – my youngest for now.’
Youngest for now?
Of course, Ava would always be the oldest. That was one thing that would never change.
I attempted a winning smile. Ingrid was unwinnable, though, at least as far as I was concerned. She looked at me even harder, then turned back to Mum.
‘Mark’s running late – there’s some trouble or other on the roads, an accident and a tailback, people being careless as usual. So we’ll be able to have a nice girls’ chat and get to know each other without him around. When you’ve moved the car, press the buzzer and I’ll let you in. Flat 3 is on the ground floor, directly off the main entrance hall and opposite where you come in. You can’t miss it.’
With that she walked off and disappeared into the house.
The three of us sat and looked at each other. Then Mum pulled herself together and said, ‘I’m sure she’ll thaw. Buckle up.’
Ava and I put our seatbelts on again, and Mum moved to the part of the car park Ingrid had pointed out. Then we made our way into the building, crossed the chequerboard floor of the big entrance hall and were admitted to Ingrid’s flat.
Inside, it had a hushed, slightly cramped feeling. The front door opened onto a small lobby that gave way to a narrow corridor. Ingrid waved us through to a big living room that had thick green carpet and lots of dark, heavy antique-looking furniture, and long French windows that opened onto a terrace and gave a view of the lawn.
It smelled of polish and lavender pot-pourri, and was immaculately spick and span, even though Ingrid had plenty of the kind of ornaments that were magnets for dust: china candle holders, statuettes, and a ticking, golden carriage clock. There were photos too, in ornate gilt frames: a younger, rather handsome Mark on his graduation day, a younger Ingrid with the younger Mark having a picnic by a river somewhere, Mark – presumably – as a little blonde boy holding tadpoles in a jar, Mark looking tanned and happy in a boat on a lake that didn’t look at all English. That photo looked as if someone had been cut out of the other half of it. Mark’s first wife, presumably; there were no pictures of her anywhere.
Tucked in a corner, behind a very tall, very green pot plant, I spotted a picture of a bald man with glasses and a thin smile: Mark’s dad, presumably. He very definitely didn’t have pride of place. B
ut there was a space reserved on the mantelpiece for a black-and-white photograph of a couple who I guessed were Ingrid’s parents. The man looked old and fierce and like he wasn’t used to anybody disagreeing with him. A bit like Ingrid, in fact. The woman looked like the sort of landlady Mum would have complained about, who’d bill you for stuff you didn’t even know existed when you moved out. They were next to a picture of Mark in a suit looking nervous and serious and as if there was absolutely no way he was going to run the risk of letting anybody down.
‘Do take a seat,’ Ingrid said, looking us over with a touch of regret, as if we might have brought dirt in with us that would mess up the upholstery but there was nothing she could do about that now.
She wafted a hand in the direction of the round table on the far side of the room; it was already laid, and there were dishes in the centre covered with tea-towels. ‘We’ll sit down to lunch when Mark gets here. It’s rather a picnicky sort of meal, I’m afraid. Cooking for several people is too much for me these days. I’m lucky in that I enjoy very good health, but I do know my limits.’
We sat down as directed. Ava perched next to me on the overstuffed sofa and Mum settled on a manly-looking leather armchair with wings, the kind of seat you could imagine someone snoozing in by the fireside in an old red-curtained library. Ingrid went off to the kitchen to get us drinks, and once she was out of the room we all relaxed a little.
Mum yawned and stretched, and said she was going to have to make a definite effort not to drop off. I could see her point, though I didn’t feel at all sleepy myself: it was rather stuffy in Ingrid’s flat, and the French windows were shut tight.
Ava looked up at the old picture of the couple on the mantelpiece, the one I’d assumed was of Ingrid’s parents. She said, ‘They look like a barrel of laughs, don’t they?’
