by Jenny Eclair
Bel isn’t in the house. Andrew searches everywhere before he gives up and heads for the kitchen where the remaining adults are drinking a good single malt and rubbing their faces with tiredness. Natasha and the police have disappeared; he feels a bit silly but is tempted to call them back. ‘It’s Bel,’ he tells everyone, ‘she’s gone missing.’ Freya actually laughs, a snickering hysterical laugh, until her mother says something sharp in Norwegian and she falls silent.
At midnight, the men take torches into the grounds. Even Jamie and Ed join in the search. Indoors the women drink tea, ‘This is ridiculous,’ they keep muttering, they must have found her by now. Maybe she was more concussed than we thought? She may have been confused and wandered off. They should have taken her to hospital when the accident first happened, surely she can’t have got far, they will find her, any minute now, they will find her.
58
Found
Andrew finds Bel halfway between the house and the barn. She must have walked the long way round and tripped and fallen on the rough track where Lance had parked his huge black Range Rover. The bulk of the four-wheel drive is masking her from view in the dark. How ridiculous, she was here all the time.
At first, he almost laughs with relief. She is fast asleep and smiling. She looks like someone has cast a spell on her, like a princess who has become middle-aged in her sleep. He needs to get her indoors, where there’s a glass of Jameson’s and a finely sprung mattress waiting for her. They can get her checked out by a doctor once they get back to London.
Greedy Bel, he should have known she couldn’t resist the lure of the birthday cake. She must have come down in search of a slice and tripped. He puts his hands under her arms and tries to lift her, they’ll have a good laugh about this in the morning, only it is already the morning and his wife isn’t breathing.
A stroke, they said. Nothing to do with the bump on her head. A faulty valve – it could have happened at any time. She didn’t suffer, she would have been dead before she hit the ground.
*
Her sons wear shirts and ties at her funeral and they cry like they did when they were small. Andrew looks shell-shocked but he is polite to everyone who shows up and he wears Bel’s favourite jacket and makes sure he polishes his glasses because she hated it when his lenses were all smeared.
Natasha doesn’t come – she isn’t strong enough to leave the hospital – but Lance and Freya turn up without the children in that wretched Range Rover and as Andrew shakes his brother-in-law’s hand and lets his sister-in-law kiss his cheek, he knows they will never see each other again. Why should they? The day seems to go on for ever, there are hymns and readings and in amongst the floral tributes is a small bunch of cream roses. The card attached is handwritten:
From Maisie with love xx
Epilogue
Serena Changes Her Mind
Kittiwake, Cornwall, February 1963
Serena looks at the baby. Yellow goo is oozing out of her left eye and she looks like a potato. Maybe when her hair grows, she will be more attractive. She may even grow up to look like Benedict, which would solve a lot of problems, but Serena knows deep down that she won’t. Benedict has brown eyes and dark skin, this baby is destined to be fair and freckly and burn in the sun.
‘I’m going to have to buy you a sun hat,’ she tells the baby, buttoning one of Bren’s finest two-ply white woollen bonnets under her tiny chin. ‘Yes, I am, a sun hat for holidays by the seaside, only not this seaside, sweetheart, another one, a proper one with donkeys.’ At that the baby’s eyes widen and she gives her mother a gummy grin.
Serena has never seen her do this before and the sight of her daughter’s empty pink gums undoes a knot in her chest and she laughs as she wraps the child in the arctic fox shrug she used to wear for Kittiwake’s notorious parties.
It isn’t hers and she has no right to take it now, but it will keep the baby warm. Snow is still thick on the ground, but at last it’s thawing and the sun is lemonade-bright to the eyes.
Serena opens the Gladstone bag that she found in the attic. She has wiped off all the dust inside and out and lined it with all the clothes she thinks she can manage, plus a couple of spare towelling nappies and an extra bottle for little miss.
Finally, after checking all the contents several times, she pops the baby inside, ‘It’s time to take you home,’ she tells her.
Serena treads carefully in her slightly too big borrowed boots down the icy driveway to the gates, the bag is heavy but she hasn’t got much choice. When she reaches the stone pillars at the end of the drive, she looks back at Kittiwake, sparkling in the winter frost, and notices how with its windowsills piped in snow it looks like an iced lemon cake. It’s the most beautiful house she has ever stepped foot in and she wonders if she will ever come back.
Probably not. She turns away and rounds the corner and sticks out her thumb.
In Southend, Ida and her mum are sitting on the sofa with a hot-water bottle each under a multi-coloured crocheted blanket. This winter has gone on for ever and bar a glittery robin Christmas card postmarked Cornwall there has been no word from Serena.
Ida worries her mum will die before she sees the girl again, Noreen is very low and can’t even be bothered to bite the heads off jelly babies any more, whole bags of them get ignored until they harden and have to be thrown away.
Ida reckons she’ll have to give in and buy the old woman a new budgie. The old one fell off its perch a couple of weeks ago and her mum’s been in a sulk ever since.
It’s not doing Ida much good either, all this stopping in night after night to babysit her own mum.
She even feels guilty about leaving her to go out to work and every time she comes home, she dreads what she might find, but mostly Noreen hasn’t moved, she spends hours sitting on the sofa staring at the mantelpiece at that photo of Serena when she won the bonniest baby competition on the pier.
Sometimes, after tea, when it all gets too much, Ida lies about what time it is, she tells her mum it’s gone 10 p.m. and she should be getting to bed, even though, in reality, it’s only 9 o’clock. Then Ida frogmarches her mother to the lavatory in the hope she’ll stay dry through the night, helps her into her nightie and reminds her to drop her teeth into the cup of Steradent on the windowsill. Her mother seems to be shrinking every day.
Once she’s settled, Ida goes upstairs and reads her Mills & Boon library book alone under the covers for an hour or so, because anything is better than the suffocating sadness of the two of them trapped in that front room, both silently wishing she’d come back, please come home, Serena.
Every fibre of that room seems to scream unhappiness, they can’t forget and they can’t move on, it’s as if the place has been wallpapered with her face.
Ida yawns theatrically, she is on the verge of pulling the ‘Oh my goodness, look at the time’ trick, when she hears the doorbell ring.
Her mother doesn’t hear it and Ida is tempted not to bother getting off the sofa. It’ll be kids, no one ever calls in real life, it’s been months since she’s had a fellow pop by, once they smell her mother on her they run a mile in the opposite direction, and who can blame them?
Bloody kids playing knock down ginger, no doubt, but then, what if? What if it’s the police, what if something’s happened to Serena? Ida gets off the sofa in one move, instantly panicked, and with loose legs and what feels like piano hammers beating at her heart, she goes to answer the door.
Seconds later, she is making a noise she has never heard herself make before, ‘ahahaeeah ohohaaaee’ because she is standing there, her daughter is standing in front of her very eyes, ‘ahahaeeah ohohaaaee’.
Serena stands on the doorstep in a great big fur coat smelling of woodsmoke and snow, she is all bundled up with a man’s scarf around her neck and carrying a kitten in a leather bag.
Ida can hear it, Serena has bought her nan a kitten. Buggers on your nylons are kittens, but who cares when Serena has come home?
Still
unable to form recognisable words, Ida pushes her daughter into the front room and Serena says, ‘Hello, Nanna, look who’s come home.’ And then she opens up the bag and she brings out a big white cat. It’s too big to be a kitten, it’s a massive thing. But then something very odd happens, out of the white fur comes a baby, it’s like a magic trick, like a little bird coming out of a rabbit.
‘This is Amanda Karen,’ says Serena, and she passes the bundle over to her grandmother, who holds her firmly on her knee and says, ‘Hello little Mandy Tipping. Welcome home.’
The baby opens her eyes and immediately closes them again. Baby Mandy Tipping sleeps, because her life has already been quite an adventure, and who knows what the future holds.
Jenny Eclair is the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of four critically acclaimed novels: Camberwell Beauty; Having a Lovely Time; Life, Death and Vanilla Slices and Moving. One of the UK’s most popular writer/performers, she was the first woman to win the prestigious Perrier Award and has many TV and radio credits to her name. She lives in South-East London.
