‘Wake up, Gigi,’ she whispered. ‘It’s Rachel. I’ve come to see you.’
Gigi stirred, licked her lips and slowly opened her faded, sticky eyes. ‘Rachel?’ she murmured. ‘Is it teatime?’
‘No, Gigi,’ she smiled. ‘It’s not. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I need to ask you a question and I don’t think I’ve got very much time.’ How long would it take them to work out where she’d gone?
‘Question…?’
‘Yes, Gigi.’ Rachel took out her phone, opened the photo gallery and scrolled through the images to the one she needed. ‘Do you recognise who this is? I know it must have been a very long time ago, but I hope you will.’
Gigi fumbled her spectacles on, and peered at the image. She moaned softly and closed her eyes.
‘You know her, don’t you?’
‘That poor girl…’ Gigi whispered. ‘That poor, poor girl.’
‘She was your neighbour, wasn’t she?’
‘Beatrice. Her name was Beatrice. Bea.’
Gigi was looking at a picture of Mary that Rachel had taken on the day of their disastrous shopping trip.
Oak Mary.
Annabel Clayton.
Eline Lambert.
Daphne Massey.
Beatrice Eaton.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Gigi whispered. ‘Please.’
‘She was your neighbour and Stephen was her son, wasn’t he? My grandfather wasn’t your child.’
Gigi’s eyes were pleading. ‘She didn’t come home!’
‘When didn’t she come home?’
‘I’d babysit for her, when she worked nightshifts at the Longbridge works, and when she was out with her fella.’
Rachel leaned closer. ‘What fella?’
‘Soldier, he was, or so she told me, finally. That wasn’t her story at first. She moved down from somewhere up north with a wedding ring on her finger and a story about how her husband was away at the war. And why wouldn’t he be? So many young women exactly the same. But then one night she came clean, swore me to secrecy and said that there was no husband but she’d just met a new fella who she really liked and would I look after little Stephen if she went out dancing? I was so happy for her – she always seemed sort of sad. I thought if anyone deserved a shred of happiness it was Bea. So she left her pretend wedding ring at home and went out with her fella.
‘One night, she simply didn’t come home. Well the night went by and then another and Albert and I looked at each other and said she isn’t coming back, is she? I said give her another day, she’s in love. It can make a girl do all manner of peculiar things. So we waited another day and she still didn’t come home. Call the police, said Albert, but I said no, they’ll take him away from us, won’t they, meaning little Stephen, and I couldn’t bear that, because we had no babies ourselves, though not for lack of trying. I said if she turns up I’ll give him straight back of course, but why have him go to an orphanage when he’s got people here who love him? So I talked Albert round.
‘I went next door to her house and found Stephen’s ration book and the rest of his bits and bobs, and on Bea’s dresser I found the wedding ring that she’d taken off to see her fella. I want you to know that I took it for Stephen. I always meant to tell him, whether she came back or not, but somehow I never did.
‘And then a year and a half later they found her in that tree. I knew it was her straight away from the police sketches in the newspaper, but I’d have known it was her even without. And I know we should have gone to the police, but little Stephen was walking! He’d learnt to walk in our home, and he was starting to talk, and we were his parents. They’d have taken him away from us and given him to some auntie or uncle who didn’t know him or love him, and I wasn’t having that.
‘But that poor girl. In that tree.’ Gigi reached up to cup Rachel’s cheek.
‘I’m going to find her, Gigi,’ Rachel promised. ‘I’m going to tell her her own story, so that she can be at peace.’
Her great-grandmother fumbled at the ring on her right hand; it hung loosely on her shrunken finger and came off easily. She pressed it into Rachel’s palm and closed her fingers over it tightly, with surprising strength. ‘When you see her, give her this, and tell her that Carrie said she’s sorry.’
‘I will, Gigi. I promise.’
* * *
The nursing home had been converted from a large Edwardian town house, and its gardens survived as the grounds where patients strolled and took the air. It was easy to find a secluded corner from which to call Tom, hidden by heavy rhododendron bushes and the towering forms of thick-trunked beeches and sycamores. Ignoring the clustered blinking icons telling her how many missed calls and message notifications she had, she made the only call that was really necessary.
‘Rache?!’ Tom’s voice was raw with disbelief. ‘Christ, Rache, where the fuck are you? Your mother’s beside herself!’ His voice had a tinny, echoing quality, which told her he had her on hands-free.
‘Are you driving?’ she asked.
‘What? Yes! I’m bloody looking for you!’
‘Pull over, right now. I’m not having you crash. And don’t hang up and call anyone else. If you hang up, I hang up, and that’s it.’
‘Just tell me—’
‘Now!’ she yelled.
She heard him muttering obscenities as he pulled over, and the swoosh of other vehicles going past in the background. When he spoke again, his voice was clearer.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Happy? Now tell me where you are.’
‘Is Mum with you?’
‘No, she’s with the police, and like I said, absolutely beside herself. Let me come and get you – they’re talking about having you sectioned, for God’s sake.’
‘I remember you threatened as much not so very long ago.’
He made no reply to that.
‘But then you saw that it was all true,’ she went on. ‘I know that you’ve been lying about all of this because you think that’s going to make it go away and that it’s the only way to protect me. You’re wrong on both counts.’
‘Rache, I—’
‘Just shut up and listen. I love you and I wish there was some other way but there just isn’t. There’s nobody listening to you now, you have nobody to be brave and sane for, it’s just you and me, so tell me: you saw it all. You believe me. It’s true.’
The cars continued to swoosh past in the background, and she realised that she was holding her breath.
He said ‘yes’ on a great expulsion of air as if they’d been holding their breath together. ‘But you don’t know it all,’ he added. ‘How much of a shit I’ve been.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The library.’
‘What about it?’
‘The whole reason we went there in the first place…’ He gulped, and she could hear the tears in his voice. ‘I said I’d done some digging and found out where the Oak Mary case files were, but I lied. I hadn’t. I was told.’
‘By who, Tom? Who told you?’
‘The Small Man. He set us up right from the start and I went along with it because I thought it was the best way to protect you and now everything’s fucked up…’
Rachel was surprised to find tears of relief streaking down her cheeks. ‘I want you to know that I don’t blame you for anything,’ she said. ‘And I’m sorry. I wanted to make a home with you and yes, have babies with you and watch them grow up, and grow old and die with you, and now none of that is going to happen because I have to go away, and I won’t be able to come back again.’
‘No you don’t,’ Tom said, and his desperation nearly broke her. ‘Or I can come with you. We can go together. Please, Rache—’
‘No. Not where I’m going.’
It took a moment for him to register what she meant. ‘Not that place. You can’t. It nearly killed you!’
‘I have to!’ Rachel said. ‘Beatrice – that’s Mary’s real name – is still trapped there. She thinks she’s a prostitute called Da
phne Massey; she’s forgotten that she’s Beatrice because there’s nobody left to remember her. That’s why she reached out to me, because I’m all the family she has left. Oak Mary is my great-grandmother, Tom. She just needs to know the truth so she can be at peace.’ Suddenly Rachel was weeping. ‘If I hadn’t pulled her out of that tree she’d still be Oak Mary, which would be better, because the Small Man is killing her! He’s raping and killing her over and over again, and she thinks that’s who she is, and I can’t bear it! I have to stop it, and you have to let me go and do it.’
‘There’s got to be an alternative,’ Tom insisted.
‘There is.’ Rachel sniffed and wiped away the tears with her stump. ‘It involves me being tranked up to the eyeballs on antipsychotics for the rest of my life. Do you remember we talked about what each of us would want if we were brain-dead and on a machine? You said you’d want to be alive as long as possible because it was the only life you were going to get.’
‘And you said you’d want to be switched off.’ She could hear the tears in his voice now.
‘That’s the alternative, Tom – the machine. You promised you’d switch me off.’
‘Yeah,’ he said thickly. ‘Yeah I did, didn’t I? Fuck that, though.’
‘Tom, I—’
‘No, you listen now. Go, save Mary, or whoever she is, and come back to me. You’ve got that hand of glory – you can punch a hole into limbo, right? Well when you get there and take care of business you punch one the other way and get your arse back home.’
‘I don’t think that’s—’
But he’d hung up.
She stared at the phone. Part of her wanted to call him back and demand to know what he thought he was doing hanging up on her. It might be the last time they’d ever speak. He hadn’t even said he loved her. But then of course that was the point: it would have been the same as saying goodbye. She put the phone away, shivering; it had grown cold in the garden. The trees and bushes seemed to be leaning over her, eavesdropping on her conversation; they made her feel small and powerless.
She took out the fake wedding ring that Gigi had given her and passed it into the umbra to her left hand. For a moment she thought it lucky that Beatrice hadn’t had tiny fingers, but then realised that if that had been the case then Rachel herself would probably have inherited them, so it wasn’t such a coincidence that the ring comfortably filled the gap where her own wedding ring had been. It felt like it belonged there.
* * *
She went back inside and could tell straight away from Gigi’s listless, glazed stare that she was having another episode. Which memory from her long, long life was she reliving in the umbra? Rachel wondered. She extended her Sight. There was blazing sun, but even here it had the peculiar violet tinge of limbo, and sand, and the glitter of an ocean. Gigi was reclining on a deck chair in a navy-blue one-piece swimsuit and a sunhat with a brim so wide that it must have been a metre from one side to the other. Gigi was older than she’d been the last time Rachel had spied on her (because that was what it felt like: spying), in her forties or maybe a well-preserved fifty-something. That would make this the seventies – was she enjoying the new fashion for package holidays to sunny Europe? Given how grim the post-war decades had been, Rachel couldn’t blame her. She looked happy and relaxed, in the prime of life.
The problem was that this didn’t help Rachel get any closer to Beatrice. She needed Gigi’s wartime memories – they were her way into the umbra where Beatrice was trapped. Feeling sick with shame, Rachel whispered, ‘I’m sorry about this, Gigi, but there really is no other way,’ then cleared her throat and said in a much louder voice: ‘Hello, Carrie, it’s me. Bea.’
Gigi turned to her in surprise, and as she saw Rachel her eyes widened and changed. Shadows rose from the sand like ground mist, wreathing themselves into the shapes of walls, furniture, floor and ceiling. Decades melted from Gigi’s face, and she was Carrie again; Gigi was sixty years in this young woman’s future. The sun hat had been replaced by a headscarf and the one-piece by a flower-print dress and apron, and she was standing in the open front doorway of her house on Queens Road, blinking at Rachel.
‘Bea? Is that really you?’
‘Of course it’s me!’ said Rachel, plastering a big smile on her face. She held out both hands – living and dead. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’
Carrie shook herself, smiled, and held her hands out to grasp Rachel’s. ‘Of course!’
Rachel took a deep breath and, bracing herself against Carrie’s grip, pulled herself into the umbra.
37
UNREAL CITY
THE TRANSITION WAS MUCH QUICKER AND SMOOTHER than it had been in the asylum, because here she was willing rather than resisting. Instead of spasmodic pins and needles, all she felt as she stepped over the threshold and into Carrie’s home was a cold shiver run through her.
Someone just walked over my grave, she thought.
Carrie’s memory clothed her in the mustard-brown overalls of a factory worker and gave her longer hair, curled and pinned back in victory rolls. Her left hand was solid and whole again, and the ring on it caught the dim light, shining with a preternatural lustre. Her right leg was healed, while her breath moved in and out of her lungs without pain from her cracked ribs. In the land of the dead, she felt more alive than she had for a long time.
Rachel stepped into Carrie’s front hallway. ‘Come in,’ said Carrie, heading into the lounge. ‘Stephen’s asleep – minor miracle, that is – let me get you a cuppa.’
‘No, thanks though,’ Rachel replied. ‘You’re all right. If he’s down I’ll just pop my head in, then go next door and get changed. I’m a right sweaty Betty.’
Carrie waved at the staircase. ‘You know the way.’
‘You’re an angel, Caroline Howson. You know that, don’t you? Seriously,’ she stopped Carrie in the kitchen doorway with a hand on her elbow. ‘Thank you so much for looking after him all this time.’
Something clouded Carrie’s face, some dim recognition of her older self that ‘Beatrice’ was thanking her for far more than just a spot of babysitting, but then it disappeared and she grinned and swatted Rachel with a tea towel. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘It’s no more than anyone would. You can return the favour when me and Bert finally catch.’
Rachel had intended to sneak out the front door and start looking for Beatrice as soon as possible, but found herself climbing a narrow staircase to a crooked upstairs hallway, and a back bedroom made even gloomier by the closed blackout curtains. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the cot and the small, pale form curled up beneath a patchwork quilt. Closer, she could hear the baby’s soft breathing and see his fine, wispy hair.
‘You’re not my grandfather,’ she whispered to him. ‘You’re just Gigi’s memory of him. All the same.’ She laid a hand gently on the soft rise and fall of his sleeping form. ‘Sweet dreams.’
As she made her way back downstairs, Carrie called out to her, asking if she was sure she didn’t want that brew, but she ignored it and tiptoed out through the front door, and Carrie’s voice cut off as if at the flicking of a switch.
* * *
Looking back, Rachel saw that the house was dark and silent, barely even distinct; it was hard to make out specific features any more. Above it, and the saw-toothed ridge of the terraced rooftops, the sky looked like a ceiling of violet granite shot through with veins of saffron orange, which pulsed slowly as if it were a living organism, or a vast conflagration glowing through cracks in the stone. She’d only ever seen glimpses of it before, through windows or holes in roofs, and seeing it now in its crushing vastness she understood that whatever this umbra really was, it was not a place where human souls belonged. Still, they were here, recreating their last living moments and most treasured memories either in terror of what might come afterwards or simple ignorance of the fact that they had died. They weren’t being punished for anything or given a chance to purge their sins in preparation for some final Glory.
There was no purpose here. This was just the desperate, mute denial of a man clinging to a cliff edge by his fingertips afraid to let go. They deserved better. Beatrice deserved better.
The house next door was hers, and it was just as dark and featureless as Carrie’s. Rachel knew that she’d find nothing useful there – Beatrice thought she was Daphne Massey, and the Small Man had her hidden away somewhere in her limbo of blitz-era Birmingham, but Rachel knew where she would inevitably end up. Every night he would take her up to the viewpoint on Beacon Hill, rape her, murder her, and put her corpse in the hollow oak tree, whereupon the nightmare would begin all over again. That was where Rachel had to go.
* * *
It was hard to tell how long she had been walking, as the houses remained anonymous cyphers of themselves and the sky was unchanged, but in time she heard the sound of children singing. It was a simple, lilting up-and-down refrain, like a nursery rhyme. Soon she saw the source.
A group of six children – three girls and three boys – were holding hands and dancing in a circle in the middle of the empty road. The boys wore long shorts and knitted sleeveless jumpers over shirts, while the girls wore dresses and long socks. War-era clothing.
Mary in the oak tree,
Cold as cold can be
Waiting for the sky to fall
Who will dance with me?
She remembered the images of the Lickey obelisk graffiti, Who danced with Oak Mary?, and the gloating, triumphant response daubed in a murdered youth’s blood: I danced with Oak Mary! She knew who was responsible for that now.
‘Excuse me?’ she said, approaching carefully, afraid to scare the children away. ‘Do you know where Mary is? Have you seen her?’
The kids saw her and took to their heels, shrieking.
The Hollow Tree Page 29
