The Daughters of Foxcote Manor

by Eve Chase

  “And that was where I first saw Elliot’s profile. On the Harrington Glass website.”

  “What?” I turn to her with a small crack of a laugh and immediately see she’s not joking. So this is why she’s been cagey about how they met and not told me anything about him. Not married. Not an ex-con. I should be relieved. I’m not.

  “He kind of stood out.” She animates when she talks about him. Her eyes shine. “Didn’t look like the rest of the headshots, all the old suits. On the staff list, it said ‘digital brand ambassador’ or something, and linked to a Twitter page that made me laugh. And then, well, I ended up going down this wormhole online. Don’t look at me like that, Mum! It was just a distraction from what was going on with you.” A wave smashes onto the rocks below: my guilt, with sound effects. “Okay. And Dad,” she adds, as a sweet, conciliatory afterthought.

  “And what did you find?” My mouth is dry. “In this . . . this wormhole.”

  “Dark web opiate-delivery service.”

  “Christ.”

  She smiles affectionately, and I realize she’s winding me up. “He was ’gramming Devon beaches, Mum. Look.” She points to a distant bay, a wedge of golden sand. “Turns out he was staying there with a friend at weekends. Surfing. I started liking his photos and we got, you know, chatting.”

  No, I don’t know. Annie makes it sound so easy.

  She’s silent for a moment. She blushes. There’s more, I think. Oh, crap.

  “He was working at Harrington Glass for a few weeks because his mother had an ‘in’ at the company.” She makes quote marks with her fingers. “Some contact. No big deal, is it?” She’s seeking reassurance. “I mean, he doesn’t work there anymore.”

  “No biggie.” One of those unpleasant surprises tossed up by a digital world that connects people who wouldn’t ever normally cross paths. “But, Annie, it does concern me that he was just a random stranger off the internet.”

  She frowns. “Er, how else are you meant to meet anyone?”

  “At a party? On a train?” A boat. A canal boat. What’s wrong with me? I’ve left my husband. My teenage daughter is pregnant. My mother’s hovering in a nightmarish no-man’s-land between life and death. I haven’t worked in ages. I’ve not even buffed my nails. Or had my roots done. And I’m having disrupting thoughts about a bloke ten years my junior. Tragic.

  “A train?” She giggles.

  “Okay, I’m a dinosaur.” I put my hands up, catching her giggle, realizing how much I’ve missed these confidences. “What happened when you actually met in real life? Did you like him straightaway?”

  She nods. “There was this attraction, this thing.” Her voice is soaked with longing. “It felt like . . . like it was . . . right.”

  That feeling. I felt it once too. But a lifetime ago. The weekend I met Steve we sat up talking all night at a festival in the rain. I remember the soft glow inside the leaking orange tent that smelled of spilled beer and sleeping bags. Lying side by side on the boggy ground sheet. Midges whirling around our heads. Falling asleep at dawn, holding hands. Waking to the dazzle of sun, fat and gold with promise. We were so young. We were different people.

  “I know it sounds corny.”

  I smile. “It sounds like you fell in love.”

  Annie doesn’t deny it. But she picks a lichen flake off the bench, self-conscious, as if I’ve caught her off guard. Waves boom beneath us. The tide is turning.

  “Granny met him, right?”

  Annie stretches out her long legs, polished and tanned nut brown after a summer spent surfing and not wearing nearly as much sunscreen as I’d have liked. “A couple of times.”

  “Did she know where he worked?” I ask curiously, warily. Mum would dread the wrecking ball of the past colliding with her beloved grandchild in any way, I know that.

  Annie nods. She bites her lower lip. “I told her that on the walk.” A cloud covers the sun, tipping the sea from turquoise to a bottomless navy. “Just before she fell,” she whispers, rasping with the horror of it still.

  “Oh, Annie.” I take her hand, remembering what she told me and Caroline: Granny fell because of me. “It doesn’t make her fall your fault.”

  “I don’t know why I even said it.” Annie starts to cry. The tears stick her hair to her cheek. I pick the strand off gently, wanting to take the weight from her shoulders too—and her place on the cliff path that day. “So stupid,” she whispers, shaking her head. “It just spilled out of me and made her start, like I’d plugged her into the national grid or something.” She closes her eyes, screwing them up, the memory flickering across the minute muscles in her face. “Then she . . . she stepped backward. And Granny was gone.”

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Annie comes down the cottage stairs with her bag slung over one shoulder and my old childhood mobile, the little wooden trees on strings, bouncing off one finger. “Can I have this? For my baby.”

  My baby. The overwhelming sense is of loss, and powerlessness. I have to remind myself of how, when Annie was growing up, each stage seemed set and unsolvable. I’d felt like I’d always be leashed to a pram I couldn’t figure out how to fold, nap times and feed times, worries about meningitis, vaccines, choking on raisins, never sleeping properly again. But then a new Annie would emerge: toddler, preschooler, tween . . . I’d loved each one with such passion, mourned and marveled when she morphed again, never quite finished off, never quite ready. This too is a stage, I tell myself. A point of transformation. I just need to hold my nerve. “Of course, Annie. You have it.”

  She grins. “It’ll go nicely with the terrarium, I reckon.” The mobile starts to turn and twist. “Babies love to stare at things like that, don’t they?”

  The little forest under glass left at the hospital for Mum. In the whirlwind of the last two days, I’d forgotten all about it. “Oh, yes, they do,” I say absently, distracted, niggled by a half-formed thought.

  “Mum . . .” She fiddles with the car key in her hand. “I never told Elliot about Granny working for the Harringtons.”

  “You didn’t?” I can’t hide my surprise. The way Annie talks about Elliot—and the look in her eyes as she does so—suggests the union was a meeting of minds as well as bodies.

  “Or me first seeing him on their company website.”

  “But I thought you’d got close.”

  “We did. I mean, it was perfect. That was the problem. I . . . I didn’t want to ruin things. And it sounded, I don’t know, stalkery. Complicated. It still does.” She winces. “Please don’t say anything either. Not to him or Helen or anyone. Promise? Please.”

  I hesitate, thinking of the photo of the Harrington family standing outside the lovely stucco house. That there’s a link, however gossamer delicate, between them and Annie’s situation is like a stitch in the brain. “Not if you don’t want me to, of course not, Annie. But—”

  “He doesn’t want me to have this baby,” she interrupts, jiggling the mobile from her finger. “His mother thinks I’m a gold digger. Why make things worse?”

  “He did drive all the way down from London yesterday,” I point out. “I bet he’s phoned.”

  She presses her lips together, which means he has. And she probably hasn’t taken his call.

  “He seemed genuinely concerned about you.”

  “No. His monster mother dispatched him from London to make me change my mind, that’s all.” She blows the mobile, one puff, two, harder, and it starts to spin. “I’m doing this on my own,” she adds vehemently.

  A shadow forest flickers against the pale wall. As the tiny trees slow to a stop, I feel something still in me too, a dawning realization. Annie’s body is not mine: I can no more alter its inner workings than change the course of a satellite circling the moon. And if it weren’t for my inability to confront my own past, she’d never have felt the need to start probing into it . . . So th
is is my mess. My responsibility.

  I bend down and blow the mobile, so it dances on her fingers once more. “You’re not on your own, Annie. We’ve got this, okay? You and me.”

  26

  Rita

  Rita stares down at the puzzle of strings, wire, and half a dozen or so wooden trees, each the size of her palm, yet thin and flat as a fingernail, just as smooth. They’re attached by a large brass hook, which she instinctively picks up so that the strings hang down from a circular central rim, like one of those jellyfish that would wash up on the beach near home. The sweet scruffy collie, sitting beside Robbie, glances from one of them to the other, as if following a silent conversation. Her heart rears in her chest. Has Marge gossiped already? Leaked the mad plan to keep a baby hidden at Foxcote until the end of August? Fear mixes with the smell of fresh pencil shavings.

  “I made it last night.” His eyes smile right inside her. She pictures him cutting and sanding, oblong thighs spread, leaning over a workshop table, an alchemist, pulling something exquisite and delicate from a lump of wood, where it’s been hiding. “For the baby.”

  “The baby?” she stutters.

  “The baby I can hear over the garden wall.” He nods at her collar. “The baby that’s left a patch of milk on your blouse.”

  Oh, no. She rubs frantically at the bobbly scurf of milk, where Baby Forest nuzzles. She wonders if it’s Robbie she’s sensed on the grounds this last day or two, if that would explain why she can’t shake the feeling she’s being watched. Sometimes, walking in the woods, she’ll hear something, glance around and no one’s there, and she’s left rattled. The other night, burping the baby in the drawing room, pacing and jiggling, she could have sworn she saw something at the window. But when she ran over and looked out, she could see no one. Just a slick of moonlight. She began to feel a bit silly then, thickheaded from broken sleep.

  “One sec.” She collapses the mobile back into the paper and closes the front door so they’re standing alone in the porch, awkwardly, the site of the fumbled kiss, a few days ago yet light-years away. “A friend of Jeannie’s got into trouble. We’re helping out. It’s all very hush-hush.”

  He nods. It’s only the slight sharpening in his soft brown eyes that makes her wonder if he believes her.

  “You mustn’t say anything. It’d be a right old scandal. There’s so much at stake.” This is true, at least. Heaven knows what Walter will do.

  He phoned yesterday, his questions forensic: “Has Jeannie been eating properly and managed to put on any weight? How much?”

  “Do her eyes look swollen from crying in the morning?”

  And the worst one: “Has my wife mentioned me?”

  She reported back, yes, Jeannie’s mentioned him a lot—honking lie—and her spirits were much improved. Not a lie. When he’d asked if there’d been any “distracting” visitors—she could tell from the timbre of his voice he meant Don Armstrong—and she’d said no, she could feel his relief down the phone. “I told you Foxcote would restore her, didn’t I, Rita?” Walter had said, obviously heartened. “A break from . . .” And then a pause and Rita felt Don slip into it. “. . . her normal routine. I can’t wait to see you all.”

  His sister Edie also phoned. That didn’t go as well. Rita didn’t cup the receiver with her cardigan in time: the baby started to mewl in the background. “Have you got animals in the house or something?” Edie said, with a small laugh followed by a pause. “Shit, Rita, you’ve not got yourself into trouble, have you?” Cars beeped manically in the background. The sounds filled Rita with an agitated longing, and a fear that she might never get back to the city. It felt as if an unbridgeable gap had yawned open between that world and Foxcote’s. “Rita? Are you still on the line? Do you need my help, darling?” So she’d had to lie to Edie too. She hated that. She’d always liked Edie, her particular kind of worldly brisk kindness. After Edie had hung up, Rita had just stood there listening to the pips, feeling utterly alone.

  “I won’t say anything to anyone, Rita.”

  She believes him. She can’t imagine Robbie gossiping. A silence thickens. “I wouldn’t judge if . . .” He stops. “I mean, if I can do anything to help, Rita.”

  “The baby’s not mine!” She stifles a gasp with her hand. “Is that what you’re thinking? It is! I can tell from the look on your face.”

  “I didn’t know what to think. Sorry.”

  She starts to giggle at the awful irony. The idea that Baby Forest is hers. But she’s also touched by his sweetness. And the package in her hand. All so confusing. She’d hated him for lunging at her after the dance and thought him a brute, grabbing her like that, his hands like carpenter’s clamps on her hips. But he isn’t a brute. In fact, people never seem to be who she thinks they are. She wonders if she’s the exception. Or if she’ll surprise herself too. “Thank you for this,” she says, feeling oddly humbled. “It’s beautiful.”

  He looks away shyly, but can’t stop his spreading smile.

  “Big Rita, Baby Forest wants you,” shouts Hera, from inside the house. Then the front door flings back and there is Hera, the baby whining in her arms. “Oh!”

  “Hera, it’s all right. Robbie knows we’re looking after Jeannie’s friend’s baby,” Rita says, with slow deliberation. Hera nods, cottoning on.

  “Look. He’s made her a mobile. Will you take it upstairs and show your mother?” She reaches for the baby. “I’ll take her.” The baby grabs a handful of her hair. “Ouch.” She smiles, unwinding the little fingers.

  “Hello, baby.” Robbie grins, cocking his head to one side. He cups his not-quite-clean-enough hand around the fluff ball of her head. The dog brushes up against his legs, competing for attention.

  Rita remembers how Fred claimed to love babies. “I can’t wait for our nippers, Rita,” he’d say, patting her belly, as if it was his Ford Cortina’s bonnet. But he’d always gravitate to the Anchor rather than spend time with his infant nephews, “ankle biters,” he’d call them. “Uncle Fred will be back when you’re old enough to help me butcher a lamb, boy.”

  “She’s a beauty, Rita.”

  Rita feels herself puff with pride, as if Baby Forest was hers, then catches herself. She’s promised herself not to get sentimental or too close to this child, since she’ll soon be going away. She must be professional. It’s proving difficult. No wonder Jeannie’s got so attached.

  “What’s her name?”

  “We call her Baby Forest.” She’s gently discouraged Jeannie from giving the baby a proper name, the sense of possession that comes with it. She clears her throat. “Discretion’s sake, you know.”

  He says nothing, processing this odd detail. He strokes the baby’s head with a tenderness that makes Rita look away, confused. “She’s hungry,” he says.

  “Always hungry.”

  He laughs and a tension she wasn’t aware of dissolves. She allows herself a glance at his compelling mouth. How could it have been such a clumsy collision of a kiss? Such a total disaster?

  “Rita, I’m sorry. For that night.” He rushes into the apology, like a man trying to get through a crowd with his head down. “I’m not . . . I’m not like that.”

  She focuses on the constellation of milk spots on the baby’s forehead.

  “I don’t know what came over me. Well, I do . . . I mean . . . Ach. Someone shut me up.”

  She bites back a smile and longs to say, No, don’t stop now, tell me exactly what you felt, in your heart, in your trousers. What made you pull me toward you like that? She wants him to prove she was the focus of his desire, not just a lumpy female body that happened to be there, a few beers into a warm summer’s night.

  “I’d better go,” he says instead.

  She looks up. Their eyes lock, and something crackles between them, like a radio broadcasting in a foreign language she doesn’t understand. “Bye then.” She watches him step into his
truck, yearning to call him back to ask for help. The baby, agitated by the quickening two-step thump of Rita’s heartbeat, starts to cry.

  27

  Hera

  The tree stump has a funny draw. I keep returning to the squat column of wood with its bulging root toes, reliving the moment I found Baby Forest, lying there sweetly like a pudding on a plate. It’s a good place to sit alone, unbothered by the others, far enough away from the house not to be seen, with a good view into the dappled shade of the woods. If you sit very still, like I am now, you can see deer, the trusting fawns, the nervous mothers.

  Movement! A flash of something reddish. A deer? I visor my hand over my eyes. But the trees chop up every view, so you see in sections and can only fill in the missing bits by moving from side to side and revealing your presence. Whatever was there vanishes.

  I wait a bit—it doesn’t come back—then start to swing my legs, brushing the bare soles on the bristly bracken. I like my feet today. They don’t look like fat girl’s trotters anymore. They’re tanned or a bit grubby—it’s quite difficult to distinguish between the two. My soles are hardening, padding out, adjusting to not wearing shoes. They make me feel free. Soon my zigzag fringe will tuck behind my ears, and I won’t think of Mother screaming, “Oh my god, what have you done to your hair?” every time I look in the mirror. The sun is out, streaming through the branches. And the light is really nice, amber and soft. Like looking at the world through a bar of Pears soap.

  I smile. It feels like the baby’s changed everything. She brightens Foxcote’s shadowy corners too, filling the house with her funny sounds and smells and bits and bobs: bottles and rubber teats on the draining board; the silver rattle on the sofa; baby clothes draped over the fireguard, like happy little ghosts. She has had a magical effect on Mother, who is so different from a week ago, no longer sleepy and switched off, like a cold dark room in a basement. She hasn’t worn her sunglasses once. I feel proud: I found the baby, after all. I’m sure the baby knows this. She smiled at me last night: Rita said it was wind, but it wasn’t.