The Daughters of Foxcote Manor

by Eve Chase

  She watches Teddy rush toward them and tug Don, laughing and protesting, away by the hand, talking about shooting in the woods. Jeannie waves them off.

  Anxiety taps its way down Rita’s spine. She hopes they don’t go too far. Or pick any mushrooms. Or fall into a disused mine. She’ll take the dried washing upstairs, keep her hands and mind busy until Teddy returns safely. Half an hour later, she hears Jeannie’s light footstep on the stairs.

  Here’s her chance. She knocks gently on Jeannie’s bedroom door. “It’s me, Rita.”

  “Come in!” Jeannie calls out cheerily.

  “I just—Oh. Sorry.” Jeannie is dressing, wrestling with a bra strap and stepping into an oyster-satin dress. “I’ll come back later.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’re both women.”

  She’s probably got more in common with the wheelbarrow in the garden than with Jeannie in that liquid halter-neck dress, more lovely than Rita has seen her in months. “Thought I’d scrub up properly for once.” Jeannie turns and lifts teased, oiled curls off her neck. “Would you do me up?”

  Rita fumbles with the tiny pearl button. She can’t help brushing Jeannie’s skin, smooth and unblemished, with her own roughened fingers. “I was wondering how long Don might be staying.”

  Jeannie spins round and holds her gaze a little longer than is comfortable. “A few days. Then he’s off to Arabia. Since you ask.” The sisterly warmth of a moment ago has gone. “I’ll do the fastening.”

  How will they survive a few more days? Also, next week is the last of August. Walter’s due back in the country. And the plan is to call the authorities. Or is Jeannie not considering that Walter might actually turn up here? She seems to be refusing to think about everything else.

  Time’s slipping between their fingers. The seasons are changing. Angry wasps have replaced the corps of white butterflies. The late-August air is blood warm, the sky a tired, bilious blue. And at the dawn feed of the day, she’s started to smell autumn seeping through the cracks in the windows, sweet and acidic, like the brown bruised flesh of fallen apples. Rita aches for the sea.

  “You’re not to mention Don’s visit to Walter.” Jeannie tries to sound nonchalant. “Let’s not make a fuss.”

  Rita stares down at the unraveling edge of the old Persian rug, feeling as though she’s fraying too. “What should I tell Marge?” she asks quietly, not looking up.

  “Just say a family friend is staying.”

  As if she’ll believe that. Marge is a bloodhound. She glances at Jeannie’s unmade bed, the twisted sheets, and imagines Marge lifting them to her nose and sniffing.

  “Best to instruct her not to mention anything to Walter too,” says Jeannie quickly.

  “She’s unlikely to listen to me.” Marge believes she’s a rank, no, a whole species, above Rita.

  “Well, Walter can’t easily be contacted for the next few days. What with the mine business. Isn’t that what he said to you on the phone?”

  Rita nods. For some reason, she’s not sure if she believes Walter. He’s as likely to phone—or even roll up, with no warning, straight from the plane—to surprise them, catch them out.

  “Anyway, Marge can’t exactly mention Don to Walter and forget about the small matter of the baby, can she?” Jeannie perches on the edge of the bed and snaps a paste-jeweled cuff bracelet on to her slender wrist. “It’s all or nothing.”

  The same goes for her note-taking. The whole summer is off the record now, a gaping hole where truth no longer lives. Only the story Jeannie has shaped: this fantasy family in the dreamlike Arcadian woods.

  “Marge cares about the baby, Rita. She’s bigger-hearted than I gave her credit for.”

  Rita’s not sure about this, either. She suspects Marge gets a thrill from being in on a secret. And the power it wields. A silence pools.

  “Look, Rita, I know you don’t approve of Don.”

  She can’t bring herself to deny it, even though it’s not her job to approve or otherwise.

  Jeannie turns to the mirror and lifts her chin, examining herself. “And I wish Hera didn’t hate him. It’s all very awkward, given how fond Don is of her.” She adjusts the cuff on her wrist, then glances at Rita sharply, as if rebuking judgment that Rita hasn’t yet expressed. “Nothing’s black or white. Not how it seems when you’re young.”

  Rita gives the smallest of nods. She’d never be unfaithful to her husband. She knows this in the same way she knows that she’ll never be short or not love ferns.

  As if reading this, Jeannie’s eyes start to swim with tears, endangering her mascara, the catlike sweeps of kohl. “I don’t love my children any less, you know. In fact, the opposite. I feel like a proper mother again, not some—some dreary black cloud.” She catches a tear deftly on the edge of her finger. “Given everything that’s happened, aren’t I allowed a few crumbs of joy? Answer me that, Rita.”

  A difficult philosophical question. And one she’s saved from answering by the muffled gunshot outside.

  29

  Hera

  The deer was alive a few seconds ago. The closeness of death, just a breath, a bullet, away, brings a swooping sick feeling. I stick my finger into the warm hole in the young deer’s flank and recoil. What have I done?

  Watching me, Don starts to laugh. “Bravo. Your first kill. Now taste it.”

  I shake my head. Teddy, standing next to me, one hand resting on my leg for comfort, is trying really hard not to cry.

  “All talk then, Hera? Thought so.”

  I bring my finger to my mouth and suck. It tastes of blood and copper coins and something else. Power, I think. My own.

  “That deer’s life force has just transferred into you. Feels good, eh?” With no warning, Don lunges at me, hugging me to his bare chest. My face is pressed against the nub of his nipple, the scratchiness of his hair. I don’t like it.

  He resists as I pull away, his skin sticking to mine. I can’t stop looking at the deer. And I’m struck again by the starkness of its being alive one moment, a carcass the next. “Teddy, come on. Let’s go.” I grab Teddy’s hot paw of a hand.

  “Wait.” Don reaches down to the animal, dips his finger in the wound, and wipes the stickiness across my forehead. “There you go. Blooded. Little hunter.” He frowns, as if something’s bothering him. “It’s hard to shoot anything in these damn trees.” He hasn’t hit anything that breathes. “Didn’t aim for the head, either, like an amateur. The mouth is still full of grass. See? She didn’t see the bullet coming. Who taught you?”

  “No one,” I say truthfully.

  “A natural.”

  It would feel like a compliment from someone else. I turn and run, tugging Teddy with me, away from the blood and the deer’s open surprised black eyes.

  In the bathroom, I wipe the smear of blood away, over and over until the tissue disintegrates. I pour myself a scorching hot bath that draws a red line on my thighs and I start to cry, thinking of the young deer, how it must have a mother somewhere, and I wonder if she saw, if she’ll come back and nuzzle it and try to make it stagger to its feet again. And I hate that there’s a link between my pulling that trigger—Don breathing over my shoulder, Don hissing, “Now!”—and the end of that deer’s life. I think of the bang on my shoulder, the wrong feeling it gave me—and I wish that Don had been lying there, not an innocent animal.

  “Hera? Are you okay?” Big Rita knocks on the locked bathroom door.

  “I shot a deer. I hate myself.”

  Stunned silence. I wonder if she’s also picturing the dainty deer on its side, tongue lolling. If she hates me too. She once found a baby bird on the terrace in London and carried it back up to her room—a nest in a shoe box—and got up every two hours in the night to feed it bits of worm. Here at Foxcote she pulls hair from our hairbrushes and leaves it outside in tangled balls for the birds to line their nests. “I’m sorry,”
she says eventually, in a soft voice, as if she knows, without my telling her, that the deer’s death has stolen something precious from me too.

  When I go back into my bedroom, pink and boiled by my bath, Big Rita is waiting for me, sitting on the carpet, cross-legged. In front of her is the terrarium, glittering. “I thought you might want to take care of it this summer. Dot and Ethel and all the others. I’m so busy with the baby.” She smiles like it’s no big deal, when I know it’s the biggest. “You’re good at looking after things, Hera.”

  I should thank her. But the words won’t come.

  “You don’t want it?”

  “It’s your favorite thing.”

  “I trust you, Hera.”

  No one trusts me. I’ve wanted this little glass case of plants from the first moment Big Rita pitched up in London, smelling of the sea, unpacking her blouses and books and then, to Teddy’s and my astonishment, this terrarium stuffed full of plants—with names! I think of the bedtime stories she used to tell us—ships moving across the globe, bringing exotic jungle plants to the gray skies of London. No one had brought them back alive before. “I swear on my life I’ll take good care of it.” I reach over and hug her. She feels soft and safe, the opposite of Don.

  “Right, shall we find its perch? We want sunlight but not too much. Not too direct. Not too little. You’re east-facing here, that’s good.” She drags a side table near the window and my bed, then lifts the terrarium onto it. “Ta-da. Perfect. You can look at it before you go to sleep, Hera. I used to love that as a kid. Focusing on it until my eyes went blurry. Forgetting all the bad stuff.”

  That night I lie on my side in bed and gaze at it. But when my eyes go blurry, the bad stuff doesn’t go away. Instead I see a deer running through the ferns, then pronking—leaping, back arched, legs stiff—at some unseen threat behind the glass. And when I sniff my fingers, I can still smell blood.

  30

  Sylvie

  Favorite smells?” Kerry asks, sliding the clipboard back at the end of the hospital bed. I’m not sure if the nurse is humoring me because I feel so bloody helpless, and she’s walked in and heard me saying this to Mum (as in therapy, you develop a taste for the one-sided conversation). “Flowers? Her perfume. Yours maybe? You always smell delicious, Sylvie, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  I laugh. “Not today. Bit of a rush this morning. But thank you.” I make a mental note to buy Kerry a bottle of my scent, a light fresh Jo Malone. She enjoys the beauty freebies I bring her and the other nurses as inadequate little thank-yous.

  “And what about music? Does our Rita have favorite songs? Play them to her. Any sounds, really. Things that might jog a memory. Mean something . . .”

  A scribble of an outlandish idea takes shape.

  I hurry home through the crowded city streets, trailed by a disconcerting reflection in the mirrored glass of office blocks: a woman who has slept badly, leaped out of the bed with a mound of messy hair—over forty, not so cute—and plucked sweatpants from the overflowing laundry basket. I turn onto the canal path, wondering if I should discuss my idea with Steve, if the new rules of our co-parenting, eggshell-stepping, demand it. But I know he’ll say it’s an insane thing to do, the very last thing I should do. And he’ll have a point.

  “Brewing one, if you fancy.”

  I startle. The canal is talking.

  A head appears in a porthole window. The boatman. “Beautiful morning.”

  I hadn’t noticed the weather. But I notice his eyes. One blue. One hazel. Did he really just offer coffee?

  “Have to be some upsides to being self-employed and living in a floating bathtub, right?” He leans farther out of the boat window and sticks out a hand. “Jake.”

  “Sylvie.” His handshake is just the right side of too firm. I can’t stop staring at his eyes. They gleam with a sort of delicious amusement.

  “I’ve seen you. On the balcony.” He nods up at Val’s block. I become aware that I’m smiling at him, almost involuntarily.

  I should probably pretend coquettishly that I don’t know this but find myself saying, “Yes, you too. With the guitar.”

  “Talent and enthusiasm not always fairly divvied up. You wouldn’t be the first neighbor to complain.”

  So he doesn’t think he’s the new Ed Sheeran. This is a relief.

  “So what size cafetière should I use?” he asks, with just enough of a sidelong smile to make me blush.

  “Sorry?” I say, stalling for time. I’m so bad at this. I need some sort of intervention from my single female friends. Dating seems much more complicated than it was the first time round. If this is dating.

  Standing there—confused, flattered, vaguely alarmed—I remember how I used to tell myself to be more French about Steve’s affairs. I could have an affair too: even things up! Only I didn’t. But if I had, where would I be now? With whom? My mind boggles. Married life is an editing process, I realize, a discerning closing down of other options. It’s like choosing a capsule wardrobe—navy, black, and cream—over fleeting extravagances, throwaway fast fashion. You tell yourself: understated day-to-night dressing, this works, this is me. But what if you’re wrong? And how do you ever know what turn your life might have taken if you’d sashayed to the school gate in a leopard-print jumpsuit instead? None of this helps.

  “Would Sylvie-from-the-balcony like a coffee?” he perseveres.

  Hearing him say my name brings an unexpected sexy jolt. A tightening. Then it occurs to me that no one but Steve’s seen my body naked for years. All its bumps and moles and stretch marks. But he’s suggesting coffee, not a shag! How ridiculous. “I . . . I’m kind of busy, I’m afraid. Thank you for the offer, though.” I sound like an old lady thanking him for giving up his seat for me on the tube.

  “Another time,” he says, meaning, I won’t ask again. Our eyes lock; then he vanishes back into the porthole.

  I’m left with a funny hollow feeling, like when you flake out of a party at the last minute and spend the evening wondering if it might have changed your life. The heron spreads her wings and flies away. Deflated, I turn into the concrete cool of the block, trying to persuade myself that the last thing I need is a date.

  Slightly breathless from the stairs, I stop on the open-air walkway. Who’s that? There’s a woman outside my front door.

  Skinny, blond, and perfectly coiffed, she’s wearing a navy bouclé jacket with gold buttons that squeals Chanel and a pair of tailored white trousers, and she’s lifted off the dirty paving by patent leather heels. Mid-fifties? Hard to tell. She stands very upright, with a look of jaw-gritted focus, as if she’s doing secret pelvic-floor exercises. Clearly not a resident.

  Who is she? Why is she at my door? I’ve got things to be getting on with. A mission to plan. The woman holds her handbag to her chest, as if expecting a mugger to come steaming toward her at any moment. She glances in my direction.

  “Oh, excuse me.” Cut-glass accent. A small, strained smile, revealing a perfect row of veneered teeth. She has the nervous pale blue eyes of a whippet. “I’m looking for a Sylvie Broom. Am I in the right place?”

  It can only be one person. “Helen?” I ask tightly, trying not to sound like I’d like to toss her back down the stairwell.

  “You’re Sylvie?” she says, processing my Nike trainers and sweatpants and shock of undone hair.

  “I don’t normally look like this.” She doesn’t laugh. “Annie’s at her dad’s today. But, as I said on the phone, I’d rather you didn’t contact her directly, if that’s okay.”

  “It’s you I wanted to talk to.”

  “Oh.” I blanch. “Well, you better come in. Sorry about the mess. It’s been a bit of a morning.”

  I worry about her stiletto heels on Val’s Danish wooden floor but don’t quite have the guts to ask her to remove them. She’d probably refuse anyway.

  “I hope you don�
�t mind me popping over. I was just around the corner,” she says, and we both know she’s lying, no more likely to frequent this post code than a polar bear the tropics. She wants a heads-up on what sort of girl her darling boy has got up the duff. Her gaze is like an airport scanner. It sweeps into every corner of the tiny apartment, hovering over the new eye shadows and lipsticks scattered over the coffee table that I haven’t yet sorted through, and look like a shoplifter’s haul. A dirty plate. Annie’s dropped socks. Pale pink walls and houseplants and white sofas can only go so far.

  “I’m renting this place from a friend,” I impulsively explain.

  She tries to frown through her Botox. “Separated?”

  It’s not a question. She’s been digging. “Since June. Amicably.”

  A smile flickers at the corner of her mouth. Like she knows better.

  “Annie splits her time between us,” I overexplain. “Steve, my husband, is in the family house for now. A couple of tube stops away.” The thought of that dear little house, its teal-blue kitchen, where historic Christmases and Annie’s childhood birthday parties seem to be embedded in the walls, makes my voice go high. “Until we decide what to do next.”

  Something in Helen’s face changes. “What? You should keep the house. The woman should always keep the house,” she declares, without sympathy but with a sort of flat common sense that makes me warm to her a bit. “He should be in the council block, not you.”

  “It’s not a council block. Most of the flats are privately owned,” I say, despising myself for lowering to her snobbish level. I glance at her left hand, but it’s so crusted in jewelry it’s hard to distinguish a wedding ring. “Are you married, Helen?”