The Daughters of Foxcote Manor

by Eve Chase

  “I was. To Elliot’s father,” she says, with an emphasis on father, drawing attention to Annie’s very far from married state. “But he died a few years ago.” Her face betrays no emotion.

  A widow. I wasn’t expecting that. She fits the bitter-divorcée mold better. “I’m sorry.”

  She leans toward me intensely. “Elliot’s all I’ve got now, Sylvie. You understand?”

  “Annie’s my only child too.” She considers this a moment and something in her face softens slightly. “Can I get you something? Tea? Water?”

  “No, thank you. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Ominous. I walk into the kitchen area sensing her at my back, that spiky skinny woman’s energy, the self-righteousness that comes from self-denial and rigorous self-control. Her perfume, very eighties, overloaded with heavy, smoky notes, follows us too, like a hormonal mood. I open the balcony doors, hoping to dilute it discreetly. “Do sit down.”

  Helen plucks a scrunched-up tea towel from a chair and hesitates before she sits, as if it were a grubby seat on the Northern Line.

  We assess each other, shiftily combative over the kitchen table. I know she’s examining me as closely as I am her. A shaft of sunlight reveals a facelift, scars neatly tucked behind her ears, and—educated guess—neck work too. Her nose has the unnatural childlike snub that comes courtesy of the surgeon’s scalpel. It’s not a bad nose as worked-on noses go, and I’ve seen some honks, but I do yearn to tell her she’s gone too far with the lip fillers, when all she needed was a decent lipstick, the same shade as the inside of her cheek. Laura Mercier, probably.

  I know about reinventing oneself to get on: I understand this. I’m with her. Do what you can to fight the drag south, absolutely. But I also know that when women start surgically tinkering, like my wealthy private clients all do, there’s rarely a point when they say, “Enough. I look bloody fantastic. I’m done.” Like when you paint one room in a house, all the others start to seem tired and scruffy.

  I know Helen. I’ve worked for lots of Helens. Women who consider a private makeup artist a necessity, like a good gynae, rather than a luxury. Hair colorists. Facialists. The nail lady. All on speed dial too. These women are hard to please but also needy, easy to hurt, and too often living with the (not irrational) fear they’ll be replaced by a younger version of themselves. But I’ve never moved in the same social circles. And it’s hard to believe there might be any sort of link between us, that our DNA is actually mingling in my daughter’s womb. Even stranger, that our families have a peculiar historical intersection, a path where they randomly cross. What in did she have with Harrington Glass? How well does she know the family?

  I itch to ask outright. But I promised Annie I wouldn’t. And I can’t risk rocking that boat now, for Annie to push me away again.

  “So has Annie changed her mind yet?” she asks abruptly, interrupting my thoughts.

  “She’s set on keeping the baby.”

  She closes her eyes, and the shimmery lids quiver. “Really? Please tell me there’s a chance she’ll change her mind.”

  “Look, I know Annie. Once she’s made her mind up . . . We’re both going to have to embrace it, Helen.”

  She looks truly rocked. “I really thought . . .” She startles again. “But that means you and I . . .” She stops, with a look of dawning horror. “Good god. We’re going to be grandmothers!”

  “Makes one feel ancient, doesn’t it?” I can’t help but smile while a part of me yelps. I wonder what Jake would think if he knew. A grandmother. He wouldn’t be offering me coffee then.

  She leans forward across the table. The perfume is so strong it’s as if she’s breathing it out. “I simply must talk to her.”

  “Helen, you upset her so much last time that she ran away.”

  “I was only offering money!” she splutters. “To make it all easier.”

  “Exactly.”

  Helen looks genuinely mystified.

  “Can we be clear? She’s not going to get rid of the baby. She’s not after your family’s money. She’s determined to manage all this on her own.”

  “But your . . . your situation.” Her hand flutters around the room. “This block. This neighborhood.”

  “I love this neighborhood!” As if on cue, Jake starts playing guitar on his boat deck, bluesy strumming, the odd dropped note. It does nothing to persuade Helen.

  “Oh, come on, Sylvie. This is no place to bring up a baby. There are gangs! Armed with knives! Lurking in the stairwells!”

  “They’re just teenagers knocking about, and they live here too,” I say, pitying her. How sad to view the young with such suspicion. I wonder if she’s had a bad experience, was a victim of some sort of crime, but daren’t ask.

  “The flat is the size of a utility cupboard! And Annie’s age! Basically a child. How in God’s name is she going to manage?”

  A tightness in my chest. “I only know my daughter’s resourceful and determined and . . . just a remarkable girl.”

  Helen looks shocked, as if she’s never heard a mother talk about her child like that. Then she shakes her head, dismissing it. “What if she can’t cope? What if she doesn’t bond with the baby? Succumbs to postnatal depression? Much higher in younger mothers, the depression thing. I know. I’ve read up about it, Sylvie.”

  “I’m going to support her,” I say quietly. My heart has started to pound, like it does when you know someone’s spoiling for a fight, and you can’t see how to get out of their way.

  “This is ridiculous,” she mutters under her breath, the implication being I can barely support myself.

  I say nothing, cross my arms over my chest and wait for her to take the hint: please fricking leave. She doesn’t. So I say, “I’ll be in touch, of course. When we know more. The due date.”

  “The due date? Christ.” She stands up with a shudder. The gold buttons on her jacket wink in the sunshine. A heavy jacket to be wearing on such a warm day. And her foundation is far too thick, one of those old-fashioned formulas, more like stage paint. I decide Helen’s one of those self-flagellating women who feel most themselves when they’re pinched into high shoes, too hot or too cold, slightly in pain. I decide she’s a nightmare.

  “Thanks for dropping round,” I say, trying to stay civil for Annie’s sake.

  “I suppose we’d better swap numbers,” says Helen, looking faintly shocked by the idea, despite suggesting it. I don’t naturally belong in her address book. “Call if . . . anything changes.”

  We awkwardly tap each other’s details into our phones—“Eight, did you say? Oh, damn, sorry, bungled it. Can you repeat that, Sylvie?”—Helen’s long shellacs hitting the screen with a flinty click. Afterward she hesitates by the front door, once again positioning her handbag tightly under her arm, ready to run the gauntlet of the communal walkway. She takes in the lewd graffiti on the wall opposite and the peeling paint, with a moue of distaste. “Sylvie . . .”

  I steel myself. “Yes, Helen.”

  “This is all very well. Terribly . . .”—she gestures around her, struggling not to be offensive—“modern. But you won’t realize how precious a family house is until you’ve really lost it. That’s all I’m going to say.” She frowns. “All those memories. Don’t let your husband waltz off with them.”

  “Right.” I wasn’t expecting that. “Thank you. But don’t worry, I won’t.” Sooner rather than later we’ll have to sell the house, divide the assets, if we’re both to buy places of our own. Even though I’m no longer living there, the thought upsets me. And now Annie’s pregnant, it feels too disrupting to suggest it.

  “Right. Lecture over. I can see you’re itching for me to leave. Where does one get a black cab around here?”

  “Turn left at the bottom of the stairwell. Right at the kebab shop.”

  She flinches at “kebab,” in greed or disgust, I’m not sure. She
looks like a woman in need of one, rather than a blowout of popped quinoa.

  I watch her walk away, listening to the sound of those expensive heels meeting grubby concrete, and think about what she said—families, memories, houses—and something solidifies in my mind. I hear Kerry’s voice: Any sounds, really. Things that might jog a memory.

  I hunt down my laptop, buried under last month’s Vogue. I open up Google Maps, swing the little yellow cursor over the Forest of Dean, and land it on a junction of the main forest road. The camera twists and zooms in. The image pixelates, then clarifies: trees in the distance, in the foreground fields. I’m standing at a crossroads, with wooden arrowed signs that look like they were stuck up there decades ago and left to rot. Which way? Damn.

  Foxcote Manor, I type. Reload. Zilch. Have I remembered the name wrongly? Misspelled it? Hall, maybe. House. I frantically type, trying different versions. Still nothing. I fling myself back against the chair, frustrated. Has the house been razed to the ground? Whatever was there is no longer. Foxcote Manor has gone.

  31

  Rita

  The Morris Minor stalls at the crossroads. Rita can’t blame it. She’d like to stall too. Or reverse back down the road. But she can’t. (Not just because she can’t drive backward in a straight line.) She didn’t like leaving the baby and the children in the care of Jeannie and Don this morning. Not after the dingdong last night. Not after seeing the bruise swelling into a plum beneath Jeannie’s left eye at breakfast. Just the thought of it brings a fresh high-pitched flute of panic and a compulsion to return to Foxcote urgently.

  She restarts the ignition and skids left toward Foxcote. A maroon estate car appears in the rearview mirror. Rita tenses, aware that the back seat is covered with baby supplies she’s bulk-bought at a shop far enough away from Hawkswell so as not to cause gossip. She drives a little faster, scaring herself, sweat gumming her back to her seersucker blouse.

  Muttering, “Don’t crash, don’t crash,” beneath her breath, she straightens her arms on the wheel. They feel like stiff steel rods: the faster she goes, the more anxious she is, the worse her driving, as if the steering shaft connects to her brain.

  Today it feels like there’s no membrane between her and the rest of the world, like her skin’s been flayed. And she’s bone-tired. She didn’t know such tiredness was possible, her body a lumpen burden to be dragged around. The strain of keeping the baby secret means her stomach has been cramping. And around three in the morning, every morning, then again at five, she’s up, anticipating squalls, forearmed with a warm sterilized bottle of milk, a fresh muslin cloth. Now, far worse than any of this, there’s Don to worry about too. A violence she hadn’t seen before.

  Rita feels like the household has tipped off the edge of the civilized world and they’re all disoriented, drunk on the absinthe-green light. Only Don, she suspects, grasps the madness of the situation with the baby and his own presence at Foxcote, Walter due to arrive any day. But Don’s either too arrogant to be fazed by it or, more likely, gets a kick from the risk. No doubt he’s convinced he can brazen it out, Rita thinks, slowing into a bend in the lane. Or he’ll wriggle his way free of the situation, like a slippery Thames eel through the fingers.

  They’ve just got to get through the next four days, she reminds herself, the dog end of August. Then Don leaves for Arabia and Jeannie will finally, finally—please God—make contact with the authorities. Although this plan still strikes her as completely bonkers—why not turf Don out and call now?—it’s less bonkers than not having one at all.

  On the other hand, containment for even another afternoon seems ambitious. Robbie or Marge could let something slip. Teddy has no filter at all, bless him, and has only to pick up the phone when Walter calls and gabble it all out. And she still can’t shake that eerie watched feeling, especially at night when the house is lit up and the darkness rubs against the windows, thick and furred, like a black bear’s back. Who is it? she wonders with a shudder.

  Robbie? Oh, she’d hate it to be him. Fingers? Ugh. The other likely culprit would be Marge. But Rita doubts her capacity for subterfuge: why skulk around when you can just charge in?

  She did this yesterday, cornering Rita in the scullery. “Who, in heaven’s name, is that man marauding about the woods half naked?” she’d demanded, lantern jaw tensed, the lone hair on her chin mole quivering. “Is it his ridiculous car?” The “good family friend” line didn’t wash, of course. Marge looked apoplectic, as if she was about to sweep the tins of baked beans and tuna off the shelves with her burly, work-thickened fists. “He’ll ruin everything for the baby and Mrs. Harrington. Talk about attracting attention! He bellows in the woods, like a stag in rut!” And this image—uncannily accurate—made Rita giggle, and Marge even crosser, stamping her foot and accusing her of not taking the situation seriously.

  What could be more serious? Rita is constantly terrified of doing something wrong, the baby being hungry, cold, or ill or simply feeling unloved. Although she’s trying to be professional, to view Baby Forest simply as an independent living organism who needs nurturing, not unlike Ethel the fern, with every hour that passes, Baby Forest crawls a little further under Rita’s skin. They’ve developed a sort of understanding that circumvents language. When the baby needs her, Rita just knows. It’s like an alarm clock ringing in her brain. She’ll wake up with a start and, sludgy with sleep, stagger across the bedroom in the gloom to the cot Robbie has made especially, sanded smooth. Baby Forest will always be wide awake, waiting for her to arrive. And Rita will rest her chin on the cot’s side and sing a lullaby—“Bye, baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting”—and watch the mobile’s shadows flickering on the wall, until the baby’s eyes start to close again. Other times, if the child is grumbling and wriggling with colic, she does what she knows she shouldn’t, taking the baby into bed with her, snuggled in the crook of her arm, the only tactic that ensures both of them will get a few unbroken hours of sleep.

  Baby Forest’s too easy to love, that’s the problem. In other families, the mother is the natural barrier between nanny and baby, like a monolithic Easter Island statue, a reminder not to get too close, not to try to compete. A nanny must be efficient, kind, and discreet: never more maternal, prettier, or preferred by the children (let alone the husband). But the situation is different here. Jeannie’s attention is constantly tugged in different directions now, like hands pulling on a skirt.

  Rita senses that Teddy is starting to fret at the baby’s permanence, the threat to his position as the cherished youngest. He gets clingier and more boisterous by the day. Hera seethes at Don’s presence, her own growing ever more fraught and charged, like stretched elastic the moment before it’s pinged. And Don? Well, Don wants to keep Jeannie to himself, of course, always pawing, stroking, and resting his hand on the neat curve of Jeannie’s bottom, with a brazen casual possession. A sensual fleshy fug surrounds them. Worst of all, he wanders around after his morning bath, dominating every room he enters, looking for Jeannie, a towel around his waist, sexuality bared like teeth.

  Maybe this is why the baby’s eyes always follow Rita, not Jeannie. When the baby cries, Rita knows she’s the only one who’ll be able to soothe her and has to watch, hands fidgeting at her sides, while Don and Jeannie jiggle her too energetically, trying to distract her—never works—when all she wants is to be pressed close, held firm, made to feel safe.

  When the baby wakes in the night, Rita struggles to go back to sleep. She’s on high alert, feeling as though something bad might happen if she lets down her guard—that the baby will forget to breathe if she’s not watching the tiny mammalian chest rise and fall.

  She’s developed her own insomniac routine, a sort of mental drift, which always fails to send her back to sleep and involves taking apart the situation at Foxcote, like a jigsaw, and putting it together again in a new way, finishing it with A Nice Ending. This usually involves a kind lady with a mollifying smile from
social services arriving at the door. Not a policeman. The lady will carefully tuck up Baby Forest into a shiny new pram and clean blanket and explain that the real mother, a lovely young woman, an Emma or an Anne or a Felicity, has come to her senses and desperately wants her baby back. Who could argue with that? A baby returning to its rightful mother? They will kiss Baby Forest good-bye and promise to write and send money if Emma/Anne/Felicity needs it. Meanwhile Don will vanish through the back door and roar off in his sports car into the arms of another woman. Someone less hassle. Someone less married.

  That’s what last night’s row was all about. The married bit.

  Shouting woke her, not the baby this time. At first she thought Don and Jeannie were having sex again and she held a pillow over her head. Then she realized it wasn’t sex. It was the opposite. Jeannie was screaming, “You slept with Edie? You slept with my sister-in-law? How could you? How could you?” and there was the sound of something falling to the floor, a chair or a table, and Don shouting, “Why can’t I? I can sleep with whoever I like. You’re the married one, Jeannie. You’re the one who’s cheating on my old friend like a whore.” More yelling: words indecipherable. After that came the sound of skin meeting skin, Jeannie’s cry of pain and surprise.

  A new thought streaked through Rita’s head then: what if the knife she found under the mattress in London wasn’t to protect Jeannie from Walter, as Rita had presumed, but from Don?

  This possibility altered everything. It felt like the Harringtons’ world had been tilted on its side, exposing a previously unseen cross section, a shocking hidden view, like the first sight of ghoulish worm-white roots in a slab of dark soil.

  She suddenly felt Foxcote’s remoteness keenly—the bristling woodland, the empty lane, the way you could scream and scream here and no one would ever hear you. Only she had heard, hadn’t she? So she had to be brave.