by Flynn Berry
• • •
In the morning, Faye turned over in bed and looked out the window. It was still early. Mist rose from the lawn and the swimming pool and the woods, but the sky was clear, and the day would be warm. The property was even larger than she’d thought last night, in the dark. Like a feudal estate. White sheep were scattered across the vast green lawn.
Each part of the landscape seemed to be in the exact right place, like in a frontispiece map in a book. There was even a Neolithic dolmen on the hill in the distance. The view made her nervous, like she’d done something she shouldn’t have and was about to be caught.
In front of the flint-and-stone stables below, Shetland ponies were grazing in a paddock. Of course they had horses. Did Colin know how to ride? Had he ever been hunting? It didn’t seem like the man she knew, who had been with her two nights ago drinking snakebites in a pub in Camden. She turned around to ask, but he was still asleep.
The mist was starting to thin, and sunlight sparked off a wineglass left by the pool. Now she noticed other glasses, and bottles, and sodden towels. They must have gone swimming in the rain last night after she went to bed.
After breakfast, Faye walked with Colin and James down the lawn. They passed through a gap in the hedge wall and onto the tennis court hidden inside. James took racquets from a small blue-and-white-striped spectator’s hut.
Faye watched them play for a while, until they both had a skeleton of sweat on their shirts, then wandered outside the hedges. A few of the others were by the pool, asleep on sun loungers or reading. Behind her, she could hear the tennis ball being hit back and forth.
It wasn’t so bad, she thought. You couldn’t tell, most of the time. Though she had noticed that when they talked about travel, they didn’t talk about countries, or towns, or even restaurants, but about specific drinks and dishes, since they’d all been to the same places so many times. The bellini at a certain restaurant in Positano, for example. Apparently it was made with a cold peach slurry.
They’d also all had altitude sickness, which Faye found odd. They talked about it at dinner, how the sickness gave them strange dreams. She wouldn’t have thought so many of them would be interested in mountain climbing. “Where do you hike?” she asked. “Not hiking,” said James, after a pause. “Skiing.”
No one seemed to mind, though. All of them were friendly towards her. Because of Colin, she thought. She noticed that when his friends spoke to the group, they looked at Colin. And he was never interrupted, unlike Sam, who could rarely finish a sentence. Before dinner, they had all hesitated for a moment, just long enough to let Colin choose his seat first. He’d told her before that he liked to sit facing the restaurant, and she’d said, “Everyone does.”
At first she’d thought they deferred to him because he was clever, funny, and magnetic, but maybe it was because he outranked them. He would be an earl, he’d told her this morning, when his uncle died. James would be a viscount, which wasn’t quite as good, and the others wouldn’t inherit titles. When she’d asked, “Will you use the title? Will you make everyone call you Lord Spenser?” he’d laughed. “Do you really think I’d do that?”
She leaned against the paddock fence and looked at the ponies. Earlier, Rose had said she learned how to ride when she was three, with her mum walking beside her. She’d had a miniature Clydesdale pony. Faye had looked around the breakfast table and wondered what it did to you, to grow up with everything you want. Colin never had a miniature Clydesdale, as far as she knew, but he did have a tree house, he’d told her after breakfast, on a corner of his family’s estate. It had windows, a roof, and two levels inside. So an actual house, then.
She turned away from the paddock and headed towards the pool. He’d grown up with servants. Staff, he called them. Someone else had made his bed. Colin had been such a relief after Henry, she’d thought he was like her.
Rose’s friend Orla sat on the edge of the diving board in an orange bathing suit, talking with Sam. Faye was wary of Sam. He was friendly, but often said cruel, belittling things, especially when drinking. She walked past the hedge wall. On the other side, Colin was arguing with James about a serve. She was near enough to hear his ragged breathing. I can make a decision, she thought. I don’t have to picture him with servants, or in the first-class cabin of an airplane. I can think of him growing up in a small house in Norfolk, bicycling around, doing chores, growing bored, asking to go out for lo mein on his birthday, studying for a scholarship, being nervous in the interview. No one will know if I keep that version, she thought. It fits with who he is now, anyway. He’s not spoiled, it may as well be true.
5
I REMEMBER MUM SWIMMING in the pool at Ashdown, and helping to carry bottles of wine out to the long table set on the terrace. She never showed any signs of unease. She always seemed to belong in the group of adults, though her accent was different from theirs.
We visited Ashdown often. There were twenty bedrooms upstairs, and I remember standing at the end of the corridor, certain that one of the doors was about to creak open. So many people had lived there, might still be there as ghosts.
The land around the house was also bewitching. The stables, the woods, the walled garden with its peach, quince, and plum trees. Hundreds of years before, they’d lit fires inside the wall to keep the fruit trees warm in the winter. I sat inside the disused fireplaces and read or played imaginary games, always set in a medieval autumn, with Rose and James’s daughter Alice, who was nearly my age.
I wish now that I hadn’t spent so much time there on my own, in the garden or the woods. I wish I’d been in the house, with the adults, listening. Then I might have understood why they hated my mother. They must have, Rose, James, and Sam, or they wouldn’t have helped my father escape.
• • •
I saw Rose on the street once, on a warm evening in June, three weeks after I finished medical school. She was wearing pumps and a shift dress and carrying a jacket over her arm, and she looked like any of the other hundreds of women on their way home from work.
I followed her. I’d spent so much time thinking about her, and then there she was, holding a bottle of mineral water, waiting to cross the road. She turned, her face in profile, to check the oncoming traffic. I was just behind her, close enough to see the redness rubbed into her shoulder by the strap of her bag.
I followed her down Cadogan Street, wondering if she had been in court that day. I looked at the back of her head and the posts of her earrings. The streetlamps hadn’t come on yet, but the evening sunlight filled their dusty glass domes so they glowed. Rose lifted her head, like she’d noticed it too.
As we crossed Sloane Square, her phone rang. “Oh, hi, darling. How did the exams turn out? . . . Did he? . . . Right . . . Right . . . Are you still coming at seven? . . . Thai, your father’s picking it up . . . No, the new place. Call and tell him what you’d like.” I knew Alice was in a master’s program in California, she must have been back for a visit. Rose laughed. “Don’t say that. See you soon.”
She turned onto St. Leonard’s Terrace. The road was quiet, and I stopped on the corner while she took out a key and opened a gate. I waited until she’d gone inside, then stood for a while looking at the house. It was a large townhouse covered in ivy with a fanlight over the door. I’ve thought about it a lot since then, about the three of them having dinner at home, and the other things they might do as a family.
• • •
For a long time afterwards, I fantasized about joining their staff. There was the townhouse in London and the mansion in Sussex. Both residences were large, they would need a lot of help. I would be allowed into all of their rooms as a cleaner. I could eavesdrop, I could find out where my father had gone. But there weren’t any open positions in the city or the countryside. The Frasers had a permanent staff, all of whom had worked for them for years.
I decided to focus on James instead. After my father�
�s disappearance, when his friends were often in the press, there were rumors that James visited prostitutes. During the investigation, a woman who worked out of a flat behind King’s Cross said he was a former client, and in his diary the police found the address of a condemned building in King’s Cross.
James said a friend of his who developed property was considering buying it. No, he didn’t use the building to meet a prostitute, he said. He’d never paid for sex in his life.
I’ve spent so many hours trying to find this woman. Only her first name was ever published, and it might not have been real. She said he’d been a regular client, until he started to make her nervous. He knew she didn’t live in the King’s Cross flat and wanted to know her address. She thought he’d followed her home once. He started bringing her gifts, things that he wanted her to wear or things to eat, including an expensive set of jams.
I don’t know how to find her. If I ever do, though, if I ever find proof, James might agree to tell me where my father went. He’s constructed the sort of public life that wouldn’t withstand that exposure. He’s a major donor to the Conservative party, which would distance itself from him, the private causes he supports would remove him from their boards, his firm would fire him.
For three months that summer after medical school, I followed James to his members’ club in Mayfair, and to Waterloo station, where he caught the train down to Sussex. I watched him buy clothes, read newspapers, have his hair cut. He often went for massages, but always at the same expensive day spa.
I followed him to his office at an insurance firm near the Royal Exchange. He took at least a full hour for lunch, often at Sweetings. The restaurant was always full of men in suits. Cracked paint on the walls, wood trim, cartoons of politicians. It seemed grotesque, the still life of pheasants strung up by their necks, the smell of fish, the bright lights on all those men eating sandwiches filled with glistening white crabmeat. He usually went with the same colleague. They ordered crab sandwiches and a bottle of Meursault. When I could sit within earshot, their conversations were mostly about work, or politics, or travel, nothing useful. The problem was that James traveled so often for work, and I couldn’t follow him on his business trips. I had no way of knowing what he did when he was out of town.
Early one morning, I watched him get out of a black cab and wheel a suitcase to the door. He’d been to Hong Kong for work, I’d overheard him telling his colleague about the trip. The suitcase still had a yellow airline tag attached. He had trouble finding his key, and I heard him sigh. He must have been jet-lagged. I was so tired of waiting. I wanted to walk up to him and say, Was it a good trip? What did you do to relax?
I stopped watching him soon after that, out of frustration, and because my schedule changed so drastically. Once my foundation year began, I was always at the hospital, or collapsing into bed after a night shift.
• • •
Sam and Orla separated six years ago. I hoped then that she would decide to tell the truth, I’d read an interview with a Met detective who said that half of his cold cases were solved after a divorce. But Orla didn’t go to the police, as far as I know. She did convert to Catholicism, though.
Sam has dated a lot of women since then. I’m not his type, but could probably approximate it with enough effort. Something in my mind closes down, though, when I even consider it.
I haven’t followed any of my father’s friends in years, but I’m still watching them. I clip the pictures of them that sometimes appear in the paper after parties or charity dinners or gallery openings. I recently watched a short, blurry video of Sam at a wedding, using a saber to cut open a bottle of champagne.
I know the names and addresses of their members’ clubs. I know the names of their children and their godchildren, of which they each have about ten, some of whom have public profiles online. I know from the Times that Sam’s neighbors in Chelsea were annoyed by the constant building work while he combined two adjacent houses. The house number in the picture was blurred, but I circled through Chelsea until I found his street. Watching them has become more a habit than anything else. I don’t know what might change and finally tear an opening for me to come inside.
6
ON SUNDAY, I need to leave my flat. The detective still hasn’t called, and the waiting is making me skittish. I’ve been thinking so much about how they’ll arrest him, this man who might be my father, how they’ll break into his house, find the room he’s in, force him to the floor. I didn’t ask DI Tiernan if the man lives alone. My father might have a wife now, or other children, they might be about to learn who he is.
I can’t hold my hands steady. I was too frightened to close my eyes in the shower this morning, which hasn’t happened in years. I have to remember to swallow, and when I do the sound startles me. I don’t know why this is happening. I’m not in any danger. But I’ve already dropped and broken two cups, and while I was on my knees, gathering the shards and mopping the liquid, I had to check that there wasn’t a man behind me, ready to shove me back down if I tried to stand up.
I keep thinking that he’s going to shoot himself. He’ll lock the door, go into another room, and lift a gun before they can arrest him. It’s part of why I can’t stay still now. The blast might happen at any moment. It might have already happened. The thought makes me furious, with the thwarted, heaving rage of a tantrum.
I call Laila. “Are you free today?” I ask, my voice desperate. “Do you want to get together?”
“Sure,” she says, yawning, and my shoulders lower from around my ears. We plan to meet at the Holly Bush in Hampstead. I’ve just left the house, I’m still on Sekforde Street, when my phone rings. I can’t find it and crouch down on the pavement, using both hands to dig through my bag. It’s Rahul, asking if I can cover his on-call shift this week. I agree, and then stay in a crouch, my face in my hands.
On the tube I sit with my eyes closed, the train rattling beneath me, thinking, It’s not him, it hasn’t been any of the other times.
When I come up from the station in Hampstead, the high street is crowded with people looking in the shop windows, carrying suits out of the dry cleaner’s, waiting in a long queue to buy crepes from the stand across the road. The sight leaves me dazed, after the quiet of my flat. More people come and wait near me at the crossing. I step back from the buses as they pass, like someone might shoulder me under them.
The Holly Bush is tucked away in the curve of a road on the hill above the high street. Laila is at a table near the fireplace. She kisses me hello, and as I sit, she says, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, why?”
“You look—” she says, and stops, her eyes on my face.
“Tired? I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Is it Robbie?”
“No,” I say, which isn’t entirely true. I’m always worried about my brother. And I feel uneasy for not telling him about the detective’s visit, he’ll be furious with me if he finds out I kept it from him. “I just couldn’t fall asleep. Are you hungry?”
She orders the roast chicken, and I order a vegetable Wellington. I ask Laila about her weekend, and we talk about work. She’s thinking of opening her own practice somewhere rural, or becoming a locum. When she goes outside to answer a call from a district nurse, I look around the pub at the wooden beams on the ceiling, the fire, the other people in the room, the white mistletoe berries, like thin-skinned pearls.
We order plum pudding, which comes with a ramekin of brandy butter to pour on top. I’m absorbed in this task, but the thoughts—do they have him, have they arrested him—are just as insistent as when I was alone in my flat. This always surprises me, how it’s possible to be entirely occupied by two things at once, and how little they can have in common.
• • •
We say goodbye outside the tube station. Instead of going straight home, I decide to cross the heath and get the bus from Highgate. Bare blac
k trees arch over the path, and the ground is rutted and frozen. I can feel the warm tip of my nose in the cold air.
Past the edge of the field, Highgate rises on a hill. A church spire, some roofs and chimneys between the trees, like a country village. I continue towards its spire, the frozen ground creaking under my boots. My phone will ring while I’m here, I think.
It starts to snow. Only lightly, but enough to begin to turn the fields and paths white. I keep walking as snow drifts over the trees, and my face feels tight and clean in the cold. I start to think about what I will say to him.
7
YOU CAN STILL change your mind,” my grandfather said to Mum over the birdsong and crickets. A tractor engine stopped and started somewhere in the distance.
She yawned. “Do you think we have time?”
An usher would open the door soon. There were already two hundred guests inside, the families were being seated. When Colin had said there was a chapel on his family’s estate, she’d pictured something the size of a shepherd’s hat, but this was as large as the church in her town. Its door was studded with nails, which Faye tested for sharpness with her finger. Gene pulled at his tie. He’d worn his own suit instead of renting a tailcoat. “Oh dear,” Deborah, Colin’s mother, had said when she saw him.
Faye beat her bouquet against her leg. The sun was warm on her back and shoulders, and butterflies twitched above the meadow. A saddle hung over a fence. “Do they hunt?” asked Gene.
“What do you think?”
Colin’s family was “horse-mad,” especially Deborah. On her first visit, Faye had lifted a polished object from a side table. “What is this?”
“My grandfather made it,” said Deborah. “When his favorite horse died, he turned her hooves into inkwells.” Faye tried not to think about the mechanics involved in the process.
