by Karen Swan
To my father, Malcolm
Best dad and inspirational man
My role model
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Epilogue
Prologue
July 1981
My darlings,
There is no easy way to say goodbye – not after our hello. What a day that was, your matching pink faces blinking up at me like two old souls come to guide me through our adventures together, for I was so young when I had you. And thank goodness for that! We snatched six precious years that ought not to have been ours, and we made them dance, didn’t we?
It was all so clear to me in that very first instant: you are why my heart beats and my eyes open, why my skin breathes and my spirit soars. You are my heart, my soul, my love, my life. I have rejoiced in every moment with you – not just the wondrous look on your faces on Christmas morning, but the little miracles too: how the freckles on your noses flower like daisies on summer days and how your bodies turn gasps into laughter as I give you cowbites on your ribs – never forget those, by the way, even when you’re all grown-up. They make everybody smile.
What else will I miss? The smell of your heads – I would bottle it and wear it like perfume if I could. Heaven scent, I always called you, and I was right. I’ll miss the feeling of your ‘loving hands’ in mine; I’ll miss the three of us sleeping in our bed together, all messy and noisy like hibernating bears and no one there to tell us off when we sleep late. Please make sure you sleep enough. It’s so important. And brush your teeth twice every day. And eat fruit.
There are also, I suppose, lots of things that aren’t important, even though grown-ups say they are – things like not wearing your shoes on the carpet, or eating all your broccoli. It doesn’t matter if you never grow to like courgette. I didn’t start eating quiche till last year and it didn’t do me any harm – at least I don’t think it’s the reason I’m writing this letter. (Oh dear, bad joke.)
Just try to be open to new things; I think that’s the message to get across. Life is big and noisy and exciting and colourful, but sometimes it also feels scary and you have to be brave. Even when people let you down and break your heart – and sadly, they will – just keep going, and never give up. You will recover. I made you strong.
It had been my Big Plan that we would all go round the world together when you were bigger, maybe ten? I would take you out of school (I know, cool mummy!) and teach you myself. I wanted us to travel through Asia and South America, but I don’t think Aunty Lisa’s going to be able to do that with Uncle Martin’s job. So just travel as soon as you’re big enough and explore the world.
By the way, your grey eyes are rare – did you know that? You get them from your daddy. When Queen Elizabeth I ruled England, grey eyes were considered the very height of beauty. It’s why I gave you your name, Lillibet. As the oldest, it went to you. As for my Laura, you were supposed to be Flora, for I saw all the colour and life of the gardens in your face, but it was a letter too far from your sister and I wanted you both to be as close as shadows, so Lillibet and Laura you are, my Elizabethan beauties.
I know you will be sad for a while, maybe for a long time, but try to laugh at least once every day. And sing – you’ll be amazed how much better it makes you feel. Being happy won’t mean that you’ve forgotten me, or that you love me any less. It’s what I want for you, more than anything.
I know you’ll get through this, because you have each other. Ever since the doctors told me the news, I’ve been so grateful that I made two of you; I thought it was so that you’d always have a playmate, but now I think it must have been God’s way of making sure you wouldn’t ever be alone. As long as you have each other, you will be all right. Be kind to one another; share, and try not to fight. Aunty Lisa will try her best to make it better for you, so let her.
When I was your age, I wanted so badly to be a twin or a princess or a fairy. They’re not what I’m going to get to be, but even though you won’t be able to hear me or see me, I’ll do everything I can for you to feel me. I’ll be the butterfly in your tummy when you get nervous before Sports Day; I’ll be the shiver running up your skin when you climb out of the swimming pool; I’ll be the giggle in your throat when you want to laugh at Mr Benton’s moustache in Sunday school. And one day, when you are really old ladies – much, much older than I am now – we will be together again in heaven. I will be right by the gates waiting for you, my darlings, just like I do at school. Until then, I will be an angel on your shoulders, loving you.
Mummy xxxxx
Chapter One
Laura looked at the shoes in her hand and knew before the assistant had come back with her size that she would buy them, even if they didn’t fit. They were red, and that’s all they needed to be. She was almost famous for them around here, and Jack always teased her about it – ‘You know what they say – red shoes, no knickers.’ Of course, he knew full well she’d be the last person to go knickerless. Maybe that was why he found it so funny. Anyway, she preferred him saying that to his other response, which was to roll his eyes. ‘You’ve got almost fifty pairs!’ he’d cried last time before he’d caught sight of her expression and quickly crossed the kitchen to apologize, saying he secretly quite liked that she had a ‘signature’.
The shop assistant came back, shaking her head apologetically.
‘All I’ve got left is a thirty-six,’ she shrugged. ‘We’re completely out of thirty-eights, even in the other colour-ways.’
Laura bit her lip and stalled for a moment as the assistant moved to return the shoe to the display shelf. ‘Well . . . I’ll take them anyway,’ she muttered, looking away as she reached into her bag for her credit card. ‘They’re such a good price now. There’ll be someone I can give them to . . .’
‘Okay.’ The assistant hesitated, casting a glance at Laura’s red patent slip-ons, which she’d polished so hard at the breakfast table that morning that their eyes met in the reflection.
A minute later, she savoured the jangle of the bell on the door as it closed behind her and stood for a moment on the pavement, adjusting to the brightness outside and the change of pace. The day was already limbered up and elastic, the late-November sun pulsing softly in the sky with no
real power behind it, local businessmen rushing past with coffees-to-go slopping over the plastic covers and pensioners pushing their shopping carts between the grocer’s and the butcher’s, tutting over the price of brisket; a few mothers with prams were congregating around the bakery windows, talking each other into jam doughnuts and strong coffee to commiserate over their broken nights.
Laura turned her back on them all – glad their problems weren’t hers – and started walking down the street in the opposite direction, swinging the carrier bag in her hand so that it matched the sway of her long, light brown hair across her narrow back. Her studio was in a converted keep, just beyond the old yacht yard, eight minutes away. People tended to have a romantic notion of what it must be like when she told them where she worked, but it wasn’t remotely pretty to look at. Tall and ungainly on its stilts, it towered over all the corrugated-panel workshops and dilapidated boat huts on the banks, and her square studio-room atop them looked like it had been bolted on by an architect who’d trained with Lego. The wood was thoroughly rotted, although you wouldn’t know to look at it, as it had been freshly painted two summers previously by a student at the sailing club who was after extra cash. She loved it. It felt like home.
She turned off the high street and marched down the shady grey-cobbled lanes, past the tiny pastel-coloured fishermen’s cottages with bushy thatched roofs – which were now mostly second homes for affluent Londoners – and over the concrete slipway to the compacted mud towpath that led down towards her studio. It sat on a hillock in the middle of the estuary. ‘St Laura’s Mount’, Jack called it. The brown water merely slapped at the stilt legs during the high spring tides, but the path over to it was only accessible at low tide, which was why she was enjoying a late start this morning. Strictly speaking, if she really cared about doing a nine-to-five working day, she could have bought a small dinghy to row over in, but she rather liked the idiosyncratic hours it forced upon her. But even more than that – and she could never admit this to Jack – she loved the occasional stranding overnight, when her absorption in her work led her to ignore the alarm clock and the path became submerged. After the first ‘stranding’, she had brought a duvet, pillow and overnight bag to the studio so that she was properly set up for the eventuality, but Jack hated it. He felt it encouraged her – enabled her – to continue working when it was time to stop and come home.
The tide was almost fully out now, and the mudflats looked as glossy as ganache, but Laura didn’t stop to watch the avocets and bitterns picking their way weightlessly over them. Their mutual fascination with each other had worn off a while ago and now they existed in apathetic harmony. She walked quickly up the two flights of metal stairs and unlocked the door. Jack was forever telling her they had to up the security on the place. She had thousands of pounds’ worth of materials in the studio.
Dumping her handbag on the floor and carefully lifting the too-small shoes out of their box, she placed them on the windowsill. They looked like two blood-spots in the all-white interior. The wide planking floorboards had been painted and overvarnished so that they looked glossy and more expensive than they really were, and it had taken over twenty tester pots and Jack on the edge of a nervous breakdown before she had found the perfect white for the walls. She hadn’t wanted it to look cold in the winter, but it did, in spite of her best efforts – there’s precious little that can counteract the pervasive grey light that characterizes the Suffolk winter. She had had some blinds run up in sandy-coloured deckchair stripes and that had helped warm things up a bit. It had to – the windows ran round every side of the room so there were lots of them. Jack always used to worry that she was too exposed working up here, with 360-degree views where anyone could see her alone in the creek. But Laura insisted that neither bored teenagers nor avid bird-watchers had any interest in her.
The red flashing light on the answering machine caught her eye and she went over to listen. After several years of working alone with only Radio Four for company, it was still a surprise to realize that people were actively seeking her out and calling her up with commissions. The move from jewellery hobbyist to professional goldsmith had been accidental, when the charm necklace she’d made for Fee’s mother had provoked a positive response at the WI. After weeks of ignoring Fee’s nagging, well-intentioned demands to set herself up properly, her friend, young as she was, had taken it upon herself to place a formal advert in the Charrington Echo. Rather serendipitously, the editor of the FT magazine had been holidaying in neighbouring Walberswick at the time and happened to chance upon it whilst waiting for her lunch order in the pub. An hour later she had knocked on Laura’s door and from there it had been but a hop, skip and a jump to the prestigious placement in the FT magazine’s jewellery pages.
Today there were two messages, both from Fee – now working as her self-appointed PR and manager on the days she wasn’t manning reception at the leisure centre. Through squeals and much clapping, she was forwarding appointment dates for three prospective new clients. Yesterday there had been another one, and this was several weeks after the article had come out. Laura scribbled the dates and times in her diary, shaking her head over the fact that the commissions were still coming in. The feature had been about new-generation jewellers, and the box on Laura had been the smallest, squeezed in at the very last minute. She had pretty much dismissed it as soon as she’d seen it because they’d cropped the photo so you couldn’t see her shoes, but clearly lots of people hadn’t, because the little red light was still happily flashing most mornings when the tide finally let her in.
Laura walked over to the bench and began casting a critical eye over the previous day’s work – a necklace that was for a wedding next week. She caught a glimpse of the grey heron beating past the east window, and knew her eleven o’clock appointment had arrived hot on her heels. Good old Grey. He was better than any CCTV system. He stood for hours in the reed bed, only retracting his neck and leaping into flight when one of her customers passed by on the path to the studio. Like the avocets and bitterns, he just ignored her now.
‘Hello?’ a male voice drifted up questioningly, and she heard his shoes on the patterned metal treads.
‘Come up to the top,’ Laura called before taking a deep, calming breath. She slid the unfinished necklace into a drawer and refilled the kettle, somewhat aghast to notice that the limescale had flourished unchecked so that it looked more like a coral reef in there.
‘Hello,’ the voice said, near now.
She set a smile upon her lips, took a deep breath and turned. ‘Hi,’ she replied, as a well-dressed man emerged through the doorway.
He stopped where he was, either transfixed or appalled by the sight of her. In keeping with her ‘take me as you find me’ defiance (and in direct contrast to Fee’s ‘take me, I’m yours’ dress sense), she was sporting a grubby pair of boyfriend jeans that fell so low they exposed the upper curve of her hip bones, and a faded black Armani A/X sweatshirt of Jack’s. The only things about her that were shiny were her teeth and the glossy red flats on her feet.
‘Ms Cunningham?’ he enquired, holding out a hand.
‘Laura,’ she replied, shaking his hand so lightly that her fingers slipped away just as he squeezed and he was left gripping her fingertips. He looked down at their star-crossed hands and released hers.
He straightened up. ‘Robert Blake. You were expecting me?’
In her dreams, maybe.
His movements were assured, extending a sense of total control and purpose, and Laura immediately understood nothing ever happened in his life accidentally or without reason. He was utterly imposing and yet curiously boyish – as though she could still catch a glimpse of his twelve-year-old self in his face.
It was an intriguing clash. His voice was deep and he was tall, five foot eleven or so, mid-thirties with coppery-brown eyes and a wide full-lipped mouth of extraordinarily even teeth. His hair was carefully combed from his face but she could see it would only take one of the easterly ze
phyrs that zipped round the yard to unleash a riot of light brown curls and an easy smile. His bespoke shirt and mannered formality told her he’d seen the world; the light in his eyes told her he’d seduced women on every continent.
Laura nodded, knowing she was probably blushing. ‘Of course. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’
His eyes lifted off her to scan the room and she saw them rest on the tiny new shoes, still in their box.
‘You found your way here okay, I hope?’ she asked quickly, motioning for him to sit on one of the huge white sofas.
‘Eventually, although I thought my satnav was playing up at first. It took me a while to believe you’d really be down that tiny track. I don’t usually have to pack wellingtons for a meeting,’ he said, giving her a small, amused smile that made her stomach flip for joy and confirmed all of her instincts.
He sat down and looked back at her, and she caught a flash of the oyster-coloured silk lining of his jacket and the hand-stitching on his shoes. She could see nothing of the twelve-year-old in him here.
‘All my clients have problems trying to find me on their first visits out here. I suppose I really ought to move to somewhere more accessible, but . . . I like to be near the water.’ She shrugged, all out of small talk. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or coffee? It’s only instant, I’m afr—’
‘No,’ he interrupted, before softening it with a ‘thanks’.
Laura picked up her notebook from the workbench and sat on the sofa opposite. It was set just slightly too far back and she had to perch on the front of the cushion.
She took a deep breath and exhaled quickly. Soonest done, soonest over. She wasn’t a great people person at the best of times, much less dealing with people who looked like that. ‘So, how can I help you? What is it you’re after?’
He took his eyes off her and paused for a moment, bringing a fist to his mouth as though he intended to cough into it. ‘Well, it’s for my wife,’ he said, his voice quieter than before, as though his wife might be hiding out on the stairs. ‘Obviously Christmas is coming up, but it’s her birthday, too, on the twenty-third. I need to get her something special.’
