by A. M. Castle
I scooted over to make room for her, shoved myself up against the edge of the bed. I’d just been watching a bit of Netflix, decompressing. It was really stressful, the search. But it felt great to have Aunty Rachel there. She slid along so that we were propped up next to each other on the pillows, like friends. It kind of felt natural. Well, she’s been round those few times, while Dad’s been working from home.
There was one of those silences, like someone’s waiting for something. Then I realised she wanted an answer about Raf. ‘Yeah, well, Mum and Vicky are friends so we’ve seen them on and off,’ I said, non-committal. Then I had a thought. ‘Do you want to see my Instagram?’ All the online tutorials say you should maximise your contacts. Aunty Rachel must have billions of followers.
‘I was thinking earlier, what a handsome pair you and Raf make,’ Rachel said.
‘Do you think so?’ I couldn’t help smiling. I remember thinking it might even be a treat to talk about him.
‘Yes. Such similar colouring, your hair, your eyes. Even the way you carry yourselves.’
I could feel myself frowning now, trying to picture us. ‘Raf is way taller, of course. And so buff. I don’t work out nearly as much as I should,’ I said.
Rachel shrugged. ‘Oh, maybe. I meant on a deeper level.’
She was losing me now. ‘OK. So, about the dinner? I should mention Nessie is a pescatarian, if Mum hasn’t already said …’
‘The chef will have that under control. But with Raf, do you feel that connection? As well as having an aire de famille, as they say in French?’
‘Famille? Family? We don’t see that much of them. Aunty Vicky’s always working, Mum says. And she can’t talk …’
‘I’m an only child, you see. It’s a burden. So I just wondered.’
I was silent for a second. Then I turned to Rachel. The creamy skin. The big eyes. The expression in them. Interested, even a bit … envious. Why on earth would Rachel – ahem, Rachel Cadogan – envy me? There was that sense of expectation in the air again. I blinked.
‘Wondered what?’
She paused for a second, and I thought she wasn’t going to speak at all, was just going to let me dangle there. Then she carried on.
‘Why, what it’s like to have a brother, of course.’
I just looked at her, like I was an idiot, like I’d been struck dumb. Somewhere, I could hear Rachel carry on talking, though her words hardly registered anymore.
‘Tasha? Tasha! Are you OK? Don’t tell me you didn’t know.’
Chapter 37
Jane
Mount Tregowan, 31st October
Geoff walks back in and throws my bag on the bed. Immediately I know something’s happened. Normally he’d bring it over to me, probably give me a kiss as well. He’s only been gone what, ten minutes? We were happy, swooping around like demented vampire bats in our cloaks. Now he won’t look at me.
Not one of his moods, please. I’ve got enough to cope with. Amongst this crew, Rachel and the rest, I already feel fragile, off-centre, like a runner wrongly entered in a sprint when I’m better at marathons. Who am I kidding? This is a race I’m not qualified for at all.
I head over to the suitcase. Why didn’t I hang up my dress yesterday? Or today, even? I can’t believe I’ve left it in here. I pull it out, crumpled and forlorn. But suddenly Geoff breaks into my thoughts.
‘I’ve just bumped into Vicky downstairs. While I was getting your blessed handbag.’
I look up. His tone is so cold.
There’s a pause while I decide what my strategy should be. At home, he sometimes perks up if I carry blithely on and pretend not to have noticed anything. I’ll try it here, get on with sorting myself out.
The cloak will cover a lot, but not everything. I want to be bulletproof against Rachel’s raised eyebrow tonight. I pick up the dress and shake it, seeing if the creases will magically fall out. They don’t.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Geoff says abruptly.
I sit down, trying not to listen. ‘If I have a quick shower and hang the dress up in the bathroom, the steam will help, won’t it?’
There’s a silence. ‘Did I remember to pack that spare pair of tights, in case I get a ladder?’ I burble on. There’s no reply. And an increasingly loaded quality to the silence. I give up, and turn to him. His face looks odd. ‘What is it, Geoff? Aren’t you feeling well?’
‘I’m trying to tell you. Vicky said something, just now.’
I look at him properly. He knows my book has been put on the back burner. He even knows about the way I, um, overdid things at Rachel’s last Halloween party, years ago. There’s only one thing he doesn’t know. Ice crystals form in my stomach. No. Not after all this time. So many years clotting and passing, month by month, miscarriage by miscarriage. Why would Vicky open her big mouth now?
Because she’s Vicky, a little voice tells me. Because she’s a drunk.
She’s my friend, I tell myself. She couldn’t … she wouldn’t betray me. Would she? But another look at Geoff’s face tells me all I need to know.
I swallow. I get up and bustle about, keeping my back to him. ‘What did she say? She certainly seems a bit weird this weekend, don’t you think? Maybe it’s Raf giving her the cold shoulder … Or maybe we should all just admit it, Vicky drinks too much. Does your shirt need steaming? I can put it on a hanger with my dress if you like. I’m going to run the water really hot. That’ll do the trick. Got to put our best feet forward … especially after last night …’
‘Jane. Stop it. Just look at me. Is it true? What Vicky told me?’
For a second, our gazes lock, then my eyes skeeter away from his. I start rummaging loudly in my make-up bag for a lipstick I haven’t brought and wouldn’t use anyway. ‘I don’t know what she told you, so how can I say?’ My voice is rising, my cheeks are heating up. I know he’ll see through me. Country solicitor he may be, but he’s had his share of lying, scheming clients over the years.
I raise my eyes to his, pleading for love, for understanding. For time to explain. But he is hard, unreachable. He’s not my cuddly Geoff anymore. He’s like a statue of the man I married, and looks about as forgiving as a lump of marble too.
I sink onto the bed again, the tears finally sliding down my face. Geoff – kind, tender Geoff – who even in these last few distracted months, when he’s barely slept and has been chased by worries of his own, has always rushed to hug me when I’ve had a bad day, when I’ve had to queue behind a mum with a pushchair or passed one too many playgrounds. Now he looks at me, shakes his head once, and walks out.
He doesn’t even slam the door. Somehow that faint and precise click is the loudest, cruellest sound I’ve ever heard in my life.
Worse than when I lay with my legs in stirrups, getting that baby scythed out of me. Or when Rachel idly cast an eye over my bank statement, lying open on my student desk long ago, and saw the payment to the clinic. Or all those doctors afterwards, saying they didn’t know what was wrong. But I knew. A slip of the knife. That was all it had taken, to wreck my dreams.
It was one thing, Rachel getting an abortion. She was as casual about that as she was about any other purchase. No shame, no blame. No consequences. For me, it was so different.
Of course, I’d been madly in love. ‘Don’t tell anyone about us; it’s more exciting like this.’ His breath had been hot in my ear. Just another student, but I’d have done anything he said, amazed he’d picked me at all. It had been a very slow night in the Union bar. No witnesses, to my triumph in getting off with him, and his deciding to settle for slim pickings. Then back to his squalid shared flat. After he’d come, he’d rolled onto his back. ‘You’re on the pill, right?’ he asked, towelling himself off with my T-shirt. I’d nodded numbly, but what had I known, barely out of my teens, fat, shy and, until minutes before, an unloved, unwanted virgin?
Six weeks later, I’d finally run him down in a corridor. ‘Yeah, I’m late too, for a lecture,’ he’d said, though he’d b
ragged before that he never went to any. Then three weeks after that, when the awful deed had been done and our baby was dead, there he was that wretched evening, at Rachel’s Halloween party. Not even embarrassed to meet my eye. ‘You’re sorted now, right?’ he said over his shoulder as he helped himself to another beer. So he had understood what I’d meant, all along. But he’d chosen to abandon me, and our child, to our fate. I don’t even remember the ambulance, the hospital, and my date with a funnel full of charcoal, later that night.
All this should have been forgotten, long ago, and as dead as that baby and all the others. Why on earth has Vicky dug it up, now of all times?
I wish I could see her, in this moment, and tell her what I think of her, until my blood boils over, and my anger cascades out, overriding her vodka fug, her pathetic excuses. What will she say? I was drunk. I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.
Maybe there should be another slip of the knife. My knife, this time. Maybe she should go from being dead drunk, to just being dead.
That’s what I want right now.
Downstairs, the gong sounds yet again and I turn like an automaton, shrug my dress on at last. Who cares what it looks like? Wrinkled or immaculate, it’s all one to me. I throw on the cape and jam the wig over my hair.
Let the charade begin.
Chapter 38
Gita
Mount Tregowan, 31st October
I’m still not on an even keel, after the business with Ruby. I’m looking at this place, and everyone in it, with new eyes. I know everyone will be thinking I’m the one to blame – the mother always is. I wasn’t watching, at the crucial moment. And no, I can’t forgive myself.
But Ruby does have two parents. And Tom was supposed to be keeping an eye on her. How could he have let it happen?
I suppose he was ‘busy with other things.’ As he so often is. As he’s been for months. Along the way, his abs have re-emerged, like Aztec ruins rising from the rubble. He says it’s his way to conquer the stress. But it takes all his energy. ‘Do you still find me attractive?’ I asked him the other day. ‘Of course I do, darling,’ he said, hugging me, but I saw his eyes dart away, like silverfish running under the fridge when the kitchen light is turned on.
I know it’s irrational, but I’m angry with Vicky, too. For agreeing to come here. I know, I went all out to tempt her. I showed her those pictures, I told her Raf would love it. But that stuff I googled was so misleading. I just saw the sea as a backdrop to our frolics. Never, for one moment, did I think it would become an enemy, the thing that might have snatched my Ruby away. Or something that would enclose us so fully in its aggressive, inescapable embrace.
I look out of the window now, as I fiddle with my earrings. The sea is so high, it seems to have swallowed the bottom of the island. It’s roiling up and down, like a bedsheet twitched from the dryer. Should it be doing that?
I turn away quickly, reminding myself that it wasn’t the sea that nearly did for Ruby. She was in the chapel, drenched yes, but Tom says it was just a wave; she never went in the water.
Who has their own chapel? It’s ludicrous, even by Rachel’s standards. I want to go and see it, but there’s no time. I’ve got to get ready for this stupid evening. ‘It’s all heraldic shields in stained glass, lots of those lance things …’ Tom told me. More bloody lances, like that dagger thing Ruby had.
Of course it would come complete with a priest’s hole. Trust Rachel. She’s almost more of a goth than Nessie. Oh, my head is swimming. I’m still not right after this afternoon. Naps have always given me jet lag. I’m better staying on the go. I take a last look in the mirror. I wonder, not for the first time, what it would be like to be Rachel, to see all that expensive beauty gazing back.
But no, I’m just a woman with a job and kids and a husband who doesn’t seem to like me much anymore. A husband who seems to prefer – hell, has always preferred – forbidden fruit. Other women. There, I’ve acknowledged it at last.
I feel the spectre of divorce hanging over me, the shame and the humiliation looming. I’m going to turn out exactly like my parents. And be treated, like them, as a pariah. I was hoping this weekend would be a chance to reconnect with Tom, salvage things. Save me from lawyers and settlements and toxic wrangling. It hasn’t worked. I could kill him for all he’s done. But then, I could kill so many people this evening.
I sling on a necklace and check the fit of my dress. Thank God for Spanx. But even so, there’s a mountain ridge where the Lycra stops and the flab begins. It’s a metaphor for my life. Nothing is as smooth as it seems.
Then I catch sight of the cloak. Well, small mercies. I can eat what I like tonight at least. And I am dying, literally dying, for a drink. For a second, I think about popping to Vicky’s room for what we used to call a sharpener, or what Tasha and her girlfriends now call a ‘pre’. Vicky will have a bottle somewhere. But it’s not like the old days. There wasn’t any shame then, in openly wanting to get pissed. Now we’re supposed to have grown out of it. Well, Vicky hasn’t, but I have – most of the time. I wonder if I ought to be more concerned about Vicky’s drinking. But honestly, I don’t have the spare capacity.
For a second, my mind goes to that Halloween party long ago. I got ready then with Rachel. ‘Do I look OK from this angle, though?’
‘You look as perfect from that angle as you did from all the others. You are 360 degrees of fabulousness, Rach. Let’s go,’ I’d begged her.
The venue was the college dining room, less posh of course than her Grand Hall here, but unheard of then as a student party rendezvous. We left our bags and coats in a little room just next door, furnished with metal coat rails and little else. She turned to me later that evening, after we’d had a couple of drinks. ‘You look gorgeous too,’ she said softly. ‘And, um, Gita …’ Then Tom bounded up and the moment was lost.
I haven’t thought about that night for years. Now I suddenly wonder what she was about to say. It was about Tom, I think. But it can’t have been important. Can it?
Chapter 39
Vicky
Mount Tregowan, 31st October
God, it’s been the weirdest day, what with the hunt that never was, Rachel’s treasure nonsense, then the hunt that should never have been, for little Ruby.
I can’t be the only one gasping for a large one, desperate to get this dinner started so we can all bloody go, first thing in the morning. Gita was talking, at one point, about making a long weekend of it. Looking at her face now, across Rachel’s ancestral hall, I can see she’s gagging to get her girls back onto the mainland. I’m going to flag down the first London-bound train that comes our way.
One of the silent waiters passes and I stick out a hand – and indicate my glass. It’s as dry as the Gobi Desert. I decide to go and talk to Jane. She jumps a foot. ‘I don’t know how you’ve got the cheek to come near me,’ she spits as I almost trip. ‘Looks like you need to go and have a lie-down anyway.’
‘No, I bloody don’t,’ I snap. ‘Drat Rachel and her stupid Persian rugs.’
‘Shh,’ she wipes a bit of my gin and tonic off her cloak and looks meaningfully over to Penny. True to form, the woman looks like she’s just this moment stopped sucking a lemon.
‘God, she won’t care; she hates Rachel. Mind you, you could use her face to curdle milk tonight,’ I confide to Jane. She takes a step away and frowns. ‘Where’s Geoff?’ I ask, looking round. ‘Has he cheered up? He was acting weird earlier. Have you found out yet what’s been eating him?’
Jane glares at me. For a second, I think she’s going to ignore me. Rude. Then she just barks, ‘Where’s Rachel? Have you seen her?’
I cast a look around the room, and put a hand against the mantelpiece. The marble is smooth, reassuring. Where the hell is our hostess? Everyone’s gone AWOL tonight.
Gita comes over, Ruby super-glued to her side. I’m not sure who is clinging more. ‘You all right there, love?’ I say to Ruby, bending down a little, then wishing I hadn’t. ‘We need some
canapés or something,’ Gita says to a waiter.
‘Do you know what time the tide does its thing tomorrow?’ I say to Gita, leaning back against the mantelpiece, feeling its chill through Rachel’s cloak and my own asymmetric black number.
‘Tom will know. He’s gone full-on Bear Grylls today. There’s nothing he can’t tell you about this island.’
‘No! Don’t bother him. He’s doing sterling service, keeping that fun-sucker out of our hair,’ I say, waving in the general direction of Penny. Jane and Gita exchange a glance. ‘Oh come on, girls. I don’t mean it. But honestly, what is she like?’ I say, sotto voce.
Just then Rachel’s little stepson turns up. ‘Rodney, Rodney,’ I say, trying to make him feel welcome.
‘Roderick,’ Jane hisses, but all I hear is dick and it’s the funniest thing anyone’s said all night. It’s not until Tasha comes up to us that I shake my head and stop giggling.
‘Are you OK?’ Gita says, looking at her daughter. It’s true, she’s a bit blotchy.
‘Thank God we’re past the spotty stage now, ladies, eh?’ I say to the others, but they just stand there like statues.
Tasha is saying something to me, but her voice is so low I don’t catch it at first.
‘And you’ve pretended to be my mother’s friend, all these years, and never said a thing …’
‘What? Hang on, Tash, rewind please.’ I step forward, to hear the girl better, but also to screen Gita. Because it’s suddenly obvious to me, Tasha must have somehow found out about her dad’s roving eye. ‘Look, what your father gets up to is his business. Your mum doesn’t want to know,’ I hiss, forgetting I’m wearing such high heels. Jane and Gita prop me back up and I take a sip, try and style it out. Almost miss my mouth. But has Tasha finished? No, she bloody hasn’t.
‘But I’m talking about you, Aunt Vicky. And what you got up to.’
