by Fiona Harper
‘You need to forgive your mum, you know.’
Heather feels all the warmth generated by the unexpected gesture of closeness drain away.
‘I don’t think I can.’
‘I’ve learned a lot working with Haven,’ Lydia says, ‘about myself, what drove me to do what I did, but about other people too. She didn’t choose to be that way. It’s an illness, like depression or OCD or anxiety.’ She gives Heather a particularly knowing stare. ‘Like stealing things when you don’t mean to.’
Heather closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to hear this. On some level, she doesn’t want to stop blaming her mother, because who else is there to blame? Only herself, and after recent events she hates herself enough already.
‘I just… It’s a lot to deal with, to process.’
‘I didn’t say forgiving would be easy, or even that it could be done quickly, but you need to, Heather. Not for her sake, but for yours. Until you let this stuff go, you may never stop dealing with those emotions the wrong way, doing things you really don’t want to do.’
‘I’ll try,’ Heather says, looking out towards Beachy Head at the far edge of the bay, but it seems about as genuine as promising she’ll jump off the top of the cliffs and fly. She could try, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Or even that it’s possible.
And then, because she really needs to lighten the mood, she asks, ‘Do you want an ice cream?’
Lydia smiles. ‘Are you going to have mint choc chip?’
‘Only if you’re going to have raspberry ripple.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
NOW
Heather stands at the brow of a hill overlooking the Dart river. When she arrived here in September, there were leaves on the trees and the glow of an Indian summer warming the fields. It’s November now, and still beautiful. The naked trees are silhouetted against a slate sky, and the bright colours have bled away, leaving behind a palette of cool blues, greys and mossy greens.
Her lease on the flat hadn’t been up until a couple of weeks ago, but she hadn’t moved back in after the night of the fundraising dinner. Faith and Matthew had been amazing, letting her stay with them until it was time to start this new job, and supporting her in the aftermath of her arrest. She picks her mobile out of her pocket and dials Faith’s number.
‘Hey, how are you?’ Faith says chirpily as soon as she answers.
‘Doing okay,’ Heather says. ‘Did everything get sorted with the flat? Did Carlton give me my security deposit back?’
‘Yep,’ Faith says, as if this is no small thing. Heather knows how stingy the man can be. However, she supposes she also knows how feisty her big sister can be, and it gives her a warm feeling to know Faith has been fighting her corner. ‘The flat is cleared and clean, and everything is in the storage facility at the top of Bromley Hill.’
‘Thank you,’ Heather says again. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’
‘I was happy to help.’
Heather smiles into the phone. Funnily enough, although it must have been a lot of hard work to move her stuff out of her flat, she knows her sister is telling the truth. But then Heather’s thoughts turn to where they always do these days, and her expression becomes more sombre. ‘Did you see him?’
There’s a pause. ‘Yes. He asked about you.’
Heather’s eyebrows rise. ‘He did?’
‘He’s angry with you, Heather – and probably with good reason, given the circumstances – but he’s not a monster. I think underneath the anger, he still wishes you well.’
Heather lets out a long breath. That, at least, is something. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him you’re doing okay. You are, aren’t you? Doing okay?’
‘Yes, I think I am. The sessions with the therapist have been… enlightening.’
‘And your problem… How’s that doing?’
Heather smiles again. Faith is usually so blunt about everything. It’s funny to hear her trying to be delicate about the arrest. ‘Fine. No more shoplifting.’ She’s felt the tingle once or twice, but she’s been able to walk away. ‘It’s stunning here, Faith. You’ll have to bring the kids down for a visit – maybe in the spring when they’ll be able to go crabbing off the pontoon in the village.’
‘That sounds like a plan. And talking of plans, I need to ask you about Christmas. How about coming up to us before we go to Dad’s so we can catch a plane together?’
Heather thinks for a moment. ‘Although I can fly direct from Exeter, I think I might come up and join you. You’re flying on the twenty-second, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Is it okay if I arrive a couple of days before that? I’ve got a few things I need to do, some loose ends to tie up in that neck of the woods.’
‘Of course!’ Faith says. Her sister is never happier than when her guest room is occupied, Heather has discovered. ‘I’m really looking forward to visiting Dad in Spain. It’s the closest thing we’ve had to a proper family Christmas for decades!’
‘I think it will be good for us,’ Heather says, carefully sidestepping around the issue that, although she’s surprised everyone by agreeing to go this year, she’s slightly worried she’ll find all those people stuffed together in one small house a little claustrophobic. But this is important to Faith, and she wants to pay her sister back for all she’s done for her.
‘How’s the job going?’
Heather turns to face the house. ‘It’s interesting. Different. It’s not just letters and diaries but movie memorabilia from the old owner’s days as a Hollywood A-lister. I’m working with a film historian to try and pin down exactly what all the pieces are and which films they relate to. Her name was Hastings, you know. Laura Hastings. It almost feels like fate that I ended up here.’ She shakes her head as she looks at the hard, straight lines of the Georgian architecture. ‘I don’t know. There’s something… healing here.’
‘Good,’ Faith says softly. ‘Good. Anyway, I’ll call you tomorrow and give you our flight details.’
Heather smiles. Faith really can’t stop trying to mother her, can she? But maybe that’s all Faith has ever wanted to do, even if she sometimes goes about it in a brusque and prickly way. ‘I love you, Faith,’ she says quietly.
Her sister sounds a bit scratchy when she answers. ‘I love you too. Now, I’m going to have to run because I’ve got a lot to organize. Speak soon!’
And then she’s gone. Heather puts her phone in her pocket and walks back into the house, where the mobile signal will abruptly and inexplicably die. Out there on the hill is the only place she can seem to call from when she’s at work.
She finds her employer, Louise, in the downstairs room that will soon house a display of its former owner’s movie memorabilia. ‘It’s all gone to hell in a handbasket since you stepped outside,’ she tells Heather. ‘I’ve just had an email from a journalist wanting comment on the fact Jean Blake’s sister has published a “tell-all” biography about her actor brother-in-law, Dominic Blake, saying he and Laura Hastings had an affair, and I’m livid.’
‘Did they?’
Louise shakes her head. ‘They fell in love, true, but Laura knew his wife was fragile, unstable. She walked away from the man she loved.’ She smiles to herself. ‘Seems so old-fashioned these days, doesn’t it?’
Heather nods and smiles, but inside she’s feeling even more sympathy for the woman she’s been researching for the last month or two. She understands about walking away, doing the right thing.
‘Anyway, our work is even more important now,’ Louise says. ‘Once we’ve found all the letters and gone through the diaries, I’m thinking about publishing them. I want to defend Laura’s reputation. This vicious money-grabbing sister-in-law was still at boarding school when the alleged affair went on. I think she’s making most of it up. She’s made Laura out to be a man-eating monster, but there are always two sides to a story and I want to set the record straight.’
‘I’d b
etter get back to work, then,’ Heather says, smiling. ‘It seems we’ve got a fight on our hands.’ But as she ascends the stairs to the old attic where her office is (complete with a cobweb or two, but she’s trying not to notice them), she thinks about what Louise has just said, about monsters and other sides, and she realizes she’s starting to truly understand what that means.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
NOW
A couple of days before she’s due to fly to Malaga with Faith and her family, Heather makes what should have been a five-hour trip from her new home back to Kent. The roads are crazy with people just like her, people who’ve finished work for the year and are heading off to visit relatives. It takes her almost eight hours before she arrives on Faith’s doorstep and collapses into an armchair.
To make up for the ordeal, her sister presents her, right there where Heather is sitting, with a bowl of beef stew that she’s been keeping warm. This is a privilege indeed. Faith never allows anyone to eat anywhere other than at the table. Probably because they were never able to do a normal thing like that when they were growing up. Probably because, in her later days, their mother used to eat, sleep, watch TV, and generally live her life out of her armchair.
The fact that Faith has loosened the rules this way pleases Heather for two reasons: one, she feels her sister has lowered her impossibly high standards where she’s concerned and is just treating her like a normal person and, two, Faith doesn’t think Heather is a carbon copy of their mother any more. If she’d made that connection, she’d have shooed Heather off to the kitchen table in a jiffy.
Heather is glad of the fortifying meal because she knows she’s going to require some supernatural strength to get through the following day. When she’s cleared her plate and Matthew has brought her a cup of coffee, she pulls out her phone and sends a text to Jason:
Hi. I know this may be asking a lot, but would it be possible to drop round tomorrow evening? I wouldn’t ask, but it’s important. Thanks, Heather.
She resists adding an ‘x’, even though everything in her heart wants to.
She waits. She can almost picture him looking in shock at his phone, shaking his head, laying it on the coffee table and staring at it, weighing up whether she even deserves a reply.
Two hours later she’s sitting in bed, her mobile strategically placed face-up on the duvet next to her. She’s doing her best to ignore it and finish the novel she’s reading instead, but the phone just sits there, disobediently doing nothing. When finally the screen flashes into life, it makes her jump.
Okay. Any time after six. J.
It feels as if there’s a hole where the ‘x’ should be at the end of his text too. She wonders if he almost added it out of habit, then laughs hysterically inside her head at her own lunacy. Of course not. The fact that he’s actually replied at all must be making her giddy.
The next evening she drives to Shortlands and parks outside her old house. She sits in the car for more than ten minutes before reaching for the door release. The truth is she doesn’t want to go inside. As painful as it’s been not seeing him, leaving this conversation unsaid means they’re still connected, there’s still something hanging between them. What she has to say today will change that forever.
Eventually, she prises herself from her car and walks up the drive. She automatically reaches into her pocket for keys as she approaches the door. Stupid. Faith gave them back for her. She rings the doorbell instead. The door buzzes and she pushes it open and steps into the hallway. It looks exactly the same as it did the last time she was here – the same black-and-white tiled floor, the same unruly potted palm in the corner – but it feels unreal, like a film set.
She climbs the stairs to the first floor, only to discover a miserable-looking guy dressed head to foot in black waiting at Jason’s open door. She’s never seen him before in her life. ‘Yes?’ he snaps.
‘I-I’m looking for Jason,’ she says.
‘Downstairs,’ he says and slams the door in her face.
Oh, thinks Heather as she stands there absorbing the information. Downstairs. In her old flat. That’s going to be… interesting.
Instead of going back outside to press the right buzzer, she just knocks on the door of the ground-floor flat. A few seconds later a dark shape appears behind the partially glazed door, and then it opens and she’s staring into Jason’s eyes.
He doesn’t smile, doesn’t say ‘Hi’, just steps aside so she can pass him. Not sure where to go, she heads for the living room. The first thing that strikes her is how full it seems, with more furniture, more technology, more stuff in general.
Jason sees her looking. ‘Do you want to sit down?’
Heather shakes her head. Even though it might be the polite thing to do, she’s not sure she could sit still while she says what she has to say. She would dearly love to stand in the centre of the room, as she always used to when she was feeling het up, but there’s a coffee table in the way. She chooses the biggest empty piece of floor, in front of the French doors, and stands there, one hand clasped painfully in the other as she tries to work out how to begin.
‘I owe you an apology,’ she tells him as he perches against the arm of the sofa, crosses his arms, and looks at her. There’s no hiding, no misdirection now. She’s using her new-found skill of being open, telling the truth about herself, but instead of wielding it to wound, as she did the last time she saw him, she hopes she can mend a little of what she tore. ‘I’m really sorry for everything I put you through. It wasn’t planned, wasn’t calculated, but that doesn’t make it any better.’
He nods but remains silent.
‘And I owe you an explanation – you probably don’t want to hear it. I wouldn’t if I were you – but I’d like to give you one. If you’ll let me?’
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, but then replies, ‘Okay.’
Heather breathes for a moment. In… out. In… out. And then she launches straight in. ‘I started stealing after my mother died. Always baby clothes and toys. I didn’t know why at the time. I didn’t even want to. It just… happened.’
She checks his expression. He’s looking predictably incredulous.
‘I know, I know. It sounds like a cop-out.’ She takes another hurried breath and carries on before she runs out of nerve. ‘You know about my mother’s hoarding, how I grew up, but there’s stuff I didn’t tell anyone, secrets I buried and never dealt with.’
She sees his eyes narrow at the word ‘secrets’ and she looks down at her feet. It was probably the wrong thing to say, but it’s too late to change that now. The only thing she can do is carry on. ‘I only even told Faith recently.’
She inhales. Time to stop being a coward. If she’s going to say the rest, if she’s going to tell him her most awful, shameful secret, the one that she’s been running away from since she was a teenager, she needs to be looking at him. She lifts her head, makes sure she has eye contact and carries on.
‘When I was fifteen, I got pregnant.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
BABY SHOES
They’re tiny. I can sit both of them side by side in the palm of my hand. They’re made of lilac corduroy with a spray of tiny purple flowers embroidered on the top. I sit on my bed and stare at them. I have something growing inside me that might one day fit into these, walk around in these. I am horrified and awestruck in equal measures.
THEN
Heather’s mother yells up the stairs for her. ‘Heather? I need to talk to you. Come down here!’
Typical, Heather thinks. I always have to go to her, never the other way round. Her mother is so selfish.
She puts the little shoes down on her bed and stands up. She found them in a plastic bag in the bathroom and she’s fascinated with them. Perhaps they belonged to her or Faith once upon a time? Of course, they might just have been a result of one of her mum’s shopping splurges. She really has no idea.
Before Heather leaves the room, she picks the shoes up again and tucks the
m carefully under her pillow. Her mother doesn’t know she’s got these, and Heather doesn’t know how she’d feel about it if she did. Better to just let it be one more secret stacked up alongside all the others.
As she heads out onto the landing, she catches her reflection in the mirror. She’s wearing a baggyish T-shirt, so she pulls it up and inspects her stomach. She’s done this at least once a day ever since she found out. There’s a tiny bulge there now. Her skirt was getting tight before, but not so much that anyone could guess. She could have just gorged herself on cakes or chips or mint-choc-chip ice cream.
She’s known for exactly six weeks now. Her mum has known for three. She caught Heather throwing up four mornings in a row and put two and two together. Seeing as she spends most of her life checked out and on planet stuff, Heather’s quite pissed off that this was the moment her mother actually started to pay attention.
Her mum was alright at first, although she made Heather take another test, even though Heather told her she’d taken the bus to Lewisham and bought one there, where nobody knows her, that she followed the instructions, did it all properly. But now Mum has got over the shock, she’s started nagging.
‘Heather!’ she yells again.
Heather sighs. This is probably her gearing up for another round. She pulls her top back down and negotiates the stairs. Only half of each tread is visible because her mother has started using the edges as a bookshelf again. There are at least ten volumes piled on every step.
She finds her mum in the living room, of course, sitting on her corner of the sofa. The shopping channel is blaring away on the TV.
‘There you are,’ she says. ‘Now, we need to make an appointment to go and see the doctor to get all of this sorted out.’
Heather frowns. ‘You said it would be my choice. I haven’t made up my mind yet.’ She knows she’s been dithering but, for once, she has some control over her life, her future. Once she’s made her decision, that’ll be gone.
