by Lucy Lawrie
‘Not true, Janey. You could never not be you. You just are you, and you’re incredible. So incredible. You just need to start believing it.’
‘How much of it was true?’ I blurted out. ‘With me, I mean. I can’t separate out what you knew, and what you didn’t know, and whether what you seemed to feel for me was real. Or something I imagined.’ The words choked and disappeared as I ran out of breath. ‘So please, just tell me. How much of it was true?’
‘All of it.’ His voice was low. ‘You got to me, Janey, like no one else ever has. I felt this massive connection with you from the start. I didn’t fully trust it at first. I thought maybe it was because of the shared history. But as time went on, I realised it was just because of, well, you. Just you as you are. And then it was too late. I was hooked. And I couldn’t tell you about Esme in case it changed things between us.’
‘But did you ever . . .’
Did you ever love me?
‘Say it,’ he said softly.
I shook my head.
‘Why do you never say what you’re thinking? You see, this is what you do. You want me to fill in all your gaps. All the things you can’t say, or do, or believe. Love was never going to be enough for you, Janey. That’s the whole problem. I can never do what you want me to do.’
With a groan, he lifted his hands to his head. They closed into fists, scrunching his short hair. Then he looked up.
‘It’s like you want me to love you into existence. Nobody can do that, Janey. Nobody.’
I nodded. I shouldn’t really be surprised at the hurt. Of course he was never going to stay.
The train was arriving now, moving smoothly up the platform with a hiss of brakes. Coming to take him away from me.
He gripped my upper arms, as though holding me together, holding me up. I felt the charge all down me.
‘Just promise you’ll stay strong, Janey. Just keep being yourself.’
Out of nowhere, anger shook me so hard I could hardly speak.
‘You can’t just leave me! Stay with me. Stay with me.’
‘I need to get on the train,’ said Steve.
‘You’ve got another minute or two.’
‘I should go.’
He lifted the handle of his suitcase. I needed him to hold me. Just one more time. One more time to last for the rest of my life.
He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Take care, Janey.’ And he turned, walked up the platform towards his carriage.
I could go after him, I thought, as I watched him. How late would be too late? When he stepped up onto the train? When the doors shut? When the guard blew the whistle? When the train actually pulled off?
‘Mummy!’ A gust of wind caught Pip’s balloon, and the loop I’d tied round his wrist slipped off. The balloon lifted and lurched away. In a split second I read Pip’s impulse to run after it: towards end of the platform and the track. I grabbed him, catching him under the arms, yanking him backwards.
‘My balloooooon!’ he wailed.
‘Pip, calm down.’
His feet scrabbled on the concrete, every fibre of his little body consumed with wanting that balloon.
I held on and held on. He collapsed onto the ground, back arched in a full-blown tantrum.
‘Pip, Pip, calm down.’
Steve was still walking.
Look back. Look back.
‘I hate you, Mummy! I hate you!’
Just look back.
‘Hate you!’
And he was stepping onto the train now, pulling his bag up behind him.
I sank down onto my knees and folded Pip tight in my arms, as he fought and kicked and struggled. As my own heart fought and kicked and struggled.
You just are you, and you’re incredible.
You got to me, Janey, like no one else ever has.
I can never do what you want me to do.
And then I thought of Miss Fortune, shivering on a bench in the park, pulling her thin skirt further down over her knees.
I just had to leave a message with social services. It might take a while to filter through.
I looked up into the sky, up, up. Pip’s balloon was just a little red dot now, dancing on the wind, being buffeted in a northerly direction, towards Leith, towards the Firth of Forth, Fife, the cold, blue mountains.
Pip was growing quieter now. He got onto his knees and circled his arms around me, his face wet, his breath hot against my neck.
Somehow in the struggle, the truth had come free.
The train was leaving now, the windows sliding past, making the ground seem to slide beneath me.
Wrenching together all my courage and my strength, I lifted Pip and I turned away.
And I said goodbye, then. I said it into the sky, as far as the eye could see, said it to the Steve who had never existed anywhere except in my heart.
46
Janey
Pip had fallen asleep in the car on the way over, and I was holding him in my arms as I walked up the steps to the Regent’s Crescent house. A man dressed like a butler pulled open the door just as I reached it.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Is Hattie here?’
‘Please come up,’ he said. ‘They’re in the drawing room.’
I was slightly annoyed, if truth be told, that Hattie hadn’t suggested keeping Miss Fortune here for the night, then I wouldn’t have had to drag Pip out of the house again like this after giving him his dinner and bath. But she hadn’t replied to my texts. What could she be doing that made her so busy, too busy to get back to me after the day I’d had?
As if on cue, my phone bleeped. ‘Don’t come back. Miss F asleep for the night. Will call in the morning. x’
The time on it was two hours ago: 5 p.m. A bit early to be going to bed surely.
With the next step – the third step on the staircase – I remembered Renee’s ‘retrospective’ party. He’d be there, wouldn’t he? James.
I wobbled to the side, legs suddenly weak under the weight of Pip. And I thought of my fourteen-year-old self, off my face on gin, wobbling up these steps on the night of that other party. The heft, the weight, the consequence of each of those steps that night.
So there they were, seated around the room in silence.
Hattie.
Renee.
James and – what was her name again – Simone?
The Cartwrights, a couple I remembered from years before.
Lord and Lady Smythe, the Marlowes’ neighbours.
And Miss Fortune, her hair askew, with a pillow crease along one cheek.
‘Janey! Pip!’ Hattie got up, came over. ‘Are you okay?’ she whispered, pulling us into a hug. ‘Didn’t you get my text? I had her asleep upstairs, but she woke up when the Cartwrights came in.’
‘Janey,’ said Renee, with a bitter little twist of her mouth that was presumably meant to look something like a smile.
What should I do? Shake her hand? Kiss her? I felt my body begin to move forward.
What was this? Could it be that I still had an urge to please this woman, after everything? I stopped. Stilled myself. Simply nodded. ‘Renee.’
James got up.
Hattie had spoken of his drink problem, his suicide attempt. I’d been expecting a skeletal, yellow-skinned wraith of a man. I hadn’t quite reconciled this with his job as a top banker, but maybe he was one of those thin, glittery-eyed types that kept going by snorting coke in the toilets.
But no. Six feet tall, he’d filled out into, well, a man. His features had thickened, his eyes a bit piggy in a fleshy, tanned face. A smart suit and an expensive watch.
‘Janey.’
There was nothing in his eyes. No awkwardness, no guilt. Did he even remember what had happened?
‘This is Simone,’ he said. She was petite and tanned in a simple pale-grey shift dress and dangly earrings.
I wanted the haunted, yellowing wraith back. Even the arrogant shit of an eighteen-year-old who’d used me and chucked me away without a thought. Something – somet
hing – that I recognised. Because how could I make sense of any of this, if James didn’t exist any longer . . . if he’d just gone?
A uniformed girl with a tray stepped forward hopefully. ‘Have a drink,’ said James.
He lifted one of the champagne glasses and held it towards me. I glanced down at his hand: smooth and tanned against the white cuff of his shirt, the long violinist’s fingers less pronounced now that they’d thickened with the onset of middle age.
‘Hattie,’ I whispered. ‘Can you take Pip for a second?’
I left the room, made for the nearest bathroom and vomited it all up. The anger that had been lodged inside me all these years, safely dammed up by the things I’d told myself: No, no, it was nothing. And it was mostly my fault.
Even now, with James in the next room, part of my mind was working to minimise it. I thought of the news I’d been watching just last night. A sixteen-year-old gang-raped and tortured in a derelict London tower block. A twelve-year-old who’d committed suicide after years of abuse in a Midlands care home. A man who’d murdered his wife and her toddler by setting fire to their home, just up the road in East Lothian. I’d turned it off in the end, because what could you do? How would you ever handle it if you could see it all: a trail of human misery stretching on and on, as far as the eye could see or the mind could imagine.
But none of that changed what had happened to me. It didn’t make it nothing.
All I had was the truth. My truth.
I pulled myself up, looked in the mirror. I’d aged about a hundred years since this morning but I stood up straight, and nodded slowly to myself. To all my old selves. It was time to take James on a tour of the house.
Hattie
It’s hard to remember exactly what happened next. The counsellor said it might help to write it all down. I need to get my head around what happened, incorporate it into myself, accept it as part of my story.
Janey had run out of the drawing room. I was holding Pip.
The atmosphere in the room had changed.
Mum turned to the Cartwrights. ‘Marian and Kenneth,’ she said. ‘How was your Monte Carlo trip? What’s the weather like at this time of year?’
‘Oh, well, the hotel’s not what it used to be,’ said Marian. ‘Gone downhill, you know. The towels used to be so fluffy but really now I’d have to describe them as quite hard. And the new egg chef seems really quite incompetent. Gave Kenneth a duck egg instead of a goose egg on the last morning.’
‘And it rained,’ added Kenneth, who seemed anxious to downplay the trip.
‘And did you see the Williamses out there?’ went on Renee.
‘Yes, but George is not doing so well.’
A discussion followed about George’s failing health. He had Parkinson’s disease, apparently, and was finding it hard to grasp small items, like his keys.
Then Miss Fortune piped up, ‘Oh, how dreadful for him. I too have very limited use of my fingers since Renee here smashed them with a hammer.’
There was total silence for about three seconds until Marion gave a polite, tinkling laugh and Kenneth and the Smythes joined in. Renee raised an eyebrow and made a twirling motion at the side of her head. The guests were happy to accept that Miss Fortune had gone loopy. The alternative didn’t fit in with their world, which centred around socialising with the old Edinburgh set and quaffing champagne in Georgian drawing rooms.
Janey came back in then, and asked James if she could have a word. From where I was sitting I could see her leading him up the stairs. My skin prickled. Why would she be taking him up to the bedrooms?
But then the musicians came in – a pianist, a tenor and a soprano – to perform some of the songs from Dad’s musicals.
The soprano sang ‘Once Upon a Summertime’ and everyone said ‘Ahhhh . . .’ and clapped.
I heard the stairs creak in the hall, and looked round again to see Janey leading James downstairs now. He looked as though he was wobbling a bit. Hanging on tight to the banister. He’d probably drunk too much already. I felt a pang then, as though I should follow them down, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to leave Miss Fortune and my mother in a room together.
The pianist started up the opening bars of ‘Vienna Serenade’.
During the applause that followed, Miss Fortune leaned down and drew something out of her handbag. She handed it to the pianist. ‘Do play this, dear. I do so want to remember Emil properly.’
The pianist studied it for a moment. The soprano peered over his shoulder at the music on the stand, the dark blobs and slashes of ink on heavy cream manuscript paper.
‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen this arrangement of the Dark Side theme before. It modulates into E flat minor. Interesting.’
‘This is not the Dark Side theme.’ Miss Fortune winced over the words as though they tasted sour. ‘This is Blue Bear’s Dance. See?’ She gestured towards the title at the top of the page.
But it was indeed the Dark Side theme that rang out through the drawing room as the pianist played the opening bars. I did a quick bit of mental maths. Judging from the letter that Dad had written to Miss Fortune, returning the manuscript, she’d composed this, his hit melody, about fifteen years before he even sat down to write Dark Side.
Mum knew it too. It was written all over her face. She rose and walked out of the room, and I followed, the sleeping Pip still in my arms. In the hallway below, James was emerging from the basement, heading towards the front door.
Janey stood at the top of the basement stairs, a dark shape, just watching.
‘Where are you going?’ Mum’s imperious tones rang out through the hall.
‘Get Simone. We’re leaving.’
‘You can’t leave!’
‘I said we’re leaving.’
There was mud on his shoes, as though they’d been out in the garden.
Miss Fortune was singing now, her voice drifting out from the drawing room.
‘My laddie, oh my laddie, when you lay your head to sleep . . .’
Simone appeared behind me.
‘Get the fucking bags, Simone,’ said James. Then added, to me, ‘This is a fucking nut house.’
Renee followed Simone up the stairs, as the climactic bars of Blue Bear’s Dance rang out from the drawing room.
‘What do you dream, my laddie?’
This next part is important. It’s hard to remember it clearly because it’s been burning its way through my brain for nearly three decades now. Burning too dark to be contained in what was then the future, in this vanishing point of a moment.
Mum reached the top of the stairs. Instead of following Simone into the bedroom, she dragged the stool over from by the upright piano, and positioned it in the mid point of the balcony landing, underneath the cupola, black as black. And she climbed on to it.
She caught my eye, and waved: a sad but inconsequential sort of wave. It was a gesture I’d seen a thousand times, when leaving for primary school on dark winter mornings, or boarding the Ramplings train at the start of a dozen miserable terms. I’d seen it not long ago, at Newark airport, glancing back as I’d walked through the barriers to catch my flight home.
And then, for one moment, I felt it all. Howling emptiness, pressing up against the walls of her mind, finding and filling every room and passageway so there was no room for anything else. It was unbearable to feel it for a second. How must it have been to carry it for decades? A lifetime?
I saw how it was that she’d anchored herself to this life with outside things. Things that she thought the rest of the world cared about, that would give her substance through their eyes. Being married to a famous composer helped, not just because of the money – her family already had plenty of that – but because of his passion, his creative spirit, his moods, the way he drew both men and women to him. And there’d been the beautiful houses, the travel, the influence with people who mattered, the parties that were talked about for months afterwards. Two pleasingly photogenic, almost-talented children w
ho she’d never quite managed to love. This house had always seemed so imposing, so solid in its Georgian stone, but I saw now that it was only ever a glittering stage set, paper thin.
And now it had all gone, disappeared along with the last echoes of Blue Bear’s Dance, and there was nothing to stop her from falling away.
In the inklings, she’d fluttered, her hair streaming behind. A black bird diving to earth.
Now she dropped like a stone. She dropped like the nine-stone lump of flesh and bone that she was, and when she hit the bottom she crunched, and split.
47
Janey
The funeral took place on a blustery Tuesday the week before Christmas; unseasonably mild, but misty grey. In the circumstances it was family only, which meant just Hattie and James. Simone hadn’t stayed. She’d said she had some work thing: a new project in Madrid, and that she didn’t know when she’d be back. She’d turned her back on all this horror and gone off to find the sun.
‘I think she’s had enough,’ said Hattie when she came round to mine that evening. ‘James has been drinking like a fish since it happened and she can’t be arsed to see him through all that again. The doctors told him the last time that his liver would pack in if he didn’t stop. I’m trying to make him get help. A clinic or something. Residential therapy. I phoned up a few places yesterday and they sound good. But the truth is when he gets like this he doesn’t want to stop.’
‘Does he have anyone else – friends – who might be able to help? To talk to him?’
She looked at me. ‘I keep thinking of the flies, the flies crawling out of his nose. I thought I’d saved him that time, but I hadn’t, I’d only delayed the inevitable. I’m going to lose everyone, Janey. I’m losing them to the inklings.’ Her voice was rising now, with a hysterical edge to the words.
I put my hand over hers. ‘You’re not. You’re not.’
‘It’s all come true, Janey. The falling woman. I saw the future. It was all tied up in me like a horrible black knot. You should stay away from me. You and Pip.’
‘I don’t think you were seeing the future.’ I paused. ‘Hattie, have you thought that maybe you were just seeing your mum’s thoughts? She’d been envisaging committing . . . doing something like that for years, and that’s what you saw. It was an obsession for her, the thought of ending it all, throwing herself down those stairs, a huge emotional black hole that pulled on everything in that house. Twisted it. You would have felt it on some level. You saw her crying on the landing that night, didn’t you? You wrote about it in your diary. Maybe some trick of your senses made you see what you knew intuitively, played out in physical form.’
