As a student when I’d come to visit Aunty May, I had often walked about the little town, peering in windows and dreaming that this place, this kitchen, this courtyard was mine. Now having my own place here had come true! I let myself spin up on a high again, breathing the sea air; the headiness of knowing I was going to see Patrick again today, the thrill of owning a house by the sea, it all gathered until I thought I might explode.
I found myself crossing the grassy playground behind the church, where I used to come to as a child. The old swings I remembered but the tall metal slide had been replaced by an assortment of coloured plastic climbing equipment, in grotesque shapes. A woman sat texting on her phone while her child in a pink quilted coat swung to and fro on the swing, calling for her mother, who ignored her.
A memory nudged the corner of my mind, of me and Ben and someone else? And May calling, ‘I’m leaving you in charge.’ Pushing two younger children on the swing. Being pulled in two different directions, as the vague child I couldn’t put a name or a face to vanished across the park to climb the steps of the tall slide. Knowing I couldn’t just abandon my little brother to tell her to come down at once. Pulling him out of his seat – he was so small he still went in the ones with the safety harness – and carrying him across the park to the slide. Feeling like an adult, not the six-year-old I must have been. Then looking up to see May coming back, hurrying, treading a cigarette out underfoot.
I pushed through the swing gate into the graveyard. Wandered about looking at the graves. Reading the epitaphs and wondering about the people whose names were engraved. Then I stopped. It was a small, blackened grave in the corner but it was the words that caught my eye and made me stand stock-still.
‘A piece of you.’
The very same words that appeared on the box containing a lock of hair in Aunty May’s kitchen.
I peered more closely. The engravings had faded and were covered in some kind of lichen. I scraped the lichen away and brushed my finger along the stone, clearing the lettering.
Daisy 1985–90
Much loved and cherished and never forgotten.
I shuddered. So a child had died! And that old sense of darkness underlying the happy memories of this place washed over me.
The sun had gone in and it looked like rain, so I pulled my parka tighter around me. I’d quiz Mum next time I saw her. Make her tell me everything she knew about Aunty May’s past. Now I was inheriting my aunt’s house I was entitled to be party to the truth.
The sky was growing darker now. I’d take Pepper back to the house the other way, over the marshes. The wind buffeted us as we went across the exposed flatland where the circular water tower was silhouetted against the lowering sky. It was a desolate landscape, me and Pepper the only figures for miles around. Up to our right, the creek was a slate-grey expanse of water.
We reached the humpback bridge over the stream and went past the fishing huts. These ramshackle buildings hadn’t changed for years, with their heaps of rope and netting coiled underneath and their smell of salt and fish and weed. Boats were moored along the quay. There was the clanking sound of metal ropes against masts, and the slap of the water against the makeshift jetties and landing stages. The other way, the sea sparkled, still lit up by glimpses of sun between the gathering clouds.
I was almost back at the house, when a voice startled me out of my reverie.
‘Hey there! You!’
I looked up. A shock passed through me when I realised it was Larry, waving a hand up and down, his bike dropped at an angle between his knees.
I don’t know why it made me shudder seeing him, why I wanted to run.
I controlled this impulse, however – the poor man was harmless. Instead, I waved back, hoping he’d move on.
‘Larry! Anything I can do for you?’
‘Where May gone?’ he said, puckering his face up childishly.
‘May doesn’t live here any more.’
‘May dead,’ he said. ‘May not coming back no more.’
‘That’s right. I’m here now. I’m Ellie.’
‘You killed May.’
I laughed. ‘No I didn’t, Larry. May died. But you’re right, she’s not coming back. I’m sorry.’
He turned his back and was gone without saying any more.
Why did I get the impression he hadn’t forgiven me?
I put the key in the lock, trying not to let his accusation take hold. I had to fight the compulsion to let his words germinate, begin to haunt me. May had died. She was depressed. Her suicide was carefully planned. There was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it. ‘You killed May.’ I thought again, with a jolt of guilt, how I hadn’t come down to see her that weekend. How I hadn’t tapped the gatepost three times. It wouldn’t have been tapping the gatepost that would have saved her, my rational mind told me. But perhaps I could have cajoled her out of the depths of a despair that had convinced her she couldn’t face another day?
Inside the house, I pulled out the kitchen drawer. There was a notebook in which May had listed the children she had fostered, but I put this aside for now and held up the bib. It contained a memory, I wasn’t sure what of, more a series of impressions, a vague troop of images that I could barely put a name to. Childhood in all its fleeting intensity. The Crooked House had been the name of a shop on the high street, as well as featuring in the nursery rhyme. I remembered loving that house with its Aladdin’s cave of beautiful trinkets, of jewellery and fridge magnets, of incense and bead sets and things to hang above your bed that swirled and caught the light.
I opened the tin next and again felt myself shudder looking at the lock of hair and the note ‘A piece of you’. The very words that were engraved on the stone in the churchyard? As if she wanted to keep part of the child who had died. Then I noticed the matchbox, and opened that. The passport-size photo of a girl, not me, blonde, the name Daisy scrawled on the back.
Inside were six milk teeth, tiny and with little pointy ends and stippled with dry blood.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I left May’s house as soon as I could after this. The physical mementoes of Daisy were making me feel nauseous. Anyway I couldn’t bear to wait any longer to see Patrick. If I left now I should arrive just in time for visiting hours.
Patrick was sitting up, watching some film on the screen hooked up on an arm over his bed.
He held out his hand as I approached, took mine in his and kissed my palm, and I felt my insides collapse.
‘I’m being discharged soon,’ Patrick said. ‘Back into civilian life. You’ll get to see me with my clothes on again.’
I laughed.
‘When?’
‘Sometime this week.’
‘Would you like me to come and drive you home?’
‘Would you mind? Aren’t I asking too much of you?’
‘No, of course I don’t mind. Where do you want me to take you?’
‘To the flat. The one in Wapping. Matt and Suki said they’d leave some beer and bits, so it’ll be ready for me. I just need a lift.’
Wapping! Blimey, I knew that area. It was highly desirable, mostly inhabited by City types, with its converted warehouse apartments right by the river near Tower Bridge.
‘OK. That’s fine. When do I come?’
‘They haven’t said which day, but they want the bed. And anyway I’ve had enough. If I stay any longer I’ll get institutionalised. I’m on a processed carbs and sugar-only diet in here! I’ve started craving tinned peaches and plastic cream!’
‘I’ve brought you some fresh fruit.’
‘Aha! I said you were an angel.’ I put the paper bag of oranges down on his locker and handed him a strawberry.
He ate it from my hand, taking my finger into his mouth and sucking it.
‘Lucky I just disinfected it.’
‘You couldn’t have germs,’ he said. ‘You’re too exquisite. Anyway, it’s time I was up and about and back to sushi. And learning to use this damn peg leg.’
‘I’m not sure if I’ll be much help – I haven’t dealt with anything like this before.’
‘It doesn’t matter!’ he said. ‘Together, we can be strong. When the going gets tough, Ellie, the tough get tougher.’ He smiled, waved his hands over his poor damaged leg. ‘I’ve just got to work at it. You will be an incentive! As long as you’re sure about this?’
‘I am. I’m sure.’
If they were discharging him later this week, then it was sooner than I had imagined it might be, given the extent and seriousness of his injuries, though I knew the NHS, short of beds, got people up and about as quickly as they were able to.
‘I’m still amazed I forgot your beautiful face,’ he said, gazing up at me. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you each time you appear in the ward. An apparition of loveliness. Come here. Pull the curtains around my bed. Just for a minute.’
And so it was happening. I was getting drawn further and further into his life and it gave me a curious, heady kind of energy.
It was two o’clock by the time I got in the car. It would be too late to do much work by the time I got home anyway so I decided to do the detour I hadn’t done last weekend to see my mother. She wrote about complex relationships, maybe I could get some perspective from her about what was happening. And anyway, the teeth I’d found at Aunty May’s had made me feel ill.
Who was the little girl? Why did I feel as if I remembered her, yet when I tried to grasp where I’d seen her she slipped out of my reach? She was the one whose name was on the gravestone, so what had happened to her? I would ask Mum to tell me about it.
I was wary of taking the smaller, prettier country route since the hit-and-run. But it was light, no chance of half-visions of possible victims of my driving. The countryside opened out as I got beyond Bury St Edmunds, flattened into large fields of rape, lurid yellow to either side, and the sky grew wider and murkier. I was at the junction to Cambridge in just over an hour and a half, driving down its leafy streets, along the river past Jesus Green, where students sprawled on the grass. My mother’s house was in a narrow street off the road that ran along the river. I found a parking space, walked back down the terraced houses, negotiating my way between bikes propped up against the walls blocking the narrow pavement. I knocked on the front door, which opened straight off the street, and when there was no answer, used my key.
There was a vase of bluebells on the table in the front room.
‘Mum?’
Her desk under the window was covered in heaps of papers and books. Photos of women cut out of magazines, and chiselled handsome men, were pinned onto a notice board. My mother churned out two romantic novels a year, sometimes three, and was in a constant state of anxiety that she wouldn’t be able to come up with another complicated relationship to untangle in time for her deadline.
I called out again.
‘Hi, it’s me!’
No answer. She wasn’t here. I went upstairs, Pepper at my heels, to the little room in the back where I always slept when I came, and dumped my bag.
I ran down the stairs, Pepper behind me, turning around three times, performing my stupid rituals before I’d even realised I was doing it.
I put the kettle on in her kitchen area which adjoined her open-plan sitting room at the back of the house, and strolled over to her desk. She’d scrawled notes above the photos on her board: ‘Sabine begins affair with her sister Marcia’s lover, Bella tries to attract attention of sales assistant at Apple Store to no avail.’
‘Hello?’ Mum came through the front door, her arms full of carrier bags, her hair, which was just greying, a little wild and unkempt, her brow furrowed. She looked older, and her face had thickened, almost imperceptibly, but it gave me a tiny shock.
‘Darling! I didn’t know you were coming! Grab a couple of these bags for me, will you? I’m parched, let’s have a cup of something.’
‘You’ve been shopping . . .’
‘I had an appointment at the Apple Store.’
‘The Apple Store?’
‘They run free workshops. Been there all afternoon. And before you say anything, let me tell you, I bloody needed it.’
‘What is it, Mum? You look stressed.’
My heart sank. I needed to consult Mum about Patrick, to see if she might throw some light on the moral dilemma and vague feelings I had for this injured man that weren’t even coherent but shimmered in the back of my mind, all mixed up with the confusion about his thinking he knew me and the accident and whether I’d caused it. Her own life had been complicated enough – she of all people would be able to give me some pointers as to what I was doing, where I was blindly heading.
‘Stressed doesn’t come near it.’
‘Oh no. Nothing’s wrong, is it?’
I looked her up and down, fear that she was keeping something from me coursing through me. She looked healthy enough.
‘Nothing major. Just Life. With a capital L. Don’t do that, Eleanor.’
‘Do what?’
‘That looking over your shoulder over and over again. I thought you’d grown out of that. Come on, let’s talk.’
We went through to the kitchen area – an extension off her sitting room with a glass roof and French windows onto a small walled garden. She’d had the extension done quite soon after she moved in with Miriam.
‘Use the tea temples, will you?’
‘Tea temples?’
‘Those Teapig thingies, whatever you call them. I’ll have Peppermint and Liquorice. I’ve given up caffeine. And there are some soya bean whatsits there we could have. You’re probably on a diet. Are you?’
‘I don’t do diets, Mum. You should know that. And why soya? Ick. Haven’t you got cake? I haven’t eaten much today. I’ve been down at May’s cottage, Mum, and I want to ask you—’
‘Soya’s good for imbalances.’
‘Imbalances?’
‘Hormonal ones, darling, of course. Help me unload?’
I took the carrier bag from her and pulled out industrial-sized brown jars of magnesium, Evening Primrose Oil, Black Cohosh and Red Clover.
‘I thought you were sceptical about these things?’
‘I was,’ she said. ‘Now I’d try anything. Look,’ she said, picking up a pot of cod liver oil. ‘For my brain. Red Clover for mood swings, St John’s Wort for depression, fish oil for my nerves. Calcium for bones and Black Cohosh for the hormones. It’s got desperate. My flushes are catastrophic – if I could I’d peel off my flesh and walk out of it.’
‘Ouch.’
‘My body’s a disaster zone. Eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, you name it.’
‘Mum, while I was at May’s—’
‘And I’m on an emotional roller coaster – euphoric one moment, in the depths of despair and confusion the next.’
She paused, and looked at me, her mouth turned down.
‘Not sure I like the sound of that,’ I said. ‘Are things OK with Miriam?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with Miriam, it’s being a woman. No getting round it. Puberty, menstrual problems, pregnancy.’ She stopped and looked at me oddly when she said this. ‘If you get through those, you’re lucky to escape postnatal depression. Before you know it you’re hitting peri-menopause, which I hasten to add is like a second adolescence – blushing, sweating, wanting to hide from the world. No wonder I need the Apple Store. It’s the only place I feel sane.’
She shook pills into her hand as she spoke.
‘Why the Apple Store though? Shouldn’t you be going to the gym? Or a therapist of some kind if you’re feeling like this?’
‘NO! I want hard knowledge. Apple men with clean fingernails. Apple men with their patience, explaining about Siri and how to download an app. They’re what give me respite.’
‘Respite from what though, Mum?’
‘From inner turmoil! They’re so calm, and cool, and smooth-skinned. And young. So sure. They do what they love and they know how to do it. You can go to as many
workshops as you like and they never grow tired of showing you. Or maybe, maybe what I love is being taught again by people who have a greater knowledge than I do, yet who are so much younger, have so much future ahead of them. I find it rejuvenating.’
‘You sound like you’ve found religion.’
‘Actually, sometimes I wonder if it perhaps is a kind of sect. But that’s my imagination running away with me. The fact is, those hours in that clean room among handsome young men in blue shirts calms my mind. They don’t flirt though. I think it must be part of their training, not to flirt with the women who come to them in desperation. They listen, and they offer solace, and they have the patience of saints. But it is all strictly non-sexual, so in this respect it’s definitely safer than therapy.’
‘Mum, you’re sounding cynical.’
‘I’m going to use one in my latest novel. He’s wedded to his Apple job, she can’t make him notice her. She tries everything. So how’s it all going? How’s Finn? How’s work?’
My mother was so behind with where I was up to I felt despair. And this, in fact, was typical. My mother had always been wrapped up in her work, her thoughts elsewhere when I needed her. Right back to those days in the school holidays when she’d packed us off to Aunty May’s instead of taking time off to spend with her two children. Yet I always hoped, against all evidence, that this time, at last, she would tune in to me, give me her full attention.
‘I wish you could have made it to the Private View,’ I said. ‘I sold quite a few. And some Americans have commissioned a painting.’
‘That’s fabulous, darling, but I knew you would. You’re a star.’
‘I wish you could’ve come. Especially as Dad couldn’t.’
‘I know, I wish I could have come too, but you know how my work can be. And I can’t really face Southwold any more. That chapter of my life is closed. I don’t want to keep on going over and over why May did what she did. If I’m not careful, it could haunt me. The only way I’ll get over it is once we’ve sold that house and had done with it.’
I wanted to point out the house was mine now, and that she had no say in whether I sold it, but I sealed my lips.
A Trick of the Mind Page 10
