The Snow Rose

by Lulu Taylor

  Caz hesitates before she speaks. ‘But she’s not been herself for a long time. Even before that night, I mean.’

  ‘I know.’ Rory bites his lip. ‘After she found out about . . . my situation.’

  ‘Yes. That’s when she started to change.’

  Caz remembers when Kate came round to the house, icy calm, and told her everything: the hidden redundancy, the credit card bill run up to keep up appearances, the talk at home and Rory going.

  ‘Oh Kate.’ Caz had shaken her head, stunned. ‘I can’t believe it. Rory doesn’t seem the type! I would never think it of him.’ Caz knew it was awful, but she couldn’t help feeling sorry for Rory. Kate had such high standards. Fine when everything was going okay, but not so good when it wasn’t. Rory hated confrontation. He must have dreaded telling her. He must have somehow decided not to. That habit of silence of his. ‘You must feel terrible.’

  ‘Why did he lie to me?’ Kate asked, pale, her eyes questioning. She seemed outraged and floored by it at the same time. ‘Am I so awful? Why couldn’t he tell me he was in trouble?’

  ‘He should have told you,’ Caz said adamantly. Of course he should have. But she had a sudden vision of Rory leaving home every day, pretending to go to work, maybe going back after Kate and the children had left, or else spending the hours in the library or in a cafe, and felt a rush of sympathy for him. ‘Maybe he didn’t want to disappoint you.’

  Kate looked up at Caz, uncomprehending, hurt, torn between fury and despair. ‘How could he not tell me? I don’t understand. It changes everything between us! I feel like I don’t know him anymore.’

  Now Caz says, ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’

  Rory sighs. ‘I was a coward, I suppose. I just wanted everything to be all right. I couldn’t bear to spoil it for her when everything was going so well. I thought I could make it all right without her ever knowing. The irony was that when she found out, I’d just applied for a new job and I got an interview the week after. So I thought I could see the way out. If I got the job, I’d be earning again, and able to sort it all without worrying her. I did get it but it was too late.’

  ‘You’d still have been lying to her. You know you should have told her. She was devastated by the secrecy. She said it was like your whole marriage had been a sham, because you weren’t able to confide in her, or tell her when things went wrong. She thought she must be an awful wife, if you were so scared of telling her you’d lost your job. She didn’t understand why you couldn’t turn to her for help.’

  There’s a pause before Rory says, ‘I never thought of it that way. I was trying to protect her.’

  ‘And . . . yourself?’

  He thinks for a moment. ‘Yes. I suppose that’s true. I hardly even admitted to myself what was happening. I wouldn’t let myself think about what I was doing. It was easier to maintain the facade, act like I really did have a job and a salary and all the stuff I needed to keep it going. It was like being in a dream, and I just didn’t want to wake up.’

  ‘I know Kate isn’t always easy. She’s headstrong and seems absolutely sure of herself. But she’s as needy as anyone else. Perhaps you didn’t realise, but what you did shook her to the core because she began to think that nothing was safe, and that her happy life was just an illusion. And then—’

  Rory looks agonised. ‘I’ve wished a million times that I’d told her. Because if I had, maybe it would never have happened. Maybe Heather would still be here.’

  ‘That was an accident,’ Caz says firmly. ‘It had nothing to do with what happened with your job. You mustn’t blame yourself for it.’

  ‘But Kate thinks it. She blames me because I wasn’t there that night. If I had been, maybe I could have saved Heather.’ He covers his face with his hands. ‘I have to live with that.’

  The dream flashes into Caz’s mind again – the gorgeous sweetness of Heather’s presence, her whispered command: Mummy needs you. You have to help Mummy.

  The emotions of the dream ripple through her: the shock, the confusion, the strangeness of being somewhere so familiar that has gone. But they pass over her in an instant and vanish. Caz says slowly, ‘I only wanted to do what was best for Kate.’

  ‘Of course.’ Rory rubs his face and looks over at her wearily. ‘You’ve always been there for her.’

  ‘I thought she was out of it – disconnected – because of the pills. She just wasn’t with us, was she? Not at the funeral, or the inquest. It was like she was focused somewhere else, on something we didn’t know about or couldn’t see. In another place.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rory says thoughtfully. ‘She seemed to be afraid of being . . . persecuted. I don’t know if that’s the right word. She seemed to think we were all out to get her.’

  ‘Paranoid?’

  ‘Yes. But not like someone with schizophrenia or anything. She was too businesslike for that. It was honestly as though she was exasperated that people expected her to be anything other than normal, after what happened. She just seemed untouched by it, but afraid that our assumptions that she must be suffering were going to force her into something she didn’t want.’ Rory shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. It was like a cold disconnection.’

  ‘So determined,’ Caz says.

  Rory smiles sadly. ‘So like Kate. She always knew exactly what she wanted, and she made things happen. It’s how she copes with things.’

  ‘I thought I was helping her. But . . . maybe I wasn’t.’ Caz stares at the table. ‘When she went away.’

  He looks over at her, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’ Then he goes very still. ‘What do you mean, Caz? Is there something you want to tell me?’

  She looks up. ‘She was so commanding. I didn’t know how to say no to anything – not considering what she had been through. She promised me that this was her way to get better. It wouldn’t be for long. All she needed was a little time. So . . . so I said I would help her.’

  ‘Okay . . . When? When was this?’

  ‘I suppose it started about a month before she left. She had to make arrangements, you see, because she was determined that she wouldn’t be found. So she had to plan it.’ She starts fiddling with her fingers, nervous and guilty. She feels simultaneously disloyal to both of them – to Rory for not speaking earlier, and to Kate, for telling him when she swore she wouldn’t.

  He stares at Caz, astonished. ‘You’ve known all this time? You haven’t told me?’

  ‘I promised I wouldn’t.’

  He slams his palm down on the table and she jumps violently. ‘For God’s sake, Caz! You must have known she wasn’t in her right mind, that she wasn’t capable of making a rational decision! She was using you, manipulating you to do what she wanted. Christ knows what she was thinking.’ Then his expression changes from furious to pleading. ‘How could you see me suffering like this and not help?’

  ‘I was just trying to do the right thing, for both of you,’ she whispers. ‘But Kate was so . . . so implacable. She would have done it whether I helped her or not.’

  ‘What did she get you to do?’

  ‘She wanted to use my address as hers, in order to get a credit card that wasn’t connected with her.’

  ‘So . . .’ He frowns. ‘In a fake name?’

  Caz nods.

  ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘And she didn’t tell you where she was going?’

  Caz shakes her head. ‘No. She was very careful about that. She mentioned a company. That was the only thing. She said “The company’s expecting me . . .” or something like that. But she was very careful with what she said.’

  Rory stares at the table, tapping the top with his fingertips. ‘Do you think she was planning to go abroad?’

  ‘I have no idea. But I don’t think so. Because . . .’ Something floats into her mind, a throwaway remark which she can’t quite recall. ‘I got the impression that she was driving somewhere. And the ringtone isn’t foreign either.’

  She’s sp
oken without thinking, and it’s only when Rory’s face changes that she realises what she’s said. His look of concentration is replaced by one of astonishment and then of hard anger.

  ‘What? The ringtone? The fucking ringtone, Caz?’ His voice is climbing the register, as what she’s said sinks in. ‘You mean you’ve spoken to her?’

  Caz is mortified. Of course she planned to tell him everything, she just hadn’t got there quite yet. She stammers out, ‘W-well, I . . . I . . .’

  He gets to his feet. ‘How the hell could you? How could you do this behind my back, knowing what I’ve been going through?’ He stops and looks at her with a terrible disappointment. ‘I had no idea you could do something like this.’

  ‘Please, Rory.’ She gets up as well, her hands out to placate him. ‘I’m telling you now! Don’t you understand? Kate made me promise. She swore she was all right, that she was doing the right thing. I believed her.’

  ‘You wanted to believe her. We both know she’s far from all right! I’ve been in her house, I’ve looked on her computer and in her email. There’s a load of stuff quite obviously designed to be blind alleys. She booked tickets to Spain and to France and never showed up for any of them. But there’s nothing else to tell me what she might actually have planned.’ He stops, puts his palms on the table and leans forward to stare hard at her. The look in his eyes makes her want to back away. ‘So, what do you know?’

  She starts to talk, faltering at first, and then it comes pouring out. That Kate has an email account – not one with a name like jane doe at hotmail, but just a few numbers and letters – and that Caz can contact her through that. She tells him that she has a mobile number, and that she’s spoken to Kate three times on it since she left.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Rory says, running his hands through his hair again. ‘You’ve got a number for her.’ He shakes his head. ‘You better hope the police don’t find out what you’ve been withholding from them. They’ve been putting out enquiries all over the country. They could have just phoned her up!’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ Caz protests. ‘And I told her . . . I told her she was doing the wrong thing, that it wasn’t right to let the police look for her, or to let you worry. She wouldn’t listen! You can’t blame me for this, Rory. I can’t change it, I’ve tried! And when I mentioned Ady, she just hung up on me! I haven’t heard from her since.’

  ‘Have you tried to reach her?’ he asks, in a low, intense voice. Caz is sure he knows in his heart that she’s right and that there was nothing she could have done to change Kate’s mind, but he needs a focus for his frustration and anger. And she has lied to him.

  Or is it in the same way he lied to Kate? Not so much outright deception as by omission. I haven’t told untruths, but I’ve also volunteered nothing. Rory, of all people, ought to know how easy it is to do that.

  Caz says, ‘Yes. I’ve tried to reach her. But it all went quiet over a week ago.’ She leans back in her seat, exhausted from it all. She’s been worrying about it so much, and she’s tired of it.

  Rory sighs, and looks as defeated as Caz feels. ‘Then we’re back where we started,’ he says. ‘She could have dumped that phone and that email account.’ He shakes his head. ‘Why were there no records on her computer?’

  ‘She was very careful,’ Caz says quietly. ‘She used internet cafes and libraries, so she couldn’t be traced.’

  Rory slumps in his chair. ‘What’s the point? She doesn’t want to be found. Look at how hard she’s tried to get away. Maybe we should just let her go.’

  Caz leans towards him, suddenly intense. ‘We can’t give up,’ she says firmly. She’s not about to tell Rory of her dream. It would be a cruelty to bring his dead daughter into all of this. But she can use what it gave her to sort out this horrible mess. ‘We’re going to find her. Let’s start right away.’ She pulls her mobile phone towards her. ‘I’ll text her first. We’ll keep going until she replies. She’ll have to, in the end.’

  Rory looks at her miserably. ‘What if we’re too late? What if she’s already dead? That’s probably what she was planning.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that. She didn’t sound suicidal. Until we have evidence, we assume she’s alive and that we can find her. Someone has to have seen her. Someone knows where she is. Come on. We can do this. For you and her, and Ady.’

  ‘Okay.’ Rory musters a smile, trying to look confident. ‘What have we got to lose?’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Arthur barely speaks to Letty during the day, and maintains his exterior of a bored and sulky young man, the Arthur she knew before their marriage. He slopes about, occasionally disappearing for one of his walks, or reading wherever he can find somewhere private without too many women flocking about. He is treated with a kind of remote respect by the ladies, but the Angels do not like him at all. They evidently suspect his motives.

  ‘He’s walking about the village,’ Kitty tells Letty when she is overseeing the organisation of the linen cupboard. Sometimes, Letty feels like she’s running a good-sized hotel, with the amount of household work that needs doing: fifteen bedrooms to be changed and cleaned; the endless replenishment of the generous larder, and the planning and ordering of meals; the maintenance of the house and grounds. Arabella is content to leave it to Letty to manage. She is more queenly than ever, growing into her place at the Beloved’s side. And Sarah, that calm and serene presence, has been moved further away: two more places down at the table, the row behind in the church. Arabella seems to wish the distance to be widened, as though eventually everyone might forget that Sarah was ever anything other than one of many middle-aged ladies devoted to the welfare of the Beloved and keen to hang on his every word. Sarah appears to be suffering, though no one knows if it is a result of her treatment. She is increasingly unwell, grey-faced, tired and in pain. She is spending many hours alone in her small bedroom, tended by the Angels.

  ‘Arthur walks about the village?’ Letty asks carelessly. She points at the upper shelf. ‘Single sheets only on there, Kitty, please. I suppose he’s entitled. After all, no one is forbidden from leaving. It is a matter of choice to be here.’

  ‘But once you’re in, you’re in,’ Kitty replies, pressing a mound of fresh white sheets onto the upper shelf. ‘I don’t think he is in. And you know what’s going on in the village.’

  Letty remembers Enid and her outlandish accusations. She said they’re all saying it. ‘You mean the gossip about us?’

  Kitty nods. ‘It’s not healthy. I don’t go there myself at all anymore. The other girls say it’s not pleasant doing the shopping down there right now.’

  ‘Well,’ says Letty crisply, ‘if they don’t want our custom, I’m perfectly content to use other tradesmen, and take deliveries from further afield. We put a lot of business their way, don’t we? I don’t see what life here has to do with them.’

  ‘You know what people are like,’ Kitty answers, patting down a pile of pillowcases. ‘They like to be shocked. They’d be disappointed if they could see us as we really are.’ She grins and leans over to Letty and murmurs, ‘I expect they think we do the housework in the altogether.’

  Letty gasps and then laughs. ‘Kitty . . . stop it. Well, if Arthur is going down to the village, perhaps he can help counter the rumours. They might listen to him.’

  ‘Have you had any luck with him?’ Kitty enquires. ‘Is he hearing the word?’

  Letty sighs. ‘I don’t think so, not yet. But at least we’re a little more friendly than we were. He wants to leave by the end of the summer, so if he goes then, I’ll have failed.’

  Kitty shakes her head. ‘He is a mighty challenge. You’ll have to fight the Devil hard for that one, his grip is so firm on his heart.’

  Letty knows it’s true, and yet she has found herself looking forward more and more to the evenings, when she retires to the blue bedroom and Arthur joins her there. He always gives her time to go up alone, use the dressing room and change so that she is safely in bed when he
comes in. He seems to understand that this gives her the security she needs. He preserves his own modesty, always changing in the dressing room and insisting on sleeping on the chaise longue at the end of the bed. But from their separate posts, they have long conversations, and sometimes, in order to hear him better, she turns around and wiggles down to the end of the bed. There she makes him out dimly in the darkness – the shadow of his profile, the glimmer of his eyes – and hears him speak in a low voice, punctuated by throaty laughs when he says something that amuses him. The darkness seems to liberate them in a way that is not possible in the daytime. Sometimes, when they are downstairs in the dining room and she glances at him, stiff and silent beside her, she finds it hard to believe that their nocturnal conversations actually happen. But then, darkness comes and he is back, and their whispered confidences begin again.

  He tells her about his life: a boyhood in Buckinghamshire and then a move to London with his father’s work. As the family prosperity increased, so did the expectations of his achievement. He is the only child, the sole focus of all ambitions. He was sent to Harrow and from there to Oxford – ‘where I had the best fun in the world. Only I suppose it had to come to an end, it was all going so fast. It couldn’t be maintained.’ He thinks for a moment. ‘I’ve got through all this by pretending I’m on a curious kind of rest cure. Like being sent into a sanatorium for a seaside convalescence.’

  Letty listens to his tales of Oxford with fascination. She’s never heard of such a wicked, dissolute life. It makes her feel so very provincial and innocent when she hears of gambling clubs and dancing, and girls and motorcars and huge amounts of food and drink and money.

  ‘The old man wanted it that way,’ Arthur says carelessly into the darkness. ‘He gave me a decent allowance so that I could keep up with the smart set. He wanted more than anything for me to have position in society, perhaps marry an earl’s daughter or something. Money can get you that, sometimes, if you’re clever and not too pushy. But when it came down to it, he didn’t like it. I told him what they all got up to, all the nobs he was so desperate for me to make friends with, and he couldn’t believe it. Dissolute, he thought. Immoral. He doesn’t understand high jinks, or the fact that it’s a rite of passage. We’ll all be respectable when we settle down and get married. What he couldn’t stomach was the idea that half the boys were sissies and the other half were sleeping with other men’s wives or actresses.’