by Hannah Emery
Isobel wants to sit down. She’s exhausted, her legs are aching, her head pounding. But there is nowhere to sit in the hall and Daphne shows no signs of moving. Hugh stares up at his mistress, his huge brown eyes doleful, before whimpering and trotting off to the kitchen in search of something better than these two strange, tense women.
‘Is it Georgia?’ Isobel prompts. ‘Has Georgia been in touch with you? Does she want to see Tom again?’
Confusion flits over Daphne’s face. ‘Georgia?’
‘Yes. I thought it might be her on the phone the other day.’
‘It’s not Georgia,’ Daphne’s voice is barely a whisper. ‘Is Tom in?’
‘No. He’s at work. He’s doing a short shift, so he’ll be back soon.’
Daphne kneels then, straight onto the floor, her long legs folding beneath her without any warning. She sits on the wood, her head in her hands, her grey hair spilling through her long fingers. Isobel moves towards her and then sits on the floor next to her. Close up, she can see tiny streaks of brown, of the hair that Daphne must have once had.
‘Tom’s not mine. He never was.’ Daphne whispers, her voice barely audible. ‘I took him. But I can’t lose him, Isobel.’
The words float in Isobel’s mind, making no sense.
Daphne looks up, her face white and stricken.
‘Let’s get you up. I’ll make some tea,’ says Isobel. She guides Daphne to her feet, feeling the woman’s thin arms trembling under her dark-green fleece. When they reach the kitchen, Isobel motions for Daphne to sit down at the table, then puts the kettle on an Aga ring before sitting down.
‘I don’t know what you meant before,’ Isobel starts, as Daphne’s words from the hall ring in her ears. ‘What did you mean when you said Tom wasn’t yours?’
Daphne opens her mouth to speak, but no words come. As the two women sit, Isobel staring at Daphne, they hear the creak of the front door opening. They turn to the doorway of the kitchen, where Tom stands, a brown parcel and a letter in his hands.
He smiles cheerfully and drops the parcel onto the table with a thud.
‘This is for you, Mum.’
Isobel and Daphne stare down at it. The handwriting on the brown package is similar to the spindly style on the Christmas card that Isobel found the other day, the handwriting that has been etched into Isobel’s exhausted mind, that made her lose all sense of everything.
But instead of Tom’s name, it’s Daphne’s.
Chapter 23
Evelyn: 2011
Victoria’s baby hadn’t died, of course. It had been a lie. Evelyn had realised that just after leaving Gaspings House.
When the train had stopped at the station after Gaspings and Evelyn had sat, aching all over, her head resting on the seat, her brain clicking through image after image, the face of the tall nurse with brown hair appeared in her mind. She had remembered the nurse’s eyes, as Matron said Baby was lost too. The nurse’s expression had said something different. Her eyes had been wide with fright and excitement and exhilaration and horror. Evelyn hadn’t noticed at the time, but she noticed at the precise moment that the train paused in the station.
She had leapt from the train, her body moving faster than it had done in years. She had run back to Gaspings, her heels bleeding, her breath rasping.
The tall nurse had answered the front door and the blood had drained from her face. She wasn’t pretty, but her face had a softness to it that compelled Evelyn to take her hands.
‘Victoria Lace’s baby. I was told that it died?’
‘It was a boy,’ the nurse said. ‘A beautiful boy.’ She glanced behind her and bit her lip, put her hand up and brushed it through her dull, brown hair. Evelyn saw the glint of a wedding ring: a plain gold band, a circle of love and commitment.
‘Do you have children?’ Evelyn breathed, her lungs still struggling for air after running.
The nurse looked down. She shook her head. A headshake of broken dreams, of desperation, of waiting and waiting for something that was already loved, but was never going to come. Evelyn saw it all in an instant.
‘Meet me. Tonight. Do you know the castle in Silenshore?’
The nurse stared and stared at Evelyn. Panic fluttered in Evelyn’s chest. What if she had it all wrong? What would this woman think of her? But then she remembered the thought she’d had on the train not even an hour earlier as it pulled away from Gaspings, towards Silenshore. Only one chance to get things right. She remembered the nurse’s face lingering in her mind, telling her that something didn’t add up.
Evelyn waited. Eventually, the nurse looked behind her again. Then she nodded so quickly that Evelyn almost missed it.
‘Meet me at the gates. Midnight,’ Evelyn said.
‘Midnight,’ the nurse repeated, before swinging the heavy door shut between them.
To anybody else, the castle might have looked eerie at midnight. The moon glowed behind it, broken in two by the turret that used to be Evelyn’s bedroom what seemed like hundreds of years ago. As Evelyn waited by the gates she wondered, for the millionth time, what it might be like inside the castle now. She wondered if it might still hold, somehow, the sweet sounds and scents of her mother and father, of the evacuees, of Evelyn’s childhood. She wondered if Victoria had ever seen Harry here, if her beautiful, darling girl had been kissed here, if she had felt the thrill of new love with the castle looking down on her.
The castle was the only place at which Evelyn could do what she was about to do. She looked at her watch. It was approaching midnight. A few more strokes and the nurse, if Evelyn had been right about it all, would be here.
Midnight. A black cloud drifted across the moon, casting darkness down on Evelyn.
Silence. The ticking of Evelyn’s watch as second after second went by.
And then a figure.
The nurse was stooped, rushing, breathless. She stopped at Evelyn as the cloud passed over the moon, her outline lit by silver.
Evelyn reached out and touched her arm. ‘Please, tell me what happened.’
The nurse shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. ‘I don’t know. I tried to save your daughter. I tried so hard. You must understand, she didn’t know what was happening. So she’ll be at peace now. I can promise you that.’
Evelyn nodded, her soul ripping in two, her heart stinging and raw. ‘And the baby?’
The nurse wept. ‘He’s so beautiful.’
‘He didn’t die, did he?’
‘No. No, he didn’t. I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you. I…’
‘There are some new houses being built here in Silenshore.’ Evelyn cut into the nurse’s words, pressing her hands against her bony fingers, pushing the notes that she had taken from Jack’s hiding place under the floorboards into the nurse’s hand. ‘Buy one of them. Be nearby to me. I will never tell the baby he isn’t yours. I will never take him away from you, as long as you take very good care of him and as long as I know he is near to me.’
There was a strange pause in the black air, as though time had stopped. The nurse looked at Evelyn, her eyes wide and unsure. For a cruel, stretched moment, Evelyn considered taking her by her frizzed brown hair and demanding to know where the baby was right now, to find him, and wrap him in the peach blanket that her darling Victoria had knitted and take him home.
But then she remembered Jack and his brutish strength, and her own strange weakness that seemed to be tied to him. She remembered Victoria’s poor, poor Harry, his death splashed all over the newspapers while Victoria was in that dreadful place all alone. Someone had been waiting for him when he finished work at the university. They’d set upon him, beaten him and left him for dead. He was beaten so badly that it was some time before he was even identified. Suspicious, the black print had said. Evelyn had pushed that word to the back of her mind. If Jack knew she had considered telephoning the police and saying that she thought it might have been Jack who had left Harry for dead behind her beautiful castle gates, he would have broken her
in two: snapped her like a twig in a second.
No, she certainly couldn’t take the baby home to Jack, and she couldn’t tell him that the baby was still alive. She would tell him that the baby was dead, so that he wouldn’t hunt it down and bruise it and whip it like he did her, or snarl and curse at it like he always had with Victoria, or leave it for dead like he had with Harry. This baby would be the start of a new life with new people and new fortune. He would make a time for change. He would be Victoria’s secret, and Evelyn would watch him forever, guarding him with her life.
She stepped away from the nurse, who was still weeping, and turned from the castle. Her legs moved smoothly, carrying her back home.
One chance to do the right thing.
Evelyn was sure that this was it.
The next morning Jack had returned from the auction. Normally, the days after an auction were tight and fraught with anxiety for Evelyn. But at this auction he had won a gilt-lined painting of some snappy-looking hunting dogs and grand horses. He was affable and gentle. He did not even appear to mind that Evelyn wasn’t watching the shop. Lace Antiques had been quieter since Victoria had gone to Gaspings anyway. They hadn’t told a soul about their daughter’s misfortune, but somehow people seemed to know.
Now, none of it mattered anyway.
‘Victoria is dead,’ she said to Jack as he shuffled a pile of ten-pound notes.
His head shot up from the money and his eyes suddenly appeared to become very bloodshot. His fist curled into a neat ball on the counter, then relaxed as soon as it had tensed. He looked down.
‘She’s better off dead than in the sorry state she got herself in.’
‘Baby was lost too,’ Evelyn said next, using Matron’s words, Matron’s lie.
At this news, Jack shrugged and continued to count the money, though a deadness had appeared behind his grey eyes. Evelyn remembered the first time she had seen those eyes. She had been charmed, seeing his darkness as a symbol of exoticism. Now, she knew different. There was nothing exotic about her husband, nothing charming, only danger.
She swept past him, unable to form words about funerals or death in childbirth or their beautiful lost girl.
Evelyn took to walking up the hill and through the dark, cobbled streets to the new houses that she had told the nurse about. They were almost finished now: lower and wider than any houses Evelyn had seen before. The skeletons of the houses soon became a row of pastel-painted bungalows, spacious and modern.
The sharp, salty air and the daily uphill walk to the houses made Evelyn’s limbs ache, made her lungs tight and full, as though they might burst. When she returned home after her walks, she left Lace Antiques closed up and floated upstairs to her soft bed. Every day, she dreamed of Victoria, her poor Victoria, her darling body lying in that horrible place, all alone, silver-white with death.
I ruined things for you, she told Victoria in her silent sleep. I let you ruin things for yourself. I won’t let things be ruined for your baby. I won’t.
It was autumn when Evelyn saw them together for the first time. The air sparked with the first electric hints of winter. Copper leaves danced along the streets of Silenshore, and when Evelyn stared up at the castle on her walk to the new houses, it loomed in front of a fluorescent-orange sky. So taken was she with staring up into the turret that used to be her bedroom so long ago that she almost missed them.
He was in a navy-blue Silver Cross pram, his face only just visible in a twist of pale-blue blankets. The nurse from Gaspings was pushing him along, her tall figure stooped over the curling white handle. She didn’t see Evelyn silently observing her from the corner of West Street. She stopped for a moment, reached a slim hand into the pram, perhaps to stroke his cheek, or cover him more securely, or wipe a tear. Her line of vision did not move from the pram. If the world had crumbled around her, the nurse wouldn’t have noticed, as long as the pram and the baby within it remained.
Once Evelyn knew that the baby was living in Silenshore, she walked across the road every day, through the lane to West Street and up and down, her heart dull with a heavy ache, in the hope that she would see one more glimpse of Victoria’s darling baby. As the season changed to winter and the air became sharp with a hostile iciness, Evelyn wondered if there was any point in walking up and down West Street now. Surely the nurse wouldn’t take him out until the spring.
Just one attempt and then Evelyn would stop herself from trying to see him again.
It was on the one attempt, though, that Evelyn saw the nurse pushing the pram towards the beach. Evelyn walked behind her, far away enough not to be seen, her body tight with the chill of the air and the thrill of seeing her grandchild. He was growing now: even at a distance, Evelyn could see his cherubic face staring from the pram as he sat up. The nurse was thin, rather drably dressed in a shapeless beige coat. Evelyn walked a little further, blind to the sea beyond, the declining cobbles beneath her, the wide row of new houses beside her.
Turn around now, she told herself. Go back home and leave them. The wind bit into her cheeks and salt settled on her lips. She paused, let the nurse retreat an instant further towards the promenade and tried to gather the strength to turn her back to them. But she found herself unable to move and so instead she watched until the figure of the nurse and the blue pram turned into a blur, an indistinguishable dot, and then nothing.
The year swept by, coming to a close as Evelyn lay alone in bed listening to the sound of the crashing black waves, isolated cheers on the streets, the clanking of bottles as people left The Smuggler’s Ship, the clanging of the various clocks in the shop downstairs as they struck midnight. Jack was out somewhere and would be back in the early hours, angry about something or other and reeking of stale cigarette ash and sloshed, warm bitter.
The new year brought with it angry storms from Jack as Lace Antiques stood forlorn and empty of custom.
‘They don’t want to know us now. Nobody wants to know us because of what happened,’ Jack yelled, banging his ugly fist down on the counter.
Evelyn sighed. It was probably more to do with changing tastes and times, but she wouldn’t say that to Jack. He liked to blame her and Victoria for things that went wrong: he always had. Lost shoes, broken clocks, lost fortunes at auctions, were all somehow twisted into the endless fault of Evelyn and poor Victoria. Now, even though Victoria lay still in the ground in a churchyard near Gaspings House (with what Evelyn presumed was an empty coffin at her feet), she was still being blamed for things that had gone wrong.
‘I don’t know why we bother,’ Jack was ranting. ‘I might as well close the bloody place.’
Evelyn closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
‘Let’s close it. Let’s sell it. I’ve seen a house for sale on West Street. It’s cheap. You’d like it.’
Jack stared at her, his dull, brown eyes burning into hers. Evelyn shifted, leaned on the counter, thought of her bed. She could mumble an apology for speaking out of turn, for presuming that she should offer ideas, and then she could sink into her soft bed and close her eyes, and dream of Victoria and the baby and another life altogether.
She’d seen the house that morning when she’d been out walking around West Street. It was directly opposite the one that she had seen the nurse emerge from with the baby.
She gripped the counter so that the bones of her knuckles protruded from her papery skin. No. She could not give up on this. She would never take the baby. She couldn’t; she’d done such a terrible job with Victoria. But if she could persuade Jack to buy that house, then she would be able to watch him, to make sure that he was safe in her own way, to perhaps see him sometimes and transmit, somehow, that he was special, rich and royal.
It wasn’t clear why Jack listened to Evelyn. Perhaps, for all these years, she’d been wrong. Perhaps if she’d spoken to him more, told him her ideas, he would have nodded along, and they would have sailed along more peacefully, without purple bruises and a heavy feeling of sorrow and days when the only thing to d
o was sleep.
But then again, perhaps they wouldn’t have.
The house was narrow and dark; not much different from the upstairs of Lace Antiques that Evelyn had spent the last seventeen years in. It smelled of damp and the paint on the walls cracked in spidery lines.
Jack managed to sell Lace Antiques at a high price. But the man who bought it turned his nose up at the stock.
‘It’s a holiday town,’ the man said, without expanding. Jack was furious. But Evelyn felt like she knew what that meant.
On their first night in the new house they lay in their bed, surrounded by the boxes of unwanted antiques. The ticking of old clocks and the scent of the past lingered in the air.
As the years rolled by, Jack and Evelyn led separate lives. Evelyn watched the family across the road grow and shape themselves into a unit. She saw the nurse’s husband knock a house sign that said Broadsands into the brick next to the front door, and thought what a nice name for a family home that was. She listened carefully to snatches of conversations as the family pushed their bicycles into the garage, as they left the house and piled into their car, as they shouted to one another in the back garden and walked to the beach and over the road to Castle Street. She watched as the baby changed into a toddler then a schoolboy then a tall, sophisticated man who wore woollen coats and striped scarves, who once helped her when one of her shopping bags split in two so that her tins of peaches rolled along the cobbles, who drove a rather intimidating black car. She gazed at him from the narrow, smeared windows of her cottage and wondered at how different he was to Jack, who was short and aggressively opposed to men like her grandson: tall men who dressed well and were gentle and subtle.
She watched and listened and waited. She found out their names.
