by Heidi Perks
Eleanor hadn’t been right. The real truth was alarming, and once she had worked it out, it all seemed so obvious. The thought had been haunting her for a while, but since seeing Peter it was practically jumping into her head and kicking away at her skull. Eleanor hadn’t told Kathryn what to do for the best. Not for Kathryn anyway. Not for the girls, and definitely not for Abigail.
Eleanor had been so scared everyone would find out about the girls. When it came to the end she had been adamant what they had done would never be revealed. She had said she was worried they would take Hannah away, and Kathryn believed her. Because of the way Abigail was being, she had thought her mother was right, and she was scared too.
But what if it really wasn’t like that? What if she remembered wrong? After what Peter had told her, Eleanor certainly had other things to lose.
Kathryn slammed her fist against the mirror. ‘You stupid, stupid woman!’ she screamed again, pounding harder and harder until the mirror shattered and she yelled in pain, her balled fist sliced with a shard of glass. Blood quickly rushed to the surface, dripping into the basin. For a moment she watched, mesmerised by the bright red drops splattering against the stark contrast of the white porcelain. Pulling a piece of toilet paper from the holder and wrapping it around her fist, she haphazardly created a bandage to soak up the blood that still flowed.
Hannah would tell Lauren what she now knew.
Hannah would want to find Abigail.
None of them would forgive her; none of them would want to know her. She would never forgive herself.
She would be all alone; she would have no one. That was too unbearable to think about. She had to to do something, anything – but what?
Kathryn backed out of the bathroom. She couldn’t look at herself any longer without the rush of bile rising in her throat. Running down the stairs, she picked up her jacket and fled through the front door. She had to get out, to where she didn’t know; she just had to go somewhere.
*****
It was five hours later when Kathryn returned to the house. The church bell was chiming two o’clock as she unlatched the gate and shuffled up the path. She couldn’t explain how she’d passed five hours walking, trying to make sense of what had happened, how much truth there was in what Peter had told her, what the future held in store. She had decided to come back and call Peter; to get that call out of the way.
Inside the house she hung her keys on the hook and picked up her mobile that she’d left behind in the rush to escape. It was flashing away at her angrily. She pressed a button and the screen lit up. You have 14 missed calls, it told her, all from numbers she didn’t recognise. Her fingers unsteadily jabbed at the Voicemail button when the shrill ring of the landline made her jump. Grabbing it from its cradle she called into the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Mum?’ the voice cried out. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.’
‘I’ve been out, I’ve been walking, I was … Lauren, what’s happened, is everything OK?’
‘No, it’s not,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m at the hospital. I, oh, Mum! You need to get here. You need to be here! I even had Morrie looking for you. No one could find you.’
‘Lauren, tell me what’s happened,’ Kathryn begged.
‘Hannah was in an accident. The car went into a tree and—’ She broke off, crying.
‘What do you mean, car? What’s happened? Is she OK?’
‘I don’t know all the details but I think it’s serious.’
‘How do you mean, serious? She’s going to be OK, isn’t she?’
‘I don’t know, they’re doing a scan on her at the moment to find out what’s wrong. They said something about internal bleeding. She looks awful, Mum. Her face is so swollen I hardly recognised her and they said she might have concussion. I’m sorry,’ Lauren wept. ‘I really don’t know what they were saying, it’s all too much.’
‘No,’ Kathryn cried. ‘God, no!’
This was all her fault. It was karma coming right back round for her with a vengeance.
‘Don’t take away Hannah,’ she sobbed as she hung up the phone.
– Twenty-Six –
Dear Adam,
I’ve found Eleanor. I took the plunge and figuring my grandmother would be the easiest person to start with, I looked on Rightmove for her house in Yorkshire. Lordavale, it came up straight away. Turns out all you need is a postcode and you can find any property that’s been put on the market in the last few years. I didn’t expect to see it because I hadn’t believed she would leave her precious house, but there it was, clear as day in all its eerie glory. Photos of each room, as stark and cold as they were in reality. I felt as if a ghost had swept through me when I saw it again.
Another few clicks and it appeared her neighbour, Doris, hadn’t put her house on the market. I say ‘neighbour’, she lived a good five hundred metres from the haunted house, but anyway, Doris, whose telephone number is still listed, was easy to get hold of. I told her I was an old school friend of Kathryn’s, that we’d lost touch years ago, and I was trying to trace her to invite her to a reunion. Doris told me she knew all about what had happened to Eleanor, yet didn’t manage to be very specific.
‘My memory,’ she kept telling me. ‘It’s not what it was.’
Doris is in her mid-eighties and couldn’t hear well. She kept asking for my name so eventually I made up the name Nancy, and she said, ‘Oh, yes, dear, I remember you.’ She couldn’t recall much about Kathryn and didn’t know what had happened to her but told me she could probably find the address for Eleanor, if that would help.
I told her it definitely would. ‘Well, hold on a moment, dear, and I’ll have a look in my drawer,’ she said. Her voice went in and out of earshot as she carried the phone with her. I could hear her rummaging and tutting, ‘No, no, maybe I don’t have it anymore.’ As she searched, she peppered me with snippets about the family.
‘Of course when dear Charles passed away four years ago it took its toll on her,’ she said. ‘The big house was such an upkeep.’
It threw me to hear my grandpa had died. I hadn’t really thought through what I might learn from the call, so when she dropped in his death it was a shock. Grandpa was an elusive presence flitting between his office and the dinner table, always absorbed by his work. He wasn’t an unkind man – he just had absolutely no interest in anything other than business. So I wouldn’t say I was particularly sad to hear about him dying, I just hadn’t given him any thought.
‘And then it was about a year ago she moved to the home.’
‘The home?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean a care home?’
‘Yes, dear. And Lordavale was sold to a young family. Bit of a saga all that was of course, with all Charles’s debts. I don’t think Eleanor saw much money in the end.’
‘He had debts?’ I asked.
But Doris didn’t answer me. ‘Oh dear, I can’t find this address. I’m really not being too helpful, am I?’ she said.
‘Don’t worry,’ I sighed. ‘It was a long shot anyway.’
‘It’s in a place just to the West of Darlington,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember the name, a grand place though.’
‘That’s great, Doris,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
I hung up the receiver and took a deep breath. My hands were shaking; I hadn’t realised how nervous I was. But it had been easy – too easy. I felt a fluttering of excitement as I tapped another search into Google. There are twenty care homes in that area and so I starting calling each one in turn. By the fifth I struck lucky. Eleanor, they told me, was in Elms Home. A huge Victorian building and, according to their website, ‘the pinnacle of all care homes, where everyone wants their loved ones to be looked after’.
The person I spoke to asked who I was. ‘I’m a granddaughter,’ I said, ‘of her cousin Mabel. My name is Katie.’
Another lie, though Mabel did exist: she died when I was young and her family then moved to America, so even if Eleanor
had no interest in seeing her cousin’s granddaughter, I hoped she’d believe the story. I told the nurse I was in the area and wanted to see Eleanor, and the woman said she was happy for me to visit as long as I made an appointment.
I put the phone down and reality hit me: I had found my grandmother. A major link to the girls, and my mother, yet I didn’t know if I could face her. What would I say? Hello, Grandma, remember me? Well, it’s been a while, but here I am and I just wondered if you wouldn’t mind being awfully kind and giving me my mother’s address. You wouldn’t mind? How wonderful! Well, I’ll just pop along and say hello to her, then.
This was Eleanor. But this wasn’t any ordinary grandmother: this was the force behind our lives, the woman who had dictated everything. This was the evil bitch who had made me hand over my baby daughter.
But then if I didn’t go and see her, what would I do?
*****
And so I am going today, Adam. Right now I am sitting in a hotel room, surrounded by a sea of beige and mustard. There are putrid yellow plaid curtains and a dull carpet covered in stains. I dread to think what they might be and have to hotfoot it over them to get from the bathroom to the bed.
I have been pacing the room since 6 a.m. this morning and knew if I only had myself to talk to, most likely I’d get cold feet, which is why I’m talking to you. I’m hoping you’ll give me some courage. I need to keep my end goal in mind, finding the girls. I can’t let Eleanor win again without even confronting her. I only hope that when I do, I don’t fall apart – I don’t want all my hard work with Maggie to be pulled from under my feet the moment I lay eyes on Eleanor. Because she has a way of doing that, making me feel like I’m nothing.
Eleanor ruled all of us. She ruled my mother because Kathryn was weak and because she allowed herself to be controlled. She ruled me because I feared her. Whatever Eleanor wanted, Eleanor usually got, whatever the cost.
The night my mother left, when Eleanor turned up and pushed past me into the living room, she told the police officers she knew exactly where my mother was and I should never have called them in the first place.
‘Abigail is being dramatic,’ she said, gesturing a hand towards me. ‘As always.’
The policeman nodded, as if he knew exactly the type of girl I was. He had, after all, already made up his mind about me the first time we had crossed paths.
I was in shock but tried telling them I had no idea, pleading for them to believe me. But Eleanor shot me a look, her steely eyes piercing through me, and I was scared. There was something about her that night, like nothing would stop her, and I found myself clamping my mouth shut and waiting for her to get rid of them so I could hear what she knew about my mother.
The two police officers shuffled beside me, neither knowing what to do. But this was Eleanor Bretton, wife of Lord Charles Bretton, and I was just a kid who had been in trouble with them the week before, and so wholeheartedly they swallowed up her lies.
I knew I should have told them the truth – that I had no idea where my mother had gone with the girls. But as Eleanor glared at me, almost goading me to speak, I couldn’t, Adam. I just couldn’t.
‘I’ll be sorting this out,’ she said to me once they had left.
‘Where have they gone?’ I begged her. ‘Just tell me.’
‘They have gone away,’ she said simply. ‘And it’s up to you what happens next, but things have to change, Abigail, because I will not tolerate you trying to orchestrate what happens around here.’
And I didn’t stand up to her – I let her tell me what to do, to wait, to leave well alone, because that’s what Eleanor makes you do. But the funny thing was, when Eleanor had turned up on my doorstep that evening I’d seen the surprise in her face. She hadn’t known my mother had left – she had been as shocked as me. Yet over the course of the following days I had forgotten that and allowed myself to believe she had been responsible.
*****
While my mother’s disappearance was out of the blue there had been some build-up. Our relationship had hit rock bottom and I shouldn’t have been surprised that she did something crazy. There were times before the girls came along when I got home from school expecting to find her swinging from the rafters, so I guess her going was the preferable outcome. I shouldn’t make light of it but that’s the way it was – Kathryn was pretty mental. And Eleanor would take advantage of it.
All Eleanor wanted was to make sure she came out on top and that no one stood in the way of her doing that. In her eyes I was an obstacle. Everything I did was one major hurdle after another for her. She despised me for the amount of complication I brought to her life.
In February 2001, Hannah had hit the terrible twos and wasn’t averse to throwing tantrums. Every time she didn’t get her own way she threw herself to the floor and kicked at the air, screaming. If anyone approached her they would often get struck on the shins, so I found the best way to deal with it was to leave her well alone until it passed. It usually did within ten minutes. If I was on my own with the girls I would roll my eyes at Lauren and say, ‘What’s she like, eh?’ and we would ignore her. Then as soon as Hannah had stopped, she would pick herself up and join us. By contrast, Lauren was amazingly placid. Nothing provoked her into a bad mood.
It was clear Kathryn found Hannah and her moods harder to cope with. She would fuss and get agitated, fanning herself like she was overheating. Her arms waving about her, she would parrot, ‘Please just stop that. What is it you want? I just don’t understand what you are crying for.’
‘Leave her alone,’ I’d say. ‘Stop trying to calm her down, you’re obviously making things worse.’
My mother would then get defensive. ‘I’m perfectly capable of raising my daughter,’ she’d say, always a slight emphasis on the word ‘my’, but never a confident one.
If Eleanor was around when Hannah was having a tantrum, her eyebrows would rise to a point and her shoulders arch back further and further before she almost screamed at my mother to do something about it. ‘I would never let you throw yourself about like that,’ I often heard her say. ‘Your children should be controlled.’ She always said ‘children’, with one never differentiated from the other, careful not to point out that one was any worse behaved than the other. I expect she would have taken great delight in pointing out it was Hannah who was the uncontrollable child, but she never did. Eleanor was much too measured for that.
Then one day I came out of the bathroom to find Hannah lying on her back in the hallway, screaming and kicking the front door with Kathryn about to lose it. My mother was shaking, her arms flailing around the top of her head like some crazy woman. Meanwhile Lauren was cowering in a corner, one watchful eye trained on Hannah to make sure her sister was OK.
I don’t know what Kathryn was about to do but I wasn’t going to find out. ‘Leave her alone!’ I shouted as I raced down the stairs, standing in front of Hannah to block Kathryn. She glared at me and told me to move.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t let you anywhere near my daughter if you’re going to be like that.’
Kathryn inhaled a deep breath and said, ‘She’s not your daughter, Abigail. She is my daughter. Step aside.’
But I refused. ‘You don’t know how to handle her,’ I said. ‘Just like you can’t handle anything.’
That was the second and last time she slapped me round the face. I didn’t care that time. I wanted to slap her right back but I could hear Lauren whimpering in the corner. Hannah had by then stopped screaming and was staring at us both, wide-eyed with fear.
Kathryn held out her hand as if she was trying to take her slap back, but I pulled away. ‘You aren’t fit to bring up any more children,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I should never have let you do what you did.’
She didn’t respond, which only gave me more ammunition. ‘I’m going to make sure everyone knows whose child she really is,’ I said, and left the house.
*****
‘I’m going to take Hannah,’ I told C
ara, full of confidence. ‘I should never have handed her over.’
But by the time I had left Cara, I was less assured. She reminded me Hannah had been legally adopted, that I’d have no money, and would probably never see Lauren again. But I also knew I didn’t want to carry on living the life I’d unwillingly signed up to.
At home backup had already arrived. Eleanor was standing at the door when I got there and pulled me in with force, shutting the door behind me. ‘Don’t you ever refer to yourself as that child’s mother again,’ she warned me. ‘She is no longer yours, she is your sister and nothing more.’
Her eyes bore into mine as her words sliced through me. I’d signed documents the day Hannah was born. Dr Edgar Simmonds had pushed them in front of me the moment Mae had taken Hannah to be weighed. I was so tired and my hand was trembling as I put my childish signature next to where Eleanor’s bony finger pointed. In that moment I had signed away any right I had over Hannah and I knew that. I was also aware, as Cara pointed out, that should I ever run off with Hannah, I’d get nothing from them. Financially I’d be broken and I couldn’t support a daughter on fresh air and love.
My life wasn’t suitable for looking after a baby and I was well aware of that. I spent my evenings drinking and smoking in alleyways with my mates, and days in school trying to scrape by as best I could. I was aware I couldn’t look after a child, even when I loved her as much as I did Hannah. So I knew I wouldn’t take her away, but that didn’t stop me from threatening it. I enjoyed the reactions I got. Every time my mother pissed me off, I told her I would tell the world Hannah was my daughter and I was made to give her up. She would shrivel into herself before my eyes. It gave me a wonderful feeling to see the power I had over her. That with those few words I could send shivers down her spine. Of course every time I made a threat it wasn’t long before Eleanor arrived to reprimand me, but I didn’t care: it was all just words.
