by Tara Hyland
‘I’m sure you got my message,’ he said, his voice low and raspy. ‘I’ll talk to you when I’m ready.’ He stopped, as though he was struggling to speak. ‘Whatever’s bothering you can wait.’
‘No, it can’t.’ She paused for a beat, and then said, ‘I know.’
‘Know what?’
‘About Sophie.’
That got Max’s attention. His eyes flicked over to Hilda. ‘I think it’s best if I talk to Cara alone.’
The housekeeper didn’t bother to argue. She hurried out, leaving Max and Cara alone.
‘So how did you find her?’ Max wanted to know.
‘That’s hardly the important point, is it?’ Cara snapped.
‘Then what is?’
‘That you’ve been lying all these years! Firstly, claiming that your child died. Not to mention it was never your child in the first place.’
Max went very still. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, please. I know the child was Olivia’s. I saw the doctor’s records.’
He couldn’t keep the shock from his face. ‘How dare you dig into my family’s lives like this.’
‘Again, that’s not important,’ Cara said dismissively, refusing to get distracted from the main point. ‘What is important is that you sent away that poor baby. What kind of people were you, to offload a child like that, your own flesh and blood, simply because she wasn’t perfect? Would it have been that much of an inconvenience to have her here? You could have hired the best nurses to look after her. You could have given her a home. But instead you abandoned her, with people who could have been cruel and abusive.’
‘It was a good place!’ Max retorted. ‘The nuns have given her nothing but the best care.’
‘Perhaps. But did you know that? Or did you just hope for the best?’
Cara was aware that somewhere along the way she’d stopped talking about Sophie and started referring to herself, as though this was a conversation she was having with her mother. All the resentment that she’d felt over the years was flooding out.
She shook her head in disgust. ‘You saw that Sophie wasn’t the perfect little baby you wanted, and so you hid her away.’
Max closed his eyes for a brief moment. ‘It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t because of Sophie’s condition.’
‘Then what was it?’ Cara pressed. ‘Why did you leave her there? What made you abandon your own grandchild to an institution?’
‘Because of Olivia!’ he burst out, finally cracking under the pressure of her questions. ‘Because my daughter blamed herself for the way Sophie was born. She was already fragile enough before everything that happened. Having the child here would have been a constant reminder of what she’d done!’
Chapter Fifty-eight
Stanhope Castle, December 1958
‘It’s my fault, isn’t it?’ Olivia stared up at her stepmother with dead eyes. ‘It’s because I’d been drinking. That’s why Sophie’s the way she is.’
The doctor had gone now. He’d given Olivia a tranquilliser before he left – something to calm her down and help her sleep. Hilda was looking after the baby and Max had holed himself up in his office, so Franny had offered to sit with her stepdaughter. Unfortunately Olivia still seemed to want to torture herself over what had happened that day.
‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ Franny told her stepdaughter yet again. ‘It was a breech birth. That had nothing to do with you. If anything, your father and I are to blame. If we’d got the doctor sooner, then things would have turned out differently.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Olivia started to weep again. ‘You’re just trying to make me feel better.’
‘No, I’m not.’
But Olivia refused to listen. ‘It doesn’t matter what you say, I know it was my fault. I’m a horrible, disgusting person.’ She turned away from her stepmother then, burrowing her head into the pillows as she cried.
Over the next few days, Franny, Max and Dr Robertson all tried to tell Olivia that she wasn’t to blame, but it didn’t make any difference – she wouldn’t listen to them.
Franny still wanted to keep the baby, but Max wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Olivia’s hardly functioning as it is. How is she going to feel, seeing her child every day? A permanent reminder of everything that’s happened?’
He was right, of course. Since the birth, Olivia had sunk into a deep depression. She didn’t speak, eat or sleep. She spent most of her time crying.
With the baby gone, left at the Sisters of Charity Orphanage one cold, foggy night by a troubled Max and a tearful Franny, it was hoped that Olivia might improve. But if anything, she seemed to get worse.
Max finally took her to see a specialist, at Cranfield House, a discreet institution recommended by Dr Robertson. Clayton Lorimer, the Head Psychiatrist at what was essentially an asylum, quickly delivered his assessment.
‘Electro-shock therapy is the only way forward.’
Max couldn’t conceal his horror. ‘Is that really necessary? There must be some other way.’
The doctor sighed. The parents were always so squeamish, so ready to question his advice. ‘Olivia is very depressed,’ he told the businessman. ‘In my opinion, EST is the only way to jolt her out of that state. Otherwise she could be like this for ever.’
Max looked at his beloved daughter, staring glassy-eyed at nothing in particular, and reluctantly agreed.
Max insisted on being present while she had the treatment. Franny didn’t think it was a good idea, but agreed to go along with him for support. She hated Cranfield House: with its clinical white floors and walls, the terrified screams, and the lights that flickered from electrical surges. This was no place for Olivia to be, in her opinion. But Max felt it was for the best.
There was a glass wall that let him see inside the treatment room. He made himself watch everything. First, two nurses led Olivia into the room. She looked calm, docile even, dressed in a simple white nightdress. Her feet were bare. The room was stark, apart from the array of contraptions that looked like medieval torture instruments. When she saw the gurney, and realised what was about to happen, she began to protest. As the orderlies strapped her down, pulling the restraints tight around her wrists and ankles and across her chest, she began to beg for Max’s help.
‘Please, Daddy. Don’t let them do this to me.’ She wriggled and twisted in vain. ‘Daddy, stop them, please.’
‘Try not to listen,’ the doctor said with an air of professional detachment.
And Max wanted to say: ‘How can I not listen, when my baby is pleading with me for help?’As the leather bit was fitted between her teeth, to stop her swallowing her tongue, she was no longer able to speak. But Max could still see her eyes, beseeching him to intervene, reproaching him for having ever considered doing something like this to her. He wanted to tell them to stop, but then he remembered the way Olivia had been these past few weeks and how the doctor had assured him that this was the only way to help her.
The orderlies moved to a safe distance. The doctor pulled a lever down. Max could hear the electricity pulsing through the air. As the charge hit Olivia, her body began to convulse and spasm, her back arching off the table. Her eyes bulged; there was a smell of singed hair. Then mercifully, after thirty seconds, the machine was switched off. Olivia’s body flopped limply down onto the gurney.
The doctor said, ‘We’ll give her a minute’s break, and then we’ll go again.’
Olivia must have understood what was being said, because through the mouthpiece she gave a groan of protest. She sounded weak. When the current struck again, her body still jerked, but there seemed to be less of a fight this time. When she came to rest, she emitted little more than a whimper.
Max turned to Franny, and there were tears streaming down his face as he said, ‘What have I done? What on earth have I done to my daughter?’
Chapter Fifty-nine
Cara faltered, her temples throbbing. She forced herself to focus. She coul
d understand now why Max hadn’t wanted to keep the child, why they had constructed an elaborate plan to conceal Sophie’s birth. But it left Franny’s death unexplained.
‘So if Franny didn’t kill herself over the baby, then what did happen to her?’ She waited a beat, and then said, ‘Did you have something to do with her death?’
‘And why do you ask that?’ Max looked coolly at her, his expression giving nothing away.
Cara’s heart was beating hard: part of her was scared of the answer, scared of what he might do to her to prevent people finding out. But she had to know.
‘Because right now, it seems like the only answer is that you were somehow involved. Up until Franny met you, she was a famous actress, with a good career. Then, within two years of marrying you, she was dead. Now, I don’t know exactly what happened. But from what I heard, you had a lot to do with what went wrong.’
‘In what way?’
Max’s tone was soft, but Cara could hear the latent anger simmering beneath the surface. She chose to ignore it. Instead, she began to list all the things she’d heard.
‘You were controlling,’ she told him. ‘You hid her away up here and interfered with her career.’ As Cara spoke, she began to warm to her theme. ‘By the time she’d been living with you for two years, she’d changed from a confident, outgoing woman to a drunk, who looked as though she’d gone a few rounds in a boxing ring.’
Max’s eyes hardened. ‘So, like everyone else you’ve chosen to believe idle gossip instead of trying to find out the truth for yourself.’
‘Well, give me a reason not to.’
‘Fine!’ Max snapped. ‘You really want to know the truth?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I can tell you for a fact that your mother wasn’t a drunk. Nor was I beating her. And I certainly, at no point, ever sabotaged her career.’
Cara stared at him, trying to decide whether she believed him. He looked as though he was telling the truth, but it was hard to be certain. ‘Then what was wrong with her?’
‘She was sick,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘Your mother was very sick. And she didn’t want anyone to know.’
Chapter Sixty
Stanhope Castle, November 1959
As the months went by, Stanhope Castle settled back into some semblance of normality. Olivia was still in Cranfield House. Franny and Max went to visit her once a week. The doctors had declared the EST to be a success, but Franny was less convinced. Although Olivia had stopped crying hysterically since the treatment, now she simply stared into space all day.
Gabriel knew nothing of what had been going on with his sister. He was busy at Stanford now, and hadn’t been home to visit in a while. Max still hadn’t figured out what he was going to tell his son about what had happened to Olivia. It was something he was going to have to confront at some point, but first there was a more pressing problem concerning his wife to deal with.
It was Max who finally insisted that his wife went to see a doctor. Franny hadn’t seemed right for some months. She was tired all the time, staying in bed until late into the day, and when she was up, she seemed distracted, as though she couldn’t focus. Not to mention the ongoing clumsiness. She was covered in bruises, and he knew more than one person suspected that he was the cause of them. He’d been worried about her for a while now. This lethargic, defeated creature wasn’t the woman he had married.
‘This has gone on long enough,’ he said one day. ‘You don’t seem well, my love. You haven’t for a long time.’
She turned listless eyes up at him. ‘I’m fine,’ she said flatly.
‘No, damn it. I’m insisting on this.’ He took her in his arms. ‘You’re too precious to me. I can’t have something bad happening to someone else I love. I couldn’t stand it.’
Dr Robertson had seen Franny several times in the past few months. Her depression had been obvious to him, but he’d assumed it was to do with the Olivia situation, which hadn’t been easy on anyone. But it was Max’s insistence that something more was wrong, that it wasn’t all in her head, which made him look for another explanation.
It would have been easy enough to misdiagnose the real cause of her problems. The symptoms were so general: the anxiety and depression; the lack of coordination and memory loss. But watching her walk into the room, he saw that she no longer glided, but instead her gait was ever so slightly off, her hand movements a little jerky. These developments, almost undetectable to the eye, rang an alarm bell in his head. To be certain of his suspicions, he referred her to an old friend of his, a Dr Gillon, one of the leading neurologists in America.
He made Franny talk him through her symptoms in painstaking detail, and then carried out some physical tests to help measure her eye movement, hearing, reflexes and coordination. Then he asked her to tell him about her family history. He seemed especially interested in her father’s death, something she hadn’t been there for, so she had to rehash what her mother had told her: that after years of sobriety, they suspected he had been drinking, and then one morning he’d driven the tractor into a ditch and died from his injuries.
Dr Gillon nodded along as Franny spoke. She was getting increasingly worried throughout the appointment.
‘Well?’ she demanded finally, when she could stand it no longer. ‘Do you know what’s wrong with me?’
His heavy sigh told her it wasn’t good news. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I think you have Huntington’s Disease.’
Huntington’s Disease was notoriously hard to diagnose, Dr Gillon told Franny. Before the nineteenth century, sufferers had often been persecuted as witches or thought to have been possessed. Even now, it was often misdiagnosed as alcoholism or insanity.
‘You’re lucky, really,’ the doctor said. ‘At least you know.’
Sitting there in shock, listening to him run through the implications, Franny didn’t feel very lucky – to learn that she had a degenerative disease which was going to erode her body and mind for the next ten or twenty years, before she succumbed to pneumonia or heart disease. Because there was no cure, Dr Gillon told her: no treatment, even, to ease the symptoms.
Max clutched her hand tighter. He had come with her to the appointment, waiting patiently outside, but once she’d heard the bad news she had asked him to come in and sit with her, knowing that she was still in too much shock to fully take in what the doctor was saying.
‘But if this is a hereditary disease, why haven’t any of her other family members had it?’ Max asked. He looked over at his beautiful wife, fighting to understand how this could be happening to her.
‘From what Frances has told me about her father, it may have been passed down on his side. As I’ve said before, the disease can be hard to diagnose, and it can often be mistaken for other ailments. He may well have died before becoming symptomatic.’
Dr Gillon suggested to Franny that she should visit Mayfield Care Home; that it might help her to come to terms with the illness.
‘You can see how patients who are in a more advanced stage than you are coping with their illness. It might be therapeutic.’
Franny knew that it was the doctor’s way of getting her to face up to the realities of the disease. But even she hadn’t been prepared for how bad it would be. On the day that he’d first diagnosed her, Dr Gillon had run through the prognosis. But hearing him describe the breakdown of a patient’s body in excruciating detail still wasn’t the same as actually seeing it in the flesh: the bodies in spasm, the minds gone, the smell of incontinence. Standing in the ward, all she could think was: That’s going to be me. It didn’t matter what she did, she couldn’t avoid the inevitable process: she was going to get sick, and after a long, drawn-out illness, she would die a painful death.
Max, who had insisted on coming with her, took her by the arm and said, ‘Let’s go.’
That whole evening, Franny could think of nothing but what she’d seen that day. She couldn’t stand to end up that way.
So, once Max had gone to bed that night,
she crept downstairs, drank a bottle of brandy and went out to her Pontiac.
Chapter Sixty-one
Sitting in Max’s study, Cara felt a chill pass over her as he reached the end of the story. She’d spent so long assuming that he was the bad guy, that he’d somehow harmed her mother, that it was a shock to find out that something else had caused her to go downhill.
‘So you’re saying that she found out she was sick and then – what? She killed herself? Have I got that right?’
Max hesitated. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Then what did happen to her?’
‘It’s hard to explain,’ Max said.
‘Well, try.’
He looked at her for a long moment. ‘I would, but it’s not my secret to tell.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she exploded.
He held up his hands, to quiet her. ‘But maybe I can persuade the person in question to speak to you.’
‘Where is this mysterious person?’ Cara couldn’t keep the scepticism out of her voice.
‘In one of the guesthouses.’
The guesthouse – where Hilda lived.
‘So? What are we waiting for?’
Cara followed Max outside, and along the path to the guesthouse which she had seen him visit. She was aware that she might have put herself in a dangerous situation: being alone with someone she suspected of killing her mother. But she needed to find out the truth.
The building was one of four guesthouses on the estate. This was the smallest of them all, a chocolate-box-style bungalow. Unlike the rest of the grounds, the garden was beautifully tended, and there were white sheets pinned onto a washing line, blowing in the afternoon breeze. A ramp led up to the front door. At the bottom, Max paused.
‘Please wait outside.’
‘No way.’ She hadn’t come this far to be fobbed off again.
‘Please.’ He looked weary. ‘Just trust me.’
