by Sanjida Kay
Chloe nods. She’s blinking hard to stop herself from crying. Amy passes her a tissue and takes one for herself.
‘Bee told me. Can I stay here? Please?’ her stepdaughter asks. ‘I could sleep in Ruby-May’s bed?’
Amy hesitates. It’s time. It is time.
She holds out her hand to Chloe. ‘Yes, love, you can.’
PART IV
21 NOVEMBER, SOMERSET
40
NICK
A few ragged leaves still cling to the otherwise bare branches. The pewter-grey trunks of the beeches have a long damp streak, with a greenish sheen on the opposite side from the prevailing wind. Orange larch needles have collected in the corners of the drive, and pinecones pop beneath my tyres. I pull up outside and sit in the car, collecting myself. There is always that moment of dislocation when you return to your childhood home and hold the conflicting dualities within you of yourself both as a child and an adult. The child inside the man… That hungry, lonely little boy is still trapped inside me somewhere, or maybe I left him here, wandering in this garden, gathering the courage to climb the ruined cottage by himself; a small ghost, now joined by another child’s, only one who never had the chance to realize any of her dreams. Still not too late to go in search of mine… I tell myself and try not to wince at my sentimentality.
The house looks as if no one lives here: the windows are dark, the curtains have not been drawn and the once-neat lavenderedged herb garden at the front is dense with ash saplings and long grass. I knock on the door and then let myself in. Amy insisted we all have spare keys. Just in case. Dad is in a high-backed chair by the fire. His hair is uncombed and his cardigan is buttoned up incorrectly. He has a rug wrapped round his lap, but he hasn’t lit a fire. He pushes his glasses onto his forehead when he sees me.
‘Ah, Nick. What a nice surprise!’
‘You invited me.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘Yup. For lunch. I called you yesterday to confirm. Remember?’
His brow furrows and he looks into the distance. Then he shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry, Nick, I have no recollection of that.’
I’m astonished. My father has almost never apologized to me. He pushes himself to his feet, using his fists on the armrests to lever himself upright.
‘I’m not quite sure what I’m going to give you to eat.’
I follow his slippered feet as he shuffles into the kitchen. We look in the fridge and the cupboards, and as we accrue a random selection of vaguely edible food, some of which is even within its use-by date – a can of tuna, a packet of no-longer crisp Ryvita, ketchup, frozen green beans – I’m reminded of the ravenous child I once was, scavenging for my supper, coupling unlikely combinations of food: pairing cubes of mandarin jelly with chocolate sprinkles, Cheddar with tinned sweetcorn. And I wince inwardly at how I’ve neglected my father, now reduced to foraging in his own home, as I once had to.
It’s late afternoon on a Friday and I’m bone-tired. Tamsyn and I have been filming at Trebah Gardens in Cornwall all week, for their new website and publicity brochure. The gardens are beautiful, if you like that kind of thing, but the starts have been early, the days long. I left at five this morning to get to Bristol in time to drop off the gear and download the photos and then turn round and head back to Somerset. I’m not sure string beans and crackers are really going to cut it. I find a couple of old but cold cans of Thatchers in the fridge and I pop the top of one, stick the other in my pocket.
‘Dad,’ I say, as we look at our haul.
He mutters, ‘It’s not so bad. Not so bad.’
‘Dad, let’s go to the pub.’
He brightens. ‘Good idea, Son. Good idea.’
Now that I’m a bit calmer, I notice how empty the house is.
‘Where is everything?’ I ask, wandering back into the sitting room.
‘Ah, now I recall. I wanted to tell you that I’ve decided to move.’
‘Move? Where? When?’
‘I asked Audrey, from the village, to help me pack and sort out… well, your mother’s things. It’s mostly finished now.’ He opens the door to the dining room and shows me neat piles of cardboard boxes. ‘I didn’t want to involve Amy, but I’ll need her help to put the house on the market, find somewhere smaller to live. More manageable.’
‘Oh. Well, I guess that’s a good idea. What about your flat? I can move out, if you want to be back in Bristol.’
‘Too many stairs. You stay there, Son.’
I feel as if the stuffing has been knocked out of me. It’s not as if I’ll miss this place, but it is our childhood home. There’s a small framed photo on top of one of the towers of boxes. I pick it up. It’s of Ruby-May, grinning widely, tiny baby teeth, big blue eyes, that tumbleweed of hair haloed round her face.
‘Lovely, isn’t it? I couldn’t bear to pack it away just yet. Chloe gave it to me.’
I set the photo down. I still can’t bring myself to look too closely at pictures of my niece.
‘She comes here quite a lot, you know,’ Dad continues.
‘Who?’
‘Chloe. On the train and then the bus. A long journey for her. But it’s nice to see a young face.’
‘Really? Why? Sorry, that sounds rude. I mean, I know you’re her grandfather, sort of.’
‘Yes, Nick, I am. I am her grandfather. She’s been part of our family since she was four years old. She wants to be a journalist. She comes here to talk to me about politics, ask my advice about writing articles, which university she should go to, that kind of thing. Not that I can help her much. It’s all changed since my day, hasn’t it? Vloggers and podcasts. You could help her, though: give her a masterclass in photography.’
‘I’m hardly a master. I spend my day carrying kit and making the coffee,’ I say. ‘I’m lucky if I ever get to touch the camera. Should have gone to university, like you always told me to.’
I guess Matt must have put Chloe off a career in TV, I think. I look at my watch. The pub will be open now, although it’s too early for food.
‘You’ve done well, Son. I’m proud of you.’
I don’t know how to deal with a compliment from my dad, so I ignore it.
‘Shall we take a turn round the garden? For old times’ sake. If you’re selling it, I might not see it again. And then we can head over to the Railway Inn.’
‘Of course, of course.’
It seems to take an age for my father to lace up his boots, wrap himself in a scarf and a hat, zip up his fleece, try and wiggle all his digits into the correct fingers in his gloves. I fidget and restrain myself from helping him or telling him to hurry up. We walk slowly round the edge of the house. The patio is treacherous: slick with algae, moss growing through the cracks in the paving slabs, and the hedge has encroached so that the glossy laurel leaves nearly touch the walls of the house. It’s dusk and it takes a while for my eyes to acclimatize.
‘Oh!’ I stop abruptly.
‘Ah, yes. Did I not tell you?’
‘No,’ I say. After a moment I pull myself together. ‘Good thinking, if you’re selling the house. Might put potential buyers off, if they’d… you know, heard what happened.’
The fence and the gate have gone, and there’s a flat, muddy patch where the pond used to be. The tyre tracks where a digger has driven over the lawn have sprouted a fine film of new grass.
‘Should have done it a long time ago. But the pond reminded me of your mother and the paintings she loved to do. Mind if we sit, for a minute?’ His breath rattles in his throat.
I help Dad across the uneven ground to a garden table and wooden seats beneath one of the old perry pear trees. I’m on to the second can of cider and my breath hangs in front of me like a small white soul. A barn owl swoops low across the grass, a soft shadow with a heart-shaped face.
The past few months have been difficult, to put it mildly. Matt and Amy reassured me that I had done the right thing by telling them about Bethany and what had really happened but
, of course, it brought it up for everyone, just after we’d achieved some sort of fragile equilibrium. I never told them about Luca’s part in it. That’s up to him. He’s already given up a lot, but it was more that I didn’t want Lotte and Theo to grow up thinking that those you love the most aren’t who you think they are; that one day a gentle young man might try and kill you.
I feel as if I’ve lost my sister as well as my niece. None of us have heard from Bethany. I realize, now that she’s gone, we made a lot of assumptions about her. My sister’s life was so public that if we wanted to know how she was, we never asked her, we simply looked at her Instagram account, or her Facebook page, or watched her on TV. None of that exists now; her phone, her email, her website – it’s all disappeared. And obviously those stories never told the truth.
I don’t know how to think about Bethany any more: I hate her, but I miss her. I know she was selfish and self-absorbed and shouldn’t have left Ruby-May on her own, but I wonder whether, if it had been me, I’d have behaved any differently. We Flowers are all alike, or at least Bethany and I are more similar than I would have admitted before. Cut from the same cloth, all that crap.
‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ my father says suddenly.
‘Hey, are you cold? Maybe we should go in. Or go up to the pub. I could get a blanket…’
‘I’m fine,’ he says, with his old authoritative brusqueness, but he pats my hand. ‘I remember now why I asked you to come. I’m sorry I forgot to buy any food.’
I shake my head, take a swig of cider. ‘Don’t worry about it. You wanted to tell me you’re selling the house. I get it. It’s okay.’ I stare across the garden, to where the lawn disappears into darkness, the twilight closing in, the woods beyond.
‘No,’ he says, ‘it wasn’t that. I wanted to say thank you.’
‘For what?’ I ask, not really concentrating. Something white falls through the night: the owl must have been perched above the ruined cottage and now it’s pounced. Or maybe I’m imagining the thin, high-pitched shriek.
‘For telling us about Bethany. I’m sorry, of course I’m sorry, and it was terrible for Amy to have to relive it all over again. But I thought I was going insane: I know I’m growing more forgetful, but really I had no memory of her asking me to look after the child that day. It took a lot of courage for you to tell everyone, but it’s repaired my relationship with Amy – and Matt and the children. I’m grateful to you, Nick.’
He pats my hand again. I drink some more cider and feel as if I’m floating.
‘I’m sorry too,’ he says, ‘for what happened to you as a child. I was not faithful to Eleanor. I’m sure you have realized that by now. I drove her away with my infidelity, and because I tried to make her into something she was not: I wanted her to be a wife and a mother. I didn’t value her art or her idea of herself as a painter. It’s my fault she left, and I’m sorry you had to bear the brunt of it. I was not a terribly good substitute for a mother, to a twelve-year-old boy.’
I swallow hard. I’m not sure what to say, but something heavy has slipped from my shoulders. Perhaps it’s time, after all these years, to speak to my mum.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I say. ‘But it’s not really me you need to apologize to.’
‘Oh?’ he says, and looks at me from beneath his thick eyebrows. His hand clasping the arm of the wooden chair shakes slightly, the veins raised, the swollen knuckles like small bulbs. It seems cruel to say it, and so I don’t.
‘You mean Bethany,’ he says, turning away, his breath condensing in front of his face.
I nod, my fingers starting to freeze where I’ve been clutching the cold can.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That man’ – his voice is filled with bitterness – ‘that man destroyed something in her. She was never the same again. I always wished I’d handled it differently. A father should protect his daughter. I did not.’
We both sit in silence and I imagine that he, like me, is thinking about the consequences of that failure in judgement eighteen years ago. I down the last of the cider and rub my eyes.
‘Is there still a spare bed in the house or have you packed them all up?’
‘I’ve left your room as it was, Nick.’
‘Well, let’s head up to the Inn and I can have a pint. I’ll stay over.’
‘They even do non-alcoholic beer,’ he says, and I smile at my father in the gloaming.
I go inside and fetch a couple of torches. We walk through the garden, and the beam clips the outline of the ruined cottage. I pause alongside it, feeling the familiar surge of panic, the sickening sensation I still have in dreams, of falling, of being buried alive. It’s shrouded in ivy; a sycamore has grown through the bread oven, the roots like something out of The Blair Witch Project. It’s much smaller than it used to be. Half of one wall collapsed on me and, once the rubble had been cleared away, my father arranged for the remainder of the cottage to be shored up and repointed. Apparently there was some Building Preservation Notice that prevented him from removing it entirely.
‘Ah yes,’ my dad says, catching up with me, ‘what a terrible fall you had. You climbed right to the top of the chimney to hang up some decorations for Amy.’ He shines his torch to the tip of the ruin. ‘You must have been five or six at the time. You’d have done anything for your big sister.’
‘What? No, Bethany dared me to.’
‘Oh, I know you were scared all right. You were always more cautious than Bethany. Amy had planned a whole pretend tea party in the cottage and had her heart set on stringing up one of those things – what do you call them? those colourful triangles of fabric – right across the ruin.’
‘I was with Bethany,’ I repeat. ‘She was meant to be looking after me and she goaded me into climbing to the top.’
My father stares at me and I’m expecting him to get that confused, slightly out-of-focus look he has these days when you remind him of something he’s forgotten. It’s as if Bethany’s lie has been realized, like a bad spell or a curse. He says, ‘You were with Amy. She was beside herself when you fell and were hurt so badly. Bethany told everyone she was with you and she made you climb to the top. She took the blame. And you didn’t remember, because you had concussion.’
‘That can’t be right.’
‘I’m surprised you can recall any of it at all. You were out cold. The paramedics had to dig you out from beneath the bricks.’
‘But why would Bethany—’
‘Bethany was Eleanor’s favourite. Your mum was incredibly hard on Amy. Expected her to be like a little adult, look after everyone, be the mother she herself was not. And Bethany was strong. She could shrug off criticism; Amy would have taken it to heart. I suspected, of course, that was what happened. I asked Bethany when you returned from hospital, and she told me not to tell anyone that I knew.’ He gives a chuckle. ‘Only nine years old and she was already protecting her big sister.’ He gives a sigh and starts his lurching walk down the final stretch of the garden path, his boots crunching in the gravel. ‘I wish…’ he says, but he doesn’t finish the sentence.
I stand there for a moment and feel as if something cold has rushed down my throat and expanded in my chest. I’m outraged. Have I been lied to by both my sisters for all these years? And – if they lied about this, for so long and so comprehensively, what else have they lied about? Then again, my father’s memory is shot to shit. Or at least, it is now.
I order the pie and chips, and a steak and salad for Dad; a glass of non-alcoholic beer for him and a pint of IPA for me. We sit near the fire and wait for our food. Dad starts talking to some of our neighbours and I take my pint and go and stand outside. I call Amy, taking advantage of the pocket of mobile-phone signal, since there’s none at The Pines.
She answers on the third ring. ‘Is Dad okay?’
‘Yeah, fine. We’re at the Railway Inn. I’m going to stay over.’
‘Oh, good.’ The tension eases from her voice. ‘And you haven’t forgotten…’
‘Abo
ut the party? No. I thought I could hang on with Dad in the morning, see if he needs any jobs done, and then bring him over.’
‘Thanks, Nick, that would be helpful.’
It’s Lotte’s birthday party tomorrow; well, one of her parties. This one is only for our family. I’m not sure I could cope with a gang of seven-year-olds high on cake.
I take a sip of my beer. There’s a thick half-moon, a blunt thumbprint; and a skein of cloud drifts across it and glows briefly. I don’t know how to say it, so I blurt it out.
‘Dad says you were with me, when I fell off the top of the cottage and nearly died. Not Bethany.’
There’s a pause and I can feel Amy readjust; something in the way her breathing changes.
‘I’m sorry, Nick. I should have told you, but honestly I haven’t thought about it for years.’
‘So it’s true?’ I say, tilting my head back and letting my breath crystallize in front of me.
‘Eleanor said she was leaving. She was going to go that afternoon. I was trying to keep you occupied, so you wouldn’t notice or get too upset. I planned a tea party in the cottage. I thought it would be a distraction, and Mum said we could have cake and orange juice…’ Her breath hiccups. ‘But then you fell. I was so upset. I’d wanted it to be a special day for you, in spite of what was going to happen. Bethany told Mum she’d been with you. She said she made you climb to the top. It sounded plausible, like something Bethany would do. She didn’t tell me beforehand – she just took the blame. You were out cold, so we didn’t think you’d remember. Mum was cross with her, but Bee was right: she wasn’t half as angry as she’d have been if she’d known it was me. And Mum stayed. For you. She was so worried about you. I know she left eventually and it was awful. It could have been so much worse, though – leaving us when you were only five and Bee was nine.’
