Her mother’s bedroom smelt fusty, with a hint of apple blossom talcum powder. Clothes that had been worn were piled on the chair in front of the dressing table, and there was a pair of tights on the floor. She hesitated at the threshold; she felt awkward entering this room, as though she was being watched by some secret camera. It was never very light down here, but it was a bright day and she could see dust motes spinning in a ray of sunshine that was coming in through the bay window. The sun illuminated the layer of dust on the dark wood dressing table with its three mirrors. She hated the three mirrors and what they reflected – three snooping daughters. She went straight to the built-in cupboards that stretched across the back wall. The bottom shelf was stacked with sheets, blankets and pillowcases, but the other shelves were a bit of a jumble, with boxes of face powder, various bits of costume jewellery and a bunch of dusty red plastic tulips mixed in with assorted handbags, gloves and neatly folded scarves. She moved things carefully so that it wasn’t obvious they’d been disturbed. Towards the back were two shoeboxes, which she lifted down. The first was stuffed with papers – her old school reports, her mum and dad’s marriage certificate, a letter to her dad about National Service. She closed the lid and opened the other box – bingo! The wedding photos were right on top. Her dad, smiling and clean-shaven, didn’t even look like her dad in these pictures. But as she thought about him, she realised she couldn’t remember exactly what he’d looked like.
Lots of these shots were similar to those in the suitcase upstairs, but mostly taken earlier. There were a few of her mum as a young girl. She’d forgotten how pretty she’d been with her clear, almost luminous skin and long, dark blonde hair. There were quite a few pictures of her mum and Peggy as student nurses, then one of them dressed up and ready to go out, by the look of it, both laughing, both wearing full-skirted dresses, hats and light-coloured gloves. Her mum looked so happy. There were two snaps of Peggy and the twins when they were babies. She looked so young in these, and a little bit frightened. There was one of Ken with the babies, too – even he looked about twelve here, though she knew they were both eighteen when the twins were born. Then she found one of her dad looking more like she remembered him. He had the beginnings of a moustache and his hair was sticking up at the back as it always did if he forgot to use Brylcreem. He had his arms folded and was leaning back, half sitting on his motorbike and squinting at the sun. She’d forgotten her dad had a motorbike; she remembered her mum saying they used to go out for long rides to the coast when they were courting. She closed her eyes for a moment so she could picture him. What would life be like now if her dad were still alive, she wondered?
She slipped the photo into the pocket of her jeans and was about to put the lid back on the box when she noticed another cardboard frame near the bottom. It was a professional portrait of her parents in evening dress: her dad, handsome in a dinner jacket and bow tie, her mother, looking not unlike a young Princess Margaret, in a long, dark-coloured evening dress and with a double strand of pearls around her neck. They were both smiling softly at the camera; her dad had his hand on her mum’s shoulder, and she was touching his hand with her own. They looked more recognisably themselves than in most of the others. It was nice; why hadn’t she seen it before? After only a moment’s hesitation, she decided to take it for herself. The fact that her mum had put all her wedding photos away up here meant she probably didn’t intend to look at them any time soon. Slipping her fingers inside the cardboard frame, she took hold of the photograph and tried to slide it gently out. It would be smaller and easier to conceal in her room without the frame, which she’d throw away somewhere later. She expected it to just slip out, but it snagged on something. Another, smaller picture had got stuck to the back of this one and was caught in the frame. Carefully, she peeled it away. It was a snap of her mum and herself in the living room. They were sitting on a stripy settee, her mum holding a baby wrapped in a shawl, a smiling Eleanor wearing a tartan pinafore dress and with her hair in bunches holding the baby’s hand. Her mum was smiling here, but she looked tired and thin, as though she’d been ill. The baby was tiny, although you couldn’t see its face. She wondered vaguely whose it was. The other children she remembered being around when she was small tended to be older than her, not younger. She put the photograph back; she’d been kneeling too long and she was getting pins and needles in her legs. But something made her pick it up again.
Back upstairs in the dining room, she sat at the table staring at the snap with the little baby. It had unsettled her, and suddenly seemed of much more importance than having a photo of her dad. Her mum would be home from work any minute, and her stomach felt as though there were eels swimming around in it. The palms of her hands were sticky and she could feel sweat trickling under her armpits. She wouldn’t admit to having gone through things in her mum’s bedroom; she’d swear blind she’d found this in the little suitcase which was still open on the table. She heard her mum’s key in the door and took a deep breath.
‘Eleanor? Are you in?’
‘In the dining room,’ she called back. ‘I was just looking through these,’ she said when her mum came in. She held up the picture of her parents in evening dress. ‘You look lovely in this, can I keep it?’
Her mum looked at the suitcase. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise . . .’ She looked at Eleanor. ‘What made you get these out?’
‘I’ve not seen them for ages. And . . . and to be honest, I wanted to find a photo of Dad. I didn’t want to ask you in case it upset you.’
Her mum sighed and shook her head. ‘Oh, Eleanor.’
‘Would it be all right if I kept this one?’
‘Of course. You could have asked me, you know. I wouldn’t have been cross.’
Say it now, Eleanor told herself. Before it’s too late. ‘And by the way, whose baby is this?’ She held up the snap.
The colour drained from her mum’s face. ‘Where . . . ?’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘Where did you get this?’ She snatched the photo from Eleanor’s hand.
Eleanor had never seen anyone’s skin go so pale so quickly. Her mother’s face was ashen.
‘It was . . .’ She pointed towards the box as she started to speak, but she couldn’t say any more, because the idea that had twinkled for a fraction of a second in the back of her mind was starting to flash again. ‘Mum? Whose baby is it?’
Eleanor, the present
If the sitter works out, Eleanor should be able to go back to Scalby for a while, even if she has to come down again in a couple of weeks. Part of her is desperate to be there. It’s May, the sun is shining, there’s work to be done on the farm, lots to be planted or thinned out. Things will be growing already; little green shoots bursting with life will be stretching their leaves up through the rich soil. And Dylan should be there by now, although Jill hasn’t texted to say so.
The sitter, Jenny, is a semi-retired nurse who doesn’t want to stop working completely. She enjoys sitting with people with dementia, she tells Eleanor; it’s usually straightforward, and all she has to do is make sure they remember to eat their dinner and take their medication – and that they don’t burn the house down, of course. Eleanor stays in the house for the first couple of nights, but everything goes swimmingly. Jenny is easy to get along with and has a reassuring air of capability about her.
On the third night, Eleanor goes to Bromley to see a film, but sleeps through the whole thing. She hadn’t realised just how exhausted she was. When she gets back, Peggy is there and the three of them are playing cards in the kitchen and giggling like schoolgirls at something Peggy said. They seem to be getting on so well that Eleanor feels distinctly surplus to requirements.
On the fourth night, she decides to take advantage of the warm evening and go for a walk. After half an hour or so she finds she is almost in Greenwich, so she carries on towards the river then walks along the Thames path up to the Trafalgar Tavern. She orders a large glass of Sauvignon blanc and, as it’s still fairly early, manages to bag the ta
ble by the huge bay window directly overlooking the river. At high tide, the water laps at the brickwork a few feet below, making it the most coveted table in the pub. She remembers crowding around it on summer nights with the girls from school, long before the days of identity cards, and drinking vodka and lime by the open window as they watched the boats going up and down and fireflies dancing in the warm breeze. She’d taken all this for granted when she was a teenager; but then, you never really appreciate the place where you grew up until you’ve left it.
As she sips her wine, she watches the sunset, just as she does on summer evenings back on the farm. While the streaks of colour in the sky change from orange to apricot to pink, she feels a curious mix of affection for this place where she was born, and a profound homesickness for the place where she’s lived for so many years; the place that, despite her years of reluctance to admit it, she thinks of as home.
Over the last few days, being here has felt less onerous. Maybe it’s because she knows she’s going back soon; or maybe it’s to do with the tiny chinks appearing in her mum’s armour of silence about the past. They’ve talked about her dad a few times now, and Marjorie even mentioned Peter once, although she clammed up again as soon as Eleanor asked a question.
She finishes her drink and sets off back along the path, down towards the town centre, past the restored Cutty Sark, or as Jill calls it, ‘that boat in a car park’. It’s one of the many tourist attractions she’s never been to. People are always impressed to hear that she grew up in London. They seem to imagine that she must have spent every spare minute visiting museums and art galleries, going to the theatre or watching the changing of the guard. In reality, she rarely did any proper ‘London’ things when she was growing up here. She went to the Tower of London once, but that was on a school trip. Grandma Crawford took her shopping in Oxford Street a couple of times, and to the theatre to see Fiddler on the Roof on one of her birthdays. It made her cry and she was embarrassed because she couldn’t explain why she was crying, but instead of saying so, she’d turned away, unable to answer, and her grandmother had been cross and thought she was being ungrateful.
She looks over the wall down to the river. There is a faint salty-sea smell in the air tonight, so different to how it was when she used to come here in her teens. The Thames was a nasty brown chemical soup back then, and rumour had it that if you fell in they’d have to pump your stomach. These days, it’s possible to catch salmon in its waters, but Eleanor still has a horror of falling in. There is something about deep water that both repels and attracts her, and even now she feels a certain fascination which draws her towards it like iron filings to a magnet. Perversely, she steps up to the railing, slides her fingers around the cold, rusty metal and leans so far over that everything but the deep, dark water is outside her field of vision. This has the effect of concentrating her fear, exposing her fully to it and making her stomach go over and over so that her whole body ripples with adrenalin-filled terror. Don’t let go, she has to tell herself; stand up, stand up.
A brightly lit pleasure boat makes its way upriver, the wash causing the water below to rock and chop, twirling its frosting of discarded styrofoam cups, plastic bottles and other unidentifiable detritus. It jolts her out of her frozen state. She forces herself to straighten up and waits for the nausea to subside before setting off again, her legs and hands slightly shaky as they always are when this happens. She often finds herself doing the same thing near the sea at home, and on a rare day out at Whitby last year she’d been drenched and nearly knocked off her feet by a heavy wave when she’d stood much too close to the slipway at high tide, despite the signs, which were pretty clear: EXTREME DANGER FROM WAVE ACTION DURING ROUGH WEATHER. Her relationship with water is a complicated one, which is why she has always found herself unable to stay away from it, despite the compulsion to pit herself against it being almost overwhelming. Away from water, she never even thinks about it. She certainly doesn’t feel suicidal, not now, and even during that terrible time when she’d briefly considered ending her own life, her chosen method would have been gentler, more cowardly. Pills and whisky, probably, with the hope that she’d just go to sleep and sink into blissful oblivion. But maybe water is her destiny; maybe that is how she will die.
*
Lost in the past, she barely notices the walk back, and it is almost completely dark by the time she arrives. Her mum is in the living room, watching one of the David Attenborough DVDs they got from the library. She appears mesmerised by the weird and wonderful sea creatures that billow and undulate across the screen, accompanied by a haunting underwater soundscape to which their movements seem perfectly choreographed.
‘Hello, Mum,’ Eleanor says. ‘Everything okay?’
At that point, Jenny appears in the doorway. Her hair is dishevelled and there are two livid scratches down the side of her face. ‘We’ve had a bit of an eventful evening, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Any idea who Jeannette is?’
Eleanor, the present
As she sits on her bed, waiting for Jill to answer, Eleanor catches herself absent-mindedly fingering her hair, probably subconsciously testing it for stability. She stops immediately, terrified that the very act of touching it will cause it to loosen and fall.
‘Ellie! At last. How’s your mum?’
‘Bit of a nightmare, to be honest. Listen, I don’t think I’m going to be back this weekend after all.’
‘Oh, no. Did the sitter not work out?’
‘No, she’s great, but we had a bit of a drama last night and I think I need to be here until I can be sure everything has calmed down.’
‘Shit, what happened?’
‘She went for the sitter – started hitting her in the face.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘Quite. I’ll tell you more when I see you, but anyway, she – Jenny, the sitter – is being really good about it. Says it’s one of those things that happens sometimes and not to worry about it.’
‘Well, then, if she’s not worried . . .’
‘Yes, but . . .’ She sighs. ‘She doesn’t seem too bad today, I suppose. But then she’s often fine in the mornings, so it’s hard to tell.’ She can still hear her mum moving around in the kitchen upstairs. ‘Maybe I’m overreacting. Oh, Jill, I just don’t know what to do for the best.’
‘I wish I could come up with a solution.’
‘I feel as though I’m being pulled in two directions. I really, really want to be there, but I know I should be here. Part of me wants to be here.’
There is a pause before Jill says, ‘Are you sure it’s not just duty?’
‘I don’t know.’ More than once, Jill has asked Eleanor if she loves her mother, and it’s not an easy question to answer. It’s definitely there, but it’s a love that she has often pushed down in order to protect herself. ‘Maybe it’s partly that. But she’s clearly grateful that I’m here, and that in itself . . .’
‘Well, make sure you look after yourself, that’s all. You sound like you need a break – and soon. Why not come back for a few days and then go down again if you need to? We’re longing to see you.’
‘The feeling’s mutual. God, Jill, I’m not sure I can do this. Not indefinitely, anyway.’
‘We’ll all have a good old chat about it when you come; see what we can come up with.’
Eleanor is about to say there isn’t another option, but instead she just agrees. Jill’s mother walked out on her and her two younger sisters when Jill was thirteen, leaving a fiver under the biscuit tin – which was empty – and a note saying sorry, but she wanted her life back. Jill managed to look after the other two for almost three weeks before social services came along and took them all into care. It was several months later when their father and his new wife finally turned up to claim them. Hardly surprising that Jill has a dim view of filial duty.
‘By the way, has—’
‘Not yet,’ Jill says. ‘I reckon he’ll be here at some point in the next couple of weeks, so see if you can
time it right!’
Eleanor pretends to be indignant. ‘I might have been going to ask if David has fixed the roof on number six yet.’
‘But you weren’t, were you?’
Eleanor smiles. ‘No.’
‘There you are, then. Go on, see what you can do.’
‘I’ll think about it. I’ll see how it goes this week, and I’ll give you call.’
When she goes back upstairs, her mother is pouring milk onto branflakes that she’s spread out over a dinner plate. ‘Mum, what are you doing?’
‘I’m having my . . . what’s it called?’ She looks at the plate. The milk has splashed over the edge and onto the table. ‘The morning one.’
‘Breakfast,’ Eleanor says. ‘But you’ve already had your breakfast. We had it together, about half an hour ago. You were supposed to be clearing the things away.’
Marjorie looks at the box of branflakes and the carton of milk. Slowly she picks up a jar of marmalade and stares at it, then puts it down again. ‘I thought . . . oh dear . . .’
‘It’s all right, Mum, don’t worry. Here, look.’ Eleanor takes a bowl out of the cupboard. ‘If you’re still hungry, you need to put your cereal and milk in this. So it doesn’t spill.’
Marjorie looks at the mess on the table and shakes her head. ‘No, no, I’m not hungry.’ She sighs. ‘It’s getting worse, isn’t it?’
She seems so defeated and vulnerable that Eleanor almost wants to put her arms around her. ‘We’ll talk to the doctor again soon,’ she says softly. ‘Try not to worry. Why don’t you go down and get dressed while I put this lot away?’
Her mum nods and goes downstairs, appearing again five minutes later dressed in an ancient baggy jumper with holes in the sleeves and men’s trousers tucked into wellington boots, of all things. Eleanor’s heart sinks. ‘Oh, Mum, what on earth . . .’ She stops herself. ‘Tell you what, shall I come and help you choose some clothes?’
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