‘Eileen, would you ask him something?’ I said. ‘Would you ask him what he’d suggest using to get some wallpaper off a wall when the paper’s been so well glued that nothing seems to lift it.’
Eileen duly disappeared away from the telephone receiver to consult my father. As I waited, I closed my eyes and imagined I was there, in my father’s house. I pictured him sitting in his chair with his feet on Granny’s footstool, a cigarette burning in the ashtray at the side and the newspaper on his lap, Bess lying at his feet. I had a pang of missing that old house and my father so much that it hurt.
Eileen returned. ‘He says have you tried white spirit? He reckons that will shift most things. He said to dab it on carefully, bit at a time, with an old rag.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll give that a go.’
I could hear Julia stirring in the living room.
‘I have to go now, Eileen,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in touch soon.’
‘Make sure you are,’ Eileen said. ‘Ta ta, pet. Take care.’
I took the telephone back into the front room. Julia was stretching in the corner of the settee.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.
‘I’m OK.’
‘Daniel will be here soon to open the trunk. He’s bringing the paint. There’s only one patch of wallpaper left in the empty bedroom. I’ll have it off by lunchtime tomorrow and then I’ll start painting over the walls.’
Julia smiled sleepily. ‘That’s good.’
‘I’ll ask if he can give us a hand emptying the shed too.’
‘We’ll burn what we can and the rag and bone man can take the rest. Where’s Viviane?’
‘Didn’t you say she was staying on at school for her tea?’
‘Ah, yes, of course. It’s the concert.’
‘I’ll make a start on our dinner, shall I, while we’re waiting for Daniel?’
‘Yes. Yes, you do that.’
I went into the kitchen, half-filled the sink with cold water. I tipped potatoes and carrots into the water and swirled them around to wash away the mud. Outside, darkness was falling and the air was cold. The lake was slate-grey, reflecting a bank of threatening cloud, and the branches of the naked trees were black, delicate as filigree against the sky. A mist was forming over the lower fields. It was fragile for now but as the mist rose, and the cloud descended, I knew there would be another thick fog; another masking of the lake. I thought of the black tide running through the sluice-gate; Jean Aldridge pressed against the grille by the weight of those millions of gallons of water and Caroline standing above, in the sunshine, holding the baby. I thought of Jean’s lost shoe, lying in the silt at the foot of the dam. I thought of the pendant that I planned to throw in beside it. All these dark thoughts weighed me down.
I was so relieved when I heard the jeep drawing up outside. I dropped the carrot I was peeling into the sink, wiped my hands on a tea-towel and went out to meet my darling. I could see, as soon as he stepped out of the vehicle, that the side of his forehead, above his left eye, was swollen. This time I was in no mood to pretend I had not noticed. I was also relieved because concern for Daniel pushed the secret I was keeping from him to the back of my mind.
‘Your father again?’ I asked, reaching up to touch his sore face.
‘I’m OK,’ said Daniel.
‘You’re not OK! You’re going to have a terrible black eye and that must sting like anything.’
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘He can’t carry on like this,’ I said. ‘Someone needs to stand up to him.’
‘Standing up to him is what led to this,’ said Daniel.
‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Come in and let me see what he’s done to you.’
I stepped back and Daniel followed me in, down the narrow hallway, past the awful old paintwork, beneath the yellowing lampshade that swung from the ceiling. I sensed a scuttling, a myriad tiny creatures moving, a change in the density of the air.
In the kitchen, Julia looked up and smiled.
‘Hello,’ she said to Daniel, ‘have you been in a fight?’
Daniel propped the cutters against the wall and joked, ‘You should see the state of the other fellow.’
‘Sit there,’ I said, ‘under the light. Let me look at your face.’ I tipped Daniel’s head back, inspected the wound. ‘I’ll clean it for you.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘There is.’ I wanted to cover over the violence that had been inflicted on Daniel with tenderness. I wanted, somehow, to prepare him for the news I was going to break. And at the back of my mind I was thinking: This is good news. His mother wasn’t murdered, she died in an accident. But I knew it wouldn’t be as straightforward as that. When somebody has believed something all their lives, it becomes part of them, and learning that that part is false is always difficult.
I went to the sink, held a bowl under the tap, filled it with warm water. There was a sound from upstairs. Julia looked up. I found some lint in the cupboard, cut off a piece. I went back to the table and began to bathe Daniel’s forehead.
‘Is that Viviane up there?’ Daniel asked.
‘No,’ Julia replied. ‘It’s a draughty old house. The doors are always opening and closing by themselves.’
‘Would you like me to take a look? I might be able to sort it out for you.’
‘No, thanks,’ I said. I had scrubbed and scrubbed at Caroline’s words on the wall of the empty bedroom, soaked them in bleach, but the ghost of the letters remained. I hate Jean Aldridge. I wish she was dead. Daniel must not see those words, or he would never believe me when I told him the truth. Tomorrow they would be painted over. Tomorrow it would be safe to let him upstairs and then, perhaps, we could talk – he, Julia and I – about a past that none of us remembered. I dabbed the lint as gently as I could around the bruise. It would be difficult to know where to start to talk to them, how to begin. Secret was layered upon secret, lie upon lie, the truth so well hidden that it was almost unreachable. And still I did not understand why.
‘Nearly done,’ I said. I kissed the top of Daniel’s head gently.
There was a crash from upstairs, the sound of something being dropped or broken.
All three of us looked up. Julia stood, picked up her stick, crossed to the door.
‘What was that?’ Daniel asked.
‘Perhaps one of us left a window open.’
Julia went into the hallway, the stick tapping on the floorboards. I stood still with the lint in one hand and a bottle of ointment in the other. I felt as if the life were draining from me, running away through my capillaries, down into the ground. I felt weightless, lifeless, empty.
Through the half-open door, I saw Julia at the foot of the stairs, looking upwards. I saw her place a hand on the banister rail and start to climb the stairs with her awkward, painful motion.
I put my hands on Daniel’s shoulders and examined his face. ‘That’s better now.’ I smoothed his hair tenderly.
‘It sounds as if something has got in upstairs. Shouldn’t I go and have a look?’
‘It’s always like that in this house. It’s a noisy house. It has a peculiar energy to it.’
‘One of us should go up to Julia.’
‘No, no. Julia is fine. Open the trunk, Daniel. That’s the best thing you could do for her.’
He looked at me, unconvinced.
‘Really,’ I said. ‘Julia’s been waiting all day to get into that trunk. She’s been desperate.’
‘Are you sure?’
I nodded.
Daniel picked up the cutters and went over to the trunk, prodded it with the toe of his boot.
‘Where do you want me to cut the straps?’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not like anyone will ever use it again. We’re going to burn it in the morning.’
Daniel walked around the trunk, considering.
I watched him and I remembered the dead weight of the trunk, how hard it had been to move it and I lost my nerve.
‘No, wait, perhaps we should leave it,’ I said. ‘What if there’s something awful inside?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, but …’
He leaned over the trunk and put all his weight behind the handles of the cutters. I bit at a fingernail. He cut the straps.
‘Piece of cake,’ he said.
‘Don’t open it!’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Daniel laughed. ‘Whatever’s inside has been there for years and years. It can’t hurt you now.’
He pressed the catches with his thumbs. They snapped open. Then he put his hand beneath the lid and he pushed. It opened wide, like the mouth of some giant creature; it exhaled a puff of foul air and what was inside was revealed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
THE FIRST THING we saw, on the very top beneath the huge old lid, was a picture, a little watercolour painting. It was such a pretty, innocuous thing and I was filled with relief.
‘It’s Fairlawn,’ said Daniel, and he picked it up and looked at it closely. ‘It’s lovely,’ he said. ‘Whoever painted this must have known the house very well. See how they’ve caught the sunlight falling on the facade.’ He held the picture up to see better. ‘Oh. It’s signed: Caroline.’
He moved the picture away then, as if it horrified him.
You’re wrong about her, I thought, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep the secret to myself for long.
‘Can I see?’ I asked.
Daniel passed me the picture and I held it between the palms of my hands by the frame. It was very cold, and surprisingly light. The colours of the paint had been perfectly preserved. In Caroline’s picture, Fairlawn seemed a brighter house than it did now, a happier house; a house with potential. It was almost as if the facade were smiling; the greens of the garden were interspersed with pinks and yellows, light dapples. A man was standing in the shade of one of the trees, leaning against it, smoking. He was only sketched into the painting, but I was certain it was the young Robert Aldridge. He was looking out of the picture, at Caroline herself.
‘She was such a good artist,’ I said.
Daniel didn’t reply.
‘What else is in there?’ I asked.
‘Mostly clothes, I think.’
He took out a couple of old dresses, a green cardigan, an apron and then a tiny white knitted garment.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘a baby jacket.’
‘Isn’t that gorgeous! It’s so beautifully made; such tiny little stitches.’
‘It looks like new.’
‘How strange that it’s in the trunk with all the old clothes.’
I sensed Caroline behind me. Her hand was on my shoulder, her breath on my neck. I almost realized something then, almost understood what it was that had been eluding me, but the thought slipped away again.
Julia was coming back down the stairs, the clump of the foot on her good leg, the drag of the other. I glanced at the clock. Viviane would be on her way to Sunnyvale by now. She would be sitting in the back of the minibus with the other girls, all of them wearing their choir gowns, whispering and giggling, sitting on their hands, nervous and excited.
‘There’s more,’ Daniel said, ‘look.’
‘All those dear little clothes. Why hide them away? Somebody could have made good use of these.’
Now I had the sense of something close, something strong and real and physical, as vivid as my pulse. I felt a pull at my hand, a pull at my heart, a tugging deep inside; a pain. The only baby who had been born around the time of Caroline’s death was Daniel. But surely Caroline wouldn’t have knitted anything for Mrs Aldridge’s baby? Why would she take so much care making gifts for the child of the woman she hated? The woman whose husband she wanted for herself? Had she wanted the baby for herself too?
Julia came back into the room.
‘You’ve opened it!’ she cried, shocked. ‘Oh my goodness, what have you found?’ She looked over Daniel’s shoulder.
‘Clothes, mainly,’ said Daniel, ‘and here’s an old blanket, and … oh!’
‘What’s that?’ Julia asked. Her voice was just a whisper. ‘What is it?’ The three of us stared into the trunk. Bundled inside was bedlinen, screwed up, terribly stained, dark brown, black.
‘Is it blood?’
‘I think so.’
I pulled at a corner of a sheet and it unfolded; the staining was awful – flakes of dried matter fell back into the trunk and on to the back of my hands. I shuddered, then pushed myself up to my feet, stumbled to the sink to wash the stuff away. As the water hydrated them, the brown flakes turned red again, liquefied, turned back to blood. The blood circled the perimeter of the drain, turned the base of the sink red and was rinsed away. I was shaking. I felt sick.
‘It looks like somebody was murdered in those sheets,’ Daniel managed to say.
‘Or slit their own wrists.’
Julia touched the baby clothes on the table. ‘Or they gave birth and haemorrhaged,’ she said. She sat down heavily on a chair.
We were all silent for a moment.
Of course, I thought. Of course!
Julia said sadly, ‘My sister didn’t die of fever, she died in childbirth. And they hid the bloodstained bedding so nobody would know she’d been pregnant.’ She covered her face with her hands. ‘God,’ she choked out, ‘it just gets worse!’
Daniel was holding the sheets in his hand; the staining was so great that more of the old fabric was dark brown than was the original pale pink stripe. ‘What happened to the baby?’ he asked.
There was another silence.
‘Perhaps it was stillborn,’ Julia said. ‘Something was wrong. There shouldn’t have been so much blood.’
Daniel looked down into the trunk, the bundled old fabric, the quilted, bloodstained coverlet.
‘Oh no,’ I whispered. ‘No, don’t look!’
‘Take everything out,’ Julia said in a voice quiet and cold as ice. ‘Make sure there’s nothing in there.’
Daniel blanched, but he set his lips in a line and he pulled the sheets out of the trunk, the old quilt, the bedspread at the bottom. I stood behind Julia’s chair, holding her hand. I watched but my eyes were unfocused so that if Daniel were to find anything worse than what he’d found already, I would not see it. Julia sat before me, still as a statue, hardly breathing. We were both dreading Daniel saying something, for some expression of horror, but in the end all he said was: ‘It’s all right. There’s nothing else in here.’
‘Where is it then?’ Julia asked. ‘Where is Caroline’s baby?’
‘Did they bury it with her?’
Of course. That’s what they would have done – put it in the same coffin, in the same grave: the last day of August 1931. Out of sight, out of mind, far away from the other graves, the unnamed, unchristened child of the wicked, unmarried girl whom everyone in the village believed to be a murderer.
‘It seems so cruel,’ Julia said. ‘Even for Caroline, it seems cruel for it to have ended like that.’
Daniel stood, went to the sink and washed his hands. His face was blank, shocked.
‘Least said, soonest mended,’ Julia said bitterly. ‘Everyone knew my sister was a murderer, but they kept quiet about what else she was.’
I was thinking of Caroline’s mother, sitting next door with Mrs Croucher, inconsolable throughout the long night while Caroline’s father and Dr Croucher cleaned up the mess, the two women listening to the footsteps going up and down the stairs. In one night, they got rid of everything: the bodies of Caroline and her stillborn child to the undertaker, the soiled bedding and furniture into the shed, Caroline’s story, the hopeless love affair, her hatred for Jean Aldridge, her picture of the hanging doctor all papered over.
The whole thing, her whole life, swept under the carpet, made to disappear, as if she had never existed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
WE PUT EVERYTHING but the picture and the baby clothes back into the trunk, closed it and dragged it
outside, bumping it down the steps. The fog had come in; the garden was swathed in it, so thick that the rest of the world had disappeared completely. Daniel and I pulled the trunk as far away from the door as we could, into the middle of the lawn where we could douse it in petrol and burn it in the morning. I looked down towards the lake, trying to make out the lights of Sunnyvale but the fog was too dense. They would be there by now, the choir. They would be preparing for their first song and the old people would be getting ready to listen to them. I thought of Vivi, a bundle of nerves and excitement, and Dr Croucher in his wheelchair, and his friend the vicar oiling back his hair ready to do the introductions. Did those two men ever think about Caroline Cummings? Were they haunted by the thought of what had become of her and her child? And what of the Debegers? They had been at Fairlawn the day their daughter died. They must have been part of the conspiracy. Had they ever wondered what became of poor pregnant Caroline? Had they known about her death?
Susan must have known Caroline was pregnant.
She would be there now, at Sunnyvale, nervous and shy in her too-small cardigan, Susan who used to have to pull down her pants and bend over a chair to be beaten by Frank Leeson’s slipper, Susan who had been terrified by her own father into colluding in the lies about her only friend.
So much for the past being a better place, a more honourable place. It was not.
Daniel went back inside the cottage and I heard him talking to Julia. I stood in the fog and listened to the to and fro of their voices although I could not make out the words. I felt nothing but tenderness towards them both, but even that did not match the anger I was feeling on behalf of Susan and Caroline; it did not come close. I fetched the torch and went back down to the shed. I shone the torch into its furthest recesses. I shone it on the smudged writing on the wall. Something something something smudge smudge smudge. Caroline had done that, I was sure of it. She was the one with the propensity for writing on walls. What had she written? What had she been counting? Why had she set fire to the shed? What had she wanted the fire to destroy? All that was in there were blankets and cushions, Julia’s toys. I crouched down, spat on my fingers and rubbed at the smudging, but the rubbing made it worse, less clear. I smacked the wall with frustration.
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