In Her Wake

by Amanda Jennings

  Every morning, on his drive to the surgery, he considered whether this was the day he would go to the police station to confess. Yet he never did. He couldn’t do that to Elaine. It would destroy her and he couldn’t be responsible for that.

  He slammed his hand repeatedly against the steering wheel. ‘You are contemptible!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘You are weak and contemptible!’

  When he arrived in Zennor, a hamlet on the sea at the very tip of Cornwall, the first thing he noticed was the number of people milling about in the road. There were so many children, so many young parents, so many wracked faces. The search for the little girl, for Morveren Tremayne, had been called off two weeks after she went missing. The French police had scoured the area with dogs, had dredged lakes, checked cellars, appealed to the public for information, but then, when her Mickey Mouse nightie and teddy were found washed up on a beach a few miles north of the campsite, it was announced that she was presumed drowned. Yet, only now were the parents having a funeral. He imagined them holding out in hope all this time. Praying that she would be found alive and well. Then finally having to admit the worst. Their baby wasn’t coming home. Their baby was dead.

  The worst thing a parent could ever face.

  Henry drove slowly past the church where two men stood in cheap, shiny suits at the foot of the steps, ushering people in and handing out service sheets printed on pink paper. There was a policeman directing traffic down the narrow road to a field the farmer had opened up for parking. He held up his hand to stop Henry’s car to allow an elderly woman to cross. Henry once heard that police officers could read guilt in the faces of criminals with one glance. He hoped it was true, that the man would see the crime in Henry’s eyes and arrest him. Henry held his breath.

  ‘Come on,’ he muttered. ‘Come on.’

  But the policeman nodded genially and waved him through.

  Henry parked the car, turned off the engine and sat in the quiet for a while. He reached over and took the light-blue envelope that nestled in the flowers he’d bought, and studied the writing on the front: To the parents of Morveren Tremayne. He thought of her then. Pictured her sitting on the floor of their kitchen behind drawn curtains, hidden from prying passers-by who might recognise her, who might take her from Elaine. This child they called Bella, so trusting, so loving. She was the only thing in the world his wife cared about.

  Losing Bella would kill her.

  Henry began to sob. Tears flowed unchecked down his cheeks. When he finally stopped crying, he pushed his sleeve against his eyes to dry them, sat up straight and drew in a deep breath. Then he slipped the envelope into his jacket pocket and got out of the car.

  Henry Campbell laid the flowers – a bouquet of lilies and white Lisianthus that the florist said would be ideal for the funeral of a child – beside the others that were collected outside the church entrance, and joined the people filing sombrely into the church. He squeezed himself in at the back. There was a soft rumble of voices around him. Two women in front him were whispering loudly, one wondering to the other whether she really did drown or whether, as she suspected from the start, she was taken by a foreign paedophile ring.

  ‘I’ve read they do that, you know. Pick up young kids and then make them do all sorts of God-awful things. Disgusting.’

  ‘Don’t think those thoughts,’ her companion said. ‘Poor little mite. It’s better she drowned than that.’

  He had a sudden overwhelming urge to push his way to the front of the church and face these people wracked with a grief that had long since lost its bite and shout: You stupid idiots. Why haven’t you found her? You gave up too soon. She’s alive. If only you’d keep looking. We took her. She’s in my house.

  But why was she in his house? How was she? He’d spent so much time trying to work that out. In the end he blamed love. Love had made him do it. The love he had for Elaine. Visceral, powerful, overwhelming. People sometimes questioned the force of love. Not him. He knew full well what love could make men do. Crimes of passion happened all the time. People killed for love. They also stole children. Ironic that this ultimate act of love had destroyed the very love it was designed to protect. He felt nothing. Nothing but grim acceptance of his own innate weakness.

  After the vicar finished the service and had reiterated they must all find a way to believe in God’s will and trust in His plan, the congregation waited for Alice and Mark Tremayne to walk out of the church. There was no coffin. Henry knew that made it easier for people; nothing was as heartbreaking as a tiny coffin. Mark Tremayne walked in front of his wife. He was a large, swarthy man, with unkempt black hair. His face was reddened by the weather and, by the look of his rheumy eyes and capillaried skin, drink. He and Alice didn’t hold hands and he didn’t offer his shoulder for her to lean on. When Alice Tremayne walked passed Henry, he felt his heart crack. She was a petite woman, with thick brown hair and delicate features coloured grey with grief. She didn’t look at anybody as she moved through the pews. Her dull, blank eyes stared fixedly ahead. People touched her on the arms, patted her, offered their condolences, but she looked straight through them, as if none of them were there. She was the spitting image of her daughter, the little girl they called Bella, who now lived in his house – a house of which none of their estranged friends or family was even aware – and called his wife Mummy. Then Henry noticed the child. Another girl. She gripped her mother’s hand. When he caught her eyes, pale green, the colour of sea glass, he had to look away as a wave of bile rose in his throat.

  This wasn’t right. These people were broken and it was his fault. He put his hand into his pocket and fingered the corner of the envelope, his mind turning over and over. He walked out of the church and into the sunshine, and as he passed the collection of flowers he stooped to tuck the envelope back between the stems of the Lisianthus. And then he walked back down the pathway and out, leaving the others to stand around the brand-new marble headstone, gleaming white, with Morveren Tremayne’s name etched into it.

  It was done.

  It was nearing eleven when he arrived home. He turned off the car engine and looked up at the house. Elaine was peering through a gap between the curtains. The room was lit behind her. She smiled and lifted a hand to him but he didn’t respond. Instead he got out of the car and locked it. He slipped the keys into his pocket and walked up the lawn to the oak tree. Then he lay down at its base, his cheek against the earth, his knees drawn up to his chest. He stayed there until morning when he woke stiff and cold. Elaine was in the kitchen when he walked in through the back door, but she made no mention of it at all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I only make it a few houses down the street before I collapse. I press the flats of my hands into the wet pavement on my hands and knees. My lip and head hurt, my ribs, too, are bruised. I want to be at home. At The Old Vicarage. I want the high brick walls and drawn curtains and bolted doors. I want to be safe.

  I want Elaine.

  I can feel her with me now and it’s comforting. She has sent me up to my room, told me she’ll be up in a minute, and when she arrives she has two slices of hot buttered toast and a mug of hot chocolate. She peers through my curtains, before checking the window is locked, and pulling them tightly closed again.

  ‘All safe, my angel.’

  ‘Who are you looking for, Mummy?’ I ask, as I pull my doll’s arm through the little cardigan Elaine knitted her.

  ‘Nobody, sweetheart. Everything’s fine. I just like to be on the safe side, that’s all.’ Elaine sits next to me and takes my hand in hers. She holds it to her lips. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you. My precious, darling gift.’

  There was a funeral. We fucking buried her. My sister’s dead!

  Dawn’s shrieking voice drowns out Elaine. Her sister is dead. That’s what she said. They buried her. She should know, shouldn’t she? So if Henry told the truth, there must have been two children lost in France, one drowned, one snatched. A coincidence, yes,
but possible. Morveren drowned. I don’t belong to those people in that stagnant flat. The emerald eyes are a red herring. That family is Morveren’s family. Mine is somewhere else, sad and missing me, waiting in the whitewashed cottage with the pink candy-stripe wallpaper and the patient soft toys. I rock back and turn my face up to the sky. Big fat drops of rain patter down on me, running down my neck, soaking my jeans.

  I don’t know how long I kneel in the rain; long enough to drift away to some far-off corner of my mind, and when there’s a touch on my shoulder, I struggle to refocus.

  It’s her.

  ‘You’ll catch your death,’ she says gently. She reaches out to me and I flinch. ‘Come on, now. Come inside.’

  She takes my hand. I don’t want to go with her and pull feebly out of her grasp, shuffling away from her as I try to get to my feet.

  ‘Please.’ She holds out her hand and beckons me with her finger. I hesitate but then take hold of her and let her lead me back to the musty-smelling flat and into the kitchen with the flickering television.

  ‘You believe him, don’t you? This man.’

  I shrug and pull at a loose thread on my sleeve.

  ‘You think you’re Morveren?’

  ‘You said there was a funeral. How can I be her if you buried her?’

  ‘There was no body. She wasn’t found. They said she drowned but maybe that’s because they’d had enough of looking.’

  ‘All I know,’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady, ‘is that I didn’t wish any of this on myself. I didn’t ask for it and I’m not making anything up.’ I chew my lower lip to keep myself from crying. ‘This is all I have to go on. The man killed himself. He wrote a letter saying they weren’t my parents. He included the newspaper cutting and this address and he said my mother’s name was Alice Tremayne. He asked me to forgive him.’

  Silence takes hold of us again, but it doesn’t matter now. It can be silent for eternity and I’d be happy; the thought of talking is exhausting.

  ‘There’s a scar.’

  I look at her blankly.

  ‘My sister had a scar on her arm. Round, like a ten-pence coin.’

  My heart feels as if it might leap out of my mouth.

  ‘I can’t remember which arm.’

  Tears begin to pool as I pull up the right-hand sleeve of my top as far as it will go. I turn myself so my arm and the white, indented circular scar is facing her.

  Dawn gasps then reaches tentatively out to graze her fingers over it.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she breathes.

  A look of bewilderment is written over her face. She drops her hand from my skin and looks at me and I pull down my sleeve to cover the scar. I stop myself asking her how she knows about it, because of course it’s self-evident.

  It was there before I was taken.

  Henry Campbell was telling the truth.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘She said you weren’t dead. When they buried you, she said it was stupid to have a funeral because you weren’t dead.’ Dawn steps away from me and leans back against the worktop. ‘She said she felt it in her heart and that she’d have known if you’d died because part of herself would have died, too. She knew you were somewhere.’ Dawn pauses and smoothes the edge of the worktop with the flat of one hand.

  ‘She was right.’

  ‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ she whispers.

  I sit down at the kitchen table and rest my forehead on its surface, deflated, as if no longer capable of emotion, as if I’ve reached saturation point.

  ‘Did they do bad things to you?’ she says. ‘The people that took you.’

  I lift my head slowly. I think of them then, Elaine cooking in her kitchen, Henry reading in his study.

  ‘No, they didn’t do anything like that. They had … issues,’ I say. ‘Issues that make more sense now. She liked me close to her. She wouldn’t leave the house unless she had to. He was distant. Spent a lot of time alone. He was a doctor.’

  ‘I hate doctors,’ Dawn says, picking at her fingernail. ‘They talk so much shit and poke their noses in where they’re not welcome. Know-it-alls, the lot of them.’ She shakes her head and sniffs. ‘And they never did anything to hurt you?’

  ‘No,’ I pause. ‘They loved me.’

  ‘Loved you?’ she spits. ‘They didn’t love you. People who steal children. They are bastards and they destroyed our lives.’

  We fall quiet again, both lost in different thoughts.

  ‘Do you remember anything? From when they took you. From France?’ she asks after a while.

  ‘I’ve tried to remember stuff. I have dreams. About being alone in the woods and being terrified. I don’t know if that’s a memory. It could just be dreams.’

  ‘And you never suspected a thing all these years?’

  ‘She had my skin.’

  ‘What about baby photos? They can’t have had any baby photos. Didn’t you think that was odd?’

  I want Dawn to stop interrogating me. I want her to take that hardened look off her face. It’s like she’s challenging me, as if any moment she expects me to throw both hands in the air and admit I was in on it all.

  ‘She said they were destroyed by a burst water main. She cried when she told me. Said she missed looking at them.’

  Dawn glances at the clock on the wall and stands. ‘It’s past Mum’s tea-time. I need to get her fed and washed.’

  ‘How did I get the scar?’

  She furrows her brow, as if shocked by my question. ‘I don’t know. Look, I really have to get her fed. She needs her routine.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Up to you.’

  I sit at the table while Dawn puts a pan on the gas hob, then reaches for a can of soup from the shelf above. She opens the tin and tips the contents into the pan; the soup sizzles as it hits the hot metal. She sets a tatty plastic tray with a mug of water, a spoon and a roll of kitchen towel, laying everything out precisely, taking care to line up the spoon so it’s parallel with the edge of the tray.

  ‘Shall I bring…’ I want to say Mum but it doesn’t feel right. ‘Shall I bring Alice through?’

  ‘She’s done in her chair.’

  ‘Dawn,’ I say. She turns to look at me. ‘Should I tell her?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Of course you should. She’s been quiet for years. Don’t be surprised if she doesn’t respond.’

  ‘Will you tell her?’

  Dawn nods and I follow her into the other room.

  ‘Tea-time, Mum.’ She pulls over a low wooden stool, on top of which she rests the tray.

  Alice Tremayne slowly turns her head and blinks.

  Dawn kneels by the armchair and tears three squares of kitchen towel from the roll and tucks them into the neck of Alice’s faded dressing gown. She takes a spoonful of soup and blows on it, and then moves it towards Alice’s mouth. Alice opens her mouth like a baby bird. Some of the thick orangey liquid dribbles onto her chin, and Dawn scrapes it up with the spoon and redelivers. Dawn smiles at Alice who gives a slight nod of her head.

  Dawn takes another spoonful and blows on it. ‘Mum, there’s someone here to see you.’

  Alice opens her mouth for the soup. Dawn delivers it and dabs her clean with the kitchen roll.

  I step forward so I am standing in front of the chair.

  I notice Dawn’s eyes have glazed with tears. ‘It’s Morveren, Mum. She’s back.’

  I kneel beside Alice so my face is near hers, and then I take her hand in mine. I smile at her, unsure what to say, but she doesn’t look away from the wall of mermaids and cuttings. I glance at Dawn, who looks at her feet.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘There’s no hurry.’ And then I sit on the bed and watch as Dawn finishes feeding her the soup, methodically scooping, cooling, spooning and wiping until the bowl is empty.

  ‘Now a nice bath, Mum. You’d like that wouldn’t you?’

  Alice doesn’t respond.

  Dawn hooks an arm underneath her and Alice stands, then
moves with Dawn as if in a trance. They walk slowly out of the bedroom, and I follow them down the hall and into the small bathroom. Dawn sits Alice on the closed loo seat and turns on the bath taps. Then she begins to undress her. Without her dressing gown I see she is more skeleton than living human. Is this shrivelled body the one that carried me? I look at her breasts, hanging low, empty sacks of skin on her ashen ribcage.

  ‘Did she breastfeed me?’

  Dawn recoils from the question, her noise wrinkling as if she’s smelt something horrid. ‘God knows.’

  When I’d asked Elaine if I’d been breastfed she said she hadn’t been able to. She’s glossed over it. I assumed she was embarrassed. Elaine didn’t discuss intimate subjects like sex or boys or pubic hair, preferring instead to pretend none of it existed, but as with so many of these remembered vignettes, I am forced to reassess that torturous conversation; I now understand why she didn’t like talking about baby photos, green eyes and breastfeeding.

  Dawn puts her arm underneath Alice’s, lifts the loo seat, then lowers her back down. Then there’s the noise of urine against the water in the bowl and I look away; to watch feels like spying. Dawn pulls off some toilet roll and hands it to Alice who robotically wipes between her legs.

  ‘Can you move?’ Dawn asks abruptly. ‘I have to get her in the tub.’

  Dawn turns the taps off then pours a capful of clear liquid into the bath, which turns the water chalky white.

  ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Helps stop bedsores.’

  Dawn holds Alice’s hand while she steps into the bath, still in her hypnotic state, then she reaches up for a scratchy looking towel from the rail, which she lays on the floor to kneel on. I watch her take cupfuls of the water and pour them over Alice’s skin. She rubs soap between her hands then cleans Alice’s front and bony arms. The scene reminds me of a Roman slave bathing her mistress in ass’s milk.