Feeling recharged I head back inside. Most of the rooms are done, the items within are decorated with dots that portend their fate. There is one room left to do, however.
The attic.
By now I have convinced myself that the boxes that must be in the attic will contain answers: papers, hospital records, bank accounts.
Nothing that can hurt you.
I pause at the bottom of the narrow stairs and look up. It’s as dark and eerie as it always was. I step onto the lowest tread and hear Elaine’s voice telling me not to.
‘It’s dangerous,’ her voice says. ‘Dangerous! Don’t you ever, ever go up there.’
I force myself to continue up. I tell myself not to be ridiculous, that it’s just an attic, but I hold the screwdriver I’m carrying in front of me like a sword, nonetheless. When I get to the top of the stairs, I take out the key from my pocket, neatly labelled with a tag and Henry’s handwriting, and unlock the door. There is no handle, and I hope the screwdriver will do the job. I push it into the square thread that would usually hold the handle and turn it. The latch clicks and, with my heart pounding, I swing open the door.
I gasp in shock. My knees buckle and I have to catch myself on the door frame.
Pushed up against the left wall, its head tucked into the sloping eaves, is a bed.
It’s the same bed I’ve dreamt about so many times. I step into the room and walk slowly over to it. As well as the bed there’s a familiar bedside table and two white curtains that hang limply at the dusty window, cased in cobwebs. A pair of child’s slippers rest neatly on the floor. A white cotton nightie is folded at the foot of the bed.
I’ve seen this all before.
I have a flash of what the bed feels like to lie on. I close my eyes and push my fingers against my temples. I walk over and touch my fingers to the bedspread. I catch a smell of cleaning fluids and disinfectant long since gone, but there in the back of my memory. The sheets are thick with dust and the bedspread has moth holes eaten into it. I lie on the bed and curl myself into a ball. It feels familiar. Did I sleep here? Was this my room? Fear creeps over me. I close my eyes. Hear the thunderous sound of feet on the stairs. Shouting. I mustn’t be in this room. She can’t find me. I want to hide, but it’s too late. She’s there in the doorway. Her face is dark and angry. As frightening as the monster man who haunted my dreams.
‘You are never to come up here! Do you hear me?’ She is puce with rage. Grabs my wrist. Yanks me out of the room. ‘I have told you time and again! This room is out of bounds. Do you not understand!’
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
‘Get downstairs.’
I sit up and swing my legs around so I’m sitting on the edge of the bed. Beside me, on the bedside table, is a painted wooden box and a brown leather photo album like the ones Henry kept in his study. I reach for the box and open it. Inside is a plastic ballerina held in a frozen pirouette, a small oval mirror behind her on a pink satin background. I turn it over to find the small metal key that winds it and turn it a couple of times. Then I open the lid again and the music starts and I recognise it. Tears spring in my eyes, though I’m not exactly sure why. I draw my sleeve across my face to dry them and reach for the leather album. Unlike the other albums, which now sit in a box with orange stickers attached to them, this has no gold lettering on the spine. I open the cover and there is a photograph under the protective film. It shows a group of men. Five in the front, seated on chairs, the others stood proudly behind them, their chins lifted, hands behind their backs. It’s a sports photograph, a hockey team. The photo is grainy and the hair-styles dated. Written on the mount is a list of names and King’s College, London. First XI. Henry Campbell sits in the middle and wears the captain’s cap. His face and shoulders are strong and lifted, his muscles well-defined, his pose commanding, so very different to the bookish, withdrawn man with whom I grew up. I turn the pages and see more photographs from Henry’s university days. Then Henry and Elaine. Henry is wearing graduation gowns and holding a scroll tied with red ribbon. Elaine is beaming up at him, her honey-coloured hair for once set free, loose and fanning her shoulders. And then their wedding day. A long white dress. Wide smiles. Family and friends surrounding them. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to see how they were before.
I turn to the next page and stare at the facing photo.
I rock back my head, take a few deep breaths of air, then look again at the picture. It’s Elaine. She is in her hospital bed holding a newborn baby and smiling for the camera. She is years older than the wedding photo, but her skin is radiant. Her new dressing gown, crisp and white, is buttoned up to her chin. Her hair shines. Flowers surround her, mostly roses, in an array of colours. There are hundreds of cards and a large, pink teddy bear holding a red heart in its paws. A baby sleeps in her arms. Serene and peaceful, her light blonde hair glistening as if she’s been dusted with gold. Beneath the photo, in Henry Campbell’s nauseating writing:
Bella Grace Campbell, our beloved and longed-for child, 2nd September 1984
The second of September.
My stomach flips. Their child’s birthday. I sit on the bed and think back over all those sullen, disappointing September-the-seconds. They had never belonged to me and it was no wonder the Campbells didn’t celebrate. All they could think of was her. Each year it was her present they wrapped, her name on the card. It was the one day they couldn’t pretend that she had never existed.
The rest of the album is filled with family snaps of the three of them. Each is lovingly labelled. Bella’s first footsteps. Bella on a swing in the park with Elaine. Bella and Henry on the beach in Dorset. I touch my fingers to the picture. The sand Elaine told me she hated. Henry is smiling, tanned and muscular, the proud dad showing off his sandcastle, as Bella grins at his feet in a flowery swimsuit with a frilly skirt. The photograph is dated two years before I was taken.
I turn the next page.
It’s her.
It’s the girl from my dreams and my room at the hostel and the church. In this picture she is dressed in a tartan pinafore and red shoes, her hair a mass of blonde curls.
I look down at the bed and see her. She is lying there, pale and weak. Her curls dress the pillow. She was in this room. In this bed. I met her. I have played with the music box. I talked to her. Heard her thin, sick voice. I called her Dory. The name I used to call Dawn. Then, when she went, she became Tori. In my muddled child’s mind, confused, unrooted, displaced, Tori, the amalgamation of the sister I loved and lost and the child who lay in this bed, shut away and dying.
I look around the room, a shrine to Bella Campbell, to their child who died.
I dry the tears that have begun to fall unchecked down my cheeks and then turn to the last page. There’s no photo, but instead, trapped beneath the film, is a single sheet of blue Smythson notepaper with Henry’s copperplate handwriting curled across it.
SEVENTY-SIX
Henry Campbell – 27th August 1989
Henry made a bedroom for Bella in the attic room. He made it look nice, as cosy as he could. He bought white bed linen with an embroidered trim and off-the-peg white curtains. He crept into her old room and took her music box, the wind-up one to which she loved to listen, while staring mesmerised at the tiny dancer who slowly revolved as the tinny notes played. He sat with her day and night, nursed her, changed her drip, stroked her forehead and administered morphine. Elaine came in occasionally, but she never interacted. She wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t touch her. In her mind she was already gone.
One day he had left her to make a small bowl of soup in the hope that she might eat and when he returned he found the other child sitting on the edge of her bed. She was holding Bella’s hand and chattering away, more animated than he had ever seen her. He stood in the doorway and watched as she touched Bella’s face. Bella turned her head. The other girl smiled, marched her fingers up and down Bella’s arm like a drunken soldier. He watched Bella’s hand flex open and closed, as a smile
crossed her face like a glimpse of sunlight from behind a passing cloud. He walked over to them and took hold of the girl and gently led her away from his daughter and out of the room.
At the door she stopped walking and looked up at him with those remarkable green eyes. ‘Can I stay with Dory?’
He didn’t answer her, merely moved her out of the door, then closed it and collapsed on the floor and cried, sobbing for his daughter, for his wife, and for the green-eyed girl.
Elaine found her in the attic again a few days later. Henry had slipped out to bathe while Bella slept. He heard a crash and a scream and then Elaine erupting. There had been so much shouting he’d jumped out of the bath and run, dripping wet, into the hallway to see her dragging the child down the stairs. Then she marched back up, muttering expletives, and locked the door, removing the handle. He returned to their bedroom and listened to Elaine shouting at the child in the next-door room.
‘It’s dangerous, do you hear me? I told you that, Bella! I told you. If you go up to that room, very, very bad things will happen to you. The monsters will get you. The monsters will eat you up. Promise me. Promise me you won’t ever go up there again!’
‘I won’t,’ the girl said, over and over. ‘I promise, I won’t.’
Bella died three days later. He held her close to him as she took her last torturous breath. His sickening guilt and the physical pain he felt rendered him immobile. He sat with her cradled in his arms, kissing her forehead, whispering his love for her until dusk. When he told Elaine, her face registered no emotion. Impassively she turned and walked away from him. As she reached the bottom of the stairs her knees crumpled and she threw a hand up against the banister to catch her fall.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Henry Campbell – 10th September 1989
My darling Bella,
Today, my love, I lost you. I held you in my arms as you drew your very last breath. I carried you down the stairs and outside. It was dark, not even the moon was in the sky. The air was cool on my skin, fresh with the earlier rain, for which I was grateful. I wrapped you in a blanket so you would be warm. My tears fell on your hair and on your skin but I didn’t wipe them off. They stay with you. I carried you up to the large oak tree and laid you gently on the grass. I told you I’d build a swing in that tree when you got better. Do you remember? Even though I knew it was impossible, I never stopped hoping. But I was wrong to hope. As I dug, my sweat mixed with my tears as the spade’s dull thud beat into the ground. She wanted you somewhere else, somewhere isolated and far away, scrubland she said. But I need you near me. I need you in a place where I can visit you, sit with you, remember you. I need to be able to feel you.
She loved you too, my darling. I promise you. It might not have seemed that way at the end, but she loved you so much, the thought of not having you drove her mad. You were all she ever wanted. For years it was only the promise of you that kept her going. And then the cruel twist of fate. Nothing we could do to save you. Her world was ended. The thought of living without you changed her. Twisted her. She lost her mind. I wish I could have done something to help her, but her devastation pushed her past the point of help. The deep love she had for you warped her beyond repair.
My darling, I love you so very much.
Forgive me.
I wish you peace,
Your father
SEVENTY-EIGHT
I go downstairs and open the back door. The longhaired grey cat is waiting outside. He loops around my ankles, purring to be picked up. I bend to stroke him and he closes his eyes and lifts himself off his front feet to meet my hand.
The sky has closed in.
Perhaps it will rain. I walk across the lawn and listen to the birds calling to each other from the canopies. I remember again how she taught me about the trees, holding my hand, picking up leaves and describing their structures. I glance down at the weeping willow, which dips into the pond, the still, brown water reflecting the tree in perfect symmetry. The grass crackles under my feet, insects flit over it, grass-hoppers bounce out of the yellowed shafts. I think of her watching her child die, a child loved to the point of madness, and for the first time I feel sympathy for her. And Henry. A broken man. Lost and grieving for all those years.
The oak tree rises out of the garden and I am drawn towards it. I see him digging. That small body lying still beside him. Blonde curls inching out of her blankety shroud. I see him crying, tears falling unchecked on the freshly turned earth. He places her gently into the hole he has dug, covering her over with his bare hands, caressing the earth with the same love with which he will craft the bench that encircles the trunk of the magnificent tree.
The bench is covered with broken twigs and leaves. I brush a few away and sit, then look up through the branches, grey sky and clouds visible in the gaps between.
It would be easy to collapse. Easy to give in, to curl up and lick my wounds beneath the weight of the past, like my father, like Henry Campbell. I could allow history to overshadow any chance of a future. I rub my hands over the rough wood of the bench and tell myself that from this point onwards I have a choice. There are two paths I can follow. I can either be the child who was taken from her family, who was locked away by desperate, damaged people who made her dependent, who allowed her to love them. Or I can be someone else, thankful for what I have now, a product of my past but not defined by it. Bella Campbell didn’t have a chance at a life.
But I do.
I do have a choice. For me and for my unborn child.
I place my hands on my stomach and feel for the life, the pulsing beat of the baby within me. I would die for this child. I know that already.
I think of Bella. ‘I hope you are at peace, because,’ I say, my voice loud against the stillness, ‘I am now. I wasn’t sure I could be, but I am. I’ve found peace.’
There’s a flurry of leaves, a murmuring through the branches like a whispered voice. Something catches my eye. Down by the pond. A flash of golden curls. Bare feet running through the grass…
Then nothing.
I scan the trees, searching for her, but she’s gone.
The first spots of rain begin to fall. I turn my face up into them and smile. A clean slate. Rain to rinse the world of its sins. I head back down towards the house. The cat is nowhere to be seen, no doubt headed back to Miss Young’s to escape the weather. I walk into the kitchen and lock the back door behind me. Then I go into each room and close the curtains. In the hallway, I run a hand over the console table, leaving two finger tracks in the dust.
I hope whoever moves in will have a happy life here. I close my eyes and hear myself playing somewhere upstairs, catch the smell of beef stew drifting in from the kitchen where a radio plays softly in the background. Memories.
All just memories.
EPILOGUE
I am closing early today. I put a sign in the window apologising for it. I wouldn’t usually close on a Saturday afternoon, but it’s a special day.
I walk home and make sure Mum is ready in time for the taxi. We live in a small fisherman’s cottage overlooking the sea in the centre of St Ives. It has a narrow staircase and low ceilings, and the sitting room has an open fire and dark beams. It was bought with the Campbells’ money and to begin with I worried that their presence would hang in the bricks and mortar, but it doesn’t. It’s a happy home. They would have wanted me to be happy, I’m sure of that. Dawn moved in with Craig and Stacey about six months ago. She wasn’t sure it would work, but all three of them are so happy now, especially Stacey. Mum and I have Nino. Mum is besotted with her, and spends most evenings sitting in our living room with the cat curled up on her lap.
I still think about the Campbells. I try not to, but it’s impossible to keep them away sometimes. The police found the remains of Bella’s body near the oak tree. Even though I knew they would, it was a shock. When the police telephoned me I collapsed and sobbed. Dawn did too.
Mum helps look after my son, Matthew, my beautiful boy. She says it’s a wa
y to make up for not having looked after me. She still talks about her guilt, guilt about losing me, guilt for allowing Mark to hurt Dawn and me. The therapist she sees says it’s understandable. Guilt and fear caused her to close herself off, to split her inner world from the external and, as she recovers, the feelings that prompted her elective disconnect will still be there. Mum sees herself as complicit in both the Campbells’ crime and my father’s abuse. Being with Matthew helps her and from my point of view it means I can concentrate on making the café work. I contacted the owner and offered to buy it not long after I accepted an offer on the house in Bristol. It was a rash decision, given I have no experience of running a business, and signing the contracts was terrifying. But Fi has been a great help. She practically ran the hostel singlehandedly, kept all the books in immaculate order and is showing me how to do it. I don’t know what I’d do without her, her friendship as well as her expertise.
I’ve called the café The Merrymaid. I love it and can’t imagine doing anything else. I cook everyday, make my own bread and cakes, quiches, homemade cottage pies and lasagnes, and Jenny, the girl who works for me on the days I don’t go in, makes a coffee that beats even Phil’s.
The taxi drops us outside the pub in Zennor and we cross the road to the church. As I climb the three steps and open the gate I pause briefly. The churchwarden has removed the headstone with my name on it and where it stood is a mound of bare soil like a scar in the grass. Looking at it doesn’t make me feel sad or morbid or even regretful, instead I feel uplifted. I see it as a physical sign of my rebirth. It’s a powerful thing to come back from the dead, and I love who I am now. I am becoming more self-assured, more confident, and I have friends in St Ives. Many of them are other mothers. We meet up and talk about baby stuff, banal things to do with feeding, routines and exhaustion that don’t seem important but really are.
In Her Wake Page 34
