The Glass House

by Eve Chase

  ‘I’m going to support her,’ I say quietly. My heart has started to pound, like it does when you know someone’s spoiling for a fight, and you can’t see how to get out of their way.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she mutters, under her breath, the implication being I can barely support myself.

  I say nothing, cross my arms over my chest and wait for her to take the hint: please fricking leave. She doesn’t. So I say, ‘I’ll be in touch, of course. When we know more. The due date.’

  ‘The due date? Christ.’ She stands up with a shudder. The gold buttons on her jacket wink in the sunshine. A heavy jacket to be wearing on such a warm day. And her foundation is far too thick, one of those old-fashioned formulas, more like stage-paint. I decide Helen’s one of those self-flagellating women who feel most themselves when they’re pinched into high shoes, too hot, or too cold, slightly in pain. I decide she’s a nightmare.

  ‘Thanks for dropping round,’ I say, trying to stay civil for Annie’s sake.

  ‘I suppose we’d better swap numbers,’ says Helen, looking faintly shocked by the idea, despite suggesting it. I don’t naturally belong in her address book. ‘Call if … anything changes.’

  We awkwardly tap each other’s details into our phones – ‘Eight, did you say? Oh, damn, sorry, bungled it. Can you repeat that, Sylvie?’ – Helen’s long shellacs hitting the screen with a flinty click. Afterwards she hesitates by the front door, once again positioning her handbag tightly under her arm, ready to run the gauntlet of the communal walkway. She takes in the lewd graffiti on the wall opposite and the peeling paint, with a moue of distaste. ‘Sylvie …’

  I steel myself. ‘Yes, Helen.’

  ‘This is all very well. Terribly …’ she gestures around her, struggling not to be offensive ‘… modern. But you won’t realize how precious a family house is until you’ve really lost it. That’s all I’m going to say.’ She frowns. ‘All those memories. Don’t let your husband waltz off with them.’

  ‘Right.’ I wasn’t expecting that. ‘Thank you. But don’t worry, I won’t.’ Sooner rather than later we’ll have to sell the house, divide the asset, if we’re both to buy places of our own. Even though I’m no longer living there, the thought upsets me. And now Annie’s pregnant, it feels too disrupting to suggest it.

  ‘Right. Lecture over. I can see you’re itching for me to leave. Where does one get a black cab around here?’

  ‘Turn left at the bottom of the stairwell. Right at the kebab shop.’

  She flinches at ‘kebab’, in greed or disgust, I’m not sure. She looks like a woman in need of one, rather than a blow-out of popped quinoa.

  I watch her walk away, listening to the sound of those expensive heels meeting grubby concrete, and think about what she said, families, memories, houses, and something solidifies in my mind. I hear Kerry’s voice, Any sounds, really. Things that might jog a memory.

  I hunt down my laptop, buried under last month’s Vogue. I open up Google Maps, swing the little yellow curser over the Forest of Dean and land it on a junction of the main forest road. The camera twists and zooms in. The image pixilates, then clarifies: trees in the distance, in the foreground fields. I’m standing at a crossroads, with wooden arrowed signs that look like they were stuck up there decades ago and left to rot. Which way? Damn.

  Foxcote Manor, I type. Reload. Zilch. Have I remembered the name wrongly? Misspelled it? Hall, maybe. House. I frantically type, trying different versions. Still nothing. I fling myself back against the chair, frustrated. Has the house been razed to the ground? Whatever was there is no longer. Foxcote Manor has gone.

  31

  Rita

  The Morris Minor stalls at the crossroads. Rita can’t blame it. She’d like to stall too. Or reverse back down the road. But she can’t. (Not just because she can’t drive backwards in a straight line.) She didn’t like leaving the baby and the children in the care of Jeannie and Don this morning. Not after the ding-dong last night. Not after seeing the bruise swelling into a plum beneath Jeannie’s left eye at breakfast. Just the thought of it brings a fresh high-pitched flute of panic, and a compulsion to return to Foxcote urgently.

  She restarts the ignition and skids left towards Foxcote. A maroon estate car appears in the rear-view mirror. Rita tenses, aware that the back seat is covered with baby supplies she’s bulk-bought at a shop far enough away from Hawkswell so as not to cause gossip. She drives a little faster, scaring herself, sweat gumming her back to her seersucker blouse.

  Muttering, ‘Don’t crash, don’t crash,’ beneath her breath, she straightens her arms on the wheel. They feel like stiff steel rods: the faster she goes, the more anxious she is, the worse her driving, as if the steering shaft connects to her brain.

  Today it feels like there’s no membrane between her and the rest of the world, like her skin’s been flayed. And she’s bone-tired. She didn’t know such tiredness was possible, her body a lumpen burden to be dragged around. The strain of keeping the baby secret means her stomach has been cramping. And around three in the morning, every morning, then again at five, she’s up, anticipating squalls, forearmed with a warm sterilized bottle of milk, a fresh muslin cloth. Now, far worse than any of this, there’s Don to worry about too. A violence she hasn’t seen before.

  Rita feels like the household has tipped off the edge of the civilized world and they’re all disoriented, drunk on the absinthe-green light. Only Don, she suspects, grasps the madness of the situation with the baby, and his own presence at Foxcote, Walter due to arrive any day. But Don’s either too arrogant to be fazed by it or, more likely, gets a kick from the risk. No doubt he’s convinced he can brazen it out, Rita thinks, slowing into a bend in the lane. Or he’ll wriggle his way free of the situation, like a slippery Thames eel through the fingers.

  They’ve just got to get through the next four days, she reminds herself, the dog-end of August. Then Don leaves for Arabia and Jeannie will finally, finally – please God – make contact with the authorities. Although this plan still strikes her as completely bonkers – why not turf Don out and call now? – it’s less bonkers than not having one at all.

  On the other hand, containment for even another afternoon seems ambitious. Robbie or Marge could let something slip. Teddy has no filter at all, bless him, and only has to pick up the phone when Walter calls and gabble it all out. And she still can’t shake that eerie watched feeling, especially at night when the house is lit up and the darkness rubs against the windows, thick and furred, like a black bear’s back. Who is it? she wonders, with a shudder.

  Robbie? Oh, she’d hate it to be him. Fingers? Ugh. The other likely culprit would be Marge. But Rita doubts her capacity for subterfuge: why skulk around when you can just charge in?

  She did this yesterday, cornering Rita in the scullery. ‘Who, in Heaven’s name, is that man marauding about the woods half naked?’ she’d demanded, lantern jaw tensed, the lone hair on her chin mole quivering. ‘Is it his ridiculous car?’ The ‘good family friend’ line didn’t wash, of course. Marge looked apoplectic, as if she was about to sweep the tins of baked beans and tuna off the shelves with her burly, work-thickened fists. ‘He’ll ruin everything for the baby and Mrs Harrington. Talk about attracting attention! He bellows in the woods, like a stag in rut!’ And this image – uncannily accurate – made Rita giggle, and Marge even crosser, stamping her foot and accusing her of not taking the situation seriously.

  What could be more serious? Rita’s constantly terrified of doing something wrong, the baby being hungry, cold, ill or simply feeling unloved. Although she’s trying to be professional, or view her simply as an independent living organism who needs nurturing, not unlike Ethel the fern, with every hour that passes Baby Forest crawls a little further under Rita’s skin. They’ve developed a sort of understanding that circumvents language. When the baby needs her, Rita just knows. It’s like an alarm clock ringing in her brain. She’ll wake up with a start and, sludgy with sleep, stagger across the bedroom in the
gloom to the cot Robbie’s made especially, sanded smooth. Baby Forest will always be wide awake, waiting for her to arrive. And Rita will rest her chin on the cot’s side and she’ll sing a lullaby – ‘Bye baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting …’ – and watch the mobile’s shadows flickering on the wall, until the baby’s eyes start to close again. Other times, if the child is grumbling and wriggling with colic, she does what she knows she shouldn’t, and takes the baby into bed with her, snuggled in the crook of her arm, the only tactic that ensures both of them will get a few unbroken hours of sleep.

  Baby Forest’s too easy to love, that’s the problem. In other families the mother is the natural barrier between nanny and baby, like a monolithic Easter Island statue, a reminder not to get too close, not to try to compete. A nanny must be efficient, kind and discreet: never more maternal, prettier or preferred by the children (let alone the husband). But the situation is different here. Jeannie’s attention is constantly tugged in different directions now, like hands pulling on a skirt.

  Rita senses that Teddy is starting to fret at the baby’s permanence, the threat to his position as the cherished youngest. He gets clingier and more boisterous by the day. Hera seethes at Don’s presence, her own growing ever more fraught and charged, like stretched elastic the moment before it’s pinged. And Don? Well, Don wants to keep Jeannie to himself, of course, always pawing, stroking and resting his hand on the neat curve of Jeannie’s bottom, with a brazen casual possession. A sensual fleshy fug surrounds them. Worst of all, he wanders around after his morning bath, dominating every room he enters, looking for Jeannie, a towel around his waist, sexuality bared like teeth.

  Maybe this is why the baby’s eyes always follow Rita, not Jeannie. When the baby cries, Rita knows she’s the only one who’ll be able to soothe her and has to watch, hands fidgeting at her sides, while Don and Jeannie jiggle her too energetically, trying to distract her – never works – when all she wants is to be pressed close, held firm, made to feel safe.

  When the baby wakes in the night Rita struggles to go back to sleep. She’s on high alert, feeling as though something bad might happen if she lets down her guard, that the baby will forget to breathe if she’s not watching the tiny mammalian chest rise and fall.

  She’s developed her own insomniac routine, a sort of mental drift, which always fails to send her back to sleep, and involves taking apart the situation at Foxcote, like a jigsaw, and putting it together again in a new way, finishing it with A Nice Ending. This usually involves a kind lady with a mollifying smile from social services arriving at the door. Not a policeman. The lady will carefully tuck up Baby Forest into a shiny new pram and clean blanket and explain that the real mother, a lovely young woman, an Emma or an Anne or a Felicity, has come to her senses and desperately wants her baby back. Who could argue with that? A baby returning to its rightful mother? They will kiss Baby Forest goodbye and promise to write and send money if Emma/Anne/Felicity needs it. Meanwhile Don will vanish through the back door and roar off in his sports car into the arms of another woman. Someone less hassle. Someone less married.

  That’s what last night’s row was all about. The married bit.

  Shouting woke her, not the baby this time. At first she thought Don and Jeannie were having sex again and she held a pillow over her head. Then she realized it wasn’t sex. It was the opposite. Jeannie was screaming, ‘You slept with Edie? You slept with my sister-in-law? How could you? How could you?’ and there was the sound of something falling to the floor, a chair or a table, and Don shouting, ‘Why can’t I? I can sleep with who I like. You’re the married one, Jeannie. You’re the one who’s cheating on my old friend like a whore.’ More yelling: words indecipherable. After that came the sound of skin meeting skin, Jeannie’s cry of pain and surprise.

  A new thought streaked through Rita’s head then: what if the knife she found under the mattress in London wasn’t to protect Jeannie from Walter, as Rita had presumed, but from Don?

  This possibility altered everything. It felt like the Harringtons’ world had been tilted on to its side, exposing a previously unseen cross-section, a shocking hidden view, like the first sight of ghoulish worm-white roots in a slab of dark soil.

  She suddenly felt Foxcote’s remoteness keenly, the bristling woodland, the empty lane, the way you could scream and scream here and no one would ever hear you. Only she had heard, hadn’t she? So she had to be brave.

  She’d knocked, once, twice, on Jeannie’s bedroom door and, when there was no answer, she’d asked quietly, ‘Jeannie, is everything okay?’

  No answer. Her mind flung to awful places: Jeannie dead on the rug; Jeannie tossed from the window, lying like a ragdoll across the rampaging hydrangea beneath. She was turning the doorknob, ready to enter when Jeannie replied cheerfully, ‘I’m fine! Go back to bed.’

  She’d retreated, mortified, wondering if she’d mistaken passion for fighting. After all, what does she know of the former? But at breakfast this morning Jeannie came downstairs alone in her tortoiseshell sunglasses, which didn’t quite hide the mark on her cheekbone.

  Jeannie didn’t chat, or fuss over the baby. She half-heartedly stabbed toast soldiers into the boiled egg until it became a mess of broken shell and dripping yolk that seemed horribly symbolic of sex and violence and babies in a way Rita didn’t quite understand. After that she couldn’t stomach an egg. As she pulls into Foxcote’s drive, she’s not sure she ever will.

  *

  ‘The short-arse woodsman called for you when you were at the shops, Rita,’ Don says, leaning up against the table, gulping coffee, rubbing the dark, wiry hairs on his belly with his free hand. He’s only wearing shorts. Rita drops the shopping bags by the kitchen dresser, and starts to unload them. ‘Wondered if you fancied a stroll,’ he adds goadingly.

  Heat prickles around her collarbone, rises up her neck.

  Don’s merciless. ‘Oh, look at Rita! There I was thinking you might bat for the other side.’

  ‘Shut up, Don,’ says Jeannie, walking into the room with Teddy, the baby dozing over her shoulder. No longer wearing sunglasses, she’s trowelled Pan Stik over her cheeks, which gives her complexion a strangely chalky appearance. ‘Teddy, give Rita a hand.’

  Leaning down to the bags, Rita smiles at him. Teddy grins back from under his curls, adoringly, a reminder of why she stays.

  Afterwards, Rita can’t stop Don taking Teddy shooting. When she enquires as to Hera’s whereabouts Jeannie tells her Hera’s gone ‘off roaming, in one of her funny moods’. Rita feels a skewer of worry. She’d like to go after Hera and check she’s okay: she’s sure Hera will have noticed the bruise beneath Jeannie’s eye too. She misses nothing. But the baby’s nappy is heavy as a bag of frozen peas. No one’s changed it all morning.

  Rita lays the baby in the living room on a towel, pin in her mouth, and starts changing her, while Jeannie watches from the sofa, lost in thoughts, nibbling a bit of shortbread. The phone rings in the library. Neither of them moves.

  ‘I can always tell when it’s Walter calling,’ Jeannie whispers. ‘Don’t even think about answering it, Rita.’

  The phone rings again, five minutes later. It feels like Walter’s banging on the front door. They both hold their breath, waiting for the noise to stop.

  The baby, delighted to be free of her nappy, to have her bottom in the air, rocks back and forth with a gurgle. But Rita doesn’t smile, or pull a silly face, like she normally does. She feels scared and stuck. The world outside Foxcote is closing in.

  ‘I’m sorry if we disturbed you last night,’ Jeannie says.

  Rita doesn’t know what to say or where to look. Neither does Jeannie. Now the phone’s stopped ringing, it feels like the deafening silence that follows a scream.

  ‘I’ll do the nappy.’ Jeannie jumps off the sofa and rolls up the crêpe-de-Chine sleeves of her blouse. ‘Take a break, Rita. A walk? If you see Hera, will you send her back to the house?’

  Rita hesitates. She’s never seen Jea
nnie change a nappy. Does she even know how to do it?

  Jeannie picks up one of the new pink Babygros. ‘I won’t prick her with the nappy pin, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  Closing the heavy front door behind her, Rita wishes she hadn’t missed Robbie, and feels a pang for the walk they could have had. There’s something reassuring and solid about Robbie. She can be silent with him, neither of them speaking a word, and feel like they’re having a conversation. That she’s not entirely alone here.

  But she is alone. And the forest’s never felt more alien.

  She drifts for twenty minutes or so – neither Hera, Teddy nor Don to be seen – then returns. Unable to face going back into the house, she sits on a rusty iron bench in the garden, under a canopy of wild roses. She rests her chin in her hands and closes her eyes. Her skin feels numb, like it belongs to someone else. She can smell the throaty tang of smoke. It reminds her of something, and she has the peculiar sense of being tugged back in time. A memory surfaces, like a splinter working its way out of the body and up through skin, then another: thick smoke and thicker heat; the numbness in her little girl legs; hands yanking her out of the car window; looking back, over her rescuer’s shoulder, and seeing her parents’ car engulfed in a hellish ball of flame, her mother’s hands banging on the wrong side of the glass. With a groan, Rita bends over and is sick into the geraniums, just missing her shoes. As she looks up and wipes her mouth, she realizes the smoke smell doesn’t belong to a distant memory, after all. It’s twisting, like a sheer black stocking, from Hera’s bedroom window.

  32

  Hera

  I didn’t expect my little fire to make so much smoke. Or for Big Rita to see it. She throws back my bedroom door and just stands there, mouth parted, staring at the terrarium on the window seat. The water dripping down the glass. The black smoke still curling from the little pile of sticks that I’d arranged to look like the log pile outside, as a nice surprise.