by Eve Chase
‘It’s true, Sylvie. We always felt watched,’ Helen says. ‘I used to sense someone out there, in the trees, but she was so quick, so deft, like a woodland creature. I never actually saw her.’ She lays a jewellery-crusted hand on my arm. ‘She stayed as long as she could. But had to bolt after making the call to the police, or she’d have been questioned too. She’d have been rightly terrified.’
A new feeling opens inside me, like the heron’s wings. Forgiveness of sorts. If not forgiveness, understanding. And a sadness so sharp and sweet it feels like relief.
‘So you see, Sylvie.’ Walter takes off his glasses and rubs his rheumy eyes. ‘Marge’s mad plan failed. And I failed you – and your birth-mother. I promised I’d give you every advantage and I didn’t. The shame is mine, all mine.’
My childhood rushes past, imperfect and happy: wind-blistered beaches; the gnarly apple tree in the garden; Dad in his workshop, soft-leaded flat carpenter’s pencil behind his ear; me and Caroline rushing into the cottage with handfuls of wildflowers for Mum, and Mum beaming and saying, ‘Wow. Aren’t I just the luckiest, most spoiled mother in the world?’ I swallow. Feel a charge of pride, and truculence. ‘I had every advantage, Walter.’
‘And a bloody lucky escape,’ agrees Helen, gulping back her drink.
‘Look, Sylvie, if there’s anything you need, anything at all, property, money …’ Walter begins.
‘I don’t want anything from you.’ I stand up. My legs feel strong again. Made of steel. ‘Nothing.’
‘I will make it up to Annie and her baby.’ Walter splays his hand on his chest. ‘I give you my word.’
I only just bite back, ‘Screw you,’ because Annie could probably do with all the help she can get, and stride towards the door.
‘Oh, must you go, Sylvie?’ Helen says, as if I were leaving a dinner party early. ‘Stay for another drink.’
‘After all, here we are,’ Walter marvels, incomprehensibly. ‘We end as we began. With a baby.’ He brings the tips of his fingers together. ‘There’s an excellent bottle of Krug in the fridge.’ He looks up at Helen. ‘Perhaps this time we can celebrate. Not grieve.’
‘Except we didn’t need to grieve my little baby sister, did we, Daddy?’ The atmosphere in the room switches like a blade. My hand freezes on the door handle.
‘Not now, Helen,’ Walter mutters, with an embarrassed laugh.
‘Why not?’ Her lip curls. ‘Are you ashamed of Sylvie knowing?’
The room grows smaller and hotter. I suddenly feel I’m in the presence of a family secret so murky I don’t want to hear it.
Helen’s telling me anyway. ‘I had a little sister once, Sylvie. My father told us she’d died in hospital an hour after birth.’ She speaks with cool ferocity. ‘But she didn’t.’
Walter stares into the middle-distance. He swallows hard, like he knows what’s coming.
‘She just wasn’t good enough, was she, Daddy? She was flawed. Monstrous.’
‘She was Don’s baby. She wasn’t mine.’ Walter’s words come out choked, as if the bow-tie is tightening around his neck. ‘Your mother couldn’t have coped.’
‘You told her a lie! She literally went mad with grief!’
‘I thought it was for the best. Everyone did. She was blue. Not breathing properly. And the face … the wretched child’s face.’ Walter closes his eyes and presses his fingers to his temples, trying to dam the flow of images.
The room starts to hum. An awful possibility is solidifying. Something so disturbing, my brain bucks away from it like a horse.
‘It was a cleft palate, Daddy. Just a cleft palate, I’m sure of it. But you saw a monster. Because you saw Don’s child. If she’d been yours …’
‘She wasn’t.’ His face flushes, turgid with bitterness. ‘She wasn’t mine, damn it.’
The humming sound swarms in my head. The room starts to shudder and contract violently. I lean back against the wall.
‘Are you okay, Sylvie? You’ve gone white as a sheet.’ Helen’s face looms closer, all her features smudged, a painting melting.
I try to get the words out. My tongue feels too thick. In my bag, my phone starts to ring. The outside world. Annie? The noise twists into my ears like wire.
‘Here. Sip, darling.’ She presses gin and tonic to my lips. My phone rings again. I push away the glass and check my phone, with dread. The hospital.
52
Rita, now
A woodpecker. A chiselling sound. Beak on bark. Or skull. But Rita can’t see the bird. She can’t see anything. Someone’s turned the stars out. It’s dark in there. Robbie’s not bothered by it. He can read the silhouette of the trees at night like an Ordnance Survey map under an Anglepoise. Robbie knows where he is on a path by the timbre of the crunch beneath his soles. Rita needs Robbie. She fumbles around, arms outstretched, like blind man’s buff, looking for him, like a slipped thought. Then she remembers: Robbie’s not there. Robbie’s dead. She’s alone. She’s been alone for ten years now. And if she does get out of this forest, she will still be alone, so she doesn’t need to escape, does she? She can stay there. Peacefully disintegrating. Lie down on the soft mattress of earth, while the woodpecker pecks, and the dry leaves spin from the sky. Easier like this.
Rita’s eyelashes knit together, sealing the darkness inside. A hand grabs hers. She tries to shake it away – she’s busy dying here! – but it’s strong as a carpenter’s clamp. She can feel its calluses, the thickened pad of skin under the wedding ring, the small hard scars from slipped hammers and nails, and she can hear Robbie’s voice, Robbie who is not there, whom she misses like a severed limb, Robbie, saying, ‘You damn well don’t give up, Rita Murphy. You’re needed.’ Then something about life having the structure of a tree – concentric annual rings, stitched through by radial lines – as he rushes her through the shadows towards the tiniest chink of blue-white light, his hand gripping tighter, and then, out of the silence, a voice saying, ‘Rita? Rita, blink if you can hear me.’
53
Hera, now
I tap a fingernail against my veneers impatiently. When will Sylvie be back from the hospital with news? I hate not knowing what’s happening. Her apartment seems smaller and pinker than ever, like the inside of a migraine.
I begged to accompany her to the hospital. I even leaped into the lift, overcoming my fear of its clanking cell-like enclosure just to spend a few more seconds in her company. She could barely talk. She just said, in this strange broken whisper, ‘Tell me about your baby sister, tell me more.’ So I described how, over twenty years after she was born, a charity leaflet had dropped through the letterbox of my Battersea apartment with photos of cleft babies in the developing world. How I recognized my newborn sister’s face in theirs, and searched for her but could find no trace.
Outside the building, Sylvie sprinted in the direction of the tube. ‘I’ll keep Annie company while we wait for news!’ I shouted after her. I’m not sure she heard me.
I was still standing on the pavement, dazed, wondering why Sylvie was asking about the cleft, if she was in any state to get on the tube, when Edie rang. She’d just had a very bizarre call from my father, she said. What the hell was going on? I gabbled it out. No, he hasn’t lost his marbles. It was all true. Declaring a state of emergency, she insisted on escorting me to Sylvie’s apartment too. So here we all are. Waiting.
It’s been over twenty minutes now. From the look on Annie’s face I suspect we may have outstayed our welcome, such as it was: ‘What are you doing here?’
‘But Annie’s such a great girl!’ Edie exclaimed, in a loud whisper, a few minutes after we bustled past Annie into the apartment. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
I felt such shame then. I still feel it now, more acutely than ever. I can’t meet Annie’s eye.
‘Just like Venice,’ Edie calls over her shoulder. She’s standing on the balcony, her knotty hands on the balustrade, tapping her feet to music: a young man in a fedora is shamelessly playing a guitar on the dec
k of his narrowboat below. A straggly heron watches from the bank, one of the ugliest birds I’ve ever seen.
‘No offence but I have no idea why you’re here and I’d like you to leave,’ I hear Annie say. ‘This has got nothing to do with you.’
I spin around, wishing I could tell her everything. But that’s her mother’s job. My mouth opens and closes.
Incensed pink dots blaze on her cheeks. ‘I’ve ruined your son’s life, remember?’
Edie turns from the balcony, silently imploring me to say the right thing. As ever, I have no idea what this might be.
Annie digs her hands into her jeans pockets, revealing a slither of tanned tummy, ever so slightly rounded. The sight of it brings a lump to my throat. I want to rest my hands on the smooth skin. I want to talk to it. I want to say sorry.
‘You’re quite right, Annie. We’ll get out of your hair,’ says Edie, warmly, walking back into the room. She slings on her denim jacket.
When I don’t move, Annie turns to me, polite again, despite everything. Well brought up. ‘Do you have a coat, Helen?’ she prompts.
‘A coat?’ I mutter, at a loss how to stall my removal. I want to say, Let me stay here and get to know you. I’m so sorry. I’ve messed up. Instead I say, ‘Just that jacket on the back of the chair. The Chanel.’ Stupidly, out of habit. Like the designer matters.
When Annie glances at me I can’t bear to think whom she sees. ‘Would you like me to call Elliot? Get him over instead? Maybe he could go with you to the hospital later.’
She shakes her head.
I have the urge to toss the damn jacket into the canal, if only to show her I’m not that woman. Because, my God, Edie’s right. Annie is great. Beautiful. Determined. She’s also Big Rita’s granddaughter. By some trick of the universe – or the Internet – I’ve been given an unexpected second act, a new role, a new family. A second chance. And I’ve already blown it.
Cruel to be kind, I’ve justified. Elliot’s weeks of love-struck mooning have scared the pants off me. Just like Mother and her passion for Don. I had to protect him from that disaster, as I protected myself with a sensible marriage built on friendship and separate bedrooms. Annie will never cope, I thought. Too young. Too smart to be satisfied by motherhood. Not rich enough. The statistics are against her. At the back of my mind was always the teenage girl who’d abandoned Baby Forest to Marge’s mad scheme. So I’ve told Elliot repeatedly that Sylvie’s confided to me that Annie’s said there’s no possible romantic future. (Just as I’ve lied to Annie and Sylvie about Elliot dating.) He must do his duty, I’ve told him, and pay his way – rather, his grandfather and I will do that – but he must stay free since one day, when he’s older, he will meet someone else, someone he can get serious about. Someone suitable, more like us. Us? Me? What on earth was I thinking? As if we need another person like us in the family.
‘Helen, your jacket,’ Edie says firmly. She’s staring at me with an alarmed expression. Not unlike the way the neighbours would look at Mother during one of her ‘episodes’.
‘Thank you.’ The bouclé tweed swings heavy in my hand. How will I ever explain myself to Annie and Elliot? Let alone be forgiven? The thought of telling my son terrifies me.
‘It’s been a bit of a long day. I’ll get her home,’ I hear Edie say, in a conspiratorial tone, to Annie. She takes my arm. ‘Right, come along now, Helen, darling.’
‘Wait. Can I just say to Annie …’ My voice wavers.
‘I’m not sure this is the time, Helen,’ Edie says, with a short, uneasy laugh. Her grip on my arm tightens, warning me not to gabble it all out.
‘I … I just want to say that you’re going to make a wonderful mother, Annie. Truly.’
Annie’s face flames. Too horrified or embarrassed to speak. With Edie’s help I pull on my jacket, all fumbling fingers. The fabric feels different on my shoulders. Lighter.
Annie yanks open the front door. The city blasts in. Diesel micro-particulates and the greasy stink of kebabs, yes. But also the caffeinated whiff of life and hope. Just as Annie’s shutting the door, she stops, looks up with those serious emerald eyes, and says quietly, ‘Thanks, Helen.’
Something in me soars. It’s a start. As if quiet riches the world’s held back for so long, that I’d forgotten even existed, are within my reach.
Edie turns to me. ‘Taxi?’
‘No,’ I say, wanting to prove something to myself. ‘I think it’s about bloody time I tried a bus, don’t you?’
*
Three hours later, I check the grainy image on my entry camera. It’s not Sylvie, as I’d hoped, on her way back from the hospital finally to share news of Rita. Nor is it Elliot, who isn’t answering my calls. It’s a grey-haired woman, plainly dressed, holding up a badge to the camera: police. Panic flutters inside my chest. I want to rush back inside the house and hide behind the sofa, as I did when I was a girl. Another ring. Something in me rallies. You can do this, Helen. I take a breath and open the door.
‘No one’s hurt and you’re not in any trouble, Mrs Latham,’ the police officer says quickly. ‘I’m here to inform you of a development in the Armstrong case.’ She flashes her badge again and peers into my house. ‘May I come in?’
*
After she’s gone, I sink into a wicker chair in the conservatory, doors flung back, the terrariums surrounding me, my life’s work, a constellation of stars. Over the terrace walls, the church bells start ringing out over the Chelsea rooftops.
I flex the policewoman’s card in my fingers, a reminder I haven’t dreamed this. Dare I believe the nightmare’s over after all these years? Marge Grieves has been arrested, the policewoman said. The suspect handed herself in after her carer, who’d been clearing out the house for a move into sheltered accommodation, discovered a weapon and old ammunition hidden in the loft. Initial investigations suggest a match with those used on Don Armstrong in 1971. Grieves is helping them with their enquiries. Yes, they believe there will be enough evidence to charge.
I can barely remember what else was said after that. Something was already falling inside me, like snow, starting to settle. And it is this: my mother thought I’d shot Don that night. Not only did she forgive me, she did everything she could to protect me. She even returned to The Lawns, shielded behind her apparently ‘unsound mind’, which modern doctors would surely recognize as post-natal depression, or even PTSD, a heart breaking. She loved me as fiercely as any mother ever loved a child. Hers was the greatest of sacrifices, and the most dogged. I think of her words, ‘You mustn’t ever think it was you, Hera. That’s all that matters,’ and lift my face, squinting into the setting sun, until I can see my mother’s mirror-chip dress aflutter among trees, my mother, turning slowly, blowing me one last kiss, a smile, then gone.
54
Rita, ten months later
A burly wind skids down the trees, shaking the spring leaves like coins. Having never forgotten Marge’s list of forest hazards, Rita instinctively peers up. But no branches are falling. And it was Marge – Marge! – who had turned out to be the most dangerous of all. Lethal as any death cap mushroom. Rita had had no idea.
‘One sec, Sylvie.’ Pausing to catch her breath, she inhales the sweet whiff of wild garlic. The forest furs at its edges. She feels like she’s falling through it.
‘You okay, Mum?’ Sylvie’s eyes are so clear today that the forest is reflected within them. ‘Do you need to sit down?’
‘Certainly not.’ She’d love to sit down. She gets tired so easily now. But she refuses to admit it. Hates the fuss. Rehabilitation has been frustratingly slow. She often wakes with a roaming confusion that takes a few minutes to clear. She sieves through everyday words, familiar names, as if beachcombing, rinsing away the sand. But, occasionally, her jolted mind throws up unexpected gems, long-forgotten treasures: her mother’s voice, the smell of her hair, the bristles of her father’s beard against her fingertips. She is closer to them at least. And this weekend she’s got a feeling she’s finally
returning to herself, too – and to a family changed out of all recognition.
‘I just want to take a moment.’ She buttons her camel coat, a present from Helen, as immaculately cut as any of the coats she ever modelled, with a delicious midnight-blue silk lining. ‘Are you sure I’m not imagining all this, Sylvie? It’s not a side effect of my medication?’
Sylvie laughs, the sort that stays in the eyes afterwards. Jake has a lot to do with that, Rita thinks approvingly. She’s got a good feeling about the boatman.
‘Take a look over there, Mum,’ Sylvie whispers, pointing back to the woodland clearing, where Elliot and Annie are dawdling, shaking off the oldies. Elliot’s sitting on a log, Annie on his knee. His chin rests on her shoulder and he’s beaming down at the bundle in her arms: Poppy, perfect in every way, with her fuzz of black hair and blue eyes, named after Rita’s mother. Her tiny fist rises into the air, snatching at the light and shadow, leaf and sky.
Rita’s heart swells. Babies love forests. We’re born with a love of trees deep in our souls, she decides. Like a love of the sea. She hopes that when the young family move to Cambridge in the autumn, and Annie starts her studies, they’ll still seek out woodland for Poppy to romp around in there, too. She suspects they will.
A boom of laughter. Rita whips around. She squints at the footpath ahead. Goodness.
Teddy. She can almost see his 1970s dungarees strap swinging. Edie, sprightly in a duck-yellow fake fur jacket. (Thirty-one thousand Instagram followers and counting, Annie tells her. More than the entire population of Barnstaple. The world’s gone mad.) And further ahead, yes, there they are, Helen and Caroline. Talking. Always heatedly talking.
No, they don’t look like half-sisters. You could slip four Chanel-clad Helens into a pair of Caroline’s Target jeans alone, Caroline says. But somehow they fit together perfectly.
