by Eve Chase
*
A hole where the mouth should be. A baby with no face. It came to Rita one day, a few weeks after adopting Sylvie, the hazy memory of a little boy in the hospital after her own childhood car accident. A boy who hid his mouth behind his hand in shame. She couldn’t forget the Harrington baby then.
The search for an infant in care with a bilateral cleft palate or some other craniofacial anomaly, born in London around certain dates, was not as hard as it should have been. No one wanted to adopt the little girl who couldn’t smile. On the birth certificate, no father was named. A bit of digging revealed that Jeannie’s mother’s maiden name had been used. The birth date was also a day out. Walter had clearly done whatever he could to fudge it.
Poor Jeannie was dead by then. Walter wasn’t. Rita would wake in a cold sweat, imagining him coming to take Caroline away, poisoning the adoption authorities against them. She carried that anxiety always, pressing on her diaphragm: if you lose your family once, you can easily imagine it happening again. The more you have, the more you can lose. Everything snatched in an instant. Robbie feared Walter’s influence too. His brave little girl had already gone through so much, not least with all the corrective surgery. So they were not as open with either of the girls as they’d originally planned. As they should have been.
Mentioning the Harringtons felt like a risk. The less was said, the fainter they became, until they were just shadows flickering at the sunlit edges. She never spelled out the link between the family she’d once worked for years ago and Caroline’s birth-mother, let alone the suspected father and his brutal end. She’d planned to. She’d kept some of the newspapers. One day.
They didn’t even dare take the girls to the forest. Robbie would occasionally return, quietly, anonymously, just to walk on his own. And when he worked in his carpentry studio, he’d talk to the girls about trees, the rings of time inside their trunks, all the hundreds of life forms one oak hosted. He’d give them blocks of wood to sand and touch. Took them camping and riding in other woods. She’d hoped this was enough.
It wasn’t, was it? With the hindsight of age – and the perspicacity that comes from dangling inside death’s icy chamber – she realizes she’s always been appalling at revealing things when she should, that her fear of losing someone overrides it each time.
Of course, if either of their daughters had asked … But Caroline and Sylvie were like two little girls on tiptoe, hands reaching up, and together, with their combined strength, bolting a heavy door.
‘Mum, we’d better not forget about Walter,’ says Sylvie, softly, tugging her out of her mash of thoughts.
‘More’s the pity,’ says Rita, stepping around a spectacular buckler fern she’d love to inspect more closely.
*
Teddy sets the urn of cremated ashes on the ground. His dog circles it, sniffing.
‘The dog’s licking her chops!’ shrieks Edie. ‘Naughty dog!’
Rita notices that Caroline and Sylvie – standing side by side – are discreetly shaking little fingers. They did this as little girls too. Never told her why. (‘Secret!’ they’d bark in unison.) In childhood the finger shake was done with wrought seriousness, today with a wink and a bitten-down smile.
‘Right. Where are the young love birds?’ Teddy holds the dog back by the collar and looks around.
‘Oh, leave them be, Teddy.’ Edie takes a photo of the urn on her phone. ‘We don’t want the baby breathing in Walter.’
Rita suddenly remembers Robbie explaining that when a giant tree crashes down in a forest, light and air rush into the cleared space, dormant seeds flower, and new life scrambles up, seizing its chance.
‘Well, here goes, Pa old man,’ says Teddy, kneeling down to lift the lid.
Rita begins to feel peculiar. It takes a second or two for her to recognize that this peculiarity is not her woolly brain misfiring, as it’s wont to do, but the old snared feeling, the one she’d felt here decades ago.
‘Teddy,’ Rita says, too loudly. Everyone turns to look at her. ‘I hope no one’s offended …’ She’ll say it anyway. ‘… but I don’t think I should be here for this bit. No, really. I’m going to head back to the house. For a nice cup of tea.’ As soon as she’s spoken, the trapped feeling slithers away, like a slow-worm in the bracken. Sometimes it’s a relief not to be young any more. To be able to say no.
Sylvie runs after her.
‘I can’t pretend to mourn him,’ Rita mutters, beneath her breath, as they walk away.
‘Me neither.’ Sylvie pulls a car key from her pocket and dangles it from her finger. ‘Fancy a spin in a Porsche instead of a cup of tea, Great-grandma? Teddy’s lent me his car.’
‘He has? That terrifying-looking thing in the drive?’ Rita laughs at the very idea. ‘No, thank you.’
A few paces on, Wildwood’s red-tiled roof appears through the trees. Funny to think that Poppy will inherit the place one day, Rita thinks. Quite right, too. Despite its facelift and name change, it’ll always be Foxcote. As Helen will be Hera. (The same angry, agitated fingers that once lit fires now design the most exquisite terrariums she’s ever seen. Worlds under glass, a lost sweet joy.) And the garden gate, although a tasteful shade of putty now, is still recognizably the same rickety gate she once crept through at dawn, wearing a lurid pink dressing-gown and boots that belonged to the great love of her life, whom she hadn’t yet met. It makes her breath catch.
As they get closer, something else snags Rita’s eye. A streak of lightning-white hair, a loping flash, vanishing into the bluebell haze. Fingers? Watching them? Eyes and ears of the forest. The Green Man. Revealer and burier of its secrets. She wonders what else he knows.
And it’s then that a fuzzy thought that’s been niggling throughout this hectic weekend takes on a more solid shape. Fat as a raindrop about to roll, it feels like the first crystalline, defined thought she’s had since the accident.
The gate’s well-oiled latch clicks behind them. They walk into the garden, along a path banked by white tulips and delicate feathery ferns that bear a striking resemblance to Ethel. Rita’s mind ticks over. This is her chance. She’s got Sylvie alone. She must say something.
But they’re on the drive already, and Sylvie’s stopping by Teddy’s car, gleaming dangerously, its roof rolled down. ‘Oh, go on, Mum. Wouldn’t it be good to escape for a bit? Just the two of us? See a horizon?’
Rita thinks, My parents died on a forest road. Don drove a car not unlike this. She says, ‘It’s tiny! I wouldn’t fit inside!’
Sylvie opens the car door anyway. And something about her daughter’s ease in this forest, the gleam in her eyes, makes Rita slide into the low leather seat, trustingly. Her knees almost graze her chin.
Sylvie leaps into the driver’s seat and sticks the key into the ignition.
‘Wait.’ Now. Now is the time. ‘There’s something I need to …’ Rita swallows. She’s dreaded this conversation for years. She’s constructed her life to avoid it. ‘As I’m on the mend, I’d like to help you find this – this Jo. Your birth-mother.’
Sylvie blanches. Clearly she wasn’t expecting this. The trees stir around them. Curl back.
‘There’ll be local leads,’ Rita continues nervously, thinking of Fingers. ‘Or the ancestry DNA company Caroline used a few weeks ago. You just rub a cotton bud on the inside of your cheek apparently.’ Her voice fades. This is coming out all wrong, as she always dreaded it would.
Still Sylvie says nothing. High in the branches above them, a woodpecker starts to drum, like Rita’s heart.
‘Of course, I understand if it’s something you want to do on your own …’ Rita dials back, losing confidence.
A moment passes. The house peers down, the mullioned windows blinking, waiting.
‘Honestly?’ Sylvie’s pupils have spread, ink drop black. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned these last few months, Mum, it’s that I’m so your daughter. No one else’s. Just like Annie’s mine. And Poppy is Annie’s.’ She starts the engine and the car
bucks, then begins to growl.
It rumbles Rita’s old bones. She’s terrified. Her heart’s exploding. ‘Good Lord.’
Sylvie drives slowly out of the gate, the first few bends. But when the road straightens, she accelerates, throwing them back against the seats. The trees stream past, a riot of green. Their hair whips. And Rita laughs and whoops because she’s no longer scared, not one bit, and they’re moving so fast that, in no time at all, they’re piercing the forest’s edge. And then, look, just look, it’s shrinking to a smudge behind them.
Acknowledgements
A huge thank you to my editors, Maxine Hitchcock, Tara Singh Carlson and Helen Richard. You’ve brought so much to this novel, and I count myself one lucky writer – we’ve a great hive mind! Lizzy Kremer, my agent – heartfelt gratitude, always. Hazel Orme, Maddalena Cavaciuti, Bea McIntyre, Alice Howe, Rebecca Hilsdon and the inspiring teams at Michael Joseph, G. P. Putnam’s Sons and David Higham Associates, thank you, thank you. My fellow author readers: I know you’ve all got teetering proof piles, and I’m so appreciative. Lastly, my family: Ben, Oscar, Jago and Alice. In the end, it’s all for you. (And the dog!) With love.
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EVE CHASE
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First published 2020
Copyright © Eve Chase, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted Cover image: © Arcangel, © Getty and © Shutterstock
Retouching by Terry Obiora ISBN: 978-1-405-94097-9
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