I take a deep breath and let it out. I remember so clearly when she surprised me before the wedding, telling me tearfully why she couldn’t call me mom. Now she’s surprising me again. She has questions, practical questions, which I do my best to answer.
‘Dad and I, we don’t want this to get ugly,’ I try to reassure her. ‘We’ve agreed to separate. There won’t be any need to go to court or anything.’ I touch her hand. ‘It will be hard. For all of us. But I truly believe it’s for the best.’
In the car, she cries quietly, looking away from me, sniffing. I hand her a tissue and she takes it silently, blowing her nose.
I haven’t mentioned Sam, because Leo asked me not to. ‘She needs to deal with the fact that we’re separating first,’ he said. ‘And this man … Sam Sage … may not reappear in our lives,’ he added grimly.
I agreed, because it seemed only fair, and I knew he needed to claw back some control, to set limits and rules.
October 2001
My tiny terraced house in Gospel Oak is still near enough to the Heath for daily swims. The neighbourhood is mixed, the sidewalks dirtier, the shops more eclectic, creating an energy, a buzz that was missing in the long, sweeping, elegant road I’ve left behind. As I arrange my ornaments and books on shelves, put my few pictures on the walls, I have a sense of rightness.
The days pass, and I work in my study looking out at the square of muddy grass that passes for a garden. I swim and walk. Grace is away in India. When she’s in London, she’ll share her time between her father and me. Leo is reserved with me, polite. He holds himself stiffly, as if he’s standing behind an invisible protective barrier, and he never touches me. It will take a long time to reach something more relaxed and friendly. Perhaps we never will, but we’ve achieved what we agreed we wanted, at least as much as it’s ever possible: a civilised divorce.
I want to contact Sam. Three years early. I sit down in my kitchen and try his cell. My fingers shake as I dial: Sorry, the number you have dialled has not been recognised. I try again, and get the same mechanical voice. I call his music label. The receptionist seems confused when I ask to speak to someone about Sam Sage. Eventually a voice comes on the line. They tell me that he’s left the label. He’s gone off grid, they say. I remember that his sister is called Mattie, and try finding M. Winterson in the directory, but she’s not listed. Maybe she goes under a different surname.
At his old house in Islington, there are different curtains at the windows. The door is painted red, not grey. I stand on the doorstep, my heart hammering in my ears as I ring the bell. A housekeeper holds the door part open, looking suspicious. She shakes her head when I ask if she has a forwarding address for the previous occupant.
As I walk back to the Tube, rain begins to fall, light and misty, dampening my skin, darkening my coat. Disappointment hollows me out, and I drag my feet, suddenly exhausted. I falter to a stop on the sidewalk, and people mutter in annoyance, stepping around me. I stare into the blank, wet sky, watching pigeons flutter from a ledge. From their outspread wings, a feather falls, landing grey and lost at my feet. I bend to pick it up. As I turn it between my fingers I wonder: shouldn’t I be able to feel something? Intuit something about what he’s doing and where he is? I close my eyes, concentrating. But it’s like that time in Atlantic City when I was waiting for his letters, as if he’s stepped off the edge of the world.
FORTY-EIGHT
Cat, September 2004
My cell phone rings. I sigh, taking my hands from the keyboard, wrenching myself out of the scene I’m in the middle of writing. The word I was searching for hovers, then disintegrates like ash before I can grasp it. Damn. Without looking away from my computer screen, I fumble for my shrill, demanding phone.
‘Hi,’ I say, clicking the on button.
‘Mum?’
‘Sweetheart?’ I hold the phone closer to my ear. ‘Bug, how are you?’ My eyes move to the photo of her pinned to my cork board. She’s just started a new job in Nairobi with the VSO. The line crackles. ‘Just checking in,’ she says. ‘Can’t talk now. Just wanted you to know that everything is fine. The people here are really nice. I’ll call again next week for longer.’
‘I’m so glad to hear that,’ I say. ‘It’ll be good to have a longer chat.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I miss you. Shame it’s so expensive to call. But … if you need me, Mum, my mobile works most of the time.’
‘I’ll be fine, darling. Don’t worry about me. Stay safe. Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
I sit with the little black Nokia in my hand. Odd to think it’s the conduit for a connection across the globe – from one world to another, from her to me – and I try and imagine the place where Grace is right now, the heat, the parched earth, the unknown shapes of a foreign city. The words on the computer screen in front of me seem less important, reduced somehow. Grace’s voice has tipped me out of my story. She’ll be twenty-seven next month, the same age I was when I met Sam.
September. Ten years have gone by, made up of days and weeks and months and years, a stacking-up of small, ordinary things: shared meals and solitary swims, vacuuming and writing, sickness and arguments, holidays, reading in bed and visits to the cinema. A life. And now, the date that seemed impossibly far is almost here. It doesn’t feel real. Sometimes I’m afraid I imagined it. I scan newspapers and magazines for anything that might give me a clue as to what he’s doing – who he’s with, where he lives. But as far as I can tell, he’s still off grid, disappeared from public view. He must be travelling. I remember how, at our last meeting, he listed some countries he wanted to visit.
His songs sometimes get played on the radio. Tracks from the Lambs and his solo work pop up on various stations. When ‘Ocean Blue’ gets airtime, I quit what I’m doing, turn up the volume.
Ten years. Will he remember? Will he come?
And if he does, what will he think of the forty-eight-year-old me? Will he still want me?
*
I stand in front of the long mirror in my bedroom and look at my reflection, scrutinising the changes. There’s grey in my hair, enough for me to notice when I run a brush through. Fine lines etch my forehead, crinkle at the edges of my eyes. My waist is thicker. I touch my chest, where sun-damaged skin mottles darker brown. Blue veins scrawl over my thighs. But I’ve never had a child, and daily swimming and long walks across the Heath mean I’ve kept in pretty good shape.
I scribble some sentences in my diary, stop and flick back through the pages to the beginning of the volume, to the time straight after Grace’s suicide attempt, to the days when I could do nothing more than function, each hour like another stepping stone across an endless river. And then the divorce, and the days after that, a different kind of hard, but getting better as we settled into our new, separate lives.
I close the diary and put it back, next to its companion. The pair of them charting my life for two decades. I go down into the kitchen and make another cup of tea, then return to my desk to try and get back into my children’s novel. The Time-Jumping Detectives ran into an eight-part series, and then a TV show. I’m experimenting with a new idea about a race of children who live underwater, like a modern Water-Babies, but with more adventure.
Dougie and I eat Vietnamese noodles in a little restaurant in Soho. You have to bring your own wine, and the line of hopeful customers stretches down the block. He’s editor of Marie Claire now. Lives with his photographer boyfriend in a house in Hackney. We try and meet for supper once a fortnight to catch up.
‘Did you see that story about the Fathers for Justice campaigner?’ he asks, adding soya sauce to his food. ‘Scaled the fence at Buckingham Palace dressed as Batman.’
We slurp from our bowls and discuss Batman on the Queen’s balcony and the righteous cause of divorced fathers. He refills my glass and tells me about the latest drama between him and his boyfriend. ‘How’s Leo nowadays?’ he asks, dabbing his mouth with his paper napkin.
‘He and
Ann seem happy. I’m glad he remarried.’
‘You still see him?’
‘Yeah – we meet up sometimes, and we talk on the phone. Sharing Grace will always connect us.’
Dougie sits up straighter. ‘So, isn’t it that time – you know, the ten-year thing you arranged with Sam? Isn’t that coming up soon?’
I put my glass down, my fingers suddenly shaky. ‘You remembered?’
Dougie’s the only person who knows, but I haven’t talked about Sam for years, not since a drunken evening after it happened, when I needed his elegant, bony shoulder to cry on.
He rolls his eyes. ‘I’m not going to forget something like that. It was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard.’ He gives me an intense look. ‘So?’
‘It’s this month. I don’t know if he’ll show … It’s been so long.’ I push my bowl away. I’m not hungry any more.
Dougie reaches across the table and takes my hand in his. ‘He’ll be there, hen. I know it.’ He squeezes my fingers.
The pond is the only place I could think to come for the courage and clarity I need. Freezing water will do that for a person. I have missed Sam for so long; the missing has been like a creature hiding inside me, between the slots of my ribs, in the base of my throat, inside my fingers and toes. But now it’s crawling out, letting itself be known with urgent roars and pleas; it’s stretching to fill all the spaces, taking me over.
I swim and swim. After my laps, I’m panting, exhausted. I put my feet down on the muddy bottom, toes pressing into thick, sludgy sediment, and wade through the weeds towards the ladder. My skin is pimply with cold. I’ll sleep tonight, I think, after this. A sharp prick under my foot makes me wince. As I climb out, I leave bloodied prints on the scuffed wooden boards. I bend down and examine the small tear in the sole of my left foot. It’s not too deep. I make sure to wash it out under the shower. When I get home, I stick the edges together with a Band-Aid. The cold water has left me chilled. Shivering.
Counting down the days to our meeting date has become unbearable. I try to lose myself in work, and when that fails, I spend a whole day rearranging the linen cupboard and clearing out my wardrobe. Anything to make the seconds pass. But I’m coming down with flu. All the signs are there. I have a pounding head, and achy bones; I feel hot and cold by turns. I make myself lemon and honey, pour in a slug of single malt. I shouldn’t have gone swimming.
I have to get well before I see Sam, before I feel his arms around me, his cheek against mine. Before I tell him, I’m here. I’m home. With you.
In bed, the duvet twisted over me, I sleep and wake and sleep again.
Hello, little sister, Frank’s voice whispers. It’s been a long time.
I open my eyes, puzzled, staring up into the gloom. I thought Frank was sitting on my bed. I felt his hand on my forehead.
I’m not sure what day it is, or how much time has passed. I try to get out of bed, but it hurts to stand and the room spins. I’m so thirsty. My skin is scorched, clammy. It’s agony to move, or open my sealed lids; my eyes shrivel in dry, gaping sockets. I sleep again, falling into fragments of memory. Or perhaps it’s real, the past, present and future colliding, crushing me.
Sam is standing by the bench. I see him turning his head to look for me. I stand on tiptoes and wave. I’m here, I try to call. I’m coming!
I reach out to him, but hawthorn leaves obstruct my way, rustling in a thickened wall of leaf flesh. I try to battle through, but the leaves multiply and multiply. I’m sobbing and struggling, caught up in the branches. Thorns pierce my hands, stab my face, tear my skin.
This is what I deserve, a voice says. I’m a bad person. I don’t deserve to live. No! It’s not my voice. Those are not my words. I don’t want to die. I want to live.
And then someone is saying my name over and over.
FORTY-NINE
Sam, September 2004
Cutting across woodland, squelching onto open ground, boggy with recent rain, he approaches the bench from the front instead of going past the hawthorn. He wants to be able to see it from a distance. He wants that advantage. After all these years, with no communication, he is afraid of disappointment. But he believes she’ll come.
When he looks up, shielding his eyes from the glare, gazing towards the top of the hill and the silhouette of the bench, he realises with a heart stutter that she’s there. He digs in with his toes and sprints up the steep slope, head down, arms pumping at his sides as if he’s in a race.
When he reaches the top of the rise, he understands that his eyes have tricked him. It’s a stranger sitting on the bench. A young woman with dark hair. In all his imaginings, he never once pictured another person on those wooden slats. He worried that Cat wouldn’t show. He thought of all the scenarios that might play out if she did come. But now this – this impostor, this trespasser, this young woman sitting just where Cat should be. It confuses him.
He’s panting, and he stands catching his breath, running a hand through his hair, pushing it off his forehead. The young woman is looking at him expectantly, as if she knows him. He glances at her again, at her neat features, her tanned skin – which looks odd under the flat autumn light – the loops of coloured beads around her neck, the clutch of silver bracelets at her wrists.
‘Sam?’ she asks.
And then he knows, he knows who this stranger is.
He sits beside her on the bench, gathering his scattered wits, trying to suppress the fear unravelling in the pit of his belly. ‘Grace?’
She nods, twisting her bracelets around.
‘Did … did Cat tell you about me?’ He keeps looking at her face, trying to read her expression. ‘Did she send you?’
‘No.’ Grace gives a small shake of her head. ‘I had no idea about … you and her. She never mentioned your name.’
‘Then … how …’
She picks something up from the bench beside her. A battered book with a blue cover. She rubs her hand over it. ‘Her diaries. They were in her bedroom. Two volumes. And after she … when she wasn’t there … I … I wanted to feel closer to her. So I read them.’ She fights to control her face. ‘Once, a long time ago, she read my diary.’
‘Hang on.’ He shakes his head. ‘After she … what?’ Fear slips from his control, surging through his body. He puts a hand over his mouth to stop himself crying out. Taking deep breaths, he manages, ‘Is she all right?’
‘It took me a while to find the bench,’ she says. ‘It’s described in the first diary.’ She hugs the book to her chest. ‘The hawthorn. The hill. The view. I worked it out in the end.’ She touches the back of the bench. ‘And then I read the inscription, and I knew it was the right one.’
‘Grace, please tell me what’s happened to Cat.’
She stares out at the view.
‘Grace?’
She startles, and looks at him as if remembering why she’s here. ‘It happened at the pond,’ she says. ‘She’d been swimming. She trod on … something sharp …’ She touches her mouth with a trembling hand. She doesn’t look at him, but out towards the horizon. ‘She was alone in the house. All alone …’ Her voice cracks. She gulps. ‘She got blood poisoning. Sepsis.’
‘What?’ Sam clutches at her arm. Grace looks startled; he withdraws his touch, clamps rigid fingers around his knees. ‘Where is she now?’ He speaks clearly. He understands that he needs to be gentle, even though he’s desperate for clarity.
‘Her friend Dougie found her. He was worried when she didn’t answer his calls. He alerted the police and they broke in.’ She’s crying, cheeks shiny with wet, snuffling and sniffing. She fumbles for a tissue in a pocket.
‘But … I don’t understand … Where was your father?’
She gives him a puzzled look. ‘They divorced. Years ago.’ She rubs her eyes. ‘I wasn’t here either. I was in Africa. She’d been alone for days …’
‘Where. Is. She. Now.’ He has to stop himself from shouting, from taking hold of her by the shoulders and shaking the
answer out.
Grace wipes her eyes and blows her nose. ‘She’s in the Royal Free.’
‘In hospital?’ He feels sick with relief.
‘She’s on an antibiotic drip. She had an operation. They saved her life. We thought … I thought she was going to die.’
Sam’s shoulders slump, his hands drop, dangling between his legs as he leans forward, staring at the leaves twisting and falling through the air. He feels as though he’s falling with them, weightless, fragile.
‘She was planning on coming here,’ Grace says. ‘To meet you. She wants to be with you. I read it in her diary. That’s why I’m here, to take you to her. She doesn’t know. I wanted it to be like … I don’t know … a surprise. A gift.’
He blinks away the tears stinging his eyes. ‘I thought you’d be angry,’ he says. ‘About us.’
‘It was a shock, at first. But it explained a lot of things. And after the divorce, she never wanted to meet anyone else. She was waiting for you. She loves you.’ Grace swallows a sob. ‘I know … I know what she did for me, what you both did for me. All those years apart from each other. Now I just want her to have the chance to … to live the right life.’
They stand up from the bench, Sam’s fingers trailing the sturdy wood, the engraved inscription.
Then they walk away, down the hill, towards the city, towards a bed on a ward in a hospital, and a woman who is waiting there.
FIFTY
Cat, September 2004
I am tethered to the bed by a drip in my arm; clear liquid slides into me, chasing away the poison, making me better. The ward is airless, windows sealed against the outside. There are five other women in here with me, breathing and moaning and chatting to each other. From my bed, I have a view of sky, empty of everything except clouds. The ward must be at the top of the hospital.
The first thing I asked when I came round from the operation two days ago was the date. The answer I was given made me let out a wail, and a nurse patted my hand. ‘You’ll feel better soon,’ she said. ‘You need to rest.’
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