by Kate Morton
Dorothy Nicolson recognised Greenacres as the place to raise her family the first instant she saw it. She wasn’t supposed to be looking for a house. The war had only been over a few years, they’d no capital to speak of, and her mother-in-law had graciously consented to rent them a room in her own establishment (in exchange for ongoing duties, of course—she wasn’t a charity!). Dorothy and Stephen were only supposed to be out for a picnic.
It was a rare free day in the middle of July. They woke at the crack of dawn, tossed a basket and rug on the backseat, and then pointed the Morris Minor west; no further plans than to follow whichever country lane took their fancy. This they did for some time—her hand on his leg, his arm slung round her shoulders, warm air flowing through the open windows—and so they might have continued had the tyre not sprung a leak.
But it did, and so instead they slowed the car, pulling onto the side of the road to inspect the damage. There it was, plain as day: a rogue nail protruding from the rubber, a comprehensive puncture.
They were young though, and in love, and they didn’t often have free time together, so the day wasn’t spoiled as it other-wise might have been. While her husband fixed the tyre, Doro-thy wandered up the grassy hill, looking for a flat spot to spread the picnic rug. And that’s when she crested the rise and saw Greenacres farmhouse.
None of this was supposition on Laurel’s part. The Nicolson children all knew the story of Greenacres’ acquisition by heart. The sceptical old farmer scratching his head when Dorothy knocked on his door, the birds nesting in the parlour fireplace as the farmer poured tea, the holes in the floor with planks laid across them like narrow bridges. Most importantly, no one was in any doubt as to their mother’s immediate certainty that she must live in this place.
The house, she’d explained to them many times, had spoken to her; she’d listened and it turned out they’d understood one another very well indeed. Greenacres was a cantankerous old lady, a little worn, to be sure, cranky in her own way—but who wouldn’t be? The deterioration, Dorothy could tell, concealed a great former dignity. The house was proud and she was lonely, the sort of place that fed on children’s laughter, and a family’s love, and the smell of rosemary lamb roasting in the oven. She had good, honest bones and a willingness to look forwards rather than backwards, to welcome a new family and grow with them, to embrace their brand new traditions. It struck Laurel now, as it hadn’t before, that her mother’s description of the house might have been a self-portrait.
Laurel wiped her feet on the mat and stepped inside. The floor-boards creaked familiarly, the furniture was all where it should be, and yet the place felt different. The air was thick and there was a smell that wasn’t usually there. It was stale, she realised, and that was understandable— the house had been closed up since Dorothy went into hospital. Rose came to take care of things whenever her grandchild-minding schedule allowed it, and her husband Phil did what he could, but nothing compared with the constancy of habitation. It was unsettling, Laurel thought, suppressing a shiver, how quickly a person’s presence could be erased, how easily civilisation gave way to wilderness.
She counselled herself not to be so bloody cheerless and added her bags, from habit, to the pile beneath the hall table. She went then unthinkingly to the kitchen. It was the place where homework had been done and sticking plasters applied and tears cried over broken hearts; the first place anyone ever went when they came home. Rose and Iris were already there.
Rose flicked the light switch by the fridge and the wiring hummed. She rubbed her hands together brightly. ‘Shall I make us all some tea?’
‘Can’t think of anything better,’ said Iris, lining up her court shoes and stretching her black stockinged toes back and forth like an impatient ballet dancer.
‘I brought wine,’ said Laurel.
‘Except that. Forget the tea.’
While Laurel fetched a bottle from her suitcase, Iris took down glasses from the dresser. ‘Rose?’ She held one aloft, blinking sharply over the top of her cat’s eye frames. Her eyes were the same dark grey as her bobbed hair.
‘Oh,’ Rose worried her watch face back and forth, ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s only just gone five.’
‘Come now, Rosie, dear,’ said Laurel, digging through a drawer of vaguely sticky cutlery for a bottle opener. ‘It’s full of antioxidants, you know.’ She retrieved the opener and pressed her tacky fingertips together. ‘Practically a health food.’
‘Well … all right.’
Laurel drew out the cork and started pouring. Habit had her lining up the glasses to make sure the amount was even across all three. She smiled when she caught herself—talk about a reversion to childhood. Iris would be pleased, at any rate. Fairness might be the great sticking point for all siblings, but it was an obsession for those in the middle: ‘Stop counting, little flower,’ their mother used to say. ‘Nobody likes a girl who always expects more than the others.’
‘Just a tipple, Lol,’ said Rose cautiously. ‘I don’t want to be on my ear before Daphne gets here.’
‘You’ve heard from her then?’ Laurel handed the fullest glass to Iris. ‘Just before we left the hospital—didn’t I say? Honestly, my memory! She’ll be here by six, traffic permitting.’
‘I suppose I should think about putting something together for dinner then,’ said Iris, opening the pantry and kneeling on a stool to inspect the use-by dates. ‘It’ll be toast and tea if I leave it up to you two.’ ‘I’ll help,’ said Rose.
‘No, no,’ Iris waved her away without turning around, ‘There’s no need.’
Rose glanced at Laurel who handed over a glass of wine and gestured towards the door. There was no point in arguing. It was enshrined in family law: Iris always cooked, she always felt put upon, the others let her savour the martyrdom because that was the sort of small kindness accorded between sisters.
‘Well, if you insist,’ said Laurel, gurgling a tad more pinot into her own glass.
While Rose headed upstairs to check that Daphne’s room was in order, Laurel took her wine outside. The earlier rain had washed the air clean and she drew a deep breath. The garden swing caught her eye and she sat down on its bench, using her heels to rock it slowly back and forth. The swing had been a gift from all of them on their mother’s eightieth birthday and she’d declared immediately that it must live beneath the big old oak. No one had pointed out that there were other places in the garden with prettier views. The outlook might have struck an outsider as little more than an empty meadow, but the Nicolsons all understood its blandness was illusory. Somewhere out there amongst the shifting blades of grass was the spot upon which their father had dropped and died.
Memory was a slippery thing. Laurel’s memory put her here in this very spot that afternoon, hand raised to block the sun from her teenage eyes as she scanned the meadow, waiting for a glimpse of him returning from a day’s work; waiting to run down, hook her arm through his and walk with him back to the house. Her memory had her watching as he strode across the grass; as he stopped to watch the setting sun, to register the pink lining of the clouds, to say, as he always did, Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; as his body stiffened and he gasped; as his hand went to his chest; as he stumbled and fell.
But it hadn’t been like that. When it happened she’d been on the other side of the world, fifty-six rather than sixteen and dressing for an awards ceremony in LA, wondering whether she’d be the only person there whose face hadn’t been shored up with fillers and a good old dose of botulism. She’d been none the wiser about her father’s death until Iris called and left a message on her phone.
No, it was another man she’d watched fall and die one sunny afternoon when she was sixteen.
Laurel struck a match and lit her cigarette, frowning at the horizon as she fumbled the box back into her pocket. The house and garden were sunlit, but the distant fields, beyond the meadow and closer to the woods, were shadowing. She glanced upwards, past the wrought- iron top of the swing seat to
where the tree-house floor was visible between patches of leaves. The ladder was still there too, pieces of wood nailed to the trunk, a few hanging crooked now. Someone had draped a strand of glittery pink and purple beads from the end of one; one of Rose’s grandchildren she supposed.
Laurel had climbed down very slowly that day.
She drew deeply on her cigarette, remembering. She’d come to with a gasp in the tree house and recalled immediately the man, the knife, her mother’s terrified face, and then she’d scrambled to the ladder.
When she’d reached the ground, she’d stood clutching the rung in front of her with both hands, resting her forehead against the tree’s rough trunk, safe in the still quiet of the moment, unsure where to go or what to do next. Absurdly, the thought had come that she should head for the stream, catch up with her sisters and baby brother, her father with his clarinet and his bemused smile …
Perhaps that was when she noticed she could no longer hear them.
She’d headed for the house instead, eyes averted, bare feet picking along the hot stone path. There was an instant when her glance skittered sideways and she thought she noticed something large and white by the garden bed, something that shouldn’t be there, but she bowed her head and glimpsed away and went faster, fuelled by the wildly childish hope that maybe if she didn’t look and didn’t see, she could reach the house, jump across the threshold, and everything would continue on as normal.
She was in shock, of course, but it hadn’t felt that way. She’d been buffered by a preternatural calm, was wearing a cloak, a magic cloak that let her slip outside real life, like the person in a fairy tale who exists off the page and arrives to find the castle sleeping. She’d stopped to pick up the hoop from the ground, before she continued inside.
The house was eerily quiet. The sun had slipped behind the roof and the entrance hall was dark. She waited by the open doorway for her eyes to adjust. There was a sputtering sound as the iron drainpipes cooled, a noise that signified summer and holidays and long warm twilights with moths fluttering around the lamps.
She looked up the carpeted staircase and knew somehow that her sisters weren’t there. The hall clock ticked away the seconds and she wondered, briefly, whether they were all gone—Ma, Daddy and the baby too—and she’d been left alone with whatever it was beneath that white sheet out there. The thought sent a tremor down her spine. And then a thump came from the sitting room, and she turned her head, and there was her father standing by the unlit fireplace. He was curiously rigid, one hand by his side, the other balled in a fist upon the wooden mantel as he said, ‘For God’s sake, my wife is lucky to be alive.’
A man’s voice came from off-stage, somewhere beyond the doorway where Laurel couldn’t see him: ‘I appreciate that, Mr. Nicolson, just as I hope you’ll appreciate that we’re only doing our job.’
Laurel tiptoed closer, stopping before she reached the spilled light creeping through the open doorway. Her mother was in the armchair, cradling the baby in her arms. He was asleep; Laurel could see his cherubic profile, his plump cheek squashed up flat against her mother’s shoulder.
There were two other men in the room, a balding fellow on the sofa and a young man by the window taking notes. Police-men, she realised. Of course they were policemen. Something terrible had happened. The white sheet in the sunny garden.
The older man said, ‘Did you recognise him, Mrs Nicolson? Is he someone you’ve met before? Someone you’ve seen, even from a distance?’
Laurel’s mother didn’t answer, at least not so anyone could hear. She was whispering against the back of the baby’s head, her lips moving softly against his fine hair. Daddy spoke loudly on her behalf. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘As she told you before, she’d never laid eyes on him. If you ask me, you ought to be comparing his description to that fellow in the papers, the one who’s been bothering picnickers.’
‘We’ll be following all leads, Mr Nicolson, you can be sure of that. But right now there’s a dead body in your garden and only your wife’s word as to how it got there.’
Daddy bristled. ‘That man attacked my wife. It was self-defence.’ ‘Did you see it happen, Mr Nicolson?’
There was a note of impatience in the older policeman’s voice and it made Laurel frightened. She took a step back-wards. They didn’t know she was there. There was no need for them to find out. She could creep away, keep on up the stairs, mind not to hit the creaky floorboard, curl up tightly on her bed. She could leave them to the mysterious machinations of the adult world and let them find her when they’d finished; let them tell her everything was fixed—
‘I said, were you there, Mr Nicolson? Did you see it happen?’
- but Laurel was drawn to the room, its lamp-lit contrast to the darkened hall, its strange tableau, the aura of importance that her father’s tense voice, his stance, projected. There was a streak inside her, there always had been, that demanded inclusion, that sought to help when help had not been asked for, that loathed to sleep for fear of missing out.
She was in shock. She needed company. She couldn’t help herself. Whatever the case—
Laurel stepped from the wings and into the middle of the scene. ‘I was there,’ she said. ‘I saw him.’
Daddy looked up, surprised. He glanced quickly at his wife and then back to Laurel. His voice sounded different when he spoke, husky and hurried and almost like a hiss. ‘Laurel, that’s enough.’
All eyes were upon her: Ma’s, Daddy’s, those of both the other men. The next lines, Laurel knew, were very important. She avoided her father’s gaze and started. ‘The man came round the house. He tried to grab the baby.’ He had, hadn’t he? She was sure that’s what she’d seen. Daddy frowned. ‘Laurel—’
She went faster now, determinedly. (And why not? She wasn’t a child, slinking off to her bedroom and waiting for the adults to patch things up: she was one of them; she had a part to play; she was important.) The spotlight brightened and Laurel met the older man’s eyes.
‘There was a struggle. I saw it. The man attacked my mother and then … and then, he fell down.’
Nobody spoke for a minute. Laurel looked at her mother, who was no longer whispering to the baby, but staring over his head at some point beyond Laurel’s shoulder. Someone had made tea. Laurel would remember that detail through all the years to follow. Someone had made tea but no one had drunk it. The cups sat untouched on tables around the room, one on the windowsill too. The hall clock ticked.
Finally, the balding man shifted on the sofa and cleared his throat. ‘Laurel, is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Daddy breathed out, a great stream of air, the sound of a deflating balloon. His hand gestured in Laurel’s direction and he said, ‘My daughter.’ He sounded defeated. ‘My eldest.’
The man on the sofa regarded her, then his lips pulled into a smile that was a duty and didn’t reach his eyes. He said, ‘I think you’d better come in, Laurel. Sit down and start from the beginning. Tell us everything you saw.’
Five
LAUREL TOLD the policeman the truth. She sat down cautiously on the other end of the sofa, waited for her father’s reluctant encouragement, and then she began to recount her afternoon. Everything she’d seen, just as it had happened. She’d been reading in the tree house and then she’d stopped to watch the man’s approach.
Why were you watching him? Was there something unusual about him? The policeman’s tone and expression gave no hint as to his expectation.
Laurel frowned, anxious to remember every detail and prove herself a worthy witness. Yes, she thought perhaps there was. It wasn’t that he’d run or shouted or behaved in an otherwise obvious way, but he’d nonetheless been … she glanced at the ceiling, trying to conjure just the right word … he’d been sinister. She said it again, pleased by the word’s aptness. He’d been sinister and she’d been frightened. No, she couldn’t have said why, precisely, she just was.
Did she think what happened later might have shaded her
first impression? Made something ordinary seem more dangerous than it really was?
No, she was sure. There’d definitely been something scary about him.
The younger policeman scribbled in his notebook. Laurel exhaled. She didn’t dare look sideways at her parents for fear she’d lose her nerve.
And when he reached the house? What happened next?
He crept around the corner, much more carefully than an ordinary visitor would—sneakily—and then my mother came out with the baby.
Was she carrying him?
Yes.
Was she carrying anything else?
Yes.
What was it?
Laurel bit the inside of her cheek, remembering the flash of silver. She was carrying the birthday knife.
You recognised the knife?
We use it for special occasions. It has a red ribbon tied around the handle.
Still no change in the policeman’s demeanour, though he waited a beat before continuing. And then what happened?
Laurel was ready. Then the man attacked them.
A small niggling doubt surfaced, like a shimmer of sunlight obscuring the detail in a photograph, as Laurel described the man lurching towards the baby. She hesitated a moment, gazing at her knees as she struggled to see the action in her mind. And then she went on. The man had reached for Gerry, she remembered that, and she was sure he’d had both hands out in front, making to snatch her brother from their mother’s arms. That’s when she’d swung Gerry to safety. And then the man had grabbed at the knife, he’d tried to take it for himself and there’d been a struggle …
And then?
The young policeman’s pen scratched against his paper as he wrote down everything she’d said so far. The sound was loud and Laurel was hot, the room had grown warmer, surely. She wondered why Daddy didn’t open a window.
And then?
Laurel swallowed. Her mouth was dry. And then my mother brought the knife down.