‘I just don’t … I mean, why did this happen to them? I don’t know why.’
‘No,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘Neither do I.’
* * *
‘It was a beautiful service.’
We were in Eden Gardens, drinking from rented glasses in the public garden. I was facing an earnest young couple in black. The girl, Sonia, had worked for a while in the café before leaving for uni. I’d never met her before.
‘Thank you,’ I said. It was easy to do – I was numb and cold and utterly alone, even in this throng of kindly people, in a chemical cloud of alcohol and Valium and wretchedness. I was a waxwork Sophia, poised with my glass. My reply sounded thin and reedy, as though someone else were reading my responses out through a cheap loudspeaker. ‘And thank you for coming.’
‘Sophia,’ Kayleigh, Rowan’s other half, appeared at my elbow, gently clasping it in one hand. ‘Someone’s asking to see you.’
I nodded and smiled at Sonia – it must have been a rictus, but she took it in good part – then Kayleigh was leading me back to the house. Her round cheerful face was pinched with discomfort. ‘They just arrived …’
‘Who?’ I asked, though I didn’t really care.
We were already up the steps to the house, moving into the hallway. Two elderly people I didn’t recognize were standing there, dressed in muted black. The woman hunched around the jacket bundled in her arms, as though the very walls could reach out and touch her somehow. Her cheeks were scored with deep downward lines, as though she had been carved from some pale warped wood, and her escort was a tall thin old man with a round beer belly and a tiny, bitter slit of a mouth.
I paused on the doorstep.
‘Sophia?’ asked the woman. Her teeth were yellowing, her grey hair tinted the colour of steel.
There was something here, some barely suppressed intensity that I didn’t understand. They both made me feel distinctly uneasy.
‘Yes?’ I asked.
‘I’m Estella – Nina’s mother. Your grandmother.’
This I had not expected.
Several conflicting emotions overtook me. I had never met these people before in my life. They’d fallen out with my parents, or more correctly my dad, at some point shortly after my birth, and that was that.
‘Your grandmother,’ she repeated.
At her shoulder the man blinked at me. ‘We’re Nina’s parents,’ he said, with a brusqueness borne of embarrassment, I sensed. It appeared to be an emotion he had trouble processing as little red spots appeared on his cheeks. ‘What part don’t you understand?’
I just stared at him.
‘Thomas.’ The word was a short, staccato bark. Estella’s black gaze flashed at him.
He subsided, though his eyes darted about. I think he was someone not used to being at a loss.
I considered them for a long moment. As self-absorbed as I was in my misery, it struck me suddenly that they had lost their daughter, and most horribly, before they’d had a chance to make up after that long-ago quarrel.
I had no idea what their quarrel was about – my mum would only tell me that they didn’t like Daddy. But there was always a kind of strained, stretched tone in her voice when she talked about them, and from this and various half-remembered stories she told about her youth, I got the impression that they were not very kind people.
‘I see.’ Kayleigh let go of my elbow as I tried to compose myself. I couldn’t just stand there staring at them; I had to say something. ‘I’m afraid you missed the service.’
‘Yes, we know,’ muttered Thomas, looking about in disapproval.
My grandmother’s hand came up, the knuckles grazing his chest, as though warding him back, very gently, but it was enough. His bitter little mouth shut and his gaze dropped.
‘We just came to let you know how terribly sorry we are that you’ve lost your mother.’ Something trembled then, at the very corner of her eyes, but she mastered it. ‘Thomas and I think you … you perhaps have questions, about us and the rest of the family. With Nina gone …’ She paused for a second, as if it had only just occurred to her that it might be true. ‘With Nina gone, perhaps we have questions, too.’
I didn’t know what to say, but I nodded through my sedated fug.
She nodded back, as though relieved, as though we had come to some agreement. ‘I’d like us to meet. Not here, not now – I know you have things to organize – but soon.’
I nodded again.
‘Take this, and when you’re ready, call us.’ She reached into her black patent leather handbag and removed a card from a silver case. ‘We need to talk about the house in any event.’
‘The house?’ I blinked at her.
Thomas looked about to speak then, but once more the hand came up.
‘It’s not important now,’ she said. ‘But we do need to talk at some point, Sophia.’
She came forward, and as I realized what she was about to do, I nearly flinched, but managed to master myself while she kissed me decorously on the cheek, smelling of face powder and some heavy perfume that hung around her like a wreath of lilies.
She pressed the card into my hand firmly, then slipped her arm through Thomas’s.
‘Till then, dear,’ she said.
Just like that they left, and I was too surprised and dazed to even say goodbye, leaving all that to Kayleigh, who seemed to understand.
I glanced down at the neat, mint-green card. ‘Mrs Estella Mackenzie, The Gables, Pinsworth, Oxfordshire’ was printed in a faux-cursive script across it.
I dropped it on the windowsill near the front door, on top of a pile of unopened post.
* * *
‘Amity Studio.’ She sounds as she always does – endlessly poised and utterly disengaged.
‘Hello, Olympia,’ I said.
It was August, and the heat had moved from pleasant to stifling. The plants in Eden Gardens wilted around me despite Rowan’s best efforts. He told me there was talk of a hosepipe ban.
‘Oh, hello – who is this?’
‘It’s Sophia Mackenzie.’ I dug at a stain on the kitchen table with my thumbnail, feeling it scrape across the distressed wood.
‘Oh … Sophia, sorry, of course.’ She didn’t sound sorry. I had a bad, uneasy feeling. I hadn’t been back to Amity for nine days. ‘We were so sorry to hear …’ She lowered her voice to an almost pantomime whisper. ‘How are you?’
I had no answer, because I had no idea how I was. In front of me, the faintly rusting wind chimes hanging over the kitchen window twirled infinitesimally slowly, though I’d no idea what could be moving them as there hadn’t been a breeze in days. A single drop of sweat was crawling down over my collarbone, and I crushed my shirt to my skin to catch it.
‘Thanks – I’m getting by,’ I replied.
‘Oh it must be awful,’ she said.
‘Well …’ I said. ‘Yes.’ I paused, derailed. ‘Look, Olympia, sorry, but I have to get back to the hospital soon and see my dad. I need to speak to James. Is he in?’
This request elicited a long moment of silence.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Sure. Just let me see if he’s available.’
With a click I was on hold, and my uneasy feeling intensified. A few seconds passed, punctuated by gentle double beeps, and I glanced down to see I’d gouged the varnish from the table with my nail.
I stopped, balling the offending hand into a fist.
Another click.
‘Sorry, Sophia, he’s busy with a client at the moment. Can I get him to ring you back?’
This was the third such message I had left in four days.
‘Thanks,’ I said, ceding defeat. ‘But it’s OK. I’ll email him.’
‘If you’re sure,’ she said, and there was a tension underlying her bright tones. ‘We’re all thinking of you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. I was sure that was true. ‘Speak to you soon.’
She hung up with a quick clatter, and in it I sensed her relief.
I wrote an email
to James, the managing partner, updating him on the situation.
I had been given seven days off work when I phoned in with the news of my mum’s death and the harrowing circumstances surrounding it. They had delayed my presentation of the plans for the visitors’ centre to Scottish Heritage, which should have taken place last week, but this had been granted with poor grace.
I had wanted to reschedule for later in August to give me more preparation time, but nothing came back from the office except hazy mutterings about the client having problems setting a date.
I had a bad feeling about the vague yet intransigent tone of these emails – nobody actually phoned me, and when I phoned them nobody was in or they were too busy to talk to me.
One word kept running through my head while I considered all this – Benjamin.
Looking through the email correspondence with the client, his name had suddenly cropped up in a truncated part of an email I hadn’t been cc’d into, but which the project manager had unwittingly forwarded to me earlier when I’d asked for clarification of who would be at the presentation. In it, Benjamin described himself as ‘caretaker for the project while Sophia is “indisposed” ’.
He hadn’t shown the slightest interest in the project while I’d been working on it, and anyway his area was corporate architecture, not leisure and heritage like mine.
Normally I would be challenging all of this, but I was exhausted, heartsick and too overwhelmed to indulge in the luxury of anger or self-defence. Besides, he was one of James’s favourites, and much more senior than me at Amity.
The only way to resist successfully was for the presentation to blow them all out of the water. Somehow, I had to find the strength to do just that.
* * *
Dad was not getting any better. In fact, every day he looked more sallow, more drawn, as if the infection was devouring him from the inside out.
I left him at eight o’clock. It was still daylight as I reached the front door of the house and pulled out the keys. I was so dispirited I had to try three times to open the door.
I shuffled into the damp landing with its sour, mouldy smell, which the hot weather didn’t seem to be helping. I moved off towards the kitchen, switching on the light, and put my handbag down on the table.
Lying in the middle in a rusting wire basket was some new post. Rowan must have brought it in for me – he’d always had a key to our house.
There were two letters. One was from the water company, with some terrifying figure on the bottom in red and a threat to cut us off in capital letters. I threw it back in the basket.
The second was in a white envelope. I turned it over and saw an embossed address – Paracelsus Press, with an office somewhere in Clerkenwell.
I tore it open. Inside, there was a single sheet of high-quality paper.
Dear Nina,
Thanks so much for your note, which I was very excited to receive.
Do let me know when is a good time for me to come up to Suffolk and read the completed Morningstar manuscript. I can’t tell you how much we are looking forward to seeing it!
Any questions, just ring me.
Best wishes,
Max Clarke
Senior Editor
So my mum had finally written a book, the one thing my dad and I had been convinced would never happen.
It had even found a publisher.
I read the letter – once, twice – then burst into tears.
Chapter Four
‘Hello, I was hoping to speak to Max Clarke.’
It was the following morning, Tuesday, and the torpid heat continued unabated. I was sitting inside Eden Gardens’ café and my head ached.
I’d spent hours going through the old, rumbling freezers and cupboards, throwing bags of frozen food, stale flour and rotting root vegetables into the bins outside – I hadn’t been able to decipher my mum’s system of stock rotation and nothing she’d prepared herself was marked with dates. The last thing we needed, with the business so parlous and short-staffed, was to poison someone.
Serving in the café had been one of my chores since my earliest memories, my mum hovering over the pots in the background, filling the tea urns, sometimes humming the latest pop tunes to herself while I ferried plates back and forth to the dishwasher. If I’d been very good, she would give me a sliver of cake, which I would wolf down at one of the tables while she cleared away the Tupperware boxes of salads and garnishes lying out on the work table.
My own, very average aubergine and coconut curry bubbled away in the background on the wonky stove with the same broken hob that had given up the ghost in 2008 and never been fixed. The plan was to sell this concoction to visitors as the Special of the Day, but a cursory tasting a few minutes ago had thrown doubts on this scheme.
The minute the clock struck nine I picked up the phone.
‘Who’s calling, please?’ replied a female voice, cultured yet brusque. Paracelsus Press had clearly sourced their receptionist from the same factory where Amity got Olympia.
‘Hi,’ I said, scratching anxiously at the back of my neck. ‘My name is Sophia Mackenzie. I’m calling on behalf of my mother.’
‘I see, and what’s it in connection with?’
‘A book my mother submitted to your company.’
‘I see.’ There was a wary note in her voice, as though this was a ruse I’d constructed to get round her vigilance. ‘And what was the name of the book?’
I groped through my mind for a minute, the name forgotten. But then, in a flash, it came to me. ‘Morningstar.’
There was a profound silence for one, then two beats.
‘Oh, of course. I’ll put you through now, Ms Mackenzie.’
A click, and then:
‘Hello? Nina?’
He was young – I could tell that immediately – and he had a slight accent I couldn’t identify beneath his smooth London media patina.
‘No, I’m sorry, I’m not Nina,’ I said. ‘I’m her daughter, Sophia.’
‘Sophia? This is Sophia I’m talking to?’
‘Um, yes,’ I said, disconcerted. Why was he asking after me as though he knew of me? ‘Listen, I got your letter.’
‘My letter … you did?’
‘Um, yes. Are you sitting down …? I mean, I’m afraid I have some bad news. About my mother.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I …’ I didn’t even know how to begin. Before I’d picked up the phone, I’d decided I would cut to the chase, but it wasn’t working out that way. ‘You see …’ Just come out and say it. ‘My mother’s dead.’
Silence. No, not complete silence. I could hear him breathing. Just about.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said after a few moments. ‘I know it’s a shock.’
‘Uh … no, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I had no idea. Um, how did …’
‘She … well, she …’ No. I will not weep. Or at least I’ll get this over with first. ‘I’m afraid the police think she killed herself.’
I’d thought the silence before had been profound.
‘Killed herself?’
I didn’t reply. Sometimes you just have to let people absorb things. I was discovering this for myself.
‘B-but that’s … I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘No. Neither do I.’
‘I mean … She’d just … she was so excited about the book. About Morningstar. We’d been talking about the manuscript for the last six months …’
Six months? Where had I heard that recently?
‘I … I have to confess, I had no idea she would ever get around to writing a book.’ I felt light-headed. ‘So you’ve read it? What’s it like? What’s it about?’
‘Well,’ he said, and I sensed a pulling back, an equivocation, in him. ‘I’ve got to be honest – I haven’t seen the completed manuscript yet.’
‘No?’ A little shiver of disappointment, of sadness, went through me. Perhaps there was no book. Perhaps my dad was right; she could only talk abou
t it, not actually do it. Perhaps …
‘… But I’ve certainly seen the notebooks.’
‘Notebooks?’
‘Yes. The manuscript existed in the form of handwritten notebooks. Nina wouldn’t let me make copies, but once we’d talked on the phone a few times I came up to Suffolk in person and met her in a café in Southwold. I read the first two while she waited, and I was very excited by them. I immediately made an offer for the whole thing once it was complete. She wrote to me a fortnight ago to let me know she’d finished the final third. She said she’d start putting them all together into a single manuscript.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ I said, my head spinning. ‘My mum always said that she wanted to write a memoir.’
‘That’s right. Morningstar is a memoir.’
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I pictured Mum in this very room, placing the menus on the table, wiping the counter with a ragged cloth, that tiny half-smile on her face. In my memories she was always here, always in Eden Gardens. ‘I loved my mother dearly but …’ It felt like treachery to say it, but still. ‘Why would you be excited by a book about her life?’
Silence fell, and within it I sensed an enormous surprise.
‘You don’t know … you don’t know about her time at Morningstar?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t even know what Morningstar means. What is it?’
‘Sophia – may I call you Sophia?’
I shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘Do you have any idea where the notebooks are now?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, they’re not in the house, as far as I know. The police—’
‘Have you looked?’ Those chummy tones had grown sharp – I’d alarmed him.
‘I’ve spent the past two weeks going through their things. I haven’t seen anything that looks like handwritten notebooks.’
‘I mean,’ and he sounded faintly desperate, ‘you might not have recognized them for what they were. Would your father know, perhaps?’
I swallowed hard. ‘Maybe, but, um, I’m afraid he was very badly injured during the, er, incident, and … well, he’s in a coma now. It’s not clear if he’ll wake up.’
I shut my mouth with a click, trying to squelch my oncoming tears. I can’t start crying every time I discuss this with strangers. They can’t help and it doesn’t help me – all it does is make them feel wretched and uncomfortable, which only compounds my own misery.
Everything Is Lies Page 4