by Eve Chase
At the first sight of it, that looming swampy green, all the blood rushes from my head. I try to concentrate on the road. But it’s getting closer and closer, filling the expanse of the windscreen, making my heart knock so hard in my chest it feels like it’s going to smash its way out. I’m struck by the irony of being in a place with so many trees, when I was born with no known family tree of my own.
“Mum, what you doing?”
I pull up at the side of the road, feeling an unstable slipping sensation, a foot on black ice.
“Mum, are you having a moment? A funny turn?”
I shake my head. It’s more like being hit by an asteroid. Or having a stroke. Christ. Am I old enough to have a stroke? When I peer at the trees ahead, I feel a dull tugging, dragging-down sensation, as if the forest has its very own dream logic and centripetal pull. “Long drive. I need some air.”
I wind down the window. The woody scent of bark and leaves. But also the ripe tang of decay.
“You’re scaring me. No offense.”
“It’s a proper forest, right? Sorry, I think I was expecting something more like Hampstead Heath. I’ve been in London too long. A toffee, please.” The sugar hit works. “Cured. Let’s go.”
“You sure? We don’t have to do this, Mum. I mean, I’d love to see the forest, but not if . . . Well, I guess it must be kind of weird.”
“Annie, do I look like a woman who is intimidated by some old trees?”
“Er, yeah.” And we both laugh. Only mine fades quickly. I suddenly remember how fearless I’d once been as a young girl, before I realized being discovered meant being abandoned. I think of the apple tree in my parents’ garden, how I’d climb it—small hands gripping, bare feet swinging upward, knowing every twist of twig, every eye and dimple on the bark, the joyous weightlessness of sitting in the upper branches, like a bird in its nest. What happened to that girl?
In the rearview mirror, the exit is no longer visible. Low, twisted branches scrape against the windows. I feel a tremor of panic, then awe.
The forest is monumental. Dwarfing. Disorienting. At the side of the road, the gouging scars of old mines. Tourist signs to caves. A knock-kneed heap of old railway tracks.
This is not a nurturing fairy glade or the twinkly arboretum Mum would describe to me as a child. Oh, no. This is a darker, wilder place. Indifferent to my survival. And I can’t help but wonder if it forged neural pathways into my kernel infant brain, like the veins in a leaf. As we drive, I imagine them flickering into life. I sort of like this idea. It also scares the crap out of me.
I can’t imagine this place has changed much since the seventies, only the world around it. Time no longer feels linear, but on a loop. I think about the body in the woods in the newspaper cuttings and wonder if forest noises are the best idea, after all. On the other hand, perhaps they’re perfect, just the sort of visceral shock Mum needs. Even if, right now, the shock is all mine.
We pull up in a car park. Startled birds explode from the trees. “You wanted to see your roots?” I say, getting out of the car and pointing to the thick toes of a nearby tree, hiding my nerves behind a joke.
Annie laughs. Her hair is dogwood red against the green. We walk, looking for “the right spot” to record for Mum. I’m astonished by it all. The enormous haggy yew. A yellow fungus protruding from a trunk, like a giant’s ear. Mud churned by the wild boars’ trotters. The earth is the color of rich bronzer and it stains my white trainers. I imagine the archaeological dig beneath my feet: poachers’ bullet cartridges; a steak knife with a criminal history; the skeleton of a baby who wasn’t as lucky as me. This forest could hide anything.
“Here,” I say, because I don’t want to go any farther. “Then we’ll go and find a cup of tea and some cake.”
“Shush. Don’t make a sound. One. Two.” Annie holds up her phone. She’s pinning so much hope on this that I don’t want to say anything negative. Long shot. “Recording.”
At first nothing. It takes a minute or so for our ears to tune in. Annie listens rapturously, like those YouTube clips of deaf people hearing for the first time. The drilling of a woodpecker. A twig breaking. The paper-bag rustle of leaves. I try to imagine the noises penetrating the oceanic deep of my mother’s brain, lighting up her synapses, like a shimmer of cognitive fluorescence. It suddenly feels unlikely, and my mood dips.
As we walk back to the car, Annie turns to face me. Her eyes are shining. “Aren’t you glad your biological mother had you? Even given what she did?”
I know this question is loaded, Annie’s way of justifying her own decision. But I can only be honest. “Well, yes. Otherwise there’d be no you, and I’d not even get to be a jostling atom in the universe, which would be pretty rubbish.”
“I’m glad too,” she says, and I squeeze her hand.
* * *
Casey’s Café is the only tearoom in Hawkswell, a village name I recognize from the newspaper cuttings. A small, slightly dingy establishment with a sun-faded stripy awning, it looks out at a village hall and a cobbled square. The small round tables are empty, apart from one old woman sitting beside the dimpled glass of the window, warming her hands on a metal teapot. She’s weathered and gray and oddly still, like she might have died in the chair a few hours ago and no one’s noticed. We sit at the table next to hers, avoiding the gloomier rear of the café. Annie giggles at the menu. “Oh my god, what’s lardy cake?”
“Sugar and lard, basically. No smashed avocado on toast here, Annie. Scones. Look. Can’t go wrong with scones. Let’s order them.”
The elderly lady on the opposite table squints at us suspiciously. When no waitress appears, I walk to the beaded curtained door that separates café from kitchen at the back. “Hello?”
An attractive woman in her sixties swishes out, dusting off her hands on a black apron, which hugs her curves and is embroidered with the name Casey. I notice that the kitchen is incongruously papered with old movie posters before the beaded curtains clatter shut. She writes down our order on a notepad with great care and reads it back to me with a softly burred accent. I assure her it’s correct—plain scones, not fruit, that’s right; cream, yes—and wonder how ordering scones can be quite so complicated, then turn back to the table.
I start. The old woman has Annie’s hand clutched in hers. Annie’s backed into her seat, horrified. I hurry over. “Is everything okay?”
Annie shoots a save-me look.
“She’s the spit! Looks just like her!” The woman’s eyes seem to swivel in their sockets, hectic in the leathery folds of her skin.
“I think there’s been some misunderstanding,” I say, gently removing the old woman’s hand from Annie’s.
Casey hurries over. “Leave my customers alone, eh?” she says to the woman, not unkindly. She rolls her eyes at me, as if to say, Don’t worry, the old dear does it all the time. “Let me help you to the door, love.” She affectionately takes the woman’s arm.
“But . . .” the woman protests indignantly.
“Here’s your walking stick. Careful. That’s it. We’ll see you same time tomorrow. Your pot of tea and egg sandwich will be ready and waiting. On the dot. As always.” She guides her out and mouths a smiling “Sorry” to Annie. She waves. “You enjoy the rest of your day now, Marge.”
But Marge doesn’t move. She stands on the other side of the window, staring at Annie, the swirled dimples in the glass distorting her baggy face, and something in me too. Only when the café owner smilingly shoos her away does Marge reluctantly turn and, hunched over, walking stick extended, tap her way down the darkening village street.
34
Rita
Marge ambushes Foxcote through the garden gate, armed with muddy stalks of broccoli, carrots from her veg patch, and a jar of pickles. Don quips, loud enough for Marge to hear, “Just as well my constitution’s been hardened on the Serengeti.”
Rita hol
ds her breath. Don’s soft in the head if he thinks messing with Marge is a good idea. Nor is it likely to help that he’s sunbathing on the lawn in swimming trunks that leave nothing to the imagination. The baby sleeps beside them, wearing a nappy, her soft pudding belly rising and falling. (In a forest small things grow quickly: Rita swears the baby gets bigger by the hour.)
“The child needs her blanket,” Marge says accusingly.
“Oh, dear. Has it got a bit nippy? There,” Jeannie says, quickly rectifying the situation. “Nice and cozy.”
But Marge is not looking at the baby now. She’s zoomed in to Jeannie and Don’s feet—their toes are just touching—and then, as if drawing an invisible line between them, the fading yellowy mark under Jeannie’s eye. Jeannie, sensing this perhaps, slips down her sunglasses, which were holding back her hair.
Too late, thinks Rita. Violence, after all, is proof Don is a lover, not a friend. What sort of friend smashes you in the face?
The broken veins on Marge’s cheeks blaze. She looks at Don with such frank loathing it makes Rita’s breath catch. It’s Teddy who saves them, leaping out of a tree and rolling across the lawn.
“Heavens,” says Jeannie, snatching up the baby. “Careful, Teddy.”
“Ah, man-cub.” Don grins approvingly. He nods up at a towering pine swaying on the other side of the garden wall. “Now go and climb that. Show us what you’re made of, Teddy.”
Rita grabs his hand and pulls him up. No way is he climbing that. “Come on, Teddy. Let’s see what Hera’s up to.”
“Don says—” protests Teddy.
“Don has no idea what he’s talking about,” says Marge, more pugnacious than ever.
Don lazily scratches his stomach. His nonchalance puts Rita on edge. Don, she’s quickly learning, is a man who can accelerate from docile charm to aggression in seconds, like his car.
“Do what Rita says. Inside, Teddy,” says Jeannie, glancing at Marge, silently imploring her to say no more.
“Doesn’t know trees.” Marge lifts her chin. She snorts. “Doesn’t know guns, neither.”
“I’ll let the hunted animal heads that adorn the walls of my Chelsea flat know.” His eyes are sparkling dangerously.
“That’s enough,” Jeannie whispers. She looks on the verge of tears.
Rita tightens her grip on Teddy’s hand and pulls him back to the house. Two days before Don leaves, and the question of the baby is settled. She’s started to pray that Marge is right and the Harringtons are able to adopt easily. The other prospect—the baby taken away, given to another family—is now too unbearable to think about.
“Is this a good time?” comes a voice from over the wall.
Something inside Rita clenches.
“Robbie!” calls Jeannie, clearly glad the fraught scene has been interrupted. She leaps up, smiling too brightly, baby over one shoulder. Her cotton dress sticks to the back of her legs. Even with Marge there, watching him like a hawk, Don grins at Jeannie’s bottom. “Do come in,” Jeannie calls out.
Rita can’t breathe. She’s unprepared for Robbie, especially in the company of others. She dreads Don saying something. And she looks awful. She’s got a spot on her chin, weepy and adolescent, and bags under her eyes.
Ever since Hera told her about the poor Harrington baby, alive when she left the Primrose Hill house, Rita’s moved through her domestic tasks in a disembodied daze, her body leaden, her mind fidgety. She’s witnessed a lot of dawns. She can’t even be sure that Hera, overtired and traumatized on the night of the birth, didn’t imagine the whole thing. Maybe she wanted to believe her little sister was alive so much that she saw movement that wasn’t there. Willed hope where there was none. Maybe Don wasn’t the baby’s father after all.
Nannies, she realizes, only get to peep inside a marriage—the contents of the bathroom bin, the conversations that spill under doors or stop suddenly when they enter the room—but they never really know. The Harrington marriage—and the family—is a huge intricate jigsaw, with too many missing pieces.
So many unanswered questions niggle. Does Jeannie know the newborn left the house alive? She suspects Jeannie was out cold and Walter persuaded the midwife to remove the distressing baby. She can imagine that, Walter being the controlling sort, especially if the baby was Don’s—unfortunately, this has begun to make a dreadful sense—and soon died at hospital. But why? Of what? No one’s ever explained it to her—and it’s not something she dare ask.
Irrationally, she feels she might have been able to help. After all, she knows the power of a surgeon’s stitches, the way they can mend the most broken and twisted of bodies: she has scars like coat zips, more metal pins and plates than a junkyard. Maybe it’s different with a newborn baby, she reasons, with its miniature body, the workings fragile as a tiny Swiss clock. Still, if she had been the mother, she’d have wanted to spend those last few minutes with her baby. She’d have kissed and hugged that poor doomed creature as it turned stiff and blue in her arms. It was still a dear human being. A tiny precious thing.
“What do you think, Rita?” Jeannie’s saying.
Rita startles, shocked that she’s still standing in the same spot on the lawn: her thoughts have traveled miles, yet only a second or two has passed. Everyone is staring at her oddly. She winds her scrambling mind back toward her, like a skein of wool. She blinks repeatedly. “Sorry?”
Don snaps his fingers and laughs. “And she’s back in the room.”
“Robbie was asking if we had any use for extra logs?” Jeannie frowns, puzzled by Rita’s absent expression.
“Go on, Rita. Give Robbie a hand bringing the logs in. I’ll take Teddy and keep him out of . . .”—Marge shoots an acidic glance at Don—“harm’s way.”
Stripes of sunlight stream through the gaps in the shed’s planks. The wood chips on the floor muffle the sound of their voices. She’s aware of him watching her as she moves logs from wheelbarrow to stack, then straightens and rubs her lower back, gracelessly, catching the tang of her own sweat. She seems to spend half her life bent over changing mats and she aches, the curse of the tall girl. “Well, that’s it, I think,” she says. “We’ll not freeze in our beds this last week of August.”
He looks slightly sheepish and fights a smile.
From the garden, Rita can hear the baby starting to whinge. Calling for her. The sound travels right under her skin, as it’s always done. She moves toward the door and reaches for the rusty latch.
“The thing is . . .”—he takes a breath—“I just wanted an excuse to come round and speak to you in private.”
The temperature in the woodshed rises. She colors. The conversation suddenly feels almost unbearably intense. “Oh, right,” she says, struggling to sound casual. “Why?”
“I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but you look a bit . . . a bit . . . trapped here. At Foxcote, I mean. Not in the shed.” He grins, and her stomach swoops. “You’re free to leave the shed at any time.”
Rita lets go of the latch and studies the floor, scared she’ll give herself away. Her mouth is dry and, for some odd reason, tastes of burned toast. Trapped, yes. It feels like she’s caught in the air bubble inside a heavy glass paperweight. She looks up with a small frown. “Have you been spying on us, Robbie?”
“Spying?” He looks so baffled by her question—and hurt—that Rita immediately realizes that if someone is secretly watching them, it’s not Robbie.
“Doesn’t matter.” She feels bad. Presses her lips together. “Sorry.”
He steps a little closer. She catches the exertion of the log-lifting on him too, a salty musk. He smells exciting. Robbie lowers his voice. “Look, you don’t need to tell me nothing. About what’s going on. I don’t want to put you in a position, Rita.” He pauses. She fights the urge to tell him everything. “But you don’t look happy, that’s all I care about.” He fixes her with his warm direct gaze. “
And . . . and you should be. You deserve to be happy, Rita.”
She bows her head, unable to hold that gaze because if she does she knows she’ll start to cry, like you do when people are unexpectedly kind and understand deep unknowable things about you without being told. “I’m dog-tired, Robbie, that’s all,” she mutters.
“You must be exhausted,” he says, with such feeling it’s almost as though he’s moving around under her skin, and this makes her feel exposed and vulnerable, in a way she never was with Fred. “You don’t like this forest much, do you?”
She looks up. Her pupils are dilated, black and huge. “It’s beautiful, Robbie. But it’s not home.”
His Adam’s apple rises and falls. “And never could be?” The question lands softly, devastatingly.
She realizes she can’t see his shortness anymore, those missing crucial few inches. When she looks into his earth-brown eyes, they seem completely level to her own. And she wants to say, Yes, I could live here, maybe, just to see what he’ll say next, what unexpected course the conversation might take. But it’d be an insult to lead such a good man on. She couldn’t do it. “I don’t think so.”
They stand there in silence, digesting their fundamental incompatibility, letting it settle around them.
“We go back to London in a few days. For the new school term.” It sounds unbelievable even to her. She feels like she’s been at Foxcote for centuries, that she’s morphed into someone else here. Will she really soon be pushing Teddy on a swing in Regent’s Park? Feeding the fat London ducks?
“I could still cook you dinner tonight?” he suggests, his opportunistic cheekiness defying the somber mood.
“Dinner?” She laughs. She can’t actually imagine having dinner with Robbie. In her mind, he forages for berries and traps rabbit and eats it raw, with the fur still on. “The thing is . . .”