by Eve Chase
“Christ, no. You’ve done it once. You’ve got the woodland noises for Mum.” She doesn’t say they’ve not had any impact other than to cheer up the nurses. But I know she’s thinking it. “Don’t be a nutter and go back! Not when you’re in such a tizz, Sylv.”
“I’m not in a tizz,” I huff. I am in a tizz.
“It’s that bloody woman again. Elliot’s mother and her terrariums. She’s thrown you,” Caroline says. My pulse quickens at the mention of Helen and the eerie sight of the terrarium collection in her conservatory. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
I don’t answer.
“Knew it. It’s a coincidence, I’ll give you that. But these things are fashionable, aren’t they? Terrariums, I mean. Not coincidences. Did you mention someone gave one to Mum?”
“No.” A reluctance to share the private pain of Mum’s situation stopped me. A fear of Helen’s indifference. Or, worse, sympathy. The possibility I might break down. “We were there to talk Annie and Elliot business.”
“Bet that was fun.”
“Indeed.”
Caroline laughs. After that, an easier silence stretches between us, the comforting kind when you simply listen to the person you love, thousands of miles away, breathing. “Please don’t go back to the forest,” she says, breaking the silence. “Sisters’ proper promise you won’t?”
The mobile feels very hot against my ear. I feel really bad. “Too late. I’m sorry, Caro.”
“Sylvie. Where the hell are you?”
“Casey’s Café in Hawkswell.” I lower my voice. “And that old lady, the one I told you about—bit mad with a stick, remember? Marge. Here she comes. Caroline, I’ve got to go.”
I hang up on my sister’s protestations. I flick the phone to silent. Needs must.
On time, Marge crumples down at the adjacent table, like a brown-paper bag. An egg sandwich and a pot of tea duly appear, courtesy of Casey. Neither seems to recognize me without my flame-haired daughter. Although I’m not sure I quite carry off looking like a local, either.
I wait for the right moment. Striking up a conversation isn’t difficult—an observation about the weather, followed by a compliment on her excellent choice of sandwich, and she’s mine. She invites me to her table. Up close, Marge’s face is creased with an extraordinary crosshatching of lines, all going in different directions, deeply carved, like a dried-up riverbed. Never worn sun block, clearly. It’s the thing my private clients most fear: the marks of a long life lived. But she fits this place perfectly, and the lines bring with them a certain respect.
After a few minutes, she warms up. Pleased to have a bit of company. I wonder if the old woman’s on her own a lot, shuffling between doctor’s appointments and bus stops, sitting in the café to keep heating costs down at home, like Mum and her nan used to do. I feel for her. She tells me Casey’s windows need a clean: newspaper and vinegar would do the job, and she’d do it herself if her arthritis wasn’t playing up. When she blames her arthritis on a lifetime of working as a housekeeper—“a hard life and a thankless one”—my ears prick up. Before I can ask if she knew of a house called Foxcote Manor, she’s on to the husband who drowned (“drunk as a newt”) in the river Severn a year after they married, and left her with nothing, just a mistress knocking at the door, asking for the money he owed her, a son Marge didn’t know about, all told with the rhythmic patter of an anecdote relayed before, honed for an audience. She doesn’t really listen to me, rather pounces on pauses in the conversation to talk about herself. Lonely, the poor thing, I think. Never had her own family, she says, with a sigh, but collected people around her, “the leftovers, like me.” I’m soon so swept along by her tale—an unsung story of female working-class hardship, I’m thinking—I’m completely unprepared for the confrontational clink of her teacup on the saucer and the hissed question “Why are you being bloody nice? What do you want?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the café owner, Casey, hovering warily, sensing the change in tempo too. I wonder if she was expecting it. Something tells me Marge won’t be fobbed off, either.
“Look, you probably don’t remember, but I was here last week, sitting just over there, on that table, that’s right, over there, and you seemed quite startled by my teenage daughter. A redhead? You grabbed her hand and you said she was the spit of someone.”
“Of course I remember. I may be old, but I’m not crackers.”
The café owner moves toward us and smiles quizzically. “Everything all right, Marge?”
Marge glances between me and the teapot, sniffing an opportunity. “This lady’s going to treat me to a cream tea.”
“Of course. Anything you like, Marge.” As soon as Casey’s gone, I press her again about the spit part. But Marge is more reluctant now, tapping a foot beneath her, staring at me so hard, it’s like being poked with a knitting needle. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.” I smile too brightly, sure she’s going to tell me to sod off.
“A girl. Jo. Same red hair. Used to live not too far from here.” Her gaze fixes on the middle distance, gone somewhere I can’t follow. It feels like a hand is reaching out of a dim dirty alley and yanking me in. “Big slanty eyes,” she adds. “Color of sycamore leaves.”
“What happened to Jo?” My heart has started banging. Looping in my head, She walked away.
“Oh, she was one of those girls.” She makes a tsk noise between her teeth. “Got into a spot of bother.”
Was that me? The trouble. The mistake.
“Silly girl. No one but herself to blame.”
“Does she live here still?” The words come out strangled with anxiety.
“Oh, no. Left donkey’s years ago. Moved to Canada, I believe.”
A weight lifts. The thought that I could walk out of this café and bump into someone who could be my birth mother makes me feel fractured.
“That’s why your girl gave me such a turn, you see. Looked just like her, as she was back then.” Marge sips her tea, her lips crumpling over the lip of the cup. “Worked on the cruise ships.” She shakes her head. “Anything went on in the cruise ships. Let alone the ports. Didn’t even know the father’s name. Tsk.”
My brain scrambles to make sense of this. I know I’m being ridiculous. What are the chances? And yet. It’s a tiny village and Annie’s red hair doesn’t come from Steve’s side. We’ve always wondered about it.
“Questions, questions.” She lurches forward. “Who are you?”
I rear back, shocked by the pent-up aggression in the woman’s scrunched face. The urge to run away is overwhelming. I glance at the door. I’d be out of here in three springy steps. “I was found . . .” I begin, struggling to say it out loud to a stranger after a lifetime of being unable to talk about it even with close friends. The words dry in my mouth. “As a baby . . .” I try again. It doesn’t work.
“What? Didn’t catch that?” She puts a hand behind one huge ear, bending the pink flesh toward me.
“Sylvie.” I burrow back to a safer place. “I’m Sylvie Broom. My mother used to work for a local family, the Harringtons, as a nanny, one summer many years ago. Her name’s Rita. Rita Murphy.”
Marge’s face changes before my eyes: it’s like a cupboard door opening and everything tumbling out. “Not Big Rita?” she wheezes.
“I’ve not heard her called that.” The name makes me smile. Growing up, I loved having a giantess as a mother. It made me feel safe. “She’s pretty tall, though.”
“Well, I never.” Marge sits back in her chair, aghast. Two scones arrive, jam and cream dolloped on the side. She stares at the plate, as if they’ve dropped there from outer space.
“So you know her.”
She nods dumbly.
“Don’t tell me you were the housekeeper?” I say, half joking. “At Foxcote Manor?”
Her eyes agitate in their so
ckets. She opens her mouth to say something, then thinks better of it. She was. She bloody well was, I think.
My blood whooshes in my ears. “Mum stayed down here in August nineteen seventy-one.”
“Nineteen seventy-one?” As her face opened a few seconds ago, it closes again. Her eyes glint metallically. The big jaw tenses. “You’re the police, aren’t you? Not Rita’s daughter at all.” With some effort, she creaks down to look under the table at my legs and nods, something affirmed. “Too short to be Rita’s daughter.”
“I’m not a policewoman. I give you my word.”
But it’s too late. She’s standing up, walking stick stuck out, a proboscis.
“But you haven’t eaten your cream tea.”
She snatches a scone off the plate and tosses it into her shopping bag.
I slap a ten-pound note on the table and follow her outside as Casey watches, bemused.
It’s raining now, splashy earth-smelling drops. Marge may be old, but she’s determined, and makes steady progress down the street, pretending I’m not there. After a minute or two, we arrive at a row of small cottages, their pebble dash dirty, melancholy in the rain. She stands outside the most run-down of the lot. Grubby nets hang at the window. I notice a man’s bicycle leaning up against the wall.
Her hand flails about in her leatherette handbag for her key. “You’ve got no business here.”
“Actually . . .” But I can’t say it. My denial is so ingrained, pressed into me like whorls in wood.
“There. Thought so,” says Marge with a note of triumph. “You lot always give yourselves away. Children playing at cops, the lot of you.”
But something beats inside me. I think of Steve, all the years of marriage, in which he’d say, “You’re a Broom now. Don’t taint Annie with your history.” Don’t put our friends off their dinner. Okay, he didn’t say the last line. But he might as well have. I think of the newspaper cuttings my mother stashed away. And I feel more determined than ever. “I’m just trying to find out about what happened that summer.”
“Oh, you’re only about forty years too late! Haven’t you got proper crimes to solve?” She stabs her key in the door. “We’ve had three robberies in six months. No one arrested for those!”
“Marge, I am Rita’s daughter. Her adopted daughter.”
“Adopted, eh?” I wonder if something’s slipping into place or if it’s my imagination. Her eyes narrow again. “Not one of them reporters?”
A gaggle of geese fly above us. “I’m a makeup artist.”
She huffs disparagingly. “And I’m Princess Margaret.”
“Off duty.” I smile, trying to get her onside. “But I do have a large box of false eyelashes of varying lengths in the boot of my car for emergencies. Do you want to see them? I also have a couple of new tester lipsticks in my handbag. Here. Look. Brand-new. I’ve not used them.” I pull out one from my handbag pocket, retro, in a satisfying silvery case. “Would you like it?”
“Bribery now, is it?” She looks at it hungrily.
“You’d suit this shade. It’d bring out your eyes.”
“Oh, get inside, then. Watch the packing boxes.” She whips the lipstick from my hand, clunks the front door shut behind us, and shouts shrilly into the small dark house, “Fingers! Put the kettle on. We’ve got company.”
40
Rita
The evening with Robbie returns to Rita in small aftershocks, ricocheting up her thighs, across her hip bones. Her body’s still humming, despite the terrible sight on the living-room floor. If the terrarium’s wanton destruction had happened earlier in the day, she’d have splintered into fragments too. But right now? A feather pillow seems to be wedged between her and the universe.
After bathing Teddy and putting him to bed, Rita has calmed down a bit. (It’s hard to stay upset and angry when Teddy’s making fart noises with a wet flannel.) Petty and violent, that’s what Don is. Nothing more. The smallest of men. She’ll spell things out when she sees him, that’s for sure. He’ll have to leave. She’ll say to Jeannie, It’s him or me. Enough’s enough.
Rita presses her nose to the hall’s cool window glass, squinting through the gaps in the ivy. She wonders where Don has gotten to. Probably weaving his way back from the pub through the gloaming on ale-legs. Or chatting up a forest girl by the bar. Damn him.
She bends down to the skirting board for Robbie’s boots, the ones that started everything, thrilling slightly as she points her socked foot and slowly slips it into the soft, leathery interior.
“Thanks for coming with me, Big Rita,” Hera says, watching as Rita tightens the laces. “When I find the thing I shot, I’ll feel better. Promise I’ll go to bed then.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll find it,” whispers Rita, not wanting to disturb Jeannie and the baby, who are dozing upstairs. She wishes she didn’t have to go out again, that she could stay and attend to her terrarium plants, pick the glass shards off bit by bit, like fleas from a beloved pet. She also rather hopes any deer is dead, that she won’t have the grim duty of putting the poor creature out of its misery. “Come on.”
Outside, Rita’s not seen a night sky so pretty, all velvety folds backlit by a harvest moon, with a pale gold corona. A mist is starting to stream along the ground. The forest has never looked more magical or benign, a place of sanctuary, not a mass of trees of different species, but a sentient ancient being, with its own moods and soul. She catches herself and smiles. Where’s the old Rita gone? She should be peering into these forest shadows, sensing watching eyes and gnashing teeth and hearing the sound of her parents’ car crashing over and over again. She inwardly jolts, as you do at the odd moment when one version of yourself becomes another, and you grow up not incrementally but in one unexpected gliding-forward leap, as if taking a step on the moon.
“The logs, yes, we went past the log pile.” Hera tugs on her arm, drawing her out of her thoughts. “I think it was this way.”
As they walk, Rita feels an unexpected surge of elation. Possibility. The future is pliable. Something she can shape, as Robbie can bend steamed wood. The malignant thing that’s squatted over her for years, the burden of her shameful secret, has lifted. Nan warned her against telling anyone. “Not even friends, who’ll tittle-tattle,” she’d say, and ruin her reputation. But in telling Robbie, opening up, although she’s not removed it, she’s taken away much of its power and weight. She’s considering this revelation when she sees movement, a flicker of someone in the trees. “Don?” she calls. Nothing. She turns to Hera. “Did you see someone too?”
Hera shakes her head and stares into the gloom, her round face mushroom-pale. The mist licks their ankles.
“Don? Are you there? Are you lost?”
Again, silence. Whoever was there has gone. Or doesn’t want to be found. Maybe it wasn’t him. Fingers? Unease slides silkily over her skin. Her confidence wavers. “Let’s go home, Hera. It’s too late for this. We can come back in the morning.”
“Just as far as the stream? Then we’ll turn back. Please.”
They carry on walking until they can hear the sound of rushing water. It sounds louder in the dark, like a river. “I really don’t think you hit anything, Hera. And if you did, it’s trotted merrily home.” She takes Hera’s warm, pudgy hand. “Let’s loop along the other path. Quicker back that way.”
A round black cloud slips over the moon, like a sunglasses lens. Oh, for a torch. Still, if they keep going, they’ll see Foxcote’s brightly lit windows soon enough. And she’s not scared. Not even nervous! It’s like when pain stops, and even though it was excruciating while it lasted, you can no longer recall it. She wonders if she could live in the forest after all, with Robbie, in his sweet, scuffed cottage, rather than move back to the London house. And she’s thinking, Yes, maybe I could, when her foot lands on something soft and fleshy and Hera screams and screams, and all those lovely possibilities, a
ll those other Ritas, powder to dust.
41
Hera
Don’s eyes are open, staring at the star-spattered sky. Big Rita’s boot has left a muddy imprint on his cheek. Blood blooms on his safari shirt, on the left-hand chest pocket. An owl hoots. Once. Twice. A death warning come too late. Big Rita touches the side of his neck and gasps, snatching away her hand.
“Don’t look.” She presses my face to her cardigan.
But I peer down, fascinated and horrified. The problem of Don has gone. But Don is dead. Dead. He no longer exists. My stomach flips.
“We need . . .” Her heart ba-booms against my cheek. “We need to get help.”
As if she’s summoned it, there’s a noise behind us. “There you are!” Mother’s voice rings out, a laugh inside it.
I can feel Big Rita’s heart banging harder.
“Is the rascal drunk?” Mother asks, walking toward us, smoothing her hair, trying to make herself pretty. Her dress glitters, the teeny mirror chips trailing light. “I should have known he’d hunt down a pint in the end, not a pheasant.”
Big Rita says softly, “Jeannie . . .” then covers her mouth with her hand because she can’t say it. Nor can I. We stare at my mother, pitched on the edge, her last sweet moment of not knowing.
“Why are you looking at me like that? What’s going on?” She runs toward him and kneels down and holds his face, smacking his cheeks. “Wake up, my love . . .” It’s as though she can’t see the blood at all. “It’s me. Your Jeannie. Don . . . Don . . . Please.”
Big Rita puts an arm around her shoulders. “He’s gone, Jeannie.”
She lets out a noise that isn’t like Mother. It isn’t human. I cover my ears with my hands. Her face is a mask, stiff and white, the mouth turned down. Sinking to the ground, she curls around his body. Don’s blood glistens in her hair, like one of her jeweled hair slides.