by Eve Chase
“Stop!” Mother leaps up, her hands scrunched at the fabric of her dress. “Officer, this interrogation of my traumatized daughter is unnecessary. The poor girl is barely cogent. It’s far too soon. And we need a lawyer.”
“Mrs. Harrington, please sit down. Your daughter seems quite able to cooperate. We have to establish the sequence of events. We’ll all need to do an official statement at the station.”
The station? Tonight, then. I go tonight. I feel a surge of terror. Big Rita starts to sob onto the baby’s fluffy hair.
“You’re wasting your time.” We all turn to look at Mother. Something in her voice commands attention. “It was me. The shotgun is still in the woods somewhere. If you look, you’ll find it. Now, if you please, I’d like to call my lawyer and my husband.”
What? What’s Mother doing? I catch Big Rita’s shocked eyes, rolling, enormous, full of white.
“The medication for my . . . condition.” She taps her temple and winces and lets out a mad little laugh. “It affects my vision, Officer. Doesn’t it, Rita? So I shouldn’t have held a gun, any gun, knowing this. It was an accident.”
I’m no longer sure what’s going on. The room cracks and splits with my raggedy breaths and tears. I see Big Rita looking at me, mouthing, “It’s okay.” But it can’t be. Bright car headlights are already sweeping through the living-room windows. The sound of a car pulling up on the gravel.
“You can put your hands down, Mrs. Harrington. I won’t cuff you.” And I beg them not to take her.
“Get the girl something sweet,” I hear the policewoman say to Big Rita.
Big Rita has to hold me back and pull me against her and the baby, who has woken up and started to cry. As the police walk Mother between them out of the room, she grabs my hand and squeezes it. And for the first time in months, I feel her love flow through my skin into my body, like a color, pink and warm.
Foxcote’s front door bangs. We whip around. “Jeannie darling, I’m home.” A gust of fresh air. Footsteps. Daddy appears in the doorway, hands frozen in the act of loosening his tie. “What sort of welcome party is this?”
45
Sylvie
I’d planned to drive straight home to London, not looking back. But after the profound weirdness of Marge’s house, I find myself unable to do so. Half an hour after Fingers slammed the front door, my hands are still unsteady. I feel fuzzy-headed, pixelated. So I sit in the car, listening to Nick Cave, collecting the scattered bits of myself together, as the rain patinates the windscreen. I roll the name Jo around my mouth and wonder why I’m actually relieved not to have found out her surname too. Is this a normal reaction? Or just cowardice? Further evidence that I can’t face up to my own pedigree. I taste mascara. I’m crying. The windows fug up.
Then the rain stops. Sun slices through the cloud, hot and irresistible, and I feel a bit silly. Getting out of the car, I inhale the sweet grassy wet. My head clears. My mood lightens. And I suddenly know what I need to do before I leave this place. See it for myself. Alone.
A forest, I realize, stepping into it, succumbing to it, reveals its true nature only to the solitary walker. And it’s indifferent to me. I’ve got no more right to exist here than a bramble or a fox. I decide I like this. Liberating. Which way?
The path forks. One side leads to a narrow lane, shadowed by the trees that lock over it in an emerald-green canopy. A shortcut back to the village, perhaps. Lanes always lead somewhere.
Five minutes on, set far back from the road, a high wall. A roof rises above it. Intrigued, I walk back into the woods and around its perimeter until I can get a decent view of the house through its garden gate. Gorgeous. Ridiculously so. It is, I realize, with a dissatisfied pang, a Farrow & Ball house from a fantasy life, the one where I got richer, had a flock of charming, feral children, and married the actor Dominic West. My next life, then.
The sign above its main gate reads WILDWOOD HOUSE. If I owned a house like this, I’d call it that too.
As I stand there, gawping, I mentally style a seventies scene: children running barefoot through the trees, owl feathers in their hair; a young nanny chasing them, calling their names. I lean back against the girth of a vast yew—hundreds of years older than me, with more lines. I feel a wave of affection for this tree and slowly sink to the point that I’m squatting above the ground, which is springy and comfortable, still dry, like rush matting. The birds start chattering, alerting one another to my alien presence.
I check my phone: no signal; one missed call from my agent, Pippa, likely wondering if my compassionate leave will ever end; another from a worried girlfriend, who has started to say, slightly gratingly, “You really must look after yourself now,” every time we speak, as if leaving a long marriage is a reckless act of self-sabotage, the gateway drug to the dangerous state of not-giving-a-f*** and uncontrolled body hair. I’m glad to have the excuse of no signal, since I can’t square my London life with this. I can’t inhabit both at the same time, I realize. I can’t function and be both people. So I rope off parts of myself. Which is why I could stay married to Steve for so long, I guess.
I yawn. My body feels catatonically heavy. It’s exhausting keeping all the disparate bits separate, the endless collating of self. Am I defeated by such a process or starting to relax? Both, perhaps. I wonder if this is why forest bathing is a thing.
A memory bobs to the surface. Dad and I walking along the beach near the cottage. Dad bending down and picking up driftwood, pale and smooth, hollowed inside. “Like a skull,” I said. Dad saying, “Yes, exactly, Sylvie, just like that,” and telling me that if you cut open a human brain, slice it really thin, like salami, and peer at it under a microscope, you’ll see trees. Dendrites, they’re called. And all your thoughts, all the tiny electrical messages, shoot from branch to branch. “We have woods inside us, Sylvie,” he said, then hugged me and kissed the top of my head.
His words feel wise and true today. It feels as if I might even be reconnecting with a lost part of myself, the little girl who would climb trees to feel the sway of the top branches, her head crowned with leaves. I close my eyes and spin out to the aurora borealis wavering across my eyelids. The ground seems to rock. And then it happens. A shadowy shape emerges, like a grainy ultrasound image. Me as a baby. Lying on a tree stump. Crying.
“Excuse me, are you okay? Do you need help?”
The noise stops. Oh, god, it was coming from me. I open my eyes, look up, and see dazzling white teeth. A beard.
“The forest always gives one rather wild dreams.” The man is looking at me askance, possibly trying to work out if I’m high. He’s very handsome, I register slowly. Blue eyes. “Not local?” he asks, trying to place me.
“London.” Long story.
“Ah.” He smiles knowingly and nods back at the house. “Are you sure you’re okay? If you need to come in, you’re welcome.”
I brush off leaves from my jeans. “I’m fine, really. Just a bit embarrassed.” But I do feel tender inside, wrung out, like after a good weep. “If you could just direct me back to the village, I’d be very grateful. My car’s parked there.”
“Sure. Back up the lane, then . . .” He pauses and frowns. I suspect my dragged-through-the-hedge-backward hair might be giving off mixed messages. And it’s starting to rain, falling in fat splatters. “Look, I was just about to drive into Hawkswell. Do you want a lift?”
I hesitate. Was he really about to drive to the village or is he a psychopathic opportunist? I decide that serial killers probably don’t wear beautiful shirts with stripy yellow cuffs. Screw it. I’ll take my chances.
“Nice car,” I say, strapping on the seat belt. A vintage pea-green Porsche convertible, roof rolled up.
“I think so.” The car revs deliciously. “My husband bought it for my fiftieth.”
Typical. “Nice husband.”
He laughs.
I decide I like hi
m a lot, in the immediate gut instinct way you can do with strangers sometimes. “Thank you . . . ?”
“Teddy,” he shouts over the growling engine as we zoom down the lane in a whirl of leaves and rain. “My name’s Teddy. Hold tight.”
46
Rita, March 1972
Six months later, Rita still plays her last journey from Foxcote over in her mind: the clunk of the taxi door; the whirl of the first gingery leaves down the lane; the big house receding until it was swallowed by the trees. Like it had never existed. The sickening, lightening relief of escape.
By then five long days had passed since Don had died, and hours of circular questioning by the local police, who wouldn’t let any of them leave Foxcote. She wished she’d known then that those constables would later be heavily criticized for their bungling of the case. At the time she was terrified, the possibility that she might be sacrificed to save the Harringtons’ reputation never far from her mind.
As she’d once yearned to be at the heart of the Harrington household, she was now desperate to struggle free of it. A family could be the least safe of places, she knew that now, not the harbor she’d idolized since she was a child. In the end, you had to rely on yourself.
As the slow, anxious hours ticked past, she began to see, with thumping clarity, how she’d been sucked into the Harringtons’ world—drawn by an irrational longing for her own mother, a family of her own—and lost her bearings. She tried to explain this to the policewoman. But she’d listened with narrowing eyes, taking rapid-fire notes. Rita, scared that she was somehow incriminating herself, was quickly silenced.
A couple of days after Don died, a woman from social services wearing a boxy gray coat arrived. She plucked the baby from the trug on the kitchen floor, as if she were a lettuce. When Rita begged her to wait or at least say where the baby was going, Walter hurried the woman out of the door. That night Rita tucked the Babygros under her pillow, just as Jeannie had once done, and inhaled their milky sweetness.
She couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two. Neither could anyone else. She’d go downstairs at night and often find Hera rummaging through the larder. Or Teddy padding around in his pajamas, confused, asking where his mother was.
Everything felt shattered, just like the terrarium. Walter shoved its Don-wrecked remains into the dustbin and bashed it down with a stick for good measure, as if the little glass case was responsible for it all, which, in a way, it was.
But Rita still crept back to the bin once Walter had gone, defiantly pulled out Dot and Ethel and secretly planted them in the loamy garden bed by the gate. She knew it didn’t matter how mangled a plant’s leaves were: if the roots were still there, they had a chance. And this thought comforts her. Children are not unlike plants, she thinks.
Rita wonders what Hera and Teddy are doing on this cold March morning as thick gray fog rolls over the Hackney rooftops and she shivers in her bedsit. No fat on her now to keep her warm, she’s all angles—how the model agency likes it—jutting hip bones and tight skin.
She’s been banned from ever trying to contact the family again—a court order, Walter said. The officiousness of such a thing terrifies her, even if she doesn’t understand it. Hating the thought of the children feeling abandoned, at Christmas she’d risked a short letter to the Primrose Hill house, addressed to Hera, with her new London details—the bedsit in Hackney, with a cantankerous landlady called Mrs. Catton, blind in one eye, who knocks on the wall if she turns on the radio—but it was returned unopened: Unknown at this address. Shamefully, she was relieved. At least Walter hadn’t intercepted and read it.
She likes to think that Hera and Teddy, through the force of some as yet unknown physics, are aware she’s thinking of them as she stands in chilly workshops, seamstresses pinning fabric around her slender body. But Baby Forest . . . No, the baby is too painful to think about, although that doesn’t stop her doing so. All the time. Where is she? Not knowing the baby’s whereabouts or fate torments her.
The missing is so physical, a whiplash of pain, she struggles not to cry out. Rita misses her damp, dense weight, the pad of her palm, her musical oohs and aahs, the way she’d nuzzle her wet face into Rita’s neck, and those glossy dark eyes always following her around the room. She must have changed so much by now. Sitting up. On solids. Trying to crawl? No. Mustn’t go there.
She’s tried to follow the story in the news, but there was only one mention of Baby Forest, appealing for her mother to come forward, and many more of Don’s death. She’s stored some of the articles in the suitcase under her bed, cutting out photos of the family so she doesn’t forget their faces. But it’s been hard to know what to believe. One tabloid implied Don had taken his own life, revealing staggering debts and rumors he was being hunted down by unforgiving East End gangsters. (Marge was quoted: “He was a shady character. He was trouble.”) While in The Daily Telegraph’s obituary, Don was described as “a charismatic polymath, raconteur, and man of the world—the very best of Etonians.” Soon the story vanished, superseded by some new horror in Northern Ireland. A couple of months later a footnote in The Times announced that there hadn’t been enough evidence to charge anyone in connection with Don’s death. The case remained open. It was, the reporter said, a mystery: there was some ambiguity over whether the fatal bullet matched the suspected gun. Jeannie Harrington was of unsound mind and recovering in an institution, her confession not backed up by hard evidence. Who else had been in the woods that night? the reporter asked. Then: Is this yet another hush-up by the elite classes? Of course it was! Rita had little doubt. Walter—with his winking portly male friends in high places—would have done everything he could to make the story go away. It was bad for business. She also knew he’d been a suspect initially and had suffered the indignity of being taken “down to the station” to account for his whereabouts—until his hotshot London lawyers had got involved.
In those strange dazed days at Foxcote after Don died, Rita was astonished that Walter didn’t blame Jeannie for any of this, not even the affair, which he persisted in seeing as a symptom of an illness, something that would be cured. He refused to believe she had it in her to shoot Don, and told the policewoman so, slowly and loudly, as if she were slightly deaf. (He preferred “dealing with the chap.”) No, it was easier to blame Rita, not for the murder, although he would if he could, but everything else. She’d “conspired” with Don, he’d hissed, ripping out the damningly blank pages from the notebook and tossing them across the garden, where they’d whirled in the wind, catching on the trees like doves. He never mentioned Baby Forest: it was as if she’d never been there. He was devastated about Don’s death—she’d hear him sobbing in the library, muttering his name. “My oldest friend would still be alive if you’d told me what was going on earlier,” he’d say. “And my wife would be here. You stupid girl.” Part of her knew this to be true. In her determination to do everything right, she’d got it all wrong. But she’d also started to realize that the Harringtons’ fateful course was plotted before she’d even joined the family. Jeannie’s dissatisfaction in her marriage—including that gilded domestic life—had been the force that had set things in motion, as an exhaled sigh can make the delicate trees on Robbie’s mobile start to turn.
It wore her down, gnawed at her, not knowing who’d fired the gun. She kept changing her mind. Hera believed she’d shot him, albeit accidentally. So was Jeannie protecting Hera, her love for her daughter trumping her passion for Don? She hoped so. Then she thought of the ripe bruise Don’s fist had left under Jeannie’s eye. Jeannie’s readiness to bury him in the forest, fodder for the worms and fungi and larvae. And she wondered.
When the police finally allowed her to leave the area, Walter gave her twenty minutes notice before the taxi arrived. All she could do was pack what she could grab and hug the children one last time. She thought about diverting to Robbie’s house but realized she had no idea where it was—“Maybe that way, through th
e trees?” wasn’t really an address, as the cabbie kindly pointed out. She didn’t have Robbie’s telephone number. Did he even have a phone? And why would he want to say good-bye? She’d caused him enough damage. He’d emerged from the police cells with a shiner and a broken rib, apparently. “The cops would pin it on him if they could,” Marge had confided. “Close the case quickly. Keep Walter Harrington and all his lawyers sweet. You know, Rita, it’d be better if you don’t contact him again,” she’d advised protectively. “He needs to stay out of it, love.”
Rita was glad she didn’t have his address. Otherwise she might have given in to temptation and selfishly knocked at his door, just to see him one last time. At least they’d had that magical night. She was sure most people live entire lifetimes and never experience anything close.
Seeking what’s left of him, she kneels down on the bare boards, avoiding the exposed rusty nails, and pulls her suitcase from under the bed. The leaves he gave her that summer, parceled in paper, are in a bit of a state now, dried and powdery, shattered to just the stem, like fish bones. But she can still read the handwritten tags—ash, birch, elm . . . —and likes to do so most days.
The mobile he made is also carefully stored, wrapped in a pair of old tights. She took that for Baby Forest, vowing one day to find her and return it so she’ll know there was once a man kind and skilled enough to make that just for her, as a father would; that she was once indulged and treasured, like every other baby in the world.
Peeling back the hosiery, she strokes her index finger over the delicate tiny trees, then collects herself—she can’t risk tears or a puffy face today: she’s got a casting. Pushing the box back under the bed, she thinks of Jeannie, who hid precious things under her bed once too, and how we all hide the tender bits of ourselves. They feel safer like that. And it’s often the only place they fit.