by Eve Chase
Cruel to be kind, I’ve justified. Elliot’s weeks of lovestruck mooning have scared the pants off me. Just like Mother and her passion for Don. I had to protect him from that disaster, as I protected myself with a sensible marriage built on friendship and separate bedrooms. Annie will never cope, I thought. Too young. Too smart to be satisfied by motherhood. Not rich enough. The statistics are against her. At the back of my mind was always the teenage girl who’d abandoned Baby Forest to Marge’s mad scheme. So I’ve told Elliot repeatedly that Sylvie’s confided to me that Annie’s said there’s no possible romantic future. (Just as I’ve lied to Annie and Sylvie about Elliot’s dating.) He must do his duty, I’ve told him, and pay his way—rather, his grandfather and I will do that—but he must stay free since one day, when he’s older, he will meet someone else, someone he can get serious about. Someone suitable, more like us. Us? Me? What on earth was I thinking? As if we need another person like us in the family.
“Helen, your jacket,” Edie says firmly. She’s staring at me with an alarmed expression. Not unlike the way the neighbors would look at Mother during one of her “episodes.”
“Thank you.” The bouclé tweed swings heavy in my hand. How will I ever explain myself to Annie and Elliot? Let alone be forgiven? The thought of telling my son terrifies me.
“It’s been a bit of a long day. I’ll get her home,” I hear Edie say in a conspiratorial tone to Annie. She takes my arm. “Right, come along now, Helen, darling.”
“Wait. Can I just say to Annie . . .” My voice wavers.
“I’m not sure this is the time, Helen,” Edie says, with a short, uneasy laugh. Her grip on my arm tightens, warning me not to gabble it all out.
“I . . . I just want to say that you’re going to make a wonderful mother, Annie. Truly.”
Annie’s face flames. Too horrified or embarrassed to speak. With Edie’s help I pull on my jacket, all fumbling fingers. The fabric feels different on my shoulders. Lighter.
Annie yanks open the front door. The city blasts in. Diesel micro-particulates and the greasy stink of kebabs, yes. But also the caffeinated whiff of life and hope. Just as Annie’s shutting the door, she stops, looks up with those serious emerald eyes, and says quietly, “Thanks, Helen.”
Something in me soars. It’s a start. As if quiet riches the world’s held back for so long, that I’d forgotten even existed, are within my reach.
Edie turns to me. “Taxi?”
“No,” I say, wanting to prove something to myself. “I think it’s about bloody time I tried a bus, don’t you?”
* * *
Three hours later, I check the grainy image on my entry camera. It’s not Sylvie, as I’d hoped, on her way back from the hospital finally to share news of Rita. Nor is it Elliot, who isn’t answering my calls. It’s a gray-haired woman, plainly dressed, holding up a badge to the camera: police. Panic flutters inside my chest. I want to rush back inside the house and hide behind the sofa, as I did when I was a girl. Another ring. Something in me rallies. You can do this, Helen. I take a breath and open the door.
“No one’s hurt and you’re not in any trouble, Ms. Latham,” the police officer says quickly. “I’m here to inform you of a development in the Armstrong case.” She flashes me her badge again and peers into my house. “May I come in?”
* * *
After she’s gone, I sink into a wicker chair in the conservatory, doors flung back, the terrariums surrounding me, my life’s work, a constellation of stars. Over the terrace walls, the church bells start ringing out over the Chelsea rooftops.
I flex the policewoman’s card in my fingers, a reminder I haven’t dreamed this. Dare I believe the nightmare’s over after all these years? Marge Grieves has been arrested, the policewoman said. The suspect handed herself in after her carer, who’d been clearing out the house for a move into sheltered accommodation, discovered a weapon and old ammunition hidden in the loft. Initial investigations suggest a match with those used on Don Armstrong in 1971. Grieves is helping them with their inquiries. Yes, they believe there will be enough evidence to charge.
I can barely remember what else was said after that. Something was already falling inside me, like snow, starting to settle. And it is this: My mother thought I’d shot Don that night. Not only did she forgive me, she did everything she could to protect me. She even returned to The Lawns, shielded behind her apparently “unsound mind,” which modern doctors would surely recognize as postpartum depression, or even PTSD, a heart’s breaking. She loved me as fiercely as any mother ever loved a child. Hers was the greatest of sacrifices, and the most dogged. I think of her words “You mustn’t ever think it was you, Hera. That’s all that matters,” and lift my face, squinting into the setting sun, until I can see my mother’s mirror-chip dress aflutter among trees, my mother, turning slowly, blowing me one last kiss, a smile, then gone.
54
Rita, Ten Months Later
A burly wind skids down the trees, shaking the spring leaves like coins. Having never forgotten Marge’s list of forest hazards, Rita instinctively peers up. But no branches are falling. And it was Marge—Marge!—who had turned out to be the most dangerous of all. Lethal as any death cap mushroom. Rita had had no idea.
“One sec, Sylvie.” Pausing to catch her breath, she inhales the sweet whiff of wild garlic. The forest furs at its edges. She feels like she’s falling through it.
“You okay, Mum?” Sylvie’s eyes are so clear today that the forest is reflected within them. “Do you need to sit down?”
“Certainly not.” She’d love to sit down. She gets tired so easily now. But she refuses to admit it. Hates the fuss. Rehabilitation has been frustratingly slow. She often wakes with a roaming confusion that takes a few minutes to clear. She sieves through everyday words, familiar names, as if beachcombing, rinsing away the sand. But occasionally her jolted mind throws up unexpected gems, long-forgotten treasures: her mother’s voice, the smell of her hair, the bristles of her father’s beard against her fingertips. She is closer to them at least. And this weekend she’s got a feeling she’s finally returning to herself too—and to a family changed out of all recognition.
“I just want to take a moment.” She buttons her camel coat, a present from Helen, as immaculately cut as any of the coats she ever modeled, with a delicious midnight-blue silk lining. “Are you sure I’m not imagining all this, Sylvie? It’s not a side effect of my medication?”
Sylvie laughs, the sort that stays in the eyes afterward. Jake has a lot to do with that, Rita thinks approvingly. She’s got a good feeling about the boatman.
“Take a look over there, Mum,” Sylvie whispers, pointing back to the woodland clearing, where Elliot and Annie are dawdling, shaking off the oldies. Elliot’s sitting on a log, Annie on his knee. His chin rests on her shoulder and he’s beaming down at the bundle in her arms: Poppy, perfect in every way, with her fuzz of black hair and blue eyes, named after Rita’s mother. Her tiny fist rises into the air, snatching at the light and shadow, leaf and sky.
Rita’s heart swells. Babies love forests. We’re born with a love of trees deep in our souls, she decides. Like a love of the sea. She hopes that when the young family moves to Cambridge in the autumn and Annie starts her studies, they’ll still seek out woodland for Poppy to romp around in there too. She suspects they will.
A boom of laughter. Rita whips around. She squints at the footpath ahead. Goodness.
Teddy. She can almost see his 1970s dungarees strap swinging. Edie, sprightly in a duck-yellow fake fur jacket. (Thirty-one thousand Instagram followers and counting, Annie tells her. More than the entire population of Barnstaple. The world’s gone mad.) And farther ahead, yes, there they are, Helen and Caroline. Talking. Always heatedly talking.
No, they don’t look like half sisters. You could slip four Chanel-clad Helens into a pair of Caroline’s Target jeans alone, Caroline says. But somehow they fit together pe
rfectly.
* * *
A hole where the mouth should be. A baby with no face. It came to Rita one day, a few weeks after adopting Sylvie, the hazy memory of a little boy in the hospital after her own childhood car accident. A boy who hid his mouth behind his hand in shame. She couldn’t forget the Harrington baby then.
The search for an infant in care with a bilateral cleft palate or some other craniofacial anomaly, born in London around certain dates, was not as hard as it should have been. No one wanted to adopt the little girl who couldn’t smile. On the birth certificate, no father was named. A bit of digging revealed that Jeannie’s mother’s maiden name had been used. The birth date was also a day out. Walter had clearly done whatever he could to fudge it.
Poor Jeannie was dead by then. Walter wasn’t. Rita would wake in a cold sweat, imagining him coming to take Caroline away, poisoning the adoption authorities against them. She carried that anxiety always, pressing on her diaphragm: if you lose your family once, you can easily imagine it happening again. The more you have, the more you can lose. Everything snatched in an instant. Robbie feared Walter’s influence too. His brave little girl had already gone through so much, not least with all the corrective surgery. So they were not as open with either of the girls as they’d originally planned. As they should have been.
Mentioning the Harringtons felt like a risk. The less was said, the fainter they became, until they were just shadows flickering at the sunlit edges. She never spelled out the link between the family she’d once worked for years ago and Caroline’s birth mother, let alone the suspected father and his brutal end. She’d planned to. She’d kept some of the newspapers. One day.
They didn’t even dare take the girls to the forest. Robbie would occasionally return, quietly, anonymously, just to walk on his own. And when he worked in his carpentry studio, he’d talk to the girls about trees, the rings of time inside their trunks, all the hundreds of life-forms one oak hosted. He’d give them blocks of wood to sand and touch. Took them camping and riding in other woods. She’d hoped this was enough.
It wasn’t, was it? With the hindsight of age—and the perspicacity that comes from dangling inside death’s icy chamber—she realizes she’s always been appalling at revealing things when she should, that her fear of losing someone overrides it each time.
Of course, if either of their daughters had asked . . . But Caroline and Sylvie were like two little girls on tiptoe, hands reaching up, and together, with their combined strength, bolting a heavy door.
“Mum, we’d better not forget about Walter,” says Sylvie softly, tugging her out of her mash of thoughts.
“More’s the pity,” says Rita, stepping around a spectacular buckler fern she’d love to inspect more closely.
* * *
Teddy sets the urn of cremated ashes on the ground. His dog circles it, sniffing.
“The dog’s licking her chops!” shrieks Edie. “Naughty dog!”
Rita notices that Caroline and Sylvie—standing side by side—are discreetly shaking little fingers. They did this as little girls too. Never told her why. (“Secret!” they’d bark in unison.) In childhood the finger shake was done with overwrought seriousness, today with a wink and a bitten-down smile.
“Right. Where are the young lovebirds?” Teddy holds the dog back by the collar and looks around.
“Oh, leave them be, Teddy.” Edie takes a photo of the urn on her phone. “We don’t want the baby breathing in Walter.”
Rita suddenly remembers Robbie explaining that when a giant tree crashes down in a forest, light and air rush into the cleared space, dormant seeds flower, and new life scrambles up, seizing its chance.
“Well, here goes, Pa old man,” says Teddy, kneeling down to lift the lid.
Rita begins to feel peculiar. It takes a second or two for her to recognize that this peculiarity is not her woolly brain misfiring, as it’s wont to do, but the old snared feeling, the one she’d felt here decades ago.
“Teddy,” Rita says too loudly. Everyone turns to look at her. “I hope no one’s offended . . .” She’ll say it anyway. “. . . but I don’t think I should be here for this bit. No, really. I’m going to head back to the house. For a nice cup of tea.” As soon as she’s spoken, the trapped feeling slithers away, like a slowworm in the bracken. Sometimes it’s a relief not to be young anymore. To be able to say no.
Sylvie runs after her.
“I can’t pretend to mourn him,” Rita mutters beneath her breath as they walk away.
“Me neither.” Sylvie pulls a car key from her pocket and dangles it from her finger. “Fancy a spin in a Porsche instead of a cup of tea, Great-Grandma? Teddy’s lent me his car.”
“He has? That terrifying-looking thing in the drive?” Rita laughs at the very idea. “No, thank you.”
A few paces on, Wildwood’s red-tiled roof appears through the trees. Funny to think that Poppy will inherit the place one day, Rita thinks. Quite right too. Despite its facelift and name change, it’ll always be Foxcote. As Helen will be Hera. (The same angry, agitated fingers that once lit fires now design the most exquisite terrariums she’s ever seen. Worlds under glass, a lost sweet joy.) And the garden gate, although a tasteful shade of putty now, is still recognizably the same rickety gate she once crept through at dawn, wearing a lurid pink dressing gown and boots that belonged to the great love of her life, whom she hadn’t yet met. It makes her breath catch.
As they get closer, something else snags Rita’s eye. A streak of lightning-white hair, a loping flash, vanishing into the bluebell haze. Fingers? Watching them? Eyes and ears of the forest. The Green Man. Revealer and burier of its secrets. She wonders what else he knows.
And it’s then that a fuzzy thought that’s been niggling throughout this hectic weekend takes on a more solid shape. Fat as a raindrop about to roll, it feels like the first crystalline, defined thought she’s had since the accident.
The gate’s well-oiled latch clicks behind them. They walk into the garden, along a path banked by white tulips and delicate feathery ferns that bear a striking resemblance to Ethel. Rita’s mind ticks over. This is her chance. She’s got Sylvie alone. She must say something.
But they’re on the drive already, and Sylvie has stopped by Teddy’s car, gleaming dangerously, its roof rolled down. “Oh, go on, Mum. Wouldn’t it be good to escape for a bit? Just the two of us? See a horizon?”
Rita thinks, My parents died on a forest road. Don drove a car not unlike this. She says, “It’s tiny! I wouldn’t fit inside!”
Sylvie opens the car door anyway. And something about her daughter’s ease in this forest, the gleam in her eyes, makes Rita slide trustingly into the low leather seat. Her knees almost graze her chin.
Sylvie leaps into the driver’s seat and sticks the key into the ignition.
“Wait.” Now. Now is the time. “There’s something I need to . . .” Rita swallows. She’s dreaded this conversation for years. She’s constructed her life to avoid it. “As I’m on the mend, I’d like to help you find this . . . this Jo. Your birth mother.”
Sylvie blanches. Clearly she wasn’t expecting this. The trees stir around them. Curl back.
“There’ll be local leads,” Rita continues nervously, thinking of Fingers. “Or the ancestry DNA company Caroline used a few weeks ago. You just rub a cotton bud on the inside of your cheek, apparently.” Her voice fades. This is coming out all wrong, as she always dreaded it would.
Still Sylvie says nothing. High in the branches above them, a woodpecker starts to drum, like Rita’s heart.
“Of course, I understand if it’s something you want to do on your own . . .” Rita fades, losing confidence.
A moment passes. The house peers down, the mullioned windows blinking, waiting.
“Honestly?” Sylvie’s pupils have spread, ink-drop black. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned these last few months,
Mum, it’s that I’m so your daughter. No one else’s. Just like Annie’s mine. And Poppy is Annie’s.” She starts the engine and the car bucks, then starts to growl.
It rumbles Rita’s old bones. She’s terrified. Her heart’s exploding. “Good Lord.”
Sylvie drives slowly out of the gate, the first few bends. But when the road straightens, she accelerates, throwing them back against the seats. The trees stream past, a riot of green. Their hair whips. And Rita laughs and whoops because she’s no longer scared, not one bit, and they’re moving so fast that in no time at all, they’re piercing the forest’s edge. And then, look, just look, it’s shrinking to a smudge behind them.
Acknowledgments
A huge thank-you to my editors Tara Singh Carlson, Helen Richard, and Maxine Hitchcock. You’ve all brought so much to this novel, and I count myself one lucky writer—we’ve a great hive mind! Lizzy Kremer, my agent—heartfelt gratitude, always. Hazel Orme, Maddalena Cavaciuti, Bea McIntyre, Alice Howe, and the inspiring teams at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Michael Joseph, and David Higham Associates . . . thank you, thank you. My fellow author readers: I know you’ve all got teetering proof piles, and I’m so appreciative. Lastly, my family: Ben, Oscar, Jago, and Alice. In the end, it’s all for you. (And the dog!) With much love.
About the Author
Eve Chase is the author of Black Rabbit Hall and The Wildling Sisters, and the pseudonym of journalist and novelist Polly Williams. She lives in Oxford, England with her husband and three children.
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