by Flynn Berry
“It won’t,” said Mum.
The estate was doubled on the slow-moving river. Its witch’s-hat turrets, chimneys, lines of smoke. We weren’t very far from Sam’s house in Inverness. These might be friends of his, all of the landowner families here seemed to know one another.
We unpacked the groceries from the car, the biscuits, milk, pasta, butter, tea. The cottage had a two-burner range. Mum held a match to the ticking gas and the flame caught. I said, “I’m going for a walk.”
I started to climb the foothills behind the house. There was a path at first, then it disappeared and I scrabbled over the flattened brown grass and granite outcroppings. The wind had stopped and I was the only thing on the hill making any sounds.
This walk was a test, like the ones I’d begun setting for myself at home in Crail: walking back from Nell’s alone at night, going down into the cellar, taking a shower when no one else was home. I’d tried to take a bath, which hadn’t worked, my heart was beating hard enough to make the surface of the water pulse. I’d try again when we returned home. I needed to practice that sort of thing now, or I’d never be able to go away to university, or ever live on my own.
The cottage grew smaller below me. Mum and Robbie were inside, they wouldn’t be able to hear anything from up here. I reached the top of the first slope, a flat, bare stretch before another, steeper climb. Black streams branched through the peat, and their sound made the hair stand on the back of my neck.
From the base of the next slope, the river wasn’t in view anymore, or the cottage, which meant no one there would be able to see me. I walked over the trampled grass and around the rocks. The walk wasn’t really a test. For it to be a test, I’d need to think that this was only practice, that really I was safe. But I thought someone was going to follow me, and I wanted to get it over with. I didn’t know what I imagined would happen exactly, but I’d brought a knife in my pocket, in case. I thought that whatever happened, at least I wouldn’t be scared afterwards, that this part would have ended.
The climb down was faster. A thin layer of cloud had covered the sky and the air had grown colder. Below me, wind brushed the river silver, and the two horses moved around the paddock. Someone had put blankets on them while I was gone.
It was stupid to be disappointed. Of course I’d rather be climbing back down, instead of being up on the hillside with someone who had followed me.
When I reached the cottage, Mum and Robbie looked up from their card game. “How was your walk?”
“Fine.” In the kitchen, I tried to replace the knife in its drawer without a sound.
• • •
At night, the valley turned completely black, except for the lit windows in the estate house on the island in the river. I watched the windows but no one went past them. “Have you seen anyone there yet?” I asked.
“No,” said Mum, without looking up from her book. I didn’t understand why she wasn’t worried. Whoever they were, they were the only other people for miles.
• • •
On the hill the next afternoon, we stopped so Mum could catch her breath. Below us, the river curved between the moors and stands of dark pines. Mum rubbed at her chest with a gloved hand. I shifted my weight and felt the peat sink under my boots. Robbie pointed at a herd of red deer in one of the sloped moors below us. From this distance, they seemed to be climbing with odd, disjointed gaits.
We kept walking. Around us, the hillside rippled as the sun went in and out of clouds. After another hour, we stopped for bread and cheese, and cold slices of the apple pie we’d bought at the store in Cannich.
I opened the flask of water, its clasp falling against the tin with a satisfying clink. Mum brought me here on purpose, I thought. She knows I’m teetering and she wants me to come down on the side of travel, independence, bravery. This annoyed me. She couldn’t tell me that I’d be safe. She had no idea if I would be or not. Though I could see her point, the glen’s point. I didn’t want to never travel because it might mean being alone on a road at night, or taking a cab with a male driver.
From the ridge, we surveyed the lowlands and foothills and peaks. It would have been a shame not to see this. The estate house, far below us, was also beautiful. The people staying inside it didn’t want to hurt us. They were here for the same reason we were, probably. If we came across them on the hill, they would smile and say hello. They wouldn’t block our way, or drag us off the path.
My father, and his friends, and the men from the forum were only a few people. I shouldn’t think of them.
I should think instead about the strangers in the Blacksmith’s Arms that night, when Mum stumbled inside in her stockings, washed in blood. There were three people inside the pub, two customers and a woman behind the bar. She ran to Mum and eased her to the floor. She stripped off her cardigan and held it to the cut on Mum’s stomach, which might have saved her life, she might have bled to death otherwise.
The two men ran to our house. They weren’t armed, they didn’t know if the person who’d attacked Mum was still inside, but they went anyway. One of them ran upstairs and lifted Robbie from his crib, the other found me hiding behind a chair. He picked me up and said, “It’s all right, love, you’re safe.” His hand at the back of my head, his body hunched around mine like a shield as he carried me out of the house.
We finished the last of the cheddar and the apple pie and continued along the mountain. I started to think about what I needed to do to grow up into that sort of person, the sort of person who runs to help.
* * *
—
WE CAME BACK to Crail the day before New Year’s. I spent New Year’s Eve at the Vix with Nell, and the next day, we went to the East Neuk Hotel with our families for Hogmanay lunch. Nell’s mum teased us, offering us haggis, saying we looked green.
School started again. I had not, at all, done well on my exams. A few of my teachers asked to speak to me, one asked if anything was the matter at home. She said I’d seemed distracted recently, and I promised to work harder this term. I hadn’t visited the websites about my father since coming back from Glen Affric, I’d decided I was finished with it. I was still grinding my teeth, though. I started sleeping with a mouth guard that Mum and I bought at a sports shop in St. Andrews, but I couldn’t tell if it was helping.
* * *
—
ON THE LAST DAY of January, I rode the bus home from school with Nell. A lorry had broken down on the Anstruther Road, so the traffic narrowed into a single lane, and the ride took ten minutes longer than usual.
I said goodbye to Nell on the high street and turned towards Nethergate. The air was cold and windless. I had two school assignments to complete, and a magazine to read if I finished my work, and was so preoccupied that I took out my key before I noticed that our front door was hanging open.
There was dirt on the floor inside. It looked like part of a bootprint.
I’d gone through this in my head so many times. Don’t make a sound, run to the high street, don’t hesitate or look behind you until you’re with other people. I was stumbling backwards when I noticed Mum’s handbag, down the hall, on the table in the kitchen. She was inside.
I lifted the iron poker from the stand next to the fireplace. I left the front door open behind me, so a neighbor would hear if I screamed. Mum’s keys were next to the handbag and her shoes were on the floor under the table. I held the poker in front of me with both hands, hard enough to cut lines into my palms, and went upstairs. She wasn’t there, though, or in the garden.
I stood on our front path. The terraced houses across the road all looked empty, and the trees were upright in the still air. I could hear my breathing in the quiet. A door across the road was opening, and our neighbor Fiona was coming outside, without a coat. She ran towards me and my legs went soft.
“Where’s my mum?” I asked, in a high, stretched voice.
I smiled at Fiona then. Holding my hand at my forehead, my eyes wet. No one had taken her, hurt her.
“Can you drive me to the hospital?” I asked.
“No, Claire,” she said, and her voice broke. “She’s not there. I’m so sorry.”
My knees gave out then. Fiona tried to keep me upright but I fell onto the path. I was gasping, and trying to crawl on my hands and knees towards the house as she held me to her.
* * *
—
MUM WAS FORTY-FOUR when she had the heart attack. She’d had angina. I’d known that it was why she often had to catch her breath, and that it was a kind of heart disease, but not that it was dangerous. “There are two types,” she’d told me. “I don’t have the bad one.”
I understand that heart attacks are common. But she was forty-four. She ate well. She didn’t drink much, and she’d never smoked. She hated jogging, but liked to walk for hours on the coast path. Her family didn’t have a history of heart disease.
Mum hadn’t always had high blood pressure. Sabrina told me that she’d first started noticing the breathlessness and tightness in her chest the summer after the inquest. She developed it because of stress.
* * *
—
AFTER MUM DIED, Sabrina adopted us. She was living with her sons in Wales then, in Abergavenny, which is a perfectly nice town, and a place I never want to see again in my life.
Sabrina put two single beds in what had been a den. She bought new sheets and hung fairy lights around the window. I think about that often now, about her shopping for the sheets, and assembling the beds, and hanging the lights. I wasn’t in a state then to notice the kindness.
She has always been kind to us, even in the beginning, when I was not at all easy to live with, when I didn’t think I was going to survive it. Sabrina is loving, but sometimes that seems worse, like it only shows the gap between how she loves us and how she loves her own children, how Mum loved us.
30
IS HE STILL training to swim the Channel?” asks Rose at breakfast.
“No, that’s finished,” says Beatrice. “He’s doing some mountaineering thing now. Is it Kilimanjaro?”
I don’t know who they’re talking about. Nor do I care. I scrape butter onto my toast while rain dashes against the windows. I haven’t slept. At six in the morning, I rubbed concealer onto the red marks on my face where I’d raked at the skin.
I didn’t search the churchyard last night. It was too much. I couldn’t disinter a coffin, his or anyone else’s. I only lifted a few heaps of dirt before I gave up, cleaned the shovel blade with my sleeve, and replaced it on the nail, then washed the mud from my clothes in the bathroom sink and lay awake until morning.
I try to set down my cup without rattling the saucer. I swallow my toast and listen, waiting for them to run out of people to discuss. “He’s dug under his basement,” says Luke. “He has four thousand square feet down there that no one knows about.”
This will never work. Even years from now, they won’t talk about my father in front of me. I’ll still be sitting here, listening to them gossip.
There is a more direct route. I could find instructions online for how to load a rifle and turn off the safety. They keep ammunition in the gun room, I saw boxes of cartridges under the table. The door’s locked but with an antique bolt, like the one in my room. It wouldn’t be difficult to break. James is often alone in his study. I could close the door behind me, point the rifle at him, and say, Tell me where he is.
Across the table, James is eating black pudding, made from his own sheep, he told us. He’s silent and preoccupied, with work, maybe, or the garden, or one of his other hobbies. Alice mentioned that he likes foraging for mushrooms. He has special equipment for it, apparently.
I wonder what Rose and James would say if they knew Mum had a heart attack. That her heart failed after years of heavy stress. I wonder if they would remember every time they’d called her a bitch and a liar, every time they’d accused her of framing my father, every time they’d said she was an unfit mother, and if they’d feel remorse. I want them to know what they did, and the effort of not telling them, right now, is making my teeth grate.
• • •
Rose has gone for a hack. She invited me and I said I didn’t know how, which isn’t strictly true. I learned in Norfolk when I was six, my father put me in a helmet and led me around the paddock on one of my grandmother’s ponies.
I watch Rose in a hooded rain cape and the horse until they disappear into the woods. James is outside too, in the garden, and Alice is playing pool with her cousins. I climb the stairs to their bedroom.
James’s study is off the master bedroom. It has a large desk with a view over the lawn, and walls lined with filing cabinets. I start to search for their telephone records, flipping through folders of medical paperwork, the bill for an outpatient visit to a clinic on Great Portland Street, an appointment reminder for a root canal, then through insurance and maintenance forms for their cars.
The third filing cabinet has their credit card statements. The folders are thick, since they have so many transactions every day. I read down the account summary, a list of payments at clothing shops, restaurants, hotels, petrol stations, dry cleaners, though I don’t know what to look for in it.
They might not be in touch with my father at all. He might have never left their house that night. I’m here because I’m a coward, and this is easier than digging in the graveyard.
Someone coughs in the hallway, and I slide the cabinet closed. I reach the master bedroom just as Alice steps inside. She startles, lifting a hand to her chest. “Have you seen the dogs?” I say. “I heard them barking, are they stuck somewhere back here?”
“Dad took them outside.”
“Oh, it must have been coming from there.”
Alice nods, then turns away from me to open her mum’s jewelry box.
* * *
*
• • •
I haven’t left the house all day, and by dinner it’s started to seem unreal. The candlelight is playing tricks, too. From the corner of my eye, the woman in the Tudor painting seems to be opening her mouth.
I don’t think I can stay in this chair, in this room, for another minute, but we still have the main course ahead of us, and dessert. By the time bowls of panna cotta arrive, I’m a little drunk, and my ankles hurt from twisting my feet under the table, it’s the only way I’ve been able to keep the rest of my body still.
“When is Phoebe’s wedding?” asks Alice.
“They’re not getting married,” says Beatrice. “She ended it.”
“Did she? Why?”
“She found out what he did on his stag night.” There were other conversations down the table, but now everyone stops to listen. “His friends took him to Amsterdam,” says Beatrice. “They went to the red-light district, and he chose one of the girls in the windows.”
I look across to James. Under the table, my feet stop moving, and I carefully set down my spoon. James is listening with his chin on his hand, and a bemused expression.
He is trying to look normal. He’s making an effort, which he never does, he’s always remote at meals, staring into the middle distance, fidgeting.
Beatrice takes her time with the story. At one point, James crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair, still turned towards her with a half smile. I’ve never seen him like this before. His expression is benign, like he’s humoring her by listening, like this has nothing to do with him, and doesn’t make him uncomfortable.
After dinner, Alice begins to divide teams for Pictionary. I say I’m not feeling well, and return to my room. I sit cross-legged on the bed and open my laptop. This afternoon, I didn’t try to look for proof that James visits prostitutes. There didn’t seem to be any point—he�
��d pay for it in cash, and he withdrew money often enough to hide those transactions. But I’m not the first to wonder about this. I type, “How can I tell if my husband pays for sex?”
The first result is a thread on a forum for mothers. The post’s author said she’d found some suspicious texts on her husband’s phone, and asked, “Does this sound to you like he’s meeting prostitutes?”
A few of the women who responded said that the same thing had happened to them. Most of their advice involved his phone, and sending baiting messages to the numbers, which wouldn’t help me, since James must have a password on his.
“Do you have access to his bank statements?” wrote one. I reach over to the nightstand for a pen. “Has he made payments for hotel assistants, airport assistants, or massage services? Or reserved hotel rooms?” I’d noticed a few charges at London hotels, the Savoy and Claridge’s, on their statements, but they could have been for client dinners or drinks, or renting conference rooms.
The next one wrote, “Look in his statements for ‘AWork,’ it’s a booking site.” Another said to search his car for condoms, either new ones or scraps of foil from the wrappers, but I can’t imagine he’d be that careless.
I read down the thread as the first woman debates what to do, regrets having found anything, worries about her children. It’s so wrenching to read that I forget for a moment about my own research.
Afterwards, I can’t sleep. Cold air seeps through a crack in the window, and I lie awake wondering how fastidious James has been.
• • •
“There’s a point-to-point today,” says Alice at breakfast. “Shall we go?”
“What’s a point-to-point?” asks the man from Rose’s office.
“It’s like a steeplechase,” she says, which doesn’t really clarify things.