‘Bloody hell,’ Roly repeats after a few seconds’ contemplation. I hear Perkins’s tail slide rough against the carpet. God, that dog: I will never, ever again sneer at the Englishman’s love of the canine.
‘I told you,’ says Roly, ‘he was a good dog, didn’t I?’
I try to say something, but my mouth is still dry as stones.
‘Don’t try and talk,’ says Nessa. Tips another couple of tablespoons’ worth between my lips. I close my eyes, feel it. Breathe out and let my sandpaper eyelids drop closed.
‘I think it’s Tilly’s mother,’ Nessa finally replies to Roly’s question.
‘Tilly’s mother? The one who – oh.’
She nods.
‘I didn’t – but that would mean that …’
‘I guess so,’ she says.
‘Poor woman. My God. What a way to die …’
Poor old Roly. Thinking always takes him a while, the great, wonderful life-saving galoot.
‘Poor Tilly,’ he says. ‘This’ll knock the stuffing out of her.’
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Saved by the Cell
You would have thought it would, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t. If anything, after the initial explosion of tears, it has the opposite effect. Because Tilly gets so angry that I secretly wonder if I shouldn’t take Lucy away in case she jiggles her to death.
One of life’s great injustices: that redheads are the people least advised to cry when they have, by and large, more reason than most to do so. Tilly looks like she has been left out in the rain. She looks like she has both been bleached and gone rusty. Her eyes have that gooseberry-jam look about them and her nose, prone to colour at the best of times, would guide Santa and his reindeer through the whole of Christmas Eve and still have wattage left over to light Times Square for New Year.
But what she’s not is someone whose stuffing has been knocked out. Tilly is grim with rage as she clutches the necklace with fingers so rigid that I think its pattern will be imprinted on her palms for life. Her mouth forms a single straight line from the lobe of one ear to the other, and the tendons stand out in her neck like hawsers. Looking at her, I almost pity Mary and Beatrice. Not much, though.
Tilly has been apologising pretty much her whole life for the inconvenience of her existence, for the fact that her very appearance is a constant reminder to her father of his own heartbreak. Having her need to mourn squashed by people who told her over and over how grateful she should be. Now she’s found out about the source of her pain, I don’t suppose either gratitude or forgiveness are high on her agenda.
She is so angry that she has stopped speaking. She sits silently on the sofa, Lucy bobbling about on her knee, and glares towards infinity, lips occasionally forming tight little words that never come out.
I’m lying on the other sofa with a drip in my arm. There are advantages to getting rescued by an SRN. I’ve been gone three days. I still don’t know if it feels like more, or less. Both, I guess. Roly sits, legs akimbo, on an armchair, his heavenly, heavenly hunting dog grinning between his knees. Nessa is on the rug in front of the fire.
Tilly may have lost her voice, but I’ve found mine. ‘I don’t get how you worked it out,’ I say.
Nessa fiddles with an unlit cigarette. Even she respects the lungs of the newborn.
‘You’re bloody lucky I did,’ she replies.
‘You don’t say.’
‘It was that damn cellphone. You know what? You can be grateful you got done over by a bunch of luddites. They probably thought they’d switched it off, but as you’d got the lock on, all it did was show no display. I heard it ringing. Knew it had to be yours. No-one else I can think of would have a Tom Jones tune on their mobile. Not around here, anyway. And you only put it on there in order to annoy your mother-in-law. And a lucky thing too. Everyone thinks you’re gone. Your car’s gone, and all your stuff. Rufus thinks you cleared, and I don’t blame him. It’s not like it would be the first time, would it?’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise to me,’ she says. ‘I’m not the one who needs an apology. Mel, I have to say, you’ve not handled things well.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No, really. He thinks you’ve gone. Didn’t even question it. He’s furious. And those bloody harpies—’
‘She’s right, you know,’ adds Roly. ‘Tried talking to him m’self, but you know – chaps talking to chaps – not so good at it, I’m afraid. Always knew you weren’t a quitter myself. ’Fraid he doesn’t seem to think the same.’
‘What did he say?’ I ask, my heart sinking.
Roly pauses, considers. Tries to work out how to put it gently, gives up. ‘Said he thought he’d made a mistake. Terrible mistake, actually. Those were his exact words. Said he should never have married you.’
‘Oh, God.’ I feel awful. A sick headache slams into the back of my neck, makes me close my eyes.
‘Sorry,’ adds Roly.
‘No, no,’ I manage. ‘Not your fault. Mine.’
‘What exactly did you say to him?’ asks Nessa.
‘Terrible things,’ I say. ‘I’m too ashamed to say. I don’t blame him.’
‘Don’t give up just yet,’ says Nessa. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’
‘Oh, I think he did,’ says Roly. Colours and adds another ‘sorry’.
‘I knew you hadn’t gone,’ says Tilly suddenly. ‘Those – are you telling me Granny was in on this? I can’t, I don’t … oh God. My own grandmother.’
Nessa looks up at her, and her expression is a strange mix of trepidation and sympathy. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry, Tilly. I think – I can’t see any way she won’t have been. And she’s been … well, happy over the last few days. Sort of triumphant. I thought it was because she thought she’d seen Mel off, but then I heard the phone and I knew Mel wouldn’t have gone without it. She’s bloody welded to that thing.’
‘She always hated my mother,’ says Tilly. ‘She wouldn’t let me talk about her. I always thought it was because … and all that time, she knew. She knew. Oh God, Mummy. I can’t bear it. It’s unbearable.’
‘It is,’ says Nessa. ‘I don’t know. We have to think.’
‘So the phone …?’
‘Lucky coincidence. I was going along the Egyptian corridor when I heard it ringing. I wouldn’t normally be there. Can’t remember the last time I used it, but the Georgian staircase has come loose from the wall and I didn’t trust it.’
‘The whole house is falling apart,’ says Tilly. ‘It’s coming down around their ears.’
‘It was such a weird sound, I almost convinced myself I was hallucinating it. I mean: “Delilah” coming out from behind a door in an empty room. It actually took me five minutes to realise what I’d been hearing. And then I couldn’t remember which room it was. I had to go and get my phone from Beatrice’s room and walk up and down calling your number till I tracked it down. It was on its last legs. Another couple of hours and the battery would have run out altogether. And it was so quiet I wouldn’t have heard it at all if there had been any background noise. It was in one of the wardrobes. Buried among a great heap of your other stuff. Everything: clothes, makeup, jewellery, books, pots of glop. They must have shoved it in there in a hurry. Maybe they were planning to get rid of it later. I don’t know. Maybe they thought they could just leave it there to rot. It’s not like anybody’s used that room since I’ve been here. And when I found that lot, I went and found Roly.’
Rufus. I’m lying there thinking about Rufus. I can’t help it. My eyes are full of tears. That in a few short months he can have changed from loving me so much, from being my champion, the one who believed in me, to this.
‘Why didn’t you go and find Rufus?’
‘Mary and Hilary took him up to London two days ago,’ says Tilly. ‘They said, if you came back, it would serve you right if he was gone. I suppose they wanted him out of the house in case he went looking for you while you could stil
l make a noise. Oh God, they did the same thing with Daddy when … That fucking bitch.’
I’ve never heard Tilly swear. I look over at her and she’s bent over Lucy, clutching her so tightly I’m afraid she’ll suffocate her.
‘Oh babe,’ says Nessa. Crawls across the floor and gently insinuates herself between mother and baby. Enfolds Tilly in a hug and rocks her, gesticulating with a single finger at Roly to come and get the child. And Tilly’s really bawling, now, mouth open and howling at the memory of her lost mother, fingers digging into Nessa’s back so viciously that it must only be granite will that stops Nessa from howling too.
‘I thought she hated me.’ The words spill out in a torrent. ‘I thought, all this time, she’d left me, it was something I’d done. I thought, I must have been so bad, such a bad child, that she would leave me like that. Never look back. Never care what happened to me. And Daddy’s been broken since it happened, no sort of man, no sort of father, just … And all the time … all the time she was there, lying there, and I never knew. All these years I’ve hated her, and it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t … Oh God, what she must have been thinking! To die like that, my mother!’
Roly’s chin has vanished into his neck as he goggles at Tilly over her daughter’s head. Someone who never had a lot of luck with family himself, I can’t think what he’s thinking right now.
‘Tilly,’ he says, ‘I don’t know what to say to you. I understand that nothing – nothing – will make this better. We must do something. We can’t let this … I think we should call the police. Do something.’
Tilly sits back, looks at him over Nessa’s shoulder, and just like that, snap, the anger is back. Anger and something else – resolution. Her eyes are narrow and glittering, jaw hard with vengeance.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No, not yet. I don’t want her to think she can be forgiven. I don’t want that. She took everything from me and she can’t get away with it.’
I don’t know, now, if she’s talking about Mary or Beatrice. Both, it turns out: two matriarchs in one.
‘Mary will get jail,’ she says. ‘Sure. She’ll get jail and I’ll laugh as I see her go there, but what are they going to do to a hundred-year-old woman? What’s going to happen to her? She has no conscience, she has no heart, and they’ll say, but look, she’s too old, what can we do?’
We wait, in silence, all of us.
‘They took everything,’ she says. ‘They took everything that mattered, and all for a house. All so they could mother the heir of Bourton Allhallows. And for what? For what?’
‘I don’t want them to get away that easily,’ she says. ‘They took everything from me, and she took everything from my father.’
‘They took everything,’ she says, ‘and I want to take everything back. I want to take their sons.’
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Contact
I’m in the bath and I get a phone call from my father. It’s my second bath in six hours. I can still smell my ordeal on my skin, in my hair, and I don’t know if I will ever get it off. The caller display reads ‘UNKNOWN’, but I pick it up anyway, because, despite the fact that our making contact at this point would throw all our plans into disarray, I can’t help but hope that it might be Rufus. If I’d known who it was, I wouldn’t have picked up. I can’t be planning a retribution for one crime and sweeping an identical one under the carpet. Even I’m not that much of a hypocrite. Or that much of a coward.
But Rufus hasn’t made a single call to my phone since I vanished. I know he’s washed his hands of me, given up, no longer intends to humiliate himself for the sake of our relationship. The months of game-playing have ground him down, and he’s given up. I know it’s my own fault.
I don’t discuss this with them. But in an ironic, unintentional way, it seems that, if it wasn’t for my own family, I would probably be breathing my last sometime around now. Because the only calls registered, apart from the half-dozen from Nessa when she was tracking the phone through the house, are ten unidentified-number hang-ups, the sort you get when someone’s called you from abroad. One of these must have been the one that Nessa heard in the Egyptian corridor. And I can’t think of anyone who would be calling me that consistently without leaving a message other than my family.
So I pick it up, say: ‘Hello?’ and my father, who’s calling at 6 a.m. his time, says: ‘Please don’t hang up, Princess.’
I consider doing just that. Say, eventually: ‘What do you want?’
‘What do you mean, what do I want? You’re my daughter.’
I don’t say anything in reply to this. Listen to him breathing. It sounds as though he has a bit of a cold.
‘What’s going on, Melody? I don’t understand.’
I continue the silent treatment.
So he says: ‘Look. Your mum’s got a temper. You’ve inherited it. You both say things you don’t mean, but you’ve never done this before. This is crazy. You’ve always shouted at each other, and you’ve always got over it. We don’t sulk in our family.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘We do other things instead, right?’
‘Oh, right,’ he says, ‘so you’ve got some other gripe?’
I bite my lip. ‘Well, ‘gripe’ is an interesting way of putting it.’
‘So do you mind telling me what it is, then?’
‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I say, because I’ll never get used to it and saying it out loud is almost impossible to me.
‘No, I don’t,’ says Dad. ‘You women speak in code.’
‘OK, I’ll spell it out. I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t want to see you and I don’t want any contact with you.’
My dad’s cold suddenly sounds like it’s got a lot worse. ‘But why, Melody?’ he asks in a tremulous voice. ‘I don’t understand …’
‘Ask Mum if you can’t work it out.’
‘Melody, I’m asking you.’
OK. Have it your way.
‘I found out about Andy,’ I tell him.
A silence. ‘I thought you knew about that?’
‘KNEW about it?’ I feel the bile rising. ‘What you talking about? Do you think if I’d known about it for one minute, I’d have let you … let you do that – if I’d known about it?’
‘But, Melody, we were only doing what you wanted.’
‘Wanted?’ I slosh upright in the soapy water. ‘WANTED?’
‘You said you wanted to get rid of him …’
I practically drop the phone. ‘No I didn’t! No I didn’t!’
‘Well, what did you say, then?’
‘I said …’ I don’t have an answer to this. ‘I said I wished he was in hell,’ I finish.
‘Well, it was the best we could do,’ says Dad.
And I’m yelling at him. ‘How can you be so flippant about it? How can you behave like it’s a joke? Don’t you understand what you’ve done?’
‘Of course it’s not a joke,’ says Dad. ‘It’s not to you, anyway, and we wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think it was what needed to be done.’
I am practically choking on my rage. ‘I don’t—’
And then he chortles. Actually chortles. ‘It was pretty funny, though,’ he says. ‘He wasn’t exactly dignified, splashing about begging us to let him back on board. I would have thought you’d have found it pretty—’
‘Get away from me! Oh my God! You’re – you’re profane! How can you talk about it like that? You’re – oh – God, you disgust me!’
He starts to speak, but I cut him off by hitting the hang-up button. And then I duck under the water to wash myself clean, and I’m shaking all over. Pour half a bottle of Tilly’s Crabtree and Evelyn Aloe Vera shampoo over my head and start to scrub. I feel I will never be clean again.
The phone starts to ring again. I snatch it up, snarl: ‘Leave me alone! Just leave me alone! Forget you had a daughter! I’m not your daughter! I don’t want to be the child of fucking murderers!’ And hang it
up so hard I nearly break the button. Hit the off switch and throw the handset over on to the pile of clothes I’ve left in the corner. There are tears streaming down my face. Gritting my teeth, I drop under the surface again. Barely hear the tap on the door that announces that Tilly’s outside.
‘Are you decent?’
‘Come in,’ I tell her.
She looks concerned.
‘I thought I heard shouting.’
I swipe a soapy arm across my eyes. Bad mistake. Grope about for something to wipe them off with and find a soft fluffy towel being pressed into my hand.
‘Yes,’ I tell her, ‘no …’ I can’t quite stop a sob. ‘Oh God, how did we get these families? What did we do to deserve them?’
Tilly perches on the linen basket. ‘I don’t know. I wonder if I did something in a past life, sometimes.’
‘Well, I don’t believe in that bullshit,’ I tell her bluntly. ‘All that bloody made-up cack designed to make you say, yeah, you’re right, I drew the short straw and other people drew the long one but it’s all my fault. I deserve this.’
‘Was that your mum?’
‘My dad.’
‘I don’t suppose you want to—’
‘No.’ I massage the tension spots at the base of my skull and screw my eyes up. ‘No, not right now. I’ll tell you sometime, but not now. It’s just – I just – I don’t want to be like them. They do awful things and I don’t want to be like them.’
Tilly shakes her head. A bit sadly. ‘Nobody has to be like anything,’ she says. ‘I hope that’s true. I really hope so. How are you feeling?’
‘Awful. How about you?’
‘I can truthfully say I’ve had better days. Listen, the others are downstairs and they’ve got the phone. Do you feel up to coming down?’
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Give me five minutes.’
In the kitchen, Nessa and Roly have the new phone out of its box and are programming its number into the speed-dial on Tilly’s. She’s going to walk Rufus along the Egyptian corridor on some pretext or another and set it ringing as they pass the door. But not until Nessa has accidentally-on-purpose left him in a room with the baby monitor.
Simply Heaven Page 46