Angelo took his arms away and stared at her, the shock making his face turn pale. ‘Did she?’ he said. He turned to me. ‘Mum, is that why you’ve been asking about Dr Ferris on and on?’
‘Of course she didn’t,’ Dido said. ‘No! He left the phone in the car, I think. It fell out of his pocket when we were—’ She stopped as a blush the colour of a raspberry filled her cold cheeks. That exact colour even as far as the faint blue top note.
‘Wow,’ said Lars. ‘It was a coincidence? Her daughter and your son? His phone?’
‘Well,’ said Dido, her face still flaming. ‘She pointed him out. She— Angel, she pointed you out. One day in Kirkcudbright. You were with your dad and she just said you were handsome.’
I could imagine it. Dr Ferris seeing her fancy man and saying to her daughter, ‘He’s a looker, isn’t he?’ not realizing that Dido would look at the boy Dr Ferris barely noticed.
‘What’s going on, Mum?’ Angelo said.
I stared at him. Where would I begin? ‘Nothing you need to worry about,’ I said. ‘A bit of trouble with a couple of patients at work, that’s all. But it’s going to be okay.’
‘Is it Sylvie?’ Dido said.
‘What do you know about Sylvie?’ said Lars.
‘Only what my mum says when she’s been drinking,’ Dido said. ‘Is she in trouble?’
‘Sylvie and her sister are both in a bit of trouble,’ said Lars. ‘But, really, it’s going to be okay. There might be a lot of changes coming but it’ll work out.’
Dido gave a small unhappy laugh. ‘I want to live with Dad, not with her.’
I smiled at her. I only knew what it was like to be a let-down to my husband. I couldn’t imagine how it must be for a girl like Dido to be the kid of a woman like her mother.
‘Sylvie and her sister.’ Angelo’s voice was as flat and cold as a slab of mud.
‘What about them?’ I said.
‘Her sister? There’s two of them, Mum? Seriously? I’ve got two sisters living a few miles away and I’ve never met either of them? What the fuck is wrong with this family? How could you come and live here? No wonder you didn’t want to go and work there.’
‘Oh, my sweetheart,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I said that. Except I was embarrassed that your sister never had a name. I said the first one that came into my head. Sylvie is over thirty. She’s not your sister. Your sister was . . . Darlin’, I’m sorry, but she was so deformed she wasn’t really a baby at all.’
Dido winced at the words but Angelo just frowned at me. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Of course, she was a baby. I told you. Dad took me to the hospital. I saw her. She was perfect. She was like a dolly. She was like the dolly I brought for her. You remember that dolly, right? I took it to Australia.’
‘Oh, Angelo,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t her. Your dad showed you a different baby so’s not to upset you.’
‘No,’ Angel said. ‘That’s not right. It was definitely her. She was perfect. But she was dead. Like a dolly.’
The wind had dropped, the way it does, winter afternoons, and when the rain started it fell straight down, like threads of heavy silk. Lars came wading towards me through the mud and put one flap of his jacket around my back. ‘We need to get out of here before we all drown,’ he said. ‘Ali, you’re shivering.’
‘I don’t know where to go,’ I said. I didn’t even think of what Angelo would make of his mum sounding so lost. He was on his feet, helping Dido down from the slab of stone. She came up to his shoulder, her little pink and black head fitting in close under his chin. He wasn’t paying any attention to me. In Angelo’s head, the last few days had been about a date and a dumping and now a second chance. The police, and his mum cracking up didn’t even register.
‘Angelo, take Dido to my place,’ Lars said, fishing in his pocket and handing over a set of keys. ‘Seventeen Bailey Park.’
‘It’s my car,’ Dido said. ‘So I’ll be taking him.’
Angelo rolled his eyes but I couldn’t help a small smile. I liked her. She took no nonsense from anyone.
‘Where are we going?’ I said to Lars.
‘You need to catch Belle coming off her shift.’
He wouldn’t say more.
Back at the hall the car park was full.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked Lars, as we drew up.
‘I told you,’ he said. ‘If the doc’s chucked his wife under the bus things are going to move pretty quick.’ He pointed to a couple hurrying in the front door. ‘That’s Byron’s mum and dad, coming to pick him up and save themselves a fortune.’
I twisted round as an NHS patient-transfer minibus came up the drive behind us. Lars whistled. ‘He’s really stuck it to her if they’re scooping up the referrals as quick as this, though.’
‘It’s too much,’ I said. ‘What if we’re wrong? It’s all so unlikely, you know. We can’t be responsible for this on a crazy hunch about a crazy plot to— I can’t—’
‘Ali,’ Lars said, putting a hand on my arm. ‘You need to start trusting yourself again. We’re not wrong. You know that really. And . . .’
‘And what?’ I said, watching Ryan come out of the front door carrying a bulging gym bag, a nurse I didn’t know holding him under the elbow.
‘And you need to get ready for something else that’s going to seem unlikely,’ Lars said.
Ryan had seen us and came over, the nurse trotting after him. I wound down the window. ‘Fucken hell,’ he said, in greeting.
‘I couldn’t put it better myself,’ I said, getting out of the car and giving him a quick hug, expert that I am in getting a hug in before a teenage boy can stop me. ‘Take care, eh?’ Then I made for the front door.
‘Where are you going?’ Lars said, once we were inside.
‘Sylvie. Where do you think? If Belle really needs to speak to me about this “unlikely thing”, bring her there.’
Julia was lying on the bed and Sylvie was in her chair facing the window, but she turned her head just a little as she heard me coming.
‘It’s all kicking off,’ Julia said. ‘You wouldn’t believe how quick the tents are folding. My dad’s coming back from Portugal. I told them I was eighteen but back he comes. That’ll be fun, won’t it? Perry and Garran both fussing over me, like two hens with one chick.’
‘And your mum?’
‘On the run,’ Julia said. ‘Cops came. Dr F told them she killed Ralph and kept Sylvie high as a kite. She’s for it.’
Her voice was back to the drawl again and she was scrolling through texts and swinging one of her crossed legs with her shoe dangling from a toe-tip. But she didn’t fool me.
‘You’ll get help,’ I said. ‘You’ll get the help you need and you’ll be okay. Don’t be brave if you feel like bawling, eh?’
Movement at the door told me Belle was there.
‘I’ll stay with this pair,’ Lars said. ‘You go.’
Belle took me to the gazebo. The security light was on and it shone like a lantern as we tramped across the grass towards it through the mussed remains of Julia’s leaf collage. The inside didn’t smell any better and the cold blue tint of the lightbulb made it more cheerless than it would have been in the dark.
‘So you remember why I got sacked,’ Belle said, once we were settled.
‘Boundary issues?’
‘You see, the thing is,’ said Belle, ‘that sometimes the parents of a stillborn child, or even a late mis, sometimes they want to see and hold and love that baby a while. And sometimes they can’t. But afterwards they might regret it and it’s too late? I always wanted to help them not regret the decision they made.’
She had taken something out of her tunic pocket but she was covering it with her hand.
‘Because you can’t unsee a horror,’ I said, nodding. But Angel’s voice was in my head and the words he said were ‘perfect’ and ‘dolly’.
‘She wasn’t a horror,’ Belle said, and uncovered her phone. On the screen
was a picture of a sleeping child, a long sweep of lashes from the huge almond eyes, eyes that seemed to reach around her little face. Her mouth was pursed shut and firm lines scored down it, on either side, Queen Victoria, not amused. The hospital blanket that was wound around her like a cocoon covered all but a single sticky spike of jet-black hair.
‘So is this what she would have looked like?’ I asked. ‘Bestcase scenario for that condition?’
Belle put her arm round me. ‘Ali, my love, this is her. This is your baby girl. I took her picture. To give you the option. I took all their pictures, until they caught me.’
I grabbed the phone out of her hand and star-fished the photo as big as it would go.
‘But it’s true,’ I said. ‘She really is perfect.’
‘No,’ said Belle. ‘I puffed up the blanket around the top of her head to make the shape look better. She wasn’t perfect, but she was beautiful. Wouldn’t you say so?’
‘She looks like my mum,’ I said, and kept gazing. Her nose was as smooth and round as a seashell washed by endless tides. Her lashes were as neat and soft as if someone had brushed them. And that determined little mouth. Tight shut on all her secrets. If I could have this picture on my bedside table in a silver frame, a little one laminated in my wallet, I knew I’d never hear her crying out for me again.
‘She’s not who I thought she was,’ I said. But then neither was I. Single mum of two kids, the boy more trouble than his sister, close to my family, over my ex.
Well, that wasn’t exactly who I was just yet, but I was on my way.
Postscript
Sylvie and Julia sold the cube house. Got a good price for it too from some ghoul who was actually tickled by the thought that a body had been buried there. The girls bought a cottage, other side of the bay, quite near my brother’s farm and the annex he rents to me.
The last day I visited, Sylvie was gardening. A cherry tree, newly sunk in a mulched hole. It had three bare branches, gnarled and scaly as chicken’s feet, and the dark tips only just beginning to swell where the buds would be. I watched her pour a Coke bottle full of water carefully around its roots, then stand up and watch the puddle seep into the soil.
‘There,’ she said. ‘As long as Julia doesn’t back the car into it.’
I sighed. Of the three of them, we never could say who was worst. Dido was teaching Julia to drive. Julia was teaching Dido to drink. I suspected Angelo was teaching both of them things I’d rather not know. I tried to care when the school called me in but, deep down, I reckoned if those three kids wanted some wild time they had my blessing.
Only Lars ever managed to keep them in line. Lars was in from the start with Dr F. Co-owner of the new drop-in clinic, co-chairman of the funding board. It was only his good name that got them accredited at all, since no one quite believed that Dr F knew nothing of what had happened at Howell Hall.
Tamara Ferris got twelve years. Mona Swain just fifteen, with a domestic-abuse defence. If I was a better person I would try never to think about either of them. But, being who I am, I like to imagine them passing in the halls at Cornton Vale, the women’s prison. I like to think maybe they work together in the laundry, despising each other and still having to face each other every day.
Angel tells me Marco still lives in the cottage at Dundrennan. Fine by me. I don’t suppose I’ll ever need to drive down that way again. Howell Hall is closed. The army has the run of the headland now.
I saw Sylvie raise her head and glance over that way. Then she turned resolutely back and watched the last of the water soak away. ‘By the time I can sit in its shade,’ she said, ‘all of this will feel far away.’
I said nothing, but she heard me at it and sighed. ‘I don’t want to remember any more than I remember already,’ she said.
‘And you’re still sure you don’t want someone to talk to?’ I asked her. ‘Professionally?’
She shook her head with a shudder. ‘Just time,’ she said. ‘I have my new home and you, my good friend, and I have this to take care of and look forward to.’
She had, in other words, a house, a tree and a person.
‘And Julia,’ I reminded her.
‘Mmhmm, mmhmm,’ she said. She was new at it, but every time I heard it, it made me happy. The sound of Sylvie laughing.
Facts and Fictions
Galloway is a real place, but . . . something about it is just unreal enough to make it perfect for fiction. This time, Castle Douglas, Dalbeattie, Kirkcudbright and Dundrennan are borrowed whole. The abbey is pretty close but Historic Scotland looks after the real one far too well for any of this to happen there. There is a MoD training area near Dundrennan, but it’s not much like mine. Howell Hall is entirely imaginary. Indeed, none of the houses, businesses or individuals in the book are based on real places, institutions or people.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank:
Martin Fletcher, Krystyna Green, Amanda Keats, Aimee Kitson, Tara Loder, Helen Upton and all at Little, Brown for everything except the car-lift at the office.
Lisa Moylett and all at CMM Literary Agency.
My UK friends and my family: Nancy Balfour, Terri Bischoff, Audrey Ford and the gang, Wendy Keegan and her gang, Louise Kelly, Catherine Lepreux, Jean and Jim McPherson, Sheila McPherson (still) and a small but growing gang, Neil McRoberts, Nan McRoberts and that gang.
The Weight of Angels Page 29