The toilet flushed behind her, and Izzy pulled up her trousers, a trail of toilet paper poking from the back of them like a tail. Sophie plucked it out and put it down the loo. She was about to lift Izzy up to the sink to wash her hands when the little girl picked up a three-legged stool that had been left by the bath and carried it to the sink.
“Do you like coming back here?” Sophie asked her as she washed her hands with the kind of enthusiasm that was bad for the environment.
“I do like it,” Izzy said thoughtfully, “and partly I don’t like it because, well, it’s funny and a bit sad.”
Sophie watched her hop off the stool, pull open the door, and head back toward the living room. Sometimes she couldn’t tell if Izzy was being curiously insightful or just mimicking the conversations of grown-ups. But on that occasion she felt certain the three-year-old had said exactly what she meant.
When they returned to the front room, Louis was sitting on the sofa with what looked a photo album open on his lap. His expression was unreadable, hidden by the forward seep of his long hair, but Sophie thought she could see the tension and sadness in every line of his body.
“Whassat?” Izzy asked, climbing up and kneeling beside him.
“It’s you,” Louis said brightly for her’s sake. It was strange, Sophie thought ruefully, how all four of them were pretending to be stronger than they were for the sake of the other three. “It’s your baby book. I found it with Bella’s. I took all the photos of Bella. I think your mum must have taken most of these. She’s only in one of them. I’ve missed so much.” He sighed.
Izzy traced the outline of her own baby footprint in the book and giggled.
“Is Bella upstairs?” Sophie asked, looking up the narrow staircase.
“Yes,” Louis said. “She wanted to go and find some things. I offered to go with her, but she said no thank you very politely.”
Sophie nodded. The atmosphere was so full, so ripe with Carrie that it seemed easier to be apart from him. To somehow disperse the intensity of emotions.
“That’s my girl,” she said, before calling up the stairs, “Bella? Are you all right up there?”
“Come up!” Bella called in response. Sophie glanced at Louis, but he didn’t look up from the baby book.
Sophie felt foolishly apprehensive as she climbed the stairs. She had never imagined herself to have an overactive imagination, but in this house it was easy to let thoughts run wild. And anyway, after the last few weeks, especially since Louis had arrived in her life, she wasn’t at all sure of the sort of person she was anymore. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find Carrie at the top of the stairs waiting to ask just what she thought she was playing at, falling for her husband.
“Hello?” Sophie called out once on the tiny landing, annoying herself with the note of tension in her voice.
“In here!” Sophie followed Bella’s voice to the small second bedroom, expecting it to a child’s room. But as she entered she realized immediately it was Carrie’s room. Her grandmother’s Art Deco wardrobe that she had loved so much dominated the small space, and there was just enough room remaining for a single bed and a former dining chair on which a pile of folded laundry still waited to be put away. Bella was sitting on the bed, her head peeking out of a huge red mohair sweater. She rolled the sleeves up until her hands appeared. “This was Mum’s favorite sweater,” she said to Sophie, smiling. “It still smells like her a bit. Smell!” She thrust out a sleeve toward Sophie, who sat down on the bed and sniffed the garment, which did have a faint aroma of Carrie’s favorite rose oil, and wondered how—out of all of them—Bella seemed to be so relaxed here, and happy. Sophie had expected exactly the opposite, but for possibly the first time since she had met Bella again at her grandmother’s house, all of the lines of tension that had characterized the girl’s small body seemed to have melted away. Sophie looked at Bella and realized she was six and a half years old again, not some small, noble adult carrying the weight of the world around on her shoulders.
Bella rose on her knees and picked up a black leatherette jewelry box off a shelf that had been put over the bed. Taking it down carefully, she tipped it up and turned the handle to wind the clockwork mechanism before gently lifting the lid, holding the box at eye level.
As the red felt interior was revealed and the tiny plastic ballerina within began to twirl and pirouette, Sophie smiled in recognition. “Carrie got that for her fourteenth birthday,” she told Bella, who was watching the tiny dancer. “She said she hated it, said she wished she could burn it—that all she wanted was money for clothes and records and that your gran had got her this just to pi——to annoy her. But she never did throw it away. She always kept her jewelry in it, even when she was grown up.” Sophie listened as the tinny rendition of the “Blue Danube Waltz” began to slow. “Maybe your gran knew her better than she thought she did after all,” Sophie said. “You’ll have to tell her about the box. She’d really like to know.”
Bella set the box down on the bed and pulled out a couple of strings of glass beads, dropping them over her head. She took out some earrings and looked at them in the palm of her hand for moment before dropping them back into the box and taking out a butterfly brooch. Sophie pinned it on the sweater for her.
“Can I take this?” she asked Sophie, shutting the lid of the box before tugging at the sweater. “And this?”
Sophie nodded. “Of course you can,” she said, and she impulsively hooked her arm around Bella’s neck and planted a kiss on her forehead. Unwittingly, Bella was making this visit to Carrie’s house easier for her, when it should have been the other way around. “You seem happy to be here, Bella. Do you think you’d be happy living back here with your dad?”
Bella stared at the faded and rubbed gold border that decorated the box’s lid for a moment. “This is my home, mine and Izzy’s,” she said. “Not his.”
Sophie was prepared for that response. “But, darling, you know you will have to live with your dad eventually and—”
“I know I have to live with Dad,” Bella said with less venom than Sophie had expected, and using the word Dad instead of him. “But I want to live here, Aunty Sophie. I want to come back home to St. Ives and school and my friends. Here, where I can nearly touch Mummy. It’s like I left one morning and I didn’t even know that I wasn’t coming back. But I didn’t. I didn’t ever come back until now. And now it seems right to come back even if—even if not all us can come back.”
Sophie nodded and kissed Bella again.
“I don’t know if Izzy feels the same way,” Sophie said, releasing Bella from her hug. “And as far as your dad is concerned—well, it’s hard to know what he’s thinking. But I think you’re right about coming back here.” Sophie looked around the room. Despite the cold outside, the back of the house seemed to trap the morning sun, and it was bathed in glowing warmth.
“Do you feel happy about living with Louis now?” Sophie asked Bella.
“Well…I’m prepared to discuss it with him,” she said. “If it means I can come home.”
Sophie nodded, trying not to smile at the small girl’s formality and trying not feel a sense of rejection.
Suddenly Izzy’s scream reverberated through the small house.
Sophie, who was getting used to Izzy screaming the place down over nothing in particular, wondered what they would find as she and Bella went downstairs. But any residual apprehension she might have had dissipated the moment she saw the three-year-old.
Izzy was standing in the middle of the livingroom, her face rapturous as she almost strangled the life out of a huge ginger tomcat.
“It’s Tango!” she cried joyously. “Tango! Tango!”
“Tango!” Bella leaped the last two stairs and joined the group hug of which Tango was the remarkably compliant center.
“Okay, guys,” Louis said, laughing. “You’ll scare him.”
“Nothing scares Tango,” Bella said, hefting the giant cat out of Izzy’s grasp and lumbering wit
h him to the sofa. “He’s the toughest cat in St. Ives!”
Louis took Tango from Bella as she climbed up and sat beside him, then plonked the animal back in her outstretched arms.
Sophie, who was not used to seeing cats handled so roughly without the kind of protest that resulted in at least the loss of an eye, looked on in awe. Tango appeared to be twice the size of Artemis, had half of one ear missing and a little bare patch over one eye that meant he must have survived a few fights. He looked like a real bruiser, but there he was purring like a, well, like a pussycat in Bella’s arms as she scratched him behind one ear.
“How can he be here?” Bella asked. “He went to a cats’ home!”
Louis nodded. “I know, I was going to tell you. Leslie from next door, the lady that was coming in every day,” he added for Sophie’s benefit, “said she found him here one morning about four months ago. She called the cats’ home and they told her he had been relocated in Mousehole, ironic or what? Anyway, he can’t have liked it, because he left his new home the first chance he got and came back here. She didn’t know how he’d made it so far in one piece or how long he’d been living off scraps and that before she found him. The cats’ home phoned his new family and they took him back, but the next chance he got he was here again. So everyone agreed it was best to just let him live here. Leslie’s been feeding him. I think he divides his time between here and next door now. They’ve become quite good friends.”
“Tango,” Izzy said softly as she knelt at Bella’s feet. “Can we take him home too?” she asked Sophie. In a moment of confusion, Sophie tried to work out the logistics of fitting two children and two cats (one psychotic, one freakishly huge) into her small flat before realizing that her flat was no longer home for Bella and Izzy.
“It’s not up to me,” Sophie said, nodding at Louis as she tried to suppress an unexpected pang of loss. She sat down on a chair.
Louis reached out and scratched Tango under the chin. “All right, old mate,” he said, with fond familiarity before saying to the girls, “Well, it’s not up to me either.” He looked at Bella. “Izzy told me she’d like to live in a new house, when we come back.”
“With my own bedroom,” Izzy said firmly.
“Well, maybe,” Louis said cautiously. “But anyway, Bella—what about you?”
“I want to live here,” Bella said into Tango’s neck. She glanced up at Louis and pressed her lips together, stubborn and resolute.
Louis looked around the small front room, with good and bad memories stuffed into every corner and crevice. Sophie could see that this was the last place he wanted to come back to. But she could also see that he desperately didn’t want to let Bella down.
“It’s just, I thought a fresh start maybe…,” he said tentatively, “for us all.”
“This is home!” Bella insisted, her voice heavy with the threat of tears. She pointed at Louis. “You can’t just take us away from here and make us forget Mummy. You can’t just pretend that we’ve always been happy and that nothing happened. You left us here! Here at home!”
As Tango twisted anxiously out of Bella’s arms and scooted behind the sofa, Izzy stuck her thumb in her mouth and climbed into Sophie’s lap.
“I’m not pretending,” Louis said carefully, since the wrong intonation could have blown everything. “I know I was wrong to leave you the way I did, Bella. I’m so sorry—”
“But why did you, why?” Bella shouted, standing up, running at Louis, and bringing her fists down on his legs. Izzy buried her face in Sophie’s hair and tightened her arms around her neck. Sophie squeezed her back.
Louis leaned forward and put his arms around Bella’s stiff shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I was stupid and selfish and wrong. And I’ve regretted it and missed you all every minute since. And most of all I wish I’d spoken to your mum again and told her how sorry I was. Because I am so sorry, Bella. I am so sorry, Izzy. I am so sorry.”
Izzy slid wordlessly out of Sophie’s lap and crossed to Louis’s, flinging her arms around both father and sister and drawing them together in a hug.
“Don’t make us live somewhere we don’t know again,” Bella said.
“I won’t make you do anything,” Louis said, but Sophie could see the stricken look on his face. She knew that coming back to this house would be unbearable for him. A permanent reminder of what he had lost, of what it seemed he’d thrown away.
“Why don’t you think about it?” Sophie suggested quietly, afraid to intrude on this moment, noticing how Bella had relaxed into the embrace of her family and buried her head in Louis’s shoulder. “It’s been a very difficult day for you all. Coming back here is a very big step, and perhaps you need to talk and think a bit more before you decide anything. What do you think, Bella?”
Bella’s face emerged from Louis’s hair, and she roughly wiped the back of her hands across her face. “I need to ask you more things,” she told Louis. “And to ask you more things before I know what to do.”
Louis tense’s and stricken face visibly lightened at words that anybody else might have found intimidating. It was clear he wasn’t afraid of might happen between him and Bella. He was just glad that some kind of relationship had started at last.
“And we need to ask Tango where he wants to live too,” Izzy added solemnly, fishing the cat out from his refuge and squeezing him hard, and as Sophie looked at Tango, she felt certain he’d want to live wherever Bella and Izzy lived.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Louis said to both of the girls. “But I think we’ll work it out.” He said it so hopefully it made Sophie’s heart hurt.
“Yes,” Bella said. “I think we will.”
Twenty-three
Sophie waited on the far side of the narrow street as she watched Louis, Izzy, and Bella chatting with their next-door neighbor, who occasionally interrupted the conversation with rapid-fire kisses and bear hugs for the children. The three were gradually becoming a family again, Sophie could see, the bonds between them slowly tightening. Bonds that did not include her. She wished she could at least take some credit, but she felt it would have happened sooner or later anyway, even if the girls had never crash-landed in her life. Even if she’d gone on blissfully unaware, organizing corporate parties on the fourteenth floor of her very own ivory tower, ironing her hair weekday mornings, wearing her pajamas all weekend. Even without me, she thought, they would have found one another.
As for her, soon she’d be going back to that life, and everything would be exactly the same as it had before. Well, not exactly the same, Sophie decided. She wouldn’t be the same.
She thought about her job, her flat, and her tiny, insular social life, which she barely managed to maintain, and the same question people were always asking her came into her head: Why? What was all that hard work and near solitude for?
Sophie didn’t know the answer, but that wasn’t the revelation. What she realized—standing across the street watching Louis, Bella, and Izzy talking to their old neighbor—was that she had never known.
The three said their good-byes and crossed over to join Sophie.
“She seems nice,” Sophie said automatically, holding out a hand, which Izzy took as she hopped up on the curb.
“She is,” Louis said. “She was really pleased to see me.” He sounded so surprised that he must have had his own reservations about coming back to a town small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business. He must have wondered if he would be thought of as a returning hero or an unwelcome villain. The fact that at least one old friend had been glad to see him must have come as a relief.
“I’ve got an appointment with a solicitor after lunch.” He glanced at Sophie. “Would you come with me? I could do with a bit of moral support.”
She was touched that Louis had asked her. “And the girls?” she asked.
“If you were just outside or in the foyer, it would really help,” he told her levelly.
“Oh,” Sophie said. “Well,
okay then.”
She felt a little glow of pleasure that Louis wanted her to just be there. A glow she quickly put out. She had to curtail this crush, she had to, because, unlike her previous imaginary dalliances, she sensed that this one could really hurt her badly.
“And then,” Louis continued, entirely oblivious to her inner turmoil, “I suppose we should visit estate agents, and employment agencies.” He sighed. “It’ll be weird being a wage slave again,” he said. “Still, got to be done. Anyway, let’s go for a walk on Porthmeor Beach while the weather’s good, shall we?”
“Yes!” the girls chorused, and Izzy swung Sophie’s hand as they headed down to the beach.
Izzy raced off as soon as they reached the beach, instantly tumbling over and rolling around in the damp sand.
“She’ll be wet through!” Sophie worried, but Louis only smiled.
“She’s three and she’s having fun. Getting wet won’t hurt her,” he said, chuckling indulgently at his daughter’s high spirits.
“I’m going swimming!” Izzy called out to them, her voice almost carried away by the wind as she raced toward the choppy sea, still dotted with surfers. Unable to employ the kind of laissez-faire that Louis displayed, Sophie instinctively raced after Izzy, a fact that thrilled the three-year-old more as she squealed and dodged Sophie’s attempts to catch her. Woman and child chased each other recklessly a few feet from the edge of the surf for some minutes, until finally, all her fears forgotten, Sophie grabbed Izzy around the waist and fell backward onto the sand. Izzy turned in Sophie’s arms to face her, the rising wind whipping Sophie’s hair between their faces, tickling Izzy’s nose and making her laugh even more.
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