‘Edie,’ she says gently. ‘Edie, calm down. Come sit.’
We light a fire. We gingerly hold cups of fennel tea, as if they might break. They warm our hands and we lean into one another, staring at the flames as they crackle and dance. She is sitting with her knees together, more formal than me. My legs are curled beside me. There has been a lot of silence, the two of us allowing ourselves to exhale.
She is wearing a shirt with a navy William Morris design, swirling leaves and seed pods. My head is leaning on her shoulder. I stare at the pattern on the fabric, the pendant which nestles in the soft wrinkles of her chest. I am moved by her fastidiousness; how smart she looks. Her rings gleam on her fingers, but the skin on her hands is reptilian and her face is dragged downwards with sorrow and exhaustion. My poor mum. My tears fall again, and she kisses the top of my head.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’ she asks.
‘I went to Deeping on a Sunday, early December, it was. In the afternoon. Got there about three – it was still light. I needed somewhere to think, away from Will. I was thinking about splitting up with him.’ I look up into her face. ‘You knew that, didn’t you, Mum? I think you had an inkling that I was going to end it with him. Things had started with Helena, confusing stuff, and I didn’t know if they were a symptom of wanting to leave Will, or whether it was the start of something real with her – you know? I was really confused about it all, needed some headspace, away from both of them.
‘I’d more or less decided to sleep there. I was lying on your bed – you know how I love it in your bed. It started to get dark and I fell asleep. I woke to clattering sounds downstairs. The house was pitch dark by now and I sleepily thought: “Ah, Mum and Dad are here.” But then I snapped awake. I’d spoken to you – remember? – and you told me you were staying home that weekend. Dad had too much work on so you weren’t coming to Deeping. I froze, thinking it must be an intruder moving around downstairs. We’re so lax about security at Deeping. I’d locked the front door on arrival – I’m always nervous being in the countryside by myself – but all the same, that key in the porch …
‘There were footsteps coming up the stairs. My heart was pounding; I was terrified. I slipped off the bed and climbed inside your wardrobe, pulling the door closed and your clothes in front of my face. The intruder came into the room, right up to the wardrobe. I thought I was dead, but he pulled the drawer at the bottom and shoved something into it. I stayed there, cowering, as the footsteps receded. I heard more clattering downstairs, then the front door closed. I crept out of the wardrobe and onto the window seat. The sensor light had come on with his movement and I saw Dad open the boot of his car. I saw a body in the boot – a boy—’
‘Taylor Dent,’ says Miriam sadly.
‘I didn’t know his name. I’ve tried to find out since then – I’ve Googled missing people and murders in East Anglia – but there’s been nothing about a black boy killed in or near March. His death seemed to go unreported.’
‘Unlike yours,’ said Miriam.
‘Yes,’ I say, sitting upright. ‘In the weeks that followed, I was everywhere, but there was no mention of him.’ I slouch back down, against her shoulder. It is easier to tell her my story if I don’t look into her face. ‘I watched from the upstairs window. I was shaking. I mean, you don’t put someone in a boot unless you’re doing wrong by them. The boot is where you put animals, not people.’
‘Hadn’t he seen your car?’
‘I parked right at the end of the carport. You know how short the G-Wiz is – he can’t have seen it from the drive. My heart was thudding. I knew it was really bad – a boy in the boot. Dad was going through his pockets and the boy’s body was rocking, unconscious or dead. He searched until he found something I couldn’t see – a phone or a wallet – which he put in his own pocket. My mind was racing, thinking, why does someone go through a boy’s pockets – a boy who’s unconscious or dead? There was no explanation except the worst explanation.
‘Before I could run down to him, demand an explanation, the doors of the car had slammed shut and he had driven away. I went to the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe to see what he’d stashed there. It was piles and piles of money, bound together with rubber bands in a plastic bag.’
‘So you took the cash?’ she says. I nod and she smiles wanly, saying, ‘At least it stayed in the family.’
‘I thought about all the things I could do: return to George Street and Will; pretend I hadn’t seen anything; tell the police what I’d seen; tell you; go to Helena. And not one of them seemed possible. I was butting up against each option and it was like being in a dodgem car, hitting the buffers. I thought about flying to Buenos Aires to find Rollo, and then I thought about telling him. The awfulness. Then I wondered if anyone would believe me. I wondered if I would seem mad, the destroyer of our family life. I wondered if in fact I had gone mad, and all of it was an apparition, that I should be sectioned. I looked at the money and I thought about disappearing. And it made sense. All I knew, Mum, you have to believe me, was that I wanted to run. My only impulse was to disappear, not to hurt you.’
‘But you did hurt me. You hurt me very deeply, Edith.’
‘I couldn’t bear knowing something that would destroy you, I didn’t want to keep his secrets but I didn’t want to betray him either. I couldn’t go back to Will and I couldn’t bear Helena, the confusion of that. I was trapped, d’you see? When I looked at the money he’d left, I knew that was my way of disappearing. Money could make it happen. I could vanish, I knew people who could help me—’
‘What people?’
I get up. I can’t look at her. ‘Another tea?’ I say, taking the cup from her hand.
‘What people, Edith?’ she says.
‘Never mind that. You don’t need to know what people. That money could make me vanish, as if the ground had opened up, and that’s what I wanted.’
I come back into the room with two steaming hot mugs. ‘What’s happened to him? Where are they keeping him?’ I ask.
‘He’s in Littlehey. Rollo will visit. We’ve instructed lawyers at Kingsley Napley.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘I haven’t seen him,’ she says, and I can see the torment written on her face. ‘I will though.’ She looks up. ‘I will see him. He’s still my husband.’
Her look is defiant and I stare at her. ‘After everything he’s done …’ I begin.
She frowns. ‘I won’t explain myself to you, Edith,’ she says. ‘I won’t justify how I feel to you.’
We are silent again, but it is not a comfortable silence.
Miriam
Saying it to Edith is the first time she has allowed herself to have the thought, and she is surprised by the force of her conviction. He is still her husband. One event cannot wipe away twenty-five years. Yes, she will visit him in Littlehey. It may take her some time, she may feel furious, betrayed, ashamed. But she won’t abandon him. Friends may let out the rope, but she will not.
‘How did he die?’ Edith is asking now. ‘Taylor Dent. What did Dad—’
‘Drowned,’ Miriam says. ‘In the river close to Deeping. I don’t know what his injuries were. He’d been on drugs – ketamine – which may have been what caused his death when he hit the water. Paralysed, effectively. Anyway, it’ll all come out in the trial.’
‘So he might have been alive in the boot of the car?’ Edith says, and Miriam can see the slow dawning on her face. ‘I could have helped him, if I hadn’t stayed hidden.’
‘A lot of things would have been different if you hadn’t stayed hidden,’ Miriam says, and she can’t keep the censure out of her voice. Relief that her daughter is alive is giving way to hot fury, the kind she remembers from when Edith was little – those times when she lost sight of her in a park or on a beach, and had to search wildly, shouts becoming hysterical and other mothers helping with instinctive urgency. And then when Edith or Rollo were discovered, nonchalantly playing inside a hedge or squatting in
the sand, how she would tear a strip off them and make them cry, that they might experience a tiny millisecond of her fear. ‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again.’ At the same time holding them very, very tight.
‘How could you stay away?’ she asks now. ‘How could you? You must’ve seen the scale of the manhunt, what the police were doing. You must’ve known everyone thought you were dead. That we thought you were dead.’
Edith starts to cry. ‘Don’t you see? It had all gone too far. It had gone too far for me to come back …’ She is gulping, and Miriam wonders if it is guilt that’s catching in her throat. ‘It was a thing I couldn’t undo, and then Helena died. This whole series of events was set off by me and I didn’t even … I didn’t expect it. The bigger it became – all over the news, the number of police officers involved – the more impossible it was for me to come home.’
‘You couldn’t send me an email, a postcard, telling me you were all right?’ Miriam asks.
Edith turns away. There is something in this question she cannot answer.
‘Edith?’ Miriam presses.
Edith
I can feel the gaps in my story, how they must seem to her. I can hear how lame my explanation must sound. And yet, in the quiet of the French countryside, the days went by. The more you don’t make contact, the more impossible contact becomes, as if silence can enlarge like a seep of blood. And in the solitude I found space. Freedom. Something heady and illicit. I didn’t want to return. I can’t say that to her. It is a selfishness too far. Her face, the colour of the ash in the grate, would look at me with too much sorrow and disappointment. Well, I’ve been disappointed too.
‘He let me down,’ I whisper. ‘He wasn’t the person I thought he was. He set such high standards for me and all the while—’
‘People have inner lives, Edie; you’re old enough to know that.’
‘But why would he kill a boy?’ I say, and in saying it, I’ve answered the question to myself.
She looks away. I can see she is ashamed.
‘Mum?’
‘They were …’ she begins. ‘They were having a relationship, it seems.’
‘A relationship?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Is he …?’
‘Is he what?’ she says, looking at me sharply. ‘Gay? Straight? Are you? Is anyone just one thing?’
‘How can you forgive him?’
‘Who said anything about forgive?’
‘You seem …’ I begin, but I can’t find the right word. Accepting?
‘Perhaps I don’t set my standards for people quite as high as yours,’ she says.
‘He has always been the one with impossible standards,’ I say. ‘The one who set the bar so high when all the while he …’ I begin to cry: corrosive, satisfying, righteous tears. ‘I wasn’t even allowed to keep my baby, settle down with Jonti, lead an average life. Oh no, that wasn’t good enough, when all the time he was …’
She looks up, shocked. ‘You could have kept the baby, Edie. We never made you—’
‘That’s not how it felt,’ I say, and I am dealing in half-truths. ‘It was made clear to me that it would have been a failure. There were so many expectations.’
‘I never knew you felt that way about the baby, darling. We didn’t see it as making you get rid of it. We saw it as helping you make a sensible decision – for your life. And maybe we were wrong. I saw Jonti recently, when I was searching for you. And the thought occurred to me that the two of you could have made it work. He’s a decent chap. But we honestly thought we were doing right by you, Edie. There’s lots of time to have a baby; you don’t have to do it at eighteen, when it’s so hard. That’s not expectation – that’s love. We wanted the best for you. I don’t mean Cambridge; I mean I didn’t want you depressed and alone at eighteen with a screaming infant on your hands.’
She is looking at me now, with the concern I have longed for. She says, ‘Oh, I know Ian can be exacting and I can see you might think we wanted you to be perfect. God, maybe there was narcissism in it. I mean, which parent doesn’t want to say: “My daughter’s gone up to Cambridge”? But that’s nothing next to loving you, Edith.’
‘How was I supposed to know what I wanted when your expectation was so huge,’ I say, in a wail. ‘When all I ever wanted was to please you? Why is my life defined by pleasing you, when he … when he … he’s done something so immoral!’
It has backfired.
She has stood up and I can see the rage popping at her temples. Her words come out in a low growl, only just suppressing the violence I can see she feels towards me. ‘You are the child of a man. An ordinary man who has strengths and weaknesses, and who descended into a crisis. Yes, he’s done something terrible, for which he will face a very harsh punishment.
‘And you are my child, Edie, though you show me no love at all. You have to decide who you are. You have to decide, Edie. It’s not enough to say we made you this, and we made you that, and expectation took away this and pressure demanded that. Stand up and be counted. And if your love ends the moment you find out your parents are people, then my God, there really is no hope for you.’
‘But he’s fallen so short,’ I say quietly. A damp squib.
‘So have you, Edith.’
We are silent. Mum has dropped onto the sofa. Her eyes are glazed. She stares into the fire and then says, ‘Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds.’ She looks at me. ‘He’s your father and you should stand by us, as we stand by you.’
One Year Later
Wednesday
Manon
‘Fly? Fly! C’mon. Homework.’
He groans from somewhere beyond the hall and she waits, looking at the dappled garden, the sun playing through the fingers of the lime trees. Honeyed patio stones radiate with the heat of the day.
‘Fly! Come on, stop wasting time.’
He joins her at the kitchen table and hauls his school bag onto his knee with am-dram weariness. His white school shirt has a pen leak at the pocket, a blot of black chequering into the cotton. He smells of sweaty boy. She makes a mental note to buy him some shower gel.
‘What treats do your teachers have in store for us this evening?’ she asks.
‘I have to, like, write a persuasive argument for something, like a party political fingy.’
‘Broadcast. Party political broadcast. OK, any ideas?’
‘Like why I should be allowed to watch TV after school like them other kids.’
‘Those other kids, Fly. You’re not going to be very persuasive with grammar like that. Go on, then, write it as if you’re persuading me.’
‘No one can persuade you of nothin’, DS Auntie.’
‘DI Auntie, to you.’
He splays across the table like a broken umbrella, chewing the end of his pen. He whispers to himself when he starts to write. She gets up to stir the lamb stew, which is bubbling on the hob.
‘If you finish that, you can go out for a bit,’ she says, her back to him.
‘Serious?’ he says.
‘Serious.’
It gives her pleasure to surprise him with a loosening of his restrictions, even while she knows that same pleasure will tighten to anxiety as she waits for him to come home. She can hardly refuse him these forays: along Mill Lane to the newsagent where he can buy pick-and-mix; to sit on the swings in Sumatra Road; up to Fortune Green where friends from his school congregate in the park and scale the wire fence into the play centre. He is about to turn twelve, is well over five foot, and now walks to school alone.
‘No hoodie, though,’ she says, thinking of the group of them, how they scare people on the bus. They are so tall and so burgeoning male.
He groans. ‘Why?’
‘One, because you’ll boil in this heat, even if your trousers are right down below your bum, which makes you look completely ridiculous, by the way, but we’ve had that conversation; and two, because I don’t want anyone mistaking you for something you’re not. You
are a lovely, gentle, well-mannered boy, Fly. Don’t give anyone any reason to think otherwise.’
‘Why should I be stopped from wearing an item of clothing just ’cos of the colour of my skin?’
‘Maybe that should be the subject of your persuasive argument,’ she says. ‘Oh, and Fly? No smoking in the cemetery. And don’t come the innocent with me – I know you’ve done it.’
‘Whatevs,’ he says in a whisper. His disdain is gossamer light, and she thinks she can detect beneath it his pleasure at the tight boundaries she lays.
‘And I want you back by 6 p.m. sharp for supper. Ellie and Sol are coming.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Can I feed Solly?’
‘I’m sure Ellie would be delighted,’ she says, smiling at him. ‘What d’you reckon – rice or couscous with the stew?
‘What’s couscous?’ he says, his eyes down to his books again.
‘The grainy one, yellow.’
‘Yeah, that one.’
The room is full of pale May light and the smell of cooking meat, and she is struck by how far they’ve come in their journey to being a family of sorts.
She hadn’t thought any of it through. Fly’s mother’s illness had been swift and brutal. Three months after Ian Hind’s arrest and four months after Manon first met Maureen, the stomach cancer killed her, without pause for admission to a hospice. Manon travelled to London without a plan, telling herself whatever happened next would be temporary. She and Fly stayed with Ellie – necessity being the mother of reconciliation – in her little two-bed flat on Fordwych Road, which ran like a vein on the border between Kilburn and West Hampstead. Far from a pink paradise, Ellie had broken up with Solly’s feckless father during pregnancy, and was tearfully battling sleep deprivation without respite.
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