by Ann Troup
All because Valerie Porter had been disappointed with her lot in life?
Hard to believe. Rachel could only conclude that something much more malign was at work in their lives. It occurred to her that Stella must have thought the same thing. That maybe burning down the house was her solution to end it. Though everyone kept telling her that it might not be Stella who had set light to the house, that it might not be her charred remains that had been found, Rachel was certain. Who else could it be?
Everyone else who had been touched by the malevolent force that ruled their lives was accounted for. Amy and Charlie were with her; Frances was in a cell somewhere; and Valerie, Roy and Patsy were dead. Only Delia remained, a woman who had done her best and believed just as strongly as Rachel had.
Over the years, Rachel had lost count of the times that she had relived those moments in Delia’s kitchen when she had been told of Valerie’s visit and heard what had been said. The pivotal moment – when everything had toppled the wrong way and drowned them all in the fallout.
***
Charlie glanced across at her. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, knowing what a ridiculous question it was, but not knowing what else to say. Everything he said, everything he did, diminished her even more. It was painful to watch. All he got in response was a weary nod.
He didn’t know what else he expected from her. Part of him felt that if anything else happened, she would just disappear before his eyes, fade out in a blink, finally consumed by it all. Maybe, when this nightmare was over, she could pick up the pieces and move on. She had Amy now; she had him too if she wanted. He didn’t think she would. Bizarrely that fact still hurt, after all these years of living with it. Even in the light of the truth, she would think that too much damage had been done.
The worst part was that she would be able to walk out of his life even more effectively this time around. Once everything had been resolved, there would be no more reason for her to stay.
Chapter 28
Delia Jones wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy at all. She had just put the phone down after a call from Amy, and had been informed that Charlie was on his way back, and he had Rachel with him. That could mean only one thing. Trouble.
The news that Frances had been arrested was a bit of a shock. Delia hadn’t anticipated that, expecting that Stella would be firmly in the frame for what had happened to Roy. Just went to prove what came up when a shoddy job was done. Still, there wasn’t much else she could do about it now. It had been a long day, she was tired, and she was getting too old for all this. Whatever was going to happen next would have to wait until tomorrow. Besides, she had visitors; she needed to turn down the beds in the spare room and spit on a few bloody graves.
***
Rachel slept pretty much all the way back, only waking when Charlie pulled up onto the drive.
It was twilight, and the house was in shadow. Not that she would have recognised it anyway – the house had been bought long after she left. They’d lived with Delia. It looked nice, a family home. ‘I don’t know if this is such a good idea,’ she said to Charlie as he opened the van door ready to help her out.
‘What do you propose as an alternative? You’re in no fit state to go to a hotel, and you don’t have anyone else you can stay with,’ he said, shouldering her weight as she clambered out. ‘Come on, we can argue about it inside.’
The leg was agony; it felt as if it was on fire. Two and a half hours of complete immobility had rendered it almost useless and she struggled to let it take her weight. Inside, Charlie led her to the sofa, and lowered her down. ‘I think we should take a look at that. When did you last change the dressing?’
She hadn’t. In fact, she didn’t even know how bad it was. There hadn’t been a chance to look. She waved him away.
‘Christ, Rachel, are you absolutely determined to kill yourself through self-neglect?’ he snapped. ‘Take your trousers off – let me see.’
She hesitated for a moment, then saw the look on his face. She had almost forgotten that things had changed, that she didn’t have to be wary of him any more. She undid her trousers and slowly peeled them down, revealing a large dressing, soaked through with watery blood and pus from the wound.
Charlie winced. ‘Stay there; put your leg up. I’ll be back in a minute.’
Rachel hauled her leg onto the sofa. She could feel the stitches pulling with every move. The whole rigmarole made her cringe against the pain, not to mention how stupid she felt lying there in just her knickers.
Charlie came back in with a towel, a bowl of warm water, and a first-aid kit.
‘Always prepared. Were you ever in the Scouts?’ she said in a feeble attempt to bring some humour into the situation.
He smiled as he fed the towel underneath her leg.
‘I’m always prepared where you are concerned. In fact, I’m half-tempted to arrange for an ambulance to be on standby. Brace yourself, this is going to hurt.’ The dressing was welded to her skin. He soaked it and pulled it away millimetre by millimetre. It hurt like a bastard but Rachel refused to make a sound.
Underneath the dressing, the skin was red and hot, swelling around the stitches, and oozing an unpleasant yellow-green gunge. She grimaced as he began to clean it, wondering how the hell she had managed to give herself a six-inch, jagged gash that had obviously gone deep. Imagining what she must have done to herself made her feel queasy. A shard of thin china, gripped in a rigid hand, repeatedly gouging and stabbing as the fit took hold. It didn’t bear thinking about – few things that had happened in recent days did.
After he had cleaned and dressed her leg, he took her hand and re-dressed that. The cut there wasn’t nearly so bad. ‘Better?’ he asked when he’d finished.
‘Yes thanks,’ she said, starting to sit up.
‘Whoa! Where do you think you’re going? You stay right there, and don’t put any more strain on that leg, or those stitches are going to burst. The scar is going to be bad enough as it is.’
Rachel didn’t care about the scar. ‘Can you at least give me a blanket then? I’m feeling a bit exposed, and Amy might walk in any minute.’
‘Fair point,’ Charlie said. He kept a patchwork quilt behind the sofa for the times when he didn’t want to spend a night in bed alone. It was old and well used. He shook it out and spread it over her. ‘Where are the meds they gave you at the hospital?’
‘In my bag.’
He rifled through, finding the antibiotics she hadn’t bothered to take. He shook the box accusingly in her face. ‘Take two, now.’
Dutifully she swallowed the pills, and took the anticonvulsants that he had also retrieved from her bag.
He pulled out the single change of clothes she had taken to Diana’s. ‘Not planning to stay anywhere long then?’ he said, holding up a worn T-shirt and a faded pair of combat trousers. ‘With all that money, you could at least buy yourself some new clothes. I could have sworn you had that T-shirt when Amy was born.’
Rachel lay back and closed her eyes. What did it matter what clothes she wore? The money was still an issue for him. When she had left, she had left a cheque for him – enough to buy a house just like this: one for him and Amy. He had never cashed it. A while ago, she had invested the money in a trust fund for Amy. It would mature when she was twenty-one. Her solicitor had written to Charlie to tell him, but had never had a response. That was before she’d known that her daughter thought she was dead. It might have been easier to give it to Amy if she had been.
There was a good chance Amy didn’t even know that on her twenty-first birthday she would have enough cash to buy her own house outright. Other than that, the money just kept accumulating. Rachel had always let her solicitor deal with it. Apparently, she had a stockbroker who she’d never met, an accountant who she knew by name only, and a London property portfolio that could needle the Duke of Westminster if he’d known about it.
Rachel saw it as a giant game of Monopoly. As a child, when she and Stella had played the game Rachel
had always favoured the cheap streets, buying up Whitechapel and The Old Kent Road and building tiny houses on them. Frances used to scoff at her, and say she’d never win if she played the game that way. It had turned out that the cheap streets were where it was at. They weren’t cheap any more.
She opened her eyes to find Charlie standing over her, a mug of tea held out in his hand. ‘You should eat something too,’ he said.
It was pointless to argue; even her diet was to be dictated. ‘As long as it’s not bloody soup. I feel like I’m awash with it. I never did like soup much.’ She didn’t like tea either but drank it anyway.
He made her a sandwich. The bread was dry – so was the cheese. But she ate it just to keep him happy. ‘This is a nice house, very homey,’ she said.
‘It’s a house. Amy does the choosing of things. I just pay for it.’
‘You know she’s going to get the money on her birthday.’
He didn’t speak but picked up her plate and took it into the kitchen. That bridge could be crossed some other time.
His phone rang; he went out into the hall to answer it, shutting the door behind him so that she couldn’t hear what was being said.
While he was gone, Rachel looked around the room. On the mantelpiece there was a photo of him and a tiny Amy. The glass was missing, and she didn’t want to look at it for long because it was opening a chasm in her heart and she was afraid that she would fall into it.
He made her jump when he came back into the room. She wasn’t used to all this movement. It was hard to adjust and be around people so much.
‘Change of plan: Amy and Diana are going straight to Mum’s. They’re going to stay there tonight.’
Rachel felt a flutter of panic. ‘Why?’
‘I only have two bedrooms. Amy has decided you should sleep in hers tonight.’
‘I’m OK here, on the sofa,’ she protested, the panic beginning to take a more solid shape.
‘No, she’s right – you need a proper night’s sleep in a decent bed. It’s going to be a tough day tomorrow.’
‘Please, it’s OK. I’ll stay here,’ she pleaded, her voice cracking. It felt like the final straw. How could she explain the need to avoid it? Amy’s room, her things, her memories, her personality displayed all over the walls. Her clothes, her books, maybe even her old toys.
She had coped with what had happened at the house. She had managed seeing Charlie again, absorbed what he had told her. She could even contain the impact of what Stella had done and Frances’s arrest. But being forced to digest everything she had left behind, everything she should have been part of, everything she had been deprived of by being immersed in Amy’s space would be too much. It was bad enough just being in this nice little house, in this family home. Since she had come through the door, she had been looking at it, subliminally trying to find a Rachel-shaped space so that she could see if she was missing from the picture. It wasn’t there. Because she had never been there.
Hot tears prickled and stung her eyes. ‘Don’t make me do this,’ she said, her voice cracking with the grief of it all.
***
It hit Charlie like a brick in the face. He had been so relieved at Amy’s change of heart, so relieved to find Rachel in one piece and so determined to get her where he could look after her, he hadn’t spared a thought for how it might feel to be here, looking at where you’d never been. Desperate to relieve her of the burden of the lie, he had forgotten his initial reservations. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Amy didn’t think. I expect she wanted to make you welcome, make a gesture.’
Rachel was shaking. ‘I know. I just don’t think I can face it.’
Charlie pulled a tissue out of the box on the table, knelt by the sofa, and took her hand. ‘Here, wipe your eyes.’ He was nervous of touching her, of offering something more than wound management, unsure of how she might take it. ‘You can have my room. I’ll go in the princess’s parlour tonight.’ She pulled her hand away instantly. ‘It’s OK. There’s nothing up there but a bed and a wardrobe. No knick-knacks, no trinkets. No memories that you don’t share. It’s just a room with a bed.’ She still didn’t look like she believed him. ‘Look, you need to rest that leg properly; you can’t do that on a sofa. If you rip those stitches you’re going to end up back in hospital.’
Eventually she nodded. ‘I know it sounds stupid, but I’ve had to put certain things out of my mind. My instinct is to run, but I can’t. So I have to hide. I’ve spent all her life trying not to imagine what she was doing, how she was feeling. Trying not to look in shop windows and imagine the things she would like. I shut her out because I had to. I shut you out too. Please, just let me deal with a bit at a time. That’s all I’m asking.’
He’d forgotten she hadn’t been fighting for them all these years. Just fighting to stay away. ‘OK. One step at a time. The first of which is to get you upstairs and into bed.’
He had to half carry her up; she didn’t seem able to put much weight on the leg at all. He got her into the bedroom. ‘See? Nothing here, just a room.’ He sat her down on the bed. ‘Don’t bend it; keep it straight.’
‘I don’t have any nightclothes with me. I didn’t think,’ she said.
He opened a drawer, picked out a T-shirt, passed it to her, thinking about the one he kept in the chest at the bottom of the bed, the one she had worn on that very first night.
‘You get sorted; I’ll fetch your antibiotics. You need to take a couple more in a few hours.’
‘Can you help me into the bathroom?’
***
Once inside she locked the door, keeping her eyes firmly focused on the sink, ignoring the personal things that littered the room. She managed to rudimentarily clean her teeth using her finger and wash her face with her hands. The towel smelled of Charlie; the room smelled of Amy. Out on the landing she gasped for air, and limped back to the bedroom, shoulder against the wall for support. She dare not breathe them in and make them a part of herself again. She would be undone.
Charlie was right – the room that was his was a blank canvas. Just a room. No ghosts, no fodder for the imagination. She eased herself onto the bed and under the cover, hoping that the bed would smell of washing powder, just like the T-shirt. To her relief it did.
He knocked, surprising her. ‘OK?’ she called. It wouldn’t have felt right to give him permission to come into his own bedroom.
He made her take another handful of tablets. ‘Any Mogadon in there?’ she asked in a lame attempt at humour.
‘Worried you might not sleep?’
It was stupid question. How could she sleep with all that had happened washing around in her head? He sat himself down on the end of the bed and she shifted herself away from him, only slightly, but enough for him to realise that no bridges had been built yet.
‘What do you do with yourself, up in London?’
She didn’t want to talk about it really, but it was as hard as ever to refuse him. ‘I walk mostly. Look at things, hang about in the museums, libraries. I help Diana out at the centre sometimes.’ It was an approximation of the truth. She did all of those things. But mostly she studied other people, constantly trying to figure out the traits that made them normal, functional human beings. What she had gathered was that normal people did not live in flats that were like an ark to someone else’s past. They did not wear their clothes until they fell apart, or buy the first thing that fitted in the first shop they found. They did not live on packet sandwiches and takeaway coffee. They did not avoid eye contact because they were sure that everyone would be able to see their secrets. They did not marry their fathers and bear them children. But then again, their lives were based on some semblance of truth.
Charlie was watching her. ‘I have to ask, why did you believe it? Why did you think I would have done such a thing and never told you?’
Rachel sighed, massaged her brow with the fingers of her good hand. She could see so much pain in his face. ‘Why wouldn’t I? Is it the kind of thing anyone
would lie about? And would you really have told me you’d slept with my sister? Don’t think I haven’t been over it a million times. But no one’s mother, even a pretend mother, would lie about a thing like that.’ More specifically his mother would never lie about a thing like that. Valerie might have, but not Delia. Delia cared.
***
Charlie got it; even now, she still believed that Valerie wouldn’t have stooped that low. He supposed he could understand. His own mother had believed it, enough to keep it from him all that time, and she’d known Valerie better than any of them.
‘I’m so sorry, Charlie, I was in an impossible situation. I couldn’t stay; I couldn’t take Amy. I knew how much you loved us. The only thing I could think of was to protect you from it and give you at least something that you could build a future with. If I’d told you the truth, or what I thought was the truth, then all our lives would have been ruined. I know I hurt you, but it was the lesser of two evils.’
Charlie almost laughed. The irony was pitiful.
‘Don’t go.’
Charlie was at the door. ‘You need to sleep. To rest.’
‘But I’m not going to, and we both know it. What am I supposed to tell them tomorrow? How can I possibly explain how things were?’
He shut the door, and walked back to the bed and lay next to her on top of the covers, his arms behind his head. ‘Answer their questions; tell them what you know.’
‘I don’t know what I know, since everything I thought I knew is gone. Undone by one lie after another. I thought Valerie was my mother, I thought Frances was my sister, then that changed, and now I don’t know anything. Is Frances my mother? It might not have been you who got her pregnant, but did someone else? If she did have me, why has she always treated me as if I’m an offensive smell under her nose? Why did she bring me back here if she hates me so much? If she is my mother, and knew what I had been told, why risk this situation and the truth coming out?’