The Secrets of Castle Du Rêve

by Hannah Emery

  ‘Can I have some falafel, please?’ Iris holds her paper plate in the air for Seth to load up.

  Isobel rolls up another blanket and then lies down to rest her head on it for a moment, closing her eyes. With her eyes shut, the sounds around her are amplified. She hears Seth’s deep laugh, Iris swatting him as he teases her about something. She hears the distant waves crashing against rocks. She hears the cries of gulls that swoop disconcertingly near, drawn by bread and rustling wrappers. She hears Tom make the ridiculous noise with his lips that he always makes to try and get Beatrice to smile, a noise that Isobel not only never thought she’d hear Tom make, but equally never thought she’d enjoy hearing him make.

  There’s pleasure in today. Isobel can feel it: a bright, smooth, sweet pleasure.

  ‘Oh! Seth, we’ve forgotten to get out your radio!’ Iris says after a while.

  Isobel opens her eyes to see Seth brush himself down and then root through one of the numerous bags they brought to the beach. Eventually, he reveals a battered yellow wireless radio.

  ‘Now I know we could listen to music on our phones,’ he says, his hands up in anticipatory defense. ‘But I love this radio. It’s been on so many picnics with me, I just had to bring it to this one.’

  Iris beams up at Seth. He wears a pinstriped shirt and black skinny jeans, even though the temperature is rising by the hour. His square glasses sit on the end of his nose and he pushes them up as he tunes the radio.

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ Tom says. He takes Isobel’s hand as a pop song begins to buzz from the speakers, and sways it to the music.

  Isobel did an online search the other night, when everyone else, even Beatrice, was asleep. The symptoms she typed in linger in her mind now, at strange odds with the glimpses of contentment that flicker in her body. The website she read in those still, timeless hours are etched in her mind. Blue, rounded words in a simple font that tried to be helpful and kind.

  A feeling of sadness

  Difficulty sleeping

  Lack of interest in the baby

  These weren’t symptoms, Isobel thought as she stared at the screen. Symptoms were medical and precise. A wild panic had overtaken her then and she’d pressed ‘clear history’ and climbed upstairs to bed to lie stiffly until Beatrice began shuffling around and grunting with imminent hunger.

  I am interested in Beatrice, she thinks now.

  ‘Has Beatrice got enough sunscreen on?’ she asks Tom, who nods assuredly. ‘Have you?’ he checks.

  Isobel fingers her shoulders, tender, pink, just like the day they met.

  ‘Probably not,’ she says, thanking Iris as she slides the sand-crusted bottle of Factor 50 towards her.

  They spend almost three hours at the beach, until strings of cloud sweep over the sun and turn the sand from yellow to grey. They gather up their belongings, shaking out the blankets so that sand flies away on the breeze, and chasing after stray wrappers, laughing as they nearly get away, other people laughing too as they run past. Today has been the busiest Isobel has seen Silenshore beach for a while. It’s as though they’ve gone back in time, to the days when the beach and the high street were always crowded.

  ‘So, Paris in the morning?’ Isobel asks as Iris and Seth say their goodbyes, laden with canvas bags. The yellow radio sticks out of one of them and Isobel feels a pang of sadness that the day is over, tinged with the warm pleasure that it happened at all. She hasn’t enjoyed a day this much for what feels like so long, and the enjoyment fizzes around in her blood like sugar.

  ‘Yes! We’re so excited. We have all our packing to do, though,’ Iris says, glancing up at Seth.

  He nods. ‘It’s true. But we couldn’t have missed today. It’s been awesome.’ He high-fives Tom and Isobel smiles at Iris, their eyes meeting, laughing. Seth and Tom still seem so different from one another. Tom would never initiate a high-five or carry around an old radio. But somehow, they go together well.

  Iris bends over Beatrice’s pram and peers in. ‘She’s still asleep,’ she whispers as she stands up straight again and moves towards Isobel. The sun has beckoned the freckles of childhood to the bridge of Iris’s nose, making her look younger than she is.

  Isobel gives her a tight hug. ‘Have a wonderful time,’ she says as Iris squeezes her.

  ‘I’ll take lots of photos for you,’ Iris says.

  ‘You don’t need to do anything for me. Just have a lovely time with Seth. I’m fine,’ she says, motioning to the pram. The hood ripples in the breeze and Tom waits next to it, pushing it gently. He sees Isobel and Iris gaze at him and gives a comical salute.

  ‘You are fine,’ Iris says, giving Isobel one last squeeze. ‘I’ll see you in a few weeks.’

  Isobel watches as Iris and Seth scramble hand in hand over the bigger rocks that are strewn over the sand towards the promenade. Isobel and Tom will have to go the long way round with the pram. But Isobel doesn’t mind. She lets Tom push, and holds onto his arm until they reach the smooth path that leads to the high street, where Tom has parked his car. They bundle everything into the boot.

  ‘I told my dad we’d call in at about four, so we’re just on time,’ Isobel says. ‘We could walk up to his and come back to the car afterwards.’

  Tom nods and they continue up the hill to Blythe Finances. They pass Tom’s old flat on the way, and as they do, they both glance up at the door. They have just passed when Isobel hears it open, and hears someone shout Tom’s name. She turns and looks back to see Lucas, the man who lives below Tom’s old flat. He’s breathless, jogging to catch up with them.

  ‘Tom, mate!’ Lucas says as he reaches them. ‘Long time no see. You’re a dad now, then?’ He peers into the pram at Beatrice and smiles.

  ‘Yeah,’ Tom smiles. ‘Big changes. All well with you?’

  Lucas nods and jogs on the spot. ‘Same old with me, really. You should come round one night. We’ll have a few beers, catch up. I haven’t seen you since the move. I was going to call you, but I thought you might have your hands full.’

  Tom laughs. ‘Oh, it’s not all bad. I can definitely find time for a few drinks.’

  They stand for a few more minutes, making small talk, until Tom mentions that they should be getting going. Lucas jogs off across the road, making Isobel wonder if he ever just walks anywhere. They continue up the cobbles, the pram juddering with the uneven ground, until they reach her dad’s.

  ‘He might not spend that long talking to us,’ Isobel whispers as they open the door. But when they get in, her dad stands from his desk.

  ‘Are you okay in here for a bit, Jon?’ he asks his assistant.

  Jon smiles. He’s a round, pleasant man with a ruddy face and a tendency to tell bad jokes. Isobel’s always liked him. ‘Course. Have a bit of time with the family.’

  ‘Can you smell the bread I told you about?’ Isobel whispers to Tom as they follow Graham up the creaking, narrow staircase.

  Tom sniffs gently, not wanting to disturb Beatrice, who he managed to extract from her pram without waking. ‘I can, actually. Creepy.’

  ‘I’ve tidied up today,’ Graham says, gesturing grandly at his strangely bare lounge. Isobel wonders where all his junk is and decides quickly that it doesn’t matter.

  ‘It’s looking lovely, Dad.’ She thinks of all the times in the past two years or so that she’s tried to get him to clear up his flat. She’s tried every tone: firm, sympathetic, despairing, conspiratorial. None have worked. And now, this.

  ‘What about you two? Any closer to getting a place of your own?’

  ‘A little closer every pay day,’ Tom smiles.

  ‘I wish I could’ve had you here,’ Graham says as he looks at Beatrice nestled into the crook of Tom’s arm. ‘I would have loved it. But there’s no room here, of course. It’s a shame I didn’t stay in the house.’

  Isobel reddens and her father sees and waves his arm. ‘I know you wanted me to move on, Izzie, and I’m glad I did. But I can’t help imagining supporting you more than I have don
e. This flat isn’t a family home. That’s why my parents got shut,’ he explains to Tom. ‘They lived here above their bakery until my little brother was about one, then they sold it and moved to a big house on the promenade. I bought this place back when it came on the market, because it made sense to live above my office, with the amount of time I spend there. Izzie’s perhaps told you.’

  Isobel thinks of her grandparents’ huge, elegant house on the edge of Silenshore promenade that her father is talking about. She remembers being there as a small child, remembers white-painted shutters and various cats and dogs slinking about the wide rooms and tired furniture, the taste of salt from the sea in the lemonade she drank in the garden. Over time, lemonade was swapped for water and the white shutters began to peel, and if the dogs and cats became unwell they disappeared rather than going to the vets. Her grandparents died within a year of one another and her parents held whispered adult conversations about money and equity and debt: all words that were out of reach for Isobel. The house on the promenade was sold, and her father began working shifts at the Smuggler’s Ship as well as working in his office during the day. As a child, Isobel never questioned it. Now, looking at her father’s tired face, she sees somebody who has walked against the wind all his life.

  ‘Let’s wake Beatrice up so she can have a play with her granddad,’ she says. ‘She’s had plenty long enough.’

  As the car crunches on the gravel of Broadsands’ driveway after going to see her dad, Isobel opens her eyes. She must have fallen asleep in the short drive home. It feels as if they’ve been in the car for hours, even though it has probably only been about five minutes. The glow of the day, already a memory, feels distant and intangible.

  ‘I’ll take Beatrice inside, if you like. You get the bags,’ Isobel says through a half-yawn. Perhaps she can try and work to get the day’s fleeting contentment back.

  Tom whistles as he begins to unload the car, and Isobel leans in to unclip Beatrice from her car seat. Beatrice lets out a prompt wail.

  ‘Shhh. Shhh, little Bea,’ Isobel sings as she enters the house. She’s wearing flip-flops and they click pleasantly on the tiles of the kitchen, sounding like summer and holidays. Beatrice takes a strand of Isobel’s hair and weaves it between her chubby, deft fingers. She pulls it tightly, and Isobel lets her, leaning her head in so that Beatrice can get more. The lost feeling of contentment from earlier flutters back down over her lightly, and Isobel sighs with relief. She hums as she puts Isobel in her bouncer, then falls silent as she hears Daphne talking. She had thought Daphne was out.

  Daphne’s quiet voice is louder than usual, forceful. It’s Daphne, and yet not Daphne.

  There’s no other voice. Daphne is speaking on the phone in the living room.

  Isobel moves closer.

  ‘No, you may not speak to him,’ she hears Daphne say.

  Isobel frowns. Should she interrupt, tell Daphne that Tom is back, and available to talk to whoever it is on the phone? Daphne’s voice, sharp as needles, tells her that she shouldn’t.

  ‘You shouldn’t be calling here for him,’ she says next. Isobel leans on the wall for support, unable to stop listening, but unable to bear what she might hear next.

  ‘I know it must be difficult to hear. But you must leave him alone. I don’t want you here. He should be focusing on his baby. Not you. You know what was agreed.’

  Isobel frowns and touches the wallpaper, faded and softened with age. She brings to mind Tom’s face today as he played with Beatrice, and chatted to her father, and swung Isobel’s hand in time to the grainy music from the radio. Was it a face that was hiding something?

  The beep of the receiver as Daphne ends the call snaps Isobel’s thoughts away, and she rushes back out to the kitchen. But Daphne doesn’t follow, and Isobel hears the lounge door shut quietly.

  Isobel crouches down in front of Beatrice, who bounces and flails her chubby arms around in pleasure. Her eyes, pinned on Isobel, are turning darker. The baby blue is turning to brown. The irises are almost lost in the dark pools of colour that surround them. Beatrice will have Isobel’s eyes. Isobel’s mother’s eyes. Her hair is the same shade of rich chocolate as Tom’s, but downy and soft.

  As she stares at Beatrice, something clicks inside of Isobel, and the gnawing in her stomach pulls at her, stronger than before. She thinks back on the day. There’s something that bothered her even before she overheard Daphne, but what was it?

  ‘That’s all the things in from the car,’ Tom says as he shuts the back door neatly. ‘Do you want anything to eat? There’s quite a bit of that nice olive bread left.’

  Isobel stands and notices that she has left grains of sand on the kitchen floor where she crouched in front of Beatrice.

  ‘Lucas said today that he hadn’t seen you since Beatrice was born.’

  Tom frowns. ‘He hadn’t, I don’t think.’

  ‘But you went round to his when she was about a week old. I remember you going. You said you were picking something up that he was storing for you.’

  Tom shakes his head. ‘No, I think I just picked something up from the flat, didn’t I?’

  ‘No. You definitely said you were going to Lucas’s.’

  ‘Well, maybe he wasn’t in when I got there.’

  ‘Do you ever speak to Georgia?’ Isobel asks. She doesn’t know why she has grasped his ex-wife’s name from the air. But she watches Tom’s face carefully, waits for a twitch or a reddening: something that will reveal everything she needs to know about whether she can trust him or whether she is going to be swept into a tide of pain. But Tom’s face, as always, stays the same. His eyes glint ever so slightly, perhaps with a secret, or perhaps with annoyance that Isobel is dragging Georgia into their pleasant day.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘So she hasn’t contacted you recently?’

  Tom turns, carves some bread, turns back, tears at it with his teeth. ‘Nope.’ The word is the same as before: same tone, same enunciation, a duplicate.

  Beatrice wails, put out by the lack of attention.

  ‘So who else do you think might phone here for you?’ Isobel whispers, in case Daphne is listening. She whispers a lot of words these days. The whispers float around Broadsands, hissing and buzzing around the large, tidy rooms like wasps.

  Tom wipes his hands on his trousers, leaving a trail of white flour from the bread on each leg. ‘Isobel, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s happened? Why are you suddenly wanting to know all of this? Why can’t you just trust me?’

  Isobel looks at Beatrice, whose face is crumpling, angry and puce with an imminent howl. She doesn’t want to pick her up and soothe her. Tom moves over and picks her up instead, and Beatrice is instantly placated. Panic soars through Isobel as she watches Beatrice, red-faced, play with the buttons on Tom’s shirt.

  Lack of interest in the baby

  ‘I heard something. I heard your mother on the phone to somebody just then, when we came in.’ More whispered words, wasps in the room.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I don’t know. She was talking to somebody, telling them to leave you alone.’

  ‘It was probably a sales call.’

  Tom jiggles Beatrice and walks out of the room with her on his hip, chewing another piece of bread. Isobel looks down at the abandoned bouncer, at the crumbs of grey-gold sand on the floor, at the forlorn bags from their perfect day at the beach. She thinks of Beatrice’s eyes and hair and all the things that make her Isobel and Tom’s: a painfully sweet mixture of them both. She hears Tom open the lounge door and speak to Daphne, hears him ask her who was on the phone. She listens out for the extended vowels of his ex-wife’s name, or for an answer that will make the aching inside her go away.

  But she hears nothing except the murmur of calm conversation, the hum of the house around her, the hissing of wasps around her ears.

  Chapter 18

  Victoria: 1965

  Victoria’s parents were probably about five minutes away from
Gaspings House when Victoria was shunted into a room full of chattering women. Matron gave Victoria a tap on the waist to prompt her to enter, and then left her standing in the doorway. A few of the girls looked up, cigarette smoke making their faces grey and distorted. The room was dark, and the girls were seated on mismatched chairs around a long table. The ones who weren’t smoking knitted furiously, needles twitching away in time with their mouths as they talked to one another. Victoria could see a few of the items that were taking shape: pale-blue booties, a cream shawl, a yellow hat.

  ‘Are you new?’ somebody said over the din of voices and clacking of knitting needles. Victoria stared around the room, trying to find the owner of the voice. Everybody still seemed to be talking. Still, somebody must have asked, and it would be rude not to answer, so Victoria gave a general nod and stepped a little further into the room. It was then that she saw a woman sitting on a straight-backed green sofa in the corner, waiting for Victoria’s reply.

  The woman was tall and her body stooped even as she sat. She looked older than Victoria, and like everybody around the table, seemed to be quite accepting of where she was, of the predicament she was in. Why weren’t they all crying? How could they talk and knit booties for babies who they never meant to have, for whom goodness only knew what was going to happen? Victoria’s legs went weak at her last thought and she found herself moving towards the sofa and dropping down next to the tall woman.

  ‘I’m Bev,’ the woman said, holding out her hand to shake Victoria’s. ‘Have you just arrived?’

  Victoria nodded, ‘I’m Victoria.’ Then, because she could think of nothing else, ‘My parents have just left.’