by Heidi Perks
‘I told you, no one visits me.’
I sighed and grabbed the handle of my bag. It was useless and I needed little encouragement to leave.
Eleanor turned away from me and looked out of the window. ‘I know exactly who you are,’ she said in a cold flat tone. ‘Abigail.’
At this, I froze. My body pricked cold as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice over me, the follicles on my arms and legs pinching my skin.
‘So tell me why you’re really here, Abigail,’ she said slowly, turning back to face me.
‘I want to find the girls,’ I told her, with all the strength I could summon.
‘Patricia,’ she suddenly called out, and like a genie, the woman who had let me in appeared. ‘I need the bathroom. Please take me back up to my room,’ she told the nurse, not once taking her cold, hard stare off me.
Patricia ushered another nurse over and walked me back towards the hallway. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘She sometimes gets like that when she’s had enough. It drives her daughter mad. Not that Kathryn ever lets on, of course. She smiles her way through her visits, but you can see the sadness in her eyes. We see it all the time with relatives. The disappointment.’
‘Really?’
She still cares about the old witch then, I thought.
‘She has the patience of a saint that lady. I shouldn’t really say, but Eleanor can be a little …’ Patricia paused, ‘testing sometimes, but I’ve never once heard her daughter raise her voice, or seem offended by it.’
My mother, the saint. How I would have loved to tell Patricia a thing or two about Kathryn that would make her seem far from godly, although it didn’t surprise me that she was still keeping up her pretence that everything was fine. She probably even believed it was, despite her own mother crumbling away in front of her eyes.
‘And the girls?’ I asked. I had so many questions. I wondered how well Patricia knew them, if she saw them every week. What they looked like. How they behaved with Eleanor. If she thought they liked their grandmother or couldn’t stand her.
‘Ah yes, the lovely girls. Such pretty young things.’
‘Are they?’ I smiled, a surge of emotion rising within me. My body was swelling with pride to hear them described as lovely and pretty, and my heart ached so heavily with a desperate need to see it for myself.
I was about to ask more when a voice called from the top of the stairs.
‘Patricia, Eleanor’s asking for the lady visiting her to come up to her room.’
Patricia glanced at me quizzically. ‘That’s unusual,’ she said. ‘But I guess you’d better go up, if you want to. Suzanne can show you the way when you get up there,’ she said, gesturing towards the girl who was waiting.
I looked up at Suzanne hovering at the top of the stairwell. It was the last thing I wanted to do; I had almost felt relief at the thought of getting out of there, yet I couldn’t leave without hearing what she wanted to say. I let Suzanne lead me to her room at the far end of the corridor.
The door was ajar, and she tapped lightly on it, pushing it open as she did so.
‘Your visitor’s here, Eleanor,’ she announced loudly, as if Eleanor were deaf.
I held my breath as I stepped in. It was a large room overlooking the back gardens, with minimal furniture: a double bed, wardrobe, a dressing table and a bedside table. It reminded me of a plush hotel rather than a nursing home. I remembered what Doris had said about Charles’s debts and how little money had been left, and wondered how Eleanor could afford to keep herself plumped in comfort. Was the home draining every penny she had left?
Eleanor was perched on the end of her bed facing a mirror. She held a hairbrush in one hand, although it drooped towards her lap, as if forgotten about. She didn’t acknowledge Suzanne or me, and as Suzanne retreated back down the corridor I cautiously took another step nearer her bed.
‘Abigail,’ she said, testing the name.
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you here, Abigail?’
‘You know why I’m here. I want to find the girls.’
‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘They all went away because you can’t be trusted.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘They left days ago now. I told her she had no choice. Silly woman, though. I didn’t tell her to do that.’
‘What do you—?’
I stopped suddenly, realising she had no idea how much time had passed. Eleanor must have thought it had only just happened. I don’t know if seeing me had confused her, maybe taken her back to when my mother left, but I could tell she was getting agitated. She was tapping the brush on her knee rhythmically, her other hand scratching at her leg.
Play her game then, I thought.
‘You can trust me,’ I said calmly. ‘I won’t say anything.’
‘I knew I had to do something,’ she continued, ‘but to leave just like that …’ Eleanor shook her head. ‘Never did know what that woman would do next.’
‘Are you talking about my mother, still?’ I asked.
‘It couldn’t come out,’ she said, shaking her head as she stared at her reflection in the mirror. ‘It couldn’t come out. I wouldn’t let them say I was involved in a cover-up.’
‘You weren’t just involved, you manipulated the whole thing!’ I cried.
Eleanor lifted her brush and started running it through her hair.
‘Where are they?’ I begged. ‘Please just tell me where they are.’
There was a knock at the door and Patricia came in, slowly looking at both of us in turn. I wondered how long she had been standing outside because her eyes were watching us carefully, waiting for some explanation.
‘I’m very tired, Patricia. Please show this girl out. I need to rest.’
Eleanor threw her hairbrush onto the dressing table.
Patricia nodded and gently took hold of my arm. I tried pulling away – I couldn’t walk out with nothing, not when I had put myself through so much. But Patricia’s firm grip was already steering me out of the door.
‘Just tell me,’ I called out, but already I knew Eleanor would say nothing more.
I wanted to run back and hurl myself at her, pummel her with my fists and beat the truth out of her. How dare she still do this to me? Ruling my life as if it was her authority to do so. I turned back one last time to see the woman who ruined my life and realised there was still nothing I could do to pay my grandmother back for the years of hurt she’d thrown at me.
Patricia closed the door behind us. As I blinked back tears of frustration, I was shaking. I didn’t know what to do next. I suspected Patricia wanted to coax me down the stairs but I couldn’t move. I was contemplating my next step, whether or not to barge back into Eleanor’s room, demanding the truth, or to relent and leave. Because she’d tell me nothing I wanted to hear, and the nurses would soon be bustling me out of the home like a criminal.
‘Abigail,’ Patricia said softly, leaning in so she could keep her voice low.
‘Yes,’ I snapped back. I didn’t want to answer her questions.
She nodded, all the time her eyes scrutinising me. I was about to tell her to let me go when she held up a hand to stop me.
‘Mull Bay,’ she said, gently smiling. ‘They’re living in a place called Mull Bay.’
– Thirty-One –
Kathryn pulled down the visor but it didn’t help block the sun from piercing through the side window. She couldn’t see the road in front of her clearly and it didn’t help that her hands were shaking against the wheel. Determined not to pull over, she carried on: she needed to get to her mother quickly.
Everything her life was built upon had been ripped apart and she could see no way through it. Her mother had orchestrated her life for her, so it seemed fitting that only Eleanor could tell her what she should do now all those cleverly made plans were falling apart and she was about to lose two more of her daughters. She had never wanted to lose her first.
She needed her mother to tell
her the truth. For once she wished Eleanor could look into her eyes and tell her what happened. Had she really covered up an illness because she was ashamed? Kathryn so wanted her to deny it, and to believe her, because it was such an unthinkably cruel thing to have done. To refuse her daughter the help she needed and all because she didn’t want people knowing. But deep down, Kathryn knew Peter was telling her the truth.
Who was she kidding, anyway? She knew the possibility of having such a conversation was negligible.
It didn’t stop Kathryn hoping, though. Because there were also all the other things she needed answers to. Large chunks of the time she walked away from Abigail were missing in her mind and she needed her mother to fill them in for her.
‘Why did I just leave?’ Kathryn shouted, banging the heels of her palms against the steering wheel. It had been a hard time, there was a lot going on. The girls were demanding, Hannah always throwing tantrums, and Kathryn never knew what to do about it.
Abigail would sneer at her whenever she tried to calm Hannah down, letting her know what she herself already knew – that she was a useless mother. Peter barely spoke to her. She had wanted to scream at all of them that she didn’t belong there. Kathryn hadn’t belonged anywhere since Robert had died. He had taken her heart and her soul with him that day but Eleanor had never let her grieve. Instead she had bustled her on to the next husband. And Edgar Simmonds had been there, with more medication, which Kathryn had accepted without even asking what it was for because she hadn’t really cared, and she had trusted they were doing the right thing for her.
Then Abigail threatened to expose their secret about Hannah. She remembered that much. Kathryn was scared; she didn’t want to lose Hannah. Eleanor was adamant it never got out, that the situation must be resolved, and Kathryn never really knew what her mother meant by that.
Eleanor pounded it into her, mentally tap-tap tapping away at Kathryn’s empty shell as if cracking an egg.
Abigail will ruin everything, she kept chanting.
She will tell people we took her baby.
Tap, tap on her shell.
You will lose Hannah, of course.
Another hard tap.
Something needs to be done about her, and you said yourself she’s threatening you.
Had she? Kathryn vaguely remembered something, but had Abigail actually made threats against them?
Look what’s she’s capable of.
Eleanor had pointed to the deep cut down her face. And crack, Kathryn’s thin shell was broken.
No, she knew deep down Abigail would never have caused that.
But she’s deranged, her mother had said. She would do anything to any of them. She could hurt the children. And take Hannah back and …
But Hannah was hers now, wasn’t she, Mother? It was legal; Abigail couldn’t take her.
A swipe of Eleanor’s hand in the air.
It is legal, isn’t it, Mother? she had asked again. I did adopt her?
All technicalities or something, Eleanor had said.
Technicalities? Kathryn thumped her fist against the steering wheel again. Why had she forgotten that conversation before now? She couldn’t remember how she’d responded. Most likely she had let it pass over her.
But did that mean she hadn’t legally adopted Hannah? Had Eleanor faked the whole thing, just to get it dealt with quickly? Like she had made them fake the fact that the girls were twins. Like she had covered up that her daughter was sick, and didn’t get her the help she needed.
But she could see her mother pointing to that cut again. That awful, ugly cut running down her face. This is what she is capable of, Eleanor had said to her, and she had taken her mother’s word for it.
The sun was creeping into the window again, the road blurring ahead of her. Kathryn’s head was swimming. She should probably pull over but she had to keep going.
Her mother had told her about the house in Mull Bay. Kathryn assumed it was for them: a safe house. In her rush she had packed their bags hastily the day they left for Mull Bay, scooped up every single thing the girls had before scurrying away. Just until things settled down, of course. Because she knew she had heard Abigail telling her she would do something awful.
But had she heard that? Only now she couldn’t actually remember Abigail saying anything like that at all.
‘I’ve written this for Abigail.’ Kathryn had passed her mother an envelope when Eleanor turned up, a day later. She still wanted to explain herself to her daughter.
There was fog ahead. They didn’t usually get fog in July; everything was hazy, it felt like she was in a desert. Kathryn really couldn’t see that well at all.
Eleanor had stuffed the envelope in her pocket. She had later told Kathryn that Abigail wasn’t interested.
A horn blasted her. Not just one, they were all doing it, drivers staring at her and waving their arms as they overtook on the inside lane.
‘Slow down,’ she mouthed back.
In her heart she had known she shouldn’t leave, not really, and yet she had.
‘What is it?’ she screamed, swerving back into the inside lane, narrowly missing a red fiesta. ‘You get out of my way then,’ she called to the young girl sticking a finger up at her.
*****
Kathryn wasn’t sure how she made it to Elms Home. Getting out of the car, she stretched her arms above her head, locking her hands behind her neck, and took a moment to calm herself down before going into the home. She watched a girl run out of the home and back to her car. Her long dark hair swished behind her as she sank into the driver’s seat and closed the door behind her. The girl looked so like Abigail. There was something about her movements so familiar they took Kathryn’s breath away. But of course it couldn’t be her: it must be her mind, playing its usual tricks.
The car drove off and Kathryn made her way to the front door. She sensed both Patricia’s surprise and irritation when she opened the door, but Kathryn cut her off before she was able to say anything.
‘I need to see my mother.’
‘She’s resting. I’ve just left her room. Eleanor’s exhausted so I think it’s best if you let her sleep.’
‘But I need to see her,’ said Kathryn, pushing past her into the hallway.
‘I said she needs to rest. She’s had a very busy day and looks quite pale. I don’t think—’
‘I have to. You can’t stop me. Hannah’s in hospital and … I have to see her.’
Kathryn knew her voice was rising but she would shout if she had to.
‘Hannah’s in hospital?’ Patricia’s voice softened. ‘What happened? Is she OK?’
‘No.’ Kathryn waved her hand dismissively. ‘I don’t know. That’s not why I’m here, I need to talk to her about something else.’
Patricia bent her head to one side. ‘Not today, Kathryn,’ she said firmly.
Kathryn was about to shove past her and go up to her mother’s room anyway when her mobile started ringing. She fumbled in her bag and pulled it out: Morrie’s name flashed across the screen.
‘Morrie?’
‘Hannah’s awake. You really need to come back.’
‘Why, has something happened?’
‘No, she’s been down for another scan and the bleeding has decreased, which is really good news, but it shouldn’t be me telling you this. You need to be here,’ he continued. ‘This isn’t fair on either of them. You can’t keep running, Kathryn.’
‘They won’t let me see my mother,’ she cried out.
There was a deep sigh at the other end of the line. ‘You don’t need to.’
‘But—’
‘Your responsibility is right here, at the hospital. Hannah is asking where you are,’ he said. ‘This is your chance to make it right, Kathryn. You have to come back for the girls.’
Kathryn looked at Patricia determinedly watching her, glanced up the stairs towards her mother’s room and wavered. She knew what she should do and that was turn back and put her daughters first, however hard that
might be, yet she still didn’t know if she could.
– Thirty-Two –
Dear Adam,
Kathryn never spoke of the sea. We had always lived in London and our holidays were mostly spent at Eleanor’s house in the country. The sea wasn’t part of her – I don’t think I ever saw her swim. Yet she chose to build herself a life beside it in a bay so beautiful and idyllic. What a perfect contrast to the life she left me living.
You used to say to me, ‘One day, Abi, we should leave this city behind us and find ourselves a little shack away from the bustle and smog.’ Of course you saw us surrounded by a flock of little Abigails and Adams and so I could never fully buy into the picture, but I liked the idea, and I would let you draw me our future from your imagination.
You would love Mull Bay. I would like it if we could move to the sea now and live in your dream. If we lived in Mull Bay we could sit on the clifftop every evening and watch the sea as the sun set over the hills behind us.
*****
After my visit to Eleanor yesterday I looked up Mull Bay. It was a tiny dot on the map and when I pulled up directions I knew I would have to be careful not to miss it. I left the hotel early this morning and drove north. It took me two hours by the time I’d taken a few wrong turns and twice circled another village.
As soon as I entered Mull Bay I was drawn to its heart: the bay itself. All roads lead to it. I parked the car and walked down to the beach. It was cathartic to finally be clearing my head of Eleanor and focusing on what to do next. But as soon as I reached the sea, I realised I didn’t know what to do next. I needed to think carefully before I threw myself back into their lives.
I wore my sunglasses and the straw hat I had bought three years ago in Crete – I didn’t want her recognising me before I knew what I wanted to say. I sat down on a cluster of rocks where I intended to make my plan, and watched the sea gently roll in and out again. It was mesmerising. Two surfers ambled down the steps, chatting, oblivious to me watching them. Apart from a couple of fishermen at the other end of the bay they were the first people I’d seen. They were young and carefree and I found myself envying them the life they had.