by Heidi Perks
‘And Eleanor gave you money? She was blackmailing you?’
‘Yes, she was. I guess I knew that at the time too, but the money was a lifeline and I came to rely on it. It gave me a lot of credence amongst my friends too. All the kids whose parents didn’t care where they were started hanging out with me even more. Then one day she handed me a whole pile of cash and I realised that was my cue to get out of the house and out of her life.’
‘So you just took it?’
‘I was very mixed up – I had no one I could turn to who’d lead me in the right direction. So I took it and rented a room with a bunch of others. I didn’t really have a plan other than using the money to get me through each day at a time. Anyway, things got a little messy.’
‘Messy how?’
‘Oh, you know,’ Abi waved a hand in the air. ‘Drinking, drugs … Nothing I’m proud of.’
‘I never liked Grandma. And now I know what she did—’ Hannah paused. ‘I wish I’d never had to waste a single minute visiting the old witch. She used to scare me.’
‘She’s a scary woman. I guess that didn’t help Kathryn; it must have been terrifying as a child to have a mother like that.’
‘It was the way she looked too. Those eyes that bore into you, scrutinising your every move. And the scar that made her look so frightening.’
‘Scar?’ Abi asked. ‘I didn’t notice a scar when I last saw her.’
‘Yes, a deep red line all down here,’ Hannah replied, running a finger down her left cheek. ‘She used to wear so much make-up that half the time you could barely see it, but when she didn’t, it looked like someone had run a red felt tip down her face.’
Abi shifted on the edge of the bed and opened her mouth to speak but didn’t say anything.
‘What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘I don’t know, I just remembered something. Look, it doesn’t matter. Let’s not talk about her,’ she said, attempting a smile.
‘Anyway, look at you now,’ Hannah told her. ‘You came through it. You’re so strong!’
‘Well, of course a lot of that was down to Adam,’ Abi smiled.
‘I saw the way you wrote to him and the things you said. You can’t deny you still love him,’ Hannah said, clutching Abi’s hand and squeezing it.
‘I’ll never stop loving him.’
‘Then you need to do something about it,’ she urged.
A knock at the door interrupted them. ‘Housekeeping!’ a voice called out, ‘I’ve brought your towels.’
Abi stood up and opened the door, thanked the woman and then suggested to Hannah they made the most of the afternoon before it got too dark outside.
Hannah agreed. She’d continue her conversation with Abi some other time. She had an idea brewing, and one that was exciting her, because a love like Abi and Adam’s was too precious to throw away, and so she wasn’t about to let them do it. Dom would help her look for Adam – he had been so good about finding Peter. And then Hannah could meet him and tell him everything she knew and he would realise what Abi had really been worried about and how much she still loved him, and that it wasn’t too late for them to try to be parents and … Hannah knew she was getting carried away, and if Lauren knew what she was up to, she would probably try stopping her. So this time she wouldn’t say anything. Not until she found him.
But this time she was convinced it was the right thing to do.
Later that day they hugged goodbye outside the hotel. Morrie had arrived to drive her back to the Bay on her mum’s insistence she didn’t get a taxi.
‘Pick your battles,’ he had advised warmly. Some things would take longer than others.
‘This is for you,’ Abi said, handing over a paper bag tied with ribbon that she’d pulled from her handbag.
‘What is it?’ Hannah asked, starting to untie the bow.
‘Open it later,’ Abi laughed.
Hannah slipped into the passenger seat and closed the door behind her, both of them waving to Abi as Morrie pulled off.
‘So did you have a nice afternoon?’ Morrie asked.
‘Yes, it was lovely.’
‘And how’s she feeling about tomorrow?’
‘Nervous, I think.’ Hannah shrugged, already distracted by the bag and its contents.
‘What have you got there?’ Morrie asked, glancing over.
‘He’s very cute,’ she said, taking the blue teddy out and holding it up. ‘But why on earth would she give me this? Oh, hold on, there’s a label.’ Hannah took a moment before reading aloud: ‘This is someone I’ve always looked after for you, but he’s yours again now.’
She looked over at Morrie and then back at the bear.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I guess you’re mine now. Whoever you are, Ted.’
– Thirty-Nine –
It had been eighty-nine days since Kathryn’s mother had died. Autumn had taken hold; the days and nights were drawing in. The day before they had put the clocks back. It was a date Kathryn usually hated. She didn’t like winter approaching because normally it made her feel nervous – all black and dreary and lacking in hope. But it didn’t feel so bad that year. Despite everything that had happened, oddly, it didn’t seem so bad at all.
She was meeting Abigail the next day. For the first time in over fourteen years she would be sitting in front of her first-born daughter again. Kathryn didn’t know what to think about it, she didn’t know if she was ready. But since her mother had died, and since she had begun to piece together what had actually happened all those years ago, she was better equipped, she felt. At least she finally had some answers she’d be able to relay to Abi.
If Kathryn was honest, she was a little excited about their meeting. When the nerves moved aside to let the other emotions through, she found a small glimmer of hope lodged deep inside her that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to start again with Abi. Once they had put all the other bits to rest, once she had told her what she now knew, then they could move forward together. That was her plan anyway.
‘Kathryn?’
She looked up. Her therapist, Linda Platt, was waiting in the open doorway, her thin lips spread into a flat smile. She wasn’t a pretty woman, her lank blonde hair hung shapelessly to her shoulders, but Kathryn liked her.
Linda stood to one side and waited for Kathryn to walk past into the small square room. She didn’t make small talk and had no interest in anything that didn’t move them forward.
‘So you’re meeting Abigail tomorrow?’ She asked it as a question, so maybe she expected Kathryn to pull out. Kathryn nodded and waited for Linda to sit down on the faded brown sofa opposite her. She pulled out her familiar pad, full of notes on Kathryn’s childhood, husbands and children that she’d gleaned over six sessions.
‘I want to come back to you and your mother, today,’ Linda said, without pursuing the topic of Abigail any further.
They always came back to her mother, but then Kathryn was beginning to see that everything always did.
‘But first I want you to tell me how your conversation with Peter went. You eventually spoke with him last week?’
Kathryn nodded and gazed out of the small window. She could see the dull blue sky and the top of a tree swaying in the wind but little else. The tree moved backwards and forwards like a metronome. It was mesmerising, and she had found herself watching it many times over the past few weeks.
‘He told me what happened, when I left,’ Kathryn said.
*****
Kathryn had put off speaking to Peter after her mother’s death. She knew there were still things she needed to hear but was relieved when Linda suggested they worked through other things first. Over the weeks she and Linda had trawled through Kathryn’s relationship with her mother. Bit by bit Kathryn was piecing it all together, how much her mother had controlled her life, how even as a child she was manipulated by her.
‘When I was ten she made me do elocution even though I hated it,’ Kathryn had mentioned in one of their s
essions. ‘She made me stand up in front of the school on speech day even though I was trembling with nerves and wanted the ground to swallow me up—’
She paused: it was a memory she hadn’t thought about in years, the horrendous day when she had spoken in front of four hundred people, her hands shaking as they held tight to the paper in her hand. Even the teachers had told her she really didn’t need to do it, but Eleanor had insisted. It was only ten minutes but the fear she might wet herself had overpowered her. In the end Kathryn had run off the stage on the last word as fast as her jelly legs would take her to the sound of sporadic clapping and a few laughs from the front row.
‘Why do you think you let her make you do those things?’ Linda had asked.
‘Because—’ Kathryn paused. Why had she let her? ‘I don’t know, really. It was just the way it always was; I didn’t see an alternative. Mother was always there with the answers for me, especially when I didn’t think I could cope. She would tell me what to do so I wouldn’t need to think for myself and in the end I quite liked that. I didn’t always want to think for myself, so it made sense to me that Mother should do so instead.’
That was how it was when Robert died: Mother took over. Some days, following his death, Kathryn would get really angry that he had been taken from her. Some days she even blamed Abigail for it. They had been so happy before Abigail came along, when it was just the two of them. But then he had shared his love with her too. And Kathryn didn’t want to share his heart. She thought that Abigail was getting more than half her share and somehow convinced herself that was why it broke in the end, because he was giving too much of it away.
Of course she understood now how ridiculous that was, but at the time it was all she could see. Her mother had dragged in Edgar Simmonds, who plied her with more pills, ones she now knew were for her illness but at the time she had eagerly accepted because they made the voices stop.
No one had helped her; no one had made her understand that all those feelings were normal for someone with schizophrenic episodes, because no one other than her parents and Edgar knew. And they weren’t telling anyone.
‘What did your mother do?’ Linda had asked her. ‘When Robert died, what did she do that made you think she helped?’
‘She told me to stop being so bloody stupid,’ Kathryn let out a small laugh. ‘She told me to pull myself together and move on.
‘“It’s not healthy,” she said.’
Well, death isn’t healthy, Mother, Kathryn had wanted to say back.
‘And you think that helped?’
‘Well, she took Abigail to school for me and would lay out clothes for me to wear.’ All Kathryn had wanted to do was stay in bed in her pyjamas. ‘And she bought food. So yes, I guess she helped.’
Eleanor said baked beans weren’t a staple diet, but Kathryn couldn’t have cared less if they ate them out of the tin every night of the week.
‘Then one day she told me enough was enough.’
Kathryn could remember it clearly. It was mid-morning and she was still in bed. Abigail was at school and her mother had returned, telling her they had something to do.
‘Get up,’ Eleanor had snapped, pulling back the curtains. She threw a box onto the bed.
‘What’s that for?’ Kathryn asked.
‘We’re filling it up today.’
She watched her mother sweep around the house, room by room, taking down photographs of Robert, the paintings he had done at college, certificates, a card still standing on the mantelpiece. All traces of him were removed. At first Kathryn did nothing but stare at her mother, speechless.
‘Don’t throw them away,’ she pleaded when the box was full and Eleanor seemed satisfied.
‘So what do you suggest we do?’
‘I don’t know, just don’t throw them away.’
Later she had found the box resting against the dustbin, to be collected the following morning, and Kathryn knew her mother would have banked on her not leaving the house and finding them. That night she dug a hole in the back garden and buried the box so Eleanor wouldn’t find it.
Maybe it was a good idea, she had told herself as she walked back into the house. It was the right thing to do.
Maybe it wasn’t, she realised now.
‘So, your mother told you to move on after your husband’s death and you did as she told you. Even though you didn’t feel it was the right thing to do.’ Linda paused. ‘Do you think you ever grieved for him?’
Kathryn shook her head. No, she hadn’t been allowed. And in turn that meant she hadn’t let Abigail either.
In the build-up to Kathryn leaving for the Bay she was struggling again: her relationship with Abigail all but disintegrated, her marriage to Peter practically over. Not only did she have two toddlers to look after, Kathryn had the added worry that Abigail was going to tell the world one of them was hers.
At first Kathryn hadn’t seen the problem. It wouldn’t have been ideal, but would it have really mattered? Her mother was convinced otherwise, however. Eleanor seemed to believe that if it came out their lives would be ruined.
In a funny way it was a relief to hear Peter tell her what was going on beneath the surface of the life she had blindly accepted. The fact that Eleanor was so petrified of it coming out that she made her granddaughter hand over her baby. ‘Everyone would know her and Edgar had manipulated the whole thing,’ Peter told her. ‘That they had doctored the papers and as far as Abigail’s records showed, she was never even pregnant. And your records were tampered with, too,’ he said. ‘Remember they had been doing it for years. Edgar would have lost his job over it.’
‘And my mother?’
‘Public disgrace, I don’t know, they could have gone to jail. As payback to my uncle, Charles had used his position to get Edgar private funding for research. Your father was on the Committee for Privileges and Conducts, Kathryn. They would have been finished if they had been found out.’
So Eleanor knew she had to stop Abigail at whatever cost. But the more Eleanor tried to manipulate Abigail, the more it seemed to encourage her daughter to make her threats.
‘Mother told me I needed to get away for a bit,’ Kathryn told Linda. ‘She said it wasn’t wise to be around Abigail whilst she was such a danger. I told her Abigail wasn’t dangerous, but she insisted I would lose my other daughters if I didn’t do something about it.’
Kathryn gazed out of the window. ‘Peter and Mother had bought the cottage in Mull Bay from Edgar. Apparently he had been renting it out for years to an old woman who had recently died. Mother thought it was a perfect spot to hide away the family she was so ashamed of.’ She turned back to Linda but couldn’t see any emotion in the therapist’s blank face. ‘Peter told me the other day he didn’t think Eleanor had really thought through her plan for the cottage but she had this idea they could ship Abigail to the Bay for a while, until she was convinced Abi wouldn’t say anything.’
‘But Abigail didn’t come to the cottage?’ Linda asked.
Kathryn shook her head. ‘It didn’t get to that. I was frightened. My mother had been drilling into me how much of a threat Abigail was and I was scared, so scared they would find out what we had done and take Hannah away. I thought I might never see either of them again. Of course, I even believed I had adopted her back then, which I now realise wasn’t the case, but I still thought that wouldn’t matter. One night I overheard Mother talking to Peter about the cottage. She called it a safe house and I thought she intended it to be for me. I fell in love with the sound of it, the idea of living near the sea in a tiny village far away from London. All I wanted was for us all to be safe, and suddenly I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I was in such a bad way by then I decided to take matters into my own hands and one day whilst Abigail was at school I packed up all the girls’ belongings, a few things of my own and ran away.’
Kathryn wiped the tears from her face. ‘I was a dreadful mother, I know that. But I hoped my mother would deal with Abigail and then someh
ow we could all be together again. Only it didn’t work out like that.’
‘So what happened?’ Linda asked.
‘A few days after I had gone I wrote to Abigail and told her where I was, said that I hoped she would come to her senses and then she could move up to be with us. But she didn’t respond and so I told Mother I wanted to see her. I said I would go back to London to collect her. That’s when my mother turned up with a cut down the side of her face.’ Kathryn ran a finger down her own cheek. ‘She said to me, Look what that girl is capable of. If she can do this to me then think what she might do to the girls. So I didn’t go. Instead I wrote her more letters but still I never heard back and eventually –’ Kathryn paused – ‘Eventually I gave up on her.’
She might never know for sure, but she didn’t think Abigail would have taken a knife to Eleanor’s face, though it was frightening to think how warped her mother must have been to have done that to herself.
‘I guess, in time, Mother grew to like the thought of holing me up in the Bay and once Abigail had gone off her radar she had got away with everything. What a pity I found out too late,’ Kathryn said. ‘Now she’s dead she doesn’t have to answer to anything.’
Linda passed her a tissue and Kathryn rubbed her eyes and blew her nose noisily. She didn’t want to cry any more tears over her mother, but these were tears for all of them now. And she didn’t know if she would ever be able to stop crying for what she had done to Abigail.
‘I believed my mother and never gave Abigail a chance. It’s too late now, isn’t it?’
‘That’s something you can ask her yourself,’ said Linda. ‘When you see her tomorrow.'
‘I see Morrie is waiting for you outside again.’ Linda motioned towards the door at the end of their session. Kathryn turned and saw him sitting on the sofa in the waiting area, rubbing his beard and browsing through a newspaper. When she turned back, Linda was still watching her.
‘He’s just a friend,’ Kathryn said, feeling the need to justify his presence. ‘He’s been very good to me. He’s even been to the home today to collect some of my mother’s things for me. And of course he’s letting me use his house to meet Abigail.’