by Lulu Taylor
‘Wait, Caitlyn . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘How’s Sara? Have you heard from her?’
‘Sara?’ She blinked, surprised. An image of Sara flashed across her mind: long russet hair, upturned grey eyes, khol’d into Cleopatra almond shapes. ‘How funny, I was just thinking about her. She’s fine, as far as I know.’ She paused and then said slowly, ‘Why?’
‘Caitlyn, there’s something I have to tell you. About Sara.’
A sudden wariness filled her. ‘What? What about her?’ A silence. Now he had her attention, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. A nasty sensation of fearful suspicion began to swirl in her stomach. ‘Patrick . . . what do you want to tell me?’
The connection between them crackled with static.
‘Are you there, Patrick?’ She heard his voice. He was speaking but it was broken up by interference. ‘I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up . . . Patrick!’
His words came in chopped and random. ‘Sara . . . she said . . . explained . . . you . . . threatened . . . important . . .’
‘I can’t hear you! Stop talking, it’s no good!’ She began to turn about the room, hoping somehow that she could retune him into clarity by moving around. Now his voice was almost entirely lost to the hiss of static. ‘This is hopeless.’ She was about to end the useless call, when his voice suddenly bounced back into vivid clarity.
‘Did you hear me?’
‘No, no, I haven’t heard anything you’ve said! There’s too much noise on the line.’
She caught something in his voice. Was it desperation?
‘I need to tell you before she does. Listen—’
Then it came. A noise like no other she’d ever heard: a fierce, vastly loud mechanical roar and crunch, with a great screech underneath. Then, abruptly, silence.
‘Patrick? Patrick! Speak to me!’
But there was nothing. The phone was unconnected to anything or anyone. ‘Patrick?’ she whispered. There was no reply. She was talking only to herself and the empty room.
Chapter Two
January 1947
‘Don’t be silly, Harry, take it all down. All of it!’
Tommy stood in the hall in her fur coat. She hardly took it off at all these days, and certainly put it on to go from room to room in the house. Standing here on the cold stone flags, shouting up the stairs, she wished she had her hat and muff on too.
‘All right. If you say so.’ Her son Harry was on the first-floor landing taking the swags of ivy from the carved oak stair spindles. It had dried a little in the chill air and bits of stalk and crisp green leaves floated downwards as he tugged at the long ropes of greenery.
‘No, don’t just pull! You’ll need to untwist it – look how it’s caught in the spirals. Show him, Antonia.’
Her daughter, two years older, and finding her dignity at almost eleven, was descending the stairs ahead of Harry and pulling out the pine cones they had stuck into the ivy at intervals. Tommy had been particularly proud of the pine cones: they’d dunked them in a glue paste and then into salt to frost them, and used twisted wire to give them stiff tails that could be pressed into wreathes and garlands. Some, left untailed, were scattered on chimney pieces or arranged in a bowl to decorate the table. But that had all been before Christmas, when the excitement lay ahead, and the decorations had seemed glittering and magical. Now it was long over, and well past the time the decorations should have been taken down, and the sparkling baubles were just dried-up old cones that shook showers of salt everywhere when they were moved.
‘I can’t show him,’ Antonia said, a touch primly. ‘I’m full. Where shall I put these?’ She pulled out her jumper to show that she had a load of pine cones in the front.
‘By the fireplace in the drawing room. We’ll burn them tonight. It’ll be fun – the salt will make the flames change colour.’ She glanced up at Harry who was tugging hard on a rope of ivy. ‘Stop that, you chump, you’ll cause an injury to the staircase! Just think how awful it would be if you snapped something. Come on, I’ll help untwist.’
She ran lightly up the stairs as Antonia stomped off towards the drawing room, stopping to pull down some bits of holly from the top of picture frames and toss it over the banister to the floor below. It was already so littered with bits of foliage, the holly wouldn’t matter. ‘Here, I’ll start and you follow me down.’
‘Antonia had better get back in a moment,’ Harry grumbled. ‘I’m not doing all this by myself.’
‘She will,’ promised Tommy, though she had a feeling Antonia might have taken advantage of the situation and hopped it. Nobody was quite as keen on taking down as they had been on putting up. ‘Come on, we’ll be done in no time.’
As they untwisted the ivy, sending down showers of dry stalk and leaves, Harry said idly, ‘Did Daddy like Christmas?’
Tommy stopped still for a moment; the children occasionally talked of Alec, but it was always a shock when they did. She’d get the same inner thud at the mention of him, and need a second to recover from it. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘He loved it.’
‘I wish I could remember him,’ Harry said mournfully.
‘I know, darling.’
‘Mummy, can we look at the photographs later, please?’
‘Of course we can.’
It was a little ritual they went through every now and then. She’d pull out the pile of snaps from the old biscuit tin and they’d go through them, the children asking hundreds of questions about their father, while she looked into that face again: Alec’s dark eyes, his black hair and moustache. There he was on their wedding day, tall and handsome in uniform, while she stood – so very young – beside him, pale and wide-eyed, in a froth of falling veil and white silk. There was his studio portrait, making him look like a film star, with his chiselled features and smooth skin and straight dark brows; and all the records of the babies’ arrivals, holidays, parties and celebrations.
‘Tell us, Mummy,’ they would beg, and she would have to tell them the stories again – about meeting Daddy and marrying Daddy, and having Antonia and Harry, and how happy they’d been in their little house. The only story they didn’t want to hear was the one about Daddy dying. He had to live for them, just for a moment, their wonderful hero father, whom they’d never known.
And they never will.
‘We’ll get the photographs out after tea,’ she promised him. That would give her a few hours to steel herself for the ordeal.
Ada Thornton came in, drying her hands on the large striped apron she always wore over her dark brown dress.
‘Oh my, this mess! It looks like a forest floor in here.’ She tutted. ‘I’ll tell Thornton to come and sort it out. You should have said, he’d have taken all this down.’
‘I’m sure Thornton has plenty to do without taking down the Christmas decorations,’ Tommy said with a laugh. ‘We’re fine, Ada. We can do it. I’ll send Antonia to get the broom. If we ever see her again.’ She was tempted to shout for her daughter, but she knew it would be useless. Even if Antonia were in earshot, she could simply pretend she wasn’t. ‘We’re almost finished anyway. What is it you need me for?’
‘I said I’d need to be off early today, miss.’ Tommy would always be miss to Ada, no matter how long she’d been married. ‘And it’s Clara’s day off so the dinner is in the range. You’ll need to put the potatoes in at seven o’clock, and the greens should boil at a quarter to eight.’
‘Thank you, Ada, I’m sure I can manage,’ she said, tugging out a last bit of ivy, but Ada still looked worried. She knew only too well from Tommy’s previous efforts that she would struggle with eight of them to feed, now that Roger’s friend was coming.
‘I could stay behind if you’d prefer . . .’ Ada said.
‘Don’t be silly, Ada. I’ll cope, I promise.’
‘Very well, miss. The bedroom’s all made up for the visitor.’
‘Did Clara set the fire? The radiator never gets warm in there. Too far f
rom the boiler, perhaps.’ Tommy had no idea what might cause a radiator to be colder than it was supposed to be, but this sounded plausible.
‘She did. And don’t you forget to ask the gentleman for his ration book.’
‘Of course I won’t. Now off you go.’
‘Very well, miss.’ Ada, stout and walking with her toes turned out, went to take off her apron and put on her huge green wool coat and the small brown hat she always wore with it. Tommy tried to remember if Ada had said where she was going that day – perhaps it was the doctor; there was something of the sufferer in her general demeanour. Maybe her rheumatism was playing up in the cold. That reminds me, I must get Thornton to chop more wood. Something else to be done. Always a million and one things to remember, and never a pen and paper to write them down. I must be more organised.
Now Tommy regarded their handiwork; all the great skeins of ivy were on the hall floor. ‘We just need the broom, and we can sweep all this up. It’ll make very good kindling now it’s so dry. Where is that wretch Antonia? And look at me, I’m covered in bits.’ She brushed ineffectively at the holly leaves embedded in the rich brown fur of her coat, and then yelled as loudly as she could, ‘Antonia! We’ve done all the blessed work. Antonia! Where are you, you lazy good-for-nothing?’
At that moment, the front door swung open and her brother Roger came in, exclaiming, ‘What a racket! What on earth’s going on?’
Someone else was just behind him. The two men looked similar in their dark overcoats and hats, but Roger was shorter, his face paler and pudgier than his friend’s.
‘Well, what are you doing coming in at the front?’ demanded Tommy crossly, embarrassed to have been caught yelling. ‘Close that door, can’t you, there’s a horrible draught coming in and it’s cold enough already in here.’
‘I thought it might be nice to show our visitor in the formal way,’ Roger said. He glanced down at the strewn floor. ‘But I see you’ve decided to create some kind of woodland effect in here.’ He turned to his friend. ‘Sorry about this, Fred.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ said his friend, his mouth curving upwards into a half-smile. ‘I don’t need a grand entrance, you know that.’
‘No, but . . . well, dash it, I did want to give a good impression of the Gainsborough.’ Roger gestured up at the painting in pride of place on the wall opposite the front door, and the two men looked up at it. Tommy couldn’t help turning to look too, even though she’d seen it thousands of times: the full-length portrait of a sad-faced woman with soulful dark eyes, standing beneath an oak tree, wearing gauzy white muslin, her white-grey powdered hair dressed high with soft curls falling over her shoulder.
‘It’s very fine. I’ll have a good long gaze later,’ the visitor said, taking off his hat as he stepped out into the hall from behind Roger. ‘You must be Roger’s sister. How do you do, Mrs Eliott.’
He put out his hand, and Tommy took it. ‘Yes, that’s right. But please call me Tommy. And you’re Mr Burton Brown, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. Fred.’ He smiled at her. He was gaunt, she noticed, his cheeks sunken under high bones, his nose beaky and his eyes – green or blue, she couldn’t quite make out – seemed deep in his skull. But that’s not surprising, I suppose. After all, he’s been ill. He turned to Harry who was standing quietly, his arms full of ivy, watching everything. ‘And who is this young fellow, looking like a pageboy at a Bacchanalia?’
‘My son, Harry,’ Tommy said. ‘Say hello to Mr Burton Brown, Harry.’
‘Hello,’ Harry said obediently.
‘I suppose you’re back at school now?’ Fred asked him in a friendly tone.
Harry nodded. ‘We have been for ages.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Spring Hall prep.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘I s’pose so. But it’s jolly cold at the moment and we all scramble to sit on the radiators at lunchtime. I’ve been on one all week,’ Harry said proudly.
‘Survival of the fittest,’ remarked Fred.
‘You like school perfectly well, don’t you, Harry?’ Tommy said. ‘And you’ll find my daughter Antonia is floating about somewhere.’
‘The lazy good-for-nothing,’ Fred said solemnly.
‘What? Oh yes. I was shouting for her.’ Tommy laughed lightly. ‘Please excuse our informality.’
‘It’s just what I want.’
‘Enough chattering.’ Roger grabbed his friend’s arm impatiently. ‘Come on, Fred. I’ll show you around.’
‘This really is a beautiful house,’ Fred said, looking about. ‘Seventeenth century?’
‘Bits of it are,’ Roger said importantly. ‘This bit is sixteenth. Good Queen Bess. It was built as two separate houses, but connected. My mother lives in the smaller one these days. There are some later additions, though we think the barn is a medieval tithe barn, you must see it. But first, I’ll show you the panelling. It’s Jacobean and quite stunning.’
‘I was hoping to look at the painting a little longer,’ Fred said, gesturing over at it.
‘Yes, but really it’s too dark now for a proper examination. You can hardly see it hanging in the shadows at this time of day. We’ll have a closer look in the morning. But you must see the panelling.’
‘Where are your bags?’ Tommy asked as Roger pulled his friend across the hall and towards the drawing room.
‘We left them in the motor. Get them brought in, will you? Come on, Fred.’
Mr Burton Brown allowed himself to be led away, sending a look of mild amusement at Roger’s enthusiasm over his shoulder to Tommy. She watched them go, feeling suddenly like a fool, standing there in her leaf-littered coat, her hair a mess and looking a fright. It hadn’t always been like this. Once she’d cared about how she looked and had taken pains over her clothes. She’d lived a life of carefree gaiety, when she’d worn long dresses and waltzed in the arms of young men in candlelit ballrooms. Then, after she’d married, there were dinners and parties and dances. She remembered being in Alec’s arms, his breath rich with tobacco, smelling the pomade he used to dress his moustache, her slender hand in his large one, his other palm heavy on her waist. He’d held her tight and controlled the way she moved about the dance floor, pressing against her from chest to ankle, turning her as he murmured in her ear promises for later, when they were alone . . .
Tommy shivered now just thinking about wearing a silk gown and very little else, and pulled her fur more closely about her.
That’s all over now. It died with Alec. It’s finished with. For good.
Chapter Three
From the first day, Caitlyn knew everyone was waiting for something: a breakdown of some sort. A huge emotional reaction. A response to the earthquake that had shattered her life. It hadn’t come. Instead it felt as though someone had scooped out everything from inside her and left her functioning quite normally on the outside, but hollow and empty within. It was useful in some ways: it meant that she could cope, and get everything done that needed to be done.
She had already been thinking about that when she’d answered the door to two officers, the fluorescent flashes on their clothes and hats shining in the light from the hall.
‘We’ve got some news about your husband, Mrs Balfour. Could we please go inside and sit down?’
She’d nodded. They’re going to tell me he’s dead now. Poor things. I bet they dread this.
A police sergeant and a woman constable, both solemn-faced, sympathetic through their well-cloaked discomfort. They made her a cup of tea, though she didn’t really want one.
The words came like something she’d heard in a play or a film. She already knew them; they were familiar and completely expected. First one spoke and then the other – ‘unfortunate road traffic accident’ . . . ‘ambulance’ . . . ‘hospital’ . . . ‘extensive injuries’ . . . ‘most likely instantaneous . . . no suffering’ . . . ‘our deep condolences.’
‘I see. Thank you for telling me. What exactly happened?’ she sa
id, icy calm.
‘We don’t know yet. There’ll be a full investigation. But preliminary reports are that a lorry went into the back of your husband’s taxi, which went into the car in front, and caused several other collisions of varying severity.’
‘How many died?’
‘Your husband and the taxi driver are the only fatalities at present. But there are casualties in a serious condition.’
‘Oh. That’s awful.’ She thought of the way the phone had cut off with a snap, from live to dead air, just like that. ‘You think he was killed at once?’
‘I’m afraid we can’t confirm those facts at the present time. A full investigation will endeavour to answer all your questions.’
Police-speak. A whole different language. She imagined Patrick over her shoulder laughing at it. Christ, where do they learn it? she could almost hear him say. Does someone actually teach them to talk that way?
The officers refused to go until she had telephoned someone to come and keep her company. She said she would call Maura but as she went to the phone she pictured her sister and brother-in-law Callum asleep in their bed, great bulky lumps under a duvet, prodded awake by the ring of the phone. She saw Maura’s dark hair askew, her blinking eyes, mouth agape as she reached for the handset and the horror and anxiety on her face as she heard the news. She’d drop the receiver and start to get dressed, panting and panicked. ‘Holy shit, Callum, Patrick’s been killed. I’ve got to go to Caitlyn right away. You stay with the kids . . . make sure they get to school in the morning.’
Why make that happen, when they could go on, blissful and untroubled till morning?
So instead she dialled Sara’s number and waited for her to pick up the telephone.
Sara was not asleep. Of course she wasn’t. She lived the adult hours of the childless, able to suit herself.
‘Caitlyn? This is very late for you. Is everything okay?’
‘Yes, fine,’ Caitlyn said automatically, then saw the two police officers watching her solemnly and remembered. ‘I mean . . . No. Sara, can you come round?’