by Gayle Curtis
He stared at her for a long time, overcome and mesmerised by the movement, his overwhelming love for her warming even deeper in his chest.
‘Go on . . .’ She reached out and touched his arm.
‘You promise me –’
‘Anything!’ she beamed.
‘Let me finish. You promise that afterwards you’ll let me draw you again?’
She frowned. ‘Of course. I let you do it yesterday, didn’t I?’
‘I know, but I don’t want you to think I’m being weird. It probably sounds like a strange thing to like doing, but it’s not, not really. It wasn’t to me and your mum anyway. I miss that . . . I miss her . . .’
‘That’s enough of that, Uncle Sebastian. It is my job to keep your spirits lifted today and if drawing me while you sit in the bath makes you happy, then that is what we will do.’ She theatrically finished her tea and placed the cup back on its saucer. ‘More bubble bath today though please.’
They both laughed and Sebastian stood up, waving his hands in a royal gesture before holding them out for her to take.
‘I am my most creative when I am in the bath tub, darling!’
Caroline giggled, grabbed his hands and allowed him to pull her from his bed; enticing her towards him, further and further, deeper and deeper, into the mire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
After the funeral, Cecelia packed some of her clothes in a suitcase. Caroline had made it clear she wasn’t coming home for the time being and wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. Samuel, clearly tired from it all, had failed to support Cecelia in her protests. Even when Cecelia had told him all the strange things Sebastian had done when they were younger in a desperate, pathetic attempt to see if that would make a difference. His response hadn’t really surprised her – he was always so amiable about everything; showing a brief moment of shock and then subservience as he realised leaving well alone would be easier.
Just before Cecelia had begun to pack her things, he’d told her their marriage was over. But to her, it had never really started. It had been an escape route, a way out of her dismal situation. She had been seventeen and pregnant when they married. No prospects and no family interested in helping her. Samuel had promised to accept what he thought were his responsibilities, offering her a new life since he had been totally besotted with her from the very first time they’d met. But she had made every year they’d been together miserable for him.
Now that it was finally at an end, she told herself it was the beginning of something new. There were questions she’d carried around in a tiny suitcase she’d had as a child, and now she needed some answers.
Standing on a chair in her bedroom, she reached into the dark shelf at the top of the wardrobe, her hand straining for the handle; she’d shoved it right to the back, forgotten about it for all those years.
Stepping down hard off the chair, she placed the tiny suitcase inside the larger one she’d been packing and opened the lid. Leaning forward she sniffed the musty, cold smell that reached her nostrils – it hadn’t been opened for so long. Violet sweets, wood from a sharpened pencil and the strong smell of notepaper hit her nostrils. She picked up the little case and sat down on the edge of her bed. There at the bottom lay her mother’s letter, still unopened, the one she’d thought Roger had written. She opened it and read the words, ‘I forgive you, love always, Mum’. Had she read it all those years ago, she’d have known her mother was still alive, that her father had been telling the truth. Keeping it safe was her soapstone hippo, the snout finally having dropped off. She closed the lid, placed it back in her suitcase and made her way downstairs, where she found Samuel sat at the kitchen table.
‘Before I go, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘I know.’ He looked up at her, his face pale, drawn. It was the first time she’d realised how tired and haggard he looked, older than his years. Guilt rose up in her throat again, the old familiar feeling of blame slapping her round the face, threatening to strangle her.
‘What do you mean by you know?’ She couldn’t help sounding defensive, however bad he looked.
Samuel sighed deeply. ‘I’ve been waiting to see if you were going to come and tell me before you left. I think I’ve wanted you to tell me for most of our marriage . . . maybe it would have made a difference.’
Cecelia pulled out a chair and sat down opposite him.
‘I know you shot your father.’
For a few moments she held her breath, swallowing the words that were jumbled in her throat.
‘That was what you were going to tell me, wasn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘Partly. Did Sebastian tell you?’
Samuel laughed. ‘No. I’ve known all along.’
‘How?’ Cecelia’s voice had become meek, distant, as it always did when she was upset; the ghost of her past muteness hovering around in the background.
‘You told me once when you were sleepwalking, Cecelia . . . I think I knew, deep down anyway. Knew you were trying to make a go of it with me, pretend everything was normal because you couldn’t deal with the guilt of what you’d done. I didn’t really take it in at the time, not until after the twins were born. I think I justified it because you and Sebastian were so badly abused.’ He swept his hand across the table as he always did when he was talking about something serious. ‘What I can’t understand, Cecelia, is why you didn’t tell the truth in court . . . if you’d told the police what had happened, they would have taken pity on your story, especially as you were a girl. You were just children, provoked by years of abuse and with no mother around. It would have been manslaughter; Sebastian wouldn’t have gone to prison and neither would you probably. I’ve wondered all these years if you actually wanted him out of the way.’
Cecelia stared at the table, the lines of the wood, the knots and the cracks where words had been trapped for years, and she was suddenly transported back to the farmhouse.
‘I felt suffocated by him, I thought he’d grow up to be like Roger and I’d never get away from him.’
‘But Cecelia, an innocent man – your own twin brother – went to prison. I just don’t understand.’
‘You never have understood, Samuel.’ Tears fell down her face, fading and smudging the words that lay on the table. ‘Don’t you think I’ve felt terrible about the lies I’ve told? What I did at the farm that night scared me. I did it without any thought . . . I just shot him . . . dead. What does that make me?’
‘I have no idea. What does that make you, Cecelia?’
‘There’s something else I need to tell you . . .’
‘The twins aren’t mine. Don’t you think I fucking know that!’ He banged his fist on the table. ‘They don’t look anything like me . . .’
Cecelia flinched, shocked that he knew her far better than she’d ever realised.
An icy silence wisped through the kitchen as they both rested on the dusty words left unspoken for so many years.
‘I thought you’d be disgusted with me if I told you the truth . . . can you see why I needed Sebastian out of my life?’
‘I don’t understand . . . I thought it was one of your college friends . . .’
Cecelia began to sob again; she’d hoped he’d know what she meant without her having to say it out loud.
‘What . . .’ Samuel stood up, his chair falling away from his legs. ‘You have got to be fucking joking.’
‘I was ashamed,’ she whispered.
‘Ashamed! Bloody hell, Cecelia! Bloody hell!’ Samuel ran his hands through his silver hair. It had been a deep auburn before Lydia had died and seemed to grey overnight as if he’d passed away with her. The dark hair Cecelia had so wanted her children to have, so she could believe they were his.
‘You should have told me from the start . . . I loved you.’
‘That’s part of the reason I didn’t tell you.’ Cecelia wiped her face with her sleeve. ‘I knew you’d accept it, be too kind to ever brin
g it up and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want anyone to think it was OK, because it’s not.’
‘Except, you left out the part about your brother raping you . . . shit, we need to go and get Caroline.’
‘Sit down, Samuel.’ Cecelia frowned, slightly baffled by what he’d just said.
‘We have to go and get her . . . why didn’t you tell me all this before, I would have stopped her going there.’
‘Sit down!’ Cecelia grabbed his arm. ‘He didn’t rape me, Samuel . . . I never said he raped me . . .’
Samuel stared at her, then at her hand clamped around his arm before he shrugged her away and sat back down at the table.
‘What?’
Cecelia took a deep breath. ‘I know . . . and I don’t want to talk about how and why, it just happened . . . we were young and I know it was wrong but . . .’
‘But what, Cecelia?’
‘Look, I’m not going to sit here and blame Sebastian. It happened, I’m not proud of it, but it’s none of your business.’
‘You are unbelievable. The result of what you did was two children, two children that I brought up and who call me Dad. It is quite clearly my business!’ He leant forward making her flinch.
He stood up and continued the search for his keys.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to get our daughter. Regardless of what you say happened, I do not want her staying with him.’
Cecelia stood up and grabbed hold of him again. He shrugged her away violently and for a few moments they fought one another.
‘Listen to me! Samuel, just listen to me!’ she screamed. ‘I’ve been over and over this. The more we tell her she can’t see him, the closer we’ll push her to him. ‘
‘If she won’t come home, I’ll call the police.’
‘No you won’t! She’s seventeen; she can do what she wants.’ Cecelia’s voice was fading and heavy with fatigue – she desperately wanted the day to be over. ‘There is absolutely nothing we can do but keep an eye on her and hope she sees him for what he is.’
She looked up at Samuel as he leant on the back of the chair, gripping the wood. He knew the twins weren’t his and he’d loved her anyway. And probably still would have even if he’d known they were Sebastian’s.
‘Caroline’s different from me. She’s tougher, not so easily led. She thinks he’s her uncle. I know her, Samuel – if we don’t make any more fuss she’ll get bored and come home. Trust me, it’ll be OK.’
‘If he touches her, I don’t know what I’ll do.’
‘She won’t let him do that.’
‘But what if he . . . you know, gets violent with her.’
‘He won’t do that, he loves her. He never did that to me. Ironically, I’m ashamed to say that, but he didn’t. And you have to remember the kind of upbringing we had, the special bond we had as twins . . . I’m not trying to justify it. I know it was wrong but we only ever had each other. Sebastian won’t hurt her, I know he won’t. I know him better than anyone . . .’ The jumbled words tumbled from her mouth.
‘Why have you spent all this time trying to keep him away then?’
‘Jealousy, I suppose . . . Visit her, call her but whatever you do, don’t tell her she can’t see him. She’s stubborn and we’ll lose her altogether.’
‘OK.’ He nodded. ‘I guess you know him better than anyone.’
‘And I know her better than anyone. It makes me feel sick to say it but she’s part of me and Sebastian. I am him and she is me . . .’ She stood up and clumsily tried to embrace him. ‘But she’s your daughter, Samuel, and nothing can change that.’
He relaxed into her arms and she felt his head move in agreement.
‘I need to go away for a while, sort some things out. And then, when I come back, we can see where we’re at?’
Their arms fell from one another, breaking their embrace.
‘Let’s see . . .’ He reached up and touched her cheek with his hand.
‘Just promise me you’ll leave well alone, Samuel.’
There was more meaning in those words than he could possibly understand at the moment. Cecelia knew that leaving everything as it was could quite possibly be the very thing that would bring their daughter home. There was no other option.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ONE MONTH LATER
It had been two weeks since Caroline had died and Sebastian had told no one. Not his nosy, overbearing neighbour next door and not even Ava.
Samuel had called on several occasions, even turning up at the house, but Sebastian had managed to send him away with the excuse that Caroline didn’t want to come to the phone or the door. Give her some space, I know it’s hard but she’ll come back if you respect her wishes, Sebastian had reassured him. Cecelia had been in contact less and was more accepting that her daughter was angry and needed space to calm down. It left him time to spend with Caroline, although he knew, even through the fog of his madness, that it was going to be short-lived.
Newspapers were crowding the rooms; he’d still collected them as normal, followed his usual routine. More than ever, the broadsheets offered great comfort; the insulation they gave him seemed to shut the world out further.
Instead of going out walking, he spent a lot of his time with Caroline and some of it with Ava so she wouldn’t become suspicious. Ava knew something was wrong but assumed he was grieving for his mother, so she gave him plenty of space, tried not to crowd him too much. But he was grieving for his beautiful girl, who he lay wrapped around at night in his mother’s bed. During the day he would carry her upstairs and lay her in his own bed, sobbing uncontrollably, begging her to wake up. Every time he left the room he expected to return to find her lips pink and smiling, her eyes sparkling again, as though time would magically resurrect her from the dead. She couldn’t be dead. She wasn’t dead. Without her, he was dead.
That terrible day had played out over and over in his mind, so much so, he’d find himself reaching out to touch her in his imaginary visions as though his mind was projecting the pictures on the wall.
They’d been laughing about her terrible knowledge of geography while she sat on the chair in the bathroom, him drawing her from his usual place. She was giggly on wine they’d drunk and the cocaine they’d taken and then she’d had one of his sleeping tablets to calm herself down. Eventually he’d fallen asleep in the chair during the dead man’s hours and when he woke up she’d gone. He’d picked her up, held her like a rag doll, shaken her and given her mouth-to-mouth, but she was dead.
Each time he ventured downstairs, he would stop in the room where she’d slept and wrap himself in the sheets, covering himself in her smell, lying in the imprint her body had left.
At first, he’d tried to continue with the daily routine they’d come to know in the short time she’d stayed, laying her on linen sheets on the floor of his art room so he could draw her perfect form, but it wasn’t the same and in the end he would carry her back to his bed and sit in the bath for hours crying.
Then the crying ceased and the panic subsided when he realised he still had his Caroline, that she was just in another dimension. That was when drawing her wasn’t enough – the pictures he’d pasted all over the walls post mortem lacked depth and he needed them to hold more of her essence, her form, an imprint that would make him feel she was still real. In his dark, angry moments he covered her in blue paint and took imprints of her body, hanging the linen artwork on the walls, convinced this would revive her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dust filled the gaping hole and drifted across Cecelia’s legs, eventually reaching her nose and throat. She quickly pulled her sweater up across her face and coughed into it, almost losing her balance. The purlin creaked from one weight being replaced with another.
Leaning forward with the window hook had been nerve-racking enough, but knocking the suitcase and watching it fall made her feel as though she was tumbling through the ceiling
with it; a crash had thundered through and shaken the usually mute old farmhouse.
As the clouds of dirty white dust cleared, she began to see the damage that she had done to the ceiling. She’d been so sure she could hook the suitcase by its handle. Her immediate thought was of what Roger would say, but the familiar childhood fears soon left her when she realised he was dead.
Leaning forward she waited for the dust to settle as a new picture emerged through the large hole. It revealed a part of the open suitcase, and lots of items inside – all of the things that Yvonne had said were in there.
Cecelia squinted, trying to clear her eyes of the grit that had landed in them as she peered closer. She bobbed up and down like a cat watching its prey, trying desperately to get a better look, but the objects were lost amongst the thick dust and dirt covering them.
Swinging her legs and feet back onto the purlin, she carefully pulled herself round to face the opposite direction and edged her way back to the door she’d previously wrenched open with a claw hammer, a sick, nervous feeling burning her stomach. Dreams of the green suitcase on the purlin swirled around in her mind; memories of the case and the boarded-up door just after her mother had disappeared. All she wanted to do was find out if her mother had been telling the truth that day in hospital – it would give her a better understanding of her childhood. Now she was disappointed because she’d thought for all these years that Yvonne had been hiding something from her, when it seemed as though she hadn’t.
Whilst staying at the farmhouse the last two weeks Cecelia’s head had been flooded with the past crashing in like huge waves. She’d stayed there to try and clear her mind, to see if a different environment would help her mental state. Her home with Samuel was filled with memories of Lydia. Clearing and tidying the old farmhouse that she and Sebastian now owned was meant to give her time to reflect on her marriage and family, but her mind had felt so separate from her and kept wandering back to memories from the past when she’d lived there as a child.