by Lulu Taylor
Sally must always be placated. She was the gatekeeper to Pa, and Alex had understood from early on that she must pay the gatekeeper for entrance to the fortress that was Pa. If she failed, the gates would slam shut, possibly forever.
‘So she’s a textbook evil stepmother? A stepmonster?’
‘No.’ Alex shook her head. ‘Nothing so black and white. I’m very fond of her in lots of ways. But she’s got this power in my life and it’s as though she’s always testing it to keep me in line.’
‘What’s the worst she can do? You’ve got power too. Don’t forget that. And she couldn’t stop you seeing your father. He adores you. He’d never allow that to happen.’
‘Don’t be so sure. He might not like it, but he’d always choose her over me. I just know it.’
‘Why should he have to choose?’ Di made a face. ‘He’s a grown man, surely he can see that he can love Sally and you at the same time and without the permission of either of you. Maybe he could even mediate between you.’
Alex stared into her glass of wine, gazing into the honey-coloured depths, helpless to explain. The idea that Pa might broker an accord between her and Sally was impossible. If Sally was his gatekeeper, then he was hers at the same time. If Alex asked him what she had done to offend Sally, he would prevaricate, tell Sally’s own lies for her – ‘She’s really not well, Alex, she has a terrible migraine’ – and be as adamant as she was that there was nothing wrong. When things were finally set to rights, his relief would be obvious but still, he would say nothing about it.
‘No,’ she said finally to Di. ‘It just doesn’t work like that. Trust me.’
Has Sally finally slammed the gate shut?
As she sat now by Pa’s hospital bed, his cool hand still in hers, Alex realised that all that placating, all that humility and backing down and refusing to fight had had one purpose – to ensure that she was never shut out at a moment like this, when the crisis came.
She felt a stab of pain in her stomach. Was Sally so unforgiving after all? Would everything Alex had ever done – as a thoughtless child, a hurting teenager, an impetuous young adult – be held against her? Sally had the greatest weapon still in her hands, and might desire to wield it while she could.
She might keep me away from Pa, even now. The pain was bitter in her mouth. Maybe Sally had already succeeded. What if Pa never regains consciousness? I’ll never get the chance to say goodbye. How would I cope with that?
She was afraid of how that would make her feel and what she would feel towards Sally. And Johnnie too. He already loathed Sally far more viscerally than she did. The sale of Tawray had filled him with cold fury. If Sally had prevented their saying farewell to their father . . . She shivered internally, and her gaze went towards the door as if expecting it to open, but nothing happened. She bent down to take her phone out of her bag, not hearing anything but the drone of Sally’s voice, to check for a text from Johnnie.
But just as she was doing that, the door swung open, and he was there, her older brother, his tawny hair windswept, his eyes full of anxiety, bringing the cold air of outside with him on his coat.
‘Johnnie!’ she said, jumping up, full of relief to see him.
‘I’m here,’ he said, coming in, gazing at Pa with frightened eyes. ‘Am I in time?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Alex said, going to hug him. ‘He’s stable, there’s no change. The consultant is due any minute.’
Sally said in a cool voice, ‘I think he’s here now. Yes. He’s just outside. Stand back, Johnnie, let’s give him room to get to your father.’
The door opened, and the consultant came in.
Chapter Four
Inside David Pengelly’s brain, a mass of blood has drowned a huge proportion of his grey matter. The scans, already pored over by experts, are being shown to the family, held up against a light box so that they can see the damage: the great black blots that reveal where the brain has died.
His wife gasps with horror at the sight, her hands pressed to her cheeks, her mouth a round O of despair. She can see without being told that the damage is extensive. The children, when they speak, sound stunned. Johnnie’s voice is low, a rolling deep bass, and businesslike despite the shock. He asks for exact details, for facts. Alex’s is higher, melodious like her mother’s, despite the note of sadness and disbelief. She wants to know what hope there is, what can be done.
The consultant is talking. He’s telling them gently that there is little hope. He doesn’t go too far; he doesn’t say the nerve endings in the damaged areas are extinct, the neurons inactive, the neural paths that once flashed instructions now mere stagnant canals of fluid. But he lets them know that the chances of David recovering are very slim indeed.
David, deep inside himself, knows it must be true. Darkness is falling, his spirit is disconnecting from his physical form, or perhaps is in retreat to the last living areas of his brain. Gradually he has closed down the bits of himself that are no longer needed: he has almost no movement, his eyes are closed and will never see again, and his body is powering down, conserving its last remnants of energy for breath and heart beats, for swallowing, for the warmth in his core that even now is ebbing away.
He is not afraid. He is gently letting go, slipping softly under the water and far from everything, back to the silent darkness from which he came seventy years ago. In the depths, he is still there, though. He knows that he has lived a life and that it is nearly over. Like a diver spotting the phosphorescence of deep-sea creatures, he sees lights in the darkness that swirl towards him and become pictures.
The children.
There is Johnnie, just born. And then a giggling toddler, tottering past. Here is Alex, wide-eyed, sucking her thumb, watching, adoring her brother. Now she is a girl, poker-straight dark hair, skin tanned from the Tawray summer. In seconds, they are growing, they are adults. Here are the grandchildren, new sources of pleasure, but less visceral, less immediate, less intense. And here is Sally. Oh Sally – sweet and shy, no one at first and then the port in the storm he needed so badly. His sun and moon. Oh the love, the restorative, life-saving love she gave him.
Dearest Sally. I want to stay with you.
The thought gives him a moment of longing, regret and grief and he fears he is about to be engulfed by utter, desperate and unbearable despair. But the soft silence of approaching death soothes him, as if to say, ‘What does it matter now? There’s nothing you can do. Just accept.’
So he does. Calm returns.
Tawray.
His consolation comes: a visit, as he floats like an angel or a sprite across his beloved home, through its doors and into its rooms, out again to soar over the land towards the sea, and then back to the dear, familiar view of the turreted roof, the arched front door in the tower.
But someone is missing from his memories.
What about Julia?
Her name conjures her, like the spell that summons a djinn. Her face appears before him, then her body, youthful and beautiful, and for a moment he remembers the deep, profound pleasure of being flesh, being alive, hungering for her and finding total satisfaction and joy in possessing her. Oh Julia. She smiles that bewitching smile; she is as she was and he can recall her in utter clarity, down to the scent of her hair and the taste of her mouth, and he wants to reach out and hold her.
And then he realises with something like happiness: Everyone is coming to me. But I am leaving. I am going to Julia.
Chapter Five
1975
‘It’s very tiresome, but there’s not much to be done about it.’
The voice was quite nearby and it startled Julia, who looked up from her book. Gran was coming into the drawing room with someone, talking as she went.
‘Harry wants to send her away to St Agatha’s. He’s asked me to pay for it as he is so short since the divorce.’
‘Still? He’s got a bit of a nerve. After all, he divorced Jocasta seven years ago.’ That was Aunt Victoria, Daddy’s sister, who was always s
taring at Julia with her cold fish eyes, as though inspecting her for signs of incipient madness.
Gran passed by the window but didn’t notice the tips of Julia’s sandals poking out from behind the curtain. ‘Jocasta cost rather a lot to get rid of. That flat in London nearly wiped him out for five years. And St Agatha’s is going to mean quite a commitment.’
St Agatha’s. They must be talking about me.
Daddy had been telling her only recently about the school she was going to be sent to in the autumn and how blissful it was going to be to play with lots of other girls and learn hockey and French and Latin. Julia was looking forward to it. Her ears pricked up.
An impatient sigh and Aunt Victoria said, ‘Why go to the trouble? When Julia’s only a pup from the second litter.’
I’m WHAT?
In her hiding place behind the curtain in the drawing room, Julia’s mouth opened in an expression of silent outrage. A pup from the second litter? She wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but her aunt’s tone was unmistakably scornful. She drew her skinny legs up under her chin and bit her knee to stop herself squeaking in indignation.
Gran didn’t know about Julia’s little hidey hole. She didn’t know that sometimes, when the sun was out, this corner became a blazingly warm nook, extra cosy from the radiator that had been installed underneath the little window seat. There, with a delicious view out over the gardens towards the woods and the cliff, Julia hid herself away on the old tapestry cushion, the heavy curtain providing extra insulation, and read her books, a store of apples and sweets by her side.
Aunt Victoria added, ‘A bitch pup, at that.’
‘Please, darling, don’t remind me. If we’ve been through all of this, and can’t even get a boy out of it, then I just don’t know. But don’t take it out on Julia, Vicky dear, she’s a sweet little thing.’
‘She’s a terror. Always getting into trouble. It wouldn’t matter so much if she was a boy, but she’s not.’
‘Perhaps we’ll be lucky this time,’ Gran said consolingly. ‘And if we’re not, well, so much the better for Quentin.’
Aunt Victoria said lightly, ‘Well, there is that. One hardly knows what to hope for. Quentin could make something of this place.’
Julia thought of Quentin, her cousin. He was all right, she had nothing against him, but she did think he was boring. Even though he was eighteen, he seemed more like thirty-five. He was tall, thin, and supposedly very clever, but he had no capacity for jokes, and that always made people seem dull. Books didn’t seem to give him the kind of pleasure they gave Julia. It was obvious that if the new baby was a girl, Quentin might be the one to get Tawray but she couldn’t see what he might make of it when he’d never shown even a scrap of awareness of Tawray’s magic. He didn’t run across the gardens, into the woods and down to the sea, glorying in the buffeting wind and the tangy salt air; or lean on the old brick walls of the kitchen garden, soaking up their warmth, before hunting for fruit in the orchard. He didn’t like hiding in the many delightfully dark cupboards, or dressing up from the old trunks in the attics, or scaring himself stupid in the dusty cellar by going to the furthest, blackest, dankest vault where the spiders lived.
He doesn’t love it like I do. She sighed. Violet, Quentin’s younger sister, was no better. She was timid and so literal it was impossible to talk to her. The thought of Quentin and Violet in charge of Tawray was a miserable one. Oh, why are babies so much trouble?
Mummy was in bed again, just like all the other times when a baby was on the way. They never told Julia what was happening, but she knew well enough by now because it always went the same way. Mummy would get sicker and sicker, vomiting and fainting, suffering so badly that once Julia had heard her declare with passion that she wished she were dead. It had made her clammy with horror to hear it.
It was Lorraine, the nanny, who confirmed what she’d already guessed, sitting by the fireplace in the nursery, one of her favourite magazines on her lap, smoking Silk Cut. ‘Your mum’s pregnant again.’
‘Why is she so sick?’
‘That’s morning sickness. Your mum gets it worse than anyone I’ve ever seen. And it never seems to end. My sister never had anything, my other sister was sick in the morning for six weeks and then fine. But your mum suffers something rotten.’
Julia found it terrifying that Mummy was possessed by this dreadful sickness, so severe that even a drop of water was enough to send her gagging and retching to the loo. She would get thinner and paler and more utterly miserable until she couldn’t move from her bed, but lay there, grey-faced and weak, a big bowl beside her to be sick into. She looked to Julia as if she might die, and when she smiled wanly and said in a voice reedy with suffering that she was going to be fine, Julia found it hard to believe her.
‘Why is the baby doing this to Mummy?’ she asked Lorraine, but Lorraine didn’t have much in the way of answers.
‘Dunno,’ she would say with a shrug. ‘My mum says it’s because your mum is too grand to be up the duff. You know what I mean?’
Julia was baffled but it was often hard to get much sense out of Lorraine, who seemed to talk another language most of the time.
It would be worth all the suffering, Julia thought, if there were a baby at the end of it. But after weeks of being sick, Mummy would get better and that would be that. No baby ever appeared. It had happened twice now, and it was happening again. Julia wondered if this time, there would actually be a baby, and if anyone would ever tell her what on earth was going on.
So now, she shrunk down behind the curtain and listened hard.
‘I don’t think that woman is capable of bearing children,’ Aunt Victoria declared.
‘She must be. There’s Julia.’
‘Yes,’ Aunt Victoria said darkly. ‘There’s Julia. And yet there hasn’t been another since.’
‘It’s not unknown, is it? What are you suggesting?’
‘Nothing, nothing. Only that Harry hasn’t been able to father a child with her successfully, not since the wedding. And Julia followed hard on the heels of the honeymoon.’
Gran tutted. ‘Come on, Vicky, she loves him, you have to give her that.’
‘Maybe. But she wanted this. Like they all do. Jocasta was the same.’
‘You’re too cynical.’
‘I’m not, Mother. It’s the truth.’
‘Well, I can’t help feeling sorry for her, I’ve never seen anyone have such an awful time in pregnancy. But she keeps going through with it for Harry’s sake.’
A sniff from Aunt Victoria. ‘It’s the price she’s chosen to pay, for this. For Tawray.’
I hope they go away, Julia thought. She didn’t want to hear any more.
Luckily they didn’t stay for long, and when they’d gone, Julia whisked out from behind the curtain, pushing her book and apples under a cushion, and ran down the corridor and out of the side door, onto the mossy gravel near the leaky drainpipe, and then sprinted out and across the velvety green lawn. It was June, and oh, the sense of beauty and freedom at Tawray. It fired something in her blood: the heady mixture of open sky, the cool dark wood, and the glittering crystal of the sea in the distance. Life flowed around her; it sang in the throats of birds, it radiated from the acid green grass and in the melting beauty of the summer blooms: mountains of mop-headed roses, huge drooping pom-poms of white hydrangea, purple blades of rhododendron. The gardens were a riot of colour and scent, everything thrusting upwards towards the life-giving sun, or splaying out to the cool grass and the baking gravel of the paths. Lavender in purple starbursts lined borders, each plant alive with a cloud of murmuring bees. White butterflies shimmered among the yellow-flecked Alchemilla mollis.
Poor Mummy, to be in bed, sick, when there was here, there was outside.
Julia ran through the series of walled gardens, the ancient bricks warm as bread ovens, and out though the last door with its great iron latch into the wilderness behind. She raced through the wild grass, letting the little fat grass h
eads whip across her legs as she went, sometimes grabbing one and pulling it through her fingertips so that the furry softness came off in a bunch and then floated away in a tiny silvery cloud when she splayed her fingers out.
If she carried on straight ahead, she would enter the woods, take the shady, steep path that twisted downwards, with ropes set at the steepest places to hold on to, and sometimes even steps cut into the hillside, and then emerge suddenly on the path that led along the side of the channel to the sea. The path had a sea wall along it but when the weather was rough, the waves would curl over it and land in huge, splattering, watery explosions. Julia had never been there when the weather was really rough, it was far too dangerous; Daddy had said she could be swept out to sea if the waves were big enough.
But she wasn’t going to the sea today. Instead she veered to her left through the wilderness and down a small slope to the lake, which was the latest place of fascination for her. Last year, it had been the roof, where she had set up a hideaway in one of the towers. In the old days, apparently, ladies and gentlemen had walked around upon the roof, to enjoy the views and gaze out to sea. There were two hollow towers on opposite corners, just big enough for a small supper table, where refreshments could be laid out for them. Julia had turned one into her special place, with blankets and books and supplies stolen from the kitchen, and spent hours there on her own. Once the weather turned, it had been too cold to stay in the tower for long, and the rain blew in through the opening and spoiled things.
This year, she had discovered a platform in a tree by the lake, put there years ago from the looks of it, built firmly across a sturdy branch that stuck out over the water. Julia had persuaded Tom, the gardener, to hang a knotted rope for her to climb up, and she had created her own pulley system with a basket so that it was easy to lift her things up there. Now it would be her place for the summer. The only bother was the midges from the water, which liked to feast on her bare legs and leave her covered in itchy spots, but Lorraine had given her a strong-smelling citrus oil to rub into her skin and keep them away. From her platform, Julia could see the rotting old boathouse with the skiff in it. She’d had a look in there a few times, but didn’t like the darkness and the dingy, weed-filled water beneath the boat. She was not tempted to try and row out into the lake, even with her father’s warning to stay off the water.