by Vikki Patis
My stomach lurched when I heard the name Fearne, my mind instantly turning to Saffy. In the absence of a body, we never held a funeral for her, never wanted to admit that she was gone. I still tell myself that she is lost, that she will make her way back to me someday, but my mother gave up years ago. She lights a candle on Saffy’s birthday every year, taking solace in the Edinburgh church in which she was married both times. She has gone back to her roots, marrying a Scotsman and moving to a remote village out past Stirling. They run a camping ground near Loch Achray and live with three large dogs and two wild cats. She has moved on with her life, seeking only the strength to live with the grief of losing a daughter, the strength she needed to pull herself out of that deep, dark depression.
Two daughters. She has lost two daughters, really. I haven’t visited in years, have not seen her new home nor taken the time to get to know the new husband who saved her from herself. We Skype sometimes, Mum in her dark dining room, the days so short during winter, me in the kitchen in our house in Brittany, Fleur cooking in the background. Mother and daughter, separated by so much more than the English Channel.
Now Fleur squeezes my hand and I jolt back to the present to find the celebrant sitting down on the edge of the room, and the woman with the dark skin and long curls making her way towards the front.
‘Thank you,’ she says, her eyes landing on me for a second before dropping again to the podium before her. She seems nervous, her voice small in the crowded room as she brushes a stray hair from her face. ‘I will be reading a sonnet by William Shakespeare, to pay tribute to the life of my father-in-law.’
My stomach drops. Father-in-law? I look across at my two half-brothers, and realise that she must be married to Felix. Is the boy his son? As if feeling my gaze on him, the child glances over his shoulder at me, his eyes wide and sparkling. I give him a small smile and he returns it, a dimple appearing on one of his cheeks, before his father places a hand on his head and turns him back towards the front.
So Felix has a son, and I have a nephew. I look again at the woman who shares this child with my half-brother, and try to take in the words of the sonnet, but my mind is too chaotic. I hear Fleur give a sharp intake of breath and I glance at her, a question on my lips, but she shakes her head. The woman steps down from the front, her eyes trained on Fiona, her lips pursed as she sits down beside her son, wrapping a protective arm around his shoulders, suddenly every inch the lioness.
The celebrant stands, his hands clasped on the podium before him. ‘Thank you, Lexi. And now Richard’s friend and business associate, Stuart, would like to say a few words.’
My eyes follow Stuart as he shuffles out of the pew and towards the front of the room. When he turns to face us, recognition blooms. I remember him from Sunday barbeques and afternoons on the beach, his daughters chasing us around as we played, kicking up sand and shrieking like the gulls whirling above us. His eyes were soft as he laughed at something my mother said. He was her friend first, us children bringing them together like children do. Polite small talk as we played together, one beady eye watching us in case we drifted too close to the water, progressing to enjoyable conversation and real laughter. Unexpected friendship.
I listen as he speaks, relaying tales of Fiona’s dinner parties and my father’s extravagance, though he calls it generosity. Office banter and anecdotes. I hadn’t realised Stuart worked with him, though I haven’t seen him since we moved to Scotland. Perhaps Mum kept in touch with him? A strange coldness settles on my skin like snow, and when our eyes meet, something passes between us before he looks away. Guilt.
The celebrant thanks him, Stuart finding his seat again with his head bowed, eyes averted. ‘Now we are going to take a moment to reflect on the life of Richard Asquith,’ the celebrant says, ‘and what he meant to us. Please use this period of quiet to remember him however you wish.’ Celine Dion pours from the speakers, and I turn to see Fleur clutching a tissue in her hand.
‘Ca va?’ I whisper, and she nods, her eyelids closing as she bows her head. She is a strong person, always calm and collected, but I can see something else in her now, something more vulnerable. Perhaps she is remembering the funeral of a loved one, someone she hasn’t told me about yet. There is so much we still don’t know about each other, so much left to explore. I only hope we get the time to do so.
I squeeze her hand and stare up at the ceiling, at the plain white paint and the bright spotlights. I try to bring my emotions to the surface, allow myself to feel whatever I need to feel, but I am empty. For so many years I hated my father for what he did. For losing Saffy, for his affair, for breaking Mum’s heart. For leaving me to pick up the pieces. For the secret sons who seemed to get so much more than I did. And, later, for the times he forced me to play along with them all, to pretend we were all one big happy family. But I always stood out like a sore thumb. Felix and Tobias are both fair-haired, their skin turning a warm gold beneath the Cornish sun. Their accents are refined, any regional inflections no doubt beaten out of them at boarding school in the Home Counties. Felix is my father’s image, the heir he always wanted, and it is towards him that most of my hatred is now directed. At barely twenty-one, Tobias still seems so young to me, so innocent. Just like Saffy was. The younger daughter and the younger son, hidden in the shadows of the elder siblings.
The music continues, and I glance around the room at the faces gathered beside me. Almost every pew is full. There are people I don’t recognise, have probably never met before. People who meant something to my father, apparently, and I don’t know them. I don’t belong here. I never have.
The celebrant clears his throat as the music ends. ‘On behalf of the family, thank you for joining us here today to remember the life of Richard Asquith. The family would like you to join them at The Golden Lion pub in Perranporth for light refreshments.’ More music begins to play, and the coffin begins to move backwards, curtains sliding closed around it. I watch Fiona stand, her back ramrod straight, one hand holding tightly on to Felix’s arm as he leads her across the room. They pause for a second to glance at the now closed curtains before they approach the celebrant by the door. Lexi stands next, her son holding her hand, and Toby follows, his eyes roaming the room. They land on me and I feel something flicker, electricity shooting between us.
15
The Deceased
THEN
Richard opened his eyes to see his wife standing at the end of the bed, a knife held out in front of her. Her eyes were red and swollen, her vivid hair piled up on top of her head, and he saw a dark stain on the hem of her nightshirt. His chest tightened. The baby.
‘Fearne,’ he said quietly, his eyes trained on the knife in her hand. ‘What are you doing?’ She moved further into the room, closing the door behind her with a click, but her eyes never left his face. ‘What have you done?’ he tried again, nodding towards the stain that seemed to be getting bigger. ‘What’s happened?’
‘You know what’s happened,’ she hissed, her Scottish accent stronger than usual. She had been drinking, he realised. At this time in the morning? Or had she been up all night? He tried to remember whether he noticed her getting into bed at any point during the night; he had collapsed at around eleven, exhausted after a busy week, but she had stayed downstairs watching TV. Had she come to bed at all?
Richard tried to push himself up, slowly untangling his legs from the duvet. ‘Don’t fucking move,’ she said, and he froze, his hands pressed against the mattress on either side of his body.
‘Okay, all right, I won’t move.’ He felt panic flash through him as her eyes widened, her empty hand going to clutch at her stomach. ‘But Fearne, is it–?’
‘It’s gone,’ she said, her voice strangled. Tears erupted from her eyes and spilled down her face. ‘I killed it. And it’s all your fault.’
Saffy tried to peer through the gap in her parents’ bedroom door. She pressed her face against the wood, but she could only see the corner of the wardrobe. She had heard her
mum screaming earlier, her dad shouting, a loud bang. Then, silence. Now someone was walking around in the bedroom, quick, quiet steps, like she tried to do whenever she went downstairs during the night for a glass of water. Whenever she didn’t want to be heard.
Gently, she pushed the door wider, trying to keep her breathing silent, wishing she could turn into a mouse or a spider and wriggle through the gap. Spiders were her favourite friends, but Skye didn’t like them, so Saffy wasn’t allowed to keep them in their room anymore. She was often cross with her sister for that, who would always run screaming from the room, and then their father would come upstairs and whack it with his shoe.
‘Saffy!’ A whisper from behind her, the warm shape of her sister crouching beside her. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ Saffy held a finger to her lips and shook her head. ‘Come back to bed,’ Skye said in her big sister voice. ‘It’s not time to get up yet.’
‘You’re up too,’ Saffy pointed out, and Skye frowned. But before she could respond, the door she was leaning against swung open, and the sisters almost tumbled onto the floor.
‘Girls,’ Richard said, crouching down in front of them. He held a finger to his lips. ‘Your mum’s asleep. How about some breakfast?’
‘Yay!’ Saffy whispered. She suddenly realised she was starving. How did he always manage to do that, to give her what she needed before she knew she needed it? Her dad was magic, she’d decided long ago.
Skye tried to look past her father, craning her neck to see the figure lying on the bed, but he moved in front of her, reaching down and scooping her up. ‘Come on, you,’ he said. She wanted to protest, wanted to wriggle free and run into the room, curl up beside her mother, but Richard picked up her sister and carried them both downstairs.
‘Why was Mummy screaming?’ Skye asked as he deposited them both on dining chairs.
Richard frowned. ‘She’s not very well.’
‘Is that why she’s sleeping?’ Saffy asked, though Skye could tell that she didn’t really care. Saffy was a daddy’s girl, always wanting him to read the bedtime story or to give them a bath instead of their mum. Sometimes Skye noticed a strange look on their mum’s face when Saffy said those things – ‘no, not you, Mummy! I want Daddy!’ – and although she didn’t know what it meant, she felt a strange squirming feeling in her tummy. She preferred Mummy anyway. Their mother was all soft edges and long, flowing fabrics; she had the longest hair Skye had ever seen, usually braided down her back, and her cheeks were always pink. Daddy scared her, she realised as she watched him take out a frying pan from the cupboard. She didn’t understand him, not like she understood her mother. She knew what her mum liked – Bourbon biscuits, jigsaw puzzles, and next door’s cat – but she had no idea what her father liked or didn’t like, though somehow, she felt that she fell into the latter category.
Fearne slept through the day, as she always did when she had an episode. That’s what Richard called them, her episodes. They had become more frequent in recent months, or was it years now? He remembered her coming home from the hospital after having Saffy, how her eyes seemed sunken, her skin grey. Not like when she came home with Skye. With their first daughter, Fearne had glowed all throughout her pregnancy, and the birth had been easy according to the midwives. He remembered the way Skye had latched straight onto Fearne’s breast, one tiny hand reaching towards her mother’s face, as if she knew what she needed to do and she didn’t need any help whatsoever, thank you very much. She had slept well, waking only a few times in the night for the first six months before she started to sleep through, and Richard loved pushing open their daughter’s bedroom door to find Fearne asleep in the rocking chair beside the cot, Skye held safely in her arms. He would drape a blanket over them, carefully so not to disturb them, but Skye would often open her eyes and find his face instantly, pinning him to the spot. I know you, her eyes said to him. I know your game.
When Fearne discovered she was pregnant again barely three months later, after their first tentative foray in the bedroom after Skye’s birth, Richard had been thrilled.
‘Two children!’ he’d exclaimed, taking Fearne’s hands in his and squeezing them. ‘They’ll be like twins!’
But Fearne did not share his excitement. Her second pregnancy was hard. She suffered badly from morning sickness that lasted most of the day, and a sudden, heavy fatigue settled over her. Her appetite disappeared, her weird and wonderful cravings absent this time, and she spent most of her days on the sofa, watching mindless television shows. She was lonely, having moved back to Cornwall just before Skye was born, and she hadn’t found the time to make friends yet. She lost weight and her hair began to fall out, the drain clogging with her long strands. And as her pregnancy progressed, she started to become more and more paranoid.
Richard was spending long hours at the office, often leaving before seven in the morning and returning just in time to see Skye before she went down for the night. And then he started travelling, a weekend in London, four days in Paris, a week in California.
‘It’s for the business, love,’ he told her, rubbing her shoulders. ‘It’s for us, for our beautiful girls. For their future.’ He told her that he didn’t like being away from home so much, that he wanted to be there for his children, but the mortgage needed to be paid and he’d taken out a sizeable loan to build up his company developing properties. At first it was fine, before Skye was born and when his work kept him in the local area, but as the business grew so did his days, stretching to twelve, fourteen hours, taking him further and further away from home. Fearne continued to withdraw, to glare at him with suspicion in her eyes and venom in her words. And then she disappeared.
When Saffy was born and Richard arrived at the hospital to take them home, he found their daughter lying in a cot beside an empty bed.
‘Have you seen my wife?’ he asked the nurses, who shook their heads, watching with wide eyes as he ran down the corridors, searching every room he could get into, bursting in on cleaners and wards and one woman in the middle of giving birth. He was frantic, panic clawing at his throat as he called her name. When a security officer grabbed him by the arm and began to speak, he fought like a caged animal. Fearne was missing, and their daughter had been left alone. Fearne had abandoned them, abandoned him, leaving him to bring up two young daughters alone, and he felt a ripple of anger pass over him. How could she do this?
‘Sir, sir!’ the security guard said, clamping a large hand on Richard’s shoulder. ‘We’ve found her. It’s all right, sir, we’ve got her.’ As his words sank in, Richard dropped to the floor, the wind knocked out of him. Thank God, he thought, his forehead pressed against the cold, sticky tiles. Oh, thank God. It was over, she was safe. A misunderstanding, he told himself. She’d never abandon him like that. She’d simply wandered off and got lost. She was okay, everything was going to be okay. But he was wrong.
16
The Mistress
I manage to hold myself together until the curtain begins to close around the coffin, taking Richard away. I see Fiona stand, her sons supporting her as they walk stiffly towards the exit. Others begin to file out and I catch a glimpse of short red hair glinting in the light. Skye, the daughter Richard rarely spoke of. The woman I have never met.
Although I knew there would be no mention of me in the eulogy, no mention at all of my life with Richard, my heart still hurt as the celebrant talked about Fearne and Fiona. He had loved them both once, I know that, but when he died they hadn’t been on his mind at all. It was me he had been coming to see, me. He was leaving Fiona, had given up on the marriage even before I met him, and we were going to start a life together. We were going to grow old together, in our little house by the sea. We had a plan. I feel light-headed as the future I’d been imagining is ripped away, the reality of just how much I have lost hitting me once again. I try to take deep breaths, counting to ten as the room empties around me.
‘It was a lovely service, vicar,’ an elderly woman says as she shakes the celebran
t’s hand, her voice carrying across the room. I’m not certain he is a vicar; there was no mention of God or praying throughout the service, but he smiles anyway and takes her hand in his. ‘Poor Peter was a lovely man,’ she continues, and I see Peter’s wife flash him a look. It would almost be comical if the weight of my grief wasn’t pressing down on me, taking the breath from my lungs.
As I watch from my place at the back, Fiona stops at the door to shake hands with the celebrant, her lips moving as the mourners flow out of the room. I stay in my seat, shifting sideways so people can slip past me, my eyes fixed on the back of Fiona’s head. Why isn’t she leaving? I want a few moments alone with Richard, my only chance to say goodbye without a few dozen bodies crowding around me. Without her presence overshadowing us, like it had when Richard was alive. But he was always too cocky, I realise now, forever underestimating her.
‘She’s barely got two brain cells to rub together, Ellie,’ he’d say, grinning his wolfish grin. He liked to put her down, to compare her to me. She was losing her figure, he said, her youth was deserting her. She was boring, didn’t challenge him enough, didn’t excite him. She had long since banished him to the spare room, after years of pleading headaches to ‘get out of sex’ with him. She was probably seeing one of the waiters at their favourite pub, the obscenely young man she always made sure to talk to, twirling her hair as she leaned against the bar. She was having affairs long before he started seeing me. She had broken their marriage vows first, and practically pushed him into my arms.
Or so he said.