If They Knew

by Joanne Sefton

She knew Barbara wouldn’t mind a bit. After all, Helen herself had spent a good year around the age of six tripping around the house in its gauzy layers, the spaghetti straps nicely set off against her utilitarian white M&S vests. She’d called it her cocktail dress. As a child, Helen had liked to imagine Barbara’s youth had been spent swishing around sophisticated parties. She had a vague fantasy that Barbara had come down in the world when she married Neil and renounced a life of leisure and glamour and quite possibly even cigarette holders for love, a red-brick semi and her baby girl. She didn’t actually have any evidence for this exotic former life, but, in the absence of evidence of anything more prosaic, it was an attractive fantasy.

  Alys duly trotted upstairs, but when Helen held up the dress she looked sceptical.

  ‘Which princess?’ she asked.

  ‘Not a Disney Princess. Another Princess. Princess Alys.’

  ‘Daddy buy me Belle dress.’

  ‘Did he?’ Helen was genuinely puzzled. Alys adored Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Helen couldn’t imagine she could have received such a prize and not been full of it for days.

  The girl looked sad and a little confused. ‘I get it next time, he say, next time, but …’ She faltered, and her big eyes welled with tears.

  At home, Helen had had to tell her over and over that Daddy didn’t live with them any more. Each time, it cut her up inside and the tears that she managed to hold in when she was with her children spilled out with interest after bedtime. Eventually, Alys seemed to have understood, on some level at least, but the visit up here could only have confused her.

  ‘Blue is for boys, Mummy.’ As ever, the three-year-old’s train of thought chugged on at pace.

  Helen racked her mind for some Disney Princess assistance. ‘Cinderella wears blue,’ she said, encouragingly.

  ‘Not that blue, Mummy – that’s boys’ blue.’

  Helen looked down at the dress, as if noticing its colour for the first time. ‘Oh! You mean I should give it to Barney to wear?’

  She loved her daughter’s laughter, which bubbled thick and sticky in her throat like liquid fudge. Alys liked the joke of her brother wearing the dress and her chortles brought Neil to the door.

  ‘Good morning, ladies,’ Neil said, making Alys giggle even more.

  ‘Alys thinks Barney should dress up in Nana’s honeymoon dress. What do you reckon, Granddad?’

  She expected Neil to laugh along. Instead, he reached out, groping like a blind man. His fingers touched the fabric, but then it slipped out of his grasp and the dress slithered to the floor. He sat down heavily on the bed. Helen cursed inwardly. Of course, she should have realised the dress might upset him. But a moment later he was smiling again and had pulled a toffee out of his pocket for Alys.

  He turned to Helen. ‘I came to tell you there’s a phone call for you, love.’

  ‘Darren?’ she mouthed it silently over Alys’s head, and he nodded.

  ‘Now, young Alys.’ His grasp on the dress was firm this time, and the wet sheen on his eyes had been blinked away. ‘The thing you have to know about this dress is that it belonged to a mermaid once. That’s why you can see all the colours of the deep blue ocean in it – in fact, I’m sure I once saw a tiny golden fish flickering through just about here …’

  The phone handset sat like a grenade on a chest of drawers on the landing.

  ‘Hello?’ She kept her voice low, going into the spare room.

  ‘Hi, Hels. How’s your mum doing?’ said the voice on the line.

  ‘She’s okay. We went to the hospital on Friday. They’re going to operate next week. We’ll know more then.’

  ‘I was gutted to hear it, really I was.’ She could picture him shaking his head, sorrowfully, rubbing the back of his hand against his designer stubble in that way he had. ‘Give her my best, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed, knowing she’d say nothing.

  ‘I’ve been trying your mobile.’

  ‘I know you have. It’s not the easiest time, Darren.’

  ‘Yeah, I understand that. But the kids’ll be missing me.’ As he spoke, she tried to push away the image of Alys’s perplexed face, talking about the stupid Disney costume. ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t have taken them up there, and we both wanted to deal with access informally, but …’

  Bastard. Always trying to come across as Mr More-Than-Reasonable. He should be here with his family now, rather than having fucked off with his glossy, giggling area manager. That’s what Helen wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. She’d had explosive, raging, endless rows with Darren each day since he’d left, but only in the privacy of her own mind. When it came to real life, the words would never come.

  She realised he was still talking. He was still going on in his calm let’s be adult about this voice that she’d so quickly come to despise.

  ‘… So I’ll come up at the weekend and stay with my mum. Just me, not Lauren – I don’t want to make things harder. But I want to see the kids properly, not just an hour over lunch or something. Okay? And I want to speak to them. Are they there just now?’

  Helen pressed the handset closer to her ear. Alys’s laughter was louder now, but not so loud that he’d be able to hear it down the phone line.

  ‘Mum’s taken them both to the park,’ she lied. ‘You only caught Dad and I because we were finishing the dishes. We’re just going to meet them.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed. ‘Look, call me later – just let me say goodnight to them at least.’ His voice might have cracked, or it might have been static on the line. She was learning, to her surprise, that Darren could be a good actor. It was bizarre, thinking back to how she’d always been able to read him like a book. Perhaps he’d never had the will to deceive her before, or perhaps it was the distance that had opened up between them making it harder for her to really see him the way she always had before. She ached even more for the man she had married.

  ‘I don’t want them to get upset,’ she said.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t make me beg to speak to my own kids, Helen.’

  He didn’t sound to her like a man who was begging. She felt the familiar lump swell in the back of her throat. This was why she couldn’t fight with him: whenever she tried to give voice to her anger, the rage choked her before she could let it out.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she managed.

  ‘First thing.’

  She nodded uselessly into the phone, tears running down both cheeks now. Finally she said ‘okay’ just about loud enough for him to hear, and then hung up.

  God knew she didn’t want either of the kids to catch her looking like this; they’d seen enough tears. Taking care to be silent, she slipped out of the bedroom and walked down the stairs. She wanted to return the handset to its charger quickly. Whilst she held it, it felt as though she was carrying Darren around, and he would know that she’d lied to him and be able to see her falling apart.

  Just thinking about Darren was so painful, yet she couldn’t stop herself. She had no reference point for what was happening to her and that left her completely bewildered. As she and Darren had been together since high school, she’d never had any sort of break-up before. And her parents’ relationship had always been rock solid. Barbara had her quirks – always had – she was often distant with her daughter and could be sharp with her tongue. Occasionally her claws came out and Helen could remember the odd ring of a slap or the twist of an arm when her mother was angry.

  But, even though he could be on the receiving end of her sharp tongue too, Neil had adored his wife with a constancy that was unshakeable. Even more remarkably, he’d had love enough for both of them, so Helen had never felt the need to compete, and never questioned the security of their family.

  Now, it looked like her own children were going to have none of that, and she veered between righteous rage towards Darren and anxious guilt about what more she could have done to keep her family together.

 
Helen could hear Barbara’s voice in the kitchen as she came down the stairs. Although the green and inky haze of the dreams had faded, it hadn’t left her completely. It occurred to her that if Barbara knew what the envelope contained before she picked it up from the doormat, then perhaps there had been others. She’d not thought to look for any until now, and her decision to confront her mother had lost impetus through the bittersweet family outings yesterday. The thought of interrogating Barbara about the note in the midst of the turmoil of a cancer diagnosis made her squeamish. Given how emotionally vulnerable she felt herself – her hands were still shaking after the phone call – it didn’t take much to persuade herself to put it off. She was decided; before confronting her mother, she would look for more notes.

  In the hall, she replaced the phone on its cradle and pulled out a tissue. She dabbed at her face in the mirror and managed to tidy it a bit. At least she’d learned to avoid wearing mascara these days. Now that she was closer to the kitchen she could hear Barney’s voice too. He was explaining the plot of one of the films he watched endlessly. It seemed unlikely she’d be disturbed by either of them any time soon.

  She retraced her steps, stealthily, to the staircase. There was a little hotel safe at the back of Barbara’s wardrobe, hidden by a clutter of shoes. It contained passports and building society books and pension stuff. Much duller stuff than Helen had hoped to find when, aged fifteen or so, she’d idly observed her mother opening it and gone on to crack the code: 2973. She could still remember it. Would Barbara have changed the code over the years?

  The little door swung open smoothly, and that small disturbance was enough to shift the stack of mismatched papers. Even through the gloom, a knife-edge sliver of green caught Helen’s eye. Clearly, the note from the other night had not been the first. Again, this envelope simply said ‘Barbara’.

  From the bedroom, she heard Alys pause to ask, ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Rather than risk them coming out to look for her, Helen stuffed the envelope into the large pocket on her hoodie to read later. After a few seconds, she felt safe enough to carry on. Riffling through the rest of the papers in the safe, she quickly found two more. Then she replaced everything as accurately as she could and stuck the two new envelopes alongside the first in the front of her hoodie. She’d take them back to the downstairs loo to read, where she could lock the door and not worry about being disturbed. If nothing else, this intrigue might give her something to occupy her brain other than the constant, cycling worries about Darren.

  As soon as she got to the bottom of the stairs, though, Barney erupted from the kitchen and threw himself at her, without stopping for breath in his chatter. Helen twirled him around and he dragged her back to the kitchen, where she had to enthuse over the half-done jigsaw on the table. Moments later, Neil appeared in the doorway with Alys, who wanted to show off her princess dress.

  While Alys performed curtsies, Helen watched Barbara applaud with no sign of sentiment over the reappearance of her dress. Barney talked all the louder for fear of his little sister getting some attention.

  Neil moved across to the window, where Barbara stood by the sink with a tea towel in her hand. She let her husband rest his arm across her shoulders for all of three seconds, before she gently lifted it and twisted away.

  ‘Shall I get us all some tea?’ Barbara asked, brightly.

  *

  It was half an hour, in the end, before Helen managed some time alone. The three new notes were not identical to the first, but they were all similar: short and mysterious but written with unmistakable venom.

  HELLO BARBARA

  THIS IS JENNIFER.

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

  HELLO BARBARA

  I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

  I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

  I’VE COME TO PAY YOU BACK.

  JENNIFER

  HELLO BARBARA.

  DOES NEIL KNOW?

  OR WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO TELL HIM?

  JENNIFER

  There were no dates on any of them, but that was the order that seemed to make most sense, leading up to the cancer one. There was no clue as to how long it had been going on for, nor as to whether ‘Jennifer’ had approached Neil or done anything else.

  Helen had been well aware whilst growing up that her mum wouldn’t speak about the past; that she would admit to no family, no history – in fact, no life at all before meeting Neil at the age of twenty. Occasionally, he would call her his girl who fell to earth. Helen had badgered him over it at times, mostly when she was in her teens, but as life unfurled, the mystery seemed minor in the scheme of things. It had become part of the scenery.

  ‘I know who you are,’ the notes said, and the words made Helen’s blood turn icy, because the truth was she didn’t. And she never had.

  She tried to imagine asking her dad about it now; her relationship with Neil had always been simpler. He was her dad; he loved her, worried about her and thought she was a superstar. She was his daughter; she loved him, allowed him to bore her with his gardening chat and bought him socks for Christmas. For as long as she could remember, they’d been able to talk easily about just about anything.

  But she hesitated, only now realising that the one thing they never really talked easily about was Barbara. Her mind was full of the image of his face, crumpling at the sight of his wife’s blue honeymoon dress. The notes would be devastating – doubly so if Barbara hadn’t told him about them herself, which Helen was convinced was the case. ‘Jennifer’ had threatened to tell Neil something – Helen had no idea what – but if she showed him the notes she might well blunder into the very threat that ‘Jennifer’ was holding like an axe to Barbara’s neck. So she was left with the first option she’d thought of. And the one Helen had always found most difficult – trying to talk to her mother.

  She folded the notes into their envelopes, tucking them deep in her pocket to return when she had the chance. Then she washed her face as quietly as she could, using cold water to try to subdue the redness. The tears had been close to the surface since that awful phone call with Darren, and her anger on reading the notes had quickly brought them back. When she finally looked human, she combed her hair through, listening to the hum of the house around her and the laughter and chatter of the children with their grandparents.

  On the surface, she thought, this looked like perfection. No fly on the wall, or neighbour peeping through the net curtains, would know the different ways in which every heart in this house was breaking.

  June 1963

  Katy

  She recognised the stern, mustachioed face of the policeman who came towards them, though she wouldn’t be able to name him. As Mr Robertson opened the door for Katy, the officer held out a pair of handcuffs, gaping open, the metal glinting in the sunshine.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll need those, thank you.’ Mr Robertson’s tone was firm, and the other man frowned.

  ‘Protocol—’ he began, but Mr Robertson cut him off.

  ‘I have custody of the prisoner. Miss Silver and I are content that nothing untoward will happen, and if it does, then we’ll be the ones to answer for it.’

  ‘For the sake of the family, though,’ the officer tried again, waving towards a large white estate car, painted with the letters ‘POLICE’. Katy supposed that Etta was inside.

  ‘Mrs Gardiner is here to try to find her child, not to see Katy Clery humiliated. You can put the handcuffs away.’

  Katy wasn’t so sure that she agreed with Mr Robertson on why Etta Gardiner wanted to be there, but the policeman finally did as he was asked. A few of his colleagues had made their way over during the discussion, and Mr Robertson exchanged pleasantries with the inspector in charge. The plan was that they would initially walk across the site onto the adjacent farmland, to the vicinity where it was believed that Katy must have accessed the site a year earlier, coming from the railway station. Katy turned and walked with them, keeping close to Miss Silver so as to not give the police any excuse to pull out the handcuffs again. No
ne of the adults talked to her, although she was all they were talking about.

  A few seconds after they had passed the motorway patrol car, she heard its door open and the rustle of a passenger getting out. Risking a glance back, she saw she had been right. It was Etta, not in fur this time, but instead in a black, shapeless dress and jacket, a dark-dyed straw hat pressed low on her brow. Their eyes met, and for a moment Katy thought she saw sadness rather than anger. Then the woman turned deliberately to one side, away from the constable at her shoulder, and spat coolly onto the tarmac. The hatred, when she lifted her eyes back to Katy, was clear.

  Katy fought back the tears prickling behind her own eyes and continued to walk forward. Soon the police started to slow. They were nearing the edge of the site. The tarmac of the car park ended, and there was a thin strip of scrub before a wire fence. Someone had cut a gap. There was a neat roll of fencing wire stacked to one side – ready to fix it quickly so everything was shipshape for the grand opening, she supposed.

  There were nettles around the fence, and as they made their way into the field, the ground became soft and uneven. Katy, now used to the confines of Ashdown with its paved yard and endless linoleum corridors, felt herself stumble. The smells of the wet earth, of the green grass, buzzed in her mind.

  ‘Well,’ said the inspector, suddenly turning to face back towards the service station and the motorway beyond it. ‘Do you recognise it? Are you planning to tell us anything, or just to waste everyone’s time again?’

  July 2017

  Barbara

  She held the soap out under the shower water. The jets carried away the film of dust and the creamy white surface began to glisten. She turned it over in her hands, waiting for the hot steam to release that unmistakable floral scent. Tesco shower gel was sufficient most mornings, but today something more potent seemed called for. The bar of No. 5 had been eased out of its monogrammed box and pressed into service.

  I’m still me, she thought, as she worked the soap into the brown marks left on her dry ankles by her sandal straps, and then lathered up her shins in preparation for the razor. Saggier, more wrinkly and more blemished, yes. Bearing scars inflicted both by accident and design. But still, this body was recognisable as the one that had twirled in the blue dress up in Glasgow; still the same body that appeared, bikini-clad, in the Lanzarote beach photos from a few years later. Not to mention the same body seen smothered in sheets in the blotchy hospital shot from the day Helen was born. It hung on the bedroom wall even now, despite years of trying to talk Neil into taking it down.