If You Knew Her

by Emily Elgar

  Jack’s face darkens. ‘She told you what happened between us.’

  Charlotte nods and says, ‘But I know it was her, Jack. I know all of it was her.’

  ‘No, Mum.’ His eyes wrinkle in pain as he talks, but I can also hear a fullness to his voice; it sounds like a relief as he looks at Charlotte and says, ‘Nicky’s right. I betrayed Cassie in the worst way possible. I have to live with that fact, that I failed her, for the rest of my life.’ He lifts his eyes to meet mine and I know, the way I know I have to keep breathing, that he loves her. He keeps staring at me as he continues talking. ‘But I’ll do anything to make it right. I was too ashamed to tell anyone about Nicky. She kept calling me. She wouldn’t leave me alone. I was worried the police would think we were having a proper affair, and that would be a motive for me to hurt Cassie. I was terrified that Freya would be born with no parent to love her.’

  At last, he lifts his eyes away from mine, to stare past me, past Charlotte. His gaze seems to travel down the corridor, towards the ward, towards where Cassie used to lie.

  ‘I’m not good enough for her. I thought about leaving her for her own sake. Then decided I’d try harder over Christmas. But that only made Cassie pull away from me even more. I knew I was coming on too strong. I didn’t know what to do. I was frustrated, angry with myself, wasn’t ready to accept what I secretly knew. She didn’t love me any more. I should have let her go.’

  ‘No, Jack, no. It was wrong of her to try and leave you that night. She deserved it!’ Charlotte’s voice is brittle as though it could snap on any word.

  Jack frowns at his mum as though he’s seeing with new eyes and he says, ‘I’ve just come from the police station. They’ve been questioning me about that night. They asked me where I usually keep my car keys at home. I told them I keep them in the little bowl on the side unit in the hall. I thought it was a weird question.’ He stares at his mum. ‘But then I remembered. You told me Cassie had gone after Maisie. I wanted to go and look for her. But I couldn’t find my car keys. They weren’t in the bowl. You had them. Didn’t you, Mum?’

  Charlotte doesn’t move. Her face is frozen, her eyes fixed on her son as he keeps talking.

  ‘You said I was drunk. But I remember, your hand was shaking as you poured me a glass of water.’

  ‘Jack …’ she says, raising her palm to her son, trying to calm the storm we can both feel building within Jack, but it’s impossible; she can’t stop it now.

  ‘But Charlotte, you can’t drive,’ I say quietly. Jack turns to me, his eyes golden, their colour accentuated by the force of his realisation.

  ‘She always says she can’t drive but that’s not true, is it, Mum?’ His gaze shifts from me to Charlotte and it’s like a flame that was burning, hovering over my skin has at last been snuffed out.

  ‘It’s not that you can’t drive, it’s that you don’t. Dad always drove you everywhere. Then you had that accident after he died. I was in the car, it scared you shitless and you never drove again. Until that night.’

  My veins grip under my skin, as if they’ve been pulled taut, like puppet strings. Charlotte starts shaking her head, as though Jack’s words can’t settle so long as she keeps moving. Jack doesn’t take his eyes off Charlotte as at last her head slowly stills. Her eyes are glazed, as though a transparent film has developed over her irises and she’s watching back the scenes from that night.

  ‘She was going to see him. She was doing to you, Jack, what Mike did to me and I couldn’t … I couldn’t let her. Not after everything we’ve been though, Jack, not after all this time. I was going to walk home, but it was icy, dangerous in my heels. So I went back to the cottage. That’s when I realised she’d gone. She’d left you. So I drove after her. I wanted to stop her, that’s all, to make her change her mind; but she started running when she saw the car. She must have thought I was you, Jack. She was running away from you. She had a bag with her, just like Mike. It was like she was throwing everything back at us, all the love and care we’d shown her. Mike wanted to run away too. I told him not to try and leave, that I wouldn’t let him. It was easy to swap the heart tablets in his medicine bottles for aspirin. They were almost identical, little white pills. I thought if he had a scare, he’d know how much he needed me. How much he needed us. I wanted to scare Cassie too, so she’d know how much she needed you, Jack … I thought they’d both come home.’

  I want to run away suddenly, but the very air seems to have weight, stopping me from moving. I want to force the world back to a place where I admire the way Charlotte loves, a world where Frank is getting better.

  Jack’s body is rigid, trying to absorb the shock of the demolition as his whole life crumbles to ruin with each one of his mother’s words.

  But we’re not finished, not yet. There’s still more I have to know.

  ‘Frank was getting better, Charlotte,’ I say, my own voice foreign in this new world.

  Charlotte doesn’t take her eyes off Jack. I feel the walls start to move in out, in out, as if the hospital itself is breathing as she says, ‘I only turned his machine down a little. I thought he’d pass out … forget what he heard. That’s all. He thought it was Jack.’ She pauses before she says to Jack, ‘I had to protect you. You’ll understand when you’re a parent yourself.’ She looks at me, and her face twists. ‘They didn’t tell us he was getting better. It’s their fault. They should have told us he could hear.’

  The walls keep pulsing, faster now, in time with the beating in my chest. I’m too winded to say anything.

  Jack shakes his head at the woman he has trusted, unquestioningly, all his life. ‘Don’t say “us”,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m nothing like you.’

  Charlotte moves towards him again, but he takes another step back, away from her.

  ‘Please, Jack, don’t be like that.’

  In my peripheral vision, the breathing walls seem to tremble; like the whole hospital, everything I know is going to disintegrate and we’re all going to turn to dust with it. Jack feels it too. I watch as his composure dissolves. He sways on his feet. He falls to his knees. I see the life behind his eyes splintered as a dropped mirror. He frowns at his mother, as though his vision is distorted and he can’t see her any more. Charlotte drops to her knees opposite him; she’s saying his name, shaking his shoulders, begging him, over and over: ‘Jack, oh Jack, please, Jack.’

  And as I turn away from them, the musical soprano of an ambulance siren shrills the air, on their way to another tragedy, away from here, and even though the violent noise hurts my ears, I’m grateful to it for drowning out Jack’s screams.

  26

  Cassie

  She doesn’t remember walking out here, so far out on the rocks; the sea waters slosh, guttural and thick fifty feet below, as the waves wash in and out. Come to think of it, she can’t even remember how she came here at all, but then she looks up, and how she got here doesn’t matter any more because the sunset is so gorgeous, the sky full of pink and orange as if it’s flushed with embarrassment at its own beauty.

  Her feet have gotten used to the pitted, sharp volcanic rock and she keeps clambering to the end of the crop, where she can see her mum, waiting for her. Her mum’s wearing a bright-blue swimsuit, facing out to sea, her hands on her hips, her hair thick and her cheeks full, flushed with life. She’s well again. A crab scuttles scared across her path, making Cassie yelp. The noise makes her mum turn around, and Cassie sees her whole face is glowing, laughing in joy like she used to.

  ‘Come on, Cas!’ she calls to her daughter. ‘Look, it’s the most amazing sunset!’

  Cassie’s close to her now. In just a couple of seconds she’ll reach out and touch her, she thinks, but then, without a sound, her mum leaps off the edge of the cliff and a moment later there’s a splash as the sea swallows her mum whole. Cassie’s at the edge now, where her mum just stood, and she calls, ‘Mum?’, but there’s just a wedding dress of white foamy water where her mum jumped. Panic grips Cassie before her mum’s hea
d pops out right in the middle, a watery bride. She whoops and laughs and twists in the water, agile as a dolphin.

  ‘The water’s perfect,’ she calls up to her daughter. ‘Jump in! It’s even more amazing from here!’ Cassie knows her mum sees her hesitate, and she calls again, ‘Come on, Cas! It’s totally safe.’

  Her toes shuffle shyly to the edge of the rock. She looks up again; the calm sea stretches weird as mercury all the way to the horizon where it meets the sky in a blaze of colour. She can almost see the curvature of the world; she imagines it rolling on and on, an occasional cloud puffing across the view like forgotten pieces of blowsy cotton. The water is dark as an oil slick, but the waves seem calmer suddenly; she hears it gulping on the rocks below, like something thick and delicious mixing in a huge bowl. Her mum’s on her back now, swimming like a happy otter. She’s humming, her eyes shut. Cassie wants to hold her hand, swim next to her, but she’s frightened of the fall and, looking around, she can see no way of getting out once she’s in. Typical of her mum not to think about anything practical.

  The man startles her so much she almost leaps off the edge in surprise.

  ‘Hello, Cassie,’ he says. He’s got a strong West Country accent.

  She turns to look at him. He’s older than her – nearer to her mum’s age – but he’s familiar somehow. She scrambles around her head for a name, but finds nothing. Water runs off his tanned skin like rain on glass and there are little droplets in his mahogany hair and eyelashes. Cassie looks down at her own skin, and realises she’s covered in dry sweat; compared to him, she feels stale, grubby. He’s smiling out at the view.

  ‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ he says softly. She feels safe standing next to him. He turns his smile to Cassie’s mum who’s now windmilling her arms behind her in a splashy backstroke. The man turns back to Cassie and asks, ‘You jumping in?’

  Cassie turns to look at him, and tries to smile before she shrugs her shoulders.

  ‘Come on, Cas, it’s so much better from down here!’ her mum calls, before she dives under the surface, her body shimmering in the fading light as she swims, a mermaid in the clear water.

  ‘The water’s perfect today, so refreshing. Come on, you’ll love it,’ the man says, and, without asking, his wet hand reaches out for Cassie’s dry one and it doesn’t feel strange because he holds her hand so gently. She wishes she could remember how she knows him … understand why she trusts him. Cassie looks down again at her mum who’s treading water now, smiling up at them.

  ‘Come on, you two!’ The sound of her voice makes Cassie nudges her toes closer towards the edge. The man looks at her and starts counting.

  ‘One, two and three.’ They don’t let go of each other. Their clasped hands punch the sky as they leap into the warm, pink air and in that brief flightless moment Cassie knows they were right to make her jump. She wants to be clean; she wants to feel new.

  And they fall.

  Epilogue

  Bob licks my hand as I load the final suitcase into the car. He’s been sitting in the boot, his eyebrows raised in worry, surrounded by boxes, for the last hour, terrified that we’re going to leave him behind, along with the house. He still hasn’t forgiven us our two-week holiday in Italy. It’s a boiling August day, the leaves curl in the heat and the tarmac is like molten treacle. It’s a day for lying in the shade with a book and a beer, not for moving house, but the removal men have already left and all we have to do is drive down to our new tiny seaside cottage. David promised we can go skinny dipping as soon as we arrive. I want to start our new lives feeling free, because we are free. With David’s redundancy and the sale of the house, we’ve figured out we’ll be able to get by fine for the next year. The plan is for David to finally set up his architecture practice from the small, converted stables next to the cottage, and I’ll do community nursing part-time while I start my psychotherapy course at Exeter. This time, we mapped out our future from our dusty rental car driving through the lazy hills and vineyards of Tuscany and Umbria. Experience has taught that even if the whole plan doesn’t fall neatly into place, we’ll find our own way; we’ll be OK.

  We left for Italy just after Frank’s small memorial. David held my hand as his coffin was carried past us, the photo of Frank and Lucy from their fishing trip perched on top. I didn’t get to talk to Lucy; her relatives glued themselves to her all day, like they didn’t want to miss a moment of her mourning. I only let go of David’s hand to wave goodbye to her as we left. She waved back, a small, confused wave, like she’d forgotten who I was, didn’t recognise me outside of Kate’s. The day Frank died is always with me. I carry my broken promise around with me like a shard of glass stuck firmly into my side. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it out. I think about him every day. It was him who led us to Charlotte. Without Frank, Charlotte may have been able keep the truth hidden. In a way, he saved us all.

  Freya was born, as if in homage to her maternal grandmother, on 23rd April, just shy of twenty-eight weeks. Elizabeth Longe performed the C-section; she’d held off for as long as they could. Cassie had been deteriorating for a while; both Cassie and Freya’s pulses consistently erratic ever since Frank’s death. Jack invited me to meet Freya when she was just two days old. She was in an incubator, preposterously big for her. Her tiny body covered in a fine down, her eyes wide, life a completely unexpected surprise. As we stood side by side, in front of her incubator, I noticed a new peaceful quality to Jack, as if he wouldn’t need anything again if he could just stay there, by her side forever.

  Brooks didn’t have to wait long for me at the police station. The call came through about Frank from the hospital; they told her it was related to ward 9B and she knew it had something to do with Cassie, with me missing our meeting. It was Brooks who took Charlotte away. She didn’t try to resist, her arms were limp as Brooks clicked the handcuffs around her wrists. Charlotte kept her gaze fixed on Jack, begging him to look at her, but he didn’t look up at her once.

  Charlotte has pleaded guilty to all charges. David told me her sentencing date keeps being pushed back due to her poor mental health, some form of repressed post-traumatic stress. The media couldn’t believe their luck when they found out. ‘Charlotte Jensen’ has become a byword for ‘evil’ in the cheap magazines ever since.

  I haven’t worked out what I think about that yet, and I don’t know what happened to Nicky; she only crosses my mind fleetingly, like a bad memory every now and then. When she does, I wonder if she’s found any peace, a way of forgiving herself. Brooks said that Jonny’s moved back to London; she didn’t say where exactly, and I didn’t ask. I think it’ll take some time for him to rebuild his life, but I think he’ll get there. I hope he’s happy.

  And now here we are. I move my sunglasses onto my head and sit for a moment on the back of the car, playing with Bob’s velveteen ear and look at the house we no longer own. I remember the day we unpacked our lives here almost eight years ago. I was so full of the future, planning a nursery and where our children would play, and now, here we are, just us, leaving again, our lives so different to how we planned.

  David’s still inside so I open my handbag and take out the two envelopes from Jack addressed to me at Kate’s. Sharma wanted to open them, apparently, but Mary managed to wrestle them off him before he got the chance.

  Jack and Freya live in Brixton now, not far from where Cassie grew up. If they stay, Freya could go to the same nursery her mum went to. Sometimes, every now and then, life does seem to cough up another chance.

  Jack told me in his letter that Freya’s doing well, putting on weight but she seems too gripped by the world, too fascinated to sleep much. He didn’t mention Charlotte. He enclosed two photos, one of Freya, in just a nappy and a white sun hat, her face somewhere between a laugh and a squeal at the person taking the photo, her sweet rolls of baby fat like an in-built crash mat. The other was of a group of about thirty people in bright clothes standing barefoot in a semi-circle on a cliff top, the huge sky a swirly wat
ercolour of setting sun behind them, the sea stretching all the way to the horizon to meet the sunset. Jack wrote that the photo was from Cassie’s memorial ceremony on the Isle of Wight; April’s ashes were scattered there as well. In the photo some people are holding hands; some have their eyes closed as if in prayer. Marcus is amongst them, his eyes cast down, a faint smile on his face. He’s holding Freya in a light-blue romper suit; she’s grabbing chubby fistfuls of white hair. I wonder if he has a diagnosis. I hope someone is looking out for him. I move the letter and photos back into my bag, next to the adoption papers I completed late last night, as David comes out of our empty house with the final box. He closes the door behind him for the last time. He moves slower than normal, squinting in the bright sunlight towards me. He moves the box onto the back seat before he comes next to me, and leaning his back against the car, he places his hand on my bare knee.

  ‘OK, that’s the last of it. Ready to go?’

  I nod and we kiss briefly on the lips and I know that even if our lives aren’t as we planned, they are still just as rich as we hoped.

  As we drive away I look across at David, already singing along to the radio next to me, and just like I did eight years ago when we arrived here, I feel full of the future, entirely blessed because this is it, my tiny family, and I know it’s all I need.