The Woman In the Mirror

by Rebecca James

  On impulse, she took the painting of the cottage off the wall. The little window was still wide open, a picture of clarity and stillness. Where all else at Winterbourne was flamboyant and looming, the image of the cottage was simple and quiet. It hadn’t occurred to her before how at odds it was with the rest of the house, but she liked its difference. Again she scrutinised it for a sign of human life, but naturally there was none: just the brown cow and the milk pails and the gently smoking chimney. She decided to take the painting with her. She would hang it in the gallery in New York, and every time she passed it she would feel a pull in her heart, and look at that name, M. C. Sinnett, and wonder to whom it had belonged.

  As she was leaving, the corner of wallpaper she’d noticed when she first arrived once again caught her eye – a dark, mossy tangle just above the skirting.

  Rachel bent and touched it, and, in doing so, she realised it wasn’t wallpaper at all but something painted directly on to the fabric of the house. She’d been wrong in thinking that the wall had been stripped: on the contrary, those violently torn ribbons were instead a spoiled attempt at covering up what lay beneath, not removing it. Perhaps several layers of paper had been applied in an effort to conceal it.

  She began to pick at the paper. It soon became impulsive, like picking a scab, and the more she picked, the more came away, some in small nubs like the peel of a tightly skinned orange, and some in great sheets like skin after sunburn. She was aware how frantic she would look to anyone who noticed, but Aaron was outside and she was alone and just for now she could afford to be frantic, tearing at the paper without knowing why, just certain she had to see what it was hiding.

  Afterwards, she stepped back to survey the design. It was blindingly intense.

  The corner of moss she had spotted was just the start – a mere shoot in the most sprawling, colossal tree imaginable. Although it wasn’t a tree, it was more vaguely amorphous than that, it was vegetation, a dense forest of stems and stalks that wound and twisted over and under each other. To follow one tangle was futile, as it disappeared into a nest of its sisters, so intricate and elaborate that it made her eyes swim. The vines were a solid screen of blackest green, the green of seaweed washed up on a pale shore; and as Rachel stood before it, she had the unsettling impression that if she peered hard enough, if she even reached out and parted the branches with her hands, she would glimpse a pair of eyes peering back at her from the other side.

  She stepped back, afraid. But the foliage drew her closer, with eyes and voices that flashed and whispered, whispered of something terrible…

  ‘Rachel?’ Aaron was at the door.

  She looked up.

  ‘There’s someone here to see you.’

  Chapter 30

  Jack was waiting outside. Aaron stood in the doorway behind her, his arms folded.

  ‘Give me a minute, would you?’ she asked him.

  ‘We have to leave,’ he said. ‘It’s a long drive.’

  ‘I know. It’s OK.’

  Aaron climbed into the Porsche and told her he’d pass an hour in Polcreath. ‘Then we really have to get going,’ he said. ‘All right?’

  ‘All right.’

  He slammed the door.

  When they were alone, Jack said: ‘You’re leaving Winterbourne?’

  ‘I’m leaving the country,’ she replied. ‘I’m going back to the States.’

  Jack nodded, as if he’d been expecting this. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Rachel tried not to entertain the pleasure she felt at Jack’s closeness, the warm solid bulk of him. She tried not to look at his scruffy, work-splashed clothes, so different to Aaron’s, or the patches of grey above his ears, one of which was tufting out like a barn owl’s. ‘Can I come in?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So you’re really serious about this,’ Jack said inside, looking around at the sealed crates and cartons, the extinguished fire in the grate.

  ‘I am. Aaron made me see sense.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Going home. I have a good life in New York.’

  ‘Including him?’

  Rachel passed Jack his tea. ‘I haven’t figured that out yet.’

  Jack made a face that suggested he wouldn’t press further. She didn’t imagine him to be the jealous type – at least not in any obvious way.

  ‘Did you come to say goodbye, then?’

  He drank. ‘I came to give you something. Call it a parting gift.’ He removed a folder from his bag and handed it to her. As Rachel took it, she ignored the sting in her chest that she would never see this man again. She would never stand in his farmhouse kitchen getting slowly drunk or lean against a wall with him, under the stars. She would never climb into his smelly old Land Rover or stroke his dogs.

  ‘What’s this?’

  On the front of the folder it read:

  PROPERTY OF THE PRIORY OF ST JOSEPHINE, WESTWARD, CORNWALL

  CASE FILE 0587

  But she knew before Jack spoke. She knew because when she opened the file she saw her grandmother’s name: Alice Elizabeth Miller. Born August 3, 1919.

  ‘I got talking to this guy in town,’ said Jack. ‘His dad used to work at St Josephine’s. The asylum’s long gone now – the building’s still there, I mean, but it’s a school these days. I’m sure you could visit it, if you wanted…’ He trailed off, then began again: ‘Some of the patients’ records were saved, including Alice’s. If you’re right about her being your grandmother then it’s all here. The missing piece.’

  Rachel closed the file and slid it across the table.

  ‘Why would I want this?’

  He was confused. ‘I thought you wanted to know.’

  ‘Know what? That my grandmother lost her mind? That they did all sorts of horrible things to her? That my unborn mother never stood a chance?’

  ‘You don’t know about your mother. I thought that was the point.’

  ‘I know she’s dead. I know I’ll never meet her. So why bother?’ Rachel stood and turned her back to him, wishing he had never come, never brought the folder to her; she wished Aaron would return in the car and they could drive away.

  ‘That’s not you talking,’ said Jack.

  ‘It sure sounds like me.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. Look, Rachel, whatever that guy’s said about the reasons you should go back – well, what about the reasons you should stay? Don’t you think this is important any longer? Don’t you believe in the truth? You’ve wanted the truth your whole life and now here it is, right in front of you, and you’re too afraid to look?’

  She faced him. ‘So what if I am afraid,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you be?’

  ‘Yes, I would. But I’d still do it.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘I can. It’s who I am. Maybe you don’t know who you are, and that’s the problem.’

  She shook her head, incredulous. ‘How dare you,’ she said. ‘You had no right to obtain these records behind my back and you have no right now to come and speak to me like this. I made a decision to leave this behind and I’m sticking to it.’

  ‘You don’t think you’ll regret it?’ Jack pushed. ‘You’ll never look back on Winterbourne as the one great question mark of your life – a question you didn’t have the guts to answer? Well, I’ve got the guts. That’s why I brought this to you.’

  ‘Fine, you’re a saint, Jack Wyatt. Is that what you want to hear?’

  He came to her and put his hands on her shoulders. They felt big and strong, grounding, and she remembered the first time she had seen those hands, when he’d come to the house all that time ago and told her he’d drawn the short straw.

  ‘I care about you, Rachel,’ he said. ‘I want to see you happy.’

  ‘Then let me get on with my life.’

  ‘This is your life. Don’t you see? It’s the only thing that’s going to bring you peace. I honestly feel that if you go back to America now you’ll never find peace
. You’ll never have answers. This is never going to go away. I get that you’re scared about what you might find but I’ll help you. I’ll be there. We’ll work through it, whatever it is, together. Think of the people you trust, Rachel, and I don’t mean that hopped-up vanity project streaking around town in a Porsche – what would the people you trust say? What about your adoptive parents? What about Seth?’

  ‘Seth isn’t here any more.’

  ‘But I’m willing to bet I know what he’d tell you to do. He’d tell you to put this house to rest, properly and faithfully, in all the right ways. He wouldn’t order you to sell it like your American friend, then kidnap you back across the Atlantic so he can keep you in a cage and tell you to wear a nice dress and get your hair done when I think you’re beautiful with mud on your face riding that stupid bike in the rain.’

  She blinked. She could hear the faulty kitchen tap, drip drip, drip drip.

  ‘You should never have brought Seth into this,’ she said.

  ‘But I have, so deal with it.’

  His rudeness was appalling, his assumptions, his arrogance. It had been stupid to tell Jack about her husband’s death. It could never be retracted, never be forgotten. It could remind her of the things she already knew but that didn’t fit with whatever action she’d decided – like the fact that Jack was right: Seth would tell her to stay.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rachel,’ he went on, ‘but this is how I see it. You’ve been scared for so long you don’t even know what you’re running from any more. So you’ll just keep running, from one thing to the next, without any of it meaning anything. This is your chance to come ashore. This is your chance to stop drifting. You have to let go of the pain you’re carrying, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.’

  She pushed him away, angry. ‘You have no idea about pain.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘How can I pretend it doesn’t exist, when it’s with me every day?’

  ‘You’re doing a fine job of trying. How long is it going to last? How long until you open up again, I mean really open up to someone and allow yourself to be happy? You talk about getting back to your life, Rachel, but all you’re talking about is climbing back on a treadmill. You’re not really living. You’re not really alive. Don’t you think you owe it to Seth? Don’t you owe it to him to make your life count, if for no other reason than because he can’t? Don’t you think you can find the courage to meet the facts and accept them, even if you don’t like them, the kind of courage your husband found in his last moments? You haven’t been living since he died, have you – and that guy out there with the stupid hair doesn’t see it but I do.’

  She slapped him. Her palm stung where she’d done it.

  ‘Get out of my house,’ she ordered.

  Jack accepted it. He even smiled a little, ruefully.

  ‘I want you to feel your heart beating,’ he said. ‘I think you have since you’ve been here. I have, since you’ve been here – felt mine, I mean.’ There was a pause. ‘I came to ask if there was any other reason you might want to stay,’ he said, ‘but I guess I have my answer.’

  She didn’t reply. Just kept listening to the tap, her palm burning. After a moment he left, and she heard the rumble of his car as it disappeared down the drive.

  *

  She waited a while in the kitchen, too upset to move. Her impulse was to open a bottle of wine, sit tight until Aaron came back and block out the rest. Once she was in America none of it would matter. But something stopped her: the need to prove Jack wrong. She grabbed the folder and stalked through the hall towards Jonathan de Grey’s study. Without thinking about it, she opened the file and began to read.

  Observation notes: December 16, 1947 Unhappy. Refused medication. Refused food. Obliged to restrain.

  Observation notes: December 18, 1947 High spirits. Talk of reconciling with former employer. Alleges he is father of her unborn child.

  Observation notes: December 23, 1947 Believes she is living at Winterbourne. Administered ECT/sedatives.

  Observation notes: January 19, 1948 Delusional. Maintains she saw footprints in snow outside ward window. Second attempt on life feared possible.

  Observation notes: February 12, 1948 In positive mind. Pregnancy beginning to show.

  Sitting at de Grey’s desk, Rachel read on. As the picture built, so did her sense of injustice. Alice Miller had been incarcerated at St Josephine’s while she was pregnant with the captain’s child. How could Jonathan have let this happen? How could he have allowed it while he had all of Winterbourne to offer her? The more she read, the more hateful it seemed. That women had been locked up in these times, and not just in these times but in all the times past and all the world over, with depression, anxiety, stress, with hormones and feelings and emotion; they had been labelled mad with hysteria, mad with their thoughts and impulses, and the longer they were locked up, the more real their frustrations became. The pages blurred as she read and read. She kept thinking she heard Aaron return, but the house stayed quiet.

  She followed Alice Miller through her pregnancy, watching her bloom like a lawn in spring. She could picture her grandmother walking through the gardens at St Josephine’s and liked to picture her at peace, her hand laid serenely on her stomach. Had it been like that? She’d never know. Probably it hadn’t. The file detailed ‘breakdowns’ and ‘collapses’, labelled Alice as ‘distracting’ to her fellow patients and as ‘confused’ on good days and ‘maniacal’ on others. It catalogued dosages given when Alice was ‘in a state of tension’ or when she displayed ‘troublesome’ or ‘disruptive’ behaviour; she frequently reacted badly to medication and the question persisted as to whether she’d have been better off without any interference at all.

  Reaching the end of the folder was like anticipating a collision. As the pages began to thin, Rachel knew what was coming. She wasn’t surprised when, in July, Alice’s baby girl was born. The child is called Sarah, the record read.

  Sarah. My mother.

  She snapped the file shut. She wasn’t ready. After all these years, after waiting her whole life, she still wasn’t ready. Emotions overtook her: anger, sadness, fear, rejection, and most of all disappointment in herself that she wasn’t braver than this. Jack was right. She was still running, and it was here, at Winterbourne, that all roads converged. Tears filled her eyes. She forced herself to say the name aloud – Sarah – to make certain it was right, to make sure it fit, because surely she would know when she spoke her mother’s name. She wanted time to stop, to stop here where she could imagine Alice holding Sarah and the cocoon of their bond.

  But it couldn’t stop here. She had to go on and finish what she’d started.

  Rachel wiped her eyes. She reopened the case.

  The inevitable took only a few lines to come to light. The baby Sarah was taken away. Mother unfit, so the records read. Environment unstable. Rachel could scarcely imagine the torment this must have caused Alice, that tiny hand prised from hers, that soft head with its sweet smell whisked away down a corridor. Alternative parenting sought. And that was what had happened to Rachel, too. Alternative parenting. She’d had alternative parents, just like her mother. Suddenly, she shared this vital connection with Sarah. They had both been taken away from the women who birthed them, nursed them and held them when they cried. My mother.

  Sarah Miller.

  Why not Sarah de Grey? Because Rachel’s mother had been denied – that much was clear. What other reason could there be for no further mention of Jonathan? He had either never known about Alice’s pregnancy – thanks to Constance keeping the letters quiet – or else he had known and chosen to turn his back on it. Rachel looked about her now, at the great man’s study, and was filled with a sense of injustice. That he had turned away seemed all too plausible. She could imagine him in his castle, with his splendid children and their impeccable standing, and what a blemish it would be on his widower’s reputation to have got a young girl into trouble, let alone one in his employment. And so
Sarah Miller, an inconvenience, was vanished into obscurity, away from her mother, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Or not, as the case may be – for, as Rachel turned the final page of the file, she saw that there was another document concealed there, an addendum some official had latterly slipped in. She opened the paper and folded it flat, and saw it was a summary of a life. She read it. It only took a minute to read, if that, and there was such pity in this – that a whole life could be compressed into a minute or less – that she put a hand to her mouth and cried. She cried at the sorrow of it, at the waste. She cried at the facts she’d convinced herself of, none of them true. All this time, she hadn’t had a clue. She had dismissed her mother as a dropout; someone who had never cared about herself, let alone the daughter she’d given up. How mistaken Rachel had been.

  Sarah Thripps, née Miller.

  B. July 29, 1948, d. April 3, 1984.

  Cause and place of death: traffic accident, Polcreath High Road, Cornwall.

  Mr and Mrs E J Thripps of Ashdown Road, Billericay, Essex, adopted Sarah, daughter of Alice, as an infant. She attended local state school and continued her education at college and university, moving to London aged twenty-three to train as a teacher. Unmarried at thirty-four, she fell pregnant with her daughter (father unknown); the child was born in late 1983 and named Rachel Louise. At the start of 1984 Sarah learned of her adoption, and that her birth mother, Alice, had claimed connection with Winterbourne Hall, Cornwall, owned by the de Grey dynasty. It was on a journey to discover her history at Winterbourne that Sarah was involved in a car accident, her vehicle struck in bad weather by an oncoming lorry. Sarah died on impact but her baby survived the accident and entered the adoption services.

  That was it. Ended. It was so cold, so clinical, seeing her mother’s life laid out like this. But at its heart was a glowing promise. Sarah hadn’t given her up. Sarah had kept her. Sarah had loved her. She and Sarah had been together, and been meant to stay together, and would have stayed together were it not for a freak accident that had left Rachel orphaned, essentially, for there was no word on the identity of her father.