Then he remembered his Coke and Mars bar. The chocolate was warm and soft, and the can made that satisfying little pop when he opened it. He stood there eating and drinking, and gradually the silence filled up with sounds: sheep and cows, birds, a tractor, something long and low that was probably a plane. He’d come this far, he thought; daft to turn back. He started walking up the narrow road towards Mill of Fortune.
He passed a modern wooden house, like pictures he’d seen of Switzerland, then the road curved to the left. He followed it through a pair of stone gateposts and saw ahead an enormous stone house, not a slate missing from the roof or a window broken, a pond with a wee wooden hut like a dog kennel, trees and bushes, several sheds. As he paused, taking all this in, the sounds began to empty out again. Keep going, he told himself, and walked purposefully round the house to the back door. A green car, with a dent in one fender, was parked outside. In passing, Kenneth kicked a tyre.
He knocked, a sharp rap. And then, not satisfied, slammed the palm of his hand against the wood. What if they were out? Absence had played no part in his imaginings. Well, he would just bloody wait. He counted to sixty and knocked again.
The door opened. A bearded, dishevelled man whom Kenneth had never seen before stood there barefoot, tucking his red tee shirt into his jeans. He must have come to the wrong house. “Pardon,” he said. “I’m looking for Mill of Fortune.”
“You’ve found it.”
“I wanted to speak to Mr. Lafferty?”
“Speaking,” said the man, looking at Kenneth for the first time.
“You’re Mr. Lafferty?”
“Sorry if I’m a disappointment.”
Kenneth stopped uncertainly. Hadn’t the woman in the chemists said something about Mr. Lafferty being a writer? “There was a bloke in a suit and a woman with very short hair. I thought she was Mrs. Lafferty.”
“I wish. That’s Mollie. As for the man, you’re probably thinking of her brother. He was here on a visit recently and has a tendency to suits.” The man—Kenneth couldn’t think of him as Mr. Lafferty—stopped and blinked. “Who are you?” he said. “Are you selling something?”
Kenneth’s fists tightened. “Really,” he said, “I came about the baby.”
“The baby?” The man swayed against the doorframe. “You’d better come in.” He stepped back, and Kenneth followed.
This was more like it, he thought, staring round the large room, although why would a place this fancy have a stone floor? But maybe all the rich people had them instead of carpets or lino. How would he know?
“Would you like some coffee?”
He would have preferred tea, but it was no time to be picky. “That would be grand.”
The man pulled out a chair at the table for him and poured them each a cup. “Start again,” he said, sitting down opposite. “I’m a little slow this morning.”
“Your wife, or whoever she is, and the bloke in the suit have something that belongs to me—belongs to my girlfriend, that is. They’ve taken her daughter, Grace. She’s going mad with grief. Mad with grief,” he repeated, proud of the phrase. He had a sudden brainwave, reached into his pocket, and produced the photo of Grace in her cot.
The man gave it a sidelong glance. “Jesus wept,” he said. He stood up and walked from the table to the sink, the stove, the window, back again, two, three times. Then he sat down and thrust a piece of paper across the table to Kenneth. “You’d better read this,” he said.
Kenneth looked at it reluctantly. Pieces of paper often meant trouble, but the man clearly was not going to read it to him. He drank some more of the bitter coffee—no sugar to be seen—and bent his eyes to the note.
Friday, 6 am
Dear Chae,
In an odd way, certainly not the way you intended, you saved my life showing up last night. I have to go away—all much too complicated to explain—but I’ll be in touch very soon, promise. Can you look after Sadie and Plato?
Love, Mollie
Kenneth read these words twice, with no sense of their meaning. “Who are Sadie and Plato?” he said.
“The animals,” the man said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I think she’s vamoosed with your baby. There was one here last night. I didn’t see her, but I heard her cry. And this morning she and Mollie and the car were gone.”
“There’s a car.”
“That’s mine. I’m sorry, I can’t believe this. I think she’s stolen your baby. Oh, Jesus, it’s all my fault.” He bent his head and made a snuffling sound. Could he be crying?
“Listen,” Kenneth said sharply, “I don’t have time for this crap. I came to get Grace. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. I might by this evening. There are some people I can phone. This is terrible, but I’m sure the baby’s safe. Whatever’s happening to Mollie, she wouldn’t hurt a baby.”
He started to say something else, but Kenneth held up his hand, like he had with Joan, and it worked: the man shut up. This was a setback, Grace not being here nor the suit bloke, but not a catastrophe. Maybe he could even make it work in his favour, put the squeeze on the Lafferty bloke and then the other. Cash now and cash later. Almost like a job, he smirked. The secret was not to ask for money. No question of blackmail, just gifts, generous presents passing between people who understood each other.
That pacing business seemed a good idea. He stood up in turn and went over to the window. “Okey-dokey,” he said. “I think a chat with the police is in order. I can’t have that woman traipsing all round Perthshire with my daughter.”
The man did not seem to remark Grace’s metamorphosis. “No, please,” he said. “Wait. I can get her back, I’m sure. Give me a little time.”
“Time,” Kenneth said suggestively, “is money.” One of the nicest sentences he’d ever uttered.
Mr. Lafferty gave him a lift to the town, and Kenneth waited in the car while he went into the Bank of Scotland and came out with a sheaf of tens and twenties. No fifties, Kenneth had told him; more trouble than they’re worth. He counted out the money, the entire thousand, trying to be nonchalant, and slipped it into the pocket of his sports jacket. The man thanked him profusely, several times, for waiting. They agreed that Kenneth would phone tonight at ten. “You’ll be there,” Kenneth said, “no more disappearing.”
“Absolutely not. And I’ll know where Grace is by then.”
On the bus Kenneth kept slipping his hand into his breast pocket. Only some of the notes were new, most of them were used, but what they lacked in crispness they made up for in heft. Shifting in his seat, he felt something bulge in one of his other pockets: the two sets of keys. Briefly he pictured Joan’s face in the bread aisle, gazing after the baby. She’d be upset, he thought. He realised he’d left Grace’s photo on the table at Mill of Fortune. Then his fingers touched the notes again. He’d soon cheer her up. He remembered that dress she had admired in the shop window the night they went to the Koh-i-Noor. If it was less than fifty quid, he’d buy it for her. They could survive another day or two without Grace.
Chapter 15
In a lay-by north of Perth, Mollie stopped to install Olivia’s car seat. As the woman at Mothercare had promised, it strapped in easily. Olivia fussed at being lifted off the pillow on the floor but, as soon as she was in the seat, with the door closed, settled down to stare raptly at the light fixture on the ceiling. Mollie lingered for a moment, breathing in the sharp morning air. The wooded hills were beginning to glow as the sun rose. A black lorry roared by, and suddenly the road was empty. In the fissure of silence came the call of a cuckoo, sweet, precise, and melancholy—cuckoo, cuckoo—urging her on.
Back in the car, Mollie discovered that the new seat had advantages besides safety. Olivia was much closer and faced backwards. Normally, after her first feed she grew drowsy, but today she kept an alert gaze fixed on Mollie and uttered a stream of sounds, right on the edge of speech. “Careful,” Olivia said, and another time, Mollie was sure of it, “Music.” She raised her small
hands to grasp the shifting patterns of light cast by bridges, trees, clouds, other vehicles. From Perth, Mollie took the road to Stirling and on to Glasgow. She had a superstitious fear of going anywhere near Edinburgh, as if she were an iron filing on which that familiar city could exert an irresistible magnetism.
She was almost at Carlisle before she pulled into a restaurant to get breakfast for herself and to feed and change Olivia. There was a choice of stopping ten miles north or eighteen miles south of the border, and Mollie decided to have one last meal in Scotland. She lifted Olivia out in her seat—it dangled like a bucket from the handle—and walked across the car park. Inside, the restaurant was self-service, and she struggled round with Olivia and a tray until a cleaning woman in an orange smock offered to mind her. When Mollie returned a few minutes later the woman was bending over Olivia, singing “Rockabye Baby.” Turning to smile at Mollie, she said, “What a pretty baby.” She had a broad, pleasant face, with a tiny scar on her upper lip.
“She is, isn’t she? I can’t claim any credit, though. She’s my sister’s little girl. I’m just the aunt.”
“Oh, but sometimes that can be more fun. All the nice parts, and you don’t have to tell them to put their toys away.” She patted Olivia’s cheek. “Sweetie-pie, you be a good girl for your auntie.”
Mollie sat down and watched the woman clear a pile of plates from the next table. She had believed herself perfectly happy at Mill of Fortune, only the two of them, but as she ate a bowl of muesli and a crusty roll with butter and honey, she was glad to be out in the world. The attention of other people cemented her relationship with Olivia and made it real. When she got up to leave, she waved to the cleaning woman and they called ’Bye to each other.
A quarter of an hour later she crossed the border and drove down over Shap into the Lake District. Compared with Scotland, the hills were strikingly bare; no trees, not even gorse bushes or bracken, just grass and scree. For mile upon mile Mollie passed nothing but sheep and the occasional shepherd’s cottage set in the fold of a valley. The desolation of the landscape weighed on her, and she was suddenly afraid that the car might break down. She thought she heard a strange clattering in the engine. Then Olivia cooed, and when she listened again, the noise was gone.
If she did break down, she could probably carry everything she had with her. In the back seat were Olivia’s two carrier bags of possessions, Pride and Prejudice, Mollie’s sponge bag, a towel, the jacket and cardigan that had been downstairs. For fear of waking Chae, she had not dared to pack any of the clothes she kept in the bedroom. Once the decision was made, she knew she must leave as early as possible. Passing Langdale Fell, she pondered whether there was anything she missed, besides her loom. The painting of Glen Teall that Chae had given her their first Christmas at Mill of Fortune? The 1920s handkerchief-print silk dress she’d bought in the Grassmarket to celebrate graduation? No, all that was fine; she’d buy more things, whatever she needed. In the last few months she had been absolutely educated in the difference between want and need.
Mollie had noticed on previous visits to London that the city was not a place where one arrived, a distinct destination; rather it crept over the traveller in vague increments. There were fewer fields and then, by four o’clock, none. For a mile she passed semidetached mock-Tudor houses. She crossed a road, and these were supplanted by brick terraces. Soon the buildings grew denser; there were more shops and fewer houses and even the occasional black taxicab. The traffic was heavy but mainly heading out of the city. Mollie’s shoulders ached from driving, and yet she felt perfectly alert as she came down the hill from Highgate into Archway and the Holloway Road.
She hadn’t been to Ewan’s for several years, in fact since coming to London with Chae for the publication of the novel before The Dark Forest, and she had planned to stop at a newsagents to buy an A to Z, but the route came back to her as she drew closer, street by street. By five-fifteen she was pulling up outside his house, into a space that had been waiting just for her.
She turned off the engine and sat bathed in the motionless silence. The street was lined with cherry trees, their branches heavy with blossom and the pavement beneath dappled with petals. Two women, one black, one white, both in nurses’ uniforms, both carrying bags from Sainsburys, were walking towards her, talking. She watched them pass by, and their conversation seemed to leave a fragrance in the air, like the cherry blossoms: a good omen for her and Olivia.
She took the drowsy baby, still in her car seat, and climbed the five steps to the grey front door. As a precaution she rang the bell, though for Ewan to be home at five on a Friday afternoon was highly unlikely. Then she set Olivia down and retrieved his keys from her bag. There were three of them to get into the house, twisting different ways, and Mollie felt a little flare of panic before the third set of tumblers clicked and the door swung open. Stepping inside, she saw the wink of a red light—the burglar alarm—and quickly pushed the first four digits of Ewan’s phone number.
She carried Olivia through the house. Everything was as she remembered. Ewan had had the house repainted in white and grey when he bought it; then their parents had died, and at Mollie and Bridget’s urging he’d taken most of the old Edinburgh furniture. In the hall was the coatstand where Mollie had hung her school blazer. In the kitchen stood the round wooden table off which they’d eaten their meals, and in the living room was their parents’ china cabinet, full of the Limoges tea set she had never been allowed to touch. Alongside these familiar objects were her own hangings. Ewan had staunchly bought two or three a year since she started selling them. One of her favourites, a dappled green meant to evoke the woods in spring, hung above the coatstand. She climbed upstairs to the first floor, where there were a bedroom and a study, and up another, narrower stair to the second floor and two attic bedrooms. The larger had a bathroom attached, and the beds in both rooms were already made up. “Olivia,” said Mollie, “this is our new home.”
“Mol,” sang Olivia.
My name, thought Mollie.
She scarcely knew what to do first, but Olivia made clear her wishes. Feed me, she cried, change me, bathe me, talk to me. Mollie did, then she was hungry herself. A search of Ewan’s cupboards, however, proved unrewarding. There was cereal, jam, and margarine, but no fresh food. A trip to the shops was definitely in order. It was still only six o’clock, and the slight risk of missing Ewan’s return was far outweighed by the pleasure of establishing herself as a cohabitant, sharing equally in the chores, rather than a guest.
She popped Olivia into the sling and set out. The evening was mild, and the sparrows cheeped noisily in the cherry trees. Mollie saw that the daffodils, just budding in Scotland, here were almost finished. In several gardens she noted children’s toys. Friends for Olivia, she thought. She soon found an open shop, a small supermarket run by an Indian family. She bought bread, milk, orange juice, apples, bananas, biscuits, cheese. The man at the cash register praised Olivia, and Mollie once more explained their relationship. He helped put her groceries in a bag and gently tweaked the baby’s toes. “Who’s a pretty girl?” he said.
Back at the house, she stepped into the hall without bothering to switch on the light. Sudden bright lights tended to make Olivia cranky, especially at the end of the day. She was lifting her from the sling when a figure came out of the kitchen. In an instant she remembered the burglar alarm she had forgotten to set.
“Hello?” said Ewan cautiously. “Good Lord, Mollie. What are you doing here?”
He turned on the light, and she saw he was wearing his pinstripe suit and holding his briefcase, perhaps with the thought he might hurl it at an intruder. When he caught sight of Olivia, he set the case down abruptly. “Mollie,” he said again.
“You gave me the keys.” It was all she could think of to say.
Olivia, who had been dozing, woke. She squirmed in Mollie’s arms and uttered a stream of sounds in which Mollie heard her own name and an account of their day together: the hills, the motorwa
y, music on the radio, the cleaner who had played with her in the restaurant, the glimpse of distant furnaces as they passed industrial towns. “Here,” she said, passing Olivia to Ewan.
His hands moved automatically to receive her, but he held her much too low, down around his chest, so that Olivia, deprived of her proper view, kicked with frustration.
Mollie took off her jacket and hung it on the coatstand. “I was getting some groceries,” she said. “Just the basics. I’m sorry I didn’t let you know we were coming.” Her stomach heaved as if, unbeknownst to her, the house had slipped its mooring on the cherry-tree-lined street and set out to sea. There was no place to stand that was safely apart from the watery, sick-making motion. Beneath her the floor swayed. She took hold of the coatstand to anchor herself.
It helped, a little. Be careful, she whispered. She let go of the stand and managed to pick up the bag of groceries and lead the way into the kitchen.
A red-haired woman sat at the table. She wore a grey suit, which, as she rose to greet Mollie, shimmered like the curtains in the kitchen at Mill of Fortune. “Hello,” she said with a papery smile. “I’m Vanessa.”
“I’m Mollie, Ewan’s sister. And this”—she gestured behind her to the open doorway where Ewan stood—“is Olivia.”
“Olivia,” repeated Vanessa. She stood up and went over to Ewan.
Quickly Mollie put the groceries on the table. She felt worse, much worse. Do something, she told herself. Switch the kettle on. Cup of tea. Noise. Cry, she implored Olivia.
But Olivia was quiet, and she herself stood motionless at the table, and there in the doorway stood a man in a suit, tenuously related to her, a woman in a suit, not at all related to her, and a baby in a blue top and trousers, who was her whole life. When the idea came to her last night, it had seemed so absolutely simple. Ewan had said several times that she should think of his house as her home; and if it was her home, then it was Olivia’s too. She gazed at him beseechingly. “Please,” she said.
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