by Helen Grant
I do forgive you, I said silently, but it was too late.
As for my mother, I had no idea how to feel about her. Why had she not stayed with Grandmother and me? And where had she gone instead? Dr. Robertson had said that Grandmother had told him she had gone abroad; but then, she had also told him that I was at boarding school. So my mother might be anywhere; but she had never come back for me.
When we arrived at Langlands, Tom came into the house with me.
“Ghost? Are you okay?” he said.
“I feel so bad, Tom.” I was fighting back tears. “I was so angry with Grandmother for what she did. I didn’t even try to find out what happened to her – I mean, where they buried her. I felt like I didn’t even want to know. But she was trying to protect me. She was trying to do the right thing for me.”
Tom pulled me into his arms. “You couldn’t know that. And you were in shock. You can’t blame yourself for how you felt.”
I shook my head. “I feel like I should have known. She told me she was doing it in my best interests.” I looked up at Tom. “Do you think it’s too late now – to find out what happened to her?”
“I’m sure we could find out,” Tom said. “We could go to the police. They’d know where to go – who to ask. But Ghost...” He hesitated. “There’ll be questions, you know. A lot of questions.”
“I’m her granddaughter,” I pointed out. “Surely they’d have to tell me?”
“It’s not as easy as that. I’m pretty sure you’d have to prove who you are, and you don’t have anything, do you? No passport, no birth certificate, no school records, nothing. That means you’d probably have to tell them everything. And then a whole lot of people are going to get really interested–”
“Too interested,” I said flatly, remembering what Tom had said when we discussed this before.
“Yeah,” said Tom. He exhaled slowly. “It’ll be a circus, Ghost. And you probably won’t be able to keep your father out of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you have to prove who you are – and I guess you’ll have to, if you want to inherit this place – they might have to do a DNA test or something, and he’s your only close relative, unless they can trace your mum.”
“What’s a DNA test?” I asked.
“It’s just a kind of test to see who’s related to who. But look, even if they don’t have to do that, there’s still no guarantee your dad won’t find out. And if what Dr. Robertson said is true, he’s not a nice guy.”
I closed my eyes, resting my head against Tom’s shoulder. “I don’t know what to do, Tom. I can’t just forget about Grandmother. I’d feel like I was abandoning her.”
“You’re not abandoning her,” said Tom earnestly. “Look, it was really important to her that you stayed hidden until your eighteenth birthday, wasn’t it? It’s only two and a half weeks. We can keep trying to find out whatever we can. If we don’t find anything, well...” He shrugged. “Then we can decide whether to go to the police. You’ll be eighteen then anyway. If you don’t want to see your dad, I don’t think anyone can make you.”
“All right,” I said. I knew Tom’s plan was sensible, but still I felt guilty. Two and a half weeks, I said to myself.
I’m driving home now, but I’m hardly seeing the forest drifting past. I’m on autopilot, my head filled with what will happen if Ghost goes to the police. Or maybe when. She made me promise once that I wouldn’t tell anyone about her, that I’d keep her secret, at least until her birthday. Now she’s thinking about telling them herself, and I’m the one who’s got cold feet.
I think about a scenario in which we don’t tell anyone at all, not for ages. I keep on visiting her and teaching her about life in the twenty-first century. We buy her more modern clothes to wear so she doesn’t have to go round looking like something from a history book half the time. She gets used to going out in places where there are lots of other people about. Eventually she learns enough to cope with life in 2017; people wouldn’t notice anything odd about her at all. Then we go to the authorities and explain that there’s a problem about paperwork, because her grandmother brought her up and home-schooled her and it seems as though the old lady never got around to registering her. It causes a bit of a flutter and a mountain of bureaucracy, but it gets sorted out in the end. It’s a legal problem, after all, but it’s not as though Ghost seems harmed or disadvantaged in any way. It’s not as newsworthy as, say, a girl who was brought up entirely believing she was living in World War Two, and never seeing anyone from the outside world. It wouldn’t make a really big splash in a newspaper. Girl didn’t have correct paperwork. You’d need a dull week for news to run that headline.
This might work, this scenario. Except things have changed since she talked to Dr. Robertson. Ghost has stopped hating her grandmother. She wants to know what happened to the old lady, where they buried her – maybe she wants to put flowers on the grave. She might decide that’s more important than staying hidden. It’s not up to me to make the decision, but I don’t think she really understands what it will be like if she tells.
All this is going through my head when I turn into the yard and stop the car. It’s raining again as I get out of the car and lock the door. I have my head down, shoulders slumped with the weight of everything that’s hanging over me, so I don’t see Mum until she’s right at my elbow, yelling at me.
She’s holding her jacket across her chest, trying to keep out the rain, and she’s furious.
“Where have you been all this time? I told you I needed the car this afternoon! I’ve missed my bloody appointment!”
Oh shit. I’ve done it again. I remember her saying that now, that I couldn’t have the car all day. I just forgot. Too much on my mind, all of it stuff I can’t possibly tell Mum.
I mumble something about being sorry, but I can see that isn’t going to be enough, not by a long way. She’s so angry she actually slaps me on the arm. I can’t remember her slapping me since I was about ten.
“Bloody selfish!” she shouts.
That stings; it makes me start to feel a bit irritated myself, because okay, I forgot she needed the car, but I didn’t mean to.
“You’ve got it now,” I point out rashly.
“I needed it an hour ago!” she shrieks. “I’ll have to pay for that appointment!”
I can see that anything I say is just going to make her even angrier, and I don’t want to lose my temper myself because she’s nearly given me a total ban on borrowing the car once already. So I say I’m sorry again, and then I head into the house, out of the rain.
I think she’ll take the car and go but she doesn’t; she follows me inside, still going on at me. Then I think I’ll head for my room and wait till she’s calmed down, but she’s having none of it. Next thing you know, she’s standing in my way with her hands on her hips and a face like fizz.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she says. “You and me are having a talk, Mister.”
I put my head back and sigh. “Mum, I said I was sorry. I said it twice.”
“It’s more than the car,” she says. “That’s easily mended. I could tell your father to take the money I’ll have lost out of your wages.” She narrows her eyes. “I want to know what’s going on with you.”
“Going on?” I say. My heart sinks, but I try not to let it show on my face.
“Don’t act the innocent,” she snaps. She points at the kitchen, and as there’s clearly no escape I slink in there. I try leaning against the cupboards but she says, “Sit down.”
When we’re sitting either side of the kitchen table, she folds her arms and says, “Right. What’s going on?”
“I just forgot about your appointment,” I say. “I do remember you telling me now. I just forgot. I’m sorry,” I add, for the third time.
Mum leans towards me. “You’re up to something,” she says accusingly. “You ne
ver used to borrow the car as often as this, and I always knew where you were going. Now you’ve got it every other day and I never know where you are.”
“I’m not a kid, Mum. I don’t have to check with you every time I go anywhere.”
“You do if it’s my car you’re taking.”
“Okay,” I say, stopping myself just in time from saying sorry again. “I get that now. I’ll use the bike next time.”
I start to get up but she’s not having it.
“Sit down, Tom.”
“Mum...”
“No, Tom. Sit down.” She glares at me. “I’m not joking. I want to know what’s going on. Where are you going all the time?”
We stare at each other in silence. All the possible responses to the question run through my head. I even have a mad impulse to tell Mum the entire story. But that doesn’t last long. I’ve promised Ghost I wouldn’t do that, and since she’s the one it’s all about, I don’t think it’s my secret to spill.
I sit and look at Mum and watch the angry shapes her mouth and eyes make, and try to zone out of the furious stream of questions she’s launching at me.
It doesn’t really work though. I can’t help reacting when she says, “You’re involved with someone, aren’t you?” I guess she sees from my face that she’s touched a nerve because she zooms in like a heat-seeking missile.
“Is it...” She pauses. “... a dealer?”
“Mum! I can’t believe you even asked that.” Now my arms are folded too. I’m so angry that I have to force myself to speak calmly. I say, “I’ve just been spending time with a – with friends.”
“Friends,” she says, flatly.
“Yes.” My chin comes up.
“Friends I don’t know?”
“I... guess not.”
“Friends who never come here, either?” She shakes her head. “You’ve never been secretive, Tom. What’s changed?”
“I told you. I’m not a kid. I’m nineteen. I have my own life.”
“You still live here.”
“Only until the summer. And I’d be at uni already if Dad hadn’t talked me into taking a year out.”
Mum stops looking angry when I say that and looks hurt instead: her only kid, dying to be gone. I relent, but I’m still not going to tell her anything I’ve promised not to.
“Look,” I say, “It’s nothing bad. I’ve met someone, okay? A girl. That’s who I’m meeting.”
Mum looks briefly relieved, but then she’s back on the attack.
“And you can’t bring her back here now and again?”
“No,” I say, firmly.
“Why not? Are you ashamed of her?” Something occurs to her. “Are you ashamed of us?”
“No, Mum.” Now I’m regretting telling her as much as I have, which is not much. I should have stuck to name, rank and serial number. “It’s just not the right time,” I say.
“Are you at least going to tell me something about her? What her name is, where she lives?”
“No, Mum.”
We stare at each other across the kitchen table and I hold her gaze deliberately, not flinching, not giving in. At last she makes a small angry noise of frustration.
“You’re not taking my car anymore,” she says.
“Okay,” I say calmly, though my heart sinks a bit. The bike is fine in good weather but not great when it’s crap, which it mostly is around here.
Mum chews her lip. I can see she was expecting more of a fight about the car, but I’m not taking the bait.
“When?” she says at last. “When will you bring her over here, or at least tell me something about her?”
I push away from the table, getting to my feet. I’m ready for the conversation to be over now.
“Tom,” she says.
I pause. “Soon.”
Tom came back the day after, which was Sunday, but he came on his motorcycle, even though it was a cold day, and raining. He was grim-faced.
“Mum won’t let me have the car anymore,” was the first thing he said when he came into the house, his shoulders shiny with rain.
“Why not?”
“I forgot I was supposed to be home earlier yesterday. She missed an appointment because the car wasn’t back, and she just flipped.” Tom put up the hand that wasn’t holding his motorcycle helmet and raked back the damp hair from his face. “Then she started demanding to know where I was going all the time in it.”
Suddenly I was conscious of my heart thudding.
“What did you say?”
“I just said I was seeing a friend. She wanted to know your name, stuff like that, but I wouldn’t tell her. I think she was madder about that than she was about the car.”
A friend. When Tom said that, my heart misgave me. Is that how he sees me? I knew it wasn’t, of course; I refused to believe that even in the twenty-first century anyone kissed anyone else the way he kissed me, simply out of friendship. He’d had to say what he did to his mother to keep my secret. I knew that. He was honouring his promise not to tell. It was entirely unreasonable to feel that he had in some way denied what was happening between us by not telling his mother, there’s a girl I’m seeing and I love her.
Doubt came creeping in like a weasel, avid-eyed and furtive. Maybe he’s getting tired of this. Having to bring me things all the time. Explaining things to me that other girls he knows would just understand. Having to hide things from his own family...
Just thinking like that made my head ache. It was exhausting, trying to understand Tom’s world, trying to guess how I should act or be so that I wouldn’t stand out or make myself ridiculous. And I thought too often of that day in the kitchen when we had been kissing, and Tom had slid his hand under my shirt, over my bare skin, and I had jumped like a cat. Sometimes I wished I had not jumped; sometimes I wished that it had ended differently. Then I would feel the hot sting of guilt, thinking that I wanted something that was wrong.
How does it work in 2017? I had asked Tom, and he had said, It goes as fast or as slowly as you want it to. But I supposed the end was always the same. I could tell myself that what was wrong for a girl in 1945 was perhaps not wrong for a girl in 2017 – but wouldn’t that mean that there was no right or wrong at all, that everything depended on how you felt about it? Then I began to despair of making sense of anything.
“Hey,” said Tom. I suppose I had drifted off into my own thoughts entirely because he passed a hand in front of my face, but he was smiling. Tentatively, I smiled back.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve still got the bike. She can’t stop me coming. And look, I’ve started looking for information about your mum and dad.”
He drew out some folded papers from inside his jacket. We went through into the kitchen, and Tom spread them out on the table.
“I printed these off at home. I’ve brought the tablet but...” He shrugged. “...you know the reception’s not great here.”
I nodded solemnly, although I only had the vaguest idea what he meant.
“I started with your dad’s surname. I reckoned if he’s that rich, there has to be some record of him online. And there can’t be many people with that name, not in Britain, anyway. I was right about that.” Tom drew a deep breath. “Your dad’s name’s not just unusual, it’s rare. I only got a tiny number of hits.” He pointed. “This one’s quite an old article about a company, However-you-say-it Commodities. They did importing and exporting. I tried the website address in the article but it came up ‘not found’ so I guess it doesn’t exist anymore.
“Seems like it was run by two brothers of that name, one called Max and the other called Jacob.” Tom glanced at me. “Max has to be your dad. I mean, there can’t be two people called Max whatever it is. So that’s him; that’s how he made his money.”
“Is there a picture of him?” I asked, craning to look.
Tom slid one of the printed sheets towards me. Even with the afternoon sun slanting in through the kitchen window, I had to squint a little to read the text; the letters were tiny.
“‘Missing businessman declared legally dead’,” I read aloud. There was a photograph, too, but it was small and very grainy, worse than the ones in the old magazines in the Langlands library; it could have been anyone, really.
I looked at Tom. “What does this mean – legally dead?”
“It’s when someone disappears and there’s no body. After a few years they’re declared dead, because they probably are. Then their family can inherit their money, and if they were married their partner is free to get married to someone else.”
I looked at the photograph again but it was impossible to tell what my father had looked like; I couldn’t have said, I have his eyes or his hair is the same colour as mine. If I stared for long enough, his face dissolved into a mass of little dots.
“Then he’s really dead?”
“I guess so.” Tom placed a finger on the text. “It says his brother Jacob was the one who applied to the court to have him declared dead. But look, this is the bit about your mother. ‘Estranged wife.’ They weren’t together when he disappeared, and it seems like the family don’t have any contact with her either. That’s why it was his brother who went to the court.”