Effie struggled awake and sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘Oh mercy,’ she said. ‘Tobias and Beulah will be home directly. You must go.’ She bent and kissed him before searching for her clothes among the muddle on the bed. She lit a taper at the fire and the room sprang back to life as she lit candles on the mantel. They stood in front of shards of broken mirror, placed there to make the most of the light, and with a kind of wonderment Jack watched himself dressing and Effie moving quietly around the room and setting things straight. Will it be like this? he thought. Let it only be like this.
He helped her by building up the fire and setting the iron back to heat and then caught her in his arms again. ‘You are not sorry?’ he said. ‘We shall put all to rights as soon as we can.’
‘I am not sorry.’ Effie squeezed his hand. ‘Will you be able to come to me tomorrow?’
Jack nodded. ‘We shall make plans then.’
They kissed again and then she walked with him to the doorway and watched him lead Maisie out to the track. He raised his hand to her before riding away, his heart too full for words.
He regained the lane that led to the nuttery and spurred Maisie into a trot. The sky was deepening to indigo with low streaks of grey cloud and a full, white moon rising. The wintry trees still dripped meltwater from their dark twigs. As he rounded a bend in the lane, two figures stepped back against the hedge to let him pass. One was a boy, a gangly adolescent who held out his arm protectively in front of the other, a smaller child, a girl with a long plait. Both looked up as he passed and he saw their faces plainly.
As he rode on, a flash of recognition came: the girl with the basket of ribbons who had been at the gatehouse a few days ago. Jack twisted in the saddle to look back at her. She had turned to walk on down the middle of the lane, her feet dragging and her shoulders hunched in weariness. The boy, though, stood looking after him, his hands in his pockets and with an expression that Jack couldn’t read. Beulah and Tobias, Jack thought as he rode on. Soon he would be able to visit openly, once he and Effie were properly betrothed, and he would get to know them, draw them into his family.
Tobias spat at the soldier’s departing back and turned for home.
NINE
October rain pattered against the windows as Rosie sat at the kitchen table, jotting down figures at the bottom of her bank statement, taking the chance to look over her finances while Cara took her afternoon nap. She was already overdrawn and she could see things were only going to get worse. Paying the bills and the rent for the flat took up almost all of the money coming in from Josh and now she had to pay council tax on the house here as well. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the cost of repairing and decorating was proving twice what she’d expected. She added up her likely expenses for the remainder of the month again, in the forlorn hope that she might have made a mistake. With a sigh, she added a further figure to the list. Sam would soon need new shoes.
She had mentioned it to Josh, on the phone, hoping that he would take the hint and offer a bit extra to tide her over. When he didn’t respond, she’d brought the conversation round to Christmas and suggested that he could perhaps get them as a present. ‘High tops, maybe? Those Spiderman ones that he likes. That way he’d be pleased and it would solve a problem too.’ She felt embarrassed asking about something as basic as shoes, as if she’d somehow fouled up and couldn’t even provide for her own kids.
‘We already know what we’re getting for the kids for Christmas,’ Josh said. ‘A trampoline. Sam’ll love it when he wakes up and looks out of the window at Mum’s on Christmas morning.’
‘Whoa, whoa! Who said they’d be with you guys for Christmas? We haven’t even discussed this.’
‘It’s my weekend. Check the calendar,’ Josh said abruptly.
‘Hang on a minute, Josh, Christmas is different. Surely we’ll share the time between us?’ The thought of being on her own over Christmas gave her a horrible hollow feeling.
‘We’re joining Mum and Dad and the rest of the family; everyone’s invited. They’ll see their cousins – have other kids to play with. Got to go, the other phone’s going,’ Josh said, although Rosie could hear no ringing in the background.
He hung up, leaving Rosie fuming. How did he always manage to make it seem that she was in the wrong? Now he was guilt-tripping her, implying that the Christmas she could give the children would be dull, with no playmates, too quiet, boring. Not a proper family Christmas. She had imagined opening presents together, eating toast and jam in their pyjamas, playing Lego with Sam and play-dough with Cara, maybe a walk once the chicken was in the oven and later watching The Snow Queen over a big bowl of popcorn. That would’ve been fun, wouldn’t it? She looked at the calendar; maybe Josh was wrong. No – he was right, but at least Christmas Day fell on a Sunday this year. She’d felt a little mollified. She would hate being on her own on Christmas Day but they would still do everything just as she’d planned only on Boxing Day instead, that was all. For the kids, it would be like having two Christmases, one after the other.
She brought herself back to the job in hand, added in the money for the shoes and recalculated. Like Mr Micawber, she was aware that a shortfall meant misery but she had no idea what she should do about it. She sat staring at the column of figures, letting them blur to meaningless squiggles on the paper. Unfocused, she thought; that’s how I feel.
Ever since she’d been taking anti-depressants, she’d been coping with this strange sense of detachment. She couldn’t risk stopping them: she was doing far more than she had at the flat and was less acutely anxious, but she felt spaced out, as if she were looking at the world through glass, her senses dulled, her reactions slowed up. The dizzy spells and migraines, far from abating as the doctor had implied, were a regular feature. She wondered about the strange perceptions she experienced too. Although she’d had no more night visions, she still sensed a presence in the house: a shadow out of the corner of her eye that she wasn’t quick enough to catch, a movement at the turn of the stairs that she tried to convince herself was just the swing of headlights from the road. She was conscious of her thoughts and feelings developing slowly, as if she were watching from outside herself as they rose to the surface. She tried hard to bring her mind to bear on the problem and wrote herself a list:
Ask bank for extra overdraft?
Save petrol
See if leftover paint’s enough for bathroom
Send portfolio to more publishers
Sam needs new shoes!!
She could feel one of her headaches coming on.
Sam came in to show her the letter book he’d been given at nursery school. Rosie dragged herself away from her worries and took it from him saying, ‘How have you got on then, chump-chop?’
‘OK, I think. I’ve done lots.’ He climbed up on a chair beside her while she turned over the pages she’d started off for him: wiggly snakes to copy for the letter S, bouncing balls for Os and Red Indian arrows for Vs.
‘Brilliant!’ she said. ‘Look how many you’ve done! This is such good work I think I’m going to need you to autograph it.’ She pointed to a space under a wobbly line of letters. Sam painstakingly wrote his name and she kissed him on the top of the head. ‘What would you like to do to celebrate?’ she asked.
‘Painting,’ he said straightaway.
Rosie hesitated. ‘Hmm. Let me think …’ In the flat, when she’d needed to work, she had sometimes put together a palette of poster paints for Sam and set him up with a big sheet of sugar paper at his own little table alongside her. However, she’d not managed to paint here since the afternoon when she’d had the idea for the dragon picture. Trying to empty her mind sufficiently to let ideas come had resulted only in opening the way for disturbing thoughts to return. A groping after memories of Lily that always turned to fear, as though something horrible lurked just behind the disjointed fragments she could bring to mind. Thoughts of her parents, and their silence. Their secret grief and the fact that they were lost to her made her feel both che
ated and bereft.
She had visited May many times now without extracting a single new fact from her, and had no one else to ask about the tragedy. For a while she had hoped she might see Trisha again and had often walked the same looping route with the children. She had never come across her and when she finally asked Tally she learnt that Trisha had moved away to Kent, to live nearer her daughter. She was left in limbo, unable to join together the little firm knowledge she had and the fragments of remembered impressions she could dredge up to make any sense. The past remained a wound that had not been closed and could not heal.
She hadn’t the heart to go up to the studio, unpack the artist’s materials and then stare at a blank sheet. Sam was bound to notice and ask her what was wrong. Even now he was looking at her curiously, as though the question was on the tip of his tongue.
With a momentous effort, she mustered a smile. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to help me, OK?’ She went to the cupboard under the stairs and extracted a big pile of dustsheets, which she loaded into Sam’s arms until only the top of his head was visible, and then squashed them down a bit so that he could see where he was going. ‘We’re going to make a start on the living room,’ she said, picking up brushes and a tin of paint from the stack in the hall.
Sam’s face lit up. ‘On the walls? Can I have one of the big brushes?’
‘Sure can do, deputy,’ she said.
They moved the sofa and chairs into the centre of the room, Sam helping to push, so that two walls were clear, and then spread sheets over the furniture and carpet, taping the edges to the skirting boards in case of drips. She opened the tin and Sam peered in at the smooth lake of pale blue. ‘It’s like the sky,’ he said.
‘Yep. Sky in a tin.’ Rosie was beginning to feel a little better. Here was something she could do that would move things along; she would be one step nearer to selling the house and maybe even solvency again. She dipped the brush in and showed Sam how to take off the excess by scraping it on the side of the tin. ‘Now, before we start, there’s just one rule,’ she said. She drew a big square on the wall, encompassing an expanse of tired magnolia. ‘You can paint whatever you like, as long as you stay inside the lines.’ She handed him the brush. ‘OK? And then at the end you have to fill in the whole square with no gaps.’
Sam made a series of dabs on the wall and then joined them up with a wiggly line. He looked at Rosie.
‘Is it a river?’ she said.
‘No, it’s a moustache!’
Rosie drew a square for herself on the adjoining wall. She dabbed two squiggly rectangles, one large, one small, joined at one corner. Sam shook his head. She added legs to the big rectangle and dabbed ears and a nose on the smaller.
‘No idea,’ Sam said with his hands on his hips.
‘It’s a dog. A Yorkshire terrier.’
Sam looked at it with his head on one side. ‘Funny dog,’ he said. ‘It looks more like a hairbrush.’
Rosie grinned. ‘Well, they do a bit.’ She painted the dog over with wide sweeping strokes. She carried on, working the paint in to get a good coverage, concentrating her mind gratefully on the movement and the simple task, whilst Sam made circles and dots, swirls and noughts and crosses in his square.
When she next looked across, she saw that he had a smudge of paint on his jeans. ‘Oh, drat. Sam, I forgot to tell you to put your scruffs on. They’re drying on the radiator in the kitchen.’ He went off to get changed and Rosie painted on, drawing a careful line where the wall met the skirting board, letting all other thought fall away. She started a new patch of wall, losing herself in the regular slap of the brush, letting her shoulders relax.
When she turned again she burst out laughing. There was Sam, painting away in only his underpants, his skinny body speckled here and there with blue. ‘They weren’t dry,’ he said. ‘So I just took the other stuff off.’
‘Very logical,’ Rosie said. ‘The boy genius!’
They continued, Rosie chuckling to herself as she glanced across from time to time at the small, half-naked boy wielding an oversized paintbrush. An hour later, with Sam filling in more big squares and Rosie on a stepladder doing the top edges, they had finished both walls and stood back to admire them. Rosie gave Sam a hug and felt happy for the first time in weeks. ‘You’ve got blue hair,’ she said, fingering the crispy ends of Sam’s short haircut. ‘Better get cleaned up.’
While Sam splashed around in the bath, doing more painting with the bubbles on the tiled wall beside it, Rosie got Cara up. Tally had invited the kids round to play with Nicky and Amy after school and Rosie wondered what she should do with the free time. She must go to the supermarket at some point; they were nearly out of food. If she felt dizzy or started a migraine she would just have to pull over and wait for it to abate. Whilst she was in town maybe she could also go and get her hair trimmed – she was aware that it was the first time in ages that she’d given a thought to her appearance – and she could go to the library and choose some new books for herself, for the kids …
It was then that the brainwave hit her. The library. The library would have archives with the local newspapers. She knew the date of Lily’s death. It must’ve been reported and there might be some detail about the circumstances – all she had to do was look it up! She felt scared but newly purposeful. It would be better to know what had happened and face whatever it was full on. She put Cara into the highchair, set her lunch in front of her, called Sam and then started cleaning the paintbrushes. She could do this. Of course she could.
In the local studies room in the basement of the library, a young woman wearing a baggy homespun dress and with her hair in cornrows told her that the newspapers were all available on microfiche and led her over to the machine.
Rosie sat in the dim corner, her eyes on the brightly lit screen as she turned the dial, scrolling back through time. Letters merged into grey streaks punctuated by the darker splodges of photos as she speeded through decades and then slowed: 1988, 1987, December … November … October … September … August … 4 August 1987. The front page told of a heat wave and had a picture of the town carnival, banners and floats and a Carnival Queen; the next page had reports of plans for a new school and money raised for a hospice – ordinary things. Then she saw it: a picture of bunches of flowers, still in their cellophane with tiny cards attached, leaning against a green-painted post, and in the background open sky dotted with a few seagulls. She turned the dial a fraction; the article beneath came into view. She caught her breath at the headline and then read on.
Twin swept out to sea by Cornish rip current
Northamptonshire-born Lily Milford (3½) fell from a jetty at Whitesands, Cornwall, on 4 August, whilst she and her twin, Rose Milford, were in the care of their au pair, Maria Salvas. The child’s parents, Helena and Michael Milford, who were on the beach, ran into the water to try to save her but she was swept out to sea and the parents themselves got into difficulties. They were assisted by lifeguards and treated by paramedics for shock and minor injuries.
Emergency services quickly launched a search-and-rescue operation but the child’s body was not found. The child’s sandal was found by a member of the public two days later, four miles away from the site of the original accident.
The Coroner, Andrew Harcourt, recorded a verdict of accidental death and said that there was nothing that Lily’s parents could have done to prevent the tragedy. The child had pulled away from the au pair and had slipped and fallen from the jetty.
Julie Birch from the RNLI said that the tragedy highlights the need for parents to be vigilant around water at all times. ‘Unfortunately these tragic incidents that involve young children around water happen in a matter of seconds where supervision by an adult or carer may be lacking or when they are distracted by other things,’ she said. A few weeks earlier, an older child was caught in a rip current when body-boarding at the bay but managed to climb on to rocks and was subsequently rescued by the emergency services. Las
t year, five people lost their lives in similar accidents along the North Cornish coast.
A cold horror came over her as if the water was taking her, a freezing shock to her skin and then up over her head, rushing in her ears, closing her eyes, filling her nose, her mouth … She gripped the edge of the desk and made herself breathe slowly and deeply. Her instinct about her seaside memories had been right then, that somewhere amongst them lay the awful thing that she couldn’t recall. Even now she knew that she was imagining what had happened rather than remembering; the memory was buried deep, deep as a shipwreck on the seabed. The images she had – the rollercoaster, the yellow whirring object and the blustering wind – were tiny, random echoes, faint as the tolling of a shipwreck’s bell when a storm stirs the depths.
She thought about her parents then. They had run into the sea even though they must have known that it was useless – a tiny child, taken down in an instant. It must have been something too awful to take in; shock numbing their minds against the insupportable. Afterwards, how long had they waited on the quay, watching the lifeboats quartering the bay, still hoping for a miracle? When had they started to wait instead for the sight that would break them? She imagined them standing together, watching the summer evening begin to darken and the lights from the boats sweeping the waves – the boats finally turning and making for dock – the hopelessness.
Had she been with them, she wondered, between them, hands held firmly on either side? Or in her mother’s arms, squeezed tight as though she’d never be let go? And what had happened to Maria? Had they blamed her, railed at her, sent her away? She had no recollection of it. And in the days that followed, had anyone come to support them – maybe May? She vaguely recalled a car journey by the sea with Aunty May sitting beside her in the back seat, while her mother sat in the front, her head resting against the window as if she were sleeping. May had given her a stick of rock and she remembered its sticky sweetness as she sucked it, the car full of silence save for the thrum of the engine. She remembered looking out at the long line of the glittering sea. She put her head in her hands.
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