I have no conception of what to say. Perhaps I should admit I saw her too: tell the child his mother lives, or half lives, in our two deluded minds. But the stuff about the mines confuses further. When was he down there at Morvellan? Why did Cassie let him wander? Everything is confusion: as the stiff winds bully the woodlands outside, as the Christmas weather prepares to dump more snow on this haunted valley.
She really is mad. She’s having another baby. Stupid slut.
‘Stop,’ I say, to myself, to Jamie. To the voices in my head. ‘Please, please stop.’
Jamie looks at me, perplexed. ‘Rachel?’
‘Jamie …’
Need to batter my way through this. Shout down the madness. I also have to lie to Jamie. Pretend that I am the sane and stable grown-up, that he can rely on me.
‘Jamie, you didn’t see anything.’
‘But, Rachel, I did. It was her but it wasn’t. It really was Mummy, I know it, I think. But but. But it was so strange, like a dream? I saw her at the mine, I hugged her. It was windy and cold and she was there, she was, I smelled her, I hugged her, I touched her and she hugged me, she did, she did.’
I can see doubts in his eyes. I can see him questioning his own mind. Oh, I know that feeling.
And the image is stark. Nina Kerthen, pale and slender, beautiful and blonde, in her rich dark coat, coming from the mines, coming for her son. Hugging him close, cold tears in her eyes.
‘Where’s Cassie?’
Jamie shrugs, unhappily, his voice still tight, and anxious.
‘Yellow Drawing Room. Granny and her were talking. Someone came to drive Granny away. Don’t know don’t know.’
‘Juliet is here? I mean Granny?’
‘She wanted to see me, see me, before she left, we played a Christmas game, but then she went off and, and and and then I looked out of my window, and it was the right time.’
‘And you told her you saw your mummy at the mines. You told Granny?’
He gulps air, nods.
‘Yes. Yes I spoke to Granny. Cassie too. She was angry at me. She says ghosts are evil things. She says I shouldn’t talk like this. Rachel, why doesn’t anyone believe me?’
I can imagine Cassie: scolding the boy. Yet also frightened. Wearing her amulets against evil. I know she has been on the verge of quitting for weeks: the increasingly poisonous atmosphere of Carnhallow makes her unhappy. She has no direct loyalty to me. This might be the clincher, and make her quit. Leaving us isolated and alone.
Suicide.
Or infanticide.
‘Rachel?’
‘Jamie, I’m gonna – Jamie. Sorry. Look, let’s get you some supper, some sausage and mash, hey, how about that?’
He looks at me sorrowfully and sceptically. Those blue-violet eyes pierce me somewhere deep. I think of his mother’s eyes, the eyes that stared at me from the corridor that leads to the Old Hall.
No. Yes. No.
I flush with cold at the thought: that chilly, monastic chamber. Something is in there. I know it. That’s where she was, where she came from the darkness. Something is in the Old Hall.
Yes. Waiting for you.
Grasping Jamie’s hand I lead him to the kitchen, where I fry the sausage and pound the mash as Jamie sits at the kitchen counter, reading a football magazine. His beloved Chelsea.
The mash is spooned on to a plate, making a big steaming white dollop. Then I follow with the sausages, straight out of the pan, but I drop one on the floor.
Picking up the sausage, I put it in the pedal bin. There are plenty more sausages, nice and browned. Three should do it. Jamie is still absorbed in his magazine. He barely looks up as I put the plate in front of him. His neck is white and exposed as he bends over the book. Such a slender neck. Such a pretty child. Those beautiful eyes. The neck is so vulnerable. So white and slender.
Breakable.
‘Thanks.’
His voice is now level, his demeanour calmer, after that fierce outburst. Perhaps he is pretending everything is OK. The mention of the mines perplexes. When did he go down there?
Now my mobile phone rings, buzzing and spinning on the granite worktop. Thank God. It occurs to me that it might be David. I find myself wishing it was. I feel a need to talk to my husband. I miss him. And I miss us. I miss what we were and what we had a few weeks back.
And as soon as I think this, my self-hatred surges. This is the voice of the abused child, inside me, forgiving the abuser. David is violent. He beat me. He does not deserve any love.
The phone screen says Juliet.
‘Hello? Juliet?’
‘Rachel. We need to talk.’
She sounds relatively calm. Possibly saner than me.
‘Juliet, what is it?’
‘Are you in the kitchen? Do you have Jamie there?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘Um. Fine. Yes.’ I don’t want to upset Jamie so I walk to the furthest end of the kitchen, by the advent calendar. That way Jamie can’t hear me.
The calendar window is open and shows a cheery red Santa on a sleigh. Only three days till Christmas. The snow falls thickly on us all.
‘Juliet, he’s having supper. He’s fine.’
‘But he wasn’t fine, was he?’
‘Sorry?’
The little red Santa in the advent calendar is raising a cup of something. Mead. Or barley wine. His reindeers have big fat red noses, like cherries. Christmas is coming!
The goose is getting fat.
‘Rachel, I am at the Penmarricks’ – Lanihorne Abbey. I’m here for Christmas. They collected me earlier. I had to get away, for a few days, you know, I’m sorry, but my health isn’t so good of late, all these worries … and I need to be nearer a hospital—’
The blackness tightens. Juliet has gone? It’s down to me, Cassie and Jamie.
‘OK—’
‘But, Rachel.’ Her voice quivers. Self-conscious and uncertain. ‘I have to tell you. I cannot lie, um um. Rachel, before Andrew Penmarrick drove me here I was with Jamie.’
The cold wind knocks at the kitchen door.
‘And?’
‘It was terrible.’ Her voice begins to crack. ‘I saw little Jamie, in the kitchen. And my God. My God. I walked in and he was laughing the way he used to, he was happy as I have never seen him since Nina had the accident. It was as if he had actually seen her. And then I asked him why he was laughing, and he got angry with me, angry and frightened, and said, “She is here, she is here already.” He was utterly convincing. He believes his mother is back. In Carnhallow.’
‘But this is ridiculous—’
‘I know. I know. And yet, I believe him, because as he said it I really watched him, very closely. And you know the way he turns his head sometimes and gazes at you rather sadly, when he is really telling the truth? It was like that.’
Evening
I can’t deny it. I know what she means. I know how Jamie behaves when he is being really truthful. He does exactly what she says.
But this is impossible. I struggle to understand, and to speak.
‘So he’s seeing a ghost?’
‘Yes. I don’t know, oh oh.’
‘Juliet?’
She is quiet for a moment, then returns. ‘What are we going to do? I have no idea. No idea. I would come back but, oh, now it’s snowing so heavily, I haven’t seen snow like this in many years you know, it happens very rarely. But when it happens, my goodness.’ She coughs, deeply, then adds, ‘Carnhallow can get entirely snowed in – the roads are so deep and the valley even deeper, you should take care, you should buy food. There are power cuts. Quite immoderate. We had to walk to Zennor one year, we were snowed in for half a week and all we had left were satsumas and walnuts, and eggnog.’
I let her ramble for a moment.
The advent calendar is six inches away. Its windows show penguins and sleighs, Christmas trees and polar bears. Not a single Christian image, which is fitting. Out here in West Penwit
h, so near to Land’s End, this feels very much the pagan Yule. The time of fear and hearth-fires, one last feast to keep out the cold before the monsters prowl.
And maybe I am that monster.
Taking a hold of myself, I intrude on Juliet’s fading and tangled memories. She’s all I have left. The only source, however unreliable. ‘Juliet, please, please – let’s get back. Is it possible Nina survived the accident?’
‘Ahh. I don’t think so.’
‘And it was definitely her who fell in the shaft at Morvellan?’
A pause. ‘Yes.’
‘So that makes a circle, Juliet, a stupid circle. Nina drowned two years ago. Yet you say Jamie is seeing his mother. It’s not possible.’
‘Rachel, I do not begin to understand. These people here …’ Her confusion devolves into illogic, I can picture her struggling for words that make sense, sitting by the phone in Lanihorne Abbey. ‘Sometimes I think I can sense her, smell her perfume. But of course I’m not right, you shouldn’t listen to me. Jamie is the important one. He says he hugged her at the mine.’
‘Yes, I know. He told me.’
But I need to know more. I am grasping at hope here. If I did see Nina on the bus, maybe I am not having a breakdown, not tipping once again into psychosis, maybe Doctor Conner is right, in a way he would not expect.
‘Juliet, tell me again what happened the night Nina died. If she’s not dead – then something very strange happened, maybe we, maybe I can work it out.’
A penguin regards me from a calendar. I wait for my own voices. Silence. Good. Please go away and leave me alone.
Juliet replies, ‘But you know it already, the chain of events. So awful, so awful. You know David lied and said Jamie wasn’t there, at the accident. When really he was there. And you know that David asked us all to stay quiet, for Jamie’s sake.’
Turning from the windows of the advent calendar, I look to the windows of the kitchen. Snow is inches deep on the windowsill. Like a shop window faking it.
‘So you know all that, so you know as much as me.’
‘But you were the crucial eyewitness, Juliet. That night, apart from Cassie. It’s only you. What really happened?’
‘I wanted to tell the truth!’ She sounds affronted. ‘I did. I truly did. I was in my room. We’d all been drinking, there’d been some Christmas guests, but they’d long gone, it was very late and I was going to sleep, but I was woken – there were voices. Raised voices. Arguing. David and Nina, shouting. Most of it was muffled, but then I heard him scream How could you say that How could you say it, screaming, at Nina.’ She hesitates: but it is a hesitance born of reluctance, not bewilderment. Juliet clearly knows something, and she is on the cusp of revealing it.
I ask, gently as I can, ‘You heard something else, didn’t you?’ I picture this kind, intelligent old lady at the other end of the line, in a large lordly room, Christmas tree in the background, real candles guttering in the gloom. A log fire in a marble hearth.
Juliet’s voice is hung with guilt. ‘Nina said something remarkable, something David could not tolerate.’
The pause is enormous. I swear I can hear the icicles forming on the eaves of Carnhallow.
Her answer is sad and quiet. ‘I’ve never told anyone this, but: I did hear one other thing that night. Nina screamed it so loud you could have heard it at Land’s End.’
I hold my breath. The snow falls. On Manaccan and Killivose. On Boskenna and Redruth.
‘She shouted, Why don’t you tell him, tell your son our big fucking secret, about his real parents – And then she laughed as if it was actually some awful joke, some terrible sarcastic joke. But true.’
‘Nina implied David wasn’t his real dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t tell the police this? Why, Juliet?’ There is no answer. The anger boils inside me, like the waves crashing on the cliffs at Levant. I rush on, ‘I know why you kept quiet! I know. I know. Because it implicated David? Right? Because it implied he had a motive to kill her?’ I am nearly shouting.
Juliet is crying now. Her voice catches in her throat. Dusty and tragic. ‘Oh, Rachel. There were so many lies that night, so many. I did what my son told me to do, afterwards, to keep things quiet. To protect Jamie. Shield him from the inquest. Did I do a bad thing?’
I have to restrain myself. ‘Yes, I think you did.’
‘Ahh.’ I can hear the stammer of intaken breaths. ‘Oh God. It’s awful. I’ve felt guilty for so long. Perhaps that is why I cannot think straight any more, maybe I imagined so much. Maybe I want her to be alive, because that means David didn’t kill her, his own wife, kill Jamie’s mother, and she didn’t say that terrible thing, and Jamie really is my grandson. I have to believe that, he is all I have. Beautiful Jamie. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’ She sobs, openly. ‘And now the snow.’
Christmas Eve
Morning
We only just make it to the Tesco in St Ives, before it closes for the festivities. I buy everything we need in a frenzy, with Jamie at my side, looking at me, distantly, puzzled yet compliant. We couldn’t shop yesterday because it was snowing so heavily, but today there’s a break in the weather. The sky is the white of hospital sheets, but the snow has called a Christmas truce.
‘Is that it?’ Jamie gawps at our trolley as we head for the checkout. ‘Rachel. Is that all there is?’
My trolley has one box of crackers. A turkey roll. A few potatoes and Brussels sprouts. A miniature Christmas pudding. Jamie is used to opulent Christmases. Lots of adults laughing, elegant Nina gathering elegant friends. Rumtopf. Single malt whiskies. Galettes and roast geese. And his father paying for it all – generous and charming, dashing and witty. This time it will be me, and Jamie, and Cassie. A small and tragic Christmas. I am used to tragic Christmases. And the sadness that comes after.
‘It’s not going to be a big dinner, Jamie, just us. But we will have fun, I promise. Lots of presents by the tree.’
‘Oh. Oh OK, OK. That’s OK.’
His smile is brave. His shoulders look so slender in his favourite red shirt. But all his clothes have a tender and terrible poignancy. His jeans for an eight-year-old, his boyish and innocent blue football tops, his woollen bobble hat for cold winter school runs: no child this small should have experienced so much, should be at the centre of all this.
If only I could think of something reassuring to tell him. Something happy, or cheerful, a joke or diversion. But it is difficult to find a subject that doesn’t steer us on to the besieging rocks where we will founder, as a family, the fact of his father’s exclusion, my own incipient breakdown, the mystery of his mother’s death. And the looming fearfulness of Christmas Day itself.
All around us is danger; even here in the supermarket we are surrounded by Christmas, with all that means – like a boat embayed, like a little skiff approaching the great dark rocks that protect the Cornish headlands: the Manacles, Wolf’s Rock, the Main Cages. So many died on this wrecking coast.
‘Rachel?’
I shake the daydream away. At least I’m not hearing voices, again. ‘Yes?’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Yes.’ I nearly say please. I am that desperate for a conversation. Heading for the tills.
‘Might it be OK if one day I called you Mummy?’
Jamie’s sweet face is turned to mine. To hide my confusion and angst I pluck a tin of beans from a shelf. He wants me to be his mummy. This is what I have wanted for ages. But not in these circumstances, amid these Christmas terrors. Maybe I could steal him away, rescue him from all of this. My beautiful stepson. My beloved stepson.
‘Um. Yes. Yes. Of course you can,’ I say, dropping the beans in the trolley. ‘Of course you can call me Mummy if you want to, that’s nice, I want us to be a family.’
Want? Wanted.
‘When Daddy comes back, I can call you Mummy and everything will be OK then, won’t it, Rachel? Please?’
I start to speak but he runs on, inte
rrupting. ‘It’s like Mummy isn’t like what she used to be, you know, the mummy down there, or the mines, the mummy in Morvellan? Her face is different now but when I hug her and feel her and smell her I know it is Mummy but how can that be … she is dead.’ As he tails off, his expression of anguish is unbearable.
‘Jamie, darling.’ I stoop, and face him, sweep dark hair from his eyes. ‘Jamie, you have to be brave. We have to get through Christmas. I’m going to cook this food, some nice turkey and chipolatas, you like chipolatas? And maybe bacon, or a sausage roll, I’ll get some nice sausage rolls, and then we’ll have a nice little Christmas—’
‘Not Daddy? Daddy won’t be back on Christmas Day? Won’t be with us tomorrow?’
I knew this question was coming. Now I have to deal with it. ‘Not to Carnhallow, not for Christmas morning, Jamie – not Carnhallow with you, me and Cassie. No. But in the afternoon, if the weather is OK, Cassie will take you to see him, so you will be with him on Christmas Day, just not at home.’
The pain in his face needs no words. I stand and push the trolley. Have to get out of here, now. The drive here was bad enough: it was all I could do to skid the car along the coastal road, nearly thumping into stone hedges twice, as the wheels whined and slipped. Now the winter light out there is yellowing, and dying.
At the checkout the staff are obviously clock-watching, waiting to knock off at 3 p.m., in their red Santa miniskirts and elf-helper hats, so they can head to the pub. I would love to be going with them: to some happy boozer in pretty St Ives, the Sloop on the harbour perhaps. I am only thirty, young enough to enjoy raucous pubs and Christmas Eve kisses under the mistletoe. But not this year. Instead we must negotiate our painful way along the cliffs to Carnhallow, for a much lonelier scene.
Shunting the trolley into the chilly car park, I start loading our meagre haul into the boot. Seagulls shiver on the fence, knocking their down-curved yellow beaks together; their cackles are stifled, with a hint of panic. And now the snow is tumbling, yet again, threatening to trap us in St Ives.
The Fire Child Page 23