Picture of Innocence

by T J Stimson

  She hadn’t quite told him everything. But enough. As hard as it had been for her to say it, it had been even harder for him to hear. She knew it’d taken him many nights of soul-searching before he had been able to accept what Emily had done. But she’d gambled on his fundamental sense of natural justice, and her instincts had proven right. It had been the best thing to do, even if it hadn’t been the right thing to do.

  There was a shout behind her, and she turned, kneeling up on the picnic blanket and shading her eyes for a better view. Two figures were coming across the sand towards them. The smaller of the two suddenly started running, her strawberry-blonde hair streaming behind her. ‘Mummy!’ she shouted. ‘We’re here! We’re here!’

  Maddie held out her arms and Emily launched herself into them. She hugged her daughter, greedily breathing her in. Even a week was a long time in the life of a child. ‘You’re so brown!’ she exclaimed, holding Emily at arm’s length so she could see her properly. ‘Look at you! What have you and Manga been doing for half-term?’

  ‘We went crabbing yesterday!’ Emily said excitedly. ‘I caught four crabs, but we let them go. Manga said it’s not fair to kill them if you’re not going to eat them. And guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We went to see the Exmoor ponies and I got to ride one!’

  Maddie looked astonished. ‘You rode a pony?’

  ‘I wasn’t even scared!’ Emily declared, glowing with pride. ‘His name was Great Uncle Bulgaria and he was the oldest pony there, and we went out on the moors and he jumped over a little stream, but I didn’t fall off! I fed him an apple after our ride to say thank you.’ She shrugged nonchalantly. ‘I think when we get home I might like to learn to ride at the sanctuary after all.’

  ‘I’d love that,’ Maddie said lightly.

  ‘Can I go and play with Jacob and Lucas now? Manga bought me a bucket.’

  Sarah handed her granddaughter a plastic wicker basket filled with beach toys, and Emily ran down to the water’s edge, where Lucas and Jacob were building an impressively sprawling sand fort. As soon as he saw her, Jacob leaped up and shrieked with delight, throwing his arms around his sister’s legs and nearly knocking her over. She laughed, then sat cross-legged in the sand beside him, smiling patiently as he showed off the finer architectural points of his sandcastle.

  ‘He’s missed her,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Of course,’ Maddie replied, her tone neutral.

  A beat fell. Maddie made no effort to bridge the awkward silence. She understood why her mother had concealed her past and lied all these years, and had forgiven her for it, but there was an undeniable distance between them now. Maddie had always known Sarah wasn’t a natural mother, sensing even as a small child that Sarah’s maternal attentions stemmed from duty more than joy. Now that she understood her place in Sarah’s story, she realised that if her mother loved her at all, it was a very different kind of love from that which Maddie herself felt for her own children. For Sarah, love was a discipline she’d learned through years of painstaking determination. For Maddie, it was as effortless as breathing. She and Sarah would never be close, and for the first time in her life, Maddie was fine with that.

  Sarah slipped off her sandals and sat next to her on the picnic blanket. ‘Did you have a good drive down?’

  ‘It was congested around Salisbury, but otherwise not too bad. You?’

  ‘Well, we came down on Wednesday, so we missed the worst of the traffic. Emily’s been looking forward to seeing you all. Spending some time together as a family.’ She shaded her eyes and looked towards the horizon. ‘How are you doing?’ she asked lightly. ‘No more blackouts?’

  ‘Five months clear. The epilepsy medication seems to be working. No more seizures, and no more blackouts, as far as I can tell.’ She sat up and brushed the sand from her hands. ‘I’ll be able to get my driving licence back in another month, which will make life a lot easier. Jayne’s been amazing, driving me and Jacob around like she’s my personal chauffeur, but it’ll be good to get my independence back.’

  ‘No side effects?’

  Maddie smiled. ‘Apart from making my hair go a bit curly, no. Apparently it’s quite common, it happens with some chemo drugs, too.’

  ‘My brother had curls like Shirley Temple,’ Sarah said unexpectedly. ‘He hated his hair, but I always loved them.’

  Another silence fell between them. It was the first time Sarah had mentioned her brother, and although Maddie had come to terms with her mother’s past, she still wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  ‘I can’t believe you got Emily anywhere near a horse,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘You know how much she hates them.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with me. She asked to go to the Exmoor Pony Centre, and then when we got there, she said she wanted to ride. She did it for you, of course,’ Sarah added. ‘She knew it’d please you.’

  Maddie swallowed hard. ‘She seems happy.’

  ‘She is.’

  Maddie watched her daughter upend a bucket on the sand with her brother, the two of them giggling as the castle fell apart. No one watching them would ever guess that six months ago, that solicitous big sister had tried to drown her little brother in the bath; that she’d already killed once and could easily do so again.

  After that terrible night when, for a split second, Maddie had actually contemplated killing her own child, she’d known she couldn’t keep Emily with her. Even now, the thought of what she might have done made her feel sick to her stomach. It had been a moment’s madness, gone as swiftly as it had arrived, but the very fact that she had even been capable of thinking it had turned her view of herself on its head. She’d always thought of herself as a fundamentally decent person, the kind of person who rescued spiders from the bath; she’d once stopped traffic to let a mother lead her row of ducklings across the road. Yet for a few, insane moments, she’d considered committing the most heinous crime of all.

  Sending Emily to stay with her grandmother had been a last-ditch, temporary measure while Maddie worked out what to do next. It was Sarah who’d suggested they make it permanent. ‘I can teach her how to live in this world when you’re made the way we are,’ she’d said. ‘How to compensate for the parts of her that are broken. She’ll never learn that in prison. She may never feel empathy and compassion the way you do. But she’ll adapt. I did.’

  ‘Lucas thinks she should be punished,’ Maddie had said doubtfully. ‘He thinks she needs to understand what she did was wrong.’

  ‘You can’t punish her for behaving the way she was made. It’s like punishing a lion for killing an antelope. Emily will probably never fully understand why what she did was wrong. Her brain isn’t wired that way. But she knows now it won’t be tolerated and I can teach her to behave in a way that will help her fit in.’

  ‘But what if she hurts another child? I’ll never forgive myself.’

  Sarah had sighed. ‘Where does blame get us, in the end? How far back do we trace fault? To me? To Mae? To my grandfather, or to his grandfather? In the end, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. It’s the only way to find peace.’

  ‘Have you found peace?’

  ‘Emily will be my penance,’ Sarah had said.

  It hadn’t been an answer, but Maddie had realised it was the only one her mother was able to give.

  Any lingering fears Maddie had had that Emily would miss her had been quickly dispelled. Emily had been thrilled to be sent to live with her grandmother, and delighted when she was told she could stay there for good. She had Sarah’s undivided attention, and didn’t have to share her time or space with anyone. Maddie visited her there every week without fail, and Emily always seemed pleased to see her, but showed no sign of wanting to return to what she dismissively termed ‘Lucas’s house’. Her chillingly easy acceptance of an exile that would have devastated any normal nine-year-old told Maddie she’d done the right thing.

  She watched Lucas now, watching Emily. He hadn’t taken his ey
es off the little girl since she’d arrived, his alertness evident in every stiffened muscle of his body. Lucas had only visited Emily twice since she’d gone to live with Sarah. It’d taken Maddie a month of pleading to get him to agree to this short break together, and he’d only acquiesced on the proviso they stayed in a separate B&B from Sarah and Emily.

  Jacob came running up the beach towards her, a shell clutched in his chubby fists. Maddie scooped him up, throwing off her dark mood and admiring his find. He dropped it in her lap, and wriggled out of her grasp, reaching for another shell that had caught his eye. As he did so, he turned and smiled at her over his shoulder, and it suddenly struck her for the first time. Put aside the obvious differences, and the similarity was startling.

  Emily wasn’t the only one who looked like her mother. Jacob was just like Sarah, too.

  Acknowledgements

  For nearly two decades, my agent extraordinaire and very dear friend, Carole Blake, fought like a tigress to find wonderful homes for my books in more than a dozen countries. Three years ago, we discussed the idea for my thirteenth book, Picture of Innocence, over dinner one evening, accompanied as always by much laughter and plenty of champagne. By then, I’d written ten women’s fiction novels, and wanted to take my writing in a different, darker direction. Carole was hugely supportive and excited by the idea, and it was her suggestion to subtly alter my author name from Tess Stimson to T J Stimson, to signify the change in genre to my loyal readers.

  Sadly Carole died suddenly in October 2016, before the novel was finished. A doyenne of the publishing industry with more than fifty years’ experience in the business, she was an astonishingly energetic and vivacious woman who relished life, and her death has left a gaping hole in the lives of everyone who knew her.

  It was Carole’s former protégé, Oli Munson, who introduced me to his colleague, my new agent, Rebecca Ritchie, at A. M. Heath. I consider myself exceptionally fortunate to have struck so lucky a second time. Rebecca’s enthusiasm for the book is inspiring and infectious, and I am immensely grateful to her.

  In Rachel Faulkner-Willcocks, I have an editor who is every writer’s dream. The book is so much better for her detailed and constructive edits, and the time and energy she has invested in it is hugely appreciated. Together with copy editor Jade Craddock, she is part of a fabulous team at Avon and HarperCollins who have worked their socks off to make the book a success. That it has seen the light of day at all is due entirely to them. Every book is a joint effort, and none more so than this.

  Closer to home, my wicked stepmother, Barbi, was the first to read the manuscript and we had great fun working out some of the plot intricacies together. She sets a high literary bar, and I knew that if the book entertained her, it was ready to go out into the wider world. Thank you, darling WSM.

  Thanks, too, to my children, Henry, Matt and Lily – you’re finally old enough to be allowed to read my books. And to my husband, Erik. I love you for your patience, your cooking, and especially the way you rub my feet.

  About the Author

  Writing as Tess Stimson, T J Stimson is the author of ten novels, including top ten bestseller The Adultery Club, and two non-fiction books, which between them have been translated into dozens of languages.

  A former journalist and reporter, Stimson was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Florida in 2002 and moved to the US. She now lives and works in Vermont with her husband Erik, their three children, and (at the last count) two cats, three fish, one gerbil and a large number of bats in the attic.

  About the Publisher

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