‘I guess not.’
‘She seems happy now, though.’
Lou looked sideways at her, and Kitty nodded.
‘Is it Landon, do you think?’ Lou asked.
‘Landon what?’
‘Landon who’s making her happy.’
‘He’s only been here a couple of days.’
‘True.’
‘And there’s Rosanna,’ Kitty added. There was silence for a moment, and in it the cicadas beat seemed to swell until it filled the room. ‘Unless it’s just that she seems happy because we’re both . . .’
Kitty felt her sister’s neck tense beneath her. Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid. Better to pretend they were back in Nirvana-land. But it was too late.
‘We do have to tell her,’ Lou said.
‘About Daniel?’
‘Yes. She’ll find out in the end, and she won’t understand why we didn’t say anything.’
Kitty shut her eyes for a moment. Speaking Daniel’s name aloud gave her a sick feeling that reminded her of the first weeks after Henry died – but this was worse, she thought now. That loss had been expected; part of the natural order. She hadn’t known at the time that that was something to be grateful for, but she did now.
‘Have you heard from him?’ Lou asked.
‘A couple of texts,’ Kitty said. ‘He tried to call me after Martin had been to see him, but not again.’
There was a pause. Lou didn’t ask any more, but Kitty could feel words bubbling up now. She needed to say some of this, she thought, and Lou was the best, the only, person to talk to.
‘The irony is,’ she said, ‘that he’s been nicer about it than I could have believed. Kinder, when he . . . When you’d expect . . .’ She plucked at the edge of the sheet with her fingers.
‘Poor Kits,’ said Lou. ‘It’s really horrid. Really not what you deserve.’
‘You don’t feel as if it should be possible,’ Kitty said. ‘You feel as if there must be something wrong with you, some missing instinct.’
‘He’s only a half-brother,’ Lou said. ‘Genetically, I suppose, it’s more like a cousin, and that’s . . .’ But even Lou could see genetics wasn’t the point.
‘None of this would have happened if Henry had told the truth,’ Kitty said. ‘He lied to us right up until he died.’
‘Not explicitly,’ Lou said. She pulled Kitty closer, an arm around her shoulders. This was a reversal, Kitty thought: for Lou to defend Henry. ‘We were his only family,’ Lou went on. ‘Daniel had a raw deal on that front, didn’t he? Daniel never even knew who he was.’
‘That makes it worse,’ said Kitty staunchly. ‘He deprived Daniel of a father, and now Daniel’s lost me too. We could have been – if we’d known, he could have been – part of the family.’
‘He still could,’ Lou said. ‘I know it doesn’t feel possible now, but maybe . . .’
‘Sssh,’ said Kitty. ‘Enough.’
The whole thing was like a great boulder, she thought. It was such an effort to force herself to think about it, and then a relief to be doing it, to shift the weight of it just a tiny bit, but it was too exhausting to keep it up for very long.
‘Will you stay here with me?’ she asked.
‘All night?’ said Lou. ‘Of course, if you want.’
She ought to ask Lou about Alice, Kitty thought, but she was so tired now; too tired to work out whether Lou wanted to talk about it, whether there was anything to say. And so they lay in silence, Lou’s arm around her shoulder and Kitty’s hand resting on Lou’s pregnant belly. It was surprising, Kitty thought, what you could bear. How much disillusion and disappointment and humiliation and anger. And it was surprising how soothing it was to be held in her sister’s arms, the warmth of her like an anaesthetic, shushing the pain, making it matter less. She could feel her mind racing, slowing, slipping towards sleep now.
‘Will you love the baby more than me?’ she asked.
‘You goose,’ said Lou. ‘You’ve got a long head start, you know. And you know all the words to Time is Running Out.’
‘There aren’t very many,’ Kitty said. And after that she shut her eyes and let the cicadas fade out, and her grip on the world slacken and fall away.
January 2009
On the first of January, Flora wakes to a feeling of weariness. Christmas has been accomplished, ensemble, with some panache, which is something to congratulate themselves on. Henry is in remission and the family is together, and the fatted calf has not been spared. Flora and Lou have both been back at work these last few days, but now the four of them have another long weekend together – which might be gilding the lily, she thinks, or over-egging the pudding. Whatever the right phrase is.
Hearing the creak of the attic stairs, she throws back the duvet in sudden haste, fearful that Kitty might appear in their doorway. It isn’t so much that Kitty is too old to come into her parents’ bed as that Flora is self-conscious about the notion of the parental bed these days. Sharing Henry’s bed again – or letting him share hers – feels like a provisional arrangement still. There are delicacies about the situation which have not been resolved, and Flora cavils at the idea of their sixteen-year-old daughter (already, who knows, old enough to share someone else’s bed) visiting them there.
Instead, she meets Kitty on the landing, wearing her Christmas pyjamas and an expression of animation which is unusual this early in the day.
‘Isn’t it the fair?’ Kitty asks. ‘I’ve just been thinking – it’ll be this weekend, won’t it?’
The fair in Great Barworth used to be an annual family fixture. Back in the day, as Henry says, resolutely à la mode, when the matter is discussed over breakfast. According to local mythology it has taken place on the first weekend of January since the Middle Ages – although what there would have been to sell in the depths of winter back then God knows, as Henry also says.
‘Maybe it was a pagan festival,’ Kitty says, irrepressibly cheerful. ‘Village wenches dancing themselves to death to appease the Sun god.’
Flora loathes the fair. The rides alarm her, and she is firmly in the camp that finds the ambience threatening rather than thrilling.
Lou, who might be an ally, hasn’t emerged from her room yet. She returned to Orchards last night a degree or two more agitated than she was over Christmas. Flora suspects a romance, as yet undeclared and presumably not wholly satisfactory.
‘It’s definitely on,’ says Henry. ‘I drove past yesterday, on the way to the garage.’
‘Hurrah!’ says Kitty. ‘We can go tonight.’
*
The rain has stopped, but the fairground field is already thick with mud. What will it be like by Monday, Flora wonders? She’s amazed by people’s footwear – there’s hardly a wellington boot in sight among the designer trainers and suede ankle boots. The smell of hot sugar pervades the air: candy floss, toffee apples, popcorn, doughnuts. There is surely something misanthropic about her that she can’t enjoy this.
‘They’re about to get on,’ says Lou, and Flora turns to see Kitty and Henry climbing aboard the big wheel. Kitty is wearing the garish scarf Jean and Derek sent her for Christmas. She looks, for a moment, ten years younger; an excited child.
‘D’you remember when she was sick?’ Lou says, and Flora nods.
‘All over Henry’s shoes,’ Lou says, and Flora nods again, and smiles.
They crane their necks to watch Kitty and Henry being lifted into the air, then accelerating, whisking around faster and faster, down and up and over.
‘Sure you didn’t want a go?’ Flora asks, and Lou shakes her head.
‘Dodgems?’ Flora asks.
‘Maybe,’ says Lou. ‘Let’s see what Kitty wants to do next.’
‘OK,’ Flora says; and then, feeling a sudden pressure of expectation in her chest, ‘Are you all right, Lou? You’ve seemed a bit . . .’
Lou turns, her face both guarded and eager.
‘I wondered if it might be – an a
ffair of the heart,’ Flora says, seizing a passing current of boldness. Lou’s love life has been kept almost entirely from view, so far.
Lou smiles, just. Flora expects a shrug, a dismissive syllable, but instead Lou says, ‘She’s American, and she’s gone home for the holidays. It’s felt like a long time.’
‘When’s she coming back?’ Flora asks. ‘Can we meet her?’
There is a long pause then, and Flora begins to think she’s said the wrong thing.
‘I wasn’t sure . . .’ Lou says at last. ‘What about Dad?’
Ah, Flora thinks: that’s her fault. She’s said too little, not too much, these last few years. It’s a long time since that other Christmas, that awful Christmas when she and Lou . . .
‘Dad knows,’ she says.
Lou doesn’t look at her. ‘Since when?’
‘I can’t remember exactly. I’m sorry; I should have – I thought he might say something.’ Lou must have noticed that the teasing about boyfriends has stopped, at least? But perhaps not. ‘He’s a musician,’ she says, in what’s meant to be a reassuring tone. ‘Half his friends are gay.’
‘Not quite the same thing as his daughter,’ Lou says. It’s hard to tell from her voice whether she’s upset or relieved.
‘He loves you very much,’ Flora says.
The phrase has a false ring in her ears: those words cover a multitude of sins in this family, and Lou knows it. Flora lifts her eyes to the wheel, the whirl of faces and flying hair, the collective whoop and whinny of congenial fear. Kitty’s scarf whips out as the wind catches it, covering her face for a moment as she and Henry rise up into the air again.
‘I know he was hoping for a string of grandchildren,’ Lou says. ‘Choristers in ruffs and cassocks.’
Flora doesn’t say that Henry might not live long enough, anyway, to see his grandchildren in ruffs and cassocks.
‘Kitty might turn out maternal,’ she says instead. ‘She used to love the doll’s house.’
Then she wonders whether this is evidence of stereotyping, or simply of not understanding her daughters as she should. She tries to laugh, but produces only a huffing sound that might be mistaken for contempt.
To her relief, the wheel is slowing down now. There’s Kitty again, poised in mid-air, her head tipped back as though she’s laughing at something Henry has said. Kitty has always found it easy to enjoy things, Flora thinks, but the insight makes her obscurely sad. Laughing on a big wheel is the easy part, she thinks. It’s not the same thing as being happy. It just means you have further to fall, back to earth.
38
Coming downstairs at the start of another day, it felt strange to Flora to know that Les Violettes was full of people: most of the people left in the world who mattered to her, she thought. Outside, the sun was filtering through the garden in the way it did every morning, a low glancing dazzle to wake the plants and drive out the last remnants of the night. She filled the kettle and set it to boil, then went outside to savour the coolness that would be gone in half an hour.
She still wasn’t sure how long Landon was planning to stay. They hadn’t spoken any more about it during the course of the day before: a day that seemed blissfully happy in retrospect, although at the time it had been laced with trepidation. She was surprised how much it meant to have Landon here just now, and how much she didn’t want him to leave. It was partly the relief of having an old friend around, after several weeks among strangers. Partly, too, that she felt easier with him than she had for years, and wanted to savour that felicity. But that wasn’t all. His presence had aroused certain expectations, she acknowledged – of herself, and of the occasion, if not of him.
Flora picked a eucalyptus leaf and rubbed it between her fingers, releasing its clean medicinal smell. It wasn’t only Landon, of course, who’d caused the flutter in her chest yesterday. There had been just as much apprehension about her daughters’ arrival: she hadn’t been sure why Lou and Kitty were coming, or how they would find her, or she them, after what felt like an interval of months rather than weeks. And then there had been that surprising burst of emotion in the underwhelming setting of Tours airport, like a scene marked by balloons and confetti, and the drive home by moonlight with everyone tongue-tied, it seemed, by tiredness and other things. Kitty washed out, and Lou certainly not blooming in pregnancy. Perhaps she was out of touch with the effects of working life and the English summer, but they’d both looked so pale and drawn, and she’d felt like a proper mother for once, sweeping them up into the welcoming embrace of Les Violettes and putting them to bed.
And now, standing in the garden, she could feel anticipation flowering inside her: an expansive, heart-racing thrill of pleasure and fear. The stage was set, not just for a few days together as an almost-family on holiday, but for what she must do while Landon and the girls were here. She shut her eyes, wishing suddenly that Henry were here, ready with a joke and a sliver of wise advice, but Henry was no good because he was implicated in all this – and because he was dead, dammit. That awful, immutable fact, waiting for her around every corner still. There was no way she could make things all right with Henry now, she thought – but no way, either, that anything she said or did could hurt him. That was something, at least. One less person to figure into the reckoning.
The doorbell jolted her out of her train of thought. The postman, presumably. Flora turned and went back inside. But instead she found Francine Abelard on the doorstep, with a basket over her arm of the type French farmers’ wives carry in black and white films.
‘Do you like rhubarb?’ she asked. ‘We have so much.’
‘That’s very kind,’ said Flora.
‘Take it, then. You have guests to feed, I think.’
Flora smiled, understanding suddenly what this early morning visit was about. Francine had found out, somehow, that Landon was staying at Les Violettes.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘No one’s up yet, but I’m making coffee.’
She laid the fat pink stalks out on the table while the coffee brewed. She did like rhubarb, but she had never cooked it. Could she ask Francine what to do? Would Francine tell her without being asked?
‘How is your visitor?’ asked Francine. She didn’t sit down – she rarely did, Flora had noticed – but she gave no impression that she was in a hurry to leave.
‘It’s nice to see him,’ Flora said, with a touch of prudishness which would not, she knew, deceive canny Francine. ‘And my daughters are here too. Another unexpected visit.’
‘So it pours with rain,’ said Francine. ‘Is that the right expression?’
‘Something like that.’ Flora plunged the coffee and poured them each a cup.
Francine moved towards the garden and Flora followed obediently.
‘And with me, the Swiss couple are returning.’ Francine looked up at the vine-covered trellis and then down at the roses, the box hedges, as if assessing Flora’s care of them. ‘I am honoured,’ she said, in a passable imitation of Friedrich’s accent. ‘They have changed their plans so they will return to us.’
‘They enjoyed your cooking so much,’ Flora said, attempting to echo Francine’s parody, but she felt a flicker of discomfort, remembering that she too had been a paying guest chez Abelard, even if she had crossed a boundary since then into a different category of acquaintance.
‘The grapes are growing well this year,’ Francine said. ‘Soon you will be able to eat them.’
‘I didn’t realise they were edible,’ Flora said. ‘I thought French grapes were all for wine.’
Francine made a hmph sound, conveying amused disbelief, and the two of them stood together on the terrace for a few minutes in what could pass for companionable silence. This was friendship again, Flora thought: another step on the path. How long would it be a question of filling up time, finding things to say, until one day, like a fire catching light, you didn’t have to make an effort to feed it anymore? She was torn between hoping Lou or Kitty would appear, and hoping they would s
leep for long enough to avoid witnessing this encounter.
There was a noise from inside the house. Francine looked at her, pursing her lips in the way she did; in the way she had that morning of the jam.
‘I will go home now,’ she said, draining her cup. ‘Come to the farm if you want more rhubarb.’
‘Thank you.’
Following her back into the house, Flora wondered for the first time whether Francine Abelard’s interest in her life was entirely what she wanted.
39
Kitty was still sound asleep when Lou woke, her limbs cast recklessly akimbo and her face blank and sweet in repose. Lou’s back was horribly stiff, but despite the discomfort of being squeezed into half a single bed it had been consoling, when she woke in the night, to find Kitty beside her. To be needed, and not alone.
She slipped quietly out of the room, imagining herself the first person up and feeling a tingle of anticipation about the day ahead. But as she entered the kitchen she heard voices in the garden, and after a moment Flora appeared with another woman, tall and dark and unfamiliar.
‘Lou!’ said Flora. ‘You’re up early. This is my friend Francine Abelard.’
‘Bonjour.’ Lou held out her hand, glad that she was wearing her most decorous pyjamas.
‘Vous parlez Français?’
‘I learned it at school,’ Lou said. ‘Je parle un petit peu.’
‘The same as your mother.’ Francine smiled. ‘I must go home now. We have guests this evening and I have to prepare.’
‘Your English is excellent,’ Lou said. ‘I can see why my mother hasn’t learned any French.’
Francine shrugged, and Lou thought how unexpected it was that Flora had befriended a real Frenchwoman, shrugs and all. How unexpected all of this was, really.
‘Good morning,’ her mother said, as the front door shut behind Francine. They hugged awkwardly – a more familiar embrace than last night’s. ‘There’s coffee in the pot, if you . . .’
‘I’ll make some tea, if that’s OK,’ Lou said.
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