by F. G. Cottam
I called Ruthie.
‘It isn’t me you have to convince, Mr. A. It’s your wife, and soon.’
‘You think my wife makes the decisions?’
‘Of course she does. That’s why you react in the way you do to my squalid habits and doughy heart.’
‘There’s nothing remotely squalid about you.’
‘Confront your wife. Get your daughter away while there’s time.’
I put the Barrett journal on the kitchen table next to a half-finished lampshade Katie was doing in a new fabric she’d sourced in Bembridge. A holiday did not diminish in any way her will to work. I made tea, though I wanted something stronger and waited for them to return from their bike ride.
When they eventually did, Molly silently climbed the stairs to her room. There was no sign of the limp that had so often in the past and so painfully impeded her as she ascended the steps. I was reminded briefly of Ollie Taplow and staircase building, of the going as the carpenters call it, and the rise. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Katie pick up the Barrett account and frown briefly over Ruthie’s fly-leaf post-it note. Then she tucked it under her arm and took it outside to read it on the deck at the rear of the house, by the late light of the descending sun.
She made no comment when she came back in, just over an hour later.
I went up to check on Molly. By now it was eight in the evening. No mention had been made of dinner and I assumed they must have eaten theirs at Blackgang. As I climbed the stairs I began to hear my daughter singing. She was singing softly, her tone husky and the register low. I didn’t know the melody and the words to the song made no sense to me because though I recognised it as such, I’ve never learned German.
The song stopped abruptly. She was seated on her bed when I entered her room, brushing her hair, which I saw was becoming straighter, less wavy than I always remembered it in my mind’s eye. That can happen naturally, I know. It also looked tawnier, less blonde than I recalled seeing it, but that could have been the late light and lengthening shadows, just the muted hues of approaching evening.
‘Hello, Molly,’ I said.
‘Good evening, Papa.’
Was there something slyly ironic in her tone, some subtle hint of mockery or contempt? That could have been my imagination. I didn’t think it was, though.
Quietly, I said, ‘How would you describe yourself?’
‘Golly, that’s a deep one,’ she said.
‘I’d appreciate an answer,’ I said.
She continued to stroke her hair with the brush. It had the lustre of dark honey. ‘I’m a work in progress,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what all of us are?’
I thought about this. I looked at her on the bed, poised and unblinking, brushing her hair metronomically, cold, detached and strange. I turned away to leave the room.
‘I’m a ghost,’ she said. And I knew that behind me she was smiling now.
I felt the hairs lift and stiffen at the back of my neck and a cold shudder ran through me. I’d asked for an answer and couldn’t deny that she’d given me one. I stood at the top of the stairs, staring down, my legs as stiff as stilts and my heart punching its way through my chest wall. Two words where whispered then from my rear, Molly’s voice; light, authentic, fraught and so faint they were barely audible.
‘Help me.’
Katie was standing in the kitchen, looking out of the window, both hands cradling a large wine glass. She breathed an oaky aroma into the room when she spoke. ‘Where did the journal come from?’
‘You’re concerned about its provenance?’
‘I’m curious.’
‘It was with the Barrett paintings. A carpenter stole and later returned it.’
‘And you believe it.’
I glanced back towards the sitting room and the stairs. ‘I believe every word of it.’
‘What do you propose we do?’
‘We leave,’ I said, ‘now.’
She shook her head. ‘You can leave, Michael. We’re staying. Molly is getting better.’
‘She’s changing.’
‘Children are chameleons. They’re constantly changing reflections of what they see and read and hear. You know that.’
‘This particular chameleon is a natural at tennis.’
‘And Blanche Underwood had a monopoly on tennis talent? Six weeks ago Molly would have struggled to play for five minutes and this morning she was well enough to play for two hours and you want us to just give that up?’
‘What about what you’ve just read, Katie?’
My wife raised the glass to her mouth between both hands. They were shaking. She gulped wine. She said, ‘How far would the conspiracy have to reach for it to be true? Are English Heritage complicit for luring you to the island when they gave you the commission?’
‘You don’t believe any of it?’
‘The Jericho Society was bad news, I suppose why all trace of their occupation of this spot is gone. What I don’t believe for a moment is that they were capable of magic. Arthur Sedley Barrett was demented with grief when they came to pester him into painting something tasteless for them. He was vulnerable, gullible and easily fooled.’
‘Molly is changing,’ I said again. I knew that tears were trickling down my face and that my wife would see them only as signs of my weakness and irrationality. ‘I think she’s fighting it, but she’s only nine years old and she’s losing.’
Katie looked at me. She took a deep, controlling breath. Her pupils were huge and she looked too furious to articulate speech. But she did speak. She said, ‘What’s happening to our daughter is miraculous. I’m not going to jeopardise her health and happiness because a sick cult got up to some blasphemous mischief here almost a century ago. Wake up and smell the coffee, Michael. We’re staying put.’
It didn’t matter. Not really, it didn’t, I suddenly, elatedly realised. The new school term began in a few more days and we’d all be leaving anyway. There was no point risking my marriage in an incendiary row on a point of principle when we’d so soon be out of there. I thought Molly would be Molly again in London, returned to us, come safely back.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Katie said. ‘But we’re staying on the island, in this house, in our new home. I made the calls and got Molly into a good school in Niton while I was away in London. They’re a bit daunted by her health challenges, but those are becoming less of an issue with every passing day.’
‘It’s nice of you to tell me.’
She drank some more wine. She said, ‘Someone has to take the important decisions. God knows they can’t be left to you.’
Was I unhappy at the implosion of our marriage? I wasn’t in truth all that surprised. Katie’s assumed air of superiority had always lurked like an unspoken threat. Ruthie Gillespie had rightly sensed that. It was why I’d become so comfortable with Ruthie, chaotically gorgeous, nothing calculated or planned in advance.
I could smell the familiar, lemony scent of Katie’s expensive perfume. I stole a glance and beneath the anger emanating off her saw her slender shape and honeyed halo of hair and the lovely eyes I’d been enchanted by since our very first encounter. I saw the manicured hands that had held mine; the tender lips I’d so often kissed, pictured the velvet down at the warm nape of her neck. All of these aspects of her I treasured and made what was about to happen seem unendurable.
Thinking that the gloves were off, got nowhere near the actuality. This wasn’t a moment or a predicament that could be domesticated or normalized. It was deadlier and more profound than that. Truer to say I looked down at the void then, and stepped off the precipice. My love for my daughter gave me no honest choice.
I said, ‘You think this house idyllic. You think everything here picture-postcard perfect. But I met someone a few days before you and Molly arrived here, someone I thought could help me find out what was here before I had it built. On the evening of the day I met her, she rang and propositioned me. She asked me to go and meet her and I said no. Fifteen
minutes later, she arrived outside that door. I slept with her in the bedroom I’d built and furnished for us, though I don’t honestly recall there being all that much sleep involved.’
Shock fought with incredulity on my wife’s face.
I said, ‘She’s real enough. It’s her initials on the post-it note on the inside cover of the Barrett journal.’
‘Followed by the kisses,’ Katie said, her voice empty of feeling.
I’ve heard that old expression about the scales falling from someone’s eyes and always thought it metaphorical until seeing it happen in reality that night. There was no scene, no screaming or recrimination, just quiet finality and a steely, evasive gaze as my wife swiftly re-imposed her habitual composure upon herself. She packed a few essentials into a solitary bag and then went and got Molly and they left the house.
I got only a brief, parting glimpse of my daughter, who looked sleepy and confused, bundled into a onesie and the bulk over that of a down-filled coat. She was holding onto Thumper, her bedraggled grey rabbit, her favourite cuddly toy since his liberation from a charity shop a year earlier. He was squeezed tight inside her forearm and I took this to be an encouraging sign. A tendency to clutch at straws was another character trait my wife probably despised.
Then they were gone.
They would have to walk the twenty minute route to where we parked the car in Ventnor. They would have to do it in darkness and my daughter had already endured a long and physically arduous day. But the night was bright and the weather calm and to describe her rude departure as the lesser of two evils didn’t even come close. I knew her survival to be at stake and could only pray her mother was getting her away in time. Molly wasn’t leaving. She was being offered an escape.
I didn’t know whether they’d book into a hotel, but doubted it. The island was now a place forever tainted by betrayal and therefore become intolerable to my wife. I thought that despite the wine she’d drunk, Katie would drive to the dock at Fishbourne, where the last of the night’s ferries to Portsmouth didn’t leave until 11.30pm.
I looked around, at everything I’d done for them there and all of it rebuked me. Loss competed in me with honest relief as I roamed through rooms randomly, the silence and emptiness of the place profound and so abrupt it seemed impossible, despite the knowledge that I’d been its willing cause. Its architect, I thought, bitterly. Eventually I gathered myself and went to the kitchen and took a rum bottle from a shelf and poured a large drink, which I drank down in one throat-searing swallow. I went outside, seeking fresh air, the atmosphere in the house rank with recent emotional conflict. And I thought I smelled the sweetish aroma, just for an instant, of a tobacco blend of the rough-cut sort a man might tamp into the bowl of a briar pipe.
But that was surely just fraught nerves, only liquor and imagination.
It is two years, almost to the day, since that evening. The divorce means that my circumstances are now what newspapers commonly refer to as ‘reduced.’ Katie got most of the profit from the sale of our Hammersmith house. I bought a small flat in Surbiton, using when work makes it necessary the fast rail link into London via Waterloo, but relieved really to be living out of the city.
Katie and Molly relocated to Rustington on the West Sussex coast, a quaint and lovely village where their house overlooks the sea and which to my knowledge, harbours no dark secrets. Katie doesn’t need to be in the metropolis for her business to thrive, which it happily continues to do. And having not long had her surgery, somewhere gentle and quiet best suits a not quite 12-year-old girl as she recovers fully from that intrusive ordeal.
I’m not one of those weekend-every-fortnight divorcee dads, for which I have my ex-wife to sincerely thank. I see Molly whenever I want to and before her operation, she would often come to stay. She will again in the future. Her surgeon says her prognosis is excellent and on a personal level, I’m as close to my daughter as I’ve ever been.
There was an imbalance in our marriage. I see that clearly with hindsight. It was never a match of equals. One partner often needs to take the lead when an important decision has to be faced, but it shouldn’t always be the same partner. There was a fundamental lack of trust. I don’t think my wife ever suspected me of adultery, but she didn’t trust me always to be competent. As she said herself, she thought my judgement sometimes wobbly. I only saw the strain that imposed upon us as a pair in retrospect.
I didn’t sleep with Ruthie Gillespie. I might have done, but I didn’t. Saying what I did was the only means I had of getting Katie and with her Molly out of the house for good and if the consequences were costly, I feel the price paid fully justified. My chief regret then and now is the slur made against Ruthie. That was dishonest, wrong and undeserved. But Katie has never asked for the name of whoever owned the initials on the post-it note. I seem to have got away with the lowest and most dishonourable part of what I did, though it’s still troubling my conscience.
Most women, I think, would want to know. But most women don’t possess my former wife’s hauteur. In any internal debate Katie wages between pride and curiosity, there’s only ever going to be one winning outcome.
Peter Clore’s substantial bulk was hauled out of Portsmouth Harbour early in September. The short piece I read about his death implied suicide. Whether it was or it wasn’t, it seemed obvious to me that his life was the price paid for their failure to deliver on an old pledge, not lightly made.
You might wonder what became of our dream home. Katie wanted no part of the proceeds from the sale of somewhere she considered so polluted by deceit. I loaned the keys in the end to a homeless charity. Their hostel dwellers, some of them, get a week there in the season as an incentive for staying sober. I don’t think the location a threat to the fully grown, however vulnerable. In the past it was a place of grotesque darkness. Now it rewards willpower and gives some of those who need it most a sunlit glimpse of hope.
I’ve neither seen nor heard from Ruthie Gillespie since. I wouldn’t rule out doing so in the future, though as the saying goes, don’t hold your breath. After all, she hasn’t made any effort to get in touch again with me. I really liked her. I must have done, because I still find myself thinking about her at some point of every single day. I hope she’s happy and unchanged by what part of it all she endured.
Yesterday, at Great Ormond Street, they showed us a computerised prediction of what the surgery will enable Molly to look like when her features fully mature as she reaches adulthood. And the likeness was so uncanny it made me shiver despite the heat of a sultry August afternoon.
I was delighted to see that when she gets to 18, physically at least, my daughter will be the living image of her beautiful mother.
Francis or F.G. Cottam was born and brought up in Southport in Lancashire, attending the University of Kent at Canterbury where he took a degree in history before embarking on a career in journalism in London. He lived for 20 years in North Lambeth and during the 1990s was prominent in the lad-mag revolution, launch editing FHM, inventing Total Sport magazine and then launching the UK edition of Men’s Health. He is the father of a young son and baby daughter and now lives in Kingston upon Thames. His fiction is thought up over daily runs along the towpath between Kingston and Hampton Court Bridges.
If you’d like to hear more from F.G. Cottam, follow him on twitter, @fgcottam, or check out his Goodreads page;
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ALSO BY F.G. COTTAM
The Colony: Dark Resurrection
The Going and The Rise
An Absence of Natural Light
The Lazarus Prophecy
The Summoning
The Memory of Trees
The Colony
Brodmaw Bay
The Waiting Room
The Magdalena Curse
Dark Echo
The House of Lost Souls
This edition published in 2015 by Ipso Books
Ipso Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd
Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HA
Copyright © F.G. Cottam, 2015
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Contents
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