by Eve Chase
I brush off leaves from my jeans. ‘I’m fine, really. Just a bit embarrassed.’ But I do feel tender inside, wrung out, like after a good weep. ‘If you could just direct me back to the village, I’d be very grateful. My car’s parked there.’
‘Sure. Back up the lane then …’ He pauses and frowns. I suspect my dragged-through-the-hedge-backwards hair might be giving off mixed messages. And it’s starting to rain, falling in fat splatters. ‘Look, I was just about to drive into Hawkswell. Do you want a lift?’
I hesitate. Was he really about to drive to the village or is he a psychopathic opportunist? I decide that serial killers probably don’t wear beautiful shirts with stripy yellow cuffs. Screw it. I’ll take my chances.
‘Nice car,’ I say, strapping on the seatbelt. A vintage pea-green Porsche convertible, roof rolled up.
‘I think so.’ The car revs deliciously. ‘My husband bought it for my fiftieth.’
Typical. ‘Nice husband.’
He laughs.
I decide I like him a lot, in the immediate gut instinct way you can do with strangers sometimes. ‘Thank you …?’
‘Teddy,’ he shouts, over the growling engine as we zoom down the lane in a whirl of leaves and rain. ‘My name’s Teddy. Hold tight.’
46
Rita, March 1972
Six months on, Rita’s last journey from Foxcote still plays over in her mind: the clunk of the taxi door; the whirl of the first gingery leaves down the lane; the big house receding, until it was swallowed by the trees. Like it had never existed. The sickening, lightening relief of escape.
By then five long days had passed since Don had died, and hours of circular questioning by the local police, who wouldn’t let any of them leave Foxcote. She wished she’d known then that those constables would later be heavily criticized for their bungling of the case. At the time she was terrified, the possibility that she might be sacrificed to save the Harringtons’ reputation never far from her mind.
As she’d once yearned to be at the heart of the Harrington household, she was now desperate to struggle free of it. A family could be the least safe of places, she knew that now, not the harbour she’d idolized since she was a child. In the end, you had to rely on yourself.
As the slow, anxious hours ticked past, she began to see, with thumping clarity, how she’d been sucked into the Harringtons’ world – drawn by an irrational longing for her own mother, a family of her own – and lost her bearings. She tried to explain this to the policewoman. But she’d listened with narrowing eyes, taking rapid-fire notes. Rita, scared that she was somehow incriminating herself, was quickly silenced.
A couple of days after Don died, a woman from social services wearing a boxy grey coat arrived. She plucked the baby from the trug on the kitchen floor, as if she were a lettuce. When Rita begged her to wait, or at least say where the baby was going, Walter hurried the woman out of the door. That night Rita tucked the Babygros under her pillow, just as Jeannie had once done, and inhaled their milky sweetness.
She couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two. Neither could anyone else. She’d go downstairs at night and often find Hera rummaging through the larder. Or Teddy padding around in his pyjamas, confused, asking where his mother was.
Everything felt shattered, just like the terrarium: Walter shoved its Don-wrecked remains into the dustbin and bashed it down with a stick for good measure, as if the little glass case was responsible for it all, which, in a way, it was.
But Rita still crept back to the bin once Walter had gone, defiantly pulled out Dot and Ethel and secretly planted them in the loamy garden bed by the gate. She knew it didn’t matter how mangled a plant’s leaves were: if the roots were still there, they had a chance. And this thought comforts her. Children are not unlike plants, she thinks.
Rita wonders what Hera and Teddy are doing on this cold March morning, as thick grey fog rolls over the Hackney rooftops and she shivers in her bedsit. No fat on her now to keep her warm, she’s all angles – how the model agency likes it – jutting hip bones and tight skin.
She’s been banned from ever trying to contact the family again – a court order, Walter said. The officiousness of such a thing terrifies her, even if she doesn’t understand it. Hating the thought of the children feeling abandoned, at Christmas she’d risked a short letter to the Primrose Hill house, addressed to Hera, with her new London details – the bedsit in Hackney, with a cantankerous landlady called Mrs Catton, blind in one eye, who knocks on the wall if she turns on the radio – but it was returned unopened, ‘Unknown at this address.’ Shamefully, she was relieved. At least Walter hadn’t intercepted and read it.
She likes to think that Hera and Teddy, through the force of some as yet unknown physics, are aware she’s thinking of them as she stands in chilly workshops, seamstresses pinning fabric around her slender body. But Baby Forest … No, the baby is too painful to think about, although that doesn’t stop her doing so. All the time. Where is she? Not knowing the baby’s whereabouts or fate torments her.
The missing is so physical, a whiplash of pain, she struggles not to cry out. Rita misses her damp, dense weight, the pad of her palm, her musical oohs and aahs, the way she’d nuzzle her wet face into her neck, and those glossy dark eyes always following her around the room. She must have changed so much by now. Sitting up. On solids. Trying to crawl? No. Mustn’t go there.
She’s tried to follow the story in the news but there was only one mention of Baby Forest, appealing for her mother to come forward, and many more of Don’s death. She’s stored some of the articles in the suitcase under her bed, cutting out photos of the family so she doesn’t forget their faces. But it’s been hard to know what to believe. One tabloid implied Don had taken his own life, revealing staggering debts and rumours he was being hunted down by unforgiving East End gangsters. (Marge was quoted: ‘He was a shady character. He was trouble.’) While in the Daily Telegraph’s obituary, Don was described as ‘A charismatic polymath, raconteur and man of the world – the very best of Etonians.’ Soon the story vanished, superseded by some new horror in Northern Ireland. A couple of months later a footnote in The Times announced that there hadn’t been enough evidence to charge anyone in connection with Don’s death. The case remained open. It was, the reporter said, a mystery: there was some ambiguity over whether the fatal bullet matched the suspected gun. Jeannie Harrington was of unsound mind and recovering in an institution, her confession not backed up by hard evidence. Who else had been in the woods that night? the reporter asked. Then: Is this yet another hush-up by the elite classes? Of course it was! Rita had little doubt. Walter – with his winking portly male friends in high places – would have done everything he could to make the story go away. It was bad for business. She also knew he’d been a suspect initially and had suffered the indignity of being taken ‘down to the station’ to account for his whereabouts – until his hot-shot London lawyers had got involved.
In those strange dazed days at Foxcote after Don died, Rita was astonished that Walter didn’t blame Jeannie for any of this, not even the affair, which he persisted in seeing as a symptom of an illness, something that would be cured. He refused to believe she had it in her to shoot Don, and told the policewoman so, slowly and loudly, as if she were slightly deaf. (He preferred ‘dealing with the chap’.) No, it was easier to blame Rita, not for the murder, although he would if he could, but everything else. She’d ‘conspired’ with Don, he’d hissed, ripping out the damningly blank pages from the notebook and tossing them across the garden, where they’d whirled in the wind, catching on the trees like doves. He never mentioned Baby Forest: it was as if she’d never been there. He was devastated about Don’s death – she’d hear him sobbing in the library, muttering his name. ‘My oldest friend would still be alive if you’d told me what was going on earlier,’ he’d say. ‘And my wife would be here. You stupid girl.’ Part of her knew this to be true. In her determination to do everything right, she’d got it all wrong. But she’d a
lso started to realize that the Harringtons’ fateful course was plotted before she’d even joined the family. Jeannie’s dissatisfaction in her marriage – and that gilded domestic life – had been the force that had set things in motion, as an exhaled sigh can make the delicate trees on Robbie’s mobile start to turn.
It wore her down, gnawed at her, not knowing who’d fired the gun. She kept changing her mind. Hera believed she’d shot him, albeit accidentally. So was Jeannie protecting Hera, her love for her daughter trumping her passion for Don? She hoped so. Then she thought of the ripe bruise Don’s fist had left under Jeannie’s eye. Jeannie’s readiness to bury him in the forest, fodder for the worms and fungi and larvae. And she wondered.
When the police finally allowed her to leave the area, Walter gave her twenty minutes’ notice before the taxi arrived. All she could do was pack what she could grab, and hug the children one last time. She thought about diverting to Robbie’s house but realized she had no idea where it was – ‘Maybe that way, through the trees?’ wasn’t really an address, as the cabbie kindly pointed out. She didn’t have Robbie’s telephone number. Did he even have a phone? And why would he want to say goodbye? She’d caused him enough damage. He’d emerged from the police cells with a shiner and a broken rib, apparently. ‘The cops would pin it on him if they could,’ Marge had confided. ‘Close the case quickly. Keep Walter Harrington and all his lawyers sweet. You know, Rita, it’d be better if you don’t contact him again,’ she’d advised protectively. ‘He needs to stay out of it, love.’
Rita was glad she didn’t have his address. Otherwise she might have given in to temptation and selfishly knocked at his door, just to see him one last time. At least they’d had that magical night. She’s sure most people live entire lifetimes and never experience anything close.
Seeking what’s left of him, she kneels down on the bare boards, avoiding the exposed rusty nails, and pulls her suitcase from under the bed. The leaves he gave her that summer, parcelled in paper, are in a bit of a state now, dried and powdery, shattered to just the stem, like fish bones. But she can still read the handwritten tags – ash, birch, elm … – and likes to do so most days.
The mobile he made is also carefully stored, wrapped in a pair of old tights. She took that for Baby Forest, vowing one day to find her and return it so she’ll know there was once a man kind and skilled enough to make that just for her, as a father would, that she was once indulged and treasured, like every other baby in the world.
Peeling back the hosiery, she strokes her index finger over the delicate tiny trees, then collects herself – she can’t risk tears or a puffy face today: she’s got a casting. Pushing the box back under the bed, she thinks of Jeannie, who hid precious things under her bed once too, and how we all hide the tender bits of ourselves. They feel safer like that. And it’s often the only place they fit.
She’s pretty sure the landlady, Mrs Catton, has rummaged through the rest of her things, searching for contraband. (‘No alcohol. No smoking. No male visitors. No hot bath deeper than six inches.’) It was definitely a mistake to tell her she was modelling to pay the rent.
Anyway, she could hardly have applied for another nanny job, even if she’d wanted to. Modelling has been an unlikely godsend.
She’d been doing twelve-hour days waitressing in a restaurant in Mayfair when the woman from the agency tapped her on the shoulder with a French-polished fingernail. Had she ever considered modelling? She’d thought it was a cruel joke at first. But the woman wasn’t laughing: she was sizing up her newly skinny figure, all bones since she’d lost her appetite. Nothing puts you off food like working with it and she didn’t feel she deserved nice things any more. Suspecting the woman needed her eyes tested, Rita took the stiff cream card and used it as a bookmark for at least a month. The idea that she could model was absurd. Models were beautiful. She was plain. She’d always been plain. Apart from that night with Robbie, when she’d felt like a goddess. In the end, though, curiosity – and money – got the better of her.
Now she earns more in five hours than she did as a waitress in twelve. For the first time in her life her height is an asset. Her body is on her side. She’s found it reassuring and empowering to meet other towering girls with size-nine feet, girls you wouldn’t necessarily call pretty either. No one’s laughing at them now. ‘It’s a “look”,’ as the agency woman says, puffing on her cigarette. And one she no longer minds so much.
The work consists mostly of behind-the-scenes fitting model stuff. It was mortifying at first, standing there in her underwear, until she realized she was simply a mannequin, and her thoughts her own. And she liked the brisk, matronly seamstresses, their precision and industry, their light, cool fingers, the maternal way they talk to her sometimes. Her scars mean she can’t do catwalk, although there’s one photographer – dead famous, sounds like a market stallholder – who is desperate to photograph her naked and record the scars, ‘like tribal markings’. But she feels strongly that they are her story, not his, and she stubbornly won’t do it, much to the frustration of the agency. The last thing she wants is fame. Just money. Independence. Never to be reliant on a man like Walter Harrington again. Any man actually. Soon she’ll have saved enough to put down a deposit on a flat of her own. Beyond this, she can’t imagine. There’s a fog in her brain, like the one over the city today, where her old plans and enthusiasms and the future used to be. She wonders what advice her mother, Poppy, might give, if she were alive. And the wondering makes her feel sad and cheated.
The landlady’s distinct three-knuckled rap.
Rita tenses. The old bat. ‘Yes?’
Mrs Catton shoves open the door. Her working eye rolls around the room, checking for signs of disrepute. The other, milky and blank, stares straight ahead. She takes a puff of her cigarette – ‘a landlady’s prerogative’ – and steps over the threshold. Rita hates the invasion. It always takes her a few minutes to reinhabit the room after she’s left. ‘I’ve told you the rules, Rita.’
‘You have,’ Rita says coolly. Even her voice sounds older and deeper now: she’s grown up fast. A few months ago, she’d have been hopping about trying to ingratiate herself. She won’t any more. Not after her experience with the Harringtons. The meek don’t inherit the earth. She’s no longer scared to take up space. ‘But I don’t believe I’ve broken any, Mrs Catton.’
The landlady exhales a yellowy twist of Rothmans. ‘Not yet.’
Rita frowns, fighting irritation. ‘I’m not following, sorry.’
‘No male visitors,’ the landlady barks. The puff of breath is putrid.
‘I have had no visitors, male or female, since I moved in, and don’t intend to. Now, if you don’t mind, Mrs Catton, I’ve got to get myself ready for work …’
Mrs Catton glances over the hunched bulkhead of her shoulder into the dark communal stairwell, the cigarette balancing between her lips. ‘Well, there’s a fella at the door. I can’t get rid of him. Says he has news about some baby.’
47
Hera, now
A cloud of melon vape hangs like the ghost of a fruit salad in the hall. I flap it away with my hands. ‘What is that dreadful stuff? I preferred it when you smoked like a power station, Edie.’
‘Darling, you think I don’t? But times have changed. And so have I.’ Edie stuffs the vape machine – it looks unsettlingly like a pistol – into her handbag. ‘Thanks for an impeccable cup of Earl Grey. Better shoot. On a deadline.’
I eye my aunt dubiously, suspecting she’s making excuses to leave and escape the conversation and all my angsting. ‘Really? You haven’t got your deadline face on.’
Brow furrowed. Bottom lip bitten. The metallic clatter of typewriter keys. I grew up with all of that. Edie was preoccupied a lot of the time. She’d ask me and Teddy about our homework but wouldn’t listen to our answers – she was thinking about her writing. ‘The rabbit did it for me,’ I said once, as a test, and she said absently, ‘Great work, darling,’ and banged out another
line of copy. But when the article was finished, she’d always bundle us on to the top of a bus for ice-cream sundaes in Hyde Park or lunch in Piccadilly. We loved those days. But I haven’t tasted ice-cream for over twenty years. Or taken the bus in five. Or the tube. Not when the city grows more violent by the day. The flu strains more virulent. And the panic attacks that started after my husband died – and I lost my last buffer against the past – became harder to disguise. Without him, I feel peeled, shucked, vulnerable to every shove and cough. Since the latest family drama kicked off – I mean, when will it end? – I can feel the rev of panic again, the fear that I might unravel like my mother.
‘Well, not a deadline exactly. But I’m extremely busy.’ Edie looks worryingly pleased with herself and waits for me to ask about the source of her latest busyness.
‘What with?’ I ask, dutifully playing along.
Her lips twitch into a smile. ‘Setting up an Instagram account.’
‘Heavens. What on earth about?’
‘My news-mag years. Feminism. Fashion. I’m going to turn myself into a national treasure.’ She grins and rattles the chunky resin bangles on her wrist. ‘Hell, why not?’
I stare at her for a moment, my withered, tiny, bright-eyed aunt, framed against the Colefax & Fowler foliate wallpaper, like an exotic bird. ‘I’m going to put that on your gravestone. “Here lies Edie Harrington, who looked at the world and asked, ‘Hell, why not?’”’
She giggles. ‘I doubt it. Since I’ll outlive you, vaping my melon sorbet. Now if you don’t mind …’ She brushes past me, trailing the sharp citric men’s cologne she’s always worn.
I feel a mix of affection and neediness, as I always do when she leaves, and an urge to hug her, which I never act upon. Most people I’ve hugged in my life have either died or disappeared. But Edie and I understand each other, and that’s enough. She knows she saved my life.