Come Away With Me

by Sara MacDonald

  ‘Did the lorry driver die?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. A cyclist and two pedestrians were also badly injured.’

  There is silence in the room. Danielle and Flo are sitting on the arms of Tom’s chair beside me. It does not feel real. None of this seems real. Flo gets up and goes into the kitchen to help the policewoman. I think how old she looks.

  I stare at the policeman. ‘Where are they? Where are my husband and child?’

  He swallows and cannot answer me, and I grow cold as ice. ‘Do you know?’ I whisper to him. ‘My husband survived the war in Iraq. He survived Northern Ireland and Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan and I have no idea where else. For all those years I was terrified he would be killed and he dies with my child, in a traffic accident, when he was supposed to be safe.’

  The policeman’s face changes. He walks towards me. ‘Mrs Holland, which regiment was your husband with?

  ‘He’s with the SAS. He was on leave…’

  The policeman wheels away from me and leaves the room. He calls out something to the policewoman, then he is running down the stairs and out of the front door to the police car. Danielle and I look at each other. We get up and go to the window. The policeman is holding his car radio, gesturing with his arms.

  The policewoman moves out of the kitchen, talking urgently into her radio phone. As she too runs down the stairs I hear the words: ‘Alert all units. Tell forensics…Special Forces…Bomb…’

  It is the moment I know for sure. I go back to Tom’s chair and look around our sitting room with its elegant fireplace and high ceilings. I examine closely the beautiful cornices Tom and I painted together.

  I understand, what I already suspected in some part of me, as soon as I heard all the sirens, as soon as Tom and Rosie did not come home. It is not a bomb in some foreign land that has killed Tom, but a bomb here in London, a few miles from me, when he had my child with him.

  I wish I had gone with them this morning. I wish I had died with Tom and Rosie. I wish we had all died together.

  SIXTY-SIX

  We sit huddled together as the house fills with plain-clothes policemen and army personnel. They go over our home inch by inch. They dissect the phone, make lists of all the people who enter and leave this place.

  An army doctor comes and gives me some pills. I won’t go to bed. I curl up in Tom’s chair and Flo brings me a rug. It is like seeing everything from the wrong end of a telescope. I hear, from a long way away, Danielle and Flo being asked endless and repeated questions about the car and the garage; about Tom’s movements that morning. It seems to me pointless.

  Danielle lights a fire and we spend the night in front of it, close together for comfort, our chairs in a circle as men come and go around us, as if the house belonged to them. It goes silent for a while. Danielle and Flo sleep. As it gets light I get out of my chair and weave dizzily to the bathroom. There are two policewomen in the kitchen.

  I splash cold water on my face and move back on to the landing, holding on to the walls.

  One of the policewomen comes out of the kitchen. ‘Are you all right, love?’

  All right? I nod.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ she says.

  I walk back into the sitting room, open the curtains a little and look down into the road. There is a policeman guarding the front of the house. What do they think is going to happen?

  Then I see that at the end of the road there are television cameras and a mass of photographers camped behind police tape. I go back to my chair and curl into it with my head under the rug. Tom’s death is news. An off-duty soldier is murdered in London with his child on a summer’s afternoon.

  I shake my head to release me from the image of Rosie in the car. I moan and beg God to take the image from me. It is not bearable. I will not be able to bear it. My tiny innocent Rosie.

  Flo looks old in sleep. Danielle looks sallow and ill. I notice her angular thinness. The three of us will never be the same again. Our lives have been taken from us. I drink my tea, sleepless, my eyes heavy and dry. It is still early when the regimental army padre who married us arrives.

  Suddenly, running up the stairs comes Damien, Rosie’s godfather. I know immediately that he and Tom must have been working together. I run to the door and he catches me up and rocks with me in the thin grey morning of another day. He cannot speak and neither can I.

  I cling to him. He is big and solid and safe. ‘Why? Why Tom, Damien?’ I whisper.

  He lets me go. ‘I don’t know. Tom was always incredibly careful. Something went wrong. We’ll find out who is responsible. No one is going to rest until we’ve got them. Maisie is on her way. She’ll stay with you as long as you need her.’

  ‘You really don’t know?’

  His voice breaks. ‘I really don’t know.’

  Everyone tries to stop me watching the news or seeing the papers full of the blown-up car and the pictures of Tom and Rosie alive and well. How do they get these pictures? I look down at the other people who died too, merely because they happened to be passing at that moment.

  As the days pass, I can only wonder at the sheer cruelty of fate that prevented me from dying too. The three of us should have been together. I think constantly of how I can put this right. It keeps me occupied. It keeps me sane.

  Hundreds of flowers have been placed at the roadside where Tom and Rosie died and I brave the cameras to go with Flo and Danielle to look. I am touched by the small bunches placed by children with sweet and simple messages. I recognise the names, too, of the Muslim girls in the workroom. I crouch behind my sunglasses reading them.

  The lorry driver’s wife writes to me. She tells me that her husband was once a soldier who did his time in Northern Ireland. The irony of his death does not escape her.

  I have so many touching letters from army wives and mothers who have lost their husbands or sons. They write poignantly from the heart and I don’t feel quite so alone. The army close ranks round me and protect me night and day from the persistent and merciless press. It is something they do well. It is as if, for a short while, the world mourns with me in shock and breathes in my grief.

  The house is stilled of laughter and of small pattering footsteps. The girls in the workroom no longer play their music. I need to keep working but when they see me their gentle faces fill with sorrow. Each day there is a small gift left for me in my office.

  The trees begin to lose their leaves in the London parks. There is the smell of bonfires as winter crouches round the corner. Life grinds on in a strange faraway existence. Neither the police nor the army know yet who placed the bomb under Tom’s car. They do not know or they cannot tell me. Suicide bombers are easier to identify by group. A home-made bomb under a car could be almost anyone.

  The world moves on. Another tragedy happens to someone else.

  I watch Flo’s grief but cannot help her. She gave up her flat and her privacy to move in with Tom and me and help me with Rosie. We are her family. She loves us all unconditionally. I watch her stifle her anguish; hear her walking about at night; see her diminished and lost by their deaths.

  Danielle’s refuge is in an anger she cannot completely hide from me. She is furious with God but she is also furious with Tom because of Rosie. She believes that Tom put Rosie at risk. I don’t know why, but she does. It upsets me, unsettles me. It makes me go to places I do not want to go.

  I sit night after night in the window seat of our bedroom staring out at the night sky. I watch people in the road getting in and out of their cars, going out, doing normal things. The world has not stopped because Tom and Rosie are dead. It is busily going on down there. I feel a strange surprise that this can be so.

  I go into Rosie’s room. I lie on her small bed and see what she saw on first waking: the beautiful French doll within reach; a blue rabbit with a chewed paw; a large fawn bear Tom had bought her; small fabric dolls I had made out of odds and ends.

  On the floor is a beautiful doll’s house that Tom’s parent
s bought for her when they were in London. It is hardly used because Rosie was still too small to manoeuvre the tiny catches. Her small hands were not yet dexterous enough to make the tiny furniture stay upright. Her toys lie scattered on the floor where she left them. Open ‘Mr Men’ books lying on her bean bag. Mrs Tiggy Winkle and Peter Rabbit. Wooden bricks lie in her little cart. I want everything to stay exactly the same, just as she left it. I bend to her duvet and close my eyes and breathe in her warm baby smell, the very essence of Rosie. I see and hear her everywhere in the house.

  Before he leaves to fly back to active duty, I ask Damien the question that keeps going round my head: ‘Could Tom have known there was even the slightest danger that day? I know he checked the car that morning before he put Rosie in it.’

  ‘Tom couldn’t possibly have known he was being watched. He would have stayed well away from you if he had thought there was any danger to you, Rosie, or his household. He was a true professional and he would never have taken risks. He was in London. How many of us would think someone would place a bomb under our car while we are taking our children to the zoo?’

  ‘I know that really. I just had to ask.’

  ‘Doing the job we do carries some risk, Jenny. I check my car every morning, it’s habit, but not every time I get out of it. Do you think we would ever come home if we thought our wives and children were in danger?’ He holds me to him for a moment. ‘Tom was the target, not Rosie. That is the double tragedy and the despicable crime. However careful we are, we cannot prevent betrayal.’

  ‘Is that what it was?’

  ‘With the work we do it’s possible. We’ll find out.’

  I know I cannot ask him more. I do not really want to know.

  I watch him climb into his car and drive away. Apart from Damien, the army part of my life with Tom has gone. However kind people are we will drift apart. The wide street is empty except for curled brown leaves like small dormice blowing hither and thither. I feel as directionless and pointless as those scattering leaves.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  ‘Then you found me,’ Adam said hastily, because Jenny’s face was pale and desolate. He put out his hand and closed it round her arm gently.

  Jenny smiled. ‘Then I found you.’

  Adam turned on his back and closed his eyes. That was his father’s last day on this earth. What had he been doing on the exact day that Tom took Rosie to the zoo? A familiar sorrow started up in him. He turned to Jenny, propping his chin in his hands. ‘Why did the house fill up with policemen? Why were they searching your house?’

  ‘It’s what happens when someone is killed. In Tom’s case they wanted to see if the phone had been tapped. If there was anything in his papers that might give a clue to why someone had put a bomb under his car. They didn’t find anything but it all took a long time because we have so many people working for us. People come and go in that London house all the time and…’

  Adam waited.

  ‘Most of the girls who work for us are Muslim. It was awful for them, Adam, they all had to be investigated, all their families. Not one of them left us. Not one of them complained or was bitter. It was humbling.’

  Adam nodded. No wonder Jenny had been strange when he first met her. No wonder she had nearly gone mad with grief when she saw him.

  ‘I don’t want you to dwell on Tom’s death, Adam. I didn’t tell you to make you sad. I told you because we’ve been talking so much about his life and his death is a part of how he lived his life. Darling boy, you’ve helped me so much. You are a part of him and you make me want to go on living, and I am so grateful for having you in my life. But now we move on, together, don’t we?’

  Adam nodded.

  Jenny looked at her watch. ‘I need to sleep for a while. It’s your home study day, isn’t it, so you must work and practise. Then I shall take you into St Ives and buy you and Harry fish and chips. We won’t talk of Tom’s death again. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Adam knew Jenny meant him to get up and go to his own bed but he could not leave her. She turned over away from him and pulled her knees up to her chin with a tired little sigh. Adam looked at her mass of curly hair on the pillow and felt strangely choked. She was so small. He wanted to stay guard in case she needed him.

  He slid down the bed and lay still. After a while he thought she was silently crying. Unsure how to comfort her, he turned away, moving slightly towards the middle of the bed so that she could feel the warmth of his back. Then they both slept.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Danielle telephoned me as she ran to catch a flight to Paris with Ruth. ‘I must warn you, Jen. Antonio rang me to ask if there was any chance of you meeting him in London. I told him no chance. I think, maybe he plans to come down to see you in Cornwall.’

  My heart jumped. ‘Danielle, did you make it clear…?’

  ‘Yes, I made it quite clear. I do not think he has any intention of pressurising you. I have to go now.’ Danielle’s words jumped as she ran.

  ‘We—are—back—tomorrow—night. Be—nice—to—Antonio, Jenny.’

  I went out into the garden to feed the birds. I wished now that I had never let Danielle take my sketches to show Antonio. I did not want the outside world coming in. I wanted life to roll gently on in just the way it was doing. I had my own plans.

  The morning was heavy with grey cloud. The days were winter short and melancholy. I turned and went back into the house. When the phone rang I knew it would be Antonio. He asked if he could fly down to see me for a day. I had had time to think about what I was going to say. ‘Antonio, I don’t want you to waste your time. I have no intention of working seriously.’

  ‘You think these designs I have in my hand are not serious? I do not come to put pressure on you, merely to talk for a few hours if you would be so kind as to grant me your time.’

  I could hear the amusement in his voice. For Danielle’s sake I could not be churlish. I told him I had to be at Newquay airport on Friday to put Adam on the plane to Gatwick. I could meet him on the incoming flight, if that wasn’t too early.

  He assured me it was perfect. It would give us time to talk and he would return to London in the evening. I heaved a sigh of relief. One whole day was not too bad an invasion.

  It was half-term and Ruth was taking Adam to Birmingham. They were meeting Peter, who was there for a conference. Peter had booked for a concert by the visiting London Philharmonic and Adam was over the moon. He was looking forward to seeing Peter and I was glad. He was also secretly excited to be flying on his own.

  We stood together at the tiny airport at Newquay waiting for the passengers to disembark from the incoming flight. Antonio was as distinctive as some exotic animal as he walked across the tarmac.

  Adam grinned. ‘He looks very Italian. How long is he staying?’

  ‘He’s only here for the day.’ I hugged him. ‘Listen, you, have a good time. See you next week. Take care. Stay put when you get to Gatwick so Ruth doesn’t miss you.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll ring you, Jenny. I’ll tell you what I’m doing.’ He ran backwards, laughing, then shot off after a trail of passengers and I turned to greet Antonio.

  He beamed at me. ‘It is so good to see you again. You are lovely as ever.’

  He kissed both my cheeks and we walked to the car.

  ‘So, this is where you bury yourself at the end of England.’

  ‘Afraid so. It’s good of you to come.’

  ‘It is my pleasure.’

  Antonio was quiet as we drove back to the house. He looked out of the window with interest but he did not prattle or try to talk business. It was still early and as we reached the causeway the sea on our right was a rough royal blue against a dramatic sky. He sighed, leaning forward to gaze at the flash of coastline.

  We turned for the Saltings. There was a flood tide and as I stopped outside the house seabirds called out into a day shiny and fresh from early rain. Antonio stood silently facing the swollen water, listening, seemi
ngly captivated. I felt myself warming to him.

  Once inside the house I felt suddenly awkward. Antonio smiled at me as he took in the small rooms. ‘This is charming, Jenny. I am beginning to understand your need to be here in this little house by the water, full of small calling birds and changing sky. This is the place for an artist.’

  We smiled at each other. ‘I’ll put the coffee on. If you want to wash your hands or anything, it’s just through there.’

  I set out breakfast in the kitchen and worried about the strength of the coffee. We sat opposite each other eating croissants and Antonio amused me with stories of mutual acquaintances in the fashion world. I thought as he only had one day in Cornwall I would take him in to St Ives—in summer it was a little like the Amalfi coast. And I could see if James or Bea wanted to join us for lunch. I might run out of things to say to Antonio by then.

  After breakfast we moved into the sitting room and Antonio got out my designs from a beautiful pale pigskin case. ‘Your belts and bags. I can sell unlimited numbers of these, I assure you.’

  I took him into the tiny conservatory and showed him some belts I had made the previous week. Flo had sent down some of my tools by parcel post and the sheer pleasure of using my hands again had taken me by surprise. I took a breath and turned to him. ‘I’ve met a little group of artists and we’ve formed a small co-operative to sell our work in Cornwall. The talent down here is amazing. Many of the artists and craftsmen sell worldwide, but choose to live and work down here. There is some prodigious talent, young, as yet unknown, painters, ceramicists, glass blowers, potters. The jewellery is exquisite.’

  Antonio was listening intently.

  ‘I decided to join them, partly to test the market, but also I wanted to discover local people who could make up my designs. These belts and bags are young and seasonal. Next year they will be last year.’

  ‘But in Italy they can be next year. So from where do you sell? Where is your shopfront?’