by Lucy Dawson
‘But presumably tested to make sure the high voice wasn’t down to anything being physiologically wrong with her?’ he interrupts.
I take it back. This one knows his stuff. ‘Yes. She was seen repeatedly by numerous medics over the years. She also suffered from night terrors and was quite socially challenged. I’m worried I missed something I should have seen because I was too busy concentrating on the wrong details, as it turns out.’
‘Oh, no – absolutely not,’ he says emphatically. ‘You didn’t overlook anything. You couldn’t have foreseen this, neither could any of the doctors she saw. The conditions don’t even always show up on an ECG when someone is specifically tested to see if they are a carrier.’
‘It’s genetic then?’
‘If Isobel had any siblings or children, we would now be testing them to see if they had inherited the same condition, yes. That’s the recommendation when there is a sudden death of someone young in the family. Often carriers die in their sleep, like Isobel, but sometimes it happens after more strenuous exercise, or they just collapse.’
‘My husband died when he was young,’ I say suddenly. ‘We had a car crash. I was there. He had significant head injuries but I’ve never been able to determine why he suddenly veered off the road. We were driving at night. I wondered if he’d seen something that I missed because I wasn’t looking out of the windscreen – something that he tried to avoid. That said, we’d also had an argument and for a while I considered that he might have swerved deliberately to get my attention, but he wasn’t really like that – it never made sense. It’s tormented me for years, to be honest,’ I laugh and I can hear the desperation in it. ‘Could he have had a heart attack, like Isobel, only while he was behind the wheel, do you think? Does that sound ridiculous?’
‘Not at all. There is research to suggest SADS carriers are often mistakenly believed to have died from injuries sustained in car accidents, when actually they died suddenly while they were driving and the car subsequently crashed. The opportunity to find a genetic link that other family members could be tested for would then be missed because it would be mistakenly assumed, as possibly in your husband’s case, that he died from his head injuries.’
‘Well, well, well…’ I say slowly, my voice shaking. ‘That would make a lot of sense to me. Can I ask you something else?’
‘Of course,’ he says kindly.
I take a deep breath and, with great difficulty, make a huge effort to hold it together just a little longer. It’s so hard trying to talk factually like this. ‘Isobel didn’t feel cold when I found her in her bed. She wasn’t breathing and felt cool to the touch, but I did CPR. I’m not sure I did it right, although I did the best I could until the ambulance arrived and they took over. I’ve been terrified for the last two weeks that I did something wrong, that she died because I wasn’t skilled enough to save her, and no one is telling me.’ Silent tears begin to course down my cheeks.
‘No, no. No. It wouldn’t have made any difference at all,’ he assures me. ‘She felt cool because she had already died in her sleep; it would have been very peaceful. Her heart would have just stopped.’ He waits as I wipe my eyes and nod. ‘I’m so sorry for the loss of your daughter, Eve. And for your husband.’
‘Thank you,’ I swallow. ‘It’s not the order of things, is it? To have to bury your child.’
‘No, no it isn’t,’ he agrees. ‘It’s not the order of things at all.’
‘But she didn’t suffer, that’s the main thing.’ I blow my nose as Adam sits opposite me at the kitchen table. ‘The last thing she said was that she loved me. She loved you too, Adam.’
He looks up at the ceiling, his eyes full of tears, but doesn’t respond.
‘She really did.’ I genuinely believe that to be true. Although it wasn’t the kind of love he wanted… on her part perhaps more that of a friend, or a brother.
‘I don’t feel like I ever managed to properly save her,’ he says quietly, wiping his face with the heel of his hand. ‘I wanted to, but I didn’t succeed. I should have called him out.’
‘You were a child. Paul Jones was a nasty bully.’
Adam glances at me then looks away.
‘I mean it – what goes around comes around. He got what he deserved.’ I try to calm myself down. ‘Isobel was on the verge of telling me something, I think, the night before she died. She said it was nearly finished. I can’t help thinking it has something to do with Timothy. Particularly as the last message she had on her phone was from him on the night of the fire, asking her to meet him at Fox Cottage, that he knew about the passageway to the other side?’ I shake my head in despair at their willingness to believe such supernatural rubbish. ‘She was already dead by that point, of course. That was when I was at the hospital with her and the police still weren’t letting me tell anyone she’d died while they ruled out foul play.’ I exhale slowly. ‘The night Timothy came here and was very frightened, you were angry. You told me Isobel knew what had “really happened in the house”. What did you mean?’
‘I meant that Isobel knew what was scaring Tim,’ he replies without missing a beat, ‘because it was her. She broke into the house several times after they moved in. She left him newspaper cuttings on the floor, about the shooting. She painted threatening messages over the leaves on Rosie’s cherry tree. She visited them in the night, she took photos of them sleeping, she left a Ouija board in Rosie’s room.’
‘What?’ I am appalled. ‘But why? She told me she was trying to protect them! She made two more dolls. I found them in her bedroom after she died. You know how much store she set by that kind of thing.’ I get up and walk out to the hall, open the drawer and retrieve the little family. The red boy doll, the girl doll – made from Claire’s scarf – and the little baby doll, complete with the glittery hairclip holding back its yellow wool hair. They are all tied together with a red ribbon round their middle. I set them down on the kitchen table and a brief flash of pain passes across Adam’s face. He picks them up and turns them over and over in his hands, before closing his eyes and holding the dolls tightly.
‘I asked her to stop,’ he whispers. ‘I tried to step in. You saw me, and you heard her tell me it was none of my business – that I wasn’t her boyfriend.’
‘You don’t think she had anything to do with the fire, do you, if she was persecuting them like that – trying to make them leave?’ I push the thought of Antony cowering in a smoke-filled room from my mind. Everyone locally is talking about how tragic it is that Antony should lose his life running back into the burning house to rescue the box of things belonging to Claire; the last mementos of her late parents. ‘I know Isobel had already died by the time the fire caught,’ I continue, ‘and the investigation said it was an accident – it was the cardboard box of linseed rags combusting in the barn that started it,’ I pause, watching him, ‘but Isobel would have known all of your flammable oils were in there. She wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint the moment when it would combust, but she could well have set it all up and simply not lived to see the outcome.’ I look searchingly at Adam and he looks away, refusing to hold my gaze. There is a long pause. All I can hear is the ticking of the kitchen clock that I’ve finally got round to hanging, and the whir of the cogs as it gears up to chime. I let it strike three and once the sound has died away, I clear my throat.
‘Even I know you never pile linseed-soaked rags in cardboard boxes,’ I remark. ‘You’ve told me before that they can self-combust. In fact, you stopped using linseed oil for that very reason. You wouldn’t have done something like that, much as I know you hated a certain Mr Vaughan, would you?’
He sits forward and rubs his face with his hand. ‘I did hate him, yes. I can’t deny that.’
‘Now I think about it – it’s very fortunate that Rosie was at her grandparents’ and Tim and Claire weren’t upstairs either, but downstairs, arguing with you. Almost as if great care had been taken to ensure no one would be hurt. Did you start it deliberately, Adam?’ I
whisper. ‘You couldn’t have known Tim’s father would run back in. It was an idiotic thing to do. He should never have risked it. That wasn’t your fault.’
Adam snorts. ‘Why would I start a fire that would burn a year’s worth of my work that I was just about to exhibit?’
‘Why do we do any number of things in the name of revenge, jealousy and love? I gather that now Timothy has no house to live in, the local grapevine has them going back to where they came from. Mary Morgan tells me they’re buying a house in Surrey with Susannah, and once the funeral is over, The Rectory will be going on the market. The Vaughan family will be gone. A job well done, I’d say. Had Isobel lived, your lives would have returned to normal.’ I hold my breath and wait.
He looks straight at me. ‘Claire cleaned and dried the rags I was using. The fire investigator said that was what caused them to combust. The oil doesn’t come out of the material unless you wash it at high temperatures. I don’t see how she could have been expected to know that. There was enough oil still on them to heat up when she put them in the dryer and it began the chemical process of combustion. She put them in the cardboard box, gave them back to me, then they caught properly in the barn.’
He reaches into the pocket of his parka, hanging on the back of the chair he’s sitting on and pulls out a small tin. I watch him open it to reveal a pre-rolled joint. He picks it out, gets to his feet and makes towards the back door, putting the joint to his lips and sparking a lighter he’s retrieved from his pocket.
‘It was an accident,’ he says as it catches and a puff of sweet smoke fills the room. He lets himself out into the garden and closes the door behind him.
After he’s gone, I put the dolls back in the drawer. I’ve bathed them in salt thoroughly, like Izzie told me to. She would have wanted that. They have no connections to anyone any more. They are inanimate objects, yet somehow I cannot bear to throw the little family away.
I return back to the table, in my too-quiet house – just the ticking clock. I allow my eyes to close briefly. I see Fox Cottage burning, as I have in my nightmares of the last two weeks. I swallow and try to think of Antony as I would rather remember him: in my bed, laughing with me, telling me he loved me.
I cannot believe Fox Cottage simply isn’t there any more. I can see every single detail in Isobel’s room. The skylight, the tree, the birds, but I picture her in her new bedroom upstairs, sitting on her bed, telling me how happy she was that Timothy had come home… and now, I’m so glad. I am sorry if the intensity of her love made her act in ways that she shouldn’t, if it tipped over into obsession. But if this was all the time she had left, I’m grateful that she at least had the chance to feel the warmth of such love again, to hold Timothy – albeit briefly – and tell him how she felt, one more time.
‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.’
My darling little girl, like the beautiful birds I painted for you with all of my love, may you now finally fly free.
Nine Months Later
December 2018
Twenty-Six
Claire
I make my way up a rainy Old Brompton Road after a morning sales pitch wondering if I’ve got time to stop for a quick coffee. I’m on a half-day today – and meeting Susannah at the train station so that we can go back together to watch Rosie perform in the school Christmas concert. Tim has a matinee, so will have to miss it, but I’ve promised to film it for him. Jen is coming too, which is a treat for Rosie. She has been so amazing in coping with everything. Never mind another new house and a third new school of the year; Tony’s was her first experience of a family death – followed by careful questions that Tim and I had no choice but to ask our daughter, and also necessitated having to tell Susannah everything. I was profoundly shocked by her immediate response: ‘But Adam Owen alleges Isobel was sixteen? So nothing illegal then, at least.’
Faced, however, with the irrefutable proof of the DNA test she herself had orchestrated, she crumbled once Tim explained he had never had that kind of relationship with Isobel. Tim also wanted answers of his own. Why didn’t his mother tell him at the time his recent girlfriend had come to her for help with a pregnancy? How could she have done what she thought she did?
They are very slowly rebuilding their relationship, alongside a shared grief that’s devastating enough, without having anywhere to put the anger they won’t ever be able to talk to Tony about. I don’t really know if the three of us buying a house together will work. A granny annex doesn’t quite do justice to the section of the house Susannah will be living in, but we’ll see. Time will tell. Eventually it always does.
I decide I probably have got ten minutes to get a cappuccino, when I realise with a jolt of shock that I’m outside Adam’s exhibition. I saw coverage of it in the Metro and was curious then, but stayed away. I hesitate. He won’t be there, after all. I could just look quickly.
I open the door and tentatively walk into the white space of the gallery with its light wooden floor, only to gasp and cover my mouth with my hand. The walls are full of Isobel. Canvas after canvas of her. Isobel smiling, laughing – happy.
‘Hello,’ says a voice behind me and I turn to see a young woman smiling at me. ‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’
‘Very,’ I manage. I had expected the sheep skulls and storms. Not this. I’m lost for words.
‘These are by a new artist called Adam Owen, who we’re really excited about. He painted this entire exhibition in nine months, which is just…’ she pauses and shakes her head in disbelief, ‘well, it’s a phenomenal achievement, let’s say that. It’s almost feverish really, in its intensity, and it has been a huge success. He’s attracting a lot of international interest.’ She lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘My advice would be to snap one up before he becomes outrageously expensive.’ She winks at me.
‘Well we’ve just bought a new house,’ I find myself telling her, ‘there’s a great deal of wall space to fill.’ The thought of some of Harry’s returned £250k being spent on supporting an artist from the very place his actions banished us to is quite a pleasing one.
Her eyes light up. ‘Perfect! I’ll leave you to look around. There’s an umbrella stand right there and do come and find me if you have any questions.’
‘Thank you.’
I walk slowly through the space – through Adam’s love letter to his Isobel – and overwhelmed, my eyes fill with tears. She was so loved, her whole life, by him. What it would be to inspire someone like this? I look at the walls in wonder – painting after painting of her… and then right at the centre of the back wall, at the heart of the exhibition, is the portrait I saw in the barn the day Eve showed me round Fox Cottage: a restless Isobel on the verge of sleep.
‘That was the only painting to survive a huge fire in the artist’s studio,’ the woman calls out from behind her desk as she sees me looking at it, but the phone rings before she can tell me any more about the house I burnt down.
‘Excuse me,’ she smiles and answers it, leaving me to inspect the paintings so carefully she must believe I really might be about to buy one, when actually I’m trying to steady myself, having rushed right back to the fire. Those rags were smoking when I put them in the box, a fact I chose very deliberately to ignore. Although I still can’t quite believe they would have caught that quickly. Not without a helping hand. Adam really has risen from the ashes of Fox Cottage.
I cross to a larger image of Isobel in the garden as I never saw it – a summer riot of colour and glory: lupins, blowsy hydrangeas, fat roses shedding petals on the grass as they weave around a pergola laced with honeysuckle… almost a wedding bower… and Izzie walking beneath it, having escaped the house behind her. She is dressed in one of her eccentric, long gowns and I’m reminded of Tim telling Rosie all about Morgan le Fay, that windy day at the top of the hill fort. No wonder Izzie chose to live in her fantasy world of magic. It was better than real life, and I imagine it at least gave her some sense of control. I look more closely a
t Adam’s faithful depiction of Fox Cottage in the background, and notice suddenly that he’s painted a watchful face at the skylight of her bedroom. It could be mistaken for no more than abstract brushstrokes, but I see it.
‘You’ve spotted the ghost at the window?’ The woman calls across to me, having finished on the phone. ‘Really creepy isn’t it? I hate that sort of thing.’ She shudders. ‘My husband teases me about how I can’t so much as watch a spooky advert on TV. I think you’re either built that way or you’re not. I am – while my husband is just like, “no – there’s nothing under the bed.”’ She laughs and I smile politely, but don’t comment. She’s wrong. As Tony himself said, everything that happened in that house had a rational explanation. It’s people we should worry about. Had that man not shot Tim, Adam and Isobel, Tony wouldn’t have suggested the children play together to ‘reassure’ them afterwards. Eve and Tony may never have begun their affair. So much might have been different had those ten seconds never happened. One person’s actions can devastate so many others in the blink of an eye. Isn’t that far more frightening?
But while it resulted in Isobel having the sort of life so tragic it might be considered too uncomfortable to contemplate, I’m glad Adam has forced everyone to look at her now and see how amazing she was, because I think she’s a hero. What extraordinary quiet courage and strength she had.
I walk to the small portrait I was so struck by, the first time I saw it. I should like to buy it, but of course I can’t, and I won’t. It occurs to me as I study her face, that Isobel probably wasn’t chasing sleep at all, but trying to fight it. She must have been so afraid of the night coming – and yet she bravely shone a light in the dark for my daughter.