‘I have a – a pay-as-you-go phone.’ Catherine paused.
‘Pay as you go? Aren’t you, like, a barrister?’ Merry’s voice was full of scorn, like a teenager again.
‘I threw my old phone into the canal. This one lives in there.’ She nodded at the bum-bag. ‘I worked out, when I went up to Cambridge, the only way I could face it, could cope was if I had – a plan to disappear if I needed to. I’ve amended it over the years but it’s basically the same. I take this everywhere, you see.’
‘But you’ve got it all wrong. There are people out there looking for you. People who love you. And you don’t care. If that was me –’ She stopped.
Catherine shook her head. ‘Please don’t. I had to leave. There were signs.’
‘What kind of signs?’
Catherine stood up, and paced over to the window. ‘Oh,’ she said, with a blank smile. ‘I can’t say that. You wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Try me,’ said Merry, quietly.
Catherine looked round. She was hungry, and tired. She wondered if she was really here. Whether she was hallucinating. She hadn’t really slept for three days, and hadn’t eaten since the previous night, when she had queued up outside the Pret a Manger on the King’s Road for the handout of surplus food at closing time and had been given a goat’s cheese and pepper wrap and a muesli bar. Neither items she’d have chosen in her old life, and she’d smiled grimly at the idea of asking for something else. ‘Sorry to be a pain, but have you got the crayfish baguette? And a Very Berry smoothie?’ She had the money, but was paranoid about CCTV in the shop.
Besides, the handout was very civilised. It was her and several normally dressed people. One mother, with two kids. One had a battered Paw Patrol backpack, like the little boy down the road for whom Carys babysat, and huge dark eyes. His sister carried a very stiff pink rabbit that she stroked whilst sucking her thumb. They were both expressionless. Bored. Years of her criminal-law work had taught her being poor is boring, amongst many other things. You wait a lot. For buses. For appointments. For people who tell you what to do. An old lady, with dank white long hair hanging around her face rustled several plastic bags in her pockets. Catherine had found herself wondering: will that be me, in twenty years’ time? Two young men, in their twenties, Turkish or Eastern European, she’d guessed. They’d grinned at Catherine as they took their food, waving their wraps. ‘Good, good food. Fuck Tories, huh? Fuck them!’
Why had she come looking for Merry? Why had she bothered this fragile, sad woman? Catherine cleared her throat.
‘It doesn’t matter. I came because I wanted to apologise.’
Merry folded her arms. ‘How did you find me?’
‘I looked you up,’ said Catherine. She watched someone walk past and wondered how long it would take if she were to walk back home. She supposed she couldn’t really go home again.
‘You stalked me.’
‘It’s basic data mining, Merry. I got your planning permission form off the internet. For this, I presume.’ She waved her hand at the hollowed-out flat. ‘Melissa Hester Hunter. Your mother gave you all unusual middle names, which helped.’
Merry opened her mouth to say something. Instead she laughed. It rang around the empty flat. She stood up and came towards Catherine, her footsteps clattering on the shiny floorboards, so they were facing each other. ‘You show up, out of the blue. After thirty years. You smell awful, by the way. You look half deranged, you’re barely blinking, do you realise that?’ Catherine put her hands up to her face, to shield herself from Merry’s voice, the noise. It was very loud in there, the bouncing sound drilling into her tired mind. ‘I loved you, Janey. It wasn’t just Kitty who did. I loved you, so did Joss, and Mummy. We all fell for you and you disappeared. You left one note, threatening to blackmail our father. That’s it.’
‘It was her,’ Catherine whispered, hands still up around her face. ‘Kitty. I went because of her. And then she vanished. In front of my eyes. It’s the truth, Merry. Honestly. I loved her, as much as you did.’
‘Fine. Even if you went because she forced you to –’
‘She didn’t force me. But it was her idea. She planned it all. And then she . . . she let me go.’
‘But where did she go?’
Catherine shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She’d been stung. She was in pain. I know she was. But she said it was nothing.’
Merry stopped. ‘I saw her just after it happened . . . she told me she’d been stung.’ She bit her lip, and suddenly she was a child again, a scared, lonely child, and Catherine saw the damage they had done.
‘I promise I don’t know what happened to her. I think she crawled out of sight and hid herself and I think she probably died.’ Catherine took a deep breath, and exhaled. ‘I wondered if you guys had ever heard. If your mother knew.’
‘Why would we know?’
‘I thought she might have got in touch with you if she could. I thought she’d at least contact Sylvia. She never heard from her?’ She saw Merry stiffen. ‘How is Sylvia, Merry? I went to her exhibition the year before last. It was wonderful. Is she – OK? I thought about going down to see her – what do you think?’
She glanced out onto the pavement, as Merry stepped away from the window, tapping on her phone again. Someone was looking up at the two of them. A tall, heavy-set man, hands in his pockets, shaved head. Catherine stared, suddenly alert again. ‘Do you know that person?’
‘No,’ said Merry, shortly, looking down. ‘It’s one of the security guards. Place is crawling with them round here. It’s the Russian billionaires.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Sylvia. Sylvia is . . . well, she’s fine. I don’t think it’d do you much good to go and see her. I mean she’s mad, really, but she’s been that way for so long we’re used to it. Voted for Corbyn. Voted for Brexit. She was arrested in March with some group of environmental terrorists, essentially. She glued herself to some railings.’ She flicked her hair away. ‘One isn’t quite sure what triggers it, but she definitely changed after my father died. Or reverted. That’s what Joss says. You know, we were pretty much frozen out by everyone after what happened.’
‘Everyone?’
‘Well. Not the villagers. Not the Reds, the Culneys, the old families. But – our friends.’
‘Some friends.’
Merry ignored this. ‘Mummy made me leave, go to the local school, and then there was the business with Kitty – the police – all of it.’ She closed her eyes, as if recalling it all, and then, opening them again, said in a tight little voice: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m being terribly rude. Would you like some tea? More water?’
‘No, thanks –’ Catherine sat down again. Her hands, sweating, slid off her joggers, onto the cream sofa. ‘What business with the police?’
‘What? Oh. Well, after Kitty went missing. She’d left the note saying you were both leaving, addressed to my father. But the police made a stink about it. Wanted us to produce her. Out of nowhere. And we couldn’t of course, ’cause she’d gone abroad!’ Merry laughed, moving over to the kitchen. She put the kettle on and started pushing open white handleless drawers, taking out cutlery and cups and saucers.
‘But she – hadn’t,’ Catherine said, quietly.
‘Well, we didn’t know that, did we? We didn’t find out for years. We just weren’t sure. We knew it wasn’t Kitty up at Cambridge – Mummy came and sat outside the college and saw you.’
‘Came to King’s? She saw me? Why didn’t – she – why didn’t she say something?’
Merry looked at her hard. ‘I guess you’d have to ask her that.’ She shrugged, and silence fell between them, heavy, unyielding. ‘We knew Kitty couldn’t still be abroad, surely. She’d have run out of money. And it was years after by then, and someone – I don’t know who – some friend of a friend it was, rumours, said they’d heard Hunter’s daughter, the one who’d run away, had ended up as a barrister in London. Giles’s ma came over especially to tell Mummy. Which was jolly decent of her in fact.’
>
‘Giles.’ Catherine rolled the name around her mouth. ‘Giles Leigh-Smith.’
‘Yes, of course, who else?’ Merry looked impatient, as though to say what other Giles is there? ‘He lives in the same house. Married a lovely girl, Bella, he’s a pillar of the community, he’s really – been so kind, trying to help Mummy, reaching out to Joss – Joss was very ill, he was stung about a hundred times, you know, his heart stopped twice. But Mummy’s been awfully rude to Giles. Wouldn’t let him across the threshold. I don’t understand why. It’s been embarrassing, and of course it’s one of the reasons people turned against her. They always had their suspicions about her, and then after all of it she starts designing again in earnest and she’s so successful, her stuff’s everywhere, you know. It – looks wrong, to them. And I have to say I can’t blame them, can you?’
Catherine didn’t know how to answer, but Merry didn’t seem to notice. ‘So for Ginny Leigh-Smith to take the trouble to come and see Mummy and tell her she’d heard Kitty must be in London, well. And Mummy said it was none of Ginny’s business where Kitty had gone and she knew she was OK. She was in-credibly rude to her. That really broke the last of the links with the families near us. Poor Joss, it’s made it very hard for him, to keep up the house, the traditions, you know.’ Merry hugged herself. ‘Not that we do any of that any more.
‘It was twenty years ago now. She came up to London, to wait outside the law court to see this barrister, the one she’d heard was Catherine Lestrange. She waited all day till about four when they all emerged and it was you, on the pavement, huddled with some others, someone shaking your hand, someone crying over you. Mummy said you looked so glamorous. Together. That your hair had grown back much darker. You weren’t like the old you. So . . . Mummy toddled back to Somerset. She said she was right all along. She’d seen all she needed to. And she sort of shut herself off. Said that was how it was and we’d screwed up your life enough so we should leave you alone. She started working properly again right after that. So she’s filthy rich, there’s the irony.’
‘She came and saw me . . . both those times,’ Catherine said slowly. ‘And she just left.’
‘Yes. I wanted to get in touch with you again. I insisted, really. So we came up together, looked for you again a few months later but there was no sign of you.’
‘I was married. We lived in Paris for a year. When I came back I’d changed my name.’ Catherine swallowed, sifting through it all, the concertina’d pack of facts jammed up together. ‘What – what does Sylvia think happened to Kitty, then?’
‘Kitty?’ Merry shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’ She shovelled loose tea into a pot. ‘I have no idea what goes on in Sylvia’s mind. I don’t think I’ve ever known. We all joke about it. She could have murdered her and we wouldn’t know.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Joss. And Paola, Joss’s wife.’
‘Joss is married?’
‘Why are you so surprised?’
‘I’m not,’ said Catherine, but she realised Joss was still eighteen to her, not a man the same age as her, the same as other men her age: a bit paunchy, a bit grey, a bit stiff sometimes.
‘Yes, a lovely Italian girl. She’s very clever. Organises Joss. He needs that. She got rid of Mummy, too, moved her out to the gatehouse. Mummy doesn’t really get on with Joss, you know. Hasn’t for ages. He asked her to leave – oh, ten years ago now. Tried to sell the gatehouse from under her, but she refused to go. Still refuses. He’s had to renegotiate with the buyers, accept a much lower offer. He was furious with her.’
‘And – what does Joss think about Kitty, what happened to her? What does he think about me – taking her place at Cambridge?’
Merry sighed, as if it was all rather tedious, having to explain it.
‘Listen, Janey. Catherine. Whatever you call yourself. You have to remember the stuff with the Collecting was a long time ago now. It’s not something we think about that often. We’re not close, as a family.’ She smiled faintly. ‘My father and Aunty Ros, well, they were in their sixties – Ros was almost seventy. We all have to go some time, don’t we? They knew the risks with those bees, and they refused to replace them with a more docile variety. And I don’t think we see it quite the way you do. It was terrible, of course, but it was almost thirty years ago now. When he came out of hospital Joss wanted to move on, not live constantly in the past, like our father. He’s right.’
For the first time Catherine felt something she hadn’t felt for years – decades, even. She was the outsider again. It was so odd, like when she’d smelled the scent of Amarige – Claire’s favourite perfume – on someone at the theatre just before Christmas, and it was like being punched in the stomach, being teleported back to Claire’s bedroom, listening to Soul II Soul, lying on Claire’s Littlewoods duvet – she’d seen it right there, the pastel squares of apricot, blue and green, the posters of Prince and Nina Simone on the walls, the mirror with the pink-glass trim.
Her own past, who she had been before that summer of 1989, had entirely disappeared. The sitting room of her childhood home, with the bobbled, mint-coloured, slightly shiny three-piece suite which had been her mother’s pride and joy, the potted plants and neatly arranged copies of the Radio Times, the bookshelves either side of the gas fire, stacked with Daddy’s and her books: Robert Graves next to Adrian Mole. The stairway, with the thin oval window in stained glass – a rainbow over fields. The oddest little details, things the mind held somewhere, shut far away out of sight. She was no one now. And suddenly she could see eighteen-year-old Janey again, shorn-haired, standing on the terrace as the family looked her over, the relentless August sun beating down on them all, the evening of her arrival at Vanes.
She jumped, as Merry bent down and handed her a cup of tea. Her mind was whirring. I shouldn’t have come here. Not here.
Merry’s voice broke in on her thoughts. ‘I did used to wonder, though. After Mummy came back from seeing you at Cambridge. Did people really think you were Kitty? I can’t imagine anyone getting the two of you confused.’ Merry poured herself some tea, delicately.
‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ said Catherine, forcing herself to focus. There was a bitter taste in her mouth. ‘Everyone at Cambridge knew me as Catherine Lestrange. That’s very different from Kitty Hunter. You don’t look for someone you didn’t know was supposed to be there but isn’t there, do you? No one really asked.’
In the twenty-nine years since, of course some people had asked. The first time was an old friend of Charles and Sylvia’s, she never knew from where. He’d been at King’s himself, was in Cambridge for lunch, decided to look Charles’s daughter up. She’d heard him asking one of the porters. ‘Kitty. Kitty Hunter.’
She’d been hurrying back from a tutorial on the Pazzi Conspiracy, her mind full of popes and plots, hugging folders to her chest. A bright, hopeful March sun washed the quad in warmth, the cobbles digging into her thin-soled sneakers, and then she heard the voice ringing out, and she could still hear it, years later, the exact timbre, the tight, upper-class drawl.
‘Kitty Hunter. I tell you, she’s here at King’s. Look again, if you don’t mind. Or Catherine, perhaps.’
‘And I’m telling you, sir,’ the porter had firmly replied. ‘There’s no one of that name here.’
‘History. Give me the list for history.’
He’d scanned it with his finger, as Catherine watched, pretending to fiddle with her backpack, heart in mouth, hardly able to breathe: ‘Iveson . . . Jordan . . . Lestrange . . . Oh. Hm. How odd. I could have sworn . . .’
‘You’re not the first person, I understand,’ the porter said grimly. ‘Perhaps she told people she was going there. Or the parents did. It’s happened before.’
‘Her parents aren’t – actually, her pa’s dead. Very sad. I –’ He’d scratched his head. ‘She did a runner – or perhaps she didn’t go, in the end. How curious.’
And he’d tottered off, bald head gleaming in the sun, and she had
slid past the porter, out onto King’s Parade. So Charles was dead; she had not known this before. And no one knew the rest of it. For the first time, she felt free.
Her mother was easy enough to deal with – she spent Christmas with her, and once, maybe twice, a year, when Eileen was in England, she came to Cambridge and took her out to tea. Easy enough to explain she was using her middle name, not her first name – she had gone through a phase, like all eleven-year-olds, of wanting to change her name. Eileen never asked about Sylvia, and the family at Vanes, nor what had happened to Kitty, beyond mentioning her once. ‘I never liked the sound of her,’ she’d informed Catherine. ‘One of those girls who causes trouble, you know? Wherever she is. If Sylvia’s not worried, you shouldn’t be.’ Besides, there was a weary familiarity now in her dealings with her mother. She knew she only had to lean on her a little too much: ‘Mum, can I come and stay for a bit, I’m having a bad time at university –’ and Eileen would retreat, pleading a full house, Martin’s children staying, an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in their apartment block – anything really, as long as it kept Catherine at bay. Whenever she felt Eileen was showing too much interest, and might want to stay a night, she’d do this, and it was almost funny to see her mother back away. Almost.
After she and Davide moved to Paris, and then back to London, somewhere along the way she understood she didn’t have to bother with her mother any more, since her mother wasn’t ever going to bother with her. She didn’t give her mother her new address or phone number, and let one email go unanswered. Not greatly to her surprise, after a year or so Eileen didn’t get in touch again. Her mother. And so they lost contact entirely, for twenty years, until one day Catherine realised she had to just check she was OK, and discovered her mother had advanced dementia, no visible support system, no other family, and that she was responsible for relocating her and paying for her care. Which she did, because she had to.
The Beloved Girls Page 41