by Jill Childs
‘Hello?’ A man’s voice. I imagined him in a smart, modern kitchen, already rich with the smell of coffee.
I put on my best telephone voice. ‘Good morning. This is Sophie, an old friend of Caroline’s. Is her mother there please?’
‘Sure.’
His voice carried on off-mic as he explained and handed the phone across. A pause and then a woman’s voice, clear and polite. A British accent. Caroline’s mother.
‘Hello, this is Jennifer. Who’s this?’
‘It’s Sophie, Mrs Griffiths.’
‘Sophie?’ She hesitated, trying to place me. I wondered what picture she saw. An anxious ten-year-old probably, a shadow in the background. The plain girl who sometimes hung around her daughter but lacked her style, her confidence. ‘What is it? Is everything alright?’
I took a deep breath. ‘I hope you don’t mind my calling. Caroline gave me your number a while ago. Many congratulations on your marriage. I was so pleased.’ I was a poor liar. She’d know, I was certain. She’d know I was a fraud.
‘Where are you calling from? There’s a lot of noise, I can hardly hear you.’
I cupped my hand round the receiver to block out the sound of the sea and wind.
‘I just wondered, have you heard from Caroline recently?’
A pause. ‘Well, not terribly recently. She isn’t really one for keeping in touch, you know. Always too busy.’
Neither were you, I thought. I remembered Caroline’s caustic comments about her mother in emails. Once she met her handsome Canadian, she seemed to lose interest in her daughter and granddaughter.
‘They sent me a charming card for my birthday. Dominic wrote it for her because she’d sprained her wrist, apparently. Why, are you trying to reach her? I’ve got an address if you need it. They’re back in England now.’
My mind was whirling. ‘When did you last speak to her? Can you remember?’
‘Speak to her? Well, I don’t know really…’
Her husband chimed in from somewhere in the room.
She carried on, as much to him as to me: ‘No, it wasn’t then. That was an email. She definitely called at Christmas, remember? She was still in Hong Kong and going on about packing. We were in Montreal and she called your mobile, for some reason.’
‘So you haven’t spoken to her since Christmas?’
‘Well no, come to think of it.’ Her tone changed. ‘Why are you asking, anyway? What do you want?’ It was a sharpness I remembered from long ago, a voice that put me in my place, making it clear that she was the gatekeeper who screened her daughter’s friends and she was still deciding if I were suitable.
‘I’m so sorry to trouble you. Thank you. I was just trying to get in touch with her, that’s all.’
‘Well, why don’t you email her? I had an email from her just a while back. She’s got a daughter now, did you know? She looks a dear little thing. Lucy, they call her.’ She paused. ‘What about you, Sophie? Are you married?’
I didn’t answer, I just ended the call abruptly. I didn’t care, let her think the line had dropped out. Afterwards, I stood there for a long time, leaning back against the wall of the beach house, looking out at the horizon and the low lines of light gathering there under the thick cloud. The wind chilled my cheeks and swept my hair across my face.
Could it really be possible? Could this woman, living here with Dominic, not be Caroline at all? But if so, who was she? And where had Caroline gone?
I thought of the police officer, dismissing my so-called evidence. It didn’t help, she said, even if that was the same brooch I gave my friend. It didn’t help her identify the dead woman.
We knew it couldn’t be Caroline. I was staying with her.
But what if I wasn’t?
I thought back to that first meeting. She had changed. I’d seen that at once, as soon as she walked in, despite the sunglasses. I just ignored my doubts. I didn’t want it to be anyone other than Caroline, my old friend, come to rescue me. I didn’t want to imagine that one of the few friends I had left in the world, one of the few people who’d reached out to me when my dad was frail, was actually a complete stranger. Someone who didn’t care about me at all.
I don’t like it, Dominic had hissed at her that evening. It’s dangerous.
Of course it was. It was the kind of mad risk only a thrill-seeker would take. I saw that at once. I was one of the few people who might realise that she wasn’t Caroline at all. That yes, she was uncannily like Caroline. Her build. Her blonde hair. Her features. She’d even copied some of Caroline’s gestures. That little excited shriek, the way she had of putting her head on one side with a coy smile.
She must have seen me as a challenge. If she could pull it off with me, she could pull it off with anyone.
My knees buckled and I sank heavily to the ground. I wrapped my arms round my body, holding myself tightly. No wonder she never spoke of the past. She hadn’t shared school days with me at all. No wonder she was so indifferent to Lucy. She wasn’t her mother.
But who was she? And what had they done to Caroline?
I closed my eyes and thought about my amazing schoolfriend, so attractive with her large eyes and long blonde hair. Always cool. Always funny and smart. Always reading and sketching.
The young woman who’d headed out into the world eager to have adventures. All those long, amusing emails she’d sent me from exotic places, bringing colour and light into my life when it seemed so very drab and dark.
The beautiful bride on her wedding day, clothed in satin and tiny seed-pearls, walking down the aisle of St John’s Cathedral to marry her handsome husband.
What had happened to her? What had they done?
I felt her now, here, more vividly than I had since I first arrived. The friend, the real Caroline, sitting here beside me outside the beach house, this refuge where she must have come with Lucy to escape the house, to find herself, to paint.
She was here, and yet she was just out of reach. Whatever she was trying to tell me, to explain, I couldn’t quite hear the words.
But she’d summoned me here for a reason. I sensed that now. It wasn’t just born out of sympathy, that email telling me so insistently to come and stay here as soon as I could. She needed me here. She wanted my help.
I turned and the shadows alongside me shrank and disappeared as I looked.
Inside the beach house, the sound of the wind shrank to a murmur and warmth started to flow back into my nose, my cheeks. My body felt suddenly exhausted. I sat on the floor, miserable and purposeless, staring out at the sea. I was trying so hard to imagine Caroline here, straining so desperately to hear what she was trying to tell me. But there was nothing but silence.
I thought of the packet of Samuel’s Wine Gums, that nod to our school days which welcomed me into her private space. Of the tormented self-portrait, left, half-finished, on the easel. I rummaged in my bag and took out her detective novel and set it on the floor in front of me, as if it might help me hear what she needed to tell me. I thought about the things she loved. Adventure. Agatha Christie. Puzzles. Painting.
The memory of her voice came to me, teasing.
‘Come on,’ she’d say, lifting her eyes finally from her book as we headed home on the bus. ‘Guess what’s just happened. See? It’s a clue. I’m sure it is.’ She loved being a few steps ahead of me, I knew that. It was my place in her life. Her faithful follower. Her student.
I blinked, listening to the quietness and the distant roar of the waves. Why had she called me here? What did she want of me? How did I follow the clues this time?
I turned my head and gazed at her painting, hanging there on the wall. The figure of the little girl in the pink coat, bending over, shielding us from whatever she’d found in the earth. It must be Lucy. The child was just her size. It was the only canvas I’d found that showed her.
Did Caroline know me so well that she guessed I’d come here? Did she know I’d want to take refuge in the beach house, as she had done, and t
hat I’d pick out that one painting, the one showing her little girl? She knew how much I loved children. How much I’d always longed to have a family of my own, to be as kind and loving a mother as my own had been.
I peered more closely. It was such an odd portrait, now I really stopped to look at it. What was the child even doing? Why was she poking her stick like that, digging down into the earth, there, at the corner of the building?
I sat up straight and stared more closely. My heart raced. I could almost hear Caroline’s voice, mocking me. Come on, Sophie! Get with the programme!
I pulled my coat on and rushed back out into the cold. It wasn’t hard to find the corner where she’d placed the little girl. The child in the painting had one shoulder facing the cliff and the sea beyond and the other against the wooden wall. The side of the hut was banked with dead leaves and mossy earth.
I knelt on the ground and began to tear at it, clearing the space where the child poked. The mess of mouldering leaves and then clods of earth came away easily. The moss, growing thickly on the surface, wasn’t deeply rooted. I scooped it all away with bare hands, blackening my fingernails. The earth gave off a rich, peaty scent.
About a foot below the surface, tucked under the wooden struts, my hands felt plastic. I grappled to get a grip on it, then eased it out through the dry mud and shook it clean. A small, sealed plastic bag with something inside which rustled. I opened it up and took out a scrap of card.
It was printed with the words: Thank You for Coming. The edge was torn, suggesting that the original card had more to say. To My Party, perhaps. To Our Wedding.
I turned it over. On the back, there was a short message in Caroline’s handwriting.
‘Check out the safe, Sophie. Happy Birthday.’
I went back inside, dazed, rolled back the rug and lifted the floorboards. Happy Birthday? What was that supposed to mean? Was there a present inside for me? I ran my fingers over the combination pad. Was she just teasing me? How was I supposed to get it open? She hadn’t given me the code.
I rocked back on my heels, cross. What was all this? Why was she playing games with me? It wasn’t my birthday until January.
Then it hit me and I groaned. I could almost hear her laughter, her voice mocking me: ‘Finally, Sophie! Like, HELLO!’
Oh, Caroline, is that it? Really?
I leaned forward to the combination lock and steadily, carefully, punched in my date of birth. When I reached the final digit, the safe gave a satisfying click and, when I turned the knob, the door swung open in my hand.
I peered inside. A parcel, wrapped round with transparent plastic. I lifted it carefully out and opened up the plastic bag. It was a hard-backed notebook, half filled with cramped handwriting.
A wad of printed papers fell out from the back. A copy of a legal document.
* * *
Last Will and Testament of Caroline North
* * *
And there, tucked inside the front cover, slightly protruding as if it were asking to be found at once, was a short note.
‘Hey, Sophie. Finally!’
Ten
Caroline
For those first weeks back in England, I thought the tide had turned.
Once he joined us, Dominic seemed to settle more willingly into our new, fragmented life than I’d imagined possible. He disappeared each Sunday evening to London without a murmur. I tried not to ask too much about his work, but he mentioned new contacts, now and then. Lunches and dinners and drinks. It seemed a promising start.
He appeared comfortable enough living in my flat, modernised now and freshly decorated. Lucy and I looked forward to hearing his car crunch to a stop on the gravel drive of The Conifers each Friday, often early enough to catch her bedtime story. He came to us most weekends, only staying back in London if he had conference calls with Hong Kong or Singapore. The signal out here was too unreliable, he said.
We rubbed along, each of us playing a part. Neither of us discussed what had happened in Hong Kong. I had humiliated him, I knew that. I’d forced him to follow me back to England because I had power over him. He adored Lucy. He needed my money.
Did it hurt me, to know that he’d come back under duress? Yes. Very much. But I didn’t regret it. I’d done what I had to do, for the sake of our marriage and for Lucy. We had the chance of a fresh start together, back here in England.
He’d been a fool. He’d cheated and lied to me about it. Even now, he didn’t have the grace to admit it, to apologise, to beg my forgiveness. I hadn’t forgiven him. Not yet. But Lucy needed her father, now more than ever. And I stayed hopeful that eventually I would grow to trust him again. Despite it all, I still loved him. He was my husband. We’d been together a long time. I couldn’t help myself.
During the week, I spent every second with Lucy. I cleared out the old beach house on the cliff and had it refurbished with a tiny kitchen and modern toilet. Dominic pulled a face when he saw the workmen arrive but what could he say? It was my money.
It was my sacred space, the beach house. I insisted on that from the start. I wanted a private place of my own, a hideaway to give me the space to heal and to rediscover myself. Lucy was the only other person allowed in. If Dominic cared, he certainly didn’t show it.
Lucy and I gave it different names, depending on the game. The Den or The Stable or The Burrow if she was being a bunny. I was always her mummy, whatever game we played and whatever species she adopted. I insisted. That was the most important part of my identity, being her mother, and I didn’t want to lose it for a moment.
She was a splashy painter, but I didn’t care. She sat beside me with her child-sized table and chair and painted with her watercolours while I tried to capture what I could on my easel in oils. Seascapes, mostly. Storms, blowing up. They matched my mood.
On fine days, we waited until the tide went out and then headed down to the beach with her plastic bucket and searched for shells, for interesting pebbles, for treasure. The waves reached for our ankles and tried to drag us back with them, into the depths, to oblivion. I never let her go too near the water’s edge. It wasn’t only the fact I was never a strong swimmer and the tides here were ferocious, it was my fear too that, despite the medication, despite the fact I was getting much more rest now, I didn’t trust my body not to fail me. I had a horror of Lucy being in danger, swept out to sea, flailing, and of watching helplessly, a prisoner locked inside myself, unable to save her.
* * *
In the afternoons, we were both tired. I put it down, at first, to the bracing sea air. I often put a children’s film on for Lucy and lay on the sofa with her, dozing as she watched. I blamed the tablets, but I just couldn’t get enough sleep. They were precious to me, those sleepy hours on the sofa. The feel of her small, compact body squashed against mine, wriggling now and then in my arms. Her high-pitched occasional giggle. The way she sat up, spine rigid, head high, and flapped her hands when the film’s tension mounted.
But just as I was starting to hope again, to imagine once more that we could find a way to be happy, the headaches came back. They were crippling, this time. I registered with an emergency nanny agency in town and came to know their number by heart. The worst attacks lasted several days, bringing pressure inside my skull that painkillers didn’t seem to touch and bouts of vomiting too.
I was forced, in the end, to give in and dig out the leaflet the Harley Street doctor had given me. I made an appointment with another doctor, Dr Braithwaite, and started a round of day-trips to London, gruelling even with a car and driver. There were hospital tests, one set after another, and medication which dulled my thoughts and made me feel a stranger to myself. My money cushioned it all, I knew that. It bought me expertise and professional kindness and comfort.
But I had stepped onto a medical conveyor belt from which there seemed suddenly no escape. I resented everything. The pain. The time away from Lucy, who was left day after day in the care of cheerful strangers. Even when I was at The Conifers, I could
often do nothing more than lie in bed, head throbbing, catching strains of her high-pitched voice outside, whipped by the wind.
My worst moments were in the night. There is no fear like the night terrors of the small hours. The shadows reached for me. Sometimes, I sat up and tried to read but mostly I pushed my feet into my slippers, pulled on a dressing gown and climbed the stairs to Lucy’s room to lie beside her. The steady rhythm of her breathing soothed me. The peacefulness of her sleeping face. Her hair, splayed, splashing across the pillow. The pulse of the waves outside, shaking fistfuls of rocks. God, out there in the darkness, playing dice.
* * *
During my headaches, I thought my world was in ruins, but little did I know it was about to collapse altogether into nothing more than dust.
I had made another trip to London to see Dr Braithwaite and assess the latest medication. As I came out of the consultation, I caught sight of myself in the vast, gilded mirror in the entrance hall. My eyes looked unnaturally large in my skull, bulging as the flesh around them shrank. My skin was waxy and pale.
I wanted to head straight back to The Conifers, but I also wanted to make progress on a practical task. I’d been planning for a while to visit a jeweller in Covent Garden, to invest in a charm bracelet for Lucy. I wanted to choose a gold bracelet first and then pick out a series of gold charms, starting with a pixie or fairy and gradually becoming more sophisticated. The driver dropped me at the jewellers, and I spent half an hour there, seated in a client room at the back of their shop, with a cup of tea and the tray of charms, making my selection.
I’d told the driver to go off and park where he could – it was never easy in central London – saying I’d take a cab on to Kensington to do some shopping there and call him later to collect me. But by the time I left the jewellers, I regretted trying to be so ambitious. I struggled to hail a black cab on The Strand and in the end, I picked my way past the blankets and sleeping bags of the homeless to the underground at Embankment.