by Jill Childs
When she’d chosen the best pinecone, she brought it to me and stuck it into my pocket to carry for her, then pushed her hand in mine again and we continued, side by side, walking back towards home. The sea was calm today, flat and glassy. There was little breeze and the sound of the waves breaking out of sight far below us, that familiar roar up the beach, followed by a rattling stony drag, was peaceful and benign.
Lucy swung my hand and sang softly, a meandering song of her own about being hungry and going home for lunch.
I said, ‘That’s a lovely song, Lucy.’
She tilted her face to me and beamed, carrying on.
We understood each other, Lucy and I. We were two of a kind. We’d both lost people we loved. But, at heart, we were both survivors too. We were people who knew what mattered, who knew how to be happy.
Once we were inside the house, Lucy careered from one room to another, shedding her coat, then her shoes and socks and finally her cardigan. I followed in her wake, picking things up, reminding her now and then that she needed to learn to put things away for herself.
Where do your shoes go? Not here in the middle of the hall, is it?
She didn’t answer and I didn’t press it. Already her mind was elsewhere. She was kneeling by the tub of plastic construction bricks, clattering through as she searched for a piece, carrying on with the house she started building this morning, before we left for nursery. She was good at that, at picking up where she left off.
I padded through to the kitchen to heat a beaker of milk for her, then switched the oven on, ready to cook our lunch.
Later, we pulled on old clothes and wellies and headed down to the sea.
The tide was out and patterns of jagged rocks had surfaced, slimy with seaweed. Lucy took my hand to steady herself as she climbed out to a shallow rockpool with her plastic bucket and spade. She splashed there, poking and peering, sinking at times to her haunches for a closer look.
These were the times we had some of our best chats, Lucy and I, splashing about here, looking for sea-treasures, breathing in salt air, steeped in the thick, mouldering smell of seaweed.
I still found it difficult to talk to her about Caroline and Dominic. I didn’t want to upset her, but I still wondered what she’d seen that night and how it must haunt her. I’d tried once or twice to get her to talk about it but she never would.
Lucy seemed to understand that I was pursuing the long journey to legal adoption, as Caroline asked in her will. I’d explained too that Caroline had left almost everything to her. The house, her savings and investments were all protected through a trust until she was eighteen. Lucy didn’t yet understand how much money she’d inherit but she was pleased we could still live here, in The Conifers. She loved her new bedroom, the one the nanny used to have, just across the landing from mine. The attics were closed off now, from the rest of the house. That nursery was too draughty for a child. And besides, it held too many difficult memories.
Caroline had left me her London flat. It gave me a steady income now, rented out through an agent. That, plus the money I’d finally inherited through my parents, left me free to focus on being a full-time mother to Lucy, just as I’m sure Caroline would have wanted.
And I was starting to make friends. I was learning to sail one morning a week, when Lucy was at nursery, and I’d joined a morning film club at the local cinema. We would watch a movie, then discuss it over coffee and I found I could hold my own, after all. I only had one rule: nothing too obscure, nothing with subtitles, not just yet.
I’d kept the criminal proceedings from Lucy. Establishing the DNA match and formally identifying Caroline’s remains proved the easy part. Caroline’s inquest returned an open verdict in the end, despite everything I said. Perhaps that would make her parents’ deaths easier for Lucy to accept when she was older, but it frustrated me. I couldn’t prove it in court, but I knew in my heart that she was murdered. I knew it was them.
I could only hope that, if she knew, Caroline wouldn’t think I’d failed her. Her scheming, cheating husband and his mistress did, after all, bring about their own destruction.
Now, as we both splashed, ankle-deep, in saltwater, poking through the seaweed for shells, I said, ‘Your Mummy and Daddy loved you very much. You know that, don’t you? They didn’t want to leave you.’
She looked up and smiled. ‘Silly Sophie!’
I said lightly: ‘Why’s that?’
‘Mummy hasn’t left me. Not really.’
She climbed on to the next pool, her hands grasping the pitted surfaces of the rocks as she skidded her way over them.
I hesitated, wondering whether to challenge her. She scrambled forward, focussed and determined, stray hair falling across her face. I considered. Perhaps in a way, she was right. Caroline would always be with her. In the contours of her face. In her expressions. In her laugh.
Her painting of Lucy in her pink coat hung in Lucy’s new bedroom. She loved lying in bed and looking at it. It was special to her. I was sure she’d always treasure it.
Lucy slipped and missed her footing, sploshing heavily into a deep puddle.
‘My welly’s full!’ She screeched, then pulled her wet sock out of her boot and fell backwards onto her bottom on a rock. She started to laugh, waving her dripping foot in the air. ‘Help!’
I scrambled across as fast as I could and lifted her into my arms. Her hands reached round my neck to hug me, confident and sure. Her bucket and spade banged against my back as I picked my way through the rocks.
I sat her on a flat, dry rock at the bottom of the cliff, pulled off the sodden sock and rummaged in my bag for dry socks and trainers. Afterwards, she sat there for a while, sorting through her new treasures and deciding which ones to keep.
Weak sunshine broke through the clouds and, sitting beside her, I tipped back my head, enjoying the warmth on my face, and stared up at The Conifers, high above us on the cliff.
A movement caught my eye, right up at the top of the house, at the barred nursery window.
For a moment, it seemed to me as if a figure stood there, Caroline, her face pressed against the glass, looking right down at me. She was grinning, just as she always used to, then she half-turned and pointed behind her into the gloom.
I strained to see. Was that another figure there, at her shoulder, one hand raised? No, not one but two people, pressing in close at her side, smiling down at me, their features veiled by the darkness. My heart stopped. How could it be? My mother and father, together again, there in the shadows, their faces full of love.
The window blurred as my eyes filled and when I blinked and looked again, all I could see was the sunlight, glinting on the glass, patterned by the reflections of scudding clouds.
‘Come on!’ Lucy, ready now, lifted her arms to be carried again. ‘Time to go home.’
Twelve
Caroline
I’m in the beach house. The day is already drawing to a close and outside, darkness is pressing against the windows. The weather’s changed, brewing into a night storm.
These pages I am sitting down now to write, these loose sheets torn from the back of my notebook, these are for you, my lovely daughter. This is the real ending to my story. Will you find it? That’s something I can never know.
I wrote a different account for Sophie in the notebook. I hope she can forgive me for that. I needed her to believe a story, you see, which was not quite true. She needed evidence for the police, to encourage them to the same conclusion.
She will think she’s delivering justice for my murder. Well, to me, revenge is a type of poetic justice, even if the law wouldn’t agree.
In my notebook, I told Sophie about my life in Hong Kong. How I met and fell in love with your father, Dominic. How my mind started to falter and the way he took advantage of that. It was cruel, the way he played games with me. I know that now. He even tried to make me believe that I was the one who betrayed him, that I was the one who should feel ashamed, when, all along, it was him.
>
I told Sophie about his mistress, and the fact he refused to give her up, even when I insisted that we come back to England. And about my love for you, Lucy. The still centre of my disintegrating world. That is the truest fact of all.
But I told her too that I feared for my life. That Dominic and his lover were plotting to kill me. That, if I had disappeared when she came to The Conifers, she should investigate and reveal them to the police as the murderers they are.
Did she believe it? I hope so.
But the real truth?
Dr Braithwaite is the only one who knows. What I called my moments, he called absence seizures. A kind of epileptic fit. There, in his carpeted consulting rooms, soon after he received the results from all those tests and scans, he showed me a large, pitted model of a brain and pointed out the sections which are increasingly constricted and compromised by a growing tumour. The scars show the damage to the hippocampus, a ridge of grey tissue inside my skull.
It’s the brain’s filing cabinet, he explained.
I had an immediate image of a grey metal cabinet with deep drawers. The bottom ones, it seems, contain all the memories I stored before my first seizure. Those are intact. That’s why I can still remember my childhood and school days just as clearly as I always did. My parents and friends and my early days in Hong Kong. The first time I met Dominic.
But once the seizures started, caused by the fast-growing tumour, so too did the damage. From then on, I could no longer store medium-term memories. The memories in the top drawers of the filing cabinet self-destruct after a few months if they haven’t been refreshed. Faces. Names. Even my own wedding. There’s nothing I can do about it.
It made perfect sense, once he told me. It wasn’t my fault, after all, that I couldn’t remember for all that time. My brain was just quietly dying.
Dr Braithwaite tried hard to persuade me to accept treatment, even after he’d explained that the tumour was inoperable and the form of cancer rare and aggressive.
‘There are things we can try,’ he said. ‘It might give you a little longer.’
A little longer? I was tempted, Lucy. Believe me. Maybe I’d be there for your fourth birthday after all. Maybe I could be there at the gates at the end of your first day at school to see you come running out, all swinging plaits and ankle socks.
But I refused. Can you understand that? However desperately I craved more time, I only wanted it on my terms, with the health to enjoy it. I wanted to be myself. Not ravaged by chemicals. I’d watched the flesh of aunts and cousins waste away. Vomiting. Hair loss. I couldn’t let you see that. That wasn’t how you should remember me.
I wanted to keep my dignity. To keep control. Right until the very end. And I wanted to keep my illness secret. From Dominic. And, of course, from you, too.
I came down here to the beach house early this morning, at the start of the day. You were still asleep when I crept out. I couldn’t resist the light, so pale and soft over the sea. The waves were low. No sign, at that hour, of the storm to come.
I’d had a bad night. Little sleep. I’m tormented by such pain now, in my head. It’s a constant companion. And it’s rising up too in my stomach now and my spine. Spread, I assume. The coming of death.
The world outside was calm and beautiful. Then, inside, in the studio, I caught sight of my face reflected back against the serene view in the glass. Ravaged. Dull, protruding eyes. Sallow skin. I looked such a freak that I frightened even myself, staring at my own features, seeing those bulging eyes widen even further as they looked, then fill with tears as the lips puckered. Hideous. Terrifying. That person is not me.
I tried to paint it out. I reached for a fresh canvas and set it on the easel, mixed paints and started to daub in a passion with a thick brush, angry and vengeful and bitter. My goodbye to the world. Not peaceful, after all, but furious, the self-portrait of a monster with red, swirling clouds in the sky behind and hands raised to an apocalyptic, screaming face.
I painted for more than an hour, then collapsed in a heap, exhausted, and wept.
How can I explain what I feel? That I can’t take any more of this. That already I’m too far along this disappearing road to nothingness to bear it. I am already becoming the wasted, sick creature I never wanted Lucy to see.
And so I decided.
This was it.
I chose today.
How strange, even to write those words. It feels unreal. Can it be possible that I won’t exist tomorrow? That the sun will rise without me?
I lift my hand from the paper and touch my face. That old familiar friend. The skin, slack now, but running the contours of those same cheekbones, that chin, the rounded eyes in their sockets.
I run my hands over my scalp and imagine the tumour inside the bone, proving and expanding like dough, eating away my mind. It’s taken so much already. All the memories from recent years, since the seizures began, which my brain could no longer store.
I said goodbye to you, just now. I can barely think about it.
You were alone in your bedroom, lost in your dolls, fed and bathed and in your pyjamas, waiting for me to tuck you in.
‘Come on, now. Into bed.’ I drew the curtains closed. ‘I thought we might read this tonight?’
I held up one of our favourite picture books. You’ll be too old for it soon, but it was the one I wanted to leave you with. It’s about love, of course. A mother bear’s endless love for her cub.
You settled on my knee as I read and helped by turning the pages. I held you tightly. You smelled clean and fresh, of camomile bubble bath and infant shampoo. Strands of your hair were still damp and I bunched them in my fist as I read, then let it fall, spilling round your neck. I love your hair. I wonder how you’ll style it when you grow up. I’ll never see it. I’ll never know.
Afterwards, I tucked you under the covers and kissed your cheeks, your lips, the tip of your nose.
‘I need you to be very brave, Lucy. Can you do that for me?’
‘Why, Mummy?’ You narrowed your eyes, trying to make sense of something in my face. You always had a way of reading me, even as a baby. Or so I imagined.
‘Mummy needs to go away… ‘
You struggled against me, trying to sit up. ‘Where?’
I put my finger on your lips. I couldn’t be drawn. ‘It’s a long story, sweetheart.’
You looked frantic. ‘No! Don’t go. I won’t let you.’
I put my arms round you and rocked you lightly back and forwards as if you were a baby again, struggling to sleep.
I said into your hair: ‘I love you so much, Lucy. You know that, don’t you?’
You pulled free and glared at me. ‘Why are you going?’
I bit my lip. ‘I can’t explain. It’s too tricky. But if you miss me, you can close your eyes and imagine I’m right here. See? And always remember how much I love you. Can you do that?’
You threw herself back onto the pillow with a frown and said into the pillow: ‘Will you be back for my birthday?’
I couldn’t answer that, not directly. It was too cruel.
You looked so desolate, so full of pain. ‘You will come back?’
Then I voiced the only lie I have ever told you. ‘Of course, sweetheart.’ I managed to pull my lips into a smile. ‘I love you.’ I reached over your hunched shoulder and planted a final kiss on your cheek. ‘Daddy’s on his way. He’ll be home very soon.’
I was already leaving when something occurred to me, something I hadn’t foreseen.
‘Stay in bed, won’t you, Lucy?’ The storm, blowing up, was thrashing the sea. ‘It’ll be draughty round the windows. Keep away from them, won’t you?’
* * *
I held it together until I knew you were asleep and then I came down here to the beach house, put my head in my hands and howled. I had to keep resolute. I had to keep thinking, it’s better for you this way. It’s better that you remember me like this, whole and healthy and full of love for you. No child should be exposed to death.
Hospital beds and hushed hospices and a mother so skeletal that you could barely recognise me. It would be too cruel.
Finally, I dried my eyes and reached for these pages and began to write to you.
The storm is approaching. A headache brewing behind the eyes.
I can imagine it all. The black mass of cloud will cast a shadow across the water. The sea is already agitated. A seething mass of disturbed darkness.
I’ve sent a final urgent email to Sophie, begging her to come.
Next, I’ll set the scene inside the beach house. I’ll put a packet of Samuel’s wine gums in the fridge for Sophie to find and stack my paintings neatly.
When I’ve finished this last letter to you, Lucy, ending it with a final kiss, I’ll slide the pages into their hiding place, here between the canvas and the frame of the painting I finished earlier this week. It’s my farewell present to you, Lucy, as well as part of my plan. A painting of you, crouching at the corner of the beach house in your pink coat, poking at the earth, forever searching for clues.
Sophie will be drawn to it, just as she’ll be drawn to you. She yearns for a daughter, you see. She always did and that yearning only grew after she lost her mother. We’ve known each other a long time, Sophie and I. She’ll love and care for you as her own.
Be happy, Lucy. Think of me now and then. Every birthday, when a new gold charm arrives, boxed and wrapped and dispatched from Covent Garden. Chosen with love and care. There’s a small note from me hidden inside each box with a few lines about the age you’ve just become. From Mummy, with all my love, always.
It’s time for me to go.
Before I lock the door and leave, I will pull on my thick, woollen coat and pin my old brooch on the lapel, the diamante swan that Sophie gave me all those years ago. She’ll remember it when it’s found. How could she not?
The wind will rush me in sudden squalls as I make my way down the cliff path from the beach house towards the shore and step out onto the crunching shingle. Once I leave the shelter of the rock-face, the storm will buffet me, send me staggering sideways, scream in my ears.