فصل 12

CHAPTER 12

It was the sound of tires on the gravel outside the window that made Hal’s head jerk up, breaking into her thoughts. The satin eiderdown slithered from her shoulders and she snatched for it reflexively, shivering in the sudden gust of cold wind, and then let it fall as she went to the window to see who had arrived.

She could not see the faces of the people below, only the tops of their heads and their umbrellas as they hurried across to the main doors, but she could see the parked cars—they were the two long black sedans, sleek as sharks, that had made up the funeral cortège.

The family had arrived. The real test was about to begin.

She felt suddenly sick with nerves, lightheaded with tension. This was it. A face-to-face encounter with her supposed relatives. Was she really going to do this?

She played people for a living—in her moments of clear-eyed honesty, she knew that. But this was different. This wasn’t just telling gullible people what they wanted to hear or already knew. This was a crime.

“Bugger tea,” Hal heard, floating up the stairwell as she reached the bottom of the narrow attic staircase. “Brandy’s what I want—or whiskey, if you can’t do that, Mrs. Warren.” Hal heard no reply from Mrs. Warren, but there was a remark from one of the other brothers and a gust of laughter, and she heard one of Harding’s children complaining at having to put away his phone.

This was it. The moment of truth. The words floated into her head unbidden, and she let out a short laugh. Truth? No. Lies. The moment of lies.

She had been preparing for this her whole life.

If anyone can do this, you can, Hal.

She flexed her fingers, feeling like a boxer before the fight—no, that wasn’t quite right, for this was going to be a test of mental agility, not physical. Like a grand master before a chess match, perhaps. She saw herself, as if from above, her hand hovering over a pawn, ready to make the first move.

The cold seemed to be leaving her now, and her face felt flushed and hot with anticipation as she descended the next flight of stairs, her heart beating hard beneath the black dress.

“Let’s see if we can’t get you some hot chocolate, darling,” she heard from a female voice—not Mrs. Warren, for it was clipped and rather monied. Mitzi, presumably? “That morbid wait by the grave was the absolute limit, Harding. Kitty’s frozen, where are the bloody radiators in this place?” “There aren’t any, Mit, you know that perfectly well. But I expect there’s a fire in the drawing room,” Hal heard.

As she rounded the corner of the stairs she saw them all: Harding struggling out of a Barbour jacket; Abel tapping on his phone in the corner of the room, still in his raincoat; Mitzi pulling layers off the children.

Not one of them looked up as she began to make her way down the final flight, until she stepped on a loose board, and Ezra’s head came up.

“Hellooo . . .” he drawled, and Hal felt her face flush as all the heads turned towards her, their expressions ranging from curiosity to frank surprise. “I saw you at the funeral, didn’t I?” “Yes,” Hal said. She swallowed. Her throat felt dry and sore, almost as if a thorn were stuck there, digging in. “Yes, my—my name is Hal, short for Harriet. Harriet Westaway.” Their faces didn’t change until a little dry cough came from behind Harding’s shoulder.

“Harriet is . . . Maud’s daughter.”

It was Mr. Treswick who had spoken, and his quiet voice cut through the chatter in the hallway like a knife through cheese.

The name plainly meant nothing to younger members of the group, nor to Mitzi, who carried on as if he hadn’t spoken, shooing her children towards a room up the corridor, complaining audibly as she departed about the smell of damp.

But to the three brothers, it was as if he had sworn, or smashed the empty china vase standing at the foot of the stairs. Harding felt for the chair behind him and sat down abruptly, as if he no longer trusted his legs. Abel gave an audible gasp, and his hand went to his collar. Only Ezra didn’t move. He went quite still, and his face turned pale.

“She had—she had a child?” It was Harding who spoke first, the words clotted and thick as though he had to force them out. “Why didn’t we know?” “No one knew,” Mr. Treswick said. “Except, evidently, your late mother. Perhaps your sister told her, I am not certain.” But Abel was shaking his head.

“She had a child,” he said, repeating his brother’s words, but with an entirely different emphasis, as if he could not believe the words, or the reality behind them. “She had a child? But—but it makes no sense.” Hal felt her stomach shift, and she gripped the banister tightly, feeling her sweaty palm slide against the polished wood.

“It makes no sense!” Abel repeated. “She wasn’t—she didn’t—”

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Treswick said, “here is Harriet.”

Hal took a step down into the hallway, feeling her heart beating fast and hard inside her chest, thinking of the part she had to play. It’s natural for you to be nervous, she told herself. You’re meeting your family for the first time. You can use this fear—make it your own.

“I didn’t know I had an uncle,” she said, not trying to hide the tremor in her voice, as she held out her hand towards Harding. “L-let alone three.” And he took it, his fingers warm and thick around her cold ones, and shook it, hard, in both of his, as if that handshake could somehow seal a bond between them.

“Well, well, well,” he was saying. “Very pleased to meet you, Harriet.”

But it was Abel who pulled her into a hug, crushing her glasses into his damp raincoat, so hard that she could feel his heart beating beneath her cheek.

“Welcome home,” was all he said, his voice shaking with a kind of painful sincerity. “Oh, Harriet. Welcome home.” 5th December, 1994

Maud knows. She came to my room last night after I had gone to bed, but I knew before that—I knew from her expression as she watched me over the dinner table, pushing the congealing cod and limp broccoli around my plate with my fork, feeling the nausea rise at the back of my throat.

I knew then, from the look she gave me, and the way she shoved her plate away and stood up, that she had guessed.

“Sit down,” her mother snapped. “You do not leave this table without asking permission.” Maud gave her a look close to hate, but she sat back down.

“May I leave the table?” she said, spitting each word out as if it were one of the stray bones from the cod, arrayed around the edge of her plate.

Her mother looked at her, and I saw a flicker of something pass over her face—a desire to thwart, mixed with the knowledge that one day she is going to push Maud too far, and that if Maud defied her, there would be nothing she could do in the end.

“You . . . may,” she said at last, though the last word was dragged out. But then as Maud stood, she added, “when you have finished your fish.” “I can’t eat it,” Maud said. She threw her napkin on the table. “Nor can Maggie. Look at it—it’s disgusting. Nothing but bones and tasteless white shit.” I saw the tip of my aunt’s nose go white, as it always does when she is furious.

“You will not speak about the food in this house that way,” she said.

“I won’t lie about it either—God knows there are enough lies in this house already!” “What does that mean?”

Her mother stood now too, and they faced each other, so alike, and yet so different—Maud is hot where her mother is cold, passionate where her mother is contained, but the bitterness and anger in each face made them look more alike than I ever realised before.

“You know what it means.”

With that, Maud picked up the flaccid piece of cod with her fingers and crammed it into her mouth. I thought I heard the bones crunch as she chewed, and I felt the nausea rise up in my throat, making me sweat with the effort of containing it.

“Happy?” Maud said, though the word was barely comprehensible through the suffocating mouthful.

Then, without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and left, slamming the dining room door behind her so that the china rattled on the table.

I bent my head over my plate, and trying not to let my shaking hands show, I speared a potato on my fork and put it into my mouth, my eyes blurring.

Don’t look at me, I thought desperately, knowing how my aunt’s white-cold anger could redirect onto whoever was unlucky enough to catch her attention. Don’t look at me.

But she didn’t. Instead I heard the screech of her chair legs on the parquet, and the slam of the door on the other side of the room, and when I looked up I was blessedly, entirely alone.

• • •

It was much later that Maud came to my room. I was sitting in bed in my dressing gown, a hot-water bottle at my feet, sorting my cards. I heard feet on the stairs, and at first my stomach clenched, not sure who it was, but then there came a tap on the wooden door, and I knew.

“Maud?”

“Yes, it’s me.” Her voice was low, and I could tell she didn’t want anyone to hear. “Can I come in?” “Yes,” I whispered back, and the handle turned, and she came into the room, ducking her head beneath the low attic doorway. She was wrapped in a huge cardigan, and her feet were bare. “God, aren’t you freezing?” I asked, and she nodded, her teeth chattering. Without speaking I pushed over in the narrow bed and patted the pillow beside me, and she climbed in, her feet like ice as she slid them down past my legs.

“I hate her,” was all she said. “I hate her so much. How can you stand to be here?” I have no other choice, was what I thought, but I knew that I had as many choices as Maud, maybe more.

“She acts like it’s the 1950s,” Maud said bitterly. “No TV, you and me shut up here like fucking nuns, Mrs Warren toiling away in the kitchen—does she realise people don’t live like this any more? Other people our age are out there going to gigs, getting drunk, screwing each other—don’t you care that we’re shut up here in Mother’s post-war fantasyland?” I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell her that I had never wanted to get drunk or go to gigs. That I never had—even when I had the chance.

“Maybe I fit in with it better than you,” I said at last. “Mum always said I was an old-fashioned little thing.” “Tell me about your mum,” she said quietly, and I felt a lump rise in my throat—thinking of Mum as she always is in my mind’s eye—digging in the garden, with Dad alongside her, humming along to Paul Simon, hoeing the onions or planting bulbs. I tried not to think of those last nightmare months—Mum gasping her last on a ventilator, and Dad’s heart attack a few weeks later.

“What’s to tell?” I said, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt. “She’s dead. They’re both dead. End of.” The unfairness of it still makes me gasp—but there’s a kind of rightness in it too, that’s what I’ve realised. I was the child of two people completely in love. They were meant to be together—in life, and in death. I just wish that that death hadn’t come so soon.

“I want to understand . . .” Maud said, her voice very low. “I want to understand what it must be like not . . . not to hate your mother.” This time, it wasn’t the chill of her feet, but the venom in her voice that made me shiver.

My aunt isn’t an easy woman—I know that—I knew that before I even came to live here. The fact that she had managed to fight with my father told me everything I needed to know. He was the most mild-mannered man you can imagine. But nothing had prepared me for the reality of what I found here.

“I wish I could get away,” she spoke with quiet venom, into her knees. “She let him go.” She didn’t say who—she didn’t have to say. We both knew who she was talking about. Ezra, away at boarding school. He had escaped.

“Is it the boy thing, do you think?” I asked.

Maud shrugged, trying to look unconcerned, but I wasn’t fooled. Her cheeks were wet where she had cried after supper.

“Girls aren’t worth educating,” she said, with a bitter little laugh. “Or not worth paying to educate, anyway. But whatever she thinks, I’ve got twice his brains. I’ll be at Oxford while he’s still sitting retakes at some shitty crammer in Surrey. I’m going to show her, this summer. Those exams are my ticket out of here.” I didn’t say what I was thinking. Which was—what about me? If Maud leaves, what will I do? Will I be imprisoned here, alone, with her?

“I used to hate this room,” Maud said softly. “She used to lock us in here as children, for punishment. But now . . . I don’t know. It feels like an escape from the rest of the house.” There was a long silence. I tried to imagine it—tried to imagine having a mother who would do that—and what it would do to you as a child to suffer through that—and my imagination failed.

“Can I sleep here tonight?” she asked, and I nodded.

She rolled over, and I switched out the light and turned on my side, my back to her, and we lay in the darkness, feeling the warmth of each other at our spines, and the shift and creak of the mattress whenever the other moved.

I was almost asleep when she spoke, her voice a whisper so soft I wasn’t sure at first if she was speaking, or sighing in her sleep.

“Maggie, what are you going to do?”

I didn’t answer. I just lay there, staring into the blackness, feeling my heart beating hard in my chest at her words.

She knows.