فصل 48

48

JULES

Tell me honestly. Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it?

I woke with your voice in my head. It was midafternoon. I can’t sleep at night, this house rocks like a boat and the sound of the water is deafening. In the day, it’s not so bad somehow. At any rate, I must have fallen asleep because I woke with your voice in my head, asking:

Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it? Liked or enjoyed? Or was it wanted? I can’t remember now. I only remember taking my hand from yours and raising it to hit you, and the look on your face, uncomprehending.

I dragged myself across the hall to the bathroom and turned on the shower. I was too exhausted to undress, so I just sat there while the room got steamier and steamier. Then I turned off the water and went to the sink and splashed my face. When I looked up I saw, appearing in the condensation, two letters traced on the surface of the mirror, an L and an S. I got such a fright that I cried out.

I heard Lena’s door open and then she was pounding on the bathroom door. “What? What’s happening? Julia?”

I opened the door to her, furious. “What are you doing?” I demanded. “What are you trying to do to me?” I pointed back at the mirror.

“What?” She looked annoyed. “What?”

“You know very well, Lena. I don’t know what you think you’re trying to do, but—”

She turned her back on me and started to walk away. “Christ, you’re such a freak.”

I stood there staring at the letters for a while. I wasn’t imagining things, they were definitely there: LS. It was the sort of thing you used to do all the time: leave me ghostly messages on the mirror or draw tiny pentagrams in red nail polish on the back of my door. You left things to scare me. You loved to freak me out and you must have told her that. You must have, and now she was doing it, too.

Why LS? Why Libby Seeton? Why fixate on her? Libby was an innocent, a young woman dragged to the water by men who hated women, who heaped blame on them for things that they themselves had done. But Lena thought you went there of your own volition, so why Libby? Why LS?

Wrapped in a towel, I padded across the hallway and into your bedroom. It seemed undisturbed, but there was a smell in the air, something sweet—not your perfume, another. Something cloying, heavy with the scent of overblown roses. The drawer next to your bed was closed, and when I pulled it open, everything was as it had been, with one exception. The lighter, the one on which you’d had Libby’s initials engraved, was gone. Someone had been in the room. Someone had taken it.

I went back to the bathroom and splashed my face again and rubbed the letters from the mirror, and as I did, I saw you standing behind me, that exact same look on your face, uncomprehending. I whirled around and Lena raised her hands as though in self-defence. “Jesus, Julia, chill. What is going on with you?”

I shook my head. “I just . . . I just . . .”

“You just what?” She rolled her eyes.

“I need some air.”

• • •

BUT ON THE FRONT STEP I almost cried out again, because there were women—two of them—at the gate, dressed in black and bent over, entangled in some way. One of them looked up at me. It was Louise Whittaker, the mother of the girl who had died. She dragged herself away from the other woman, speaking angrily as she did.

“Leave me! Leave me alone! Don’t you come near me!”

The other one waved a hand at her—or at me, I couldn’t be sure. Then she turned and slowly hobbled off along the lane.

“Bloody nutcase,” Louise spat as she approached the house. “She’s a menace, that Sage woman. Don’t engage with her, I’m telling you. Don’t let her through your door. She’s a liar and a con artist, all she wants is money.” She paused to catch her breath, frowning at me. “Well. You look about as awful as I feel.” I opened my mouth and shut it again. “Is your niece at home?”

I showed her into the house. “I’ll just get her for you,” I said, but Louise was already at the foot of the staircase, calling Lena’s name. Then she went into the kitchen and sat down at the table to wait.

After a moment, Lena appeared. Her typical expression, that combination of haughtiness and boredom so reminiscent of you, was gone. She greeted Louise meekly, although I’m not even sure if Louise noticed because her eye was trained elsewhere, on the river outside or some place beyond.

Lena sat down at the table, raising her hands to wind her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. She lifted her chin slightly, as though she were preparing herself for something, an interview. An interrogation. I may as well have been invisible for all the attention they paid me, but I remained in the room. I stood by the counter, not relaxed but on the balls of my feet, in case I needed to intervene.

Louise blinked, slowly, and her gaze finally came to rest on Lena, who held it for a second before looking down at the table.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Whittaker. I’m really sorry.”

Louise said nothing. Tears coursed down the lines of her face, in runnels carved from months of unrelenting grief.

“I’m so sorry,” Lena repeated. She was crying too now, letting her hair down again, twisting it through her fingers like a little girl.

“I wonder if you’ll ever know,” Louise said at last, “how it feels to realize that you didn’t know your own child.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I have all her things. Her clothes, her books, her music. The pictures she treasured. I know her friends and the people she admired, I know what she loved. But that wasn’t her. Because I didn’t know who she loved. She had a life—a whole life—that I didn’t know about. The most important part of her, I didn’t know.” Lena tried to speak, but Louise went on. “The thing is, Lena, that you could have helped me. You could have told me about it. You could have told me when you first found out. You could have come to me and told me that my daughter had got herself caught up in something, something she couldn’t control, something you knew, you must have known, would end up being harmful to her.”

“But I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .” Again Lena tried to say something, and again Louise wouldn’t let her.

“Even if you were blind enough or stupid enough or careless enough not to see how much trouble she was in, you could still have helped me. You could have come to me after she died and said, this isn’t something you did or didn’t do. This isn’t your fault, this isn’t your husband’s fault. You could have stopped us from driving ourselves mad. But you didn’t. You chose not to. All that time, you said nothing. All this time, you . . . And worse, even worse than that, you let him . . .” Her voice rose and then disappeared into the air, like smoke.

“Get away with it?” Lena finished the sentence. She was no longer crying, and although her voice rose, it was strong, not weak. “Yes. I did, and it made me sick. It made me fucking sick, but I did it for her. Everything I have done, I did for Katie.”

“Don’t you say her name to me,” Louise hissed. “Don’t you dare.”

“Katie, Katie, Katie!” Lena was half on her feet, leaning forward, her face inches from Louise’s nose. “Mrs. Whittaker”—she collapsed back into her seat—“I loved her. You know how much I loved her. I did what she wanted me to do. I did what she asked of me.”

“It wasn’t your decision, Lena, to keep something as important as that from me, her mother—”

“No, it wasn’t my decision, it was hers! I know you think you have the right to know everything, but you don’t. She wasn’t a child, she wasn’t a little girl.”

“She was my little girl!” Louise’s voice was a wail, a ululation. I realized I was gripping the counter, that I, too, was about to cry.

Lena spoke again, her voice softer now, supplicating. “Katie made a choice. She made a decision and I honoured it.” More gently still, as though knowing she was moving onto dangerous ground, “And I’m not the only one. Josh did, too.”

Louise drew back her hand and hit Lena once, very hard, across the face. The smack resounded, echoing off the walls. I leaped forward and grabbed Louise’s arm. “No!” I shouted. “That’s enough! That’s enough!” I tried to pull her to her feet. “You need to go.”

“Leave her!” Lena snapped. The left side of her face was an angry red, but her expression was calm. “Stay out of it, Julia. She can hit me if she wants. She can scratch my eyes out, pull my hair. She can do whatever she wants to me. What does it matter now?”

Louise’s mouth was open, I could smell her sour breath. I let go.

“Josh didn’t say anything because of you,” she said, wiping spittle from her lips. “Because you told him not to say anything.”

“No, Mrs. Whittaker.” Lena’s tone was perfectly even as she placed the back of her right hand against her cheek to soothe it. “That isn’t true. Josh kept his mouth shut because of Katie. Because she asked him to. And then later on, because he wanted to protect you and his dad. He thought that it would hurt you too much. To know that she’d been . . .” She shook her head. “He’s young, he thought—”

“Don’t tell me what my son thought,” Louise said. “What he was trying to do. Just don’t.” She raised her hand to her throat—a reflex. No, not a reflex: she was gripping the blue bird that hung on her chain between thumb and forefinger. “This,” she said, a hiss, not a word. “It wasn’t from you, was it?” Lena hesitated for a moment before shaking her head. “It was from him. Wasn’t it? He gave it to her.” Louise pushed her chair back, scraping its feet across the tiles. She pulled herself upright and with a vicious tug ripped the chain from her neck, slamming it down on the table in front of Lena. “He gave that thing to her, and you let me hang it around my neck.”

Lena closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head again. The meek, apologetic girl who’d crept into the kitchen a few minutes ago was gone and in her stead sat someone different, someone older, the adult to Louise’s desperate, intemperate child. All at once I had the clearest memory of you, a little younger than Lena is now, one of the few memories I have of you sticking up for me. There was a teacher at my school who had accused me of taking something that didn’t belong to me, and I remembered you admonishing her. You were clear-sighted and cool, and you didn’t raise your voice when you told her how wrong she was to make accusations without evidence, and she was cowed by you. I remembered how proud I was of you then, and I had the same feeling here, the same sensation of heat in my chest.

Louise began to speak again, her voice very low. “Explain this to me, then,” she said, sitting back down, “since you know so much. Since you understand so much. If Katie loved that man, and if he loved her back, then why? Why did she do what she did? What did he do to her? To drive her to that?”

Lena turned her gaze to me. She looked afraid, I think, or maybe just resigned—I couldn’t quite read her expression. She watched me for a second before closing her eyes, squeezing tears out of them. When she spoke again, her voice was higher, tighter than before.

“He didn’t drive her to that. It wasn’t him.” She sighed. “Katie and I argued,” she said. “I wanted her to stop it, to stop seeing him. I didn’t think it was right. I thought she was going to get into trouble. I thought . . .” She shook her head. “I just didn’t want her to see him anymore.”

A flash of understanding crossed Louise’s face; she understood, in that moment, as did I.

“You threatened her,” I said. “With exposure.”

“Yes,” Lena said, barely audible. “I did.”

• • •

LOUISE LEFT WITHOUT A WORD. Lena sat motionless, staring at the river outside the window, not crying and not speaking. I had nothing to say to her, no way of reaching her. I recognized in her something I know I used to have, too, something maybe everyone has at that age, some essential unknowability. I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one. I remember you at seventeen and me at thirteen, and I’m certain that our parents had no idea who we were.

“I lied to her.” Lena’s voice broke my train of thought. She hadn’t moved, she was still watching the water.

“Lied to who? To Katie?” She shook her head. “To Louise? What did you lie about?”

“There’s no point telling her the truth,” Lena said. “Not now. She may as well blame me. At least I’m around. She needs somewhere to put all that hate.”

“What do you mean, Lena? What are you talking about?”

She turned her cold green eyes on mine, and she looked older than before. She looked the way you did the morning after you’d pulled me from the water. Changed, weary. “I didn’t threaten to tell anyone. I would never have done that to her. I loved her. None of you seem to get what that means. It’s like you don’t know what love is at all. I would have done anything for her.”

“So, if you didn’t threaten her . . .”

I think I knew the answer before she said it. “It was Mum,” she said.