فصل بیست و هشتم

I told you, Mr. Wrexham, didn’t I, that I wasn’t even looking for a job when I stumbled across the advert? In fact I was doing something totally different, something I’d done many times before.

I was googling my father’s name.

I’d always known who he was, and for a while I’d even known where he was—a fancy semidetached house in Crouch End, with electric gates that slid automatically across the driveway, and a shiny BMW on the forecourt. I had been there once in my midteens, under the cover of a pretended shopping trip to Oxford Street with a friend. I remember the taste in my mouth, the way my hands shook when I showed the bus driver my travel card, every step of the walk from Crouch End Broadway.

I stood outside that gate for a long time, consumed with a strange mix of fear and anger, too afraid to ring the bell and face up to the man I’d never met, the man who had walked out when my mother was nine months pregnant.

He sent checks for a while, but he wasn’t on my birth certificate, and I suppose my mother was too proud to pursue him and force him to pay.

Instead, she picked herself up, got a job in an insurer’s firm, and met the man she eventually married. The man—the message was very clear—that she should have been with all along.

And so, when I was six, we moved into his boxy little house.

It was their home. Hers and his. It was never mine. Not from the day I moved into the little room above the stairs and was told sharply not to scuff my suitcase on the hall baseboards. Not until the day I packed a different, larger suitcase and moved out, twelve long years later.

It was their home, but I—I was always there to spoil it for them. This living, breathing, constant reminder of my mother’s past. Of the man who had left her. And every day, she had to look at me staring at her over the breakfast cereal with his eyes. When she brushed my thick, wiry hair into a ponytail, it was his hair she brushed, not her own fine, flyaway stuff.

For that was all I had from him. That, and the necklace he had sent me on my first birthday, the last contact I had from him. A necklace with my initial on it—R for Rachel.

Cheap, nasty rubbish, my mother had called it, but that didn’t stop me from wearing it all the hours I was allowed. At weekends, at first, and every day in the holidays, and then when I began work as an au pair, tucking it beneath my T-shirts and plastic aprons, so that it was always there, the worn metal warm between my breasts.

I was working as a nanny in Highgate when she rang me up and told me. She and my stepfather were selling the house and retiring to Spain. Just like that. It wasn’t that I had any particular affection for that house—I had never been happy there.

But it had been . . . well, if not my home, at any rate, the only place I could call home. “Of course you’re welcome to come and visit,” she said, her voice high and slightly defensive, as if she knew what she was doing, and I think it was that, more than anything, that made me lose it. You’re welcome to come and visit. It was the kind of thing you say to a distant relative, or a friend you don’t particularly like, hoping they won’t take you up on the offer.

I told her to fuck off. I’m not proud of that. I told her that I hated her, that I’d had four years of therapy to try to deal with my upbringing, and that I never wanted to hear from her again.

It wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t true. Even now, even here, at Charnworth, she was the first person I put on my prison call list. But she’s never called.

It was two days after her announcement that I went back to Crouch End.

I was twenty-two. And I wasn’t angry this time. I was just . . . I was terribly, terribly sad. I had lost the only parent I’d ever known—and my need to replace her with something, however poor and inadequate, was consuming me.

“Hello . . . Bill.” I had practiced the words in my bedroom the night before, standing in front of the mirror. My face was scrubbed clean of makeup, making me look younger and even more vulnerable, though that hadn’t been my intention, and I found that my voice was unnaturally high, as if I wanted to make an appeal to his pity. I didn’t know what kind of daughter he’d want—but I was prepared to try and be that person. “Hello, Bill. You don’t know me, but I’m Rachel. I’m Catherine’s daughter.” My heart was thudding in my chest as I walked up to the gate and rang the bell, waiting for the gate to slide back, or perhaps the crackle of voices to come over the intercom. But nothing happened.

I tried again, holding the buzzer long and hard, and eventually the front door opened and a small woman in an overall, holding a duster, came out across the shingled drive.

“Hello?” She was in her forties or fifties, and her voice was heavily accented—Polish, I thought, or perhaps Russian. Eastern Europe. “I can help you?” “Oh . . . hello.” My pulse rate had sped up, until I thought I might possibly faint from nerves. “Hello. I’m looking for Mr.—” I swallowed. “Mr. Elincourt. Bill Elincourt. Is he here?” “He is not here.”

“Oh, well, will he be back later?”

“He gone. New family now.”

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“He and his wife moved last year. Different country. Scotland. New family is here now. Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright.” Oh. Fuck.

It was like a punch to the gut.

“Do you . . . do you have an address?” I asked, my voice faltering, and she shook her head. There was pity in her eyes.

“Sorry, I do not have, I am just cleaning.”

“You—” I swallowed hard. “You mentioned a wife. Mrs. Elincourt. Can I ask—what’s her name?” I don’t know why that was suddenly important to me. Only that I knew the trail had gone cold, and any scraps of information seemed better than nothing. The cleaner looked at me sadly. Who did she think I was? A spurned girlfriend? A former employee? Or maybe she had guessed the truth.

“She called Sandra,” she said at last, very quietly. “I must go now.” And then she turned and made her way back into the house.

I turned too and began the long walk back to Highgate, saving the bus fare. There was a hole in my shoe, and as I started up the hill, it began to rain, and I knew I had lost my chance.

After that I didn’t try looking again in earnest for a few years. And then, one day, when I was idly typing Bill Elincourt into Google, there it was. The advert. With a house in Scotland. And a wife called Sandra.

And a family.

And suddenly, I couldn’t not.

It was like the universe had set this up for me—to give me a chance.

I didn’t want him to be my dad, not now, not after all these years. I just wanted to . . . well, just to see, I suppose. But obviously, I couldn’t travel up to Scotland under my own name without telling him who I was, and setting up a whole weight of expectation and potential rejection. Even with nearly thirty years of water under the bridge, it was unlikely that Bill would have forgotten the name of his firstborn daughter, and Gerhardt was unusual enough as a surname for him to do a double take, and register it as that of the mother of his child.

But I didn’t need to go under my own name. In fact, I had a better name, a better identity, just ready and waiting for me. One that would get me through the front door without any strings attached, at which point I could do whatever I wanted. And so I picked up the papers that Rowan had left so temptingly lying around in her bedroom—the papers that were, almost, going to waste. The papers so very, very close to my own that really, it didn’t seem like much of a deception at all.

And I applied.

I didn’t expect to get the job. I didn’t even want it. I just wanted to meet the man who had abandoned me all those years before. But when I saw Heatherbrae, I knew, Mr. Wrexham. I knew that one visit was never going to be enough for me. I wanted to be a part of all this, to sleep in the softness of those feather beds, to sink into the velvet sofas, to bask under the rainwater showers—to be a part of this family, in short.

And I wanted, very, very badly, to meet Bill.

And when he didn’t appear at the interview, I could see only one way to make that happen.

I had to get the job.

But when I did . . . and when I met Bill that first night, and realized the kind of man he was, God, it’s like a metaphor for this whole thing, Mr. Wrexham. It’s all connected. The beauty and luxury of this house, and the seeping poison underneath the high-tech facade. The solid Victorian wood of a closet door, with its polished brass escutcheon—and the cold, rank smell of death that breathes out of the hole.

There was something sick in that house, Mr. Wrexham. And whether Bill had been sick when he went there and brought it with him, or whether he had caught its sickness and become the man I met on that first night, that predatory, abusive man, I don’t know.

All I know is that the two run hand in hand, and that if you scratched the walls of Heatherbrae House, scoring the hand-blocked peacock wallpaper with your nails, or gouging the polished granite tiles, that same darkness would seep out, the darkness that lay very close beneath Bill Elincourt’s skin.

Don’t look for him. That was one of the few things my mother had said to me about him, before she shut off the subject completely. Don’t look for him, Rachel. Nothing good will come of it.

She was right. God, she was so right. And how I wish I’d listened to her.