Annie didn’t quite see it like that. ‘So you’ve been living a lie all this time? Pretending?’ she stuttered, when I broke the news, desperately trying to make our separation sound like a Gwyneth-style conscious uncoupling (admittedly, a stretch). I couldn’t bear to tell her about Steve’s affair since that’s an adult mess, and my own humiliating business, a symptom of our break-up as much as its cause. Also, despite everything, he’s always been a brilliant father. So I said, ‘We’re united in our love for you, Annie. That’s the most important thing.’ Which is true. But when I tried to hug her, she pushed me away.
‘Why didn’t you warn me? You know what, Mum? It’s been like this all my life, you going, la, la, la, everything’s great, just don’t ask too many questions.’
I flinched, sensing I’d tapped into something else, more subcutaneous, a vein of resentment that went beyond Steve’s and my split.
‘And it’s bullshit.’
The next day Annie decamped to my mother’s cottage in Devon for the summer, where Granny’s sympathetic shoulder was waiting. ‘Right now she’s lying on the sofa, eating a tub of my homemade caramel ice-cream, watching reruns of Girls,’ my mother reported back reassuringly, on the phone later that evening. ‘Of course she doesn’t hate you! No, stop it, Sylvie. You’re a wonderful mother. But it’s a bit of a shock. She feels duped. She needs time to digest it. We all do,’ she added, which I took as a small dig.
I hadn’t warned Mum either. We both share difficult news on a need-to-know basis. Like mother. Like daughter.
‘Let her have a carefree summer by the sea. I’ll take good care of her, don’t you worry. But who’ll look after you?’
I laughed and said I was quite able to look after myself. Yes, really. But after many years of wifedom, I needed to find out who I was.
‘Who you are?’ she said quietly, after a beat or two of fully loaded silence, then swiftly changed the subject.
Annie quickly sorted herself out with a waitressing job and a boyfriend. On the phone she’ll often claim, not wholly convincingly, the signal’s dodgy and promise to phone back later, then doesn’t. If I ask about the new boyfriend – ‘Dotty about him,’ Mum says – Annie immediately shuts down the conversation, as if I’ve lost the right to her confidence. Can I meet him? Silence. When will she come back to London and see my new apartment? ‘Soon,’ she says, often with a muffled giggle, as if the boyfriend is there in the background, nuzzling her neck. ‘Gotta go. Love you. Yeah, miss you too, Mum.’
At least she’s having fun, I reason, as I park the car on my new street that’s not nearly as nice as my old one and grab the cardboard box out of the boot. I can hear the building’s summer pulse already. Out of its open windows, the competing sounds of cooped-up children, hip-hop, radio commentary – ‘Goal!’ – and the opera singer on the second floor, throat open, practising her scales. A group of hooded teenage boys watch me idly, leaning back against a graffiti-spattered wall, smoking weed. I smile brightly at them, refusing to be intimidated, and climb determinedly up four flights of stairs, the last bit of my married life weighty in my arms.
The block is what estate agents call ‘industrial cool’, a mix of council and private with concrete communal walkways and balconies overlooking the Grand Union Canal. Slightly edgy. My apartment – two small bedrooms, the nicest one ready for Annie, yet to be used – is owned by an understanding old friend, Val, and usually rented as an Airbnb. It’s an immaculate vision of pink gallery-picture walls, whitewashed Scandi floorboards, Berber rugs and enormous, hard-to-kill waxy-leafed houseplants. More importantly, it’s only a couple of tube stops from the old house, so Annie can move between me and Steve easily, as she pleases. Or not.
I drop the box to the floor and wish there was someone I could shout to ‘Put the kettle on.’
Silence chases me around, like a cat. I flick on the radio and open the balcony’s glass doors, arms outstretched, head thrown back, pretending I’m in an old French movie. The city rumbles in, smelling of canal, diesel and beer-soaked late-July heat. I lift my face to the sunshine and smile. I can do this.
Even after a month, the view from the balcony is a novelty, as though big grey London’s cleaved open its hidden green heart and let me in. The colour of matcha tea, it’s an urban highway for dragonflies, butterflies and birds. Other interesting wildlife: a thirtysomething, who likes hats, plays guitar and sings – weirdly unselfconscious, not in tune – on his canal-boat deck in the evenings. A resident heron. Displaced from my old home, I’ve felt a funny kinship with that tatty urban heron – awkward yet stoic, no spring chicken – and can’t help but see it as a symbol of my strange new freedom. No sign of her yet this morning.
I rest my arms on the balustrade, my dark curls starting to frizz, and my mind restlessly twitches forward, like the hand of a clock, to work, the earliest acceptable time to drink a glass of wine, then Annie. Images bloom in my mind. Mum yomping across a beach, toddler Annie on her shoulders; Annie curled up on the sofa, like a silky mammal, in a nest of cushions with a hoard of electronic devices; her freckles, persimmon stars, impossible for a make-up artist’s brush to replicate. I miss those freckles. I miss her. And I can still recall, as if it happened hours ago, the precise sensation of running my fingertip over her first tooth, hidden under the sore scarlet gum, intent on surfacing.
Out of the corner of my eye, the heron, my freedom bird, swoops down and turns into a statue on the bank. I smile at her. My mobile rings. Not recognizing the number, suspecting spam, I flick it to voicemail. It rings again. ‘Hello … Sorry? … Yes, Sylvie. Sylvie Broom … What?’ My breath catches. The heron’s huge wings hinge open and she holds them there, still, open, frozen at the first intention of flight. Time slows. The words ‘an accident’ snag the baked London afternoon. And, with a clap of feathers and air, my heron’s gone.
3
Rita
A pheasant bolts up from the overgrown verge, making Rita start. She waits for it to scrabble safely into the forest, then shunts the car through Foxcote Manor’s gates. A metallic scraping sound makes her wince. She hopes Jeannie didn’t hear it. She needs this first day to go smoothly, without any bad omens.
‘The car says ouch,’ announces Teddy from the back seat. He’s lying across it, his head on the pillow of his big sister’s lap, one bare foot pressed against a window, undone dungarees strap swinging. He’s been dozing for most of the journey while Hera’s sat in a state of brittle vigilance, her cheeks squirrel-stuffed with Black Jacks. ‘But don’t worry. You scraped it on the other side this time, Big Rita. So it matches,’ he adds sweetly.
Rita turns to Jeannie. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And even sorrier about agreeing to take secret notes for Walter. Only she can’t say this.
Jeannie shrugs and smiles, the first real smile all day, as if she rather likes the idea of a new scratch on her husband’s car. Rita doesn’t understand the Harringtons’ marriage. Every time she thinks she does, something overturns it. Like the knife.
Two days after the fire, Jeannie confided that she’d hidden the dead baby’s things from Walter – who had banned ‘any reminders’ – under her bed and feared she’d never see them again. Rita immediately offered to retrieve them. She knew first-hand that memories had to be protected, like rare jewels: the enormity of tiny things.