‘You’ve always asked me, Rosie. You’ve got angry with me.’
‘I know. I—’
‘And quite right too. And I never said much, because the truth is – I just don’t know what happened to her.’
I turned to him. ‘Dad, is that really the truth?’
He swallowed, gripping his tin mug in one fist. ‘Yes. She vanished. That’s the truth.’
‘In a puff of smoke?’
He gave me a hard look. ‘One day she was there, Rose, and the next she was gone. I looked for her. Not for my sake. For yours. Do you think I could understand what happened?’
‘You’d understand it better than me.’
He sighed. ‘Your mum, she . . . we weren’t together by then. She left. Took you with her. And Connie – Constance – was there.’
‘In New York?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘But your mum went to live with a friend. A woman called Yolanda.’
‘Yolanda? But what about this Constance woman?’
My dad batted the air with his hand impatiently. ‘Just wait, Rose. Listen. Your mum and Yolanda worked together in a diner in Manhattan. Yolanda was as clueless as me about what happened. After your mum disappeared, Yolanda rang me, and I came to get you. I’d had enough.’
I’d never heard any of this before. I took it in, staring at the sea. ‘How hard did you look for her?’ I said quietly.
He turned to me, angry. ‘I spent months looking for her. I was even brought in for questioning.’ He paused. ‘But your mum didn’t want to be found. She’d gone.’ He stared back out to the water. ‘What I want to say, Rose, is that if you want to know what happened to your mum – if that’s what you really want – then it isn’t me you need to talk to. I don’t have the answers. And the only person who might know is Connie.’
‘Why are you calling her Connie? How well did you know her?’
‘Well enough,’ he said with a grim expression. ‘But we weren’t the best of friends.’
‘Why not?’
By now, my father was looking as if he wanted the sea to drag him under. ‘It’s hard to talk about. We all make mistakes. It was – a very difficult time. All I’ve ever cared about is you, Rose.’
‘If you cared about me, you would have told me this years ago.’ I felt the tears rising again and I jumped to my feet. The paperback of Green Rabbit tumbled to the pebbles. I kicked it and my dad scrambled to rescue it. ‘Why did you let me make up stupid stories about her?’ I went on. ‘How could you keep this from me? This is information.’
Dad tried to encircle me with his arms. I pushed him away and staggered a little down to the edge of the shore. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just thought it wouldn’t help. It was all such a mess! We were back in England, your mum was God knows where. I just wanted things to be stable.’
Gingerly, he took a few steps towards me, and I didn’t move away. ‘If you still want to know about your mother,’ he said gently—
‘I do,’ I said. ‘You know I do.’
‘I know. Constance Holden was there, just before she disappeared. She was the last one to see her.’ My dad paused, his face as pale as a winter bulb. ‘All I know is that Connie went to visit Elise at Yolanda’s, and we never saw your mother again. I don’t know where Connie is, Rose. All I’ve got left of that time are these bloody paperbacks.’
‘I want them.’
‘You can have them. That’s why I pulled them out of the cardboard box. But Rosie, the chances are she won’t want to speak to you.’
‘Why not?’
My dad sighed again, pinching the bridge of his nose as he always did in moments of discomfort. ‘It wasn’t a happy time. So if you do find her, you’ll have to be careful.’
‘Why?’
He looked miserable. ‘Your mum was – easily led. You’re strong.’
‘I’m not strong.’
‘You’re stronger than you think.’ He turned towards the water. ‘Sometimes, Rose, we say things and do things, and we don’t for one second imagine the consequences of our actions.’
‘I just can’t believe you never talked to me about this.’
‘Believe me, I thought about it. But what could you have done? I’d have been imposing it on you when you were too young to be able to do anything about it, or to see it from all angles.’
‘Dad. I’m thirty-four.’
‘It wouldn’t have been fair. It would have been too much of a burden.’
‘You don’t think I’ve been burdened anyway, this whole time?’
‘Maybe me telling you now is still unfair. I don’t know all the angles, Rosie, and I was there. But I’ve told you what I know. Connie was a charming woman and your mother was in her thrall.’ He placed the novel in my hands and turned away, heading back to the cottage, arcing the dregs from our coffee cups against the uneven stones.
‘What the hell am I supposed to do, Dad?’ I said.
He stopped, but he didn’t turn round. ‘Find Constance Holden if you want answers. I don’t know any more.’
1982
5
All twenty-six of Frida Kahlo’s principal paintings had come from Mexico to be displayed in the Whitechapel Gallery, the stipulation being that they travelled together, or not at all. Connie and Elise wandered the rooms, looking into the small and vivid portals. Foliage, babies, blood and beauty, a prayer book of a different order, its pages torn and hung against the wall. Illumination by a woman, her mouth closed on silent screaming prayers, a poetry they couldn’t teach in church. Always, that gaze: a suspended, knowledgeable survey of herself that managed to include you too.
Electrified by these images, Elise watched Connie’s lovely neck, the tendrils fallen from her messy attempt to tame her hair – her hair the colour of a fox’s pelt, the scoop of her shirt revealing a pattern of freckles across that collarbone. Her fingers upon that collarbone, then pointing at this painting or that, moving, always moving, so slender and pale like the fingers of a maiden in a tapestry. Her cologne of citrus and smoked wood. Her small chin that widened up into a heart-shaped face, with grey-green eyes and neat brows like the wings of a settling dove. She was so russet and English compared to the Mexican enigma she was facing. Frida and Constance could be creatures from two different planets and yet they both inspired something similar inside Elise. Nearly two years they’d been together, and Elise felt she’d come to the point of loving Connie so much that she wouldn’t last long in this world if Connie died first. Her body would give in, knowing Con’s had been handed to the gods.
Elise had never experienced this before: the mind with the flesh. Her father still didn’t know she was in love with a woman; he would never know. She’d left his house when she was sixteen, her mum dead long before that. Now Elise had entered the most beautiful chapter of her life – perhaps the only beautiful chapter she’d ever had.
*
Connie had invited Elise to come and live with her some six months after that first hungover morning in Hampstead, and Elise had sat on the floor of John’s flat with nothing more than two duffel bags, her heart jumpy as she’d waited for the sound of the tiny red Citroën. This is the right thing, she’d told herself, going down the stairs, the bags bumping her hips like the buckets of a milkmaid. She’d left a month’s rent in an envelope on the kitchen table, which Connie had paid. It feels like the right thing.