In her too-loud voice, Tammy said, ‘We’d been looking forward to seeing Bobby for forever. I still don’t understand why he isn’t here.’
‘Dad’s away,’ Laurie said. ‘He’s been away yonks.’
‘What’s a yonk?’
Laurie giggled. ‘Ages. Weeks.’
‘He hasn’t been away weeks,’ Nina corrected her daughter. ‘A week. And a bit. He sends his apologies, Tammy.’
Tammy smiled. ‘One of these days Laurie will be able to make the hop on her own, I suppose.’
‘But not yet,’ Nina said. ‘I hope you don’t mind me being here, Tammy?’
‘Why should I? Goodness me.’ She paused. ‘You’re one of the family.’
Nina noted the pause. She was certain that Tammy had almost said ‘practically one of the family’. Despite Nina’s long relationship with Rob, despite her having brought Laurie into the world, her status was still up for debate.
‘And I can’t remember if you told me – Bobby is…’
‘In the Czech Republic. Somewhere near Prague.’ It was the same lie Nina had used when Laurie had asked the question more than a week ago. She had no idea why she had answered ‘the Czech Republic’ in the first place; she had never been there. Strange how the mind worked sometimes. ‘A holiday, sort of. He’s with friends.’
‘Well, I should hope he would be,’ Tammy said with a gruesome smile. ‘What’s a holiday with people who aren’t your friends?’
Nina pressed her lips together, uncertain how much to read into the question.
She realised Laurie was watching her carefully. The image of the girl on the harbour road flashed into Nina’s mind, the face superimposed onto her daughter’s, yellow-white as though still lit by car headlights. That same baleful expression.
‘Well. Cookies are in the other room for those that can risk indulging,’ Tammy said brightly. ‘Your suitcases are still in the car. Can you manage, Nina?’
She escorted Laurie across the hallway before Nina could answer.
CHAPTER TWO
Nina slept in and jet lag turned everything inside out. She blinked sleep out of her eyes to see a hundred Robs smiling down at her. She groaned and rolled onto her face. The slats of the futon pushed through the thin mattress and dug into her chin.
Her phone gave the time as 10.30 a.m., but blearily she remembered that it would have set itself to local time automatically, and that UK time was five hours ahead. She hadn’t slept this long for a decade or more. Not that she felt any benefit. Last night, after making her excuses and turning in ‘early’, she had stared at a patch on the ceiling, trying to ignore the Robs, listening to the enthusiastic rise and fall of Laurie’s voice, the strident tone of Tammy’s, the infrequent bass rumble of Abram’s as they exchanged anecdotes in the sitting room.
Nina had an irrational sense that Laurie was being stolen away from her by Tammy and Abram, by Hope Island itself. She reminded herself that yesterday’s journey had been fraught from the off. Their booked taxi hadn’t arrived, the replacement had rolled up to their house late, the man behind the American Airlines counter had disputed the dimensions of Nina’s suitcase, and another man operating the full body scanner had detained Nina almost long enough for them to miss their flight due to a cheese knife that somehow had remained in her jacket pocket after a friend had returned it following a dinner party. The flights were long, uneventful slogs enlivened only by pilot episodes of TV shows she would never watch again and her abortive attempts to make headway with The Sound and the Fury. The stops, at Philadelphia International and then Washington Ronald Reagan, had been fluorescent-lit and bland. When they had arrived at Portland, Maine, it had taken three circuits of the conveyor belt to determine that Nina’s luggage was missing – though Laurie’s had appeared almost immediately – and then four members of staff to ponder and finally alert them to an alternative conveyor belt where, inexplicably, her suitcase had chugged around and around in a slow, solo waltz.
All of this might have been bearable. Nina had hoped that the journey would feel part of the trip, that she and Laurie would bond over the daftness of the obstacles put in their way. The whole point of Nina visiting Hope Island for the first time, after all these years of refusing invitations, was to put her daughter at ease. But Laurie had jammed in her earphones early on and had slept – or pretended to sleep – on each flight. At one point, Laurie’s phone had slipped off the armrest and into Nina’s lap; when returning it Nina had flicked on the lock screen, only to discover that no music was playing.
It was only when they boarded the ferry at Boothbay Harbor that Laurie began to come alive. On the choppy twelve-mile crossing they had gripped the white barrier side by side and Laurie had used it as a makeshift ballet barre, performing swift pliés and speaking with growing enthusiasm. She gabbled about this same journey in the past – seemingly made wonderful because of the presence of Rob in place of Nina – while Hope Island grew from a smudge on the horizon to a wide crescent, its harbour nestled at the centre and Tammy and Abram waiting at the tip of its jetty.
As soon as they were given the signal to disembark Laurie raced to her grandparents, leaving Nina to struggle with both suitcases. The roar of the ferry’s engine combined with Tammy’s accent, made even less intelligible due to her foghorn shout, meant that their hellos were a pantomime of confusion. So much for the promised peace and quiet of Hope Island. So much for the welcome embrace of what remained of Nina’s family.
Nina pulled on yesterday’s clothes and lumbered out of the den. The air reeked of bacon. She followed the smell to the dining room. Her family were sitting at the table, one on each side.
‘Moments too late!’ Tammy chirruped, still in the process of forking the last thin rasher of bacon onto her plate. She wiped the serving tray clean with a piece of kitchen roll. ‘There’s melon still left over – no, look, it’s past its best – or at least there’s oatmeal.’
‘Oatmeal would be lovely,’ Nina said, but Tammy only glanced at the kitchen without rising.
In the kitchen, Nina found a crumpled packet of oatmeal in a cupboard. When she shook it, it rattled hollowly. She sighed and tossed the packet in the bin below the sink.
When she rose, movement outside the window caught her eye. She thought of the bird that had attacked her and she reached up to touch the graze that ran across her throat. It didn’t hurt, and when she had checked in the mirror last night she had struggled to make out the line.
She pressed her hands on the cold sink and leant over it, peering through the grimy glass.
At first she saw nothing amongst the dense bushes beyond the scrubby cottage lawn. It was only when the figure shifted its position again that she identified its contours, its bare arms, its eyes peeping through the leaves.
It was a child. Could it be the same girl?
Before Nina could make out any further details, the figure retreated. The window was single-glazed, thin enough for her to hear a high-pitched laugh from outside.
Back in the dining room, she slumped into a chair and helped herself to coffee from the pot. Abram attempted to pour her cream from the jug. He frowned as she put her hand over the top of her cup, then instead poured it into his own empty cup and sipped it.