When he’s gone, I hold her warm, slack hand – the hand that once patted plasters on to my scuffed knee, that still writes random one-line postcards, sent from home, ‘Glorious weather! You should see the lupins x’ – and my tears fall and bloom on the white hospital sheet. I can’t help but feel she’s secretly conscious, saying, ‘Buttercup, hang in there.’ And I mumble it back to her, ‘And you, Mum,’ only my voice goes raspy, all the things I can’t say, haven’t said, sticking in my throat.
Lying flat, her swirl of bandages like a turban, she looks younger. This cheers me because I know she’d love that, even if she’d pretend not to. (‘Better old than dead!’ she likes to say, then slaps on the retinol cream every night.) Her shaken brain might be bleeding, the left side of her face swollen, but her bone structure stands out, revealing the face that was scouted by a modelling agent decades ago. Who she was before Caroline and I came along and she and Dad left London for the rural good life – chickens and beaches and Argyle cardigans – and she basically turned into Linda McCartney. I smile, thinking how she’s never quite lost her fashiony tics. Like muscle memory. I’ll see it in the way she’ll swing on a coat, with a small flourish, or lift her chin for a family snap. She’s always had a model’s protean ability to inhabit different versions of herself. Overwriting. Shape-shifting.
I touch her cheek with the back of my hand. Papery and dry. In need of rose face oil, massaged in under my warm palms. Or some moisture-boosting hyaluronic acid, finger-patted into her pores. If I had my make-up kit with me, I’d get to work and dust her cheekbones with blush too, salve her chapped lips and varnish her bare toenails, all the little things we do to keep life’s darkness at bay. That’s what I do. What I’ve always done. Toss handfuls of glitter into the deepest, dirtiest shadows.
As I sit watching her for almost an hour, something new and unsettling begins to dawn. Mum’s not indomitable. I’m childishly staggered by this. She may die. She may not come back as herself, memory intact. So what will be lost exactly? She’s the keeper of all our family secrets. What if there were things she still wanted to tell me? Questions she was waiting for me to ask? But I can’t ask them now. Maybe I’ll never get the chance. The truth about what really happened in a remote forest in the fading sun-bleached summer days of 1971 has been brutally, unexpectedly yanked out of reach.
6
Rita
‘Shocking business, isn’t it?’ the woman whispers, lurching into the aureole of personal space that normally separates strangers. Foxcote’s front door bangs shut behind Rita, with a suck of air, sealing the dimly lit entrance hall like the heavy lid of a wooden box. ‘Just terrible,’ the woman continues heatedly, as if Rita had answered.
Rita’s unsure if she’s referring to the loss of the baby or the other thing – the much more salacious gossip about Jeannie. She smiles politely, well practised in the art of giving nothing away, and rests the children’s suitcases on the floor with a thunk. Clocking the hissing sump of a log fire on the far wall, something in her chest tightens. This dilapidated old house would go up like a bonfire.
‘The poor Harringtons. One thing after another, eh?’ The woman shakes her head. Her hair doesn’t move. It’s stiff and streaky brown and grey, like a barn owl’s wing. ‘What a hoo-ha.’
A dull banging from the floor above snaps Rita’s attention back to the children. Teddy? Yes, Teddy. She can hear him giggling. Sound travels differently here, not bouncing off the walls, like it did in London, but seeping into the wood, like a spill of warm oil. Another muffled bump. A shower of plaster. Rita’s big eyes roll upwards.
The ceiling’s low – she could touch it with her fingertips – and the flaky plaster is crisscrossed with thick black beams, the sort you get in farmhouses, creating the dusty nooks and crannies so beloved of crawling insects and, most likely, mice. She can only imagine the daddy-long-legs count in such a place. The walls are wood-panelled and studded with oil paintings – landscapes, dogs – and dusty bunches of dried flowers. At least nothing looks too precious. A wood-wormed console. A rustic settle bench. A disintegrating upholstered chair. All listing slightly on the bare floorboards, as if on the deck of a ship. She has a sensation of tipping, too, as if she’s on the verge of falling into something. But she’s not sure this has much to do with the floor.
‘Mrs Grieves.’ The woman’s handshake is strong, her palm rough against Rita’s young skin. ‘But you can call me Marge.’ She lifts her lantern jaw, revealing a raised mole, inhabited by one prominent wiry black hair. Rita tries hard not to look at it. ‘Housekeeper.’ Marge smiles. Her teeth are greyish and oblong, chipped and irregularly sized, and make Rita think of Stonehenge. ‘Live out. Hawkswell born and bred.’
Housekeeper. Could make life difficult. She’ll need to get on with Marge. ‘I’m the nanny –’
‘Big Rita, yes, I know,’ Marge interrupts. She sweeps a sharp, beady gaze over Rita’s length. ‘Well, I can see why that nickname stuck.’
Rita struggles to maintain her smile. (‘Six blimmin’ foot at thirteen!’ Nan’s friends used to marvel, making her stoop and shrink, so embarrassed she couldn’t breathe.) She takes in Marge’s muscular forearms; the broken capillaries on her cheeks; the stout, shapeless figure. Late forties? Rita can’t tell. Everyone over thirty looks ancient.
‘Soft on the kids. Devoted as a Great Dane. Snapped the wing mirror off the car. Throws reds in a white wash.’ Marge licks her lips. ‘Mr Harrington told me all about you,’ she adds, with a note of unmistakable rivalry.
Rita wishes Walter had thought to warn her too. Divide and conquer. She can imagine him thinking that. (Also, she hasn’t buggered up the white wash for months.)
‘I can turn my hand to anything, Rita. You’ll find I’m extremely flexible,’ Marge says, in a manner that suggests the contrary. ‘I can get here in no time, any hour of the day.’ She nods towards the door. ‘That’s my trusty motor out front.’
Rita recalls the rusting heap of metal under the honeysuckle.
‘Faster than it looks, actually,’ Marge says, with a sharp sniff. ‘I’ve worked these country houses for years. Ever since my husband died. Drowned in the Severn. Tsk.’ She clicks her tongue, as if remembering his stupidity. ‘The tidal surge.’
‘Gosh, I’m so sorry.’ Rita looks at her feet, then steals a sidelong glance up the stairs. What is Teddy doing?
‘I manage just fine on my own.’ Marge speaks with grim pride, as if she’s pummelled her life into shape against the odds.
Rita warms to Marge a bit more then. They share the common ground of independence at least. In London there was camaraderie among the domestics, most of them unmarried, dispensable, burrowed into the attic bedrooms or with roommates in cramped flats. The live-outs would emerge early in the morning, worker bees, swarming from grimy districts into London’s wealthy streets and mansions to look after other people’s children – feed them, delouse them, iodine the gashes on their knees. They’d keep the houses unmarked by their charges, and then, as night fell, they’d scramble on to buses or sink back underground, returning to their lodgings, leaving no trace, as if they were never there at all.