We talked of tearing the bindings with our teeth, or of slipping a knife from the kitchen table into a smock pocket. We could build up speed during a lap of the yard, then keep running, out through the garden gate and down Moor Woods Road. Father kept a mobile phone in his pocket; that would be easy to snatch. When I think about this time, I feel a terrible confusion, which Dr K – with all of her reasoning – never managed to resolve. It was on the faces of the police and the journalists and the nurses, although none of them could ever bring themselves to ask it. Why didn’t you just leave when you had the chance?
The truth is, it wasn’t so bad. We enjoyed each other’s company. We were tired, and sometimes we were hungry, and on occasion, Father would hit us so hard that an eye was bloodshot for a week (Gabriel), or there was a guttural crack just below the heart (Daniel). But we had little knowledge of what would come. I have spent many nights combing through the memories, like a student in a library, wiping the dust from old volumes and examining each shelf, searching for the moment when I should have known: ah – there – it was time to act. This book eludes me. It was checked out many years ago, and never returned. Father taught us around the kitchen table, mistaking submission for devotion, and Mother visited us last thing at night to make sure the bindings were in place. In the early morning, I woke beside Evie, and the warmth of her body glowed against me. We still talked of our future.
It wasn’t so bad.
I spoke to Devlin first, and asked to work from London for a week. Maybe more.
‘Probate drama,’ she said. ‘How exciting.’ It was early afternoon in New York, but she had answered right away, already half-cut. Around her, I could hear the hum of a civilized lunch, or a bar.
‘I’m not sure if that’s the word I would use,’ I said.
‘Well, take your time. We’ll find you a desk in London. And some work, no doubt.’
Mum and Dad would be eating, and could wait. Ethan’s fiancée answered the phone; he was attending the opening of a gallery and wouldn’t be back until much later that night. She’d heard that I was in the country – I should come to visit them – they would love to have me. I left a voice message on Delilah’s phone, although I doubted that she would call me back. Last, I spoke to Evie. I could hear that she was outside, and somebody near her was laughing.
‘So,’ I said. ‘The witch is dead, it seems.’
‘Did you see the body?’
‘God, no. I didn’t ask to.’
‘Then – can we be sure?’
‘I’m quietly confident.’
I told her about the house on Moor Woods Road. About our great inheritance.
‘They had twenty thousand? That’s news.’
‘Really? After our resplendent childhood?’
‘You can just see Father, can’t you? Squirrelling it away. “For my God will meet all your needs” – whatever it was.’
‘The house, though,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe that it would still be standing.’
‘Aren’t there people who enjoy those things? There are some tours – in LA, I think – murder sites, celebrity deaths, stuff like that. It’s pretty morbid.’
‘Hollowfield’s a little isolated for a tour, no? Besides, it’s hardly the Black Dahlia.’
‘We’re a little more downmarket, I guess.’
‘They’d be giving the tickets away.’
‘Well,’ Evie said. ‘If there’s a tour, we should certainly go on it. We’ll be able to impart some real gems. There’s a career there, if the law doesn’t work out.’
‘I think Ethan’s already cornered the market,’ I said. ‘But really. What the hell are we meant to do with the house?’
Again, somebody laughed. Closer, now. ‘Where are you?’ I asked.
‘At the beach. There’s some kind of concert this afternoon.’
‘You should go.’
‘OK. I miss you. And the house—’
The wind was picking up where she was, whipping the sun across the ocean.
‘Something happy,’ Evie said. ‘It should be something happy. Nothing would annoy Father more.’
‘I like that idea.’
‘OK. I’m going to go.’
‘Enjoy the concert.’
‘Well done, today.’
The plan was this:
Like undercover agents, we had been tracking Father’s footsteps. In the Binding Days, we had kept a record, noted in our Bible with a stump of school pencil (Genesis, 19:17; back then, we still had a taste for melodrama). When we could no longer reach the book, I committed Father’s day to memory, the way Miss Glade had taught me when I still went to school. ‘Think of a house,’ she said. ‘And in each room of the house, there is the next thing that you want to recall. Franz Ferdinand is slumped in the hallway – he’s just been shot. You walk into the living room, and you pass by Serbia on the way out, running. They’re terrified: war’s coming. You find Austria-Hungary in the kitchen, sat at the table with the rest of its allies. Who’s with them?’
And Father occupied our house; that made decoding his days even easier. After so many months in a single room, I knew the sound of each floorboard, and the flick of each light switch. I could see the bulk of him moving through the rooms.
We had done several all-night stake-outs from our beds, so we knew that he woke late. Even in the winter, it was already light when we heard his first, slow footsteps through the house. Our bedroom was right at the end of the hallway, and he was two doors down, so a night-time attempt would be no good; he slept lightly, and he could be on us in a few seconds. Sometimes I would wake to find him at our bedroom door, or crouching beside me, in contemplation. Whatever he was considering, he always resolved, and in time he turned away, into the darkness.
He spent each morning with Mother and with Noah, downstairs. The smell of their meals permeated the house, and we heard them at prayer, or laughing about something which we couldn’t share. When Noah cried, Father took to the garden. The kitchen door slammed. He exercised: the grunts of it carried up to our window. Sometimes, just before lunch, he visited us, radiant, his skin sodden and red, a barbarian just done with the battle, wielding his towel like an enemy’s head. No, the morning wouldn’t do: the front door was locked at all times, and whether we went downstairs through the kitchen or right out of the window, Father would be waiting.
This was a point of contention between Evie and me. ‘It has to be through the house,’ she said. ‘The window’s too high. You’ve forgotten how high it is.’
‘We’d have to break the lock on our door. We’d have to go through the whole house. Past Ethan’s room. Past Mother and Father. Past Gabe and D. Down the stairs. Noah sleeps down there – sometimes Mother too. There’s no way.’
‘Why haven’t Gabriel and Delilah left?’ Evie asked. And whispered: ‘It would be easier for them.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. There had been one night, many months before, when I had heard something quiet and terrible at the other end of the hallway. A thwarted attempt. Evie had been asleep, and I had never mentioned it. Now, with hope hanging precarious between us, I didn’t think that I could.