“I think so. Yeah, he must be. So maybe we could put a cryptic announcement on it. Something he’d understand, a message he’d know could only be for him, to let him know to get in touch. I’ll think of something. He’s the one who needs that lot the most. The rest of that box is for him.”
26 Family Album Robyn
My father is dying. He has cancer of the pancreas and there’s not a thing we can do. In London, Cat has put her arms around me and let my stunned soul empty out. Through all my years of training and experience, an entire career spent working with cancer patients, I have not prepared for this. My beloved father, a man who can fix anything, cannot be fixed. How did I miss it? How did any of us?
We don’t know how long he has; he’s still pretending it’s forever. It’s high summer and we are gathered at my parents’ house on the hill. After weeks of rain, the skies have cleared to a blue so cloudless and deep it looks like a summer sea. On the small patch of lawn in front of the house, picnic blankets, deck chairs and tents are scattered on daisy-speckled grass, and beyond the low stone wall is the wild and healing moor. The swallows are back, dipping and diving above bone-colored grasses, also house martins, and skylarks too, heard but not seen. My father sits in a deck chair watching it all, a look of peace on his face. By his side is Scrap, his beloved ancient lurcher, long ago rescued by Bianka from the top of the White Cliffs, and my father’s constant shadow and companion throughout the years since.
My mother touches my father a lot these days, placing a hand on his thinning face, the back of his hand, on his tanned and sinewy arms. Before we drove down, she phoned us in London to put new house rules in place. Cry if you must, she said, but only if you have to and definitely not in front of Dad, no big speeches. He’s still here, she said, so just enjoy the now. And she’s led by example since we all arrived. You’d think, watching her pottering around the kitchen, that there’s nothing wrong. The atmosphere in the house is joyful and relaxed; there’s music, terracotta pots spilling over with flowers, mountains of homemade food. And my mother hasn’t stopped talking since we arrived, throwing her arms around all three of her grandchildren, pulling them to her, wanting to know every last detail of their little young lives.
“I’m fine,” she tells everyone. “Don’t you worry about me,” but on our second night there I find her alone at midnight in the kitchen garden, pulling out weeds with an unremitting fury, her eyes brimming with tears.
We’ve hauled out boxes of old photographs from the attic and taken many more, recordings, videos too. So many of our conversations seem to begin with the words Do you remember—and then the retelling of some old story that all of us know, sometimes embellished, other times not. We all have our personal favorites. I listen to my father. What I want, I realize, is to remember his voice, the slow cadence of his speech; the way he listens, smiling, his head resting in the crook of his hand; the way he flares his nostrils when he’s amused. At our request, my mother has dug out her tatty old exercise book, the visitors’ book she used to give her accidental guests, and all of us have written in it. My father’s entry reads, “Good days and long views up on Tea Mountain.”
In the past couple of days he’s found moments of quiet time to spend with Sophie away from us all. She knows what’s going on. Cat and I have decided that she’s old enough and we want her to knowingly lay down her memories of him, to have the chance to say goodbye. We haven’t told the boys. Right now they are racing around the garden with a football and their uncles Michael and Nate, stopping every five minutes to beg us to take them to swim.
Liv, who now wears a gold band set with a delicate opal on her ring finger, sits with Laika and Cat. Laika shifts on the picnic blanket, trying to get comfortable. It is over two years since she blazed into our lives, and now she’s almost seven months pregnant. Cat and I never wanted to find out what we were expecting, but she and Nate know they are having a girl. She even has a name, Elisabeth Elfrieda, or Elfie, as Nate has already started calling her, which is just too cute.
“She’s here,” Ned, our youngest by five minutes, shouts, “at last. I am starving to death.” To make his point he drops to his knees and keels over on the grass, spread-eagled, tongue out, eyes rolled back. I shade my eyes and look down the track to where a blue estate car is bumping its way unsteadily up the hill.
For someone so far along in her pregnancy, Laika is surprisingly light on her feet. She’s the first to the car and, as the door swings open and Willa jumps out, she presses her sister to her in the longest hug, swaying with her from side to side, both of them laughing and crying tears of real joy. Willa looks wonderful, happier and more relaxed than I’ve seen her in years. Her hair is pulled up into a chaotic bun from which a few loose strands have escaped. She’s wearing sandals, a faded blue A-line skirt and a white embroidered blouse.
“Finally,” Cat says. “Right, let’s get some food into these boys.”
Like most of our meals, lunch is a picnic of savory tarts, bread, cheese and salads: good food sourced straight out of the kitchen garden, and laid out in a vast, chaotic spread on a long line of faded tablecloths arranged across the grass. The group of us gather, sitting cross-legged on cushions, or otherwise perched on low wooden stools and canvas chairs, passing around beautiful stoneware bowls thrown by my dad. We are all talking at once.
I watch Nate smiling, talking, as ever relaxed. He calls his girlfriend Laika now, having made the switch the moment he found out the truth. Cat used to check in with him a lot in those first early days, keen to make sure her little brother was doing okay. I know the whole situation worried her. After all, she said to me late one night in bed, it takes a certain kind of person to fake an accent, to fabricate an entire life. “She had me,” she said. Hugely protective and typically direct, finally she asked Nate straight up whether Laika could ever be totally trusted.
Nate had shrugged it off. “You’re overthinking it,” he said. “Everyone reinvents themselves to a greater or lesser extent. Anyway, she was never trying to actively deceive anyone. She was just doing whatever it took to survive.” I’m pretty sure Cat must have accepted his reasoning because she never mentioned it again after that.
Willa’s face breaks into a wide smile. “You’ll never guess who turned up at the flat the other day. Jamie.”
“You’re kidding.”
“For some reason he wanted to let me know that he and Melissa had split up again. I think he was after a bit of sympathy.”
Laika rolls her eyes. “What a knob. I hope you told him where to go.”
“I felt a bit sorry for him, really.”
“Now tell me, how is your mother?” my mother asks Willa in a quick change of subject.
“She’s doing okay,” Willa says softly.
“I do so feel for her,” my mother says, “abandoned like that. Do you ever hear from your father?”
Willa replies without hesitation. “We think he must still be somewhere abroad. Going for a completely fresh start, I imagine. Unfortunately, we have absolutely no way to contact him—he must have changed both his mobile number and his email. He always was famously bad at keeping in touch.”
“You wouldn’t want to report him as a missing person?”
“Gosh, no,” Willa says mildly, “we wouldn’t do that. I mean,” she adds, “we’re not really worried. I’d say we’ve some idea where he is.” Momentarily her eyes flick over to Laika’s, then mine.
“That poor man,” my mother says, her voice full of compassion, “imagine having no idea his precious daughter came home.”
“Yes,” Laika says, speaking in the same even tone as her sister, “but there’s all sorts of reasons why someone might just disappear. Perhaps it’s in our DNA.”
“And your mother—she’s all right, is she, living all alone in that big house?”
“I don’t think she’d want to move now,” Laika says. “She really loves that garden. You should see it. She’s made this gorgeous rose garden where the old pool used to be. It’s full of lovely blooms with wonderful names like Sweet Child of Mine and Champagne Moment and Brilliant Result. Every time Willa and I visit she makes us sit on the terrace and admire it.”
Willa turns her head toward mine. She gives me a quiet smile, and, after a moment, I smile back. It is, after all, an innocent conversation, unweighted by anything other than the gamut of human concern. Bryce is away, and no one has a clue where he is or when he’ll be back. That’s all anyone knows.
It is all I know, really.
After lunch Cat says, “Are you lot up for a swim? Only I promised the boys we’d go when Willa got here and they’re driving me mad.”
“Love to,” Laika says, “just wait till you see my enormous swimmers.”
“Don’t get too excited,” I tell her, “you can’t do lengths. It’s about the size of a plunge pool, at the top of a waterfall. It’s kind of like a big natural jacuzzi. But it fills up only in years when there’s been a lot of rain, so it does feel a bit special. The boys love it.”
We go, all of us, the entire family, walking along the top edge of a steep combe where the bright temples of beech trees plunge steeply downhill to a distant river below. Edged by glossy rocks and surrounded by ferns, the small pool is crystal clear and, deep in the middle, its whorl of ever moving water a glistening celadon green. It’s fed by a hidden stream which appears like magic out of the ground at head height, its entrance hung by strands of tiny green leaves. Cat and I sit on one side of it with Sophie, next to my mum and dad.
“Don’t get too near the edge,” my mother says. “Boys—I’m talking to you.” The twins are lying flat on their stomachs where the pool plunges over the top of the combe, racing sticks over the edge. They have Nate on one side of them and Liv and Michael on the other. They’ll be okay.
Willa and Laika are the last to get in. Standing by the water’s edge, Willa turns to say something to Laika, her words lost to the rest of us by the sound of conversation and birdsong and the fast-running stream. Laika laughs, then Willa smiles and places her hands gently on the round of her sister’s growing child. Submerged up to her shoulders, I see my mother’s pale hand reaching for my father’s beneath the bright water. With a voice graveled by tenderness, he says, “That child will be loved.”
It is a blessing.
I can feel the faint warmth of Cat’s body through the water. I don’t need to look to know that she’s there. Rather, I’m looking at Willa, this beautiful woman whom I have known and loved for more than half my life, with whom I have traveled to unknown places, and to whom I have made, and kept, unbreakable promises. A woman about whom I know everything and nothing.
For a moment she and Laika stand in their bathers by the edge of the pool, holding hands for balance, then together they dip under the silver lines of its bright surface, gasping with the shock of the cold. And now the tiny pool is packed with bodies, so the sisters end up perching together under the actual stream that feeds it, letting the water pound over their shoulders and backs. Willa pulls her hair from its band and the almost-red of her hair catches the light and flashes like strands of pure gold. Then she and Laika tip their heads back and laugh like children as they let the water flood over their heads. The water is ice cold and as clear and bright as a new day. And it strikes me now as a strange sort of magic, how fresh water can appear from an underground stream, how it just keeps coming, how all of it is just endlessly replaced. And the water plunges into the pool and rushes past all of us and plummets over the edge and just disappears.
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank my brilliant, amazing agent, Felicity Blunt. Thank you, Felicity, for your guidance and keen insights, for your good humor and huge support, and for always pushing me in the right direction. You’ve made this whole thing a joy.
I count myself unbelievably lucky to have had the opportunity to work with two exceptionally wise and generous editors: Amy Einhorn at Crown in the US and Harriet Bourton at Viking in the UK. Thank you both for everything. My deep and heartfelt thanks also go to Lori Kusatzky at Crown and Ella Harold at Penguin. I’d also like to thank Donna Poppy for her eagle-eye copyediting. I’m incredibly grateful to all those people who have worked tirelessly to design, produce, and bring this novel to market, and my special thanks go to Chris Brand and Emma Pidsley for producing such a stunning cover design. At Crown, I am deeply grateful to Dyana Messina, Julie Cepler, Chris Tanigawa, Liza Stepanovich, Natalie Blachere, Heather Williamson, Michele Giuseffi, Karen Ninnis, and Mary Moates. At Penguin, I would also very much like to thank Emma Brown, Sam Fanaken, Autumn Evans, Eleanor Rhodes-Davies, and Sara Granger.
I would like to thank the entire team at Curtis Brown but especially Rosie Pierce, Florence Sandelson, Sophie Baker, Katie Harrison, Camilla Young, Katie Battcock, Jennifer Kerslake, and Alice Lutyens. My grateful thanks go to CBC Creative and especially to Charlotte Mendelson for being such an inspirational tutor. Not only was the three-month novel-writing course challenging, uplifting, and huge great fun, but it also introduced me to the most perceptive, talented, spirited, and supportive group of fellow writers that I could ever hope to meet. Thank you, Tessa Sheridan, Kas Twose, Jo Agrell, Paul Baird, Brooke Maddison, Jen Faulkner, Lucy Evans, Ange Drinnan, Kate Finnigan, Sam Olsen, Marise Gaughan, Roberta Francis, Sarah Gardner Borden, and Anni Walsh. You are all absolutely the best.
Thank you, Tony Cabon and Hélène Heurtevent, for sorting out my French!
I would also like to thank Olubunmi Adesanya at Oxford University together with Dr. John Ballam and my fabulous creative writing classmates. For their outstanding teaching, incisive feedback, and unfailing encouragement, I am deeply grateful to Lucy Ayrton, Claire Crowther, Elisabeth McKetta Sharp, Jeremy Hughes, Daisy McNally, Aleksandra Andrejevic, Michael Johnstone, Shaun McCarthy, Nicholas McInerny, Helen Jukes, Amal Chatterjee, and Elizabeth Garner.
Thank you, Paul Doctors, Giles Easter, Caroline Easter, and Jan Rayner, for helping me out with all those things that are so absolutely beyond me. Caroline and Giles, thank you for everything, I don’t know what I would do without you. Gi, relax. See? You’re really not in it.
Thank you, Camilla Luard and Katherine Luxford, for reading my first draft and, together with Annabel Turner, Andrea Dingley, Carolyn Heath, Christina McGregor, Emma Johnson, Natalie Lockhart, Kirstie Horgan, Fiona Gosden, Jill Davies, and Rachel More, thank you for being there along the way, and, as always and ever, for your steadfast friendship and support.
Families are at the heart of this novel, and I would like to acknowledge mine, and most especially my own Mum and Dad, who were both wonderful. Thank you to my wonderful son, Luke Easter, for being there at the start and for cheering me on. Thank you for believing in me, Peter Collins: without you this story would never have been written. Finally, thank you to my beloved Siddley, my beautiful, loyal, and gentle friend, who was by my side from the very first word right the way through to the last. Gone now but absolutely not forgotten.
