The Apron took the week off between Christmas and New Year, so I turned the radio up loud and sang along while I decorated the entire house with bits of holly. Or at least I did until they played Wham!’s “Last Christmas.” Then I froze, gripped by a sudden vision of our Christmas Day the year before. My father, stuffed with pudding and port, had fallen asleep in the drawing room, so the three of us had retreated into the kitchen, where Willa and I had spent the next hour alternatively laughing and then shushing each other as Mum, using a giant turkey drumstick as a microphone, had mimed along to her beloved George Michael. Oh God, I thought, I miss them so much. A hard pressure started building behind my eyes, and I ran to the radio and turned it off.
On Christmas Day itself Frieda and I had a lunch of rice and roasted vegetables and played gin rummy until the Queen’s Speech came on. Later we watched a Bond movie together, both of us curled up on the sofa. I gave Frieda a cake I’d decorated with miniature marzipan cats, and Frieda gave me an old, embroidered silk purse in which she’d placed two twenty-pound notes. The purse also contained a large wad of French francs.
“Well, they were in there already,” she said. “So I didn’t bother taking them out. I’ve no idea what they’re worth, probably pennies. Useless, I suspect, but I suppose you could always try exchanging them at the bank.”
***
Four days later, Frieda got sick. She didn’t want the TV on. Rather she wanted to listen to some of her vinyl records—a Debussy sonata, Ysaÿe’s Poème élégiaque, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. She was very quiet; I couldn’t tell if she was listening or sleeping.
She said she was too tired to face the stairs; rather, she would sleep on the old velvet sofa. I kept the curtains half closed and draped the embroidered orange throw over a lamp, bathing the sitting room in a soft amber glow. It was like being suspended in a tank, both of us floating, weightless. Waiting.
She stopped eating, then talking. She lay with her eyes shut, breathing slowly, barely awake. “Let me call someone,” I said. “A doctor. An ambulance.”
Her eyes fluttered open. She said, “Non.”
I felt a growing pressure in my chest, a rising sob that wanted to erupt from my core, a howl. Her lips moved. I bent closer to hear, her voice was barely there. So brave, I thought she said. It was only years later that I realized she’d been talking in French. Soit brave, she’d said. Not so brave. Soit brave. Be brave.
She had one hand resting on the tawny fur of a cat. I took the other, all tiny bones and thin transparent skin, and held it in mine. She took a slow, rattling breath. The pale half-moons of her eyelids stayed shut. The cats stretched and yawned. Fauré’s Élégie for piano and cello came to an end. I didn’t want to let go of her hand to lift the needle from the vinyl, so I just let it turn. Anyway, I liked the steady repeat of the hiss and the skip: soothing, constant, certain. I stroked Frieda’s white hair.
Two hours later, she died.
It was New Year’s Eve.
***
I held her hand and cried. I’d known Frieda for such a short time but I loved her, I really did. I didn’t know what to do. The Apron would be back in the morning. Then there would be ambulances, the police, Linda and Steve tearing the place apart. And what would happen when they found me there? It wasn’t my home. I didn’t belong. There would be questions and they wouldn’t understand. I wouldn’t be able to explain.
I had to go home.
I closed my eyes and imagined walking into my house, finding my mother in the kitchen or the den, waiting for me. Her tears, then the rolling surf of her love and anger and bliss. Willa running down from her room, holding me like she’d never let me go. Every time I’d had these thoughts before I’d pushed them away, but this time I let them flood my mind. I felt a painful blooming inside my chest, an urgent desire to run to the house and bang on the door and shout I’m home.
And I wanted to go home. I’d always wanted to go home, the whole time I’d been there. I just never had. Somehow a single night away had turned into three whole months.
I pulled on the old black ski trousers and a thick black jumper, socks, a pair of old black boots. I took everything else that belonged to me: my school uniform, the toothbrush I’d used, the embroidered purse, my mother’s book. I kissed Frieda’s pale cheek and tucked the blanket around her body. I opened a bunch of tins and fed the cats.
Outside the freezing air cut right through the jumper, so I grabbed a coat off the peg, an old donkey jacket that must have once belonged to Ted. I shrugged it on. It was several sizes too big: a giant heavy hug of a coat. There was a woolly hat in one of the pockets so I put that on too. At the last minute, I went back and took the photograph of Elisabeth blowing bubbles and another of Ted and Frieda in a boat and tucked them between the pages of the book. I put the purse in the deep inside pocket of the jacket. Then I closed the door behind me, hearing the click of the latch, and finally I hid the key high up in a crevasse in the old oak porch. Then I started to walk down the drive, the clear night sky above me speckled with stars. When I arrived on the empty road, I stood for a moment, looking at the outside world: everything was just as it was. It was about ten minutes to midnight. I started walking.
At the end of the drive I stopped by the dark wall of rhododendrons, honestly stunned by the sight of my own home, at once both familiar and strange. The house was in darkness, its huge white façade inked lavender by the night. In fact, only one bedroom light was on, and not any bedroom light either: my bedroom light, shining like a beacon. Like a vigil, I thought, warmth filling my chest; maybe they keep it on all night, a sign for me to come home. Then a figure stepped up to the window and a head pressed against the glass. Willa. Willa was in my room, and for some reason up in the dead of the night, awake. Every atom of my body felt pulled across the void between us. I started to run toward the house, ready to bang on the door and shout her name, yell over and over It’s me.
Two steps in an almighty bang made me jump out of my skin. A gunshot, I thought, an explosion. I threw myself to the ground, then rolled into the deep cover of the glossy rhododendrons, their hidden layer of brambles tearing at my face, jabbing barbs into my skin. From there I looked up, feeling like an idiot as fireworks flared across the sky, spraying vast arcs of brilliant sparks through the night, lighting my sister’s pale face at the window. I’d forgotten it was New Year’s Eve. Shit, I told myself, stupid girl. The sky boomed and crackled and hissed. Willa wouldn’t even hear me knocking over all that, so for a while I just lay there on the freezing grass, watching my sister as she stood at the window, hands pressed against the pane. Like a spaceman, I thought: Major Tom, remote, distant and somehow adrift.
Eventually the fireworks faded into nothing and I stood up, brushing myself down. Okay, I told myself, now. Take a moment. Just one moment. I’d learned so much that Willa needed to know. Things about myself. Things about her. Things about all of us. I had to compose myself, find the right words. I watched her as she walked away from the window. Then the light in my bedroom snapped off.
Not a vigil, then. I stood for a moment, thinking about that.
I was about to move again when a car turned into the drive, gravel crunching under its tires as it passed within a few meters of where I stood unseen, just one more shadow in the dark of the night. My parents, I thought, spotting the two dark figures inside the car’s dark interior. They were out. My heart drummed in my chest, too loudly. They parked beside the house and the front doors flew open, throwing a long trapezium of golden light over the winter lawn. Willa ran down the stone steps and all three of them hugged. I saw my mother laughing. I could hear voices, Happy New Year.
My father took my mother and sister by their hands and slowly, graciously, assuredly led them into the house. I could hear my mother’s heels clicking up the steps. Then the front doors shut behind the three of them, leaving the garden in dark. Okay, I thought, well, they’re all in there now, okay: good. I was everything at that moment: excited, pensive, scared. I took a breath, a step toward the house. But then something truly extraordinary happened: a colossal structure at the far end of the house burst into light and the sight was so startling, so completely, utterly unexpected, that I stopped in my tracks.
I thought, What the hell?
I knew what it was. It could only be one thing: the brand-spanking-new conservatory.
Staying outside its long rectangles of cast light, I edged toward the extension until the whole thing came into view. It had just been foundations when I’d last seen it. And now it was finished. And it was vast. Wow, I thought.
Then I thought, Fuck. They built the conservatory.
Through its huge glass windows, I had a good view of my father. He was sitting in a stuffed white armchair, a bow tie loose around his neck. Then my mother walked toward him, crossing that vast golden room with a cut-glass tumbler in her hands. She’d taken off her outdoor coat and now I could see the outfit she was wearing: a cocktail dress, a shimmering midnight blue. My father took the glass from my mother’s hands. I saw him pull her toward him, draw a hand slowly across her backside and say something. A slow smile moved across his face.
I looked away. At the far end of the space there was a huge Christmas tree, brightly lit and festooned with gold ornaments. They’d had Christmas, I thought. A normal Christmas. A normal Christmas with presents and a tree. They’d celebrated. They’d gone to parties. They’d got on with everything. No wonder they never found me, I thought. They weren’t even looking. I was missing and they built a fucking extension. That’s what they did.
I turned around. Outside, everything was still. The wide, dark lawn; winter trees like blackened sticks. The lights from that immense glass building gleamed on the black surface of the swimming pool, casting a strange bronze glow on the cement bunker wall.
Nothing has changed, I thought. Everything is exactly the same as it was.
What did I know about anything? I was fourteen and blindsided and angry as hell.
***
That’s when I decided. I had forty pounds in my purse and a wad of French francs.
I wasn’t going back.
21 Cleave Claudette
It was morning, sunless and cold. My mind felt fuzzy from lack of sleep, my limbs leaden and heavy. I’d arrived in Dover. I left the train and was funneled down a maze of grubby corridors toward the passenger ferry at the Eastern Docks, eventually finding myself in a large hall lined with banks of gray plastic chairs. The ticket booths were to one side. I rehearsed my lines in my head, Single foot passenger to Calais, and, if asked, I’m visiting my aunt.
“Passport.”
