She jumps out of the car, and a moment later we follow, stumbling our way over the clefts of frozen mud toward the old house. Then Laika feels around the inside of the roof of the porch and to our utter amazement produces an old key hidden inside a deep crevasse. We let ourselves in.
Inside is a real mess. It looks as if the place has been done over, drawers and cupboards left flung open, oak paneling ripped away and left in heaps, revealing a carcass of bare plaster and struts. In the kitchen Laika wraps two old brown mugs patterned with orange flowers in a tea towel and places them carefully inside her backpack. Then we head upstairs, looking first at Freida’s bedroom and then at the little room at the end where Laika slept, still with its wallpaper of tiny yellow flowers.
Finally we visit a tiny box room. It’s clearly empty, but Laika drops to her knees and starts tugging at wide section of skirting board. Nothing happens.
“What’re you doing?” Willa says.
She pulls again, and Willa gives me a look of surprise as this time the board comes away in her hand, revealing a small crawl space under the eaves. Laika sticks her arm inside and feels around, then pulls out a little dusty leather box. She flips open the lid and lifts out a photograph of two serious little girls seated side by side.
“That’s Elfrieda,” she says, tapping on one of the girls, “and that’s her sister, Elisabeth.”
She looks at the image for a long time, then passes the rest of the box to Willa.
“Look after this for me, will you?” she says. “I’ve got what I wanted.” Willa looks inside the box, her face baffled for a moment, then utterly amazed. She holds up a necklace clustered with diamonds, her mouth opening in surprise.
“Take that one. Use it to help buy out Jamie. Think of it as a ticket from Frieda, sister to sister. Nate’s group could do with a few new instruments too. As for the rest”—she turns to me, searching my eyes—“Robyn, d’you reckon you could help me track down Jabir?”
“He’s clearly checking the site.”
“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.”
