The Glass House Page 13

  ‘There you go!’ Annie laughs hollowly. ‘You’ve put your I’m-not-talking-about-this face on!’

  ‘I’ve got a face for that?’ I try to wipe it with a smile. But I can hear the serration in my voice.

  ‘Yes, you really do.’ Her gaze is unflinching, the teenage sort that comes with a bullshit detector fitted. ‘Which is why I started asking Granny questions about our family history – my history too, just saying – when I first came down here in June.’ Her face clouds. She looks away. ‘I was sick of not being told anything.’

  Although I know that my mother is more likely to discuss a bladder infection than the summer I was found, my heart hammers under her soft old check shirt all the same. ‘She told you about the mystery corpse in the woods, did she?’ I say, trying to make it sound like a jolly whodunnit.

  ‘Hardly! She’s almost as bad as you.’

  Master of sweet white lies. Spinner of grubby old yarn into beautiful silken threads. Nightmares into fairytales. That’s Mum.

  ‘But in a funny way …’ Annie laces her fingers over her almost-flat belly. And I can feel it coming, like a distant beat, distorted, carried over the water ‘… the little she did say led me to Elliot.’ She nods down at her hands, and a chill sluices through me. ‘So, I guess, whoever’s inside here too.’

  24

  Rita

  A wisp of black hair curls at the back of the baby’s neck, like a question mark. There are lots of those. Rita picks off the dark fluff that beads between the baby’s fingers and toes. She lays her down under the apple tree on a blanket – covered with a clean white sheet – so she can gaze up at the baubles of hard red fruit. But the baby’s gaze stays on her face, as it always does. She’s only been here four days yet she’s locked on to Rita in a way Rita finds disconcerting. The baby reminds her of a duckling that hatches and decides its mother is the first living creature it sees, irrespective of species. And any pleasure her presence brings is spoiled by the brute sadness of this misconception.

  Rita turns to her wicker basket of never-ending washing, and starts hanging the damp terry nappies on the line. Her thoughts roll to Robbie. His mouth. The slow spread of his smile. The golden hairs on his arms. The intense concentration on his face when he used a chainsaw on that fallen tree yesterday, the noise and whirr and mesmerizing violence of it, before he expertly bound the sections with ropes to his truck, and dragged them out of the lane.

  She smiles to herself, wondering if it’s the very mindlessness of the task that allows her to mentally wander to secret, slightly steamy places. If this is women’s way of escaping their domestic lives, inhabiting them but living elsewhere. If that’s what Jeannie did too, only she let the thoughts spill from her brain to her bed. She’s sticking up the last nappy, a wooden clothes peg in her mouth, when a shadow drapes coolly over her neck.

  ‘Nothing wrong with this one, is there? Very bonny.’ Rita whips around to see Marge hunkered over the baby, prodding her with a thick finger. She looks up at Rita, eyes gleaming with small triumph. ‘Thought you’d hide her from me for ever, did you?’

  Rita panics. Instinctively, she swoops down, picks up the baby and presses her tight to her chest. What to say? Anything you do say will be taken down and may be given in evidence … It can’t really be abduction. Can it?

  She keeps anticipating a policeman’s rap on the door. The clink of handcuffs on her wrists. She’s also jittery, constantly worrying that someone’s watching them, shadowing them in the woods and peering through the holes in the wall. But all her senses feel heightened – she’s not sure if she’s imagining these things. Turns out she’d have been better off listening for the wheeze of Marge’s rusty car instead.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there, Rita. You look like a carp. Mouth opening and closing like that. Don’t worry. I won’t say anything.’ Marge taps her nose. ‘You can trust me.’

  She doesn’t trust Marge. Not an inch. There’s something urgent and blinkered about the woman, a bitterness Rita can’t help but find repellent. She stares down at the sheet and the imprint the baby’s left on it, like a snow angel. Even that squeezes her heart. She should have left while she had the chance.

  Hera stopped her. Hera and the grave thing she’d threatened to do, preventable only by Rita’s presence. How could she go after that seed was planted? She suspects now that Hera knew exactly what she was doing.

  ‘A foundling, eh?’

  Rita flinches. ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Didn’t have to, love.’

  Rita finds Marge’s lack of shock unnerving. Guns in biscuit tins. Babies left in woods. She feels like she’s been drawn through a portal into a different world entirely, unshackled from normal behaviour. No wonder feral men hide in these woods. Anything goes.

  ‘Not as unusual around here as you might believe, I’m afraid.’ She tsks. ‘The pretty ones usually. It goes to their heads.’

  Out of the corner of her eye Rita can see Hera’s face, white and round as a moon at her bedroom window, then Hera frantically wheeling away, probably to tell Jeannie.

  ‘Half the time they don’t realize they’re pregnant until the baby’s head’s crowning.’ Marge clicks her tongue. ‘I blame their mothers, don’t you? Show me an unmarried local girl who gets into trouble, and I’ll show you a mother who’s not been paying attention.’ She tweaks the baby’s foot. ‘Still. A wild stroke of luck for the Harringtons, eh?’

  Luck? Luck is winning something in a raffle. Or being born to grow to less than five foot eight. Not this. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘To lose one baby …’ Marge raises her hands to the sky, like a preacher ‘… then to find another!’

  Rita’s unease builds. Earlier that morning, she saw Jeannie, in a long lacy nightie, showing the baby the garden, pointing out the flowers and birds, and it had made her think of those drifting women in the grounds of The Lawns. ‘But the baby can’t stay here, Marge.’

  Rita might as well have said they’d be feeding the baby to wild pigs. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Obviously, we’re going to call the authorities.’ She can hear her own voice – and belief that this will ever happen – wobbling slightly. ‘Just one more day,’ Jeannie keeps saying. But then night falls, there’s another shattering dawn feed, and that day merges into another.

  ‘Heavens, no. Rita, you listen to me. You want to ruin this little jewel’s life chances? Course not. Then keep her here, secret – you hear me? – until the end of the summer.’ She grabs Rita’s sleeve roughly. ‘Don’t tell a soul.’

  Has the world gone mad or has she? ‘But, Marge …’ she begins, with a disbelieving laugh.

  ‘You’re too young.’ She snorts dismissively and a puff of moist air lands on Rita’s cheek.

  ‘But we’re surely breaking the law, Marge.’

  ‘The law?’ Marge scoffs, as if this were the most ludicrous thing she’s ever heard. ‘We foresters have our own laws. You think some busybody from the council knows what’s best for this baby? I tell you, Rita.’ She waggles a sausage finger. ‘Those bureaucrat types, those box-tickers, clueless, the lot of them. Respect the authority in here.’ She slaps her chest so her meaty bust judders beneath her overall. ‘And here.’ She taps her temple. ‘And there.’ She stabs her finger at the forest. ‘You can’t trust many people, Rita, but you can trust an oak.’

  Rita struggles not to giggle. But nothing is funny. It’s calamitous and quite, quite mad.

  ‘Worried you’re going to get into trouble, eh?’ Marge dismisses this with such an energetic wave of her arm that Rita leaps back, protecting the baby’s head in her hand. ‘No need! When the time comes you can say you phoned and left a message. Some council secretary must have not passed it on. Oh, and you sent a letter, a letter that never arrived. They won’t be able to prove you didn’t. Post goes astray all the time here. The left hand never knows what the right does.’

  The baby’s sucker mouth latches on to her neck. ‘I’d better get on.
She’s hungry.’

  ‘You know what they’ll say?’ Marge shuffles closer. ‘How clean she is! How well fed! How she loves her new family! Look, she’s even got a devoted nanny thrown in!’ Something ticks behind her eyes. ‘The Harringtons will be able to adopt formally then.’ She curls a wisp of hair around the baby’s ear with an air of grandmotherly satisfaction. ‘No one will turn down such a good family, or such a wealthy one. Walter Harrington could fart and the mayor would applaud.’

  ‘Is that how social services work?’ Rita says weakly. ‘It doesn’t sound right.’

  ‘Is round here, love.’

  She has to say it. ‘Mr Harrington doesn’t know about the baby, Marge. And he’s due back very soon. In a week, probably.’

  ‘Ah. Perfect timing. You get to show the baby to Mr Harrington before you phone the services.’

  ‘B-but …’ she stutters.

  ‘I’ve known Walter Harrington all his life, Rita. And let me tell you, when he sees how much happier his wife is, he’ll embrace that baby with open arms. Contrary to appearances, he’s not made of stone.’ She seems so sure of this that it makes Rita question her own judgement. ‘Here. Give her to me. She needs burping. I can’t bear to watch you faffing any longer.’

  Marge slings the baby over her shoulder and starts whacking, far harder than Rita ever would. Rita wants to snatch her back. A belch erupts. ‘Better out than in,’ Marge says approvingly, lifting the startled baby above her head and giving her a shake so that her bare feet waggle back and forth. ‘One day …’ Another shake. The baby starts the heh-heh sound Rita’s learned precedes an eardrum-puncturing cry. ‘… our wee forest flower here will be all grown-up and rich and happy as any Harrington. Don’t forget that.’ As if sensing Rita’s doubt – she’s never met a child more troubled than Hera – Marge freezes the baby mid-air and her eyes narrow to beetle-wing slits. ‘So, what’s more important, Rita? Blabbing the truth to make yourself feel better or doing what’s right?’

  25

  Sylvie

  My mother is falling. Spinning. Skirt parachute-puffed. In a whirl of shredded newspaper cuttings, like a deranged Mary Poppins. My stomach lurches. I step back on the cliff path and rapidly blink away the image until I can just see blue sky again. So far this walk with Annie – to stretch our legs before the drive back to London – has done little to soothe my rattled mind.

  When I glance back at Annie, she’s a couple of steps behind, resting her hands on her knees to catch her breath, a symptom I suddenly remember from my own pregnancy, that altitude-like thinning of the air. ‘Shall we sit, sweetheart?’ I suggest, walking back to her, and putting an arm over her shoulders. ‘Rather than hoof further over these cliff tops?’ She smiles and nods gratefully.

  The bench, facing the sea, is an old favourite of Mum’s, rickety, lichen-spangled, and dedicated to a long-dead village couple, ‘who loved this spot’. I think, if Mum dies, I’ll get her an inscribed bench too, then push away the painful thought. She won’t die. It’s not her time.

  I concentrate on the light. Beautiful. That’s what I miss most about this place when I’m in London. There’s no city haze here. Colours sing. Like on an old masterpiece after its dark varnish is removed.

  My phone beeps in my bag. My fingers twitch. But I guess it’s another panicking text from Steve, and I don’t have any desire to speak to him or to interrupt things. It feels like Annie’s finally opening up to me this morning, revealing her summer love affair, petal by petal, a bud unfolding. ‘So you were saying how you met Elliot …’ I nudge, careful not to appear too ravenous for information.

  ‘I was …’ she says teasingly.

  I bang her knee with mine. ‘Well, go on, then!’

  ‘At the beginning of the summer Granny let slip the name of the Harringtons’ company.’ She raises one eyebrow, pauses dramatically. ‘Harrington Glass.’

  ‘Interesting. I didn’t know that.’ Unable to see how this might relate to Elliot, I wonder if she’s going off on a tangent.

  ‘Thing is I wouldn’t have thought much of it if she hadn’t looked so totally weird, Mum,’ she continues, twisting a strand of hair around one finger. ‘Like she’d said something she hadn’t meant to say. It felt like brushing against something underwater and not knowing what it was. Do you know what I mean?’

  My childhood was peppered with such febrile tiny moments: a certain inflection in my mother’s voice if I ever asked about her work as a nanny, a swift change of subject. Or unexpectedly charged reactions, disproportionate to the event. Like the time I set fire to my bedroom curtains, having a sneaky cig, and she yelled, really yelled – she rarely raised her voice – and accused me of almost burning down the house.

  ‘Yep, know what you mean, Annie.’

  ‘So, obviously, I googled the company.’ She lifts her face to the sunshine, and shoots me a sidelong glance under her long lashes. ‘It’s still going, Mum.’

  ‘Is it?’ I shelter my eyes with my hand and scan the sea for a sighting of seals or dolphins, those childlike shadows slipping beneath the surface, much as in this conversation.

  ‘And that was where I first saw Elliot’s profile. On the Harrington Glass website.’

  ‘What?’ I turn to her with a small crack of a laugh, and immediately see she’s not joking. So this is why she’s been cagey about how they met and not told me anything about him. Not married. Not an ex-con. I should be relieved. I’m not.

  ‘He kind of stood out.’ She animates when she talks about him. Her eyes shine. ‘Didn’t look like the rest of the headshots, all the old suits. On the staff list it said “digital brand ambassador” or something, and linked to a Twitter page that made me laugh. And then, well, I ended up going down this wormhole online. Don’t look at me like that, Mum! It was just a distraction from what was going on with you.’ A wave smashes on to the rocks below: my guilt, with sound effects. ‘Okay. And Dad,’ she adds, as a sweet, conciliatory afterthought.

  ‘And what did you find?’ My mouth is dry. ‘In this – this wormhole.’

  ‘Dark web opiate-delivery service …’

  ‘Christ.’

  She smiles affectionately, and I realize she’s winding me up. ‘He was gramming Devon beaches, Mum. Look.’ She points to a distant bay, a wedge of golden sand. ‘Turns out he was staying there with a friend at weekends. Surfing. I started liking his photos and we got, you know, chatting.’

  No, I don’t know. Annie makes it sound so easy.

  She’s silent for a moment. She blushes. There’s more, I think. Oh, crap.

  ‘He was working at Harrington Glass for a few weeks because his mother had an “in” at the company.’ She makes quote marks with her fingers. ‘Some contact. No big deal, is it?’ She’s seeking reassurance. ‘I mean, he doesn’t work there any more.’

  ‘No biggie.’ One of those unpleasant surprises tossed up by a digital world that connects people who wouldn’t ever normally cross paths. ‘But … Annie. It does concern me that he was just a random stranger off the Internet.’

  She frowns. ‘Er, how else are you meant to meet anyone?’

  ‘At a party? On a train?’ A boat. A canal boat. What’s wrong with me? I’ve left my husband. My teenage daughter is pregnant. My mother’s hovering in a nightmarish no man’s land between life and death. I haven’t worked in ages. I’ve not even buffed my nails. Or had my roots done. And I’m having disrupting thoughts about a bloke ten years my junior. Tragic.

  ‘A train?’ She giggles.

  ‘Okay, I’m a dinosaur.’ I put my hands up, catching her giggle, realizing how much I’ve missed these confidences. ‘What happened when you actually met in real life? Did you like him straight away?’

  She nods. ‘There was this attraction, this thing.’ Her voice is soaked with longing. ‘It felt like … like it was … right.’

  That feeling. I felt it once, too. But a lifetime ago. The weekend I met Steve we sat up talking all night at a festival in the rain. I remember the soft glow
inside the leaking orange tent that smelt of spilled beer and sleeping bags. Lying side by side on the boggy ground sheet. Midges whirling around our heads. Falling asleep at dawn, holding hands. Waking to the dazzle of sun, fat and gold with promise. We were so young. We were different people.

  ‘I know it sounds corny.’

  I smile. ‘It sounds like you fell in love.’

  Annie doesn’t deny it. But she picks a lichen flake off the bench, self-conscious, as if I’ve caught her off guard. Waves boom beneath us. The tide is turning.

  ‘Granny met him, right?’

  Annie stretches out her long legs, polished and tanned nut-brown after a summer surfing, and not wearing nearly as much sunscreen as I’d have liked. ‘A couple of times.’

  ‘Did she know where he worked?’ I ask curiously, warily. Mum would dread the wrecking ball of the past colliding with her beloved grandchild in any way, I know that.

  Annie nods. She bites her lower lip. ‘I told her that on the walk.’ A cloud covers the sun, tipping the sea from turquoise to a bottomless navy. ‘Just before she fell,’ she whispers, rasping with the horror of it still.

  ‘Oh, Annie.’ I take her hand, remembering what she told me and Caroline: Granny fell because of me. ‘It doesn’t make her fall your fault.’

  ‘I don’t know why I even said it.’ Annie starts to cry. The tears stick her hair to her cheek. I pick the strand off gently, wanting to take the weight from her shoulders too – and her place on the cliff path that day. ‘So stupid,’ she whispers, shaking her head. ‘It just spilled out of me and made her start, like I’d plugged her into the national grid or something.’ She closes her eyes, screwing them up, the memory flickering across the minute muscles in her face. ‘Then she – she stepped backwards. And Granny was gone.’