The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Read online

  To this end, I’ve done my very best to forget about Lisa from HR—early thirties, balayage blonde, spilled her Negroni on my best Isabel Marant dress at Steve’s office Christmas party—and, I’m 55 percent sure, the woman he plays doubles with at the tennis club—and other encounters I’ve sensed but not been able to prove these last few years.

  If you learn as a kid how to bury painful things—for me, everything that happened in a forest long ago, the sort of questions that’ll stop my mother dead in her tracks, with a coronary grimace—you get pretty bloody good at blocking things out. And keeping secrets. Only secrets don’t go away completely, it turns out. Like moths in a wardrobe, they nibble away, hidden, before you notice the hole.

  As Annie’s schooldays drew to a close earlier this summer, I felt an internal shift, one I hadn’t expected. Like a gear change on my bike, a strange freewheeling feeling, then a clunking into place. A little voice in my head started to whisper: You’re forty-six years old. If you don’t leave now, when? What sort of example are you setting for Annie anyway? She’d want you to be happy.

  Annie didn’t quite see it like that. “So you’ve been living a lie all this time? Pretending?” she stuttered when I broke the news, desperately trying to make our separation sound like a Gwyneth-style conscious uncoupling (admittedly, a stretch). I couldn’t bear to tell her about Steve’s affair, since that’s an adult mess, and my own humiliating business, a symptom of our breakup as much as its cause. Also, despite everything, he’s always been a brilliant father. So I said, “We’re united in our love for you, Annie. That’s the most important thing.” Which is true. But when I tried to hug her, she pushed me away.

  “Why didn’t you warn me? You know what, Mum? It’s been like this all my life, you going la, la, la, everything’s great, just don’t ask too many questions.”

  I flinched, sensing I’d tapped into something else, more subcutaneous, a vein of resentment that went beyond Steve’s and my split.

  “And it’s bullshit.”

  The next day Annie decamped to my mother’s cottage in Devon for the summer, where Granny’s sympathetic shoulder was waiting. “Right now she’s lying on the sofa, eating a tub of my homemade caramel ice cream, watching reruns of Girls,” my mother reported back reassuringly on the phone later that evening. “Of course she doesn’t hate you! No, stop it, Sylvie. You’re a wonderful mother. But it’s a bit of a shock. She feels duped. She needs time to digest it. We all do,” she added, which I took as a small dig.

  I hadn’t warned Mum, either. We both share difficult news on a need-to-know basis. Like mother, like daughter.

  “Let her have a carefree summer by the sea. I’ll take good care of her, don’t you worry. But who’ll look after you?”

  I laughed and said I was quite able to look after myself. Yes, really. But after many years of wifedom, I needed to find out who I was.

  “Who you are?” she said quietly, after a beat or two of fully loaded silence, then swiftly changed the subject.

  Annie quickly sorted herself out with a waitressing job and a boyfriend. On the phone she’ll often claim, not wholly convincingly, the signal’s dodgy and promise to phone back later, then doesn’t. If I ask about the new boyfriend—“Dotty about him,” Mum says—Annie immediately shuts down the conversation, as if I’ve lost the right to her confidence. Can I meet him? Silence. When will she come back to London and see my new apartment? “Soon,” she says, often with a muffled giggle, as if the boyfriend is there in the background, nuzzling her neck. “Gotta go. Love you. Yeah, miss you too, Mum.”

  At least she’s having fun, I reason as I park the car on my new street that’s not nearly as nice as my old one and grab the cardboard box out of the boot. I can hear the building’s summer pulse already. Out of its open windows, the competing sounds of cooped-up children, hip-hop, radio commentary—“Goal!”—and the opera singer on the second floor, throat open, practicing her scales. A group of hooded teenage boys watch me idly, leaning back against a graffiti-spattered wall, smoking weed. I smile brightly at them, refusing to be intimidated, and climb determinedly up four flights of stairs, the last bit of my married life weighty in my arms.

  The block is what estate agents call “industrial cool,” a mix of council and private with concrete communal walkways and balconies overlooking the Grand Union Canal. Slightly edgy. My apartment—with two small bedrooms, the nicest one ready for Annie, yet to be used—is owned by an understanding old friend, Val, and usually rented as an Airbnb. It’s an immaculate vision of pink gallery-picture walls, whitewashed Scandi floorboards, Berber rugs, and enormous, hard-to-kill waxy-leafed houseplants. More important, it’s only a couple of tube stops from the old house, so Annie can move between Steve and me easily, as she pleases. Or not.

  I drop the box to the floor and wish there was someone I could shout to “Put the kettle on!”

  Silence chases me around, like a cat. I flick on the radio and open the balcony’s glass doors, arms outstretched, head thrown back, pretending I’m in an old French movie. The city rumbles in, smelling of canal, diesel, and beer-soaked late-July heat. I lift my face to the sunshine and smile. I can do this.

  Even after I’ve lived here a month, the view from the balcony is a novelty, as though big gray London’s cleaved open its hidden green heart and let me in. The color of matcha tea, it’s an urban highway for dragonflies, butterflies, and birds. Other interesting wildlife: a thirtysomething, who likes hats, plays guitar, and sings—weirdly unselfconscious, not in tune—on his canal-boat deck in the evenings. A resident heron. Displaced from my old home, I’ve felt a funny kinship with that tatty urban heron—awkward yet stoic, no spring chicken—and can’t help but see it as a symbol of my strange new freedom. No sign of it yet this morning.

  I rest my arms on the balustrade, my dark curls starting to frizz, and my mind restlessly twitches forward, like the hand of a clock, to work, the earliest acceptable time to drink a glass of wine, then Annie. Images bloom in my mind. Mum yomping across a beach, toddler Annie on her shoulders; Annie curled up on the sofa, like a silky mammal, in a nest of cushions with a hoard of electronic devices; her freckles, persimmon stars, impossible for a makeup artist’s brush to replicate. I miss those freckles. I miss her. And I can still recall, as if it happened hours ago, the precise sensation of running my fingertip over her first tooth, hidden under the sore scarlet gum, intent on surfacing.

  Out of the corner of my eye, the heron, my freedom bird, swoops down and turns into a statue on the bank. I smile at it. My mobile rings. Not recognizing the number, suspecting spam, I flick it to voice mail. It rings again. “Hello . . . Sorry? . . . Yes, Sylvie. Sylvie Broom . . . What?” My breath catches. The heron’s huge wings hinge open and it holds them there, still, open, frozen at the first intention of flight. Time slows. The words “an accident” snag the baked London afternoon. And with a clap of feathers and air, my heron’s gone.

  3

  Rita

  A pheasant bolts up from the overgrown verge, making Rita start. She waits for it to scrabble safely into the forest, then shunts the car through Foxcote Manor’s gates. A metallic scraping sound makes her wince. She hopes Jeannie didn’t hear it. She needs this first day to go smoothly, without any bad omens.

  “The car says ouch,” announces Teddy from the back seat. He’s lying across it, his head on the pillow of his big sister’s lap, one bare foot pressed against a window, undone dungarees strap swinging. He has been dozing for most of the journey while Hera’s sat in a state of brittle vigilance, her cheeks squirrel-stuffed with Black Jacks. “But don’t worry. You scraped it on the other side this time, Big Rita. So it matches,” he adds sweetly.

  Rita turns to Jeannie. “I’m so sorry.” And even sorrier about agreeing to take secret notes for Walter. Only she can’t say this.

  Jeannie shrugs and smiles, the first real smile all day, as if she rather likes the idea of a new scratch
on her husband’s car. Rita doesn’t understand the Harringtons’ marriage. Every time she thinks she does, something overturns it. Like the knife.

  Two days after the fire, Jeannie confided that she’d hidden the dead baby’s things from Walter—who had banned “any reminders”—under her bed and feared she’d never see them again. Rita immediately offered to retrieve them. She knew firsthand that memories had to be protected, like rare jewels: the enormity of tiny things.

  Crawling on her elbows in the fine ash under the Harringtons’ marital bed, snagging her cowlick, Rita eventually found the flesh-pink velveteen shoe bag, stuffed like a belly, with a cot blanket, frilled bootees, and a silver Tiffany’s rattle that the baby never got to shake. But as she was trying to exit, almost stuck—always harder to get out of tricky situations than into them, she’d noted—she spotted a small kitchen knife tucked into the mattress wire, just below the pillow, as if awaiting Jeannie’s hand to dangle over the bed to grab it. Still spooks her. Rita doesn’t know what to think. Does Jeannie feel threatened by her husband? Has he ever hurt her? Walter would say his wife is paranoid, the knife another worrying sign of her tragically churned mind, the illness that’s shamed the family. But Walter would say that.

  After all, it was Walter and his doctor who had sent Jeannie to The Lawns a month after the baby died. Rita, dispatched to collect her eight long weeks later, will never forget it, the country-house façade, the dead-eyed women drifting around the gardens in long white nighties. She’d got talking to a sweet old lady, rocking a pillow in her arms. She said she’d been there for fifty-three years and hadn’t had a visitor for forty. Rita had had no idea such places existed. And she vowed to make sure Jeannie never went back.

  “Here. We. Are.” Rita turns off the engine. The hush is thick and soft, like her ears need to pop.

  Looking around, she notices a small brown car, violently pocked with rust, parked under a slump of honeysuckle. It’s not the only thing in a state of disrepair. Foxcote’s struggle with the forest was clearly lost some time ago. Fat tree roots have punched clean through the garden wall in many places, leaving nettles to swagger through the cavities and thorny brambles to reach across the drive, as if intent on crawling inside the house. The whole place has gone to seed. Rita hopes the energy of the children will lift it.

  “Whoo!” yells Teddy, throwing open the car door and launching himself toward Foxcote’s timber porch. Air rushes in, smelling sharp and chlorophyll green and oddly familiar to Rita, something long forgotten. It makes the fine hairs on her arms bristle statically, as if rubbed against a balloon.

  “What are we actually doing here?” Hera hurls the question, like a rock, from the back seat.

  The mood takes a perpendicular dive. At first Rita says nothing, careful not to step on Jeannie’s toes. She watches, tensing, as Jeannie pushes her sunglasses into her dark wavy hair and eyes her thirteen-year-old daughter in the rearview mirror, with a look of wary tenderness.

  Hera glares back with unblinking eyes of such a pale Arctic blue you can see right to their backs—Walter’s eyes. Her fringe falls jaggedly over her forehead. Last week she used the blunt kitchen scissors to give herself a haircut that made her mother actually scream.

  When Jeannie still says nothing, Rita twists in her seat. “We’re escaping the grimy city for the summer,” she says cheerily, even though she loves London in August, its fractious energy and greasy hot dog heat. “While the house is being done up.”

  Jeannie shoots her a small grateful smile.

  “But you’ve always hated Foxcote Manor, Mother,” Hera points out. Teddy, literal and trusting, doesn’t really understand what’s going on. Hera understands far too much and won’t stop prodding at her parents’ version of events. She didn’t miss her parents arguing in the hotel foyer earlier: Walter holding Jeannie by the arms, as if to impart some sense to her; Jeannie snapping her head away, refusing to look at him. Something about Hera’s expression today makes Rita think of a simmering pan of milk about to boil over.

  “Not at all,” Jeannie lies softly.

  Rita bites the inside of her cheek and feels awkward. She knows Jeannie had no choice but to come here. Not if she wanted the children to stay in her care. She’d felt a punch of shock when Jeannie confided she has no access to the family’s money, either, only housekeeping, that a privileged married woman has less freedom than her nanny.

  “But—” begins Hera, enjoying having her mother’s full attention for once.

  “That’s enough,” Jeannie interrupts. “Not today, okay, darling? And stop gorging on sweets. You’ll ruin your tea.”

  Hera slams the car door. Rita watches her stomp toward the house on her mottled plump legs. If Jeannie has halved in size since the baby died, Hera has doubled. Rita finds sweets wrappers everywhere—in Hera’s pockets, under her pillow. Last month, she was caught stealing from her school’s tuck-shop, twice.

  Something was damaged in Hera the night the baby was lost. Rita has tried to get her to talk about it many times. But Hera closes up like a clam. All Rita knows is that the events of the last year are somehow externalized in Hera, the turmoil a shadow in her pale eyes. And it’s her job to contain Hera’s flare-ups and shelter her and Teddy from the worst of their parents’ humdinger rows, which shake the house to its foundations. (Rita often feels about as useful as an umbrella in a force-nine gale.)

  “Bodes well,” says Jeannie.

  “Don’t worry. She’ll come round.” For some reason, Rita’s got faith in Hera. The febrile girl touches her heart. “I’ll grab some luggage and settle her in.” She unfolds her long legs from the cramp of the driver’s seat and strides around to the boot, knowing it’s not luggage she’s after.

  As the lid lifts with a satisfying clunk, Rita exhales a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

  “So has your precious cargo survived?” Jeannie calls from inside the car.

  “Yes!” Rita calls back, grinning. Her natural optimism returns. “Alive and well.”

  “I told you it’d be fine wedged between the suitcases, Rita.”

  A glass conservatory shrunk to finger-doll size, Rita’s terrarium is the only possession she cares about. The only thing she owns that has no practical purpose. On the night of the fire, after tugging Jeannie and the children down the smoky stairs in the dark, she’d tried to return for it, but the blazing heat beat her back. She rescued it the day she went to get the baby’s things. It was like reuniting with an old friend, a dear silent companion. Housing the most perfect mossy rock and, among other plants, a maidenhair fern she’s named Ethel and another she’s grown from a tiny black spore (Dot), the terrarium is the one constant between her unlikely nanny’s life and Life Before.

  Since she was little—though always the biggest in the class, least likely to be chosen as an angel for the nativity play or, later, asked to a dance—her dead father’s botanical plant case has been on her windowsill. She gazes into it as other young women might into a mirror. If she squints through the half-moon of her lashes, she can retreat inside its glass and crouch down in all the landscapes she’s ever created: the beach made from a handful of sand; a baby bonsai, its trunk like a twisted gray school sock; the prairie of dandelions rescued from a paving crack; all her old selves at different ages, different sizes, traveling the world in her mind, containing it, controlling it with her fingers. Keeping the scary big one out.

  Resisting the urge to carry the terrarium safely inside the house first, she extracts the children’s suitcases and walks around to the front of the car, the weedy gravel crunching beneath her feet. She stoops down to Jeannie, who has not moved. “Shall I grab your bag too?”

  “No, no. I’ll manage. You go in, Rita. I need a moment.” She unclasps her handbag and rummages inside for a cigarette.

  Rita hesitates, fearing Jeannie might jump behind the wheel and drive back to Claridge’s, or even to the house that ign
ited on the anniversary of the baby’s birth. A fact no one mentions. The firemen blamed the antique palm-tree lamp in the drawing room for starting the blaze. But Rita’s not so sure.

  The moment tautens, like a thread.

  “Fear not. I’m only having a ciggy, Rita,” Jeannie says wryly.

  Rita colors and smiles, reassured. But as she walks toward the house, she hears the gassy whoosh of the lighter and the muttered words: “Although I’d much rather burn this bloody place down.”

  4

  Hera, 4 August 1971

  When I peered out of my bedroom window that morning, a year ago last week, the London sky was blue and still, and it felt like the whole city was holding its breath, waiting for our baby’s first cry to peal across the rooftops. She wasn’t meant to come for another two weeks. I’d circled her due date in my flip-top calendar with a red felt-tip heart. But neighbors had already started dropping off Pyrex dishes loaded with toad-in-the-hole and coronation chicken. Mother, who’d started to walk like a cowboy, had also had “little twinges”: the words made me think of garden birds on the wing.

  After lunch I helped her lay old towels on her bed, then newspapers on the floor, and we giggled about the nonsense poetry they stamped on our fingers. I tried not to think about what the newspapers were there to soak up and concentrated instead on what it would be like to hold my new little sister. (I’d done a deal with God to secure a sister, an ally, the best friend I’d never had, but I’d forgotten to make Him promise she’d stick around.) She’d be raw-looking, like an oversucked thumb, and would grow up to be a slightly plainer version of me. I imagined cradling her in my lap and people saying, so my mother could hear, “Oh, you’re such a good big sister, Hera. She’s lucky to have you,” and me shrugging modestly, as if I’d not been practicing, using the neighbor’s cat, for weeks.