The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Page 3

  But then the twinges flew away. It felt like a party had been canceled at the last minute. We waited around. Aunt Edie arrived, creating a sizzle, as she always does. Aunt Edie has declared herself too clever for marriage and wears a white shirt and navy slacks and works on a newsmagazine that sends her abroad to dangerous places, armed with a pen. She’s been shot at twice. She has love affairs with war photographers. She finds kids’ stuff boring. Whenever she came with us to feed ducks in Regent’s Park, she’d stifle coffee-stinky yawns and check her man’s watch. I loved her just for this.

  “Don’t let us keep you from the front line, Edie,” Mother would mutter, a bit vinegary, making me wonder if she found feeding ducks boring too, but wasn’t allowed to say so. Mother was much fonder of Aunt Edie when she wasn’t actually there. She became a useful reference point in arguments with my father, waving like the vibrant flag of an exciting new country. Women like her were the future, my mother would declare, beating the cake mix harder and harder, so that shreds of it flew into the air and landed in unexpected places, like my father’s raised eyebrow. Edie was living the sort of life Mother would have if she hadn’t got married so young—at nineteen—and had me (six months after the wedding). It always made me feel bad when she said that. Like I’d come along and stopped her being her, dragging her back into a time before television.

  Anyway, that Tuesday our life still resembled one of my mother’s House & Garden magazines. The napkins were fan-folded on the dining-room table, which was polished like a mirror. I was plump then, not fat. Mother was still completely sane. She wore an apple-print dress that rocked over her bump as she moved, like it was enjoying itself. Aunt Edie had popped over and brought some things for the baby, a silver rattle and a yellow blanket, soft as butter. When my mother wasn’t looking, she nibbled off the price label with her teeth. It was obvious from my aunt’s expression she’d mistimed her visit—she’d thought she was safely two weeks from the birth. And now she was stuck. Like us. Like the baby.

  Soon Mother was orbiting the drawing room, her hand on her lower back, blowing out in puffs, like a boiling kettle, then straightening with a short, breathless laugh, herself again. Teddy didn’t like it. Aunt Edie didn’t like it. She said, “Christ, Jeannie, do you want an ambulance?”

  Mother bellowed back, “No, I want to be a man!”

  It wasn’t just Mother’s words that had roughened: she’d started to look different by then, sort of ugly. Her face was flushed and swollen. Even her feet had gone pulpy: I could press my finger into them and lose my nail. When she paced in front of the sunlit window in her apple dress, her tummy was no longer high or round but slumped, as if whatever was inside was too heavy to be held there much longer. The thought of something so big leaving her body, through the same tiny secret slit as the one between my own legs, worried me. I couldn’t work out the mechanics of it. But I took comfort in knowing it’d been done before.

  Daddy came home early from work, tugging off his tie. He brought Mother a glass of water, which she shooed away, like he’d done something wrong. After that, leaving Aunt Edie and my mother alone, he sat on the metal steps that spiral down to the patio. He lit cigarette after cigarette and frowned, as if the baby’s arrival needed serious mental preparation. He’d been doing this a lot as my mother’s belly had got bigger.

  At one point the phone rang in the hall. Mother and Aunt Edie exchanged funny looks as Daddy scrambled up to answer it and hissed something to the caller before clapping the receiver back on its cradle. After that, he stood there glaring at the phone, the cigarette burning down to an ash wand in his fingers, then falling onto the floor. When Mother asked who it was, he didn’t answer. Aunt Edie was pretending to read House & Garden. So it was me who let in the midwife.

  Mother started to grab on to the sofa with her fists, as if trying to stop it galloping across the room. Her curls clung to her forehead, oily and dark. “Time for you to go to bed,” she managed through a gritted smile. She hugged me. She smelled different. “You’ll have a new sibling by the morning.” Then she sucked in air loudly, adding, “Stay upstairs with Big Rita, okay, darling?” I couldn’t get away fast enough.

  On the top floor, Big Rita emerged from Teddy’s bedroom with her huge smile, like the seaside was inside her. Her skirt was still soaked from Teddy’s bath and she had a white caterpillar of bath foam caught in her hair. She hadn’t been with us long then—a few weeks, her nickname already stuck—and every time I saw her, it still felt like a nice surprise. I’d expected to dislike her, as I had all the other mother’s helps and nannies who’d been brought in after the death of Nanny Burt two years ago. (Sharp left-handed smack and a frown like the fork print in her pastry pie lids: I never liked Nanny Burt, either.) But I liked Big Rita. She asked me questions. She filled a room. Her hands were as big as Daddy’s. But she never used them to slap. And if Teddy woke in the night, scared of the shadows under the bed, I’d hear her say, “The safest place in the entire world is exactly where you are, Teddy.” Like bad things happened outside houses like ours. Never inside them.

  Also, Big Rita isn’t pretty, not obviously. It probably shouldn’t matter. But it does. I’ve spent my whole life with people staring at my mother’s face, then glancing at me, observing I didn’t get her looks. Pretty people wait for you to notice them, rather than noticing you. I could tell straightaway that Big Rita was a noticer. She has wide eyes, the color of a wet beach. I loved the ordinariness of her name too: it made me think of ice-cream parlors and chips in a newspaper cone, stuff I’m not allowed. (“Best not, until you lose the puppy fat, darling,” says Mother, who never stops watching her figure. Or mine.) I wanted her name instead of my own. I hate having to repeat my name—“Hero?”—and spell it. Also, Hera is the Greek goddess of marriage, which isn’t even funny. Mostly, though, I just liked Big Rita for liking me. When Daddy jokingly said I was an acquired taste, like a Brussels sprout, she whispered behind her hand, “My favorite vegetable.” I’m not sure anyone has said anything nicer to me than that. Unlike other nannies, she’d take us into the city, to museums and galleries, or mudlarking along the Thames, where we’d pocket tiny grubby treasures, our feet squelching, the metallic smell of the river on our cold pink fingertips. Until you washed the finds over the sink, you never knew quite what would be revealed.

  That night was the same. We were both so excited. I couldn’t sleep. I asked her to tell me the story of her glass plant case again. Sitting on the edge of my bed, she explained in a low, soft voice how terrariums were once called Wardian cases, and designed so that people could grow plants in the polluted London air or transport them on long journeys overseas, and how it had changed botany forever, and the contents of Kew Gardens, and then, when my eyelids grew heavy, my head filled with ferns, she stopped talking and tugged the sheet over my body. It was too warm for a blanket.

  I woke in the stuffy dark to bloodcurdling screams coming from the floor below. Mother was dying. I clamped my pillow over my head. I wanted whatever would happen to happen so that she wouldn’t be in pain anymore. Big Rita came in to check on me. There would be a beautiful baby in the basket tomorrow, she said. But when she pushed the hair off my face, I felt a tremble in her fingers.

  An hour later, I opened my window and knelt with my chin on the cool sill, my eyes on the rooftops, the pink sun rising. I was there when the ambulance pulled up outside the house, where the milk truck usually stops with a cheery chink, and when the midwife ran down the steps, the big lantern light above the door spotlighting the bundle in her arms.

  The shock of what I saw emptied my brain, then my stomach. And it hasn’t come back. I keep trying and trying, but I just can’t remember: whatever I saw is scratched out, like a face from a photograph. Daddy says this is for the best. I must forget everything I might have seen that night and remember I’ve always had a ridiculously vivid imagination. And never ever mention it again.

  5

  Sylvie


  Would it help to talk about what happened?” I ask gently, edging closer to Annie on the big white sofa. I’ve still got a niggling hunch she’s not told me everything about Mum’s accident, that something’s building inside.

  Annie shakes her head and chews on a rope of her long red hair, mashing it flat as a ribbon. I loop my arm around her shoulders. Under her sweat top, she feels young and frightened and shuddery. I notice that she’s gripping her phone and hope the new boyfriend has called to offer some moral support. Maybe he can reach her.

  A boat chugs past on the canal. Even this sounds different from normal. The world has shifted. Darkened. The rippling shadows on the wall look like people falling.

  “Granny’s in the very best place she could be now, Annie.” A brilliant specialist unit in London—the local unit she needed was full. Thank God, I think, for the umpteenth time, clinging to every scrap of good news. “I’m going back in an hour. Come with?”

  Annie nods and tries to smile. But her face is stiff with shock. Her eyes are wet green glass. She’s been crying on and off since it happened three days ago. We both have. But we’re crying for different people: Annie for Gran-Gran, as she used to call her; me for Mum, not just the woman I call most days to chat to about nothing much or squabble with, but the unspoken thing that exists in the space between us, deep and rippling like a sea, so gigantic and elemental and complicated I can’t put it into words.

  “Or I can drive you to Dad’s, if you’d rather be there,” I bluster on guiltily, clumsily trying to normalize the fact that Annie’s now got two homes, two bedrooms, all that to deal with too. I don’t want her to go anywhere. She’s been staying in this apartment for the last couple of nights, and it’s been such a comfort to have her close again. In the early hours, I’ve sat on the edge of her bed and watched her sleep, like Mum used to watch me. Or my big sister Caroline did, swinging down from the upper bunk bed, her caramel-colored hair dangling, hissing, “Sylv, you awake?” until I was.

  Caroline will be here in four days. But America feels even farther away this morning, and I’m terrified Mum will have taken a turn for the worse by the time my sister flies in from Missouri.

  “Can I get you something to eat? A nice biscuit?” I think how Mum always says a nice biscuit when just a biscuit would do, and grief thunders through me again. I have to remind myself she’s in a coma. Her heart still beats. She’s not brain dead.

  So where is she? I imagine her pinioned inside her own skull, incredulous and frustrated, demanding to be let out. This isn’t my time! She has a calendar full of busyness. Decades of life still waiting. Stuff to do.

  “No thanks,” I hear Annie say, through the white noise in my head. “I can’t face food. I feel kind of sick.” She buries her face in my neck, like she used to as a little girl, her cheeks sticky with tears, eyelashes butterfly fluttering against my skin.

  I hold her tight. My eyes slowly close. I haven’t slept for more than a couple of hours at a time since it happened, endlessly jolting awake, slippery with sweat, my heart scrabbling in my chest.

  The accident keeps flashing in staccato bursts. I can picture it all: the spray of blood up the cliff wall; the ocean boiling under the churn of the helicopter’s propeller as Mum was lifted from the rocky ledge; Annie running along the cliff path, frantically trying to catch a signal to call me.

  Then there are the photographs on Annie’s phone. Taken a moment apart, the split second that separates a casual cliff stroll from catastrophe. One shows my mother smiling for the camera in her green North Face anorak; the next, just sea and sky, my mother extracted in an instant, like someone sucked out of an airplane window.

  “Granny’s going to be all right, isn’t she, Mum?” Annie mumbles from under my unwashed curls.

  “She . . .” I hesitate. Mum told white lies too. She sugarcoated the darkest of truths for me and Caroline. Rubbed the edges off them in the hope that they wouldn’t hurt so much. I can’t help myself. I do the same. “Granny will be just fine, hon.”

  * * *

  After Annie’s left for Steve’s—home, as she calls it, inevitably: it’ll always be the family house—I stand beside Mum’s hospital bed, adjusting to her not being at all fine. When a doctor gently suggests that, given the uncertainty, I may want to get her affairs in order, I try not to scream like someone who’s googled “head injury” and “coma” late at night and scared themselves witless. Also, Mum’s affairs? It’d be easier to hack into the Kremlin, frankly. “Okay,” I say, trying to hold it together, like Mum would.

  When he’s gone, I hold her warm, slack hand—the hand that once patted plasters onto my scuffed knee, that still writes random one-line postcards sent from home: “Glorious weather! You should see the lupins”—and my tears fall and bloom on the white hospital sheet. I can’t help but feel she’s secretly conscious, saying, “Buttercup, hang in there.” And I mumble it back to her, “And you, Mum,” only my voice goes raspy, all the things I can’t say, haven’t said, sticking in my throat.

  Lying flat, her swirl of bandages like a turban, she looks younger. This cheers me because I know she’d love that, even if she’d pretend not to. (“Better old than dead!” she likes to say, then slaps on the retinol cream every night.) Her shaken brain might be bleeding, the left side of her face swollen, but her bone structure stands out, revealing the face that was scouted by a modeling agent decades ago. Who she was before Caroline and I came along and she and Dad left London for the rural good life—chickens and beaches and Argyle cardigans—and she basically turned into Linda McCartney. I smile, thinking how she’s never quite lost her fashiony tics. Like muscle memory. I’ll see it in the way she’ll swing on a coat, with a small flourish, or lift her chin for a family snap. She’s always had a model’s protean ability to inhabit different versions of herself. Overwriting. Shape-shifting.

  I touch her cheek with the back of my hand. Papery and dry. In need of rose face oil, massaged in under my warm palms. Or some moisture-boosting hyaluronic acid, finger-patted into her pores. If I had my makeup kit with me, I’d get to work and dust her cheekbones with blush too, salve her chapped lips and varnish her bare toenails, all the little things we do to keep life’s darkness at bay. That’s what I do. What I’ve always done. Toss handfuls of glitter into the deepest, dirtiest shadows.

  As I sit watching her for almost an hour, something new and unsettling begins to dawn. Mum’s not indomitable. I’m childishly staggered by this. She may die. She may not come back as herself, memory intact. So what will be lost exactly? She’s the keeper of all our family secrets. What if there were things she still wanted to tell me? Questions she was waiting for me to ask? But I can’t ask them now. Maybe I’ll never get the chance. The truth about what really happened in a remote forest in the fading sun-bleached summer days of 1971 has been brutally, unexpectedly yanked out of reach.

  6

  Rita

  Shocking business, isn’t it?” the woman whispers, lurching into the aureole of personal space that normally separates strangers. Foxcote’s front door bangs shut behind Rita, with a suck of air, sealing the dimly lit entrance hall like the heavy lid of a wooden box. “Just terrible,” the woman continues heatedly, as if Rita had answered.

  Rita’s unsure if she’s referring to the loss of the baby or the other thing—the much more salacious gossip about Jeannie. She smiles politely, well practiced in the art of giving nothing away, and rests the children’s suitcases on the floor with a thunk. Registering the hissing sump of a log fire on the far wall, she feels something in her chest tighten. This dilapidated old house would go up like a bonfire.

  “The poor Harringtons. One thing after another, eh?” The woman shakes her head. Her hair doesn’t move. It’s stiff and streaky brown and gray, like a barn owl’s wing. “What a hoo-ha.”

  A dull banging from the floor above snaps Rita’s attention back to the children. Teddy? Yes, Teddy. She can hea
r him giggling. Sound travels differently here, not bouncing off the walls, like it did in London, but seeping into the wood, like a spill of warm oil. Another muffled bump. A shower of plaster. Rita’s big eyes roll upward.

  The ceiling’s low—she could touch it with her fingertips—and the flaky plaster is crisscrossed with thick black beams, the sort you get in farmhouses, creating the dusty nooks and crannies so beloved of crawling insects and, most likely, mice. She can only imagine the daddy longlegs count in such a place. The walls are wood-paneled and studded with oil paintings—landscapes, dogs—and dusty bunches of dried flowers. At least nothing looks too precious. A woodwormed console. A rustic settle bench. A disintegrating upholstered chair. All listing slightly on the bare floorboards, as if on the deck of a ship. She has a sensation of tipping too, as if she’s on the verge of falling into something. But she’s not sure this has much to do with the floor.

  “Mrs. Grieves.” The woman’s handshake is strong, her palm rough against Rita’s young skin. “But you can call me Marge.” She lifts her lantern jaw, revealing a raised mole inhabited by one prominent wiry black hair. Rita tries hard not to look at it. “Housekeeper.” Marge smiles. Her teeth are grayish and oblong, chipped and irregularly sized, and make Rita think of Stonehenge. “Live out. Hawkswell born and bred.”

  Housekeeper. Could make life difficult. She’ll need to get on with Marge. “I’m the nanny—”

  “Big Rita, yes, I know,” Marge interrupts. She sweeps a sharp, beady gaze over Rita’s length. “Well, I can see why that nickname stuck.”

  Rita struggles to maintain her smile. (“Six blimmin’ foot at thirteen!” Nan’s friends used to marvel, making her stoop and shrink, so embarrassed she couldn’t breathe.) She takes in Marge’s muscular forearms; the broken capillaries on her cheeks; the stout, shapeless figure. Late forties? Rita can’t tell. Everyone over thirty looks ancient.