The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Page 5

Occasionally my father would mutter something about the heat of his glass furnaces or the depth of the Namibian quartz mine he’d inherited from a favorite uncle, which he calls “my most expensive, difficult child” and refuses to sell. But neither could beat the mineral gamy smell of lion’s blood and Teddy would shush him. And Mother would still be leaning toward Don, elbows on her knees, chin in one hand, all the places she hadn’t been and things she hadn’t done stamped like postmarks in the furrow between her eyebrows. (Daddy never took her traveling with him. She had to stay at home with us. “Hold the fort,” he’d say.) After Don had left, she’d get a funny distance in her eyes, not dissimilar to the look she had in the car journey down to Foxcote yesterday. She thinks I can’t see behind those big dark sunglasses, but I can. I can see through everything.

  Don never stayed long. And he didn’t stay long that weekend, either. Just one night in the guest room, while Daddy was abroad on business: he’d been away for over a month. I caught Mother leaving the guest room the following morning, her face glowing, her hair all messed up, mascara on her cheekbones, like she’d been unpicked and sewn back together overnight. And it was about three months before she announced she was pregnant and the baby’s due date.

  Before then, once a month, it felt like it was raining inside the house. Mother would go to bed with an aspirin and a hot-water bottle. There would be small spatters of blood in the lavatory bowl, and I’d know that the baby she and Daddy kept trying to have—the one who was meant to be close in age to Teddy but kept getting further away—hadn’t worked again. And I’d pray it would work. But not like this.

  I don’t know what made me do the math. Pore over my biology book. I guess I just knew. And I’m pretty sure Daddy did too. When I think about it now, and I still think about it a lot, the thoughts hopping and biting like fleas, everything bad that has happened to us is Don’s fault. And he’s gotten away with all of it.

  8

  Sylvie

  My days develop a frenetic rhythm. Trying to keep the gnawing dread at bay, I bounce from moment to moment in a blur of busyness. Between hospital visits—and calling Mum’s phone to listen to her voice mail over and over—I become obsessed with turning Val’s perfect pink apartment into a home. I want Annie to hang out here, not just to stay out of a sense of duty.

  When Caroline arrives from America, I need her to approve of the place too, rather than assume it’s a reflection of her mad little sister’s metropolitan midlife crisis. I throw old Welsh blankets over the pristine white sofa and cook Mum’s recipes from my childhood: red velvet cake, mushroom quiche with soggy pastry, and a briny fish pie.

  The world of work feels like it exists on a different plane. One on which I can no longer function. So I bat off all new commitments, including a five-day catalog shoot in Greece, reasoning that just because I’m self-employed, it doesn’t mean I can’t have compassionate leave. As my agent, Pippa, waspishly points out, I can, I just don’t get paid. “Take as long as you need,” she says—then, more steely, “but not too long.” We both know it’s a risk dropping off the radar when so many other makeup artists—younger, hungrier, with churning Insta feeds and instructive YouTube videos—are competing for work. I don’t tell Pippa my hand is not steady enough to do a cat’s-eye flick right now, that I barely sleep, and every time someone asks, “How are you?” I have no idea what to say.

  There’s no language for this strange, shifting place I’m inhabiting, unable to grieve, yet reeling from loss, the days raw with every chatty phone call I don’t make, emails I don’t send, the Christmas plans Mum and I always start discussing, madly, in August. I arrive at the date in the diary when we were going to see a new exhibition at the V&A. And I imagine the afternoon happening, in a parallel what-if universe, us walking past the Greek statues, Mum saying, like she always does, “I could live in here.”

  As I’m surviving on coffee and adrenaline, the weight drops off. (Satisfying, even in a crisis.) My heart feels like it’s running 10Ks in my chest. In the mirror, I observe a violent twitch in my left eyelid. We think other people don’t notice them, like so many things, but they do. And yet. The man in the black canal boat, the one who plays guitar and wears a battered fedora, giving him a sexy, rakish air, has started smiling at me whenever I walk past on the towpath, furrow-faced after a hospital visit. Or I’ll be on the balcony, ruminating, heron-watching, and catch him peering up at me. He might be a nut or in need of glasses, but his smile always looks like a question. Once I smiled back.

  Steve phones. “You’re not all right, are you?” Passive-aggressive. Annie must have said something. “You sound manic, Sylvie. It’s bonkers you being at Val’s flat at a time like this. Come home, babe. Let me look after you.”

  The offer is so tempting—in a cowardly, “screw it, I’m done” sort of way—that I have to sit down.

  I could slot back into my marriage, my house, our joint account, like a spoon in the cutlery drawer, and end Annie’s resentful shuttle between bedrooms. But something in me resists. I think of Annie’s words: So you’ve been living a lie all this time? How I’ve plugged painful, awkward bits of my life for so long. So I grip on, like a woman dangling from a window ledge by her fingertips.

  “You’ve always been your own worst enemy, you know that?” Steve says, hanging up, reminding me why I left.

  Caroline saves me, blowing across the Atlantic, emerging from customs in a fluttering marquee of lime-green linen, sweating and grinning, like a bomber pilot who’s survived another rough tour. (My sister hates flying and becomes religious when airborne.) We hug and I inhale the comfort of her American house with its stoop and comfy snugs, her big, riotous, loving family and three slobbering dogs—as well as the thousands of miles she’s traveled, all the months we’ve been apart.

  Caroline’s married to a haulage company director, Spike, the loveliest man, built like a grain store. They have five children under nineteen, including Alf, a seven-year-old with Asperger’s, who very much needs Caroline around. (We Skype a lot.) We are as different as sisters could be. She’s big, blond, steady, and solid, like a Labrador. I’ve always been the scrawny dark one, nervy, light on my feet, like a witch’s cat. Oh, yes, and Caroline has managed to stay happily married, like our parents.

  “Still dressed for a funeral I see, sis.” She grins. Me wearing black is one of our jokes. She holds me by the shoulders. “And traitorously skinny! I’ve put on six pounds since Mum fell, mainlining cookies, and you’ve shrunk a dress size. How is this even possible? Are you just eating steaks and foraged berries or something fashion crazy? Is your breath gonna smell like a caveman’s?”

  I laugh. The relief of her is physical and enormous.

  “Or . . .”—she narrows her eyes—“you’re not, are you?”

  “Not what?”

  “Having animal nonmarital sex?”

  “Oh, my god, no! Caro, I am so far from having sex that I may as well join an order.” For some stupid reason, I think of the man in the fedora on the boat.

  She lifts an eyebrow. “Why are you going red, then?”

  “Hot flush.”

  “You know I don’t believe that! You still look thirty. It’s incredibly annoying.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” But I can feel my grin stretching wide. How confusing it is to feel so ridiculously happy to see someone when the reunion is occurring for the very worst of reasons.

  We’re soon chatting at a hundred miles an hour until the gap between us closes and her transatlantic accent slips into British and it’s as if we saw each other yesterday. Then we’re kids again. I’m lying in the lower bunk bed, reaching up to touch her fingers dangling down from above. We’re walking back from school along the overgrown Devon lanes, bulging school satchels digging into our shoulders, grabbing wild flowers—oxeye daisies, Queen Anne’s lace—from the bank to give Mum at teatime. Mum’s turning from the sink, wiping sudsy hands on her A-line denim skirt. It all
rushes at me, sucking away my breath, nipping back time, like a belt.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks, shooting me a sideways look. “Have I got too fat to wear green or something? Do I look like a hedge?”

  “No. You look gorgeous.” I lift her bag into the car’s boot. A carry-on. Not staying long, then, I think, a bubble of sadness in my chest. “I’ve missed you, that’s all.”

  She slips an arm around my shoulders. “Same.”

  * * *

  The sight of our magnificent mother lying sessile on her hospital bed, suspended in the fathomless murk of a coma, her bodily functions outsourced, makes Caroline burst into tears.

  I did warn her. But nothing really prepares you. I take her hand in mine. Her palm is hot and damp. She hates hospitals. They’re up there with flying on her anything-to-avoid list. She had so much surgery as a kid it’s not surprising. “I can’t believe this. I thought she was invincible. She’s never ill! She never even gets colds. Oh, Sylvie, I feel so bloody guilty for living so far away.”

  “If you’d lived next door, it wouldn’t have stopped it.” I hand her a tissue. “Caro, there’s a chance if . . . when she wakes . . .” I stall. The subject has its own weft, too many layers. “Her memory might be affected. You should know that.”

  I watch this information percolate through my sister’s features. Like me, she’d never have imagined that so much family history might vanish with Mum, like a Polaroid image left in stark sunlight, fading to a skeleton-gray silhouette, then gone.

  A moment passes. She links her little finger in mine and shakes it. I smile at her, relieved. Growing up, we used to do this all the time. It was our secret way of saying, We’re sisters, that’s all that matters; we won’t talk about the past, where the monsters live. “I just want her better,” she says.

  “Me too.”

  We stare at Mum quietly for a while. The machines beep and buzz. “You know there’s a small chance she can hear us?”

  “Oh, wow. Really?” Caroline leans closer to the bed. “I’ve got your wedding photo here, Mum.” She digs into her handbag and pulls out a small framed photo of our parents outside Hackney register office. (Beaming at each other, eyes shining, they look like they can’t believe their luck.) She places it on the table to remind the nursing staff that Mum’s an individual, a woman with a story, not just a gray-haired patient in a backless gown, daft enough to fall off a cliff. “There. Stunning.”

  The curtains rattle back. Kerry. My favorite nurse on account of her nonmedical professional snort of a laugh, which reminds me of Mum’s. I make the introduction, then pull out the newspaper article about the rescue I’ve kept for Caroline and show it to them both.

  “Ooh. Not every day I get to change the IV on a celebrity,” Kerry says.

  “I wish you could see this, Mum.” Caroline shakes out the newspaper. “You’ve only gone viral.”

  Mum’s accident had coincided with charged public debate about funding for coast guard emergency services. Since the first instinct of most onlookers was to take photographs—what clickbait she made, lying so perilously, enthrallingly, close to the abyss!—the story found its way into social media, the local Devon papers, then spilled, in a surreal way, into the mainstream press.

  “Not far off a Kardashian,” I say.

  We wait for Mum to smile or say, “The Whatishians?” feigning ignorance to amuse us. But she doesn’t. Mother. Her sense of fun. Her secrets. Silenced.

  * * *

  “Aren’t you two a bit old for a sleepover?” Four days later, Annie emerges from her bedroom, wearing the pajamas I bought her in Paris and a guarded look of daughterly dismay. I suddenly remember crawling into Caroline’s sofa bed in the early hours, unable to bear the idea of her flying back to America. We’d been up half the night, talking about Mum’s prognosis, Steve’s affair, Caroline’s acne rosacea, and Annie’s conditional offer to read math at Cambridge, which we agreed was insanely exciting, and proof that one day she’d run the world. We sobbed and laughed. We drank way too much. The incriminating wineglasses are still on the coffee table, along with empty Doritos bags, a violent sight at eight A.M.

  “Your mother’s led me astray, Annie. She always does. And now it feels like a coyote’s died in my mouth. Come on, we’ll budge up.” Caroline pats the side of the bed. Her accent is more American this morning, as if part of her is already over the Atlantic, back with Spike and the kids. Although I know she’s desperately torn about leaving Mum, I can sense how much she longs to be with her own family again. I almost forgive her for leaving.

  Annie flops down on the bed, picks up the remote, and flicks on the telly. The news starts to roll. Our eyes glide sleepily to the screen. The weather: warm and cloudy.

  “There’s something I haven’t told either of you,” Annie blurts. The temperature in the room instantly drops. “It was my fault. Granny fell because of me.”

  “What?” Wine throbs behind my eyes.

  “Annie, don’t be daft,” says Caroline, with a small laugh.

  “You don’t understand. If I hadn’t tried to take a photo . . .” Annie begins. Her voice breaks.

  “Oh, sweetheart, you think that makes it your fault?” I say. “The cliff edge crumbled and she slipped. It’s bad luck. Hideously bad luck.”

  “Selfies are even more dangerous! People are always falling off cliffs while taking selfies. They step back and then . . . Argh!” Caroline stops abruptly, seeing the horrified expression on Annie’s face, me shaking my head. “Sorry. God. Sorry. There I go again. Me and my big mouth.”

  “See what I’ve had to put up with all these years?” I joke, trying to change the mood.

  Annie almost smiles.

  Caroline wiggles up on the pillow. “Come on, tell us all about your new chap then, Annie.”

  Annie’s expression darkens. She shakes her head.

  Caroline glances at me. A question zips like a current between us.

  A new sort of anxiety starts to marble inside me. I’ve been focused so much on Mum this past week, I barely know anything about Ed. No, not Ed. Elliot. “Right,” I say, my voice coming out too high, fake cheery. “Pancakes? Those big fat Nigella ones with leaky blueberries. What do you think?”

  “Tired of pancakes, tired of life.” Caroline nods.

  “I feel a bit sick. Can’t face anything.” Annie twists out of the bed and plants a foot on the rug.

  “Wait.” Caroline flings open her arms. “Before I skedaddle. Last group hug. To stop the 747 falling from the sky. You know I’m totally neurotic.”

  Annie stays: Caroline’s the teen whisperer. We both fold into her arms and we stay like that awhile, buttressed against the outside world. It’s the first time I’ve been properly still—or held—since Mum fell. Something in me loosens. Tears start rolling down my cheeks.

  “Now, ladies,” Caroline says, switching to her firm mom-of-five voice, “before we get too maudlin about things, I think we need to remind ourselves that our patient’s tough as old boots, right?”

  I nod and rub away my tears, igniting hungover sparks on my inner lids, the shape of a skeletal tree, a red vein forest. Suddenly Mum feels closer. She never gives up. Neither shall I.

  “Annie?” Caroline asks.

  “Right,” says Annie weakly.

  “There.” Caroline hugs her close again, kissing the top of her head. “That’s more like it, Annie. Don’t blame yourself. And never forget this is Granny Rita we’re talking about, okay?” Caroline shoots me a glance. Understanding flows between us, a secret sisterly transmission, and when she speaks again, her voice is soft, barely audible, like a private thought exhaled. “I reckon our Rita’s survived much worse.”

  9

  Rita

  A darkling mood is spreading through Foxcote, tender as a bruise. As each hour is squawked in by the cuckoo clock on the landing, Jeannie seems to drift further
away. Four days they’ve been at the house now, and no signs of improvement.

  Rita may be what Nan would call “born cheerful,” but she still feels the contagion of Jeannie’s sadness, the sag of energy under Foxcote’s eaves. Even the forest seems to mirror it, the air cloying, still and warm, boiling with insects. Above the trees the clouds hang low, white, and heavy, like damp laundry on a line.

  Rita really hadn’t expected another “episode” to strike so soon. Or for Jeannie’s decline to be so steep-sided, like one of those old mine openings in the woods, their mouths gummy with moss, hidden under leaves. And now her loyalties are torn. Quite how dishonest is it right to be? She has promised to inform Walter—that’s the arrangement, and as Jeannie’s husband, he’d argue he has a right to know. She’s not so sure. “Don’t mention anything to Walter, will you?” Jeannie mumbled yesterday morning, and the cup of tea Rita was holding had jerked in her hand and sloshed on her wrist.

  The possibility Walter might use information—her information—against Jeannie makes Rita want to slide out of her own skin in shame. What if Walter and those terrifying private doctors of his decided this new slump in Jeannie’s spirits warranted a return to The Lawns?

  Last night she lay awake, tossing and turning, wondering what to do, thoughts scuttling like the mice under the rotten floorboards. She woke up none the wiser.

  Brevity seems the only answer. “Friday. J still has migraine. Lost appetite,” Rita writes, sitting at the desk in her stuffy bedroom, the top of her thighs grazing the rough underside. Chewing the pen, she gazes at her terrarium—the ferns love the ravishing low light—then back at the pad. No, even this small amount of detail is damning—Walter will spot the signs, stupid—so she scrubs it all out, slaps the notebook shut, and shoves it into the desk drawer. She hates that notebook. And she dreads Walter phoning again.